strangers on the web

A tip-off sent into MP, originally from I-Am-Bored.

nomadic banks

An MP original...

From all around the town, and from the hills above it, the good folk tumbled out of their homes, and collected in the square. The bank was in town. Anxiously, the people formed a queue, the ritual most strongly associated with this social institution.
Most had come to see the bank clerks employed in valuation: the Fortune Tellers as they were called. Behind their long trestle tables of mahogany, the Tellers would Tell, judging each object as it was presented to them, and passing comment on its interest to the bank.

It was on the basis of these proclamations that the people would decided whether to keep or destroy their belongings. Something that was useless to the bank was useless to society, because the bank was the storehouse for all social objects.
You never really owned anything anymore, but simply exchanged it for credit. An object given to the bank on loan equated to the possibility to loan something else in return. A constant fluctuation in social needs for certain items, furniture, vehicles, jewelry, clothes, ensured a constant exchange. The bank worked like a cooperative society for objects, with 80 million members...
The ease with which objects were deposited and retrieved from the bank very quickly loosened the ties people had with them. The inherent desire to hoard soon melted away.

People found that in time they did not miss any of these things they gave up, and never asked for them back. They remain to this day in the vaults of the bank, able to be viewed, like a still-living museum to our civilisation. The bank was a stepping stone to the objectless society.

fistful of links

"Remember the old Simon and Garfunkel song 'slow down, you're moving to fast'? Well that says a lot about life, and about cat massage." Related, 'Glorious Scarves'.

An iron fistful of the weekist links: some news.

CNN asks if there's going to be a 9/11 sequel: I agree, there were just so many plot holes in the first one. Controversial: America the gift shop. Raunchy: Pixxxel (safe for work). Of course, CNN are not the only people who have been making up film titles (Seinfeld). Also film: Creation, a film about Darwin, is not released in the US – supposedly because only 30% of Americans believe in evolution and studios think it will flop. Comments are a laugh.

Pictures of Nouvel's bust... Air France stewardesses like lactating on the great man, but Aer Lingus prefer to simply tell the French they're about to die. Vaguely related, I met one of the guys working on this last year when he passed by Jean's in Paris. I'm not even sure how to respond, to be honest.

A paragraph about social change: watching this video influences public policy, easy as that. Laser graffiti is used to fake a gaol breakout (made funnier because its in Dutch). Homeless man tazered, catches fire– oily skin thought to blame. Man in home oiled, catches fire – portion of Nando's chicken to blame. In the same vein, so to speak: 'fat kid loves bacon.' Related, a man makes some averagely ok art with hamburger grease, but I quite like a plane of strawberries hit by a bird. Bust some space. Related, bust a move: why don't we dress like Grandmaster Flash anymore?

No links, shake a fist. Ramble: I cannot stand women that lecture me on child psychology (for a man with no children, it happens remarkably more frequently than you might think). I really don't care whether a child is incapable of understanding the concept of death before the age of 8 – I'm just going to flat out tell him: Jimmy. Your. Dog. Is. Dead.

Nick Sowers indulges my love for bunkers and all architecture military– to my intense delight (good luck finding the Arrested Development version). An ex-Jockey helps the cops out by running down criminals on horseback. Similar, the amazing Hawaii chair. There are over 50 things that are being killed by the internet, including:

A man recently went through a mid-life crisis, but through quiet negation his wife manages to delude him into accepting his own happiness. What? Effective: one crime solved per 1000 CCTV cameras. Londoners unite: Meta Loca London. Unrelated, Lovefoxxx sells out to Vice, and gets a blog.

Finally, NSFW: after doing a google search for "christian dildo america teenagers" (to settle an argument about statistics, you understand) it lead me to: Christian teens being encouraged to use "saddlebagging" ("unprotected anal sex") as a means to preserve their virginity. Related, I also discovered that Dildo is a bay in Newfoundland, (Canada) just beneath the Spread Eagle, between Chapel Arm and Norman's Cove (map).

hitler

"I mean demagoguery, I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping up, rhetoric. Listen to me, if Hitler had been British would we, under similar circumstances have been moved, charged up, fired up, by his inflammatory speeches, or would we simply have laughed? Er, is English too ironic a language to support Hitlerian styles, would his language simply have rung false in our ears?"

Stephen Fry
(not the one that sold out to America)

I'm laughing. But then I'm also thinking. Hmm. Ignoring for a moment the larger questions of whether a Hitler (rather than the Hitler) is a conceivably anglophonic creation, I want to follow up Fry and Laurie's discussion at a tangent.

Nietzsche. He suffered from an unknown and unusual disease: as his literary output increased, so his health degenerated. An introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra (I forget which publisher, unfortunately) has Georges Batailles arguing that Neitzsche was afflicted with a maladie that caused him to be physically affected by thoughts. In other terms, words could bring him actual pain. Ideas could make him ill.

The argument follows that while he was developing his most radical thoughts he was in fact making himself very sick– for example his theories about the rise of Supermen (Übermensch); the Will to Power (cited as the inspiration for the title of Hitler's famous propaganda film 'Triumph of the Will') and the distinctions between a 'Slave Morality' and a 'Master Morality'. Fascism (or however close Nietzsche got to it) is therefore posed as a type of insanity. Hitler, the extreme fascist (in case you hadn't heard) would thus be the most extreme possible madman. Of course there are some obvious holes in the reasoning: Nietzsche was an outspoken anti-antisemite for one (he disowned his publisher, his mother, and his sister for their antisemitism).

