Please label movie review postings with "spoiler" so that those of us who haven't seen the movie yet don't mistakenly read the plot. Go Frodo! (I'm joking, of course: I already saw The Two Towers.) On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 11:40:26PM -0000, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:
Blah blah blah wrote...
"My hunch is that the new towers will never be filled and will turn out to be a business catastrophe"
Who gives a crap? Despite the fact that the original towers were as ugly as hell, they were a giant "Fuck You" to the rest of the world and we New Yorkers loved 'em. (I still say to NJ-based relatives that "All of you" conspired to knock down the towers...I refuse to distinguish between bin Laden, gov Florio (or whoever), and George Bush. All I know is that it was you non-New-Yorkers who did it 'cause you hate us and all our cool food, culture, filth and crime.) And until I stop paying taxes entirely, I might as well SEE something my tax $$$ may have been used to build, as opposed to stealth buildings and giant storage "schools". (I always used the same argument to support the superconducting supercollider....)
"oops, I said "business," when in fact it is the Port Authority, a weird melange of jurisdictions which is probably constitutionally invalid)."
The PA is certainly one of the more lecherous groups in these parts, including the mob. They were supposed to dissappear after the tolls paid for roads and bridges to be built. But using that ole' loophole (something to do with refinancing), they've maintained their incpometant and corrupt stranglehold on most of our major thoroughfares for lo these many years (increasing the pollution like crazy, too).
"I wasn't sorry to see those Bauhaus boxes go."
Bauhaus? I guess. More like that 70s warmed over post-Bauhaus fascist crapola. Nobody in NYC really thought they were beautiful, but we do miss 'em (see above!).
And Peter Trei wrote...
"One thing I liked in particular was that most of the designs weren't afraid to go high into the sky this time around. Building high is an expression of confidence."
This I more or less agree with. And it's not a government thing, not a business thing, just a New York thing. We need replacement towers for sure, and that design by David Rockwell & Co (with those odd empty tower-structures) might be good. They have the additional advantage of not casting such a dark shadow over downtown and Brooklyn Heights.
PT wrote... "The WTC was a landmark for a huge part of the city; you could see it easily from most of midtown and downtown."
but Blah Blah Blah wrote...
"Hideous boxes."
Again, you miss the point. We New Yorkers navigated by them, and when traveling out in th'sticks (ie, New Jersey and west of the hudson) those ugly boxes would come popping up over the horizon welcoming you home, just like your ugly ole' Mom.
Somebody wrote, and I really don't remember or care who. Hell, let's say Tim May wrote it just to piss him off...
"My own initiial idea was to rebuild the towers as they were, but in goldtone instead of silver. Now, I'd like to be a little more respectful of the pre-WTC street grid (If you weren't actually going to the WTC, it was a huge obstacle to get around, either driving or on foot). But I still want towers which rise far above the skyline."
That original twisty-towers design brought forward in response to how shitty the original official designs were by that Amalgamated Architects was the best design, but for some reason it didn't make it into the official final round.
"One hopes not a single fucking dime of taxpayer money will go into rebuilding anything on that site. (Oh, I won't scream if $25,000 is allocated to hire that Chinese architect to replicate her Vietcong wall with the names of the dead so that the weepy ones can do their tracings and all. But nothing more should be spent out of the taxpayer's pocket.)"
Like I said, you can either SEE your tax dollars build something (even if its useless), or else they'll just dissappear up some buereucrats (I can never spell that word) nose. Unless you pay zero taxes of course.
"(Ayn Rand loved the Twin Towers, ironically, and typically, and disgustingly. But, then, she thought cigarette smoking was a symbolic affirmation of Man's control of fire and his striving to reify A or Not-A through purity of essence!"
A read through a couple Ayn Rand books and none of this should be suprising. As far as I'm concerned she wasn't exactly von Neumann.
Tyler Durden