third (creative) spaces

I have always been fascinated by places like railway stations, hotel rooms, bars and cafés, airport lounges, onboard a long-haul flight, looking out of the window. Some of them anyway. Neither here nor there. Interstitial. Liminal. Transitional. Conduit. They can offer permission to step to the side, think, imagine, to interrogate complacency. They are the…

genuine simulation

A couple of weeks ago I took a fabulous drive on a rough Montana ranch road in a 1927 Vauxhall with Miles Collier and Murray Smith. The car was the genuine article, but could the drive, in this between-the-wars archetypically English car, be said to be authentic, in the far reaches of Montana and so far from…

matters of authenticity and simulation

Is Disneyland authentic? This is a question I have pondered for a number of years, since I visited what was Eurodisney in 1992 (and explored in my book with Mike Pearson – Theatre/Archaeology – [Link]). It is too easy to say that Disney is superficial, or fantasy, or ideology. Here are a couple of cases…

medium and message – Disney

We are visiting Disneyland – it always fascinates me. Last night – World of Color – a spectacle. Cathedral of Light, Lichtdom – as Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, called his great stagings of the gathering of the people before their leaders (the images above are of Nuremberg in 1936). This is not to say that…