Volume 3

We begin Volume 3 of these efforts. The collected blogs Vols 1/2 are available, running to nearly 300 A4 hard back pages, with an original art work, as above (but not that one) for the princely sum of £100. To signify the shift I've changed my portrait, so here's what I really look like, and even that was in 2011, and in the highlands of Cork.
Contact davies.vegas@virgin.net to order.

Narrative Architecture Now (NAN)

One of the curious things about what used to be called 'studio' is that it is now almost entirely devoted to the telling of stories. Tutorials are like listen with mother. Why precisely this is the case I've no real idea, but I do know is that without a convincing story, told via eloquent cartoons (but for god sake make sure they're not actual cartoons) the student is fried. And if you've got the wrong sort of story, you're fried twice. For instance today I spent the morning in studio with the third year and their 'Place for Learning'. Would I spot a single lecture theatre, or even the prospect of one? Don't be stupid. What you get is lots of stories about archaeology, mental illness, and surveillance cameras, and these are just the base camp stories, like 'The Museum of Terrorism'. I'm sure in more high fallutin' institutions, archaeology and mental illness are old hat, and they have moved on to the contents of their grandma's fridge, or the equivalent.
The ability to generate a story and hang on to it is probably an asset, even of it doesn't sound very architectural at all (in fact my curiosity is that it sounds the exact opposite of architectural) Hewing something out and hanging on to it would seem a very useful transferable skill when you feel threatened, like it would be if you were in the dock at the Old Bailey, and that could of course be exactly where we are, metaphorically speaking.
But I'm not going to get miserable about it, and yes, presently I'm enjoying the zero narrative of Walter Gropius, because my deadline is next week, so I'm presently biased. And further and meanwhile and as an afterthought,  of course I'm marking a million essays, and if they concentrated on telling the stories  they should, I'd be delighted.

Critical Thinking

WIRED has it that TV is dead. All the entrepreneurs are 23 and it's YouTube from now on. Some of them are worth millions. I wonder what they spend their money on, Opal Fruits?
I don't doubt they are right, but here looms a big, big problem. I'm not kidding, I teach a bunch of twenty three year olds, and it's not uncommon they join the course not knowing what capitalism is, what almost anything is. They are already post graduate students. The extraordinary duty of the old is to actually teach these people something, I fear that legions have already given up, and that via various forms of condescension, latent Buddhism, and some kind of fear, people are less prepared to teach people anything, and instead, just act as therapists.
The media doesn't help matters, endless emotion, endless troubles, endless dissuasion, always orientated to the local rather than the general. It's just like Soviet TV, but in reverse (what a surprise!) In the end, you just have endless crap either way. Of course, the media is enjoyed (as industry of choice) by twenty three year olds thinking it's wonderful.
There is a solution, if people in education had the balls they would run critical thinking courses over ten weeks for every twenty three year old that feature ten texts that force them to actually read something and join the dots and think way beyond their boundaries. It's amazing, I've got a large number of the results in a pile on the table. Julie thinks I'm showing off when I say, 'Just pick one!' she does, 'This is amazing!' she says! It's not difficult I say, any day of the week. So far, I haven't had to fail a single one.
William Burroughs is one key text. Students should learn that language is a virus, that they are being sold a pup, or even a miniature mirror polish Jeff Koons purple balloon pup, which I note I could buy tonight from Nottingham, on E-bay, in a special presentation case for £85, I'll admit I'm tempted.

Doing Your Taxes

Doing my taxes used to fill me with great misery and trepidation. As a young person you cannot enjoy accounting for yourself. Now, I figure it's not unlike cleaning the kitchen, and if you've made yourself a decent kitchen, it's not such a bad operation. However it still takes a whole weekend, and puts Julie in a rare funk. She's still young at heart.
Tax, of course, is something that no person under thirty should even begin to have to consider, and so you shovel cardboard boxes of crap to a friendly accountant who knows better, ignore his letters thinking they are retribution, and eventually ignore the letters from the Inland Revenue which will usually be cheques you will only discover, when they are well out of date, ten years later.
Those who do their taxes promptly and efficiently by themselves and who are under thirty, I see as symptomatic of a failing generation who are well in need of my courses on Critical Thinking.

