"Burning Chrome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

can Streamlined Moderne." Cohen called it "raygun
Gothic." Their working title was The Airstream
Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.
There's a British obsession with the more baroque
elements of American pop culture, something like the
weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans
or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films.
In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a
uniquely American form of architecture that most
Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn't sure
what she was talking about, but gradually it began to
dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday
morning television in the Fifties.
Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler
on the local station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter
sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden
Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A
Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers
would putter around with this big old Nash with wings,
and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted
Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off,
but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land,
true home of a generation of completely uninhibited
technophiles. She was talking about those odds and
ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture
you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the
movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en-
ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the
chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran-
sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a
dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she
wanted me to photograph them for her.
The Thirties had seen the first generation of Ameri-
can industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil
sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your
basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of
decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some
pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put to-
gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change
was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made
a certain kind of sense, because the most successful
American designers had been recruited from the ranks
of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a
series of elaborate props for playing at living in the
future.
Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope
full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the
Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments lean-
ing steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a