beetleinabox:
Page from September 1939 edition of Mechanix...
Page from September 1939 edition of Mechanix Illustrated. It depicts the projected "Palace of the Soviets," an administrative centre intended for Moscow. Building began in 1937, but the project was abandoned when Germany invaded in 1941. The design was based on a submission to an architectural competition by Boris Iofanan. It was ostensibly judged by a "Council of Experts" chaired by Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, but Stalin appears to have had a hand in the final decision on, and indeed design of, the neoclassical "wedding-cake style" structure. If completed, it would have been the tallest building in the world.
"Ode to Karl Marx," a poem by John Forbes:
Old father of the horrible bride whose
wedding cake has finally collapsed, you
spoke the truth that doesn't set us free—
it's like a lever made of words no one's
learnt to operate. So the machine it once
connected to just accelerates & each new
rap dance video's a perfect image of this,
bodies going faster and faster, still dancing
on the spot. At the moment tho' this set up
works for me, being paid to sit and write &
smoke, thumbing through Adorno like New Idea
on a cold working day in Ballarat, where
adult unemployment is 22% & all your grand
schemata of intricate cause and effect
work out like this: take a muscle car &
wire its accelerator to the floor, take out
the brakes, the gears the steering wheel
& let it rip. The dumbest tattooed hoon
—mortal diamond hanging round the Mall—
knows what happens next. It's fun unless
you're strapped inside the car. I'm not,
but the dummies they use for testing are.
