James Kunstler made me rofl

I love watching these TED Talks (“ideas worth spreading”) but I just recently came by this one by James Howard Kunstler that had me literally laughing out loud.  I’ve heard of his books (notably “The Geography of Nowhere” which I think I will be ordering.  I can see no better way to explain how funny this speech is then to spell out, with absolutly no context, some of the best moments.

0:27: The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

4:20 : To create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. If you stand at the Wal-Mart over here and try and look at the Target store over here, you can’t see it because of the curvature of the earth.

5:59 : In these (public) places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them. We don’t have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. You don’t have to have a kwanzaa festival. People just go because it’s pleasurable.

6:30 : A public place so dismal that even the winos don’t go there.

6:55 : There’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down this block. …. This in fact would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and all the other great despots of the 20^th century on the side of the building.

8.28 : This is a building designed like a DVD player; audio jack, power supply… you can see exactly what went on, 3 o’clock in the morning at the design meeting, 8 hours before the deadline, 4 architects trying to get this building in on time…. What was the conversation going on there? Because you know what the last sentence was: “Fuck it.”

11:05 : And then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature band-aid on it. I call them nature band-aids because in America there is a general idea that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. When in fact the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings, not just flowerbeds.

12:31: Here you see on a small scale, the mothership has landed. R2-D2 and C-3PO have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet.

14:10 : Notice the porch here, unless the people living here are munchkins, nobody is going to be using that. This is really just a television, broadcasting a show 24/7 called “We’re normal”. But we know what going on in these houses: We know that little Skippy is down here loading his uzi, getting ready for homeroom. We know that Heather, his 14 year old sister is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit.

15:05 : These are the schools we are sending them to; “The Hannibal Lecter Central School”. There is obviously the notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver…. Notice that nature is present.