Steely Dan Gaucho

I was talking to a student who wants to do his dissertation on LA. I said maybe he could do it on Gaucho.
So I listened to the album again, which represents for me at least, perfection miraculously extricated from the mire, and such perfection, that there is more to it than just a band making a record. By the time Steely Dan made Gaucho, they were not a band at all, but a product, and they knew it, and to succeed as a product, they acknowledged product in all it's dirty ways. That's why Gaucho is so sublime, every song about drugs and dissolution, every song played in every wine bar without anybody noticing what it was actually about across the whole of Hollywood, and every track technically perfect, beyond perfect, perfect for wine bars, and so perfectly subversive. That is fucking brilliant. That degree of knowingness is rare indeed, since most of us are dupes when it comes to making shit.
When Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits was invited to contribute, I remember him saying (in NME or whatever)  he was 'really disappointed' in the way his heroes made this record, which kinda dismissed all pretensions to being a band at all. Knopfler was called in, asked to do his shit, paid no doubt handsomely, and told that's all. That's disappointing to somebody who doesn't understand how Hollywood works. They just wanted the Knopfler sound, for a second or two on 'Time Out of Mind' so that's what they took.
If you read Rob Long's excellent 'Conversations With My Agent' you will miraculously understand the genius loci of LA and avoid such disappointment.

Philip Johnson

Don't look at the work of Philip Johnson with a hangover. I tried it this morning and it doesn't work, you just start feeling queasy. It's hard not to think of Johnson as a sort of Peter Keating to Mies as Howard Roark. When he wrenched himself free of Mies, the above happened. Reading an old interview I was amused by his general whorishness which was simply very old fashioned and distinctly lacking in heart of gold, but never the less prone to blow a lot of nonsense talked about architecture out of the fiftieth floor window. However, leafing through his collected works with Burgee '79-'85 (clearly productive years!) the overwhelmimg mass of schmaltz was enough to have me recoiling to my imaginary Mies day-bed as one by one every American city fell for Johnson's jazzing up it's downtown with his own giant sized peen to the model village. It is simply astonishing to find work so cataclysmic camp on such a VAST scale. It is very hard to imagine him sitting in that glass house of his actually doing it without tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks. I know, I suppose I've propounded similar stuff, but the difference is I never got away with it.
Nobody seemed to write anything half interesting about Johnson until he was dead. This is of course because he ran everything in the American architectural world from his table in the Four Seasons while he was alive, and everybody admitted it. We don't teach people how to have lunch in architectural school, maybe we should. Hold your liquor, be caustically, viciously, funny, and run everybody scared. This was perhaps his genius.

Plastic Trunking

It's clear we are building the Villa D'Este, Hadrian's Villa, whatever. Certainly, and forgive the time travelling, Scott thinks he's fucking Michelangelo, and when I got home today to find him proud in front of a door frame, a bloody lovely door frame admittedly, a door frame worthy of the Barbican, or Jesus College, or any fucking thing of times gone by quality. I could only love it, but as soon had he'd gone, left, fucked off, go mad with fury because that's a whole days progress! It must be paid for. Maybe Philip Johnson was right, you need despots to 'build'. My god 'we need our life back' and 'we're broke' is not a cry Scott wants to hear, and for all the right reasons probably.
Hadrian, my old tutor James Madge told me, in all his sageness and mischief, pipe sucking and red wine quaffing, had his island for sulking. I'm having one I tell you, as shit heads even presume to knock on the door to track plastic trunking for the new entry phone system for the block, I go purple. 'YOU ARE NOT FUCKING STICKING THAT PLASTIC TRUNKING ANYWHERE EXCEPT UP YOUR ARSE!!' I say. The island for sulking, after all this effort, will be a repro Mies day bed, the only modern piece of furniture that in the end works out easy to make cheap, and so now is, and I will enjoy it for conceptual reasons, as cheap Mies, and stare happily at Scott's expensive ceiling, listening, even if the fucking thing  is uncomfortable, to Van Halen in the afternoon.

