Architecture and other Habits

My Kind of Olympic Moment

2012-03-07T11:35:00.008-08:00

As the Olympic quest rifles through us with inordinate tedium, and shakes us out to dry with it's soporific cultural manifesto, I am reminded of a particularly educational 'Olympic Night' I shared with some ladies calling themselves 'Olympia Moments Ltd' and the task I have immediately to hand of recalling their very special achievements in words to accompany a book of photographs by Julie Cook. Sebastian Coe might have grown beyond some permanent impression of a sulky prefect if he could even have imagined these monthly events (recorded over six years) that became a cornerstone of our healthiest enjoyment of the world.

Above you see them embroiled in some synchronized swimming on the floor of a pub. There was no winner, but there were huge congratulations all round, and tidy benefit to all. This ballsy, cynical parody somewhere in Aldgate I think, became, to us, revolutionary theatre. It was some kind of representation of the 'permanent revolution' you found in your theory texts. I remember my first ticket from this women only co-operative/initiative, I remember getting Julie along the next month, I remember the time she began, with enormous trust, to take photographs and record the events.

Those people working outside the margins of common respectability, but doing it because they like it, demand respect, not derision. There was never any trouble at these events, indeed I more than once exclaimed that the NHS should prescribe them as therapy. Wheelchairs were welcome. People who criticize sexually based entertainment tend to do so out of fear, not morality.

Tessenow

2012-03-07T01:34:00.000-08:00

Aerials

2012-03-07T01:15:00.004-08:00

Found this lovely '20's drawing by the Vesnins, no doubt for a workers something or other. Many things about it might intrigue us, not least it's painterly quality, but what got to me was the bloody aerials. Of course the aerials represent the real function of the building. At a moment of desperate importance, the spreading of the word means aerials above architecture. In constructivism we tend to get loads of planks at angles with hooters and aerials on top and that's just fine, but does it represent also the supremacy of the word, perhaps?

(I was also looking at Tessenow's music academy in Hellerau (1910 above) which looked pretty lovely. I'm sure it was lovely for him too until everybody for the last hundred years has run around declaring it fascist. Tessenow was infact more communist than fascist, and also tended to shut up in conversation about such things. He was not inclined toward the word.)

The other thing that plagues me about this sketch is that it represents the importance of those aerials above what we might call a nebulous heap of program, and further that I shall be seeing many many sketches just like this but without the aerials from all my students from here on until the summer holidays. I wonder what that means.

In Praise of...Tramadol

2012-03-06T01:51:00.003-08:00

Now I'm not drinking, or rather as drinking has become not so much a pleasant physical experience as an anguished mental one, there is nothing like reaching for a Tramadol at around three in the morning. This extraordinary little package does wonders, conjouring a dreamscape of fluffy white clouds (admittedly in my case with a soundtrack of Yes's Starship Trooper) in which to ease the pain, solve problems, connect thoughts, ease delightfully through conundrums and generally feel a fucking sight better in the morning. Last night it presented me, amongst other things, with the reason Leon Krier's work 'looks funny'. Indeed Leon Krier's classicism does 'look funny' to us. This is because, according to Tramadol, it is not Palladian, and the English only really understand Palladian classicism, that conveniently modest (cheap) rip off of the conveniently modest Italian rustic, which the freewheeling capitalists of the C18th thought was just great for just about everything. This also explains why those who worry about architecture can straightforwardly despise Quinlan Terry, who does an understandable Palladian impression, but remain bemused by Leon Krier.....because it might be good, then again it might be awful but it does certainly 'look funny'.

Poundbury apparently looks very funny indeed. Ye olde village shoppe is a Budgens.

Postmodernism in Architecture 1

2012-03-04T04:21:00.004-08:00

Found this coaster in a junk shop. The thought bubble went something like 'Ideal for Postmodernism' and 'Looks just like Mum and Dad's' and 'Urghh'. People in general don't think that this is what postmodernism looks like I know, they think that this is really how it is, some quaint country village just like in Midsommer Murders, but Midsommer Murders is only half correct in depicting the horrors of such places. The horrors begin when you actually go there and find the local pub full of half pissed international arms dealers.

People do still crave roses round the door and cottages in the countryside, and it's a bit like Joseph Goebbels craving Tutonic Knights. One's concern, should one dare to voice it, is that this is still the image 100% of Conservative cabinet members have of 'home'. The image is so pervasive it's where we might start in our cultural analysis of anything else 'British', simply because this image of authentic Britain, is to anybody with half a mind entirely fake.

That's why I don't like to use the word fake, we're all too much up to our necks in it to see it.

Research Methods

2012-02-29T08:59:00.011-08:00

To be honest there are many times when I consider just walking down the street to be 'research'. But it is time to be audited on such a response by the university, and I doubt they will agree.

Firstly, research is officially about contribution to knowledge. I once defined knowledge as only existing because we have a word for it. It might mean being able to make an atomic bomb in the first place, it might also be persuading somebody not to use it. If you were re-incarnated as Le Corbusier, and it was you painting every morning, at least it seems to me that if you indeed PAINTED EVERY MORNING whilst being the greatest architect in the world, this would be quite a tangible aspect of your 'research'. Certainly 'knowledge' is not something that saves the economy as the government might like. Instead it more happily produces toxic by products that it won't.

So, it's not as easy as you might think. I've put 'Architecture and Other Habits Vol 1' on my list of four contributions to 'knowledge'.

It got printed up in New York, and I'm well chuffed with it, the software itself picked out the Mayfair image for the cover, and put 'Some Las Vegas Strip Clubs' on the back. It has also added some decorative wing-dings and the look of a mid-town business report. I'm quite happy with this too, it's sort of 'as found' and A4. The company now send me e-mail tips on how to make it 'better'.

However I thumb through it with some satisfaction. It is as good a tutorial as I can manage without Vol2. Whilst of course you can have all of it for free anyway, some of you may like to thumb the complete vol1, and if you'd like a hard copy, contact me on davies.vegas@virgin.net and I'd be happy to order you one. Also I will include with each copy an original and singular work of art by myself, signed of course. Cost on application (£50-100).

Huge KISS

2012-02-27T12:31:00.006-08:00

I heard the title track from the new Bruce Springsteen album (Wrecking Balls- a subeditors dream headline) and immediately went and bought a huge KISS flag for the H&T base room in our place to go behind the door. Anything Springsteen has written about New Jersey, culturally speaking, is totally outclassed by KISS's Detroit Rock City 'It's not about taste it's about what tastes good' attitude, even though it doesn't sound as decent and well meaning, or as sanctimonious and, in the end, even sickening.

'Is good better than decent' I heard two girls discuss in the lift today. They were earnestly discussing their feedback. Strangely they looked at me for an answer by level 2. I said, 'He's a nice boy' is always an insult isn't it?' and left them to it. They no doubt realized I was an obtuse twat and ready to report me to the authorities for not answering questions properly.

Same with KISS, I am no Chuck Klosterman (and that guy can WRITE everybody- I recommend 'Sex Drugs and Coco Puffs' to start) but he's a great Kiss fan, and a big Billy Joel fan too. It is very rare to get away with two such obvious FAUX PAS I have to say, but even if he is probably an arsehole, I don't care. He says it because he's telling the truth on his terms. It's very rare and the only good thing still resident in the American Dream. Sometimes you make it by doing just that. This almost never happens in the UK.....apart from Motorhead.

Within this rubric, Stringsteen is an awful ham. When he squeezes his pistons or whatever, it's never as good as when KISS do it.

Singin the Blues..

2012-02-26T11:20:00.004-08:00

You can't move on Columbia Road market on Sunday for accordions and banjos. We even saw a floppy haired kid around eleven years plucking away at his acoustic guitar equipped with a music stand, probably be playing John Martyn next week. Not sure if this is a manifestation of the desperate middle class, they didn't look desperate to me even though the whole street seemed bedecked in 'Keep Calm and Carry On' memorabilia. Meanwhile newly banjoed youth sang and played their harmonicas. Most peculiar; hearing them howling about not being able to sign their name. Maybe they can't, maybe they can only text it. Meanwhile the head count on aviator shades and lattes was astronomical.

As we usually do, we made for The Birdcage. The Birdcage has just changed hands, so the old hands are worried, looking shifty as if their favourite chairs will disappear overnight. Their banter with the landlady has, after all, already gone. We walk in to find the blinds are up. This is not a good sign. The point of the Birdcage was your general wanker, if they stepped in the door, generally stepped right out again, that is the traditional way and caused us a great deal of amusement. If you expose the interior to passes by, they will not be so nervous about the exercise of coming in. Whatever the plan, it was empty. More empty than usual. Like sheep, it will take a while for the wankers to cotton on. But the big coffee machine had already been installed. It's already happened I thought, like a fucking virus, the old fellas see it and they just don't bother anymore and die to meals on wheels. When the music turned to African chanting, and not a hint of Arsenal or Tottenham, I knew it was all over, just a matter of time.

I went home and drew the kitchen again.

Heroic Modern Architecture

2012-02-24T10:47:00.005-08:00

Why is modern architecture deemed heroic? Well because it is isn't it. Even Gropius, that unlikely source, described the Bauhaus in utterly heroic terms, saying just what it was made of. I'd love to have been there for that, just as I'd have loved to have been with Malevich just after he'd painted white on white, and was wondering what to do next.

But that isn't quite good enough. Maybe we should be more specific, such as wondering what heroism might be, or where it might have gone. Certainly, lecturing once again on the greats of modernism to second year, I'm struck by how much heroism I see myself, and how little I see elsewhere. I do not need excuses for Mies, yet if I root around on the web for amusement on the subject of Mies van de Rohe, most likely I'll find the most asinine of commentaries on how lovely his work is, while I'm brewing up for a storm on how make the stuff fantastically literally shit yourself scary.......because it is! Stand beneath the New National Gallery Berlin and not think that, sit on the bog in the New National Gallery, observe the 5mm grid, and think not.

I found myself in a similar situation today with regard to Le Corbusier. Way beyond Jenck's vision of him representing a tragic view of architecture, I reckon its more of a tragic view of mankind itself, and rolled him in with Homer.

Such contemplations may or may not sit well with the twitter generation. I can't see why you couldn't twitter on the big questions of life itself, it just seems people don't, or more to the point would look stupid doing so, or maybe only do so in Scandinavia. I wonder also if they might eventually crave solitude, hills, poetry and huts in the forest or cliff tops by the sea (with connecting restaurant of course) themselves, or is that a lot of bollocks too?

Another Great Architectural Photograph

2012-02-22T14:22:00.002-08:00

Penthouse Las Vegas.

Against Nature

2012-02-21T03:26:00.003-08:00

Yesterday I found myself for the first time sitting in a hotel bar and ordering tea. Tea and coffee for one. Julie and I looked at each other. Well this is a fine thing I thought, perhaps I've finally joined the other side.

We were returning from the octogenarian Disneyland that is my parents vision of the countryside. To be fair, good for them, but to me the village looks more mechanistic than any urban industry these days. Our urban lands are now feral, but their village is patrolled by a very high percentage of sparkling Landrovers and occupied by a highly selective variety of the socially cloned. The general situation has reversed. Mondrian didn't like green, I suggest today, to represent the forefront of our technological embrace, you'd paint in little else.

One of the highlights is always our walk to the garden centre, the industrial feedstock of this curious place. Here ranks of half dead alpines stand at 50%off, ridiculous stone toads mind potential ponds, and you can buy a crappy forest waterfall for £185. Amidst sacks and sacks of compost barricade sits a cafe and a souvenir shop. It sells perfumed candles and Barbour jackets, a kind of Keep Calm and Carry On franchise with books recommending 'middle age without the crisis', the cover of which depicts a man asleep in his shed. I put it down in disgust.

If you are of a critical disposition, you have to shut up in these places.

Lolling against the counter of the cafeteria was a teenaged girl absently polishing a stainless steel tea pot for want of anything else to do. Thankfully it was clear she could not care less, not for the job, not for the place, not for anything much but her scraggy hair, red lipstick and escape route out of here. She was wearing an old black Jimi Hendrix Experience 1968 tee shirt. 'Urbanity' I thought, 'culture' I thought, people making their ordinary everyday rebellious decisions, I thought, thank fuck for that.

