It’s hard to untangle the conflicting feelings of grief, frustration, exacerbation, guilt, complicity, and denial that swill around with the millions of barrels spewing from the seafloor wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead.  Progress in capping the well is maddeningly slow, perhaps because BP is only pursuing solutions that would allow them to recover “their” oil, or because the wellhead itself is perilously close to toppling, leading to a collapse of the seafloor in the immediate vicinity: a kind of slow motion chain reaction of environmental doom.  Yet again our maddening addictions come home to roost; so many people and animals are suffering, and vital ecosystem may be crippled for a long time (so much for rebuilding the natural wetlands hurricane barrier to protect the Louisiana coast from hurricane storm surge).

I’m not one to spout off about our oil problem:  I drive my car too much, I could take shorter showers, and I could stand to sweat a little more in the summer.  However, feel at liberty to take the opportunity to mention the dependence of agriculture, and specifically meat production, on fossil fuels by way of the oil spill.  I thought about making an infographic about it, but there are already too many bad oil spill infographics out there.  Instead, I’ve made some graphic-info.  I’ve done some back-of-the-napkin calculations (my own calculations are in bold, the rest are just factoids):

According to Cornell University, on average it takes 54 kilocalories (kcal) for every kilocalorie of beef protein produced in the United States.

1 gallon of gasoline equals 31,268 calories, or 31.3 kcal.

One pound of beef contains 1,000 calories, or 1 kcal.

So, 54 kcal of fossil fuel input / 31.3 kcal per gal. of gasoline = 1.73 gal. of gasoline per 1 lb of beef.

One barrel (bbl) of oil produces about 28 gallons of gasoline.

28 gal. per barrel / 1.73 gal. per lb. of beef = 16.18 lbs of beef per bbl of oil.

The Deepwater Horizon spill dumps 52,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

52,500 bbl per day x 16.18 lbs. of beef per bbl of oil = 849,500 lbs of beef per day that could have been produced by the spilled oil.

The average American eats 0.25 lbs of beef a day (95 lbs per year).

849,500 lbs of beef could provide 3.398 million Americans with their quarter pound per day of beef.

From the beginning of the spill 7.8 million barrels have been spilled.  That amounts to 126,204,000 lbs of beef by my reckoning.  Or 504,816,000 Quarter-Pounders with or without cheese.

To wrap up the calculations, 609 million barrels of our over 7.5 billion barrels of crude oil consumed annually goes to the agricultural production of beef.  This includes transport costs of animal, product, and feed, chemical fertilizer production, and so on.  But I could be wrong.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  this all is not to say that the oil spill will affect our food supply, or that people will go hungry as a result.  I want to make a connection between our demand for cheap fuels and our over-consumption of meat made artificially cheap by those fuels and subsidy.

I’m reading my way through Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 series.  One of Clarke’s magnificent little ideas dropped, seemingly-lackadaisically, into the narrative really grabbed my attention.  In the third book, 2061: Odyssey Three, Clarke makes mention that the Soviet rescue ship Leonov from the second book

Now hover[s] high above Farside [of the moon] as one of the main exhibits at the Lagrange Museum…

Clarke presents a solution of what promises to be a problem of the physical legacy of the early history of space exploration: what to do with obsolete but significant space hardware?  The inevitable end of the International Space Station’s (ISS) lifecycle is perhaps the most significant chance to begin to answer this question.

NASA, under the direction of President G.W. Bush had planned to deorbit the ISS in 2016.  Fortunately, the Obama administration has decided to try to extend the operation of the most expensive single thing ever built by humanity (at an estimated cost of $157 billion) until 2020.  Evidentially, the international support program for the station ends in 2016, but talks are currently underway to extend funding to 2028.

How could the station be deorbited?  If left to its own devices, atmospheric drag would eventually slow the ISS until it came flaming into the atmosphere.  An accidental deorbit could end badly (see Skylab v. Austrailian Outback).  It turns out that the maneuvering thrusters on the station do not posess enough power to perform a controlled deorbit, so a variety of solutions have been studied, including employing a modified resupply vehicle or specially constructed craft to push the ISS into the atmosphere.  Interestingly, the Russians value things with history and embodied costs, and are making plans to detach and save their own modules before the station meets its fiery demise.  Good thinking (though they have decided to name their new station built from salvaged modules the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex.  Maybe it’s more catchy in Russian).

