Metallica made Medical

You don't expect medicine to make a hell of a noise, to be a crushing sonic experience. You expect medicine to be calming like tramadol and wind chimes. Even beforehand, the charming nurse said he virtually spent his holidays in there. I wasn't to know, and I wasn't even the one in the big tube, but watching your wife being pulverized like this for an hour or so in the name of a something that sounds(sic) as insignificant as a 'scan' really brought home something. It brought home to me precisely the fact that we were once, according to the best barman I've ever known, a certain Doug Twist of The Peppermill Hotel Casino Reno, Nevada; 'the best road act he'd ever seen'. And now, we were this, my babe stuffed in a tube of excruciating noise for an hour- and they will play you music over headphones- well I say they should hardly play Vivaldi, but Metallica, Metallica made medical.

They have to give you ear plugs to numb the sound even as you sit there watching. You come out numb in more ways than that.

Criticism 2

When Chuck Klosterman states that Van Halen's 'The Cradle will Rock' is exactly the most average rock record ever made, it is not so much this preposterous presumption that amazes me but the fact that I am prepared to believe him. This perhaps says a great deal about the business of writing. Taking a scientific measure to a supposedly creative field - but one crucially mediated by all sorts of quasi scientific agencies, invisible agencies the surface of which we would only understand as 'the tip of the iceberg' as in, for instance, the massage to 'FM radio playability'- is very smart, also silly, arrogant, presumptuous and to many just annoying. However I will think on whether 'The Cradle Will Rock' is exactly the most average rock record ever made all day. Perhaps I don't have enough to do, but that is exactly what I do, and it's not so far from the practice of architectural criticism.

Or take Raymond Chandler writing in 1946 on the Oscars ceremony (find it in his collected letters) a fabulous encapsulation of recognition, interpretation, profound understanding, resignation, and inward despair. Chandler was about to leave Hollywood, despite it's having brought him plenty of money, his understanding of the idiocy of the movie business is wrought in a play over three pages on the almost mathematical inevitability of this idiocy which is as pertinent today as the day it was written, hence the deep sense of tragedy.

The same can be brought to a discussion of late Corbu -but I won't do that just now- or, with closer proximity, the Case Study Houses, the precursor of IKEA. Built ostensibly for 'progressives', these first evocations of lifestyle modernism, in Hollywood or thereabouts, have presented us with a basic conundrum; can architects design houses for the average person, or rather, could they do it under those particular circumstances? A basic question you would think. However if the answer, for all sorts of reasons, is 'no they couldn't' then you are probably in the soup with regard to most of your presumptions about what architecture can do.

It took John Chase to smash the idolatry, fostered by progressives (those who go yachting at weekends) with his simple remark that such neat houses, in Hollywood, would be bought and sold and as naturally as night follows day remodeled as Grecco-Roman by people for whom doing just that was their daily bread. This was, after all, Hollywood! If they wanted a front door just like Johnny Matthis they were going to get one. It took others to note that Case Study 22 was now merely the province of Barclaycard, Robbie Williams and British Airways advertising and window cleaners carrying vast insurance policies. It took Neil Jackson to blow a few myths about Craig Ellwood and automatically make him a far more interesting, human, fallible modern master than anybody thought he was (Case Study 16 is in my opinion exquisite, even to the point of it being absurdly cramped on the site - a fact which somehow makes it better).

To wit, what? Well changing the context entirely, as bewildered pundits and politicians wonder at why today's neoliberalist youth was inspired to riot across Britain - refusing to understand it's inevitability, it's root cause, as whole generations have nothing to do but sublimate their ancient right to go down the mines and kill in wars on Playstation - as they bleat for better this or better that (which usually means some ersatz sense of 'community', 'character', 'resilience', 'meaning' etc to be applied somehow restoratively- unfortunately not a million miles away from 'blood and soil') they better grab some ancient mathematical truth about capitalism; bad things happen and it is not usually architecture's fault. In fact I doubt anybody has ever rioted over architecture. Meanwhile only the deluded have danced to it. Humans appear to adapt to the most appalling conditions. Architecture is a rather trivial subset to be ranked in our consumption of material not too far above Raymond Chandlers mystery stories or David Lee Roth's magisterial WOA WOAHHs!!

Criticism

I've been reading architecture and it's not easy, especially if the book happens to come out of the early eighties when all architectural writers seemed to have gone on some course to make themselves incomprehensible. That there is so much bad writing on architecture (I mean 'classicist stereometry' is not a good term, you can't even say it, it hardly rolls off the tongue, and you end up wondering whether the conjugation is the right way round)- that it uses too many words and has no way of seemingly putting them together effectively, must be some kind of highly paradoxical structural defect. Where is, for instance, our TJ Clark of criticism- an art critic who can actually, at some length, write an enjoyable piece on why a Da Vinci in the Louvre is better than the one in the National without using a single funny word and still be highly entertaining?