The Big House

2012-02-15T03:02:00.004-08:00

'The Big House must stay open!!' made my ears prick up. Rangers fans call Ibrox the Big House?- isn't that prison or heaven? But what a great analogy from the bald fat...er gentleman.. on the right! Certainly Ibrox looks more like a prison than any other football stadium, it's a big beast of a thing in the docklands of Glasgow nomatter who's inside. My old Coach and Horses architect pal Gordon McLean reminisced long on the scariest afternoon of his life at an old firm game in the seventies. Seemed like war.

So that's it, the next financial cataclysm strikes early and in curious ways, we will take away the fanatical Rangers fans birthright- an odd place to start, but poignant. How will they feel in Northern Ireland? Isn't this the death of Ian Paisley? I suspect international ramifications with Scottish independence too, and of course the total collapse of Scottish identity. Like the early stages of that disaster movie (see Badiou 'If this is the spectacle..') where will this end? Do not expect the flapping of butterfly wings, but the smack of a green and white fist to unleash hell across the earth.

Don't pay your mortgage off.

Great Architectural Photograph

2012-02-14T04:11:00.002-08:00

Unfortunately I had to go to godawful Bermuda to take it.

Memories

2012-02-14T02:56:00.010-08:00

I'm rooting through some old stuff, perhaps nostalgically, but mostly just wondering what's there. A whole collection of Las Vegas hotel bills for instance looks fantastic, feels fantastic and brings memories flooding back. When I got lost with architecture in the UK I found it in Las Vegas. It was the early nineties. I was in my early thirties and it was a very good education. The architecture was conceptually supremely pure (although it didn't look it) and so was the general attitude (although it didn't look it). Certainly for a decade or so the UK looked stranger than Las Vegas, and I still get real rushes of contempt when I come across crap like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16869029

Danish Modern

2012-02-12T02:51:00.001-08:00

What is it about this stuff? Put 'Danish' in front of almost any household object from lamp to chair to breakfast set(?!) and you'll find yourself there, a world of wondrously stylish and correspondingly expensive design created by wunderkind called Jensen or Blobvox when all we could do was the Austin Princess. There's even a children's book 'The Cat who ate Danish Modern'. Why it doesn't work with Norwegian or Swedish I've no idea, something happens at the border. Finland gets over excited about architecture (saunas and top lighting) and rally driving for mental health reasons. The only things I associate with Denmark apart from Danish Modern are cows, lavish social security, pastry and Laudrup. They certainly cornered the market in design, they sort of invented it, certainly patented it.

To be honest a lot of seventies Danish modern is not all it's cracked up to be in the great eBay gold rush. This stuff can easily become a bit Abigail's Party. That breakfast set (check it out) would look stupid in the Premier Inn, however I am presently lurking around the radio above. Being Danish seventies it was designed only to work on FM, my alternative on eBay is a Hacker which now 'only works on FM'. You will spot the crucial difference summing up a whole cultural divide. The first is a sweet exercise in what design might be and the second looks like an antiquated (but comfy) Rover looking for one last run, probably hiccuping on scotch (and that isn't such a bad thing).

Why am I looking for an FM radio? Well it is easily to become convinced of computerized doom. One of the macs conked out and we were scared to death. If such a thing were to happen generally, you'd be wise to reach for your trusty old FM receiver for information regarding the mayhem on the streets, even if the only people broadcasting on FM are those growing their silvery locks to Jethro Tull albums in garden sheds. So for me, if I'm lucky, it may be welcome to Middle Earth via the Danish portal.

Builders

2012-02-11T02:09:00.000-08:00

Exactly when Scott is going to come and wreck our kitchen is anybody's guess. Builders as a tribe do not subscribe to the many basic notions of the service economy. Anybody who's ever watched TV knows that- hapless couple's life savings wasted marooned in the Algarve smiling builder etc. Builders are essentially pirates who hijack your home when they consider it convenient and generally have to be coaxed to leave, and Scott prides himself on being the biggest pirate of them all. It's like having Keith Richard's come and do your bathroom tiling. I'm sure he will do a good job, but it will certainly be on his terms. We of course, get something nice in the end, but it is provided at emotional as well as fiscal cost. I'm amazed so many people do not understand this.

The main reason is of course that building work is the last refuge. With nothing, without even existing, you can still build, and build to great skill. It is just that the appearance of a bunch of hairy Lithuanians bent of societal revenge to do your kitchen may alarm us steady folks with mortgages to look after. Nomatter how much you admire Keef, you don't necessarily want him renovating your home.

Building is the last authentic work and get pissed culture(as Scott so often reminds me) and woe betide anybody who confuses that with people knocking up faux eighteenth century kitchen sideboards in the Cotswold's while wearing period costume, they are doing something else entirely. The mucky end of building is the mucky end, which is why our neighbour has already scarpered at the very thought of the hun appearing over the hill, even before they phoned to say 'later boy....later' .

Daydream Nation

2012-02-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

Very excited, spent the day listening to my Goth section. Actually that means Killing Joke's Requiem, but that's enough for anybody. It was the biggest loudest thing I ever heard in the canteen of Oxford Brookes University long ago. I thought my bottle of wine, balanced between my ankles, would break to smitherines.

And in anticipation of Scott coming in and wrecking our kitchen and us in the bloody Premier Inn, I've just bought Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. When that came out Nic Clear drilled, literally drilled, through his final diploma presentation at Westminster. In retrospect this was rather good, it certainly made for instant rebel status, now he's probably running the Bartlett. However, our Daydream Nation (Richter cover) was recorded before our present students were even born.

Frank Lloyd Wright

2012-02-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

It's interview season. Thousands of students join architecture degrees thinking the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright is absolutely brilliant. They leave three years later thinking nothing of him at all. There is only one decent critical essay on FLW's work to my knowledge, Colin Rowe's excellent 'Chicago Frame' in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, and a smattering by Vincent Scully. The rest is picture books. This, for the master who would demand you live a hexagonal life, or sleep on a futon as a millionaire. No one even seems to have stepped up to the plate to write that biography so waiting to be written, you know, the scandalous one 'The Architects Life as a Dog'. Nobody seems to stick him out. If only Fiona McCarthy was American.

Either I'm missing something or there is an elephant in the room. Even Dos Passos got FLW wrong in his fabulous novel 'USA', rather bemoaning our lost opportunity with him. But I looked at a screen print the other day - 'Too FLW I said' by which I meant 'too straightforwardly decorative' and 'not in our base room'. Most of his interiors are too dark, the main spaces bordering on church like, and if you turned up at Taliesin West to join the clan, straight out of the desert, the first thing you had to do was make your own cloak for dinner. Fuck that.

They also join thinking Gaudi is absolutely wonderful, and leave loathing the very idea of the mad monk.

But I've never met a student who joined loving Mies who stayed the course at all. Peaked too early without doing the crap first one is tempted to think.

Gong

2012-02-04T13:41:00.000-08:00

There has always been the other side, the music I meditated to before taking my final year structures exam for example (magik powers indeed). There have always been the Soft Machine's, Crimson's, and the Van de Graafs, the Caravan's, the Hatfields and the North, the gigs you came out of not knowing whether they were any good or not, one twiddle being much the same as another to the untutored ear, but sort of liking it anyway, respecting it certainly. I didn't go so far as to deconstruct transistor radios in pursuit of my own Eno like sound, but I watched my friend Rick Sanders do it. However once I got through the art room arguments around the relative virtues of the Sex Pistols or Dire Straits, and certainly beyond 'bedroom rock' (see below) and set off as you might say on my own, I gravitated heavily towards hippie eccentricity and especially the music of Gong and it's political as well as melodic significance. This was at that time hardly a contradiction. As a result I was the guy sitting at a party while the shrieking young ladies from Clifton tried to stuff a toy stuffed elephant up the sizable flares of my stripey trousers, and was certainly known as 'Hairy Paul'. I believe the lady responsible is now one of the world's most successful lighting designers. Funny what you remember, and what happens. At the time, well Mike, Carina and I had a revolution going on, and they studied politics, literature, and so on.

However that world, with it's festivals and perpetual revolution, fruit picking and tractor driving in the rain, has stayed with me as a somewhat alarming second string. We played Steve Hillage on Christmas Day. What happened to it as the space of appearance? London happened, but I still have the hair.

Air Drumming

2012-02-03T11:22:00.001-08:00

The second Boston album is so bad I'm pleased with myself. It fell exactly into the category 'man with no band in a bedroom c1977' that I so conveniently invented last week, and has now extended to a general condemnation of that particular culture of the seventies which of course produced Steve Jobs hardly by accident, that I'm confident it can be extended ad nauseum. Then I checked out You Tube for Boston 'live' and watched Tom Sholtz hardly move a muscle. Then I found an 'air guitar' version of More Than A Feeling included in the sit-com Scrubs and on the bus I thought how wonderful it was to watch imaginary drumming to an imaginary band, thought of my friends who can still do quite a bit of imaginary drumming under the right circumstances, and pointed out to the second year (as I showed it to them in the lecture theatre) that the guys in Scrubs are actors and therefore had done their homework and the bald guy playing imaginary Sholtz was more Sholtz than Sholtz and the whole thing was probably better than 'Boston' doing it. How post-modern I thought. The bald guy accented his movements toward nothing but the grin and a footpeddle. Hopefully the students are now with me on the critical interpretation stakes.

Weirdly, on of the best theory books for art of life criticism is titled 'Air Guitar' by Dave Hickey.

Hells Angels

2012-01-31T04:13:00.000-08:00

Enough of PO-MO, that and a steady diet of hamster essays had me reaching for Hawkwind's Space Ritual, the live double album from 1973, this morning. Somethings clearly wrong. Still, it was refreshingly out there to hit the spot.

I'm going to talk about the Hells Angels to the second year on Friday. The subject is 'context' and they need to discover their options. By the time you get a third through Hunter S Thompson's 1966 book, his first, the part where he's beginning to realise he's more into this than he thought, it's clear the Angels have become figures of some importance, in fact not unlike the followers of Achilles in The Iliad. Now that's not what my mother thought, it's not what Mick Jagger thought either if you watch Gimme Shelter. However, the context in which the Altamont free festival was suddenly (there) considered a disaster and the 'end' of the sixties had more than a whiff of conspiracy about it. It seems, If you consider it in context, and read the Kool Aid Acid test at the same time, the Angels were integral to the whole scene in a more spiritual way than mum could possibly have contemplated. We should definitely think about our need for filthy outlaw gangs more constructively.

Postmodernism in Rock 5

2012-01-30T11:18:00.000-08:00

Of course there were some bands who only narrowly missed the bedroom/basement. Queen would be one, saved only by the worlds most obvious and glorious frontman. Styxx and Rush were saved in the opposite way because they realised their audience were so lost they never left their bedrooms in the first place and never wanted to. They concentrated on buying kit. Yes decided to just do all possible variants on 'progressive' rock music in one song (Starship Trooper is an excellent example- the only Yes you will ever need) or later, spread it over dire triple concept albums which my brother still treasures and which strangely venerated Roger Dean. Kiss realised it wasn't about good taste, it was about what tasted good and especially what was good for them, well at least for two of them (Gene and Paul). What was good for the other two didn't quite work out (Peter and Ace). Meanwhile, if I remember rightly, Led Zeppelin struggled onward to produce magisterial yet somehow too brilliant to be played very often albums such as Physical Graffiti, which is why you can now buy plenty of near mint copies for c£40. You won't play them either, you might as well hang them on your wall (people were now producing actual books of album cover art, I wrote my 'O' level English Language essay on the subject). Supertramp managed against all odds to combine the sentiment of Jane Austin with rock, and mutations such as 'southern rock' can still be heard with the bass ploddingly way too high in the mix and the guitar player still practicing his scales and going on and on (Molly Hatchet worst example).

Amazing what you're thinking when you're cooking to Planet Rock.

Postmodernism in Rock 4:1 Boston

2012-01-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

Do not name your band after a town, that is if there are still bands to be named here in 2012 and not just random accumulations of individuals intent on careers winning 'get me out of here' or 'dancing' or for that matter 'masterchef'.

Back in 1976 there were still bands and the urge to be in bands and do band things, but there was also the first opportunity to be but not to be, to make the music but stay in your basement. This was the personal choice, and there's nothing ostensibly wrong with it, of Tom Sholtz who lead a band that was not a band called Boston, a man who would describe the music industry as 'alright if it wasn't run by drug addicts and businessmen', longtime vegetarian and supporter of many a worthy cause who certainly knew one wah wah peddle from another (he went on to make them).

