I visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers during a visit to Los Angeles in 1994 and was utterly awestruck. Rodia’s sui generis creation is truly one of the greatest examples of American outsider art. This 12-minute documentary from 1957 contains interviews with Rodia, who spoke with a thick Italian accent, as well as excellent footage from the surrounding neighborhood. (It also features a weirdly Twilight Zone-ish score.) I found this on Rick Prelinger’s archive.org a couple of years ago and was planning to upload it to YouTube myself, but I just discovered that it’s there already. Bonus Simon Rodia fact: He appears in the collage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.

Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

I was planning just to write a short post about the curiosity at right, a 12-sided Rubik’s-style puzzle called a Megaminx. I’ve had one of these things stowed away in a box for more than 20 years, and I stumbled across it a few weeks ago. My Megaminx is in its solved state, but I doubt this means I ever knew how to solve it. I think I acquired this thing toward the end of the early-’80s Rubik’s Cube fad, when I was 12 or 13, and by then I had already gotten interested in other things. Like, um, boobs and stuff.

Anyway, I was looking for a couple of good Rubik’s-related links for this post, and on the official Rubik’s Cube site I discovered a recent Manchester News story about the maverick architect Will Alsop’s plans for an 80-mile-long, 15-mile-wide hypermodern “super city” that would run from coast to coast in Northern England. Alsop’s plans for downtown Manchester include a “50-metre teddy bear” and “a revolving building shaped like a Rubik’s cube puzzle”:

Urbis, Manchester’s Centre for Urban Culture, is hosting a SuperCity exhibit. The Manchester News story explains that the Rubikian building, conceived to be a cinema, will probably never be built: “Mancunians needn’t start writing protest letters just yet. Urbis said the bear-and-cube picture was simply an image chosen to get people thinking creatively. And the city council said it had no plans to act on the ideas….”

You can buy all sorts of unusual Rubik’s-style puzzles here.