Jonathan Meades c/d?

enjoyed that, esp as an ex frinton resident

I've been looking for this for ages. From 2001, the best ever Jonathan Meades documentary:
"Queen Victoria Died in 1901.. And Is Still Alive Today"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM76cIGJ0uQ

full documentary on Youtube, nice!

Owen Hatherley wrote a generally positive review of Meades' book in the LRB recently:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n05/owen-hatherley/joe-jerry-and-bomber-blair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTyP43_8Ssk

"what you observe isn't good enough" sounds like a sentiment that could sit in the middle of the nakh-sinclair-meades venn diagram

Full episode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTCC-DGbhCg

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/03/series-clark-television

I have never seen Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, but this argument is appealing to me in theory

yeah neither have I, but I've wanted to, though Meades' essay gives me pause for thought.

Its not a controversial an argument. Clark was a conservative art critic - worth a watch as it actually reminds of a time when the BBC spent money on documentaries and made an effort on presenting an argument and giving the space and time (12+ hours) for it.

Besides all that it is more than worthwhile if you don't know that much about art and want to see lots of it quickly. It did what it set out to do.

Yet, for all its lavish grandiloquence, television of this sort is humble: it knows its place and pays due deference to acknowledged masterpieces in media to which it believes itself to be a subservient upstart. It is essentially reportorial and does not attempt to create its own reality. It soothes with the balm of the familiar and the canonical.

This rings true of the series

There are three Ian Nairn documentaries, the first with a hagiographic 80s-era introduction from Meades, on iPlayer at the moment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01rwh55/Nairn_Across_Britain_From_Leeds_into_Scotland/

interesting! loved the bits on the ribblehead viaduct & its brutal construction. wikipedia tells me the workers had various shanty towns & ironically named some of them after posh bits of london. something very tender about nairn & he captures the overwhelming quiet & emptiness of the place. I was in carlisle this week but didn't see too much outside the great second-hand bookshop. it's all pedestrianized now which is something of an improvement, seems a little strange he didn't mention the odd red castle which has seen continuous use for 900 years. nairn cuts an almost sullen but likeable figure, sat on the platform swinging his legs griping about pine trees or getting agitated about a derelict signal box insisting you cld convert the points levers into beer pumps. i'm probably going to watch all of these.

I like the dreamy quality of hearing one person's ruminations but I do wonder what all these faceless people nairn cares about think

just catching up on the brutalism progs. funny he should mention the whole Swinburne Poems and Ballads as object of cultural rebellion thing. P&B stood in relation to the fin de siècle as jazz did to the Angry Young Men. A symbol of a oppositional and willed break with the previous generation.

was thinking maybe I should watch ian nairn progs before they expire but it says

Available until
12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099

they're all really great, i've totally fallen for nairn now. he's really into stockport town centre, hates piccadilly gardens, & deems northampton the most belgian town in england. he is v otm about the desolation up the a6, which is largely the same way 30 yrs later. there's loads of little details, little points he stops at. there's lots of places i want to visit. he plays the whole of harry ogden's schoolyard song unbroken while he's pootles up the canal to wigan, it's gorgeous tv.

deems northampton the most belgian town in england

That doesn't sound so bad?

it's p dardenne bros it's true

also great:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m29kxayGYb1qz4sryo1_500.jpg

yeah he is clearly a belguim fan

just catching up on the brutalism progs. funny he should mention the whole Swinburne Poems and Ballads as object of cultural rebellion thing. P&B stood in relation to the fin de siècle as jazz did to the Angry Young Men. A symbol of a oppositional and willed break with the previous generation.

― Fizzles, Thursday, 27 February 2014 21:18 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post

the second program is a bit of a nadir of that raging against complasiant bien pensant pietist sentimental cretinous oafish morons thing he does, just screaming VANBRUGH over and again into the void

they are still better than anything else likely to be on the bbc this year but that's beside the point

I agree on both points. I also think his "bring back the big beasts of architecture, dictating to the masses and creating artistic statements" was all a bit weirdly Ayn Rand. The gratuitous bashing of "bureaucrats" and the like wasn't particularly edifying either.

re Brutalism, part 2, yes:

- it's "better television" than other people make, and one wants this good TV to exist
but
- I disagreed with almost all the substantive views he put forward.

nairn's london and paris books £50+ for a used paperback

Hello pinefox!!

Hello Tracer Hand, I've missed you.

I love Nairn striding out to his Morris Minor to "Wade in the Water".
The episode at the Munich Beer Festival is bizarre - not quite sure what is going on there, apart from the fact that he's clearly steaming drunk.
By the end of the Orient Express trip he look's as if he's been drinking for days with no sleep.

The documentary about him made it clear that his shows tended to be filmed around pub opening hours.

"Nairn's Paris", which I've never read, gets short shrift from every Nairn commentary I've ever read, but I'd love to find a copy at a reasonable price. I would also love a copy of "Modern Buildings In London", which everyone seems to like more.

Someone's recently re-published "Britain's Changing Towns" as "Nairn's Towns", I note. I bet you'd agree with Ian Nairn more than you do with J. Meades, Pinefox.

Thanks Tim !

I like the idea of NAIRN'S PARIS, too.

As a boy I used to read and reread the bits of NAIRN'S LONDON that were relevant to where I lived, which was about 1-2pp out of 300. When I take people to Blackheath I tell them what he said about it. But I never really read what he said about anywhere else, because I didn't really know anywhere else.

It's odd, or not odd, how the JM thread has become an IN thread.

I think I would agree with IN more than JM, Tim, yes, absolutely. But (or do without the But, if you like) this (or my disagreement with JM) is not so much, or not only, about the aesthetics (ie is "Brutalism" good or bad?), as about the