You'd know Boston couldn't really be a band because they spend the first half of the sleeve notes to their debut album explaining just how much of a real band they are, and as usual, the lady doth speak volumes. It is clear that they are distinctly bedroom orientated, and by that I mean sitting with your mates in their bedroom listening to it in preference to more carnal activities. They even write songs (track one side two) about being in a rock band. On the second album, they proclaim 'No Synthesizers and No Computers' as a last grab for authenticity.

The first record, which sold more albums than any other in 1976, also says a lot, especially about your Hi Fi system. Mine leapt for joy at this perfect test for it's fidelity, not a crackle or pop came from this mint 12"relic saved for £1 from e-bay, and it was time for me to lie back and indulge in the first two albums of Boston's hooklines in melodious rock. I have been there many a time before.

Unfortunately after 'More than a Feeling', a song to blame for many a youngster leaving parties in Dumfries with the realization there must be something better in the world than that (and also realising they mustn't call their band 'Dunfries') Julie said it was too loud. I said 'It's supposed to be loud' which in retrospect, sounds amazingly lame, like I was...fourteen. The album is amazing, but it is not rock music, it is a musical step to post rock music, it is, indeed, a milestone in not making rock music that sounds better than rock music does.

See similarly Frampton Comes Alive and Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous. Yep, it's time for me to face those demons one by one, no mercy at all.

Masterplanning

2012-01-27T01:59:00.000-08:00

For people like me who believe the housing question was pretty much solved by 1959 with the house we live in (above) and that the rest ever since has merely been a question of political contingency and commercial squalor, mucking around over student masterplans all day can bring some irritation. The thing is, you either let the students make all the terrible mistakes they have got it in them to make and hope that they will never do it again - ie be liberal with their liberalism, or you rather categorically tell them to stop their nonsense and learn to do it properly. Certainly in the first place you'd need a heightened sense of humour/irony/absurdity and in the second large tear ducts.

It is possible that Liberalism+Liberalism=Disaster, in short it brings around a kind of torpid lack of faith in anything, political malaise and eventual fascism and gas chambers. That's at least what happened to Germany in the twenties and if I read the signs correctly it's pretty much what's happening here today. Goebbels biography provides a straightforward lesson. The guy was a HOPELESS ADOLESCENT, positively marinated in malaise. And look what happened!

I also begged the question how many students had been good at maths at school. To study at my architecture school back in the seventies you had to have maths A level. Yesterday I understood why for the first time in thirty years. Being barely proficient at maths might be an indication that you could apply logic. I suspect the principals at the (otherwise godawful) Bristol University understood this at least and put it in as a rather useful caveat to the admissions procedure to avoid faffing about over portfolios and suchlike at all.

Such nouse is in short supply.

Lessons of History

2012-01-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

Just watched The Professionals again, I prefer it with the sound off, gives you a better chance to read the context of the mid seventies. What I see is often a historical wonderment. Today we had middle class terrorists in farm buildings, always with a dominant female, plotting and shooting pumpkins.We had the counter terrorism forces running about a lot both up and down a thousand escape stairs in the city and up and down in helicopters in the country, or all chasing each other around in Ford Cortina's (gold with black vinyl roof) Capri's (similar) or Granada's and even the occasional Triumph Toledo (!) in abandoned railway termini (Manchester?). What does this mean?

Well we no longer tread, police wise, 'Softly Softly', we have terrorists like the Baader Meinhoff Group, and they are 'lead' by a WOMAN! Next we have loads of old warehouses with escape stairs due to INDUSTRIAL DECLINE (we students would move in next- see Metropolitan Wharf- I woz there, alongside early pioneers of U2 videos god help me- and then have to move out again pretty quick for the loft livers), we have helicopters for the police because we have some notion of ACTION MAN. We have pumpkins from FREDERICK FORSYTH from The Day of the Jackal. We have cream leatherette suitcases full of money because YOU STILL HAD TO CARRY IT ABOUT and PLASTIC (but not credit cards). And you still had to wind on your Pentax and the women were suddenly NOT TO BE TRUSTED (feminism). Amazing what you can learn.

Drawing

2012-01-22T04:31:00.000-08:00

I've been drawing, good old fashioned drawing with a clutch pencil scale rule erasing shield set square and so on, on a space the size of a postage stamp on my desk, I feel very artisanal indeed and I also, once finished of a two hour session, ache like hell.

I'm drawing the revisions to our kitchen which are not very grand at all, in fact the amount of time I've spent drawing them, if I counted the cost, would double the contract, but it has made me think about drawing once again, realizing that it is in this case at least this is my architectural insurance policy, that if I can draw it, and draw it enough times at enough scales, then Scott must be able to build it ever so easily. I'm sure also that this is not going to be the case but I must keep the faith by drawing those cupboards with those particular dimensions and that door that just won't hit the boiler when you open it (and will feature a fabulous 18inch by 5ft poster of a 1960's Reno Cocktail waitress on the door- any ideas on how to fix that to that?) and getting it simpler and simpler so it will in theory get easier and easier. If only this will be the case, instead I know I'll be roosting in the Ramada Inn somewhere in Docklands for £60 per night while Scott destroys the place staring blankly over the landscape when the phone will ring and Scott will say something like 'You know that rail thing you've made into a conduit....that's not going to happen.'

What a curious business, but I will admit to enjoying the satisfaction of drawing skirting boards and so on in axonometric once again and contemplating the use of coloured pencils. I always hated drawing in ink, far too accurate, but I'm very drawn to a emotional fudge of the clutch pencil. 'Always draw wood with a pencil' the old moderns used to say; they were idealistic see.

Easy to Slip

2012-01-20T10:35:00.000-08:00

It's so easy to slip, that's good Little Feat song from Sailin' Shoes, and I felt it today alright, three months on from hospitalization to the day and now bouncing down the Shoreditch High St, lecture course on the whole history of architecture over, browsing paint for our kitchen works and contemplating not so much jazz, but the undoubtedly interesting later modern abstract screen prints that Rocket Gallery have on sale and that Risom chair I promised to buy, sitting presently in their bargain basement. In the old days, my enthusiasm would have dragged me first in to the White Horse, for calmness and thought before venturing in to the land of modern classics, but no, I went straight in and bought the bloody chair and a print by some lovely old modern who finished his days staring out of a window in Jutland. Bugger. I hadn't even had a drink. So then to the White horse and Lily's all for saying I'm too thin and I'm feeling pretty bloody good and.....this is how you slip. But, slippin's OK I think, if you rescue yourself, so I did and bought bread and fish from the Conran shop in punishment and away home for tea and the last of Julie's fabulous homemade biscuits. Phew.

Curious Postcard

2012-01-19T14:59:00.000-08:00

This is Goethe's study. Curious photograph. A very interesting wastebasket for a man writing in the eighteenth century, when of course, this photograph couldn't have been taken. Note the blinds.

Nice Postcard

2012-01-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

Lenin, Mao, Goebbels

2012-01-17T06:51:00.000-08:00

Last night Amazon asked me if I wanted to twitter the fact that I'd bought 'Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death'....

I don't. But if I did, should I add my other purchases I wondered? Or was it just the mention of Goebbels (incidentally one of the three most important figures of the twentieth century alongside Mao and Lenin) that had stirred the beast? Of course, the point is Goebbels himself would have very much approved of this little mechanism. The other day Julie googled herself and Reno and up came my blog I'd written precisely nine hours earlier - where Reno isn't even mentioned! The machine knows! Ooooh Errrrrr.

In case anybodies interested I'll admit to a sabatier kitchen knife, four sets of miniature photo postcards (Alpine), antique postcard of Goethe's study featuring interesting waste basket, antique postcard of a cable car (Alpine - See Above) and an antique miniature carved Alpine hut disguised as a moneybox from Antwerp (guess we'll all soon need one of those) and confess to total madness.

Whether it be Ebay or Amazon, it is clear they know everything. Any minor fixation urges my pushers to 'recommend especially for me!' And they do this on an almost hourly basis. If I didn't check in a couple of times a day they would assume I was dead and probably tell everybody.

Greek Tragedy

2012-01-16T04:11:00.000-08:00

The end of civilization may well have been sealed by the third series of 'Take Me Out', and any logic overturned by copywriters who have gone mad with utterly absurd adverts showing mums needing to check out the appliances (!!?) in student residences (meaning bandwidth !!!) but it might have caught it's last breath last night by the showing of The Reader. This film, and I don't watch a hell of a lot of films apart from re-runs of The Dambusters and exhaustive brain mash such as the Battle of the Medway, was fucking fantastic.

Caught on the horns of a dilemma, that's it, that's everything in that film, from whether nazi guards should have released prisoners from burning churches, to whether young lawyers should spring ex-nazi guards on the basis of their illiteracy, to things generally being, well at best, unfair, to dealing with who you loved long long after you loved them, to the right and the wrong and the law, all absolutely brilliantly done while reading The Odyssey (of course). A brilliant exercise in the virtue for those in my Ancient Greeks class who didn't quite get it.

Postmodernism in Rock 3

2012-01-15T08:03:00.001-08:00

Actually it was Iron Maiden and it was Paschendale (see below) But I've got the first two Boston albums coming my way for a pound each and I can't wait. Boston are clearly the unhippest band in the world right now but in 1976 you couldn't have moved without More Than a Feeling, and the fact that the Darkness copied them....well!

1977's Heroes by David Bowie was the first album I bought that I knew my older brother had no interest in. Heroes is a modernist enterprise. Berlin blotted out the rest of the landscape. Lyrically it is pretty much pure 'cut up''fold in' whatever, the WS Burroughs technique that jumbles things up to make a strange kind of sense if you enjoy his cocaine fueled detective show; 'Somethings going down the chips are down I'm under Japanese influence and my honour's at stake...You wake up and sleep, You can b(u)y god, it's monday, slither down the greasy pole.... ' Robert Frip played guitar however he wanted and Eno was still interesting. The bloody things been reverberating round my head for weeks after one playing on Christmas Eve.

Of course, punk was also a modernist enterprise, busses going to Nowhere and Boredom, no longer 'Further' like the Merry Pranksters school bus. Very apt, and the best singles, such as The Ruts 'In a Rut' a pure reinterpretation of the blues even if they didn't give a damn (see also The Stranglers).

Postmodernism in Rock 2

2012-01-14T05:09:00.000-08:00

Julie and I are doing our taxes. It is a ritual of paper shuffling, shredding and eventual disposal done to the tunes of Planet Rock. From this mornings listening I can confirm and enlarge upon yesterdays prognosis. Certainly modernist rock, as exemplified by Zeppelin's Heartbreaker or the Stones Gimme Shelter, both from 1970, are straightforward blues mewings put to astonishing effect, meanwhile it is clear that ACDC are the SOM of modernist Rock, ever to be relied upon to give the dog a bone forever and ever.

Beyond this, the post modern rock trajectory suddenly demands the need for story telling. Weirdly architecture did this too, we called it narrative. Usually, for rockers, these are everyday stories of roads, Armageddon or fairyland. Archetypes heard this morning include Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive but could include almost anything from anybody hacking down rock verse from 1974 on. Here Jethro Tull are exemplary (in an awful way) and became at one dreadful point in history the biggest live act in the USA, and Yes who remain indefensible. A further extremity of lyrical garbage would be reached with Rush, who even bring in quaintly Disneyesque motifs (Tom Sawyer). However I'll save that for later. I think it was Def Leopard who actually tried to do the Somme.

Meanwhile remember Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' is exactly the same as Thin Lizzy's 'Boys are Back in Town'.

Postmodernism in Rock

2012-01-13T09:10:00.001-08:00

Did my 'Postmodernism in Rock' lecture today. Postmodernism being a fraught subject to define precisely, and these being first years, 'Rock' is an obvious and visceral place to start. First take some blues, delta blues or whatever - poor black men doing whatever they can on the very edge of existence itself. I chose 'Peetie Wheatstraw' for excellent songs like 'You ain't goner stop me drinkin' and 'I want some seafood' (or whatever- find 'em on You Tube). Now this is your original rock, and to non aficionados, all the tracks sound the same (handy). This is the bedrock of rock. To develop from these beginnings the modernization process has to somehow turn these characters in to Led Zeppelin and make them GODS (Faustian overtones and modernist project). Now it's important to state that the lyrical content (sexual innuendo etc) remains basically the same as do the repetitive chord structures, but what is added is tremendous POWER and GESTURE (Bonzo's drumming and Percy's trousers). Once you have Led Zeppelin, then you let the ROCK mix bubble for a while and out pops anything from Motley Crue to The Darkness, these become your post-modern archetypes out a condition of massive over consumption. Motley Crue decide that it's all about acting, pure BE AM DO, be it, then you are it, and then you finally do it, then go back to being it again and doing it again and so on without stopping in ever decreasing circles. The Darkness, at least by death nell album No2 (produced by Roy Thomas Big Error) even calling the album 'one way ticket to hell and back,' decide to interrupt the spirit of becoming and crash and burn conspicuously in a huge cloud of cocaine within which no doubt writing a song about going bald (track 6) becomes HUGELY FUNNY all night long. However 'Bald' can be monumentally brilliant only in the ironic sense. With 'Bald' you can't get behind the ironic sense nomatter how good the riff is. Hair IS, after all, the ultimate Rock signifier!!!!

