(1) Four good documentaries:
Atari: Game Over
Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary
The Bug: Life and Times of the People’s Car
30 Bikes: The Story of Homestead Bicycles
(2) Finished my ATARI® / Sim Train World 3 project. I’m drafting a post around the process (for those interested).
Blog maintenance this weekend as we get closer to the 20th Anniversary of Limestone Roof on August 21st.
(1) On Museums and Windows (The Imaginative Conservative)
“So a knowing eye will see that the huddled masses at Mass have among them the masterpieces, the flawed works of art, the kitsch, the poor devotional souls… and someone like me, an insufferable snob and hypocrite, who also hopes for a place among the masterpieces one day.”
(2) The Shame of the Cowardly Shepherds (The Catholic Thing)
“Many believers today are beginning to wonder if the white flag of surrender has been raised by high churchmen while many of the troops – the baptized in the midst of the world – are still in the battle, fighting the good fight, and laboring for goodness and righteousness to triumph in the human heart and in society.”
Inspired by the ART OF ATARI® and Sim Train World 3 to create some original retro box artwork. I think something related to Kingdom Hearts is next.
Atari brings a powerful computer to your home TV. The system allows you to build a game library with additional Game Programs™ and controllers.
This carton contains the COMBAT Game Program™, which contains 27 action-packed game variations and 2 sets of remote controllers. Features on the Video Computer System™ are:
• True-To-Life Game Sounds
• On-Screen Scoring
• Difficulty Options
• Color on Color TV’s
• No Batteries Needed
Related
Isle of Wight: End of the Line (YouTube)
“One realizes oneself only one piece at a time.” — Marcel Proust, The Fugitive
Palisades Park by the Counting Crows
“The future sounds so crazy
We all heard that song before
Tomorrow’s the name we changed from yesterday to blame
When the train just don’t stop here anymore”
(1) More quotes from On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings by Daniel Worden:
“For Samuelson, as for Ware, history is present through objects, and the passage of time entails a regretful decline in the value ascribed to those objects.”
“Ware comments that one of the things that drew him to the project was its emphasis on Louis Sullivan’s early modernist architecture, which seemed to be ‘frozen life.’ As a form, comics rely on dialectical relationships between the fragment and the whole; each panel is both discreet and bound to its predecessors and antecedents. Ware’s phrase ‘frozen life’ suggests an analogous fragmentation, a necessary episodic moment that can be observed in and of itself, yet also placed in a temporal continuum.”
I got starry-eyed on the coaster ride
Andy said, “Man, I need a break from the world outside
These days, my life just careens through a pinball machine
I could do so much better, but I can’t get off the TILT”
— Counting Crows, Palisades Park
(1) Finding and Losing Train Culture (The Imaginative Conservative)
(2) Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary (2009) on Tubi
Railfan, train buff, railway enthusiast, railway buff, trainspotter, or ferroequinologist?
Watch ‘Railways for Ever’ (1970) by Sir John Betjeman
Visit the National Railway Museum in York
Find ‘Waterloo Station’ (1967) by Terence Tenison Cuneo and ‘First Class: The Meeting’ by Abraham Solomon (1855)
Snap a photo Sir John Betjeman at St Pancreas Station
My favorite railroad collectibles (in NO particular order):
(1) LGB G – 21962 – Diesel locomotive – Reihe 2095 – ÖBB – This was a gift from my dad before Burgoyne was born. LGB has since gone defunct but their garden scale locos are highly sought after.
(2) BRIO World Metro Train Set – A gift from a close friend. The subway map and tube station are brilliant miniatures.
(3) GWR Guards Whistle / First Class A5 Notebook – A memento from a trip to the National Railway Musuem in York.
(4) Playmobil 4382 – Train Platform – The first of several Playmobil entries. It featured quite prominently on PLAYMOBIL365.com.
(5) Chicago Railroad Fair 1948, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad – This is the fair Walt Disney visited with Ward Kimball.
(6) Playmobil 4118v1 – Graffiti Car – This was an eBay acquisition and has a 90s vibe / pulse.
(7) Playmobil Freight Car Train 4115 – It’s the bicycle print that makes this one of my favorite freight cars.
(8) TfL’s limited edition Elizabeth Line Oyster card – Part of an unofficial social media scavenger hunt before the Elizabeth Line opened. This card came from x station.
(9) Lionel 156 Station Platform Passenger Lighted Vintage Ads O Gauge w/Extra Signs – A close friend gave me her family’s Lionel Train collection.
(10) LGB # 8036 – HUTSCHENREUTHER CHINA COFFEE SET – Coffee or team? Once upon a time LGB sold decorative China. How grand to travel first class from Paris to Berlin on a steam train in the early 1900s.
(11) Matchbox D1496-RF Shunter Locomotive Yellow Train – NOT my original. Found this one in Hereford. The original was likely from my mum or pop-pop.
(12) Desktop Departures® (UK Departure Board) – Incredible entrepreneurial company in the UK with products for train obsessed enthusiasts.
Notes
(1) Do you know where the title of the post came from?
(2) A related quote from Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler:
“Hazel George, perhaps better than anyone else including Lillian, knew that Walt was anxious and aimless, without real animations to engage him. It was she who suggested he go to a railroad fair in Chicago, even though he had returned from Hawaii only a few weeks earlier. She said he still needed to relax. Picking up on the idea, Walt mused that Ward Kimball, a railroad enthusiast himself, always seemed relaxed, so he called Kimball and asked if he wanted to accompany him. They took the Super Chief from Pasadena. At one point the president of the Santa Fe Railroad invited Walt and Kimball to ride in the engine and pull the cord to blow the whistle. Kimball said that Walt pulled long and hard. When they returned to their car, Walt ‘just sat there, staring into space, smiling and smiling,’ Kimball recalled. ‘I have never seen him look so happy.'”
These were sophisticated refinements of symbolism, but the religious dimensions of bridges and bridge-building were accessible even to the unlettered. Many bridges had small hermitage chapels built on or by them, and charitable contributions to the hermit secured his prayers for the donor and went to maintain the bridge. — The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy
(1) Watching the riots in France and reminded of The Story of Our Lady of a Happy Death: Notre Dame du Bien Mourir.
The scan is from Wisdom of the Monastery.
Artists specialize in designs. God is the greatest artist of all. This is evident in nature, but also in the designs that He has for His creatures. He has a unique plan for each one of us. Given the number of creatures, God’s designs are innumerable¹.
What an odd movie. I think I liked it. My university mentor was one of the original Detroit Mad Men, but my favorite English professor gave me a copy Adbusters and had us watch Brazil and read Zen and the Art of Motocycle Maintenance and The Little Prince. The Limestone Library™ has a copy of The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen and Ogilvy on Advertising.
(1) The Coca-Cola Kid and the Corporate Comforts of Selling Out (Back Row)
(1a) The Australian Sound:
(2) The Allure of Ruins by James Lileks (Discourse)
(2a) Quotes from On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings by Daniel Worden:
Decaying and dilapidated architecture resonates as loss, as evidence of the irreversible passage of time, yet architectural ruins emanate past grandeur. Ware’s comics, then, focus on ruins and the melancholy they elicit in an attempt to render the irreversible passage of time into an aesthetic object. In both “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings, melancholy is remade into the imagination of the ruin as whole through an engagement with the built environment.
Architecture is a vehicle to convey both the affective possibilities of experiencing the past as a whole and the perpetual frustration of the inability to reconstruct modernity’s ruins seamlessly.
¹Daily Meditations on the Psalms