S01E163: The Finest Bush

Bloodcarpet
All Good Words
From Bit To Bit
Rhapsody in Mauve Blue

Man, Myth, and Magic Reading… MANDRAKE – Root, Narcotic, Sedative, Hallucinogen, Aphrodisiac, Voodoo Doll ⛧ Human, Elf, and Demon in Plant Form ⛧ Sewer Ads ⛧ Utopias! Part II – Victor Gruen and his Works ⛧ Mid Century Urban Planning – Fort Worth ⛧ Creating the Modern Mall ⛧ The 1939 World’s Fair – Highways of the Future ⛧ Scr33m Mails! ⛧

There’s Always Another Utopia!

BYO3-DG

DIRECT DOWNLOAD

ZOSO’S CORNER (Show Notes)

Tonight’s Tarot:

King of Wands (R)

Freaks of Hazard:

Spaz came in with a monthly donation of $9.99! Mommabury, Kitty, and him also sent a package with some birthday gifts in it!!

MakeHeroism and MaryKate Ultra were on a rampage! The sent a package with this LED BOO sign!

Not only that, but during their most recent Buds With Bowls appearance, they also debuted a realized version of the Boost Them All Pokemon theme cover! The final double tap was a slew of art from MakeHeroism!

Thank you oh so kindly Nick The Rat for having BTS on for this past Wednesday show! You should be able to find ep 396 when it’s published over at https://www.nicktherat.com/, but you can also check out the video show here: Nick the Rat – 396 – Behind the Schemes Interview

During that episode, Bizzle also dropped a really sweet sketch of the episode in the sewer. Thankfully we were able to grab it before it got too wet!

Comrade Christopher Battles of the Feel Good Cardboard Magic Signs Store also sent this along! Hunter Jackson used white out in his art work too!

NUDE PODCAST APPS

https://www.behindthesch3m3s.com/

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SHIRTS AND STUFF

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WEEKEND WARRIOR

Everything else I didn’t want to cram into the Freaks of Hazard section that I’ve been working on.

Got some topical show art in for Rare Encounter Encounter #155: Naked Tub Girls. That episode features Dad from Dad’s Anime Podcast as a guest!

Then there was the art for the Boost Them All song!

Also got all the rest of Spaz’s music upload via the Music Side Project and hell yea new bonus art for that too!

PROBE MY WOUNDS

MAN, MYTH, AND MAGIC VOLUME 13 – MANDRAKES

CUSTOMER TRAP

A TALE OF SO MANY UTOPIAS PT. 2

Continuing the exploration of man made gardens of plenty, locally sourced!

🌙 A look at failed Minnesota utopias – and one that worked

The most unsung local utopia, however, might have been the most successful. Designed by a Viennese socialist, it had the usual goals: a new downtown built on empty land away from the old city; enclosed areas with modern art; housing, government buildings, commercial developments surrounding the town square. It would have parks, lakes, pedestrian paths. Truly a new way of living. They called it … Southdale.

⭐ A brief history of the American shopping mall

Groundbreaking – Welcome to an American Landmark, the Southdale Mall found in Edina MN! Gruen broke the mold when it came time to placing competing stores near each other.
Experiences In Vienna – It was time to modernize the art of shopping, and by extension bringing the urban to the suburban.

⭐ Southdale Center (Edina, MN) – the first modern mall?

Not The First – Why does Southdale get credit as the first mall?
Opening Day – Listen to the fanfare, also includes a list of some of the original anchor stores.
Hate What It Becomes – Sometimes people have to witness their creations turn into literal monsters.
1. ⭐ God’s Country

⭐ Malls Weren’t Supposed to be Like This

Gruen Origins – The suburban experiment takes flight! Gruen was not a fan of reconstructing the world in your own home and craved social ties.
Car Dependent Nature – This dude really hated cars.
FLW Diss –
Disclaim Paternity –

⭐ About Victor Gruen’s Randhurst Center

Classic American Story
The Big Pinwheel On The Prairie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen

🌙 Victor Gruen (Grünbaum)