Obviously, it costs a great deal to maintain the station for inhabitation, but even if it were mothballed, orbital velocity would need to be actively maintained against atmospheric drag.   But if it takes effort to bring the station down, couldn’t we employ similar efforts to take the station up, into a hirer orbit?

Or, as Clarke suggests, to a Lagrange point?

If you’re not in the know when it comes to orbital mechanics, a Lagrangian point

Mark[s] positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them. They are analogous to geostationary orbits in that they allow an object to be in a “fixed” position in space rather than an orbit in which its relative position changes continuously.

In other words, any object placed into a Lagrange point between orbital masses will be held stationary in relation to one of the masses by gravity alone.  There are five Lagrange points (L1-L5) between any two orbital masses, such as the Sun and the Earth or the Earth and the Moon.  Already, there are several satellites in the Earth-Moon and the Sun-Earth Lagrange points respectively.  Additionally, the Lagrange points frequently hold other celestial objects: the Trojan Asteroids hang out in the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points, for example.  President Obama has suggested that future missions to Lagrange points might serve as helpful proving grounds for future deep space manned-missions.

Back to Clarke’s Lagrange Museum.  What if L1, the Lagrangian point between the Earth and the Moon became a place to deposit future space hardware and vehicles with historical significance.  Already, there are plenty now-or-soon-to-be-discarded future-exhibits: Saturn IVB rocket stages that took Apollo astronauts to the moon, the Hubble Space Telescope, a whole Lunar Module left unused by Apollo 10, and of course, the ISS.

Certainly, moving the ISS, which has a mass nearly 400,000 lbs to the L1 point, almost 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, is beyond our technical and financial means today.  But who knows what the future holds, right?

And what of the planetary legacy of the first 50 years of space exploration?  On Mars for example, there are the Viking, Pathfinder, Surveyor, and Pheonix landers from the United States in addition to a few crashed and quasi-successful Soviet missions.  Mars experiences weather, so who knows in what condition we’ll find our unmanned landers if and when we finally land a man or woman on the surface.

The Moon is a different case entirely.  With only slight disturbance from its low gravity and space weathering, the six Apollo landing sites and countless other unmanned probes and landers should be in pristine condition.  Apollo 12 touched down near the Surveyor 3 lander in 1969, which itself had landed on the Moon in 1967.  This was the first time a manned mission had “caught up” to an unmanned one.  Several parts of the lander were brought back to Earth for study, where it was found that bacteria that had inadvertently contaminated Surveyor’s camera had survived dormant on the Moon for one and a half years.  For this reason, the Galileo probe studying the Jovian system was intentially crashed into Jupiter to insure it would not one day contaminate the moon Europa, which was shown to have saltwater seas (again, see Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two).

How will the Apollo 11 National (Lunar?) Park need to be constructed if we are not to disturb Armstrong and Aldrin’s first footsteps on another world?

I’m seeking funding for a little project over at Kickstarter.  I was inspired by the success of the Lasersaurus project initiated by Nor/d.  Hopefully, we’ll do as well as they are!

I want to draw an assembly manual for a LACK coffee table from IKEA that documents every step of the manufacturing process from raw material to flat-packed product. This manual will employ the same graphic style as IKEA’s other consumer assembly manual, but will shift step one back to the harvesting of raw materials so to better appreciate the industrial heft of the seemingly simple product.

Anyone who has assembled anything from IKEA is familiar with the wordless, boldly delineated IKEA assembly manual, which placidly describes the process of assembly. The LACK coffee table’s assembly instructions are a neat four pages: one cover page, one list of tools and parts, and five assembly steps spread between the remaining two pages. We propose to research and design a kind-of prequel to the existing manual that describes the production and logistical processes that go into the manufacturing of the LACK table.

Our premise is that the manual inside that flat package is just the tip of the iceberg, and we want to discover and diagram all that’s below the surface.

Step one could begin in the forests of China or Poland where a tree is felled that will eventually be processed into the pulp that comprises the LACK’s honeycomb interior. Step 100 could be the application of glue that joins the birch-effect veneer to the honeycomb. Finally, step 1,000 could be step one in the existing manual…

Our assembly manual will follow the same graphic standards that govern any IKEA assembly manual, and will therefore remain similarly objective. The ferocious objectivity of its presentation– from the standardized cover, to the cartoon version of yourself shown assembling your new furniture on a rug so as not to damage its corners–is one of the many enchanting things about IKEA’s assembly manuals. Our hope is that one can simultaneously be amazed by the technical complexity and logistical prowess embodied in the LACK table’s simplicity while also considering the enormous resources consumed in the name of efficiency. Our manual will be apolitical: it can serve as the underpinning of scorn just as readily as it can inspire admiration.

