It's one of those morning when all of the coffee in the world can't get us awake. We thank the fine folks at BLDGBLOG for giving our brains some much needed invigoration with an interesting discussion of our freeway system.
LA's unacknowledged cinema – its highway network – was the focus of a recent article, by Tad Friend, in The New Yorker. During the OJ chase of 1994, Friend writes, "from the cameras above, the customary vantage for tracking the city's televised pursuits, you could see that this most sprawling and motorized of our great metropolitan areas is a huge web that is easily apprehended from the air – some forty police and TV helicopters keep busy doing just that – and that it is not the roadways but their surveillance that never ends." Our freeway system has become as much spectacle as it has a means to move from one point to another. Accordingly, we've trained our cameras on the freeway through the use of news helicopters ready at an instant to break into local programming with another car chase to entertain the masses, although it seems like we're getting less and less of that in comparison to just a few years ago. In a related note, our New York overlords sent us this link to a discussion about a dialect seperation between Southern Californians and the rest of the country in how we refer to our freeways.
· Thousand Mile Colosseum [BLDGBLOG]