Victor Gruen was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1903, where he also trained to be an architect at the Academy of Fine Arts. After leaving the Academy he worked as a draftsman and supervisor on local construction sites for several years. In 1933, he opened his first architectural office engaging primarily in commercial architecture. The decidedly modern layout of the stores designed by Gruen during the 1930s earned him a positive recognition in professional circles.
Gruen was forced to leave Austria shortly after the Nazis annexed the country in 1938 due to his religious and political background as a Jew and a social democrat. He escaped from Europe and made his way to the United States. Initially, he settled in New York where he formed a successful partnership with Elsie Krummeck. and was involved with designs for the World’s Fair.
Was involved with several Broadway productions, and was also part of a political satire group back in Austria.
- 🌙 The Terrazzo Jungle – On the voyage over, he was told by an American to set his sights high—“don’t try to wash dishes or be a waiter, we have millions of them”—but Gruen scarcely needed the advice. He got together with some other German émigrés and formed the Refugee Artists Group. George S. Kaufman’s wife was their biggest fan. Richard Rodgers and Al Jolson gave them money. Irving Berlin helped them with their music. Gruen got on the train to Princeton and came back with a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein. By the summer of 1939, the group was on Broadway, playing eleven weeks at the Music Box.
He analyzed and tried to find solutions for the problems of modern urbanity, namely congestion and pollution caused by excessive automobile traffic and unplanned decentralization.

🌙 Victor Gruen

Gruen was forced to leave his native Vienna in 1938 (the same week as Sigmund Freud) as a result of rising antisemitism and the Anschluss, Austria’s incorporation into Hitlerite Germany and the compulsory acquisition of his firm.
Arrived in New York City aboard Holland America’s Statendamm steamer “with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.”
Eventually was commissioned to design stores in New York City, among them fellow Viennese Ludwig Lederer’s leather goods store on Fifth Avenue. The result was a storefront unlike any other on Fifth Avenue, resembling an arcade in the entrance way, setting a “customer trap” – a concept new to America at that time.
- 🌙 The Terrazzo Jungle – One day he went for a walk in midtown and ran into an old friend from Vienna, Ludwig Lederer, who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Victor agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway, roughly seventeen by fifteen feet: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling. It was a “customer trap.”
His original vision aimed to recreate such environments in the United States, where Gruen regarded suburbanization and sprawl to promote social isolation rather than community. In addition, Gruen strongly opposed the growing reliance on the automobile and the corresponding car culture, saying that “their threat to human life and health is just as great as the exposed sewer.”
In the United States, some 1,500 malls were built between 1956 and 2005, and they became a quintessential stage of American life. This is evident, for example, in the shopping mall’s prominence in film, particularly in works of the 1970s and 1980s. The list ranges from Blues Brothers to Back to the Future, The Terminator and all the way to George A. Romero’s highly acclaimed 1978 Zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, which is set almost entirely at Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh, PA.

🌙 Gruen, Victor Infoplease

As an urban planner, Gruen was instrumental in formulating master plans for such cities as Fort Worth, Tex. (1955), Kalamazoo, Mich. (1958), Cincinnati, Ohio (1963), Fresno, Calif. (1965), and Tehran (1963–67). Among his most notable shopping-complex projects are the Northland Center (1954) in suburban Detroit; the Southdale Center (1956) in Edina, Minn., outside Minneapolis, America’s first enclosed mall; the Cherry Hill Mall (1961), in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia; and Midtown Plaza (1962), Rochester, N.Y.

🌙 The strange, surprisingly radical roots of the shopping mall

Victor Gruen was an avant-garde European socialist democrat.
He built dozens of department stores across America. Echoing Le Corbusier’s famous line about a house being a “machine for living,” Gruen called his store environments “machines for selling.”
Southdale was going to be the antidote to suburban sprawl. Instead it became an amplifier.
Fun Disney connection here as well, Walt was a big big fan, and sounds as if this was the push he needed to start on his own city of tomorrow in FL.

🌙 The father of the American shopping mall hated what he created

Created what sociologists call a”third place”—safe, neutral public spaces outside of one’s home or work that, in Gruen’s words, “provide the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place and our own Town Squares provided in the past.”

🌙 CHAPTER 11 A Downtown for the Suburbs: Gruen and the Shopping Center

⭐ How IKEA gets you to impulsively buy more

The Gruen Transfer
Guided Eyes
Big Data At Their Fingertips
1. 🌙 The Gruen Effect – 99% Invisible – Gruen argued that good design equaled good profits. The more beautiful the displays and surroundings, the longer consumers are will want to stay in a shop. The more time shoppers spend in a store, the more they will spend.

⭐ The Gruen Transfer-The Pitch-Invade New Zealand

Gruen (TV series)

Andrew Denton (Zapruder’s Other Films)

🌙 Fort Worth Master Plan

With a vision of a city free of noise, fumes and traffic, Victor Gruen designed a master plan, in 1956, that would transform Fort Worth into a pedestrian paradise. By lining the edge of the city with parking structures and infrastructure for cars, the new plan created a true walkable center.