Joe Talbot's Frisconian Field Guide to San Francisco

Joe Talbot, director of the Last Black Man in San Francisco, created this charming map - via SFGATE

The idea was to capture what places have been priced out and what still exists. Here is the title block.

Here are some details.

 

Here lies the ghost of a football stadium as people in hazmat suits dump  green stuff into the bay.

All these pictures were lifted from SFGATE where you can read and see more details.

How Hollywood has Destroyed America

From the Concourse - an animated map showing the many ways places in the US have been destroyed in movies.

Hollywood clearly does not shy away from destroying their own city. The page includes lists and explanations for each symbol type along with several caveats and a discussion of the fine distinction between monsters and creatures. The yet to be released Sharknado 2 was not included. 

Los Angeles and "Her" Future Transit System

One of the Best Picture nominees in Sunday's Academy Awards is Her. The movie takes place in a future LA with skyscrapers and a much more comprehensive transit system. There is a scene in the movie that was shot in a subway (or light rail) station. This map is in the background.

The map was designed by Champion Studio and posted on Gizmodo. The designers had fun with it giving stations names like Hair Salon and Private Drive. There are a number of other odd touches like a stop in the river, several lines not listed in the legend and a fictional transit authority.

The LAMLR has a nicely designed logo featuring an elevated train and the words "Sea to Summit." For more details and a readable map see the Gizmodo post.

Paddle-to-the-Sea is on Google Earth!

 

A young Indian boy carves a little canoe with a figure inside and names him Paddle-to-the-Sea. Paddle's journey, in text and pictures, through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean provides an excellent geographic and historical picture of the region.

When I was in school one of the teachers showed us the movie version of Paddle-to-the-Sea. At first I thought it was kind of dumb watching a kid carve a canoe and I probably wasn't paying complete attention. Then suddenly, the canoe slid down the hill and into the river and began its journey. I was transfixed and transformed and all those other cliches. Ever since then the movie has had a powerful hold on my imagination, though not in the forefront of my mind until I found out that you can see it in Google Earth.

The COSEE Great Lakes web site allows you to download a kml file and explore it, chapter by chapter. Here are the beginning chapters from the Nipigon River region of Ontario.

Paddle the enters Lake Superior. After heading the wrong way and getting stranded on beaches and marshes, it eventually finds its way to the Soo Locks with the help of a dog sled.

After a detour through Lake Michigan, it ends up in the lower Great Lakes where it tumbles over Niagara Falls and into the St Lawrence Seaway.

Finally reaching the Atlantic it gets caught by a French fishing boat and brought to France.

The book itself is worth re-reading or even purchasing. I took a nicely worn copy of it out of the library. Here is an image of the main map from the book taken from SecretPlans.

In addition to the geography lessons, the book also diagrams a sawmill, a canal lock, a lake freighter and several other industrial processes that take place in the Great Lakes region. It also has diagrams that morph the lakes into recognizable shapes long before morphing became fashionable. Lake Superior is morphed into a wolf's head, while Huron becomes a trapper carrying a pack of furs.The maps also show the birthplace of the Dionne Quintuplets - this must have been a big story for the pre-octomom era. 

Film Map

In honor of this weekend's Academy Awards, here is a Film Map from Dorothy, an art collective based in the U.K.

The Map, which is loosely based on the style of a vintage Los Angeles street map has its own Hollywood Boulevard and includes districts dedicated to Hitchcock and Cult British Horror movies. Like most cities it also has its own Red Light area. There's an A-Z key at the base of the Map listing all the films featured with their release dates and names of the directors.

Here is a detail of Reservoir Dogs (Silver Lake) from their News page.

Finally, one more detail of the Killing Fields of Los Feliz.

Map of the Week - Netflix

I was going to post something more intellectual than this but today's a busy one so here's something nice and dumb- a map of what Netflix considers to be popular in your state courtesy of Slacktory.