(so in both senses, you've lost the music)

Voila, there's your postmodernity for you.

Stingray's Beautiful Ones

2012-01-10T04:49:00.000-08:00

Ate a whole pizza and ice cream, yes I did, as well as the house red, oh YES I enjoyed myself, and I'd no idea how good it was going to feel.

Stingray is a pizza joint on Columbia Road, we wouldn't normally go there but what the hell, it's populated conspicuously by new media youth, the sort in cheque caps and skinny brown jeans and big black crochet scarves and serious looks and that through the hedge backwards hair. They are the types who cannot yet afford Brawn down the street and sweetly lay their film scripts, treatments, or whatever, out on the tables to discuss.

It's a look, may be a whole way of life, that's so sweet it's almost Waltons, and none of them would be out of place on a '37 knucklehead Harley, her on the back with her hair bound washerwoman style in a tea towel, him in a duster, beard and goggles. Old? I could just see myself as Granpops. Still it did make me relish what it was to be young and so serious that if you split up you'd kill yourself, and I guess it's appropriate for them to feel that cool there rather than trying to do it in Bury St Edmunds. We were, after all, in the midst of the next generation of Beautiful Ones. They should enjoy that misery while it lasts.

In fact, thats exactly what they were doing. I have never quite witnessed a demographic who looked quite so conspicuously pleased with themselves.

Very good pizza, ice cream and house red.

R Crumb

2012-01-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

Some things that arrive as a result of my midnight rambles on e-bay are a delight. Take this, straight from Sacramento, $100, the set of Crumb blues heroes (partially shown above) and this, fellow pickers, is one beautiful piece. There is something about Crumb, and there's something about 'small multiples', sets like this, that just blows me away. I fantasize that on seeing Crumb, Gerhard Richter did his 48 western philosophers, in grey of course. I once tried an alpine hut series of old post cards, didn't get far, my old professor painted nothing but sheds, until he moved backwards to nothing but trees. Julie's done endless 'Beauties of Today' and there's hardly a day without sets of 'men wearing watch chains' or whatever slipping through the letter box.

Multiples of the same thing, we like them, they allow us to establish difference.

I'm wondering if anybody's ever done an architects series like this? I suspect such an apparently simple idea is beyond the general consensus. Instead we have Hellman drawing architects like their buildings.

Retro

2012-01-05T02:33:00.000-08:00

My e-bay enthusiasm for the retro seems contagious to many things, from paperback books to re-runs of The Professionals on TV, but I have to remind myself that for every Mini Cooper S there was an Austin Allegro around the corner, and that every canny e-bay seller knows this, and knows that I cannot necessarily tell the difference either, especially in the more esoteric areas of design. This much anticipated box of six tea spoons (teaspoons, fuck me, what AM I doing!) was a considerable disappointment in the spoon if not in the excellent graphic department. The spoons were overpriced tinny crap, the original box rather nice, but do I want to spend fifty quid on a small b0x? Meanwhile, if I translate retro design to 'things I'm doing now' I might find everything looking like a bad book on gestalt psychology from Pelican in 1973, and that wouldn't do at all.

Sick Of It

2011-12-31T03:31:00.000-08:00

It's not being ill that's the problem so much as getting better, or at least feeling better. This is a horrible realization. When you are ill, well, games up, you're flat on your back, you can't do anything but moan and be grateful. It's when you are feeling better that the problems start, mostly because you are no longer allowed to do the things that it took thirty years of practice to perfect before you so unfortunately tumbled into intensive care. I do not, for instance, want to 'take a stroll round the block' showing a sudden enthusiasm for exercise, I want to sit in the pub for hours drinking lovely pints of beer, soaking. This is what I call a problem, and so far I have yet to solve it, other than by spending mountains of money in pseudo gratification on e-bay.

Meanwhile, those loved ones who have got so used to you helpless are now uneasy at the return of your semi, even very semi, independence. This situation must have inspired the screenplay of that film Misery.

Meanwhile, we have a long holiday period and I'm sick of it, I couldn't give a fuck if celebrities can cook, can spin, can win mastermind, can piss on mountains, have breakdowns in jungles, bake bread, fall flat on their face, can make programs about their own programs or fart. I'm going straight to work entirely clad by Julie in e-bay.

Tom Wolfe

2011-12-30T02:19:00.000-08:00

Trying to divert myself from 'Campervan Crisis' on Disc Turbo I remembered my dream last night. I dreamt my 'Unauthorized Biography of Architecture' (text now complete, but probably awaiting such additions as 'Mistakes I have Made'- the Marquise de Sade thoughtfully added that to his memoirs, and 'Conspicuous Omissions' explaining why there is no mention of Alberti or Gaudi whatsoever) had been published as one of those Commando comic books I used to love. Now an architecture graphic novel is not such a bad idea! However Asterix might be good enough for me. Then again, what Hollywood did to Michelangelo with The Agony and the Ecstasy would put anything in Commando to shame.

I'm reading Tom Wolfe's 'Electric Kool Aid Acid Test' and I doing it out of a kind of penance. it's extremely hard to write or for that matter read about people who are permanently super stoned, and on occasion, literally stark raving mad. I suspect this is why Wolfe wrote it in the first place, as a kind of challenge. He must have said to himself; 'For my first book I'm going to crawl across America cooped up in a school bus populated by a troop of crazies gulping LSD laced orange juice from the fridge all the time and deduce if this is really an epiphany for mankind..........or not. So I read it with growing respect for all the things he doesn't say rather than what he does, for instance, he never says, which all of us would have at one stage or another 'GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE!!!' Not once, at least not yet, instead he doggedly chases that epiphany like Bernstein and Woodward, and this, from a man who famously never wears anything but a white suit (with the crazies, your lucky to get indian warpaint at breakfast). That demands respect.

Jingle Bells

2011-12-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

So having got through that great day of mass inferiority, I reclined, thankfully, to a decent nightcap, and caught the last half an hour of Ocean's Eleven -the Clooney version- wishing peace to all men including myself.

After all Downton Abbey had finished so pitifully with happy ever afters for the ruling classes (in 1920!) how was I too feel apart from deeply historically cheated, and the neighbours who'd come round had talked of little but doctors and pills and holidays in Mediera, and the meal, for such a simple roast, that seemed to have exhausted the washing machine entirely.

So I sank in to my chair and while nobody cared anymore could watch this super saturated edifice, and eventually turn up the sound a bit. Of course I cared not a jot for the mundanities of the plot, instead I will admit to feeling transported, for there is nothing like the sound and feel of a giant casino floor jangling away, nor the chill of the Vegas desert night to inspire a passionate chorus of 'Walking in a Winter Wonderland'. For me, it remains the most beautiful of things, a non stop celebration of human frailty, orchestrated to make you feel good, and ran by those who make you feel better, mammon's cathedral with bells on.

I thought back to the days and days I've spent prowling around Mandalay Bay in search of slightly better lounge acts, or rejoiced in the Venetian with my pal Jackson the chief bar tender, striking up conversation with hookers playing speed poker wearing shades of lemon meringue, or Big Men who drive Big Machines before they hobble off to see Elton John and cry. Jackson, who's job it was to make me, and everybody else, feel absolutely marvelous. Hi Jackson, Hi Doug Twist in the Peppermill Reno, Happy Christmas! You were my Santa's for sure.

Nothing like a good Christmas film eh!

Christmas's I've Ruined

2011-12-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

I excused a nasty black eye as an accident during an indoor American Football game at the university when really I'd just fallen out of a cheap (but I thought 'atmospheric') hotel bed with a nice girl from Wakefield. I nearly ruined a midnight mass by joining the choir in the belfry and it was all fine until I began to swing dangerously backwards and forwards in drunken carol singing. I went to a party wearing a fur coat and my father chased me around the house with a carving knife- it was a nice fur coat - belonged to one Debbie Kopel wherever she is. Innumerable Christmas's have 'peaked too early' to the detriment of main courses, and once the dalmatian ran off with the turkey. I've eaten ready made turkey dinner to porn movies and 007. I've been stoned in Reno and loved every minute in Las Vegas, and I've probably cried my way through a few of them. The problem is, Christmas always belongs to somebody and you are always in line to ruin it.

When everybody asks you how it is, how it will be, and how it's going so far, it's almost impossible not to remember such events. By comparison settling down and paying your American express bill is hardly exotic. Cheers and heartfelt seasonal greetings to you all.

Muffins

2011-12-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

Muffins, Minx's...whatever, winners of X Factor, doomed forever and everywhere, but the elephant in the room is clear, there is an odd one out, and that's a bit mean because there's only four of them, if there were five it would be 3vs2 - better odds by far. I could not help but notice that for last night's Sun sponsored loyalty contest for the Great Patriotic War that one of them clearly spends longer in the dressing room than the others to increasingly less avail. She looked like a decorated Christmas pudding if you were inclined to be unfair, and unfair I generally am to teenage superstars. They won't like you looking at them, but look at them you must, and it would be a cultural studies crime not to wince at the 'Romford look' which has her speeding effortlessly in to the slipstream of Alison Steadman (and towards a certain part in Gavin and Stacey if the little muffs don't work out) alongside an accelerated career path that appears, within a matter of weeks of embarking on a life on the boards, to have her appearing inexplicably reminiscent of Cilla Black. Meanwhile she dances like she's tugging on a rope.

Don't blame me for such cruel observation, blame the record companies who cruelly exploit these poor mites and their audience in the name of massive and easy profit and a model for the music industry in general which is now so morally disgusting one can hardly think it might once have harbored genuine concern about anything except eternal love at thirteen years of age and the size of your arse.

Less booze, more E-bay

2011-12-21T13:22:00.001-08:00

Staying away from the booze is fucking hard this time of year. Almost everything is driven to send you to the bottle; Family life especially, and almost anything on TV. Personally I can't wait to light the candles and settle down with Julie to a good game of Escape from Colditz. We have now arrived home to our own self styled grotto and I'm not inclined to let anybody else in. We have a candle to light on Christmas Eve and when it goes out fifty hours of beeswax fumes later it's over, thankfully over.

Cards are a particular bane, cards with round robin letters telling the recipient of the years activities soul destroying.

Do not start such a missive with 'We had our flu jabs a fortnight ago..' nor end it with 'We had to buy a new television...but don't listen to any of the salesmen, we did our own thorough research and are now perfectly satisfied with our purchase! Merry Christmas!.....' Such a letter found it's way to my mum and dad, another began 'We managed to finish the glass handrail on the balcony at long last....quite and engineering feat!!' or 'I was going to go on a business trip to Dubai but would you believe it I broke my foot at the organic farm the week before...'

Fucking hell, not exactly Scot Fitzgerald is it, but it is modern life, and my jaw dropped and my eyebrows rose in horror.

E- bay, now, is addictive. Less booze, more e-bay, that is the equation.

Steve Jobs does University

2011-12-15T03:34:00.000-08:00

If...Steve Jobs had run a university department what would it have been like? Well we'd all be sitting on nice chairs for one. I'd discount his own more zen like taste in interior decor, or that of Norman Foster for that matter, as a mere sign of Jobs, and go back to the cosiness of the garage maybe, take delight in the feel of things rather than the feel of things falling apart. The food and drink would be excellent, no more crappy quiche ever again and when you touched a table you wouldn't spend five minutes wondering what it was made of. You wouldn't have to clock in, you'd be clocked in 24/7 right at the start, and graduate when time and funds ran out. A certain idealism would be involved, there would be an air of revolution, perhaps the perfect, ongoing variety, and periodically, dated formats would be junked entirely.

But would failure mean death?

Our Tribe

2011-12-13T04:17:00.000-08:00

I was very excited about my ebay purchase of two oak art deco bookends until they arrived today. they looked, well, err...rather more substantial and distinguished on the screen, but these two might have been knocked up last week in somebody's garden shed. I winced when I thought of the price I'd driven myself too, and the other rival twit who'd done the same.

