Sunday, March 9, 2014

This was tomorrow #23

Started watching this recently aired paean in two parts to modernist architecture and urban planning in the U.K, written and presented by Jonathan Meades: Bunkers Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry.... 



... Initially found the verbosity rather bracing, a flashback to a more challenging era of British broadcasting....




.... But then the mandarin hauteur, the tone of voice, the fact that this was language that might work on the printed page but was never meant to be spoken aloud, it all became quite unbearable and we had to turn it off. 

Wish Owen H had done it. 

Or that this chap could be resurrected:




Love Ian Nairn's edge-of-weepy, plaintive tone of voice, so perfect for the elegaic mode.

Or indeed, if we're allowing Lazarus-presenters, then wish it was this fellow (who apparently is subjected to a real dick move by Meades later on in his  doc, despite the fact that Reyner Banham was celebrating modernist / Brutalist architecture  and the poetics of concrete in real-time, as it was being built. "Despite" - perhaps more like  "because of"?  Belatedness-induced resentment on the part of JM?)  








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