Thursday, March 08, 2007

YOUR NEXT BACKYARD PROJECT

Isn't it beautiful!? I've had this picture for years but I can't remember where I got it. I think it's a detail of a Mayan wall. If anybody out there is about to undertake some brickwork, I recommend that they throw out their plans and redraw them to incorporate this.

Of course this probably requires a stone mason at a trillion dollars an hour.

18 comments:

Sean Worsham said...

Whoa Mama!!! But not "impossible" to replicate, provided you do a miniature version of this on a fence height.

Brubaker said...

Whoa...so many things to do...so little time and money (especially money. I'm flat-ass broke)

Eddie, I think you said you like Virgil Partch, so I thought I share this. These are samples of VIP's little known comic strip from the 1970s

http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2007/03/obscurity-of-day-captains-gig.html

Anonymous said...

Frank Loydd Wright was inspired by the Mayan temples when he built the Ennis Brown House in L.A.
http://www.ennishouse.org/htmls/photo_page.htm

Trivia: The Art Department for Bladerunner used a castings of a replica tile from the Ennis Brown House gift store for Deckard's apartment.

Kali Fontecchio said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kali Fontecchio said...

I doubt your family would let you do that to your patio hahaha.

Rogelio T. said...

Here's a color gallery of the specific structure in the photo.

Xlapak

Click on "photos" and "next" your way through them.

The rest of the site is pretty nice. It has a bunch of maps and photos.

Unknown said...

it would be an interesting statement. Not many houses have a Mayan temple theme too them :)

Anonymous said...

Dirty latin savages!

Kali Fontecchio said...

You're one to speak Jorge!


I'd like a barbeque on my backyard that looked like that.

katzenjammer studios said...

Haha! I wish I was like Hearst so I could have that airlifted to my backyard. Millions of people were sacrificed there, but I'd climb it just to throw some steaks on for me and the boys.

stiff said...

My first thought when I saw that was that it was the temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, but it's not.... It's hard to see a lot of details from this photo, but there is an interesting motif that's pretty common in Mesoamerican art: see that wide toothy mouth-looking hole across the bottom? That's what it is! Caves were sacred places, and they might have been seen as the mouth of a giant earth monster/god, which is often depicted in the art, usually at the bottom of the composition. Just thought I'd share, as I'm particularly interested by these things.

Lester Hunt said...

Rogelio, Thanks a million for that link. What an amazing site that is -- to think that so much stunningly beautiful art is still being found in the rubble of these buildings today!

Andreas said...

Beyond the money issue, I think you would have a serious problem finding the people with the skills to pull off building something like that. The more "advanced" we get as a civilization, the more skills we lose to the past.

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Rogelio: Great link! Central Americans certainly were generous with the letter "X."

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Rogelio: I just spent some more time with the pictures you linked to. Wow! What amazing people the Mayans were! If it's OK with you I'll do a whole blog about this site.

Anonymous said...

>Rogelio: Great link! Central Americans certainly were generous with the letter "X."

Eddie, did you know my name is actually spelled Xoxxe Xaxxixo and that I've got some Mayan in me?

Well, the latter is true, anyway.

Mayans hand make the best tortillas on the planet. In Guatemala nobody goes to supermarkets for tortillas, we go to the indians! They bake them on hot stones, it's their only source of income.

Rogelio T. said...

Eddie, I stumbled upon that web site while trying to find the location where that picture was taken.
I wanted to know what it was named so I could look it up on Google Earth.

That website I linked to ended up being much better than anything I was expecting to find.
---------
I don't know if you've used Google Earth before.
You might have fun playing around with it and looking at all the pictures people have posted on there.(If your computer is able to run it)

Unfortunately Google earth didn't have a high quality aerial photo of Xlapak.
20°10'23" North, 89°36'26" West

If anybody wants to look around Machu-Picchu in Peru.
13°09'49" North, 72°32'45" West
----------
>If it's OK with you I'll do a whole blog about this site.

Feel free to, I wasn't go to post anything about it. Even if I was, I still wouldn't mind.

3awashi thani said...

i've alway imagined my future house with a carving of maui above the door to ward away visitors , but this'll work!