Mies Blueprints 2

The Mies blueprints have arrived from Chicago. I'm very excited, seeing as they were printed eight years before I was born, and they are of the Commons Building at IIT, which as far as I can see served little function at all, so is ideal Mies. Plans of the Commons building, sparce to the point of nothing, and drawn by Hilbersheimer, proudly occupy the centre of my only book on IIT that has now become book of the week in the base room (of course).
I can't look at the damn blueprints yet because Scott has been making a mess. There is filth everywhere. Such is the way. However I'm damn sure Scott's tiling, which proceeds with the laborious ardor of a Soviet era film masterpiece, is thankfully better than the tiling in the bathroom upstairs but worse than the tiling in the New National Gallery Berlin, in that the grids for floor wall and ceiling do not actually connect. If they do and you are not in the National Gallery Berlin you should stop, because your domestic kitchen or bathroom will start to feel like a very unfortunate form of laboratory.
And on the unfortunate subject of which, Mies and the Third Reich, I am reading on upstairs. A most amusing page (so far) comes when Mies, director of the Bauhaus in Berlin which has just been raided somewhat accidentally by the Gestapo, and fierce believer in it's political independence (!!) goes to see Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi director of cultural policy (or whatever). The two men were probably quite similarly scary in demeanor. They were both big. Rosenberg was a Big Balt, but Rosenberg's theory on art issues as biological rather than aesthetic (!!!) makes him the great deal worse. After a fairly tortuous exchange, Mies loses it, and ends up remarking that Rosenberg's writing desk is crap and he'd throw it out of the window. Such is the weighty conjugation of design and politics at the time.
'That's the whole problem with the Nazi's' Scott chirped up sardonically 'it would all have been OK if they'd had better taste in desks!' Thats why you should always employ a smart, messy, builder to bring it down to earth (not soil).

FW190

Uncomfortably nose to nose on the third floor balcony of the Imperial War Museum with this, I thought, 'There is absolutely no way anybody could get in that and hurtle down a strip of grass to face death'. But they did. Up close, that Focke Wolf 190 looked very rickety indeed, technologically not far up from a  kids home made go cart. When I got home, I looked up a technical drawing of the Focke Wolf 190, and that suddenly looked very rickety too, basic beyond belief, and the 190 was one of the finest fighters of WW2. It made me realize how they could still have been fixing them up with slave labour in the factory beneath Tempelhof Airport even as the Soviet T34's hauled themselves across the aprons.
This afternoon, I found grown men holding 'I'm Here to Help' lollipops in Tescos. What would be a lot of help in Tescos would be if they didn't move the shit around all the time. They move the shit around all the time to keep us moving around the shop so that our lazy eyes will be attracted to one thing or another and so that we buy more. Hence, some unfortunates now need help in Tescos.
Fucking hell, both in one day. The consequences of ideology: compare and contrast.

Carry On

Because we live under the gestapo of Britains Got Talent and all, tonight including almost unwatchable pseudo burlesque, it was a relief to be distracted from marking by 'Carry on Girls' only the other afternoon. Carry On films, especially the later ones, are a kind of absurd plank to Englishness, a real burlesque. In the disturbance of the seventies, dirty old perverts and big tits sliding out of silver bikini's in cat fights with donkeys in bad hotels by the seaside made it under the nine o clock bench mark with no difficulty at all. I noted with distaste today that Ms Bourbon made the cover of the silly papers in prospect of doing nothing of interest at all. If somebody got up on Britains got talent to do a cat fight in silver bikini's with big tits and a donkey, I would be moved to vote. Donkey plus fulsome bird, what a combination, a childlike love for Eeyore meets the disturbance of adulthood, that's complex and simple at the same time.
I was 13, I was on a camping holiday in godforsaken St Davids with mum, dad and the dog. Everybody was miserable. It was raining, we went to the pictures. Thank you Lord. For me such scenes are Oedipal. I think 'Dawn' here (otherwise to be found as 'Dink' in 007's Goldfinger as the masseuse patted most unpolitically on the arse in the opening sequence) is one Margaret Nolan/Kennedy (whatever) and from what I can read in minutes off the internet but what in the old days would take years of PHD research, she's one hell of a lady. For one she did plenty of nude stuff in the days before her 007 debut, very raunchy and well available for you to peruse. And in the end after it all she retired to Spain to love dogs and recycling. A1. Now she makes art collages of her previous beautiful portraits which I can buy, and will, for £110, and they're not unlike those of Heartfield.
I'm not sure why Margaret isn't as celebrated as the Amanda Barry or Honor Blackman. Sure, they had more lines, but nobody had more of an effect, at least on me.