One Brilliant Thing in Stevenage

If there is just one brilliant thing in Stevenage it's the Parish church (c1960), right next to the Holiday Inn. We were drawn to God as Drogba headed in that corner, and continue to be drawn to God as Scott appears to be building the Ark downstairs, and taking just as long as Noah. Unfortunately they built this wonderful concrete framed church a couple of feet from the by-pass and down in a hole, but the sweeping geometry of the vaulting (the section is a double ellipse to accommodate the side aisles) and serene quality of the finishes make you very nostalgic, and the the side walls are prefabricated flint, if there can be such a thing. There is even a campanile, a simple spiral stair running up the inside of a concrete frame to a bell, simple as that.
Stevenage itself smacks of the worst kind of corruption, the corruption of good intensions by bureaucratic bungling and self important officialdom. Curiously and sadly, it was the church who managed something truly decent.

Stevenage

We've watched both the semi final and final last night in hotel bars. Last night was the turn of the new Holiday Inn Stevenage (feels new, might as well be new, at least perpetually fresh). The Stevenage Holiday Inn is a particularly recommendable exemplar of the contemporary box, probably not unlike any other contemporary box Holiday Inn are no doubt rolling out across the world. At least it feels like they are doing very much that when you are incarcerated in one. And this one is in Stevenage, which is a shit hole of considerable order where there is a great deal for the architect to contemplate as you look out of the square window.
Of course, both environments in the event simply drew out our visceral side, very counter to their contrived swatch of 'design'. That formula, that pseudo discourse on our well-being, now built in to all multinational service industries- 'it's good to keep in touch' on the notepaper,  seems rather at odds with being rat-arsed dancing to 'It's Raining Men' with your average eighty year old distant relation at two in the morning, searching for an open bar down escape staircases, and berating crowds (in this case) of lovable Dutch people, for the features of Arjen Robben.
I am once more horse, hungover, mollified, ecstatic and wondering that, in an increasingly formulaic world, whose 'discourse' now includes some arsehole who is displaying empty space in some gallery or another (where all involved should really question their own existence as a far more productive activity-I am rather an aficionado of the modernist quest for nothing, and that's not it) that, at least in my case, Chelsea playing big games of football, seems to become a reality check. They unleash the beast within, give him a bit of a run.  Didier Drogba's utterly fabulous late equaliser was still revolving around my head when we arrived home to find Scott tiling the kitchen in royal blue. Serendipity.

I Quit the AA

So it was the last episode of Frasier, then it was the last episode of M.A.S.H (we watch a lot of Comedy Central). These shows were on consecutive days at that same crucial time, and remember we are presently still dogs without baskets in dust with the potential paradise kitchen veiled before us, so I decided to quit the AA. All series have to come to an end sometime, and mine has lasted nearly fifteen years.
I'm not sure I would have done it under any other circumstances. What a life.
The Architectural Association, in the form of Mark Cousins and Belinda Flaherty in what used to be affectionately called 'General Studies', has been very good to me, picking me up when I first started going to Vegas, persisting with me when I had to start making up titles for courses. My career there was a triumph in an institution that values performance. Always the AA organises itself around the event, and any performer loves that. It doesn't organise itself around dreary one to one tutorials (although it may look like it) because they are really only one to one tutorials, it thrives on event, event is the main thing- the best in the world, the main event and the next main event, the next big thing etc. It is not really drawn to circumspection, more often than not, it is drawn to what the Americans affectionately term, 'blowhard'. I guess that's why working there might become rather draining
When I wrote my e-mail to Belinda and Mark last night I had tears in my eyes and Lloyd Cole on the HiFi. It has been a rare privilege to do what I did over those years, which for much of it was to take the day getting pissed in the Coach and Horses until I felt 'just right' before the appointed hour, and then do it, and then get pissed again because it felt so wonderful you'd done such a good job.
Unfortunately that kind of stuff can't last forever.
However, if there are any members of my old classes at the AA reading this by some chance, my love to you all. It was good, sometimes it was brilliant, I hope never was it dull. To paraphrase Keef, 'If I was dancing it was either going very very well or very very badly'.
Kisses to BK and MC.

Looking at Mies

Yeah, fuck, looking at Mies, amazing, knock out, and a long time ago. Appropriately, Julie didn't like them at all, like they were the Rosetta Stone to her, indecipherable. Me too, but mesmerising, better also that they seem a whole set of drawings for that building. Amidst the mess of Scott's sawings, I put on 'Jump'. Nobody can dance to 'Jump' like Julie, even with boxes of crap all around.