However, I am not disheartened, this must be happening to thousands of people everyday as husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends discretely and hopefully open mucho cardboard packaging to reveal....oh.....and promptly realize the great gift is not quite what it was in the minds eye.

Still, other things have a way of being much better than expected. the most unlikely of which was a friends fiftieth birthday party last might. Thankfully he'd had the gumption to hold the event in Blush, closed for the night, upstairs at the White Horse. But before you are imagining all the goings on just stop and imagine the opposite, quiet middle aged folks noodling along as best they can, commune with their favourite dancers, bar staff and host all fully dressed and quite prim and proper munching sandwiches and so on hardly raising a dicky bird of interest, but all very pleasant to be back with the tribe (remember, I'd been away near two months). It may not be much of a tribe, but at least for Julie and I, we realize that this is ours, honorary members if you like, me and Julie, take your seat at the bar Paul, and nobody will bother you at all. Delightful.

Of course, finding your tribe can take a long time, and there are many bogus versions. I've never enjoyed the tribe of architects, even architects bar's (there was on at Bristol when I was there) they are just hopelessly tedious in a way that Christie from Southend and her pals simply are not. This is not inverse snobbery either, it's directed at those who think that people who strip for a living are somehow weird, somehow impossible, when in my experience they appear the most natural folks in the world.

McCloud

2011-12-10T14:20:00.000-08:00

Lots of television celebrities are now engaged in the seasonal quest to be overenthusiastic to the sound of canned laughter, even Sandy Tostvig, who was never funny in the first place. But I wish somebody would have judiciously placed canned laughter all over Kevin McCloud's Grand Design last week for two very pertinent reasons. Firstly, now all Mother Teressa about housing for the people, Kevin expressed distain when he spotted his mug shot high and mighty over the site hoarding, advertising his great effort. What on earth did he expect? Did he think sales would employ somebody who might agree 'yes, you know what, lets keep Kevin's name out of it - it's hardly necessary?' Clearly Kev has no idea about marketing.

The next, earlier in the irksome process, was when he confessed to us privately (!) that he'd spent £450,000 of his own money (so far) with fuck all to show for it, then parted company with his forward looking N London architects who used a vocabulary almost exclusively involving the word 'pod' to eventually come up with a flat plan that almost any of us could have given him for nothing on day one! Even then he cocked it up.

Kevin would be very welcome round at our house for some instruction. It would be a lot cheaper and less misery making for everybody.

Dear John..

2011-12-08T03:11:00.000-08:00

Got a letter today from my GP, it says, presumably because I'm ill, that I shall have to register with another surgery rather then theirs. This is Cameron's world alright, and it's pretty fucking demoralizing. I mean I've only just begun to get to know the doctors in there, only just begun to feel at home after years of not needing them at all, then this bolt out of the blue, like a Dear John letter from a would be long-term date! It happens, actually that our address is right on the bordering street of their area, and coincidentally, after thirteen years, I have just started costing them some money. Very miserable making on a grey day, after all those years of carefree gadding about, and all that National Insurance.

I don't think I want the NHS to take on the model of the British education system, do you?

Not Howling, Dozing

2011-12-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

I doze a lot right now, my chair and I are very well acquainted, and I fantasize about writing fabulous blogs and howling at the moon, but for some reason I haven't been doing it. Even if I was horrified to realize that to be in a rock band you needed to win Celebrity Get..... and get the drummer on Strictly Dancing, even if I was dumbfounded at newshour exhortations to read your Dickens by the shore of the Thames, even as I noticed that there was suddenly a Christmas Channel on Sky (as if we need that!), even as I hated almost everything, instead I dozed.

There is however, much to be fearful of. Inactivity breeds contemplation, activity the opposite. Right now I feel like a character who walks out on to the balcony of some Christmas party in evening dress, staring in to the sunset and exclaiming something like, 'You know........there are very very bad things on the horizon', and taking a nice slug of whisky, before the bombs tumble down the next day. I groan with the responsibility.

However I seek solace in James Madge's book on Sabbioneta - he was my old tutor, with it he rises from the dead, and in very nearly done dissertations on life in the woods with Gunnar Asplund and the corrosive effects of Grand Designs (whose author can no longer watch 'popular' television).

Before They Make Me Run

2011-11-20T03:41:00.000-08:00

So I'm sitting in my chair last night, Julie's baking bread, I'm not doing very much at all, but there is this show on Planet Rock about the Stones 'Some Girls' album of 1977. Now I have danced around a great deal to this record in the past, and it just so happens that there are not many tracks anywhere in the world that precisely record particular circumstances, so as Keef finally got to record that fabulous confessional 'Before they Make Me Run' as his life hit the buffers in Toronto, it was funny to sit there smiling in Bethnal Green as my life hit the buffers here. I noted it is not a sad song at all, in fact, it's full of optimism, and it made me smile a great deal more.

Covalescense

2011-11-17T07:52:00.000-08:00

The doctor says I'm supposed to be convalescing, which I take to mean sitting in a state of semi consciousness under a rug drinking tea between re-runs of Millions Like Us and some awful pap like 'Junior Bake off'. I am astonished there is actually a programme called 'Junior Bake Off', it must be some kind of sick joke, and nothing could bring me to watch it. Nothing can bring me to watch almost anything on today's TV, I long for Columbo, Ironside, The A Team and six o'clock cocktail hour but I long in vain. I wonder if tea and cakes will appear, but they do not, and then Julie says she's going out tonight and I start to hum the refrain from 'Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town'.

I don't think you can do convalescing self consciously, I think it is one of those great negatives, sort of 'don't do anything' unless you are stuck in a deck chair up a mountain in the sunshine of the alps, that never did Thomas Mann any harm, but I'm stuck here instead, three days a week, in recovery from the world.

Coldplay fans

2011-11-13T02:42:00.000-08:00

Enforced to watch a lot of adds on the TV, and eventually reduced to muting them in disgust, I noticed last night the dreaded Coldplay are going back on the road. Now that's funny, have you noticed the 'Green Flag' roadside assistance add? 'We may not be the biggest, but we aim to be the best!' well that's not the main point about that add, the main point about that add is they promise to FIX YOU, no doubt tugging at the heartstrings of Coldplay fans, who no doubt, when you think about it, are probably more likely to be driving ropey motors than most demographics. Clever huh! Then remember that all roadside assistance companies claim to fix 93% of cars at the side of the road, but of course this is because 93% of roadside breakdowns are due to running out of petrol, and inability to fix a flat tire, and locking your keys in the car, which I suspect, is also something which statistically is more likely to happen to Coldplay fans, dozy lot.

Recovery

2011-11-13T02:40:00.000-08:00

I’m sorry there’s been no blogs for a while; too bloody miserable by half. Bet Bukowski would have blogged solidly every detail of such an enforced lay up, lyrically recorded every spasm. Picked up Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life, and even he manages to make hospitalization in to something, even if it is somewhere between Carry on Nurse and Dad’s Army. I couldn’t get anywhere near either, I was glum beyond glum and hospital was nothing like either anyway, it was a humanitarian disaster. Now I’m sick of ‘Hitlers Generals’ and even ‘Wheeler Dealers’ and I drink tea.

Still I am back at work, the lecturing bit anyway, I reckon I can avoid the dreaded meetings for quite some time yet, and a nice Turkish man comes to pick me up and whisk me away again in his person carrier with great efficiency and all for the money I’d usually spend in the pub. Instead I glide like royalty in a smoked glass goldfish bowl through the city streets. Without a pub to sit in I could be anywhere. And I lecture sitting down, which when I saw Dave Hickey do it, doubtless for similar reasons, can be pretty cool, but still exhausting.

There is a great fear lurking, having worked so hard on my pleasurable past, what will constitute any kind of pleasurable future? About this one has to be almost devoutly sanguine.

Learning to Walk

2011-10-28T01:08:00.000-07:00

OK so now I'm learning to walk again amongst other things, almost every other thing actually. Did I mention I had a blood transfusion? Only in my imagination could it become Keith Richards in Geneva rather that yours truly in Whitechapel. However new blood went in, and now I'm wondering, not about the worst things that might be in blood, and I'm sure they test for all of that stuff, and they even showed me the sell by date 'Look.. fresh!' said my nurse, a if demonstrating a menu. No I'm worried I've been donated stinky person blood, that incredibly unfortunate affliction. I've never thought I've smelt of anything but scotch, but now I really worry about my armpits.

McLuhan

2011-10-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

Enough uuughrrrrs, enough Aaaaah's, enough yelps when julie nudges my foot by mistake. Every ten minutes now i have remind myself I'm not going anywhere right now. Reckon I could do one of my classes entirely virtually this week, I sit in my room here, they sit in their room there and we blog away live. It would at least get us started, but the media would bring out it's own strengths and how could I resist the chance to ask, just once, 'what are you wearing?' followed by 'I'm naked wearing a fun viking helmet' on the basis of our all mutually understood invisibility and the lack of visual stimuli. Thats seems much for fun to me than skype. Thank you very much Marshall McLuhan. Students walk around again clutching McLuhan and far away eyes. But I think he's better on the 'simple' things in life, like wearing sunglassses to be cool than whenever he even goes near Finnnigans Wake. His best line is on the attitudes of topless dancers in NY, He explains to his colleagues over lunch; 'Well of course, they are wearing us'.

uuuughh

2011-10-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

laid up on the sofa i get to watch all sorts of tv. most of it appears indelibly worse than on previous occasions i've been laid up to do precisely that, i have to keep reminding myself this is our own flat for instance, and we are not removed from our natural habitat to study anything else somewhere else, we have only ourselves, over long sleepless hours, to ponder. which means i think the presenters of autumnwatch become, on the coming of the revolution, the first up against the garden wall, followed by the unfunny hopeless jonathon ross, who would be a lot better if he just reconciled himself to being hopeless and dropped away with dignity like oliver reed. instead you get the feeling these people might ride on forever, like roman sentors of schmaltz, whilst we all get progressively pissed off with of them and their simpering worlds which become bit by bit, all pervasive. soon dc might be heard from some instrument or another installed in your kitchen congratulating you for getting up and joining in.

pain is not bureaucratic

2011-10-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

the thing about pain-and note i no longer possess the dexterity for capitals-and your image of me doing this should be that of an elderly chimp stabbing a single digit at the keyboard- is that pain is not bureaucratic, it is not running a railway system on time or collecting taxes -neither of course is education even though it is so keen to embrace this model- but lying in hospital bed just begging for an extra paracetamol under a bureaucracy of superstructure over use value turns into a hopeless case of form filling, box ticking, and questions you've already answered about a million times- after four days, these all came at me from nurses i hadn't seen before, i didn't see the same nurse twice over the four days of my incarceration - and my file was already as thick as a novel, and i was in total despair.

boody pills

2011-10-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

so now I'm at least trapped here at home, in a kind of heaven, but since I can't actually do anything because everything hurts it is still hopelessly miserable. My body appears to have seized up at all the joints which I suppose were being soothed by the little bastard pills which were ruining my stomach.

Here I can also attention, wearing julie out with plaintive requests, which explains why hospital nurses behave like concentration camp guards in their dirty spaceship beep beep beep AAAAaaaaaagh, beep beep beeepertybeep Uuuuuugh..thats the noise of a hospital all day and all night for ever and ever.

Hospital

2011-10-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

And puke is exactly what I did, astonished, delirious and scared to death as tee shirts soaked up blood. So that's why saturday through yesterday lasted about a century. in hospital, time stands still, the seconds tick past, you become gradually incapacitated, and then you die, especially if you find yourself in ward of crazy people shouting until the early hours while you crouch fearful under that mantle of death.

However after a great deal of effort by others to fix you, even if you no idea what they are doing, even if it is explained in great detail; you feel considerably tiny, frail and in agony as you attempt that great escape home again, that's after you've been lectured to the point of despair by a whole stream of enthusiastic professionals , and contemplate hobbling in to some new kind of future you didn't really want at all.

Rocket

2011-10-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

Took delivery of the stuff I bought at Rocket last week, hauling myself out of bed far too early for my liking. There were negotiations to be made, stuff to bring up here, stuff to take to the university. To be honest, all such negotiations, every single one of them, make me nervous. However, it's all done now, and when Julie saw the very cheap but fabulous balcony chairs, she loved them, indeed, they gleam in the sunshine, their thin perforated structure so appropriate, so delicate, so decent, illustrating perhaps some Aalto style progression indoors to outdoors (even though our flat is a relatively tiny thing in what looks like a whole heap of shit) Still, I stare out at those chairs on the balcony, and I look at all the other chairs and lights and tables I've bought from Rocket, and I think, you know, this is all good design for everybody, it is not and has not been expensive, I'm hardly made of money, but these thoughts remind me of a purpose to the architectural endevour which, once digested, might positively make you puke at the next bit of Zaha.