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Mies Blueprints

First there was Bad Corbu, now I've bought my giant Mies blueprints (IIT 1953) nine of them. A big question is where to put them (one of them). We have some spare wall in the bathroom. Mies is good for bowel movement.
One things for certain, the Mies blueprints, looking pretty good (blue) for 1953 rank nicely with the Bad Corbu for their own individual and inherent problem, this time that they will want to disappear in sunlight. You have, potentially, the ephemeralization of architecture before your very eyes, the whole concept right there. Julie disagrees, she calls them cyanotypes and says they are very hardy indeed. We shall see. I was very interested in the ephemeralization of architecture with my final diploma project, where I realized, long long ago, that architecture was over (somehow) and that we were in the realm of ever smaller consumer impulses (somehow) both physically (devices) and mentally with advertising, so I could hardly bring myself to design anything as substantial as a building at all, and if that was the case, all you could sensibly re-run was..... that icon of everything as nothing, Mies. And as far as I was concerned then, at least you could build a Mies from a single drawing (now I have nine of them!) I only managed two in retrospect.
How clever of me, the inevitable arsehole of youth, and how funny, as the world comes rolling round in that circle game to present me with now, eventually, via e-bay (miniaturized, global communication personified) my own fading final project, thirty odd years on.
It is pertinent to show the drawing below. Note there is a grid line missing and I didn't black in the structure ON PURPOSE (not true). The drawing is sadly long lost, too big to be transported around through nomadic years, and probably still sitting in Trevor Dannatt's office basement. Incidentally, it's for student housing where you had to rent everything on a day to day basis. Sorry the scan is also appropriately filthy, like it's been stuck in an attic.

Thunderstruck

Slowly, even though Scott's still in Scotland, the green lights start beeping and we are coming back to life.  It feels like the re-boot of Apollo 13. These external systems get plugged in one by one. Once stationary and to be honest, fairly crippled by pain like an old man, suddenly everything starts to work- of course it's pills and payments that do it, but before you know it your back cooking a fish pie. It felt especially good to turn on Planet Rock, which gave me, while whisking my roux, Queen's 'Now I'm Here', as good as they ever got, something about rooms on fire by Stevie Nicks which was deeply pleasant in the rhythm section, the seminal Orgasmatron from Motorhead which I should include in History lectures, and, as if they knew I was there on the receiving end, Thunderstruck from ACDC, by far the best intro of any rock record ever. I was dancing on fresh Roman quarry tiles I tell you.

(Above Cushicle by Mike Webb of Archigram. By the time I'm wearing one of these I suspect I'll be nearly dead.)

Let it Bleed

I've had no records for a month, and I've only got one channel today, after mooching around and brushing the dust, I decided to play this, it was a difficult decision and it was a bit of a revelation, since I just heard the Jagger half, the right hand side essentially, it was so open, so real, so, yes, fantastic. 'Love in Vain' was just him! 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' was never a favourite of mine, but it is now. So when I'd finished by thinking 'Monkey Man' was the most underrated Stones classico as long as you listened only to the right hand side, I moved on to Beggars Banquet, and there's some shit there (Jigsaw Puzzle) but the eternal shit too. One hell of a way of a way to enjoy cooking an omelet. Occasionally, turn off one channel.

Die Hard 04

Since Scott's decided to go on holiday, we sit, not unlike a family in one of those Superstudio drawings (see below) camped out. At least the television works, so I enjoyed going up to bed last night having watched most of Die Hard 04. I was happy to go to bed before the end because I was sure what was going to happen, the formula is reassuring that way. Despite less drama and more comic book, Die Hard 04 employed almost all the elements of the last last three films, not unlike the next in the series of Van Halen albums; the format is resilient, for instance even amidst infrastructural wipeout, John McLean gets in via the janitor's room. He has a gripping drama in a lift shaft, helicopters are dramatically destroyed by flying squad cars, and his enemies seem so resilient at first you wonder if they are not aliens. There are daughters to rescue and innocents to protect, bla. Julie commented that he must be very tired even from the word go having done this so many times. Indeed.
I wish Steven Fry's gadgets would pack up. He trotted the same old line of tired celebrities to swear their allegiance to our technological fate and total dependency on the latest crap in a most conspicuously suspicious way in the gadget equivalent of '1001 Films You Must See Before You Die' only affirming that celebrities are interminably dull, just as I was told that the reason we are in draught despite the wettest April in history is because the privatized utility companies have sold off the water storage. There is a link in all this.