All eyes back on Hitler. In this context, Adolf's madness (which was also his reason for success) was caused by thoughts, and not necesarily by language, so that would allow for a Hitler that was British. But in reality, I think Fry and Laurie are right: the sequential thought patterns and cultural undertones of English are too rigid and sceptical to sustain Hitlerian styles. I don't think we would have had the chance to laugh, he would have ended up as a mediocre part-time artist with a BA working as felt salesman in Dorset, content to spend his free-time painting sunsets.

retroactive: calanques

A retroactive post.

The landscape around Marseille is quite spectacular, as chalky as Greece but not as arid.
The city is bookended by dramatic mountain ranges, which thrust into the sea. Gorges and valleys cut into these soft limestone faces terminate in deep and narrow inlets called Calanques. According to Wiki, a Calanque is a kind of Mediterranean fjord. I have my doubts. In any case, they are staggeringly beautiful:

just a little bit fitter

In the Cretaceous Period, tens of millions of years after the laying down of the Devonian platform, but still at so remote a distance from the present day that the imagination boggles at it, the site of modern London lay below the surface of a clear, tranquil sea that stretched away northwards to the Pennines and westwards to the Welsh marches. In this sea, more than fifty million years ago, countless billions of minute creatures died every day for at least ten million years. Their hard shells sank into the chemically-deposited ooze at the bottom of the sea, and in the course of time the whole consolidated into the thick beds of chalk which form the cup of the London basin…

London's Natural History (out of print)
by R.S.R Fitter, 1945.

Still at so remote a distance from the present day that imagination boggles. I am boggled. Today was going to be a post on the V&A's most recent one, and in particular on the work of Studio Job – Robber Barron – but at the last minute I read this quote and thought better of it. I can see from the Google Analytics reports that my readers come from almost every country on the planet (none yet from middle Africa or central Asia), with a bias towards the States (mainly East Coast, West Coast and Texas), London and Australia. France, Norway and Switzerland are all pretty up there too. Hence my question: what are your cities founded on?

I am off to Marsailles (or Marsaille, as you like) for the weekend, to stay in the Unité d'Habitation – so expect a post on the subject sometime next week. This break will finally give regular readers a respite from the relentless onslaught of Millennium People posts.
I leave you with an amazing timelapse of the LA fires, and a link to a modern-day disco track that has got very stuck in my head (I didn't even know I liked disco).

a fun palace for the people

Cedric Prices' 1961 project Fun Palace, at Mill Meads.


The site today, photo by Lara Almarcegui

The Fun Palace was to be a great open framework of steel lattice girders and towers, surmounted by a traveller crane... halls and galleries, snack bars and entertainment areas, linked by walkways, can be built and changed at will. People of all ages and interests will find space to enjoy their leisure, to relax or be active, at any time, day or night.'

12 Empty Spaces Await the London Olympics
Lara Almarcegui

Cedric Price envisaged a completely flexible program for the complex, "hanging rooms for dancing, music, and drama; mobile floors, walls, ceilings, and walkways; and advanced temperature systems that could disperse and control fog, warm air, and moisture were all intended to promote active 'fun.'" The revolutionary project was never built, though Rogers and Piano cite it as a major inspiration for their Centre Pompidou in Paris (certainly the similarities are striking). The site, which is in an ex-industrial backwater of the Lea Valley (East London), is today still empty. The only thing of note in the region is that the 2001 Big Brother studio is across the canal. The Canadian Centre for Architecture says:

On the one hand, Fun Palace was inspired by the egalitarian philosophy of 18th century English pleasure grounds, such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh, with their sprawling spaces for strolling, amusement, and gossip. On the other hand, Price’s unrealised project was up-to-the-minute, interpreting current Cybernetic theories, avant-garde theatrical principles, cutting edge technology, and a free-spirited, Monty Pythonesque sense of fun. The ultimate goal was a building capable of change in response to the wishes of users.

And I think this is really the crux of the issue: "egalitarian philosophy" meets "cutting edge technology". Modernism was founded on theories of social reform – a conscious rejection of the past. But by the end of the Second War it had deteriorated into an exercise in technological feats. Hoards of monolithic tower blocks were constructed because they could be, not because they should have been – that is, while they may have solved the immediate social and technological problems of the day, they avoided any long-term questions of social morality.

Moreover, the vast difference in amenity between new towns and old suburbs only heightened the age-old divisions of class and social status. Price is quoted as saying “technology is the answer, but what was the question?” – up until the Fun Palace the question had never been asked, technology was its own daisy chain of questions and answers. The separation of 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' entertainment continues today (there are no video arcades in our opera houses).

What Price proposed was an architecture not just capable of bringing Brave New World-esque pleasures to the popular classes, but the creation of a space that permitted for an equality of entertainment expression. By mixing avant-garde theatre with dodgems, or virtual reality simulators with book-readings, the possibilities for exchange would have become much more powerful. The exclusive world of intellectual art forms opened to the public.


Conceptual sketch, interesting for me because the most important (and flexible) part of the building is left blank. For some reason it reminded me of this article: "If you want to change society, don't build anything!"