Happiness

2011-10-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Great day today; lectured on ancient Greece this morning and that ain't easy, but started with Jumpin' Jack Flash as a representation of Achilles. Flawed, I know. Later I found a student had actually done what I hoped he would do, it almost brought tears to my eyes. He went to the forests of Sweden and Finland and tracked about on foot with the scarcest of resources (no 4x4, no camper van) to find some little weekend residences of some of our great architects. He said 'I was in the forest, I saw a paw print bigger than my hand'. This is quite tremendous, and reminds me of my own adventurous youth, when, like an idiot, I set off round Europe on a Moto Guzzi in january. It was a really stupid thing to do, but I'm still here.

Get Yer Ya Yas Out

2011-10-12T03:30:00.000-07:00

Git up this morning, actually found myself locked in. 'Honey it's not one of those days' came to mind since I'm lecturing at the AA on Dave Hickey (he's a Texan) this afternoon. So while I wait for release, what do I do, well I tell ya'all, I pour myself a large one and I read that Hickey fella over and over again, for he is the only critic who makes me swoon at almost every line, and you know what else, when he talks about Chet Baker, I decide that it's kinda the time to join in with him, so I put on this copy of the Stones live album 'Get Yer Ya Yas Out' (1969) a terrific thing, but this is an original vinyl copy bought for a tenner from the market stall, and I hadn't even put it on the turntable yet, so it's even better, like some kind of find in an archive, meanwhile less compression man, and my god does it sound fantastic. I'm sitting there doing my Jagger dancing and my Keef riffs and I'm time travelling big time, wish it didn't have to end.

You can be sure I'll enjoy my afternoon. Well awwlright!

Greek torpor

2011-10-11T02:41:00.000-07:00

I believe I have caught the Greek torpor, a condition ranging from midnight sweats to general melancholy in the face of events, perhaps induced by continual addiction to 'Newsnight'. Then again, it could be just a common cold, induced by ridiculous fluctuating temperatures and an inability to guess dress. However it is true that I have become somewhat addicted to the Eurozone banking crisis, I eagerly observe each news item for it's conspicuous absence. Last night, neither the six o'clock news or Newsnight even mentioned the collapse of two 'Belgian' banks (in reality the condition of their money supply or lack of it would imply almost total internationalism) to the tune of unimaginable volumes of euro. As far as I was concerned, such 'news' being so managed for our consumption, this lack of information, was smeared with the ghostly hand of Josef Goebels just like the waterworks machine that is X Factor.

Paul Mason may of course have had a nervous breakdown, his valiant efforts to explain the crisis on Newsnight almost everynight for the last three weeks, flying around everywhere, trawling information which he attempts, and this is a very very big ask, to put in layman's terms, having finally given up himself.

I understand the Greek lethargy, but I was cheered by one of my students yesterday who said something like 'I know this sounds a bit naieve, but I think they should shoot them'. It was a remarkably Maoist statement for a twenty first century girl.

Derivatives

2011-10-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

I am more and more convinced that contemporary conversations in architecture, indeed the very structure of the endeavour, are getting increasingly close to that of the derivatives market for banks. Top schools have to maintain their position by trading increasingly risky bonds on the back of their reputation, ordinary folks elsewhere are seduced in to thinking that's what they have to do too, so they copy them. In so doing the bundle of crap gets bigger and bigger. In fact, I think I may be verging on a kind of Maoist conversion to an absolutely no bullshit, up against the wall if you dare contradict me response. I was extremely proud to hear from Dan, presently master planning some city in China (as a Pt1student), saying he had written a good old fashioned letter to Patrik Schumacher with the simple demand; 'Why are you such a tosser?' Dan has politics, and he's busy investigating a global calamity, I think we could all do with some of that, and I don't mean being complicit in the name of BIM, I mean something more agriculturally serious.

Nice chairs

2011-10-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Did a lecture on Mies today, then got pissed and bought £500 worth of designer furniture for my new office (when it finally happens). Jesus. Still, Mies himself would be proud and even the owner of Rocket Gallery was impressed I'm prepared to invest in my university accommodation. I say, well, the students have got to sit in nice chairs.

After Theory

2011-09-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

I was at the Architectural Association today, another set of presentations. It never fails to amaze me that place, it really doesn't, I sit there listening to all these very earnest academics get up and talk about their proposed courses and I hardly understand a word of what they are talking about, one after the other. Now that is not their fault, they are completely at home, it's just me, and goddamn it if I don't have to get up and talk next, take a swig of fizzy water, and talk about my course called The Theory750 with a picture of me with my first motorbike!
I've worked there fifteen years now, I'm sure I'm due for a gold watch, but I sat and concentrated listening to these very sincere people, and realized a little something; that all the jargon of academic life interned in the AA is still dependent on a central thesis which is never discussed, cannot be discussed, whilst it is implicit to the whole endeavor; our underlying politics.
Terry Eagleton has a lot going for him with 'After Theory'.

Late Capitalist Psychosis

2011-09-27T03:15:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when I sit through many earnest presentations made to students. Collectively they provide; principally because of their timeliness (this is what we are going to do) and earnest quality (this is what we believe in) a profound and disturbing portrait of our times. It is clear that our faith in technology will not be dissuaded, this means funny shapes in buildings, our powers of analysis must not be dissuaded, this means odd objects (which used to be called models) and strange diagrams which nobody can understand, ostensibly metaphorical objects, but which we are obliged to feel represent something terribly important (but usually do not). However it is also very clear we demonstrate the almost equally and oppositely belief at the same time, that we need to return to fundamentals and basic human need! These twin desires now exist in contiguous extremity, and perfectly represent the context of late capitalist psychosis.
Perhaps if we just got students to sit in a nice chair, they might design one eventually.

This Weekends Worst War Films

2011-09-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

'The Bridge at Remagen' is just really boring, being centred merely around a bridge.
'Saving Private Ryan' looks worse everytime I see it. It's good for special effects, but not for Tom Hanks, especially not for Tom Hanks, and a horrible sense of sentimentality which Speilberg can't seem to avoid, it's like, would you like a smoothy with your atrocity?
'The Battle of Midway' is baffling, manly because they put potential star Robert Mitchum in a hospital bed from the beginning covered in calamine, and mostly features many pilots and many ships not knowing where they are in the Pacific. This is not very interesting. To make the Battle of Medway boring is quite an achievement.
'Kelly's Heroes' is funny as a comic book, many because Clint and Telly are superheroes in the Ancient Greek tradition. How do they get over that river? (Don't know, it's a miracle baby, doesn't matter) It's a kind of Iliad thing.
I'm hoping tonight they might schedule 'Cross of Iron', because it's the only war movie (pardoning many British classics 'Millions Like Us', 'The Wooden Horse' 'The One that Got Away' 'The Great Escape' etc) where the director (Sam Peckinpah) actually creates a war on set because he's crazy.
If not that, then 'Where Eagles Dare' which features a largely drunk Richard Burton, Eastward, nice looking girls who don't get hurt, and a plot I still do not understand after watching it, I promise you, at least 900 times (or so it seems). That movie never fails to baffle but entertain.
I'm sure if there are Soviet Russian WW2 movies, they'd run to about a century, because they'd want to include every gruesome detail in there. You see, it all comes down to editing.

Spitalfields Fury

2011-09-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sure dating sites are wonderful, one of them features an idiot playing a ukulele on a train platform in search of love, the winsome type, on the other platform. It's sort of Strangers on a Train meets Ben Watt. I was walking through Spitalifields market already furious on friday lunchtime and I saw a whole 'Ukulele Store'. What the fuck??!!. And the whole area was absolutely jammed solid with bankers on their lunch breaks quaffing chablis and no doubt thinking of buying a ukulele to aid their sad fucking lives. There were thousands of them, and the original market has become, irony of ironies, a fucking Craft Fair (no doubt for Christmas god help us). These numpties lose us billions and billions of pounds, lose us our pensions, fuck the world (RBS headquarters is right next door) and they have the cheek to behave like this? Still?

X Factor

2011-09-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

For a unique opinion of the X factor, just download Alain Badiou's 'This Crisis the Spectacle: Where is the Real' an hour beforehand and read it quietly. It will improve your evening no end.

Deflate

2011-09-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

Went to see Tim Pyne speak. Tim Pyne is very very good, but he had to do it in the cafe. The venue, the absurd 'Superbrands' slosh presently showing at the Truman brewery on Brick Lane, showed little other than sultry European scarves around well manicured visages as far as I was concerned, plus of course the security and the pleasantries and the fucking branded bag they give you. The work, I think they would like to call it furniture but it certainly more reasonably qualifies as downright degenerate lifestyle (Gerry, the landlord of the Misty Mountain, assured me the other day that London was now top of the cocaine consumption league tables) certainly smacked of the awkward and way beyond, but cool, that's why those bastards were there.
And I like designer stuff, I just need it far cheaper, far older, and far better designed from Rocket Gallery.
The reason Tim was speaking in the cafe was because the purpose 'built' venue, an inflatable white tent, was so bright you couldn't show any images in it and the generator so loud you couldn't hear anybody speak.

Academic life

2011-09-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Academic life, for me at least, seems to involve an enormous amount of hanging about. It's a bit, a lot actually, like war in that sense, Spike Milligan first noted this. These periods of hanging about are of course followed my moments of intense and dangerous excitement, in my case giving lectures and so on. However many of my colleagues appear to be alarmingly busy almost all the time. But I really have no idea what they are doing.
I also am working on the opinion that universities simply cannot do 'front of house', those sort of simple organizational efficiencies that services industries strive for, we are simply doomed to be back of house organizations, and that includes giving lectures, tutorials and so on, it's all rather private, we congenitally keep our public in the dark and when we don't we become heartless machinery appearing rather stupid and boring.
It's a tough time for students joining this new world.

Not stuck

2011-09-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not stuck. I'm just in a kind of agony. The early moderns are very very tricky to write about , but I'm over the hump and highly antisocial as a result. At lunch it was listening to old guys talking about cheese (not as good as it used to be) and pork (ditto, especially crackling). I wanted to kill myself. Old guys in pubs, I'm probably already one of them, the worst are those who shout at you and won't leave, then there are just the plain bores, don't know why I spend so much time in these establishments sometimes. However, once four thirty came around, the call of the wild, and I was off down the road to my friends at the Rocket Gallery to engage with yet another collection of dutch modern furniture, and pop in to the White Horse, where Lily reassured me of her interest in Scott Fitzgerald, and Simon, the 'ducks in a line' merchant came in brandishing a huge umbrella. It's probably a prop for his courses. He's a nice guy who talks with his eyes closed, as if concentrating, odd to find that in a strip bar. Then I was welcomed with open arms in to the Conran shop to buy more vastly expensive produce and discuss my cashier's present adventures in to the relationship between chemical engineering and archeology.

Stuck

2011-09-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

Stuck, I'm fucking stuck, I get to the modern movement and I'm stuck, reckon given the whole history of architecture till then has taken just 25,000 words, the modern bit is just a twinkle in the eye. It's all Malevich's fault, Black Square and White on White fuck you up, simply because they are utterly contemporary, nobody could do anything better. Had that student do the John Cage essay on me last year, crafty bastard; silence, nothing, that was the point with Malevich, he invented ground zero. This cannot be right- this is the bit I'm best at for god's sake, but I'm stuck on early Corbu. Early Corbu is my fucking stuff, how can I be stuck on it? Perhaps I'll just go from Victor Horta to moon rockets, skip the Bauhaus, but I like the Bauhaus, they did good lamps, But then, erased De Kooning!!!!
Gropius was smart. However that is not an option. This is where you have to grind it out and I say to myself, imagine what will happen when you do get to moonrockets and Vegas, you going to get stuck then?
Going to be hard work tomorrow, student life encroaching. Rauchenberg, like to have met him in a bar. Erased de Kooning, what a masterpiece.