Sound sweet?  Show us some love here:  http://kck.st/cdcESD

Heatherwick’s Shanghai Expo pavilion is a precious object for on our screen, one that we can seem to relate and place ourselves within and around without having to actually leave our chairs.

If you haven’t seen the pictures/video of Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo AKA the “Seed Cathedral,” you must be under a rock (or at least not subscribing to any architecture/design blogs).  The building is a delight; its so easy to just get it, even though most of us will not travel to Shanghai to see it in person.  How can this be?

First, the building fulfils a simple program: pavilion.  In fact, as a program, “pavilion” implies hardly more than a shelter, so Heatherwick (plus an extensive team, no doubt) have overlaid a what I read as a programmatic narrative: seeds can be collected and distributed to and from all corners of the earth, and if you listen to them closely enough, you can read both the natural and human history of our planet.  These seeds are portable, condensed databases of millions of years of plant evolution and tens of thousands of years of human agricultural development.  The envelope of the pavilion, in the way it mediates the elements, cultivates a space that seems to want to tune the visitor into a mode of concentrated reflection and discovery.

But how do I know? I’ll never see it, except in pictures.  Here, the simple effect of the cast acrylic tubes that comprise the pavilion’s undulating, hairy skin evoke a childhood memory as a spatial nostalgia: the interior is a big Lite-Brite.  The metaphor is so direct that photographs of the interior triggers a childhood euphoria like the smell of some favorite comfort food.  All the better, the memory is scaled large enough transform the Lite-Brite into a spatial experience, which is something you can never do with fried chicken.

(When I Google “Lite-Brite” for an image conjured by the Seed Cathedral’s interior, I’m trying to find an image of children playing with the toy underneath their bedspread, an image burned into my mind by advertising no doubt, but carrying the weight of a memory as if I had actually played with a  Lite-Brite under my bed spread.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t, and I can’t find the picture anyway.)

Nostalgia for childhood objects have a peculiar grasp on my generation, as we spend our unemployed days chatting on Facebook about the Improve Everywhere Ghostbusters in the NY Public Library, laughing at Family Guy’s parody of MC Hammer, and having just got home from the latest Hollywood blockbuster remake of some 80’s shlock (GI Joe, A-Team, Transformers, Land of the Lost, etc.)  Calculated or not, the relate ability of the building’s effect makes it understandable even halfway around the world.

The pavilion’s metaphorical tectonic doesn’t end there.  The perfectly drooping light gathering rods that define the exterior give the pavilion a precious zoomorphism (or maybe it is botanomorphism).  The pavilion becomes alive as one envisions the rods rippling in the wind; describing the pavilion as hairy or furry emphasize this point.  Or maybe the rods aren’t hairs at all, they are vectors tracing the collection and dispersion of the seeds (human and natural knowledge), like the red strings bomb investigators use the trace the path of shrapnel during an investigation.

Even from a distance the pavilion looks like a really big iPhone app icon in some kind of tessellating field, an apple on a picnic blanket.  The pavilion is a precious object on our screen, one that we can seem to relate to and place ourselves within and around without having to actually leave our chairs.  Without the trigger of memory by tectonic and of metaphor by form, and more complex program, the pavilion might be doomed to be ignored by the internet architectural fanboys…

Today M.ammoth pointed me toward an article in the New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and blogger.  Simberg lays out the fallacies as he and many in the aerospace community in NASA’s re-tread of the Apollo program.  In short, he calls the space agency and government to task for its monolithic bloated-ness, declaring NASA a stagnant protector of jobs in crucial congressional districts that needlessly monopolizes human spaceflight.  As an alternative, he suggests aggregating an orbiting and deep space fueling infrastructure, supplied and maintained by the private sector.  Thus the burden of lifting all of a mission’s fuel (read: weight) at the time of launch is eliminated, and the marginal cost of getting into orbit is drastically reduced.

Simberg loves his metaphors.  He likens his scheme for the exploration of space en-masse by any private citizen or organization that can foot the now lower launch costs to the way the “old west” was settled.  He begins:

The critical requirement of a reusable space system is refuelability. Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers’ hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn’t have been able to pull it.

And presses the metaphor into service to describe his own vision:

…we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.

