Invisible Themepark

Category: Purveyors of Dark Places

Let’s All Check on Senator Mary Landrieu’s Fishing Camp
History doesn’t always cooperate with us. The narrative that we are continually constructing often runs at odds with reality. Our outrage culture has built a story around Hurricane Katrina that’s pretty much the accepted narrative. One off-shoot of this narrative is that FEMA and its Director at the time, Michael Brown, were bumbling idiots who failed in every respect. In Dave Rubin’s interview with Brown on The Rubin Report, Brown offers a different side of Katrina. One interesting factoid that emerges is how Senator Mary Landrieu turned a Black Hawk helicopter around so that the U.S. taxpayer-financed helicopter–carrying Brown, Landrieu, and the Governor of Louisiana–could check on Landrieu’s fishing camp.

BROWN: It became clear to me probably within, well, it came clear to me the day after the storm made landfall. Because I was on a Black Hawk helicopter with former Senator Mary Landrieu and we were supposed to be going straight to the Superdome to meet with Mayor Nagin, who I always like to joke is–remind people he’s still in federal prison–and in I’m sitting there and I’m not I’m just kind of reading my notes from my staff and I look out the helicopter and I realize that we’re going the wrong direction across Lake Pontchartrain and I asked the pilot, “Where are you going?” and he said, “Well, the senator has asked that we go check her cabin before we go to the Superdome.” I was livid. So now I have a sitting United States Senator next to me who’s just overridden what I said we need to be doing and what the priorities are. I have the governor sitting next to her who doesn’t have the wherewithal to say to the senator, “You know what, your cabin is not our priority. The priority is the people of New Orleans.” It was at that moment that I realized that I had walked into a state that was so much more corrupt–I’ve been involved in politics since I was literally six years old–that it was just so corrupt and it was so dysfunctional that I knew that everything that I had in my hand about how things should operate were gonna start going out the window.

Mary’s brother, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, says of this camp in his book In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History:

In 1960, the year I was born, my grandmother Loretta Landrieu paid fifteen thousand dollars for a patch of land along Lake Pontchartrain, about thirty miles out from New Orleans, near the town of Slidell. That “camp,” which was a small house that looked like a triple-wide trailer, had a a long wooden pier that jutted out into the saltwater lake.

In other words, pretty much the opposite direction of New Orleans. Not to mention, Mary Landrieu barely lives in Louisiana, using her parents’ home as her address-of-record so that she can continue on with her job as Senator. That Black Hawk flight was no isolated incident. Landrieu just loves spending taxpayer money for travel, it seems.
- $3,200 in taxpayer money to fly 400 miles roundtrip from New Orleans to Lake Charles, LA
- Another time when she flew on Air Force One with President Obama to New Orleans.
- Then, of course, there was the over $30,000 in flights that she said she mistakenly charged to taxpayers.
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, Mitch Landrieu
April 30, 2018
Arthur Tress: Best Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of

His name doesn’t provoke instant recognition to the photo layperson like Diane Arbus’ name does, but Arthur Tress has been diligently putting out fantastic images for the last half-century-plus that have some of the same nightmare-ish quality. This first photo, Flood Dream, is a part of a series in a book called Dream Collector 1972 book, in which “children shared [with Tress] common nightmare scenarios such as falling, drowning, and being trapped, chased by monsters, or humiliated in the classroom.”

December 30, 2017
Alex Prager’s Cinematic Dreamspaces

I will not name the well-established artist who I’m sure Alex Prager’s work is often compared to, but I will say that, like that artist, she does spin off of vintage cinematic ideas. As MOMA’s bio says, she takes cues from Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock.

Irene 2010, Alex Prager

Great access point to her work, but she takes it further. It’s like what Hitchcock or Sirk would have done if the studios had let them slow down and wallow in the moment, instead of racing ahead with the narrative.

Alex Prager Compulsion

August 24, 2017
Dan Bell, Chronicler of Dark Spaces

Dan Bell, or This Is Dan Bell, as his YouTube channel is called, has now been added to the annals of greatness that I am always stockpiling in my mind.

Start with the basic information. Maryland resident Dan Bell films himself walking through and, post-production, narrating his strolls through commercial buildings such as resorts, hotels, and malls that are dead or on their last legs in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. region.

Is that all he does? A site called Dead Malls has been doing this for years. Or has it?

Going Way Beyond Dead Malls

Not really. Dead Malls, ground-breaking at the time for encyclopedically covering the demise of super-sized retail shopping, failed to take advantage of its own popularity. With only 40 updates in the last 4 years, the site is nearly as dead as the malls they cover. My local “dead mall,” the Totem Lake Mall, in Kirkland, WA, has long been torn down and is almost rebuilt as one of those hipster food-retail cathedrals featuring a Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.

Dan Bell doesn’t pretend to be encyclopedic; he’s selective. He ventures on day trips, just himself and maybe a friend, and a camera. Unlike urban archaeologists who get off on being dick swinging badasses who sneak into Packard plants in Detroit, Dan Bell lets the subject speak for itself. He literally stays out of the picture. As a Baltimore Sun article notes

Bell doesn’t consider himself an urban explorer, but a filmmaker who takes risks in order to create thrilling short films.

Most importantly, he elevates these dark places to the level of high art. He gets their feeling. He understands visual composition. He carefully frames images. He knows that detail is important: a pair of roller skates, brochures on the ground, hotel keys on a rack, a cocktail napkin. He gently adds music that lingers in the background, providing just enough atmosphere to the scene but rarely overpowering it.

His camera hangs on parts of the mall (he really loves shooting through metal security gates), in long pans and slow zooms. Big budget Hollywood director Michael Bay, whose shots range from 3.00 to 3.40 seconds per shot, would have a brain aneurysm while watching a Dan Bell film.

My only complaint about the Dead Mall Series and Dead Motel Series is that there is not more of them. And there is one culprit for this: Another Dirty Room.

Another Dirty Room

On November 11, 2016, Dan published his first episode in the Another Dirty Room YouTube series entitled “Cesspit From Hell : The Midtown Inn Baltimore.” Dan and friends pay for decidedly low-rent motel rooms and, armed with UV lights and gloves, proceed to deconstruct the room. Results are disgusting: rat turds, semen, and lots of hair.

I understand the impulse: you start to see success in a certain direction, you read the signals (and often, the web traffic analytics), and then you capitalize on those signals. In other words, you go where you think people are telling you to go.

Another Dirty Room is a YouTube series that is clearly looking for a major TV network to pick it up. I could be wrong; I’ve been wrong before (I clearly remember the day in 1998 when I read that Amazon would begin offering products other than books and I said, “It’ll never fly.”).

But this impulse toward reality TV is misguided, it sorely misuses Bell’s ample talents as a maker of art, and it takes him away from more important projects.

July 7, 2017