Slipping slowly

2011-09-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

Listening to Ben Watt, a fabulous EP he made with Robert Wyatt in 1981 called Summer into Winter. I'd lost this for years, but I can now be full of sentimentality for all sorts- The Cocteau Twins, Durruti Column, all of that stuff. Quite a lot of it doesn't wear well, especially the Cocteau's. Too much nothing. Manly this phase of music love came of an affection of the echophlex guitar fostered at the best gig I ever went to: John Martyn at UMIST in 1978. He was in the bar with his band before the gig before he went on, playing pool. I think this knowledge set rather a trend for my own career. I wasn't yet a student, me and my two mates Barney and Rick had snuck in wearing big coats to look older than we were, but that didn't matter in those days, and sat crosslegged and transfixed as Martyn played the set of his life, barely recoverable now on the deluxe edition of 'One World'. I'll never forget it. Dad picked us up afterwards.
To these echo sounds myself and Mike and Karina T were going to change the world, largely to a soundtrack of this plus Gong records and spurious meditation, we really were, we were going to change the world. Well what else should you do at 20 years of age.
I think the meditation helped me pass my exams, I meditated to Gong before structures exams in particular.
But as I walk down the street to Tesco's to buy the wine supplies after a good dose of Ben Watt and think of those years, you'll see tears on my cheeks.

Masterwork

2011-09-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

I'm working on my masterwork; The Unofficial Obituary of Architecture. It's going terrifically well, I'm up to Louis Sullivan with 22000words, I can do good impressions of Louis later years pissed off in a bar. It's going so well I worry it might be awful. But fuck it, what do you want to do in your life - heh? I've always thought just one thing, just one thing done really well, but I thought that with The Las Vegas Diaries, which you will only ever read by your thousands after I'm dead (publishers are very aware of death publishing) So the history is everything I've ever known about architecture written just for you, and the way I'm motoring, it will be done - my analysis of the whole history of architecture, written pretty much live without even any books to hand, rather like Neil Young's Time Fades Away album (rather a critical failure at the time, but I fucking love it now) by Easter 2012. Advance orders welcome.

Aphorisms of the day

2011-09-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

My favourite aphorisms of the day, dreamt up in exam boards and the local Wetherspoons are:

'It is a total fallacy to think that knowledge helps you do something. Usually, if you are doing it right, it stops you doing it'.

Plus

'The pursuit of knowledge is a bit like the pursuit of alchemy. It's worth doing but there is a lot of crappy by-product'.

And

'We have knowledge because we have a word for it'.

Newsnight

2011-09-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

I watch Newsnight on the banks with disbelief and swearing at each of the bastards on there (other than Will Hutton). Weirdly I say to Julie, 'Look.. I suddenly understand this!'
You have to say, basically, I'm not interested in banks investing my money in the name of greed working against the ambitions of peoples elsewhere and just making greater profit for me even as a shareholder back home when they SHIT ON EVERYBODY ELSE to do so. I understand profit has to be made, but it's so fucking obvious- how much- it's just a question of how many countries you want to rape?
If we are suffering a crisis of overproduction, if we cannot afford our own lives, try and work out how much the richer classes should pay to maintain the status quo, otherwise there will be trouble when folks get fucked off with 'Countryfile' or 'X Factor' as meaningful entertainment, since they will appear more and more like C20th versions of entertainments at the Colosseum.

Back in the saddle

2011-09-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

Back in the saddle, well almost, at least looking at the horse. It's a new horse, looks pretty mean. Weather looks pretty mean too, High winds a pretty bad omen if I was getting all ancient Greek about it. If I'm contemporary Greek about it, it's even worse. Nothing but banking crisis on CNN this morning, nothing that Scott didn't predict over the weekend. Mondays, they've had time to think about it. Walk along the street, notice number of betting shops has more than doubled. Bad sign. Pop in to the Trench, even Patch has left the place, pop in to Tesco's to check the press and buy some rocket, we're going to lose 75% of our pensions one says, not much of an incentive is it. Living standards to drop 10% says another, but not if you live in Surrey. The third was just the ghost of Amy Winehouse.
So I've got to get on this horse and start riding, it is never any fun this time of year, never any better than just hopelessly fearful every morning. THE FEAR once more comes to sit at the head of the bed. Thank god it tends to get better by lunch.

22 Seconds

2011-09-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

9/11 anniversary, can't get away from it. Everybody can remember where they were on 9/11. I ventured down to The White Horse to see Alison dance to Living on The Edge in a stars and stripes bikini. These days I might be vilified for this, it being clearly not a sufficiently serious emotion, but I assure you I was very serious indeed. I don't have any problem with those choked with loss in 9/11, a tragedy, agony, but I might have a large problem with the way it is being portrayed in today's TV programming however, because I don't think they are sufficiently serious at all, not as serious as me or Alison. I've also read some good theoretical stuff, and the good theoretical stuff on this issue, which you can find in a subscription to the LRB at least, is not the kind of thing that unfortunately made Bruce Springsteen sell millions of dreadful records; those tales of tears and pistons at the same time which seems the only way these broadcasters can present the American working man. All hail working, or not working, American males of course, but watch The Wire to adjust your sentimentality. Hal Foster talks on trickiness of icon making re: 9/11 in the 8th September edition, Richard J Evans on why the Germans never gave up in WW2 where he mentions in passing that 175,000 Volkssturm (Dads Army) died in the idiotic defense of Berlin, and Slavoj Zizek, you got to love him, dissects our riots (a minor matter).
As for the new WTC NYNY, it's a cathedral isn't it, it preceeds our return to medievalism, financial districts the new monasteries. I hope you understand that the average time, globally, that any share stays where it is now is just 22 seconds.

Sand boy

2011-09-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Me, happy as a sand boy, West Cork
Photo by Julie of course.

2011-09-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

Best building in the world, utterly stupid, me in it, basement. Photo by Julie of course

2011-09-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Best building in the world, utterly stupid, me in it. Photo by Julie of course.

Portrait

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

This is the most intelligent person I know, I give you Scott at his best. There is a seriousness in saying this, simply because many, or most, or everybody who has any sense of things at all, knows that caring about beautiful things or actions is something vary rarely understood. I found beauty today in the reflection of a bored dancer in the White Horse round opening time. I felt like Degas. For many people they'd say- 'That's too early to be drinking!' I say 'That's the best time to be drinking!' If you are looking for beauty, don't hang with the crowd. Instead, we are patrolled, disciplined, told off, for almost any enjoyment of beauty, simply because we are convinced of the economic sense of things, some other kind of imperative, but hold on, I don't want that imperative, it doesn't work for me, it tends to work for arseholes in grey shoes and grey and pink ties who are looking forward to buying a Mercedes. But we should not be convinced of that neoliberalist crap, which just wants to fill our world with it's super abundance of production, we need to savour and value the looking at a Picasso, or a Beckman, or for that matter Mies. We need to empathize with Le Corbusier as he swam to his death, we need to watch The Wire and savour Sgt Bilko or Laurel and Hardy or Tom and Jerry. Only a few people I have met in my life do this sufficiently, those who show the discrimination that effectively makes art what it is. Presently it is clear that architecture is not art at all, but a mere result of contingencies. Perhaps it always has been, but you have to love those who rose above.
Photo, of course, by Julie Cook.

Beavers

2011-09-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

Some idiot in Watford or someplace has decided to call his Lap Dancing club 'Beavers'. I nearly collapsed with laughter. Girls like Lily don't want to work at a place called Beavers, but I admit it is a bloody funny stupid thing to do. 'Beavers'. Idiot.

Enjoy the Interns

2011-09-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

We had a launch at Hotshoe gallery last night. I have a foggy memory, but I know I spent a day squeezing lime juice to make six litres of Tom Collins. I'm sure when the serious youngsters who put on their best frocks to man the stalls at book fairs either a) squeal with excitement or b) recoil in horror as we arrive with our bags of what looks like rusty water. It certainly goes down well. Scot was soon wear your bag on your head drunk. Several of the hopeful interns complemented him on the look, before they wanted me to throw him out for bumping in to them and being generally sullen. It was a bit like the slaughter of the innocents, us bitter guys can't help but laugh at the intern culture that supports these adventures, they were shockingly young and shockingly serious. I kept trying to persuade one nice young girl after another; 'Just have a sip of this!...it's really good!!' They would smile and say 'not right now'. Despairing, I wondered how these people could exist.

Nothing worse than hopeful hamsters.

Revolution

2011-09-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

Watching some BBC2 documentary on government. I realise the only thing to do is to close Oxford and Cambridge, change them into social housing, and make the so called bright bastards study at Lincoln Met or South Bank with the rest of us. I'm not kidding.

7"

2011-09-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

I only have two seven inch singles in my collection, both salvaged from e-bay and enjoyed fabulously. There's nothing quite like listening to just the one song- usually in my case over and over, and probably much to the annoyance of my so called 'Rock n Roll' silent as mice neighbours who I doubt know Joe Satriani from Sinatra.

My two records are Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper' and The Passions 'I'm in Love with a German Film Star'. All readers should buy these items on e-bay and have a little moment in Paul World nursing a large one. If you want to follow it up go for Satriani's 'Living in a Blue Dream' noticing the bass shifts. In mordant moments I wonder at these excellent funeral records, but I think I'd need a bit of WHOOOOAAAHH!!! David Lee Roth too.

Alice Cooper

2011-09-02T08:35:00.001-07:00

Ok so we are back here and the man on the record stall virtually grabs me by the throat as I make for the Misty Moon. However he has some great new stuff. I picked up Steve Winwood's first solo album, a pretty beautiful thing to play on a sunny afternoon, an original pressing of 'Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory' from Traffic, and, best of all, Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies totally original gatefold wallet sleeve etc all for £19. Now I'm not in it for the money, I'm in it for drunken afternoons playing 'Elected' as loud as I can and remembering my arrival at Heathrow yesterday. My arrival at Heathrow yesterday was shitty. All you see is huge advertisement's for investment companies using smiling children wanting presents like it's econo-porn. We know these shits are in total crappola and have put us in total crappola. Then of course the taxi doesn't turn up, but we have the privilege of watching the parade of Mercedes driven cheap suit wearing, land of grey and pink shirt and tie (hang yourself please) universal hair styling, tennis racket carrying arseholes who presumably think they are fucking doing some kind of beneficial thing by going on a jaunt for us and I just want to shout 'ARSEHOLES!" at the top of my voice. I don't, I just looked forward to my Neil Young Ditch Collection.

I come home to watch some fucking awful thing about saving English Country Houses, where the aristocracy still, plain as day, think it's lovely to be both stupid and revered at the same time with no, yes, zero, political interests in their forefathers affairs whatsoever. It no longer matters for TV if great grandaddy fucked the whole of Serra Leone. It is extraordinary to me that the British public celebrate dim witted aristocratic idiots, it's appalling.

Just make me some jam motherfuckers.

Weighty matters

2011-08-31T10:25:00.000-07:00

Tucked away in a tiny room, space N08, or what Michael Robbins would call 'a harbouring space' the Beckmans, Max Beckman painter, and deep inside Mies's National Gallery, you will gaze at them and then hurry to the cafe and the toilet. Mies's National Gallery Berlin is the only building I know that makes you want to shit yourself, both Julie and I felt the same bowel convulsion, and then you sit on the toilet in your stall, and realize you are staring at a 1" tile grid, everything perfect. This building is the architectural equivalent of the inquisition.

And of course it's deeply unpopular. People want more happening things than this these days, they want architainment in the Sony Centre, but they should realise that this building is anti-happening, even the security guards pace around like polar bears in the zoo, it drives them crazy too.

And in the cafe, where I always take my sacrament, you will stare at yourself in the carefully placed mirrors and stare at the other two people in there trying desperately to divert themselves from this abyss by fiddling with their mobile phones, I just notice the double doors close precisely ON THE GRID. It drives me crazy. They look like Beckman's themselves that couple, how uncanny, Beckman was bloody good, and that little room of Beckmans in the National Gallery Berlin is the best chapel I could imagine, just look at that dog. And they're in the 20th century's cathedral, with the only sound the air conditioning.

Fucking hell, no image can do this building justice in it's total subjugation to the art of fact.

Holiday souvenirs

2011-08-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

The end of our holiday approaches, three days to go and it's 'We'd better do something I suppose' that and 'I'd like to buy this...or that'. Buying stuff on holiday always hauls us in an interesting array. So far I've got a couple of 'ditch period' Neil Young Lps (Tonights the Night and Time Fades Away) an etching of Goethe's summer house bought for eight euro's at the Tiergarten Market, and then today's little sortie turned up an excellent solid aluminium 21 LED torchlight which only the German's could make and since our lights go out every time the local junkie steels our isolators, will come in very handy, the worlds tiniest and loveliest photobook (3" high) on GDR Dresden in it's own slipcase and a model of a sex shop for a model railway. They are very keen on model railways here and I'm glad you can buy the obvious addition to any metropolitan railway station, even if it was a bit pricey and we don't have a model railway. Next, simply the duty to go and have a brandy of two in the basement cafe of the Mies New National Gallery (the nearest I get to a church), and then the zoo, hoping the capybaras are in.