Hollywood Costume at the V&A

The trouble with marking is it drives you a bit bananas. All this assimilation of others ideas makes you scramble your own, and I have to keep stopping and making cups of tea, cups of coffee (I don't even like coffee) or bacon sandwiches, or walk around the block, write an essay on Walter Gropius, or as was the case yesterday find ourselves in South Kensington at the Hollywood Costume show at the V&A.
So that's why we were there, as a diversion, that and we had free tickets. And what did we make of it? Hard to say, or see, since it was crowded out. Clearly this sort of thing is very popular indeed. Certainly it felt like a charity shop with sub woofer special effects. And it certainly felt like it would turn in to Night in the Museum III after dark, when Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor 1961) would be found shagging Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford 1983) on the set of Oceans Eleven (2001) but with clothes on. The clothes were most peculiarly and even menacingly animated without even people in them.  What the designers had done was decide to make the only real bits of fantasy film making back in to films again ( Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco would be smiling ear to ear) with the help of enormous amounts of technology (lots of screens and sub woofers). Perhaps the world will soon be amplified in such a way, and you won't be able to take a nixon without it sounding like the krumphh! of an exploding mortar bomb. However we had the delight of not feeling obligated to stay long, so we managed the shortest visit they would have had that day, and were thoroughly relieved to reach cold, normal city air.
On reflection, the only thing I would have really liked a special effect for, Marilyn's dress, was just hanging there limp. It was very non special effect. This was poignant. Firstly, it showed us how small she was, and secondly, how good the special effect was in the first place, thirdly, that frocks don't keep very well, and fourthly that she was very very dead. So you can stuff that up your simulated arse.
Now it's back to those essays...or my taxes...

Architectural Education (again)

One of the funny things about architectural education is that presently you can sit in a room for hours with it (in the shape of student portfolios, teaching staff, directors and doctors of architecture and so on, the whole enchilada) and realize there is little tangible to the endeavour at all. This is more funny than annoying or anything worse, it has to do with some notion that architecture might embody cultivated, or more cultivated sensitivities than say, the design of an efficient or even beautiful kitchen. This is, essentially, a parlour game, it's all a bit Viennese c1910 if you are a subscriber to the theory that history repeats itself.
I am not a subscriber to such a notion but I do see that in order to protect their worth, to add value, architects have to see themselves, and more importantly have to be seen, as more elevated types, and in a sense we have been pushed toward a curiosity. When thought for the straightforwardly decent exhausted itself in the western world, and consumerism took over, it was the death of Le Corbusier and all that. Historically speaking the project of modernism should have extended to give everybody a decent lunch, not just a brand new IKEA kitchen.
Designing a good kitchen is now seen as a bit austere, a bit ordinary. I think Karl Marx would have been most interested in this almost total distance of todays young architects from their essential subject.

The Rover

'When you're down and confused, and you can't remember who you're talking to' is a nice line from Stephen Stills, but when it looms for you, like when you really do feel like that, a little confused, a little down, and you're back home, what do you do?
'Put Planet Rock on, it'll cheer you up!' says Julie, helpfully, and looking at me doing dinner. I realise that this is when rock n' roll really counts. To cheer me up it takes Nicky Horne (who I suspect is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Joe Bonomassa (born 1977!) Inc but who once at least  INTRODUCED Led Zeppelin at Earls Court in 1975?!) and still hangs a wilting flower for free something or other, to play The Rover. I first heard The Rover over a school lunchtime in Paul Smith's family lounge (not that Paul Smith) at about that time of man. Rick Sanders was there too. We had Paul's Morris Minor outside in which he practised speed shifts to get us to the girls school, but today it was duffel coats in the hall.
What a fucking record. I love this record, it's the record to make sauces to, to cook onions, it's the swagger and the riff. And when you are doing this, you are really doing Air Guitar!
(Of course we might discuss other various air guitar possibilities and their place in saving your soul, but for that, keep logging in).
I play the lead through The Rover, but only the rhythm on Freebird (the Horne plays that next). You should only play the rhythm air guitar on Freebird, and I wish some of my students knew their arse from their elbow.
The picture is me, air Zep, unfortunately looking a bit Bad Co, Bethnal Green Working Man's Club,  a few years ago. Photo Julie.