Perhaps, if we are daft enough to be so pretentious and ineffective at the same time, we should adopt the language of Masterchef. We could pant:

'Jamie has made an idiot of Le Corbusier followed by a comfit of Zaha on an unsteady base with a ramoulade of bad sociology topped with a finial of fine augustation...his first pudding is a mess of Labrouste with sweet marble sauce'.....PANT....

'Angeline has done a balls up of Fun Palace with La Villette pieces in custard. She's following with upside down Alberti cake, dressed with a swift Thai nonchalance and a Dubai dip.....PANT..

'Tricycle is plotting a teasmade of monstrosity with a snide of disaster relief, to be followed by a quantum erratum of meringue infidel with aspects of prune.....AND...

'Reggie is making an all round hash of it and has run out of time'. As is the way.

Fine Artist

'Fine artist- quivering jelly', yeah well that's a phrase that came up while Julie went into repeated hysterics as we bumbled our weekend through me 'making fine art'. I for one don't understand the term fine art in the first place, and it turned out Julie agrees she doesn't either. However I have been making it for years, just very slowly. I understand painting, photography, mixed media and other things you do to make art, but I have no idea what is fine about fine art, so amazing as it is my own work seems to show all the attributes of such a conceptually driven, process ridden and lack of effort activity as 'fine art'. I studied good and hard. The mistake in my own work is of course the joy in it. However, as Seigfried and Roy said laughter is the cure for all sorrow. This is one of my 'Richard Princettes', I won't give the game away about how I do them, but the tale is I studied at the University of Bristol and the architecture studios were through the door centre left.

These pieces are for sale. Prices on application.

Implants

I was lecturing on Vegas today. It's always a bit of an event but I no longer wear the Gram Parson's style garb. One of the good things about Vegas as a subject is that it really should inspire any critic to 'tell the truth' (it being libertarian to the bone). Academicism (or lying for purpose) doesn't really work, and the down side of that is that you can easily court trouble.

For instance, on the subject of 'implants', for I had a photo of 'Josie' (above) up on the screen (and I am forever sorry about the red eye) and I felt Zizek's fourth horseman of the apocalypse (biotechnology) needed an airing, we drifted this way:

'Culturally it is second nature for the Californians to make breast implants. Culturally, it is ridiculous for the French to try'.

This may have been an unfortunate comment, but it sure feels true to me.

(To avoid disappointment, please note Josie has long left being star cocktail waitress of the Oculus Bar in The Venetian LV)

Lyricists 2

So Big Country prove that Scots should never make rock music about streaming angrily down the glen, but then Simple Minds couldn't write about love without stating that it was not only alive, but certainly kicking. The Northern Irish fared no better when Thin Lizzy wandered off to write crap about the mountains of Mourne. I conclude in general landscapes and rock don't go.

Meanwhile, thinking about crap lyricists, England does very badly with David Coverdale, who managed to make the most ignominious prick of himself singing 'A hard loving woman like you...just needs a hard loving man' (like him) and then flatly contradicting himself by complaining that he'd be a 'fool for your lovin' (hard loving) no more' by the next line. He implies a softer love is required as far as he is concerned, therefore looking a confused wuss. In the meantime Paul Rogers is often fatally inaccurate (this from a man who prides his songwriting as the most enjoyable part of the job). Seagulls flying high in the sky indeed, but who the hell shoots them down? I've never heard of people shooting seagulls but maybe I'm mistaken and it happens all the time.

Anyway, listening to the lyrics of the first Bad Company album, whilst a highly amusing experience in itself, really should inspire you to begin a PhD on the subject of 'how dreadful rock lyrics can be'. But perhaps they're better that way?

Lyrcists

Just heard that Jon Anderson was going to present a series on 'lyricists' for Planet Rock. Nearly fell out of my Danish Modern Chair. Jon Anderson, possitively the WORST.....'down by the water' Jon Anderson, 'Olias of Sunhillow' (yes I've got it) Jon Anderson! That 'I was IN THE BAND and I didn't know what we were singing about' (Rick Wakeman) Jon Anderson! After Niel Pert of Rush, possitively the worst jingle jangle in middle earth doodler of all time, presenting on 'LYRICISTS!' Then I realized they meant Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull, and for a moment I sighed a sigh of relief and thought...fine....and then I went IAN ANDERSON!!!!, that fucking idiot playing laird of the manor somewhere in SCOTLAND! (Scotland as a country appears to generate more worse lyrics than any other country, take anything by plonkers BIG COUNTRY) Surely not! All that heavy horses and slap on your jodpurs nonsense, THAT CAN'T BE RIGHT! Now a good lyricist is somebody, as Chuck Klosterman points out, who can rhyme 'Texas' 'taxes', and 'facts is', in the same verse (Steve Miller- take the Money and Run) OR somebody so pretentious, like Lloyd Cole singing about Charlotte St, making a record I still like listening to because I can still feel the haircut that went with it.

Of course "We're going to rock n roll all night and party every day' is as near as perfect a rock n roll lyric as anybody needs, and that's from KISS. So is 'Love Gun'.

My favourite is 'It's only Rock n Roll'..but I like it.