How the fuck did I do that?

2011-08-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

A day for shopping and barring, Sunday being a day for fuck all. Still, nomatter the trickiness of shopping in German, we assembled the supplies and hunker down. It's raining cats and dogs.

So between contemplating my fabled monkfish stew and chuffed to see Robbie Savage, by far my favourite football commentator, talk of Chelsea's win on Final Score there is much time to contemplate.

I found myself awake at some stupid hour, scared to death of things I'd done long ago, for instance, taking off in February nineteen eighty something to ride to Greece on my Motto Guzzi V50 to meet and bring my girlfriend home ON THE BACK! We did it too. I was 23. I had to explain to Julie what I took with me, and I seem to remember 90% in the panniers was 'bike stuff' and my spare helmet for Clare. I had a change of shirt, socks and pants and not much else.

I just thought, how the fuck did I do that? I was away for three months.

I felt fucking fantastic when I finally got home, and wouldn't wash the bike for ages, just looked at it with it's 4,000 miles of dirt.

Above is a picture of me with my first bike, a Honda 250 G5, at nineteen.

Heat

2011-08-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

Christ it's hot, it's pyjama hot, plus as humid as a cheetahs armpit. Then this evening the skies will darken and Thor will take his place again to give us a good show while we try to understand 'The Wire'- an enjoyable exercise but not easy.

The rest of the time we work. This is really quite amazing for us. Working actually feels like a holiday. Clearly working is actually a holiday. I was writing about Marie Antoinette this morning. Julie says;

'You're writing about who?'

'Marie Antoinette! Very important!.....Nobody else writes about her so I will'

Actually I think she deserves a place in my histoire as I'm pretty much up to Montgolfier and his balloons.

I think this is how Ian Fleming did it on his holidays. He worked on the Bond novels for two hours in the morning, had a bit of lunch and slept it off, then my goodness it's cocktail hour, and he sat back at his desk to review his morning's endevours, and probably in his pyjamas.

Any way Julie now loves my progress since I read out 'The Renaissance' to her late last night and she almost glowed.

The book's all done 'live' with no artificial additives (except a little technical assistance from Wikipedia of course). I'd like it done by Christmas but as soon as we get back home I'm sure I'll get nothing done at all.

Chin chin

Thunder

2011-08-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

The god Thor tore through our district all day, never heard such a racket, with lightening and pissing rain, driving wind and squealing children in the street. No wonder the goths were superstitious. At one point I'm sure the building shook as the living room pendant light started to swing, so I put on the zoo channel to watch the birth of llamas and buried my nose in Casanovas autobiography. Which by the way is a bit of a riveting read, far more plagued with subtleties than you might think.

Got a rather amusing text suggesting that far from academic pursuit, we might be romping around fetish bars dressed in Nazi outfits in his honour. Nothing could be further from the truth, for of course you have to understand that as soon as the academic term ends, that's when academic life begins, so it's all peace and quiet for us until hostilities resume in September, but we will probably go to the zoo.

Worried about this word 'connectivity' See it coming up on CNN all the time, the new holy ghost I suppose. However it is not a reasonable connection just to witness hell and high water on the TV or get the better of some bastard on the other side of the planet in some business deal fawned over by the awful Richard Quest. And isn't 'Linked-in' just a waste of time? If I were a social networking site I'd have to call it 'Large-One'.

Hurricane

2011-08-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Mien host is a hurricane. When she arrives she appears as a force of nature, then she disappears again to Hamburg, or Malta, or Cologne, or on to expensive yachts where she will play the Carly Simon to any Warren Beatty. She's the kind of woman who cranks energy. She is the weather, and I'm that bunny rabbit sitting in a field for a day in the rain in West Cork. I like it but I cower rather before it, but I stick it out too. The weather is lovely, but I'm not quite the poet to do it justice, you'd have to be Homer to do that.

This time she brought along a new couch, humped up those terrifying flights of steps by German men who knew how...hump...hump...hump- 2.5m of it, four Berlin floors up. A herculean task if you ask me. I was exhausted at just the thought of it, being on the receiving. But there's enough room for plenty of couches in this place and, as I've noted before, there was still nowhere comfortable to sit on account of the aesthetic rather than functional criteria generally applied before my blogged interventions which of course, my host read, and acted swiftly upon. But this new couch is so splendiferous I fear even sitting on it, it being so comfortable and all. It is a real sofa for afternoon naps which I shall be frightened of taking. We must not spill anything on it. Maybe we'll buy a plastic cover, if they make one that big, for insurance.

They are very big on insurance here, given a certain historical hangover assurance is a constant necessity. Even my hosts dog, a huge hound called 'Sonic' (I have always suspected after Sonic Youth) has liability insurance.

Sonic brought us a copy of Patti Smith's autobiography. We will love it. Poetry and seventies rebellion, I guess that's what we stand for.

The Future is Medieval

2011-08-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

Just got out of a cab with one of those drivers who want to tell you everything about Berlin, like where all the bullet holes are, yes, literally where all the bullet holes are in our local bar round the corner, then stuff like:

'You know there are 1045 bridges in Berlin?'

'Well no but..'

'So what do you know?...eh?'

Well to be honest it's clear we know nothing at all, especially not to pick up a cab from the Tiergarten street market, especially one who's chatting famously with the stall holders who seem to be selling more and dubious nazi memorabilia with each passing year. Photo albums of young guards smiling at the camps, no thank you, whatever camps they were, even if they were probably summer camps.

So this guy starts the trip by pointing out the street lamps were by Albert Speer. I note that the Kaiser Chiefs are touring here with the title 'The Future is Medieval', and it quite possibly might be.

The Horses Mouth

2011-08-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at this big book on Gillespie Kidd and Coia architects resident on these Berlin shelves, who were actually Izi Metzstein and Andy McMillan under sobrique. I was wondering, as I flicked through it's pages of brick and concrete, of brutal scots sixties buildings long lost in Cardross, just what made their work so brilliant? The book retails on Amazon over £240, and this one is personally and lovingly dedicated to my host here in Berlin. I'd better not spill my scotch on it. Actually neither Izi or Andy would have scared a jot for spilt scotch, but we live in a different age. I'm surprised the tome isn't in a box.

The answer is quite elemental if you've worked in an architectural school. The work of Izi and Andy represents the sublime manipulation of plan and section in the most artful and ingenious ways, also the articulation of detail in, yes, artful and ingenious ways. They won the RIBA gold medal for it. It also represents an ugliness of every conceivable conception. Both at the same time, a passionate love of the former and a passionate distain for the latter, makes for greatness within a certain conception of what makes things great. It is an architecture which loves elbows and feet rather than that obviousness of the face. We can all love the odd elbow, and feet are now a fetish, but that's not the world they were in, they loved those elbows and feet. This of course, is a great modernist ideal, just read the fabulous novel 'The Horses Mouth' by Joyce Cary and you will understand their sensibility utterly and completely.

I worked for a while with Izi just before he retired. I regret at that my youthful age, I didn't really understand the old horses wisdom. I think I was a real pain in his arse. I went for an interview for a job at the Macintosh school in Glasgow with Andy McMillan, and of course blew it with talk of architecture students making pop videos for the Pet Shop Boys.

Now I stare at those plans and sections.

Back in Berlin

2011-08-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

I like Germany. Some people can be pretty harsh about it. AA Gill wrote a particularly bitter thing titled 'The Hunforgiven'. But for me, the only thing remotely Gothic about this oasis of calm, of bicycles occasionally gliding by, of sitting in the same bar with the same people in it eating the same sausage pondering only the minor idiosyncracies of the shower, the toilet and the locks, and dreading only the effort of climbing those four flights of stairs up to our apartment, is the gutteral accent. It feels mighty comfortable. Mind you of course, for AA Gill comfortable is probably trecking through Kalahari without so much as a Bitburger. Pathologically calm, yep that's this place, Charlottenburg Berlin, seen far too much fuss ever to be interested again. It positively seethes 'leave me alone'.....burger off!

But I'm supposed to start on The Goth's for my 'Unauthorized History of Architecture' and the distinct lack of wandering violent hoards is not exactly inspiration. They're all back in England. When Gibbon first found himself in the ruins of the Roman forum 'just after vespers' he recalls, he was transported by the image of the ancients, enraptured by what was missing. Guess I'll have to get more in to the spirit of it, and less comfortably numb.

Van Halen II

2011-08-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

So we are back in the metropolis for one day. What happens? I'll tell you what happens, Van Halen and strippers happens. It's what you need after a good dose of the countryside. You know what I love about Van Halen; Innocent swagger. Pour yourself another one and join the party, an urban party which involves people you couldn't care less about but you can stare at in lust. Rather more urban than rabbits in a field. To my knowledge no other band in the history of rock and roll manages to combine being sixteen and fifty at the same time. I think it's called charm, an old fashioned and much maligned term. However, I can't get away from it, David Lee Roth is just the best rock vocalist of all time, perhaps because he realizes it's all 'whoops' and 'woooohs', general yelps and other ridiculousness- showmanship, and he can belt it out better, even if the stuff he's singing is pretty awful, than Mrs Tyler and Jagger and so on- who suddenly become somehow too serious - trying too hard at a children's party.

Anyway. I've put Pink Floyd's 'Animals' on now, 'Sheep' actually, pour big drinks, lie back and remember what the glory of the city is while imagining it's opposite.

Rabbits in the Mist

2011-08-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

Julie was singing 'Born Free' in the shower. That's how us city folk react to the undoubted challenges of being stuck up a mountain in West Cork for a week. Nature is dangerous to us, one false move and you've had it. So, understanding this, we did as little as possible but bake bread and cakes in the land of green bacon and emerald fields, emerald if you can see them, which most of the time you can't because of the rain. Oh how I loved that rain, not mere raindrops, but sheets of it, more like wet air! Clouds drift through your kitchen, and I sat there in that kitchen watching a rabbit soaking in the middle of the field all day wondering 'Why doesn't he go indoors?' then pondering, perhaps the warren is flooded, or perhaps he's the look out rabbit. Days and nights were played out to the mysteries of rain and our miraculous enclosure from it.

We played 'Escape from Colditz' every evening, which for us is as clever as chess, and I was always the German security. There's fuck all to do if you play the German in 'Escape from Colditz', you actually play your turn most of the time walking around in circles, so it suited me perfectly. Then of course, there is 'a moment of great excitement' and you get to shoot some escaper dead via playing your opportunity card, and that's the only way you can win. Julie escaped 3-1.

Meanwhile, in these fields where we were afraid of charging cows, on the TV (there was a TV) severe lack of imagination struck the urban poor. They made off with crap toasters stuck up their jumpers and burned down furniture warehouses- because they burn. It is appropriate to call this a kind of simulcrum of revolution, for in the end it simply re-enforced the status of the disgusting powers that be. Cameron's 'fight back' echoed through the loving rooms of every household, the rhetoric could not be resisted, and now, because we refuse to understand this kind of behaviour, we will criminalize it. I hear a woman got six months for looting six bottles of water (water!) that is the same as somebody who recently got done for holding a person in slavery. The price of freedom in this country is now round about £3.69.

Schools Out

2011-08-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

It's not just that school's out, it's more that I've just heard School's Out on Planet Rock while cooking German fried potatoes (excellent- just slice the potatoes thin, fry with onion and mustard powder, dill and salt and pepper for 45mins) and it is one of the finest singles of all time. I don't know how Alice and Co did it, for they were notoriously crap, but I guess no matter how fucked up you are you can produce genius once or twice- Elected being the second fabulous exhibit, transfixing me when I was twelve or so, and my cool aunt from Texas sending me 'Elected' bumper stickers for the inside of my wardrobe door. Of course, being savvy if drunk, this Alice tune coincided with the Nixon election.

If that wasn't enough, Planet Rock next presented me with Rain by Status Quo, surely one of the most intellectually underrated bands of all time. Status Quo are like the ancient Greek architects, they knew what they had to do and just did it time and time again for ever and ever. Gradually came perfection, probably the opening salvo of 'Whatever you Want'.

Anyway school is out, so it's time away.