To me, though, the real gem of Simberg’s article is a throw-away line. He asserts that NASA’s job should be to make it possible for any group, be it “the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company”  to colonize Mars  (the emphasis is all mine).

The Mormons as interstellar pioneers!  It makes so much sense.  Consider:

a) Proven track record. In 1847, Brigham Young let a group of Mormons onto what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.  Only back then it was Mexican territory.

b) Plural marriage. Undoubtably,  the Mormon settler’s success in Utah owes something to this strong family structure developed for the rapid production of children.

c) Fastidious record keeping. An obsession with geneology has inspired a vast collection of birth and death certificates, kept within a mountain in Utah, and tended to by impeccable Mormon archivists.  Exploring new planets demands a fair amount of data collection, indexing, and storage, I’d imagine.

Arch Daily rooted up a lovely little Truffle this week.  Duh, not the kind you eat, but a modest building project by Ensamble Studio in Spain.  I want to call it process architecture (though it’s not at all something Phillip Glass would think up) but given its gastronomic nomenclature, maybe we should call it slow architecture.  More or less, Ensamble dug a big hole in the ground for the building’s outer formwork and then, as they describe it:

We materialized the air building a volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built air [with concrete] to solidify it. The poured mass concrete wrapped the air and protected itself with the ground.

In short, hay is used as the positive mold against which concrete is cast.

Once the concrete has fully entombed the hay, the outer dirt formwork is excavated away, and a quarry machine is brought onsite to excise one end of the mass to create and opening.  As the quarry machine leaves the site, a second machine arrives on site to remove the compressed, organic formwork from the now exposed interior: Paulina the cow.  Ensamble writes:

To empty the interior, the calf Paulina arrived, and enjoyed the 50 [cubic meters] of the nicest food, from which she nourished for a year until she left her habitat, already as an adult and weighing 300 kilos. She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.

They go on to become obsessed with the dense materiality of the edifice, waxing poetic about how the hay-formed concrete “contrasts with the continuous liquidity of the ceiling that evokes the sea, petrified in the lintel of the spatial frame.”  Yeah, fine, whatever…I’m more interested in the cow!

The scope of Ensamble’s diagrams are myopic.  What about the cow’s waste?  Is it a milk cow, or will she become the first meal served on Truffle’s table?  I won’t hold the oversight against them, because the expanding ecosystem of the building’s construction is so exciting.  Edible formwork, construction without waste, the construction site food web: the BLDGBLOG post nearly writes itself!

The Truffle brings to mind Australian architect Andrew Maynard’s Poop House.  If I recall correctly, Maynard proposes a kind of Quonset hut made of consecutive arches of double-walled polypropolyne bladders. The inner bladder is filled with fresh, potable water and the outer bladder is empty.  Overtime, the water in the walls is consumed by the house’s inhabitants, who in turn, produce poop.  The poop is pumped into the empty outer bladders where it hardens in the unforgiving Austrailian sun.  By the time all the water is consumed, the outer bladder has been filled with poop, now a hardened, durable building material.

The uncanny, sublime construction process in Ensamble’s Truffle and Maynard’s Poop House forgives any compromise that must be made on the building’s behalf.  In each, food plays an implicit role in the subtractive or additive narrative of its construction: the cow eats the hay formwork in one, while human waste becomes a building material in the other.  These buildings would like Michael Pollan happy: not only do they provide shelter, but the satisfying process of their construction satiates the mind.

On today’s On Point, guest host Jane Clayson interviewed Gordon Hempton, who describes himself as an “acoustic ecologist,” which is a pretty great professional title, if I ever heard one.  Hempton became an acoustic ecologist after a period in which an inescapable and painful sound replaced his normal hearing, pushing him to observe the world (when he recovered) through listening alone, and inspiring him to search for places devoid of human noise pollution.  (Meanwhile, on the Diane Rehm Show naturalist  E.O. Wilson was discussing his new book Anthill.  Wilson has focused his studies on insects because a childhood fishing accident blinded him in one eye, making him ill-suited for bird watching, which is by his description what most naturalists do).

