Gadgetory

hi I'm Emily Ishida I'm the entertainment editor for The Verge and I am in LA with yacht yacht is John about taupe and Claire Evan and they make really fun futuristic dance music and their new album is called I thought the future would be cooler and it sort of themed around outdated technology just different older visions of the future that haven't really quite come to pass so I thought it would be perfect if we hung around LA and looked at some of the more interesting lost visions of the future that still exists around the city so we are here at the theme building at LAX LAX being the major airport of the Los Angeles area it's a pretty recognizable structure anytime anybody's flying in or out of Los Angeles that's pretty much the identifier of where you are but it's a place that not a lot of people go to and it's kind of been in disuse for a while now it's true well it was originally supposed to be the central ticketing building of the entire airport when the store was designed in the sixties like it was supposed to be this massive central glass dome under which all the terminals will connect and people would come in and this would be like a atrium interchange especially with all the green the greenery in here like it's sort of it's a metaphor for Los Angeles as a whole this protected glass dome where everything's green they began construction 59 and they finished it in 61 that's and how long was it actually used before zero zero amount of time by the time this building was like dedicated it wasn't serving a central function at all it was just as I want to say decorative it seems like the wrong word but it was kind of more like a symbolic building it was supposed to represent like a lady's vision of itself as a city of the future so in addition to the theme building kind of being a symbol of Los Angeles and the symbol of LAX it's kind of this symbol of how travel used to be this sort of glamorous thing or this aspirational thing yes and I guess that's sort of why I've I've never come here before because now when you travel it's a hassle and you're just trying to get from point A to B as painlessly as possible way more stressful than a yeah well yeah I mean it's less of like a novel like let's put on our nice clothes to go on a trip she doesn't smoke a cigarette on the plane well we have our yeah totally yeah it's true now I know it's just like brutalist you know in and out that's impossible you have to pay to have the luxuries that you once had for free the Bonaventure hotel Bonaventure hotel the Bonaventure hotel Bonaventure man event rolls out the Bonaventure hotel this place was built in 1976 and it feels like 1976 like 1976 is dreams 1976 is aesthetic aspirations it's like all crazy concrete and pods and mirrored pools and clear elevators and I think it was originally designed to be like you know an indoor retail hotel public space but I don't know and I think in Los Angeles people are not very receptive to the idea of manufactured interior space like this it was kind of bound to fail like it wants to be a pedestrian place it wants to be like a public place but it's completely in zero conversation with the rest of the city yeah it's hard to get to on foot from other parts of downtown it's kind of like this weird pod and it has this kind of like weirdly utopian idea of how people would use public space in the city like there's this running track you know no one's gonna no one's running on that except for you in 2004 consider yeah this is like the biggest hotel in LA and we are in a massive metropolitan city like it's empty you know what I mean like these are all these retail spaces are empty which is weird I mean it's totally underused in that way and it's that thing again and again of people using modernist buildings to stand in for the future like this confusion of modernism like a very specific period of time or postmodern as my guess is living a postmodern to stand in for tomorrow when buildings in the future are never gonna look like this I know everywhere we look we see a million miles away further than a dream here we are in the shadow of the Tri for you it's six stories 60 tons no one likes it no one ever liked it no one ever liked this but this was kind of like his big utopian dream this sculptor which was supposed to light up at night and play music on a series of glass bells who was supposed to be reactive it would react to people's footsteps in the pedestrian mall down underneath us what's the word Polly photo kinetic you got it as soon as they opened it I mean as soon as it was unveiled the computer broke they called it a lot of names I mean like they called it like free wish free wish burns in search of a turkey and like the psychedelic Nickelodeon and then the Trifield Laurie yeah it's I don't know it's always seems like it was very a beautiful aspiration they would release let's have laser beams shooting into space yeah yeah it was really ahead of its time I mean the thing that's super tragic about this piece of art for me is that like we have technology now that could very easily just do what this sculpture and urgently intended to do so I guess in its own way this sculpture kind of asks a lot of questions about sound that a band has to ask itself in 2015 where it goes how to make it the most enjoyable and accessible you guys play around I think you you're pretty experimental as far as where your music is used and and and how it gets out there we kind of see our music is like a platform for us to do a bunch of stuff so I mean it's not like the music is not important it's hugely important but it's number one it's number one but then there's all this other stuff that surrounds music especially now that are all opportunities to do interesting things you know it's like there's got to be some visual component there's got to be some video there's got to be language around it there's got to be like the way it is disseminated like it's pretty much expected at this point that if you're gonna put out a single that needs to be a second piece of news you know ready to be something stunned or something around it you're creating a whole experience a band is an experience this is it all of Los Angeles is water right here right now fun fact about this water people complain about the water at the department water power keeping this water here cuz it seems wasteful and a drought but apparently a it's recycled water see they all the LA DWP servers are in this building and so ostensibly if there's a power outage then this water will be drained out and used to cool the server room this building has two amazing things about it one it's surrounded by water and two at night it lights up like crazy so it's like this huge excess of both water and power just to show us this is shows that they have it because water and power is is power in Los Angeles water especially is power in love in great soil great Sun no water add water great place but not sustainable in any real way people are always fearing some kind of disaster in LA I mean you guys identified as as a Los Angeles and as a California Vance would there be anything that could ever get you guys to want to completely reconsider we're going down with the ship yeah down with the ship for sure I can't imagine I mean I really cannot imagine another place but it would like excite me intellectually and personally as much as Los Angeles to us especially right now I mean I think the way that people in this city are like bending together to make a sustainable city like I mean it's a little late and our infrastructure is certainly not supporting it but you know there are efforts that are being made and they're like these grand utopian plans that are being made about the future of LA that I haven't like seen those kinds of things since like similar plans in the 60s like right all these buildings that we've seen today like I have this kind of aspirational quality to them and I think that that is coming back into the language yeah no I think it's I think it's exciting no matter what having lived in both LA and New York I do think it's exciting to be in a place where it's not all the way figured out yet