VISIT BEAUTIFUL FOLSOM DAM
August 4, 2012 7:57 AM   Subscribe

Ladies and Gentlemen, tired of the usual vacation spot? Want to get away from crowded beaches and cluttered national forests? Why not visit new-and-improved locations like: Permian Basin, Texas! Or Bull Shoals Dam, in Arkansas. Try a less-well-known section of Virginia Beach! Drive up to see the glaciers at Glacier National Park.

Mary Lydecker specializes in art concering land and use, and in her Postcard Series 1 has some ... different vacation scenes. Prison Photography blog attended one of her exhibits.
posted by the man of twists and turns (21 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
You might also like to visit Irelantis
posted by steganographia at 8:08 AM on August 4, 2012


Clay Lipski has a photo series : Atomic Overlook: 'Imagine if the advent of the Atomic Era occurred during today's information age.'
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:22 AM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


I was going to write a longer comment but I can't seem to word it in a way that I'm happy with--the gist is that this is really neat and Ballardian and I love that, but as someone who lives in one of the aforementioned postapocalyptic locales, I want this project to explore the endemic poverty, broken infrastructure and lack of organization and social services that makes this place such a crap bucket.

I will say this is one of my favorites, in part because a lot of real Texas beaches are a lot more dreary and dismal. Move the oil refineries 20 miles north and plop down the skeletons of never-to-be-finished hotels and you've got South Padre Island.
posted by byanyothername at 8:59 AM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Glacier National Park might not be a place for beach vacation but it is a spectacular place to have a vacation in. I think some city folks in the Northeast when they think vacation they think sun, surf, and sand. Me I think wilderness, white water, and wonders (natural). I lived on a beach or within 15 miles of one most of my life, got to where I hated tourists and the traffic. Give me the peaceful mountains any day.
posted by pdxpogo at 9:40 AM on August 4, 2012 [4 favorites]


You have not been in the middle of nowhere until you've been to Gates of the Arctic, in the Brooks Range.
posted by spitbull at 10:30 AM on August 4, 2012


Isn't the joke there that the glaciers are disappearing?

ha, ha.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:30 AM on August 4, 2012




Everyone should visit Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve.
posted by kenko at 10:58 AM on August 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


I really enjoyed a christmas vacation in Death Valley. If you saw Star Wars at the right age, you will be unable to fight off the sensation that a droid will come plaintively beep-booping around the corner of the canyon trails. It's incredibly, surreally quiet, too - genuinely like being on another world.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 11:23 AM on August 4, 2012


I had somebody call up and say, ‘What are you going to do about my melting glaciers?...It's not so big a deal," he said a few minutes later.

Oh really. Some of us disagree strongly. It's a very big deal. An avoidable big deal. The biggest avoidable Big Deal in human history. A feckless and incompetent Big Deal. An ongoing, tragic Big Deal. And attempting to minimize it is not going to avert the consequences.
posted by Twang at 11:26 AM on August 4, 2012 [5 favorites]


bull shoals is beautiful… one small problem: you have to go to Ark. to see it. no thanks.
posted by readyfreddy at 11:57 AM on August 4, 2012


Everyone should visit Craters of the Moon

Hoping to do just that in September!

When I was young I wanted to live in Nevada because I thought it was the closest I could get to an alien planet.

I did eventually live in Nevada, and it was plenty alien, but more because of the people than the place.
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:12 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of this segment of Koyaanisqatsi with sunbathers on the beach in front of the San Onofre nuclear plant.
posted by zsazsa at 12:43 PM on August 4, 2012


The more I look at these pictures the less certain I am about what the artist was trying to do. It seems to be intended as an ironic humor in juxtaposition sort of thing, but it's hard to understand why the elements she's mashed together ought to create conflict. For the most part she seems to have simply recreated places that actually do exist in real life, somewhere else, and which really aren't that weird when you go visit them.

The picture of Folsom Dam, for example: Folsom Lake is actually a big recreation spot for people in the Sacramento area. I remember many happy summer hours spent playing on the beach there when I was a kid. This postcard seems like it's trying to say that playing in the water next to this big industrial artifact is weird, but if you go above the dam instead of below it, you'll find many scenes like that playing out on any summer day.

Or the first one, which I think might be from Glacier National Park - my first thought was that it looked like the Alyeska Resort or someplace near Lake Tahoe. The "bridge to nowhere" is the only part of that picture that actually looks out of place. Similarly, the one "2010_01_Lydecker" looks like it is supposed to be saying "how weird that they'd put a strip mall in this natural area", but there are plenty of places in the Mountain West that look pretty much exactly like that. Or the one "Welcome to Midland, Tall City" - I have no idea where Midland is, but the resulting scene reminds me a lot of Whistler B.C. I don't get why it's supposed to be strange to have gondolas going over the street in a place that has lots of snow. Or is that the joke, that Midland is a place where it doesn't snow?

The Amistad Dam picture with the swimming lanes is funny, though.
posted by Mars Saxman at 4:12 PM on August 4, 2012


Yeah, the one with the oil derricks... I'm pretty sure the oil derricks half is from a postcard of Kilgore, Texas (The World's Richest Acre), and there IS a very nice little man-made lake around there to go swimming in, despite there being oil derricks visible around town.
posted by titus n. owl at 9:13 PM on August 4, 2012


I like these but find them sad because they don't seem to different from what may very well happen in the future.
posted by deborah at 10:36 PM on August 4, 2012


Yeah, the one with the oil derricks... I'm pretty sure the oil derricks half is from a postcard of Kilgore, Texas (The World's Richest Acre), and there IS a very nice little man-made lake around there to go swimming in, despite there being oil derricks visible around town.
The derricks are labelled as "Permian Basin" which is west Texas, so not Kilgore.
posted by Lame_username at 5:55 AM on August 5, 2012


I think some people are missing the fact that these are composite pictures. They're not actual pictures of actual places. It's two or three places (or in the Los Angeles one, several pictures of the same place).
posted by Cyclopsis Raptor at 6:59 AM on August 5, 2012


Where are the labels, this is an actual question, because I don't see any labels (and it definitely doesn't say Permian Basin anywhere on the card). I'd like to see how each of these are labeled but either it's not showing up in my browser or I'm just not figuring out where to look?
posted by titus n. owl at 12:34 PM on August 5, 2012


Hovertext on the artist's web site shows which locations were combined to make the image
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:58 PM on August 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


BLDBLOG: The Meadowlands
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:11 PM on August 6, 2012


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