Hempton advocates for the Federal government to re-route air traffic around certain designated national parks, creating refuges of natural silence.  He points out this is not an unheard (pun) of occurence: the FAA modifies take off patterns for two weeks so not to break Federer’s and Nadal’s concentration during the US Open at Flushing Meadows.  But perhaps the No-Fly Zone over northern and southern Iraq enforced by the United States in the 1990’s or similar exclusion zones over sensitive areas like the White House are more suitable, if not more active examples. Timely enough, Heathrow was silenced this week by the ash cloud from an erupting and nearly-unpronounceable Icelandic volcano.  The Guardian pointed out that people living around the busiest airport in Europe have gotten a short reprieve: to again hear their communities.  At the risk of getting the warm and fuzzies, drink in this quote:

Farzana Rafique, 43, a childminder, summed up the overall mood of the town as she returned home from Hatton Cross tube. “It’s just been a relief. Everyone usually gets a bit irritated by the noise, but I’ve noticed that people have been a bit calmer today. It’s made a difference to me, at least.”

Ugh, but the point is well-taken.  Even for those not living near an airport, machine-made decibels have crept their way up everywhere.  I came across a link submitted by a listener to the On Point comment thread for the story which pointed to a study of transportation-related noise pollution by county in the lower-48.  Judging from the map he produced of air traffic noise pollution, the sound of jets is pervasive. When Hempton describes the need to “carve out” places for silence he really nails the metaphor.  The magenta is a mass of sonic entropy from which we have to excise areas of calm.

I worked for Friedrich St. Florian for a month or so in his Providence office.  My workstation was adjacent to his 1968 photostat montage New York Birdcage: Imaginary Architectures.  I really love looking at it (and am always surprised to remember that this came from the same man that brought us the WWII memorial on the National Mall).  The drawing describes the “transparent, elusive, magnificent” waiting rooms in the air transcribed or drawn by planes in holding patterns. Bevin Cline, writing for MoMA notes that the rooms depend…

…entirely upon the airplane’s presence and on the pilot’s and air-traffic controller’s consciousness of designated coordinates. Once the craft has moved on, the parameters become irrelevant and the room disappears.

In the case of Hempton’s no-fly zones of silence, it is quite the opposite.  The parameters, no longer irrelevant, exist with or without the plane, given shape by the planes, their pilots, and the air traffic controller.  One could imagine making a kind of reverse casting of Friedrich’s project to create a model of these protected areas of audio-refuge.

It is surprising to realize how much of what seems to be genuine urban (and indeed interior and other exterior) space on television and in film is either augmented or completely fabricated from green screen digital matte techniques.  Judging from the video above, even the most mundane shot was originally filmed either on a back-lot or in some un-identifiable alley, only to be labored over by digital artists until it is fit for our consumption.

Lacking strong central authority, the “heroic” redesign of the urban environment is impossible (especially when it is not inspired by rampant disease and fear of barricading revolutionaries), yet every week on every network production designers become little Baron Haussmanns, reshaping and refining Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver into better Los Angeleses, New Yorks, and any other city in the world.  Haussmann hovered over maps, plans, and building codes as a surgeon hovers over a (presumably) sick body, his pencil a scalpel strategically excising what was seen as the cause of Paris’s disease (thanks, Anthony Vidler).  Our own Hollywood-Haussmanns are plastic surgeons who use the scalpel of the green screen to amputate the undesirable, then to stitch in digital prosthesis and implants, making our cities and urban rooms appear more vibrant and dynamic than the apparently are…

Street scenes for a tragedy and a comedy from Serlio’s Di Architettura

Of course, challenges of shooting in a “live” urban environment weighted against the restrictive budgets of television and film productions have inspired the proliferation of green screen augmentation.  All the same, I am constantly surprised when I come across an unexpected view in a city: the depth of the scene is so much more vivid, the idiosyncrasies are so much more compelling, and my heart beat is quicker knowing what I am seeing is shaped by hundreds of years and countless legal, architectural, historical, and emotional forces.  It is a composition that is a residue, accretion, and response and not a calculated, aesthetic arrangement.

Of course, everyone is going bonkers over the iPad, announced today.   This post isn’t about the iPad, it’s about me.

Bryan Boyer, representing the editorial staff at Archinect.com, put out a call for ideas.

To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment, we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?

Your task is to design a deployable minaret that can attain full presence, visible from a distance, during each of the five daily calls to prayer.

A good prompt, in my mind merging the contemporary impulse of architecture as activism and some older psychedelic probes into the form, function, and agenda of architecture.  I produced two entries (really a variation on the same theme) called Mini-rets.

