Spied in a trendy bookstore in Broadway Market, Hackney, a few weeks ago
Strange to think that this particular retro-fetish is still puttering on - 15 years after Militant Modernism, almost a quarter century since Boring Postcards
One almost wants to start a counter-current and whisper that "actually, living in one of these buildings wasn't a picnic" - certainly once the initial honeymoon bloom wore off... (Speaking as someone who spent about 9 months in a low-rise block on Brixton Hill back in '87-88.)
Release rationale for Brutal Britain: Build Your Own Brutalist Great Britain:
High-rise tower blocks, prefab panel housing estates, streets in the sky, new towns; some of the concrete constructions that once shaped the cityscapes of post-war Britain have stood the test of time, while others are long gone.
Brutal Britain by Zupagrafika celebrates the brutalist architecture of the British Isles, inviting readers to explore the modern past of Great Britain and rebuild some of its most intriguing post-war edifices, from the iconic slabs of Sheffield`s Park Hill and London's Trellick Tower, to the demolished Birmingham Central Library.
Opening with a foreword by architectural historian Barnabas Calder, the book includes short chapters with full-page colour illustrations and informative texts on each building, along with 9 press-out paper models featuring all kinds of details originally present on the facades. All models are die-cut and pre-folded with simple assembly instructions attached: all you need is glue.
Arlington House. Margate
Birmingham Central Library. Birmingham
Cables Wynd House (Aka Banana Flats). Edinburgh
Cotton Gardens Estate. London
Hutchesontown C. Glasgow
No. 1 Croydon. Croydon
Park Hill. Sheffield
The Toast Rack. Manchester
Trellick Tower. London
"Build your miniature postwar paradise from the models in this book. Very sadly, shortsighted building managements and weak heritage protection for postwar architecture mean there is a real chance that, if you use decent glue, your models could survive longer than some of the original buildings did.”
– Dr Barnabas Calder
Release rationale for London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946-1981 (Fuel, March 2024)
The most comprehensive photographic document of council housing schemes in the capital, with incredible images from every London borough and the City, featuring 275 estates built between 1946 and 1981.
London Estates documents these important buildings in all their diversity, championing the neglected alongside the distinguished, celebrating their vital contribution to the social and architectural fabric of the capital.
Featuring designs from a broad range of architects including Denys Lasdun (Keeling House, Trevelyan House); Chamberlin, Powell & Bon (Golden Lane Estate), Ernő Goldfinger (Balfron Tower, Trellick Tower); Basil Spence (Stock Orchard Estate, Tustin Estate), and Kate Macintosh (Dawson’s Heights).
London Estates: Modernist Council Housing 1946-1981reviewed byMunicipal Dreams
"You'll be left in ruins for your wrongdoings.... Brutal and British!"
" Paula Cole Releases ’90s-Summoning New Single “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.”
The follow-up to the Massachusetts-born singer/songwriter’s American Quilt (2021) is called Lo and the album’s first single will make ’90s music enthusiasts turn their heads. Titled “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.” the song chronicles Cole’s introduction to those bands by her late friend and musical mentor Mark Hutchins. Hutchins, who died in 2016, produced all of Cole’s early demos and was the one who introduced the singer to a wide array of alternative bands, like XTC, A Tribe Called Quest and Daniel Lanois. "In a statement about the single Cole wrote: “Mark exploded my mind. I literally heard the Beatles first with Mark. Also The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., A Tribe Called Quest, The Pixies, and a lot of gorgeous early-90’s alternative music folks might not associate with me. We connected in our love for Peter Gabriel’s music. I was mourning, honoring, celebrating Mark when I wrote this. I wanted to acknowledge him and his lasting influence in my life. Mark should have had an enormous career. I’m so grateful. The song needed to be fun, like he was.”
This inevitably reminded me of The House of Love's "The Beatles and the Stones"
But also - more appositely - of The Replacements's own "Alex Chilton"
That, then, was A/ quite clever and B/ indicative
Indicating the Replacements's perverse drive to fail in the marketplace, just like Paul Westerberg's revered forebear, the ironically-named Big Star.
But Big Star was only ironically named in retrospect - they really wanted to be big and thought they could be. Listening to the Anglophile distillate of Beatles-Stones that is their perfect first album, the fact that they did fail, that radio didn't embrace them - it seems so mystifying, so wrong. The music is full of self-confidence and sense of destiny.
Later on Chilton did - of necessity, through self-destructive impulses - make a right cult of himself.
But he and the rest of Big Star wanted to be big.
Plus he'd already been a pop star, in The Box Tops, with the massive hit "The Letter".
"Alex Chilton" the song is also a significant contribution to the canon of meta-pop - "I'm in love / With that song", it captures that feeling of being ravished through the radio. (Or in this case, it being Big Star, not through the radio). The chorus enacts what it rejoices in - the seizing of the ear, the endlessly renewing miracle of pop. Yet releasing a song titled "Alex Chilton" as a single virtually guarantees it'll never be a hit (except in the hearts of college radio deejays and fanzine editors).
As for The House of Love, doing a song titled "The Beatles and the Stones" and then releasing it as a single, it just seemed like a form of self-humiliation - as if the only way they could ever be mentioned in the same breath as the B and the S was by this ruse of titling a song after them.
Talking of the Beatles, here's legendary-era-of-blogs ex-blogger Owen Hatherley surprising us with an excellent piece in The New Left Review about the AI-concocted half-lives of the Beatles
"The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’....
"What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier.....
"The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors.
".... Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute."
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.
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?)
Friday, June 1, 2012
these fabulous ruins (cont.)
"The role of pop culture is interesting here, because it’s both more and
less modernist than the capital-intensive world of city-planning and
architecture. Hippies, even the smartest of them, basically hated
modernism and saw anything in concrete as an appalling monstrosity; but
then they partly grew out of Mods, who were called ‘Modernists’ for a
reason. Pop goes retro before architecture, in the late ’60s, but its
anti-modernism was very different. Postmodernists like to drag Pop into
their arguments, but it doesn’t wash for me; the difference between
architects like Robert Stern or Leon Krier repudiating everything that
happened after 1914 is a very different matter to, say, a producer in
the ’80s sampling (and distorting, and making new) something made in the
’60s. Pop kept the momentum of modernism up until comparatively
recently – something like Grime was obviously Modernist, an insurgent,
futuristic force, and rave, pirate radio and so on strike me as
implicated in everyday life and urban space in a modernist, if not
always optimistic, way"
-- Owen Hatherley, with some sharp thoughts about modernism versus postmodernism, both in his main beat (architecture) and in culture generally
oh and look Owen's got a new book out next month (incredible work-rate he maintains -- New Ruins was out not even 2 years ago!), viz:
A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (forthcoming on Verso)
An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain,
Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate
new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are
withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban
consequences of what Conservatives privately call the “progressive
nonsense” of the Big Society and “the localism agenda,” the putative
replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an
eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from
London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain
from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot- and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.
[i didn't even notice there was a 2011 sequel to "Pow"]