First, I denied the need for a “brick-and-mortar” mosque that a minaret would necessarily tower beside, insisting that the Mullah and observant Muslim themselves were all that were necessary to create a holy space.  Presumably, the call to prayer could take place over a cell phone network, with a cell tower the de facto minaret. This, however, misses the subversive aim of the competition, which is to undermine a legal change with (at least in this case) a guerrilla architecture.  In Mini-ret I, the Mullah wears a telescoping tower topped by loudspeakers and a crescent moon, which pushes into the sky five times a day for the call to prayer, wherever the Mullah may be.  The aural broadcast of a minority culture does not amount to a threat to the majority, instead it is a statement of a shared identity for the minority in strange land.

Lucky me, Mini-ret I was featured on the “results” page, with Archinect editor Heather Ring noting, “architecture already seems anachronistic – this mobilizes a collective call to prayer through a wearable network.”

Mini-ret II is more playful. It proposes that the Mullah is to hold an Alphorn upright (as if it were a periscope) to project the call to prayer.

I assume that Bryan wrote the introduction to the call for ideas result page; it at least fits with remarks he’s made previously about the architect’s potential position when so much of his or her historical duties are being apportioned away (and indeed his current position within Sitra, as far as I can tell)(I’ve been an avid consumer of all things Bryan Boyer on the internet for at least four years now.  I ran into him in person only once outside the RISD architecture building in Providence.  I wasn’t sure it was him until later…):

At the core of the Call for Ideas was an implicit question about the efficacy of architecture in the realm of politics….what does a specifically architectural mode of resistance look like? Is there even a useful specificity or perhaps architecture in the hands of an architect is nothing more than a brick – an object of resistance only inasmuch as it’s hurled forcefully into the world. Some of the entrants to this Call for Ideas are asking bricks what they want to be and hearing a much different response than Kahn could have ever dreamed.

While many of the entries are snarky (mine included), it is heartening that we at least are staking our position as inventors and innovators within a constraining condition.

I saw Daybreakers this afternoon, and found it couldn’t live up to its compelling premise.  In the world of the film, an outbreak of vampirism results in nearly the entire population becoming vampires ten years on.  In the exposition of the movie, great pains are taken to demonstrate and explain how day-to-day vampire life exists:  cars have a “daylight” mode that blacks-out all windows, forcing the driver to navigate by cameras; homes are equipped with heavy louvers; and everyone gets their sustenance from coffee laced with human blood.

Humans, of course, are a rare breed.  Large numbers are grown in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) designed by the art department from The Matrix. Ultimately,  I liked the film better as an allegory for industrial food production, with humans standing in for cows or pigs (others read the film as a metaphor for “creeping progressive socialism”).

Driving the vampire population’s desperation is a sudden drop in the availability of human blood.  You’d think that after ten years, the vampires would have been able to domesticate the human population more successfully, and would have an unlimited, cheap supply of humans. Maybe since they can’t go outside during the day to cultivate subsidized corn, they’ve got nothing to fatten the humans on.  Or maybe, and more to the point, maybe their human mono-culture had suffered from a destructive pestilence: staph infection from farmers who forget to wash their hands before changing the IVs on their crop, or whatever.

A large corporation simultaneously cultivates all blood for the vampire population to consume, looks for a viable artificial blood substitute their own labs, AND maintains a standing army of vampires to hunt down any free-range humans.  Its as if Arthur-Daniels-Midland (ADM) and Blackwater became the ultimate military-industrial-food complex from one of Michael Pollan’s sweaty nightmares.

Of course, these free range humans, when not being hunted by the vampire army, lead an idealized life on a Napa Valley winery, of all places (because there’s so much sun and no shade, they say).  They grow their own tomatoes.  The have great skin.   And the vampire ADM loves to hunt them down.

The vampires aren’t immoral though.  Some seem to be genuinely trying escape death (Sam Neill, who says he prefers the taste of free-range human blood over farmed because it has “fear” in it), some have been turned against their will and struggle with their existence (Ethan Hawke).  It is the internal struggle of Hawke’s character that finally drags out the solution to the vampire’s food shortage: again become human.   I won’t get into the details, but it involves allowing a vampire to eat the blood of a human that once was a vampire.

In a way then, once the vampire eats what he once was, he is saved.  The eater-vampire becomes physiologically aware of his food and is transformed (grok?). Thankfully, in real-life the human eater only has to become intellectually aware of his food’s sourcing to free himself from the physical perils of the military-industrial-food complex.

Fittingly, Hawke’s character in the beginning of the film is a vampire who is trying to invent artificial blood (read, corn derived food products), and by the end has actually saved the world by forcing it to return to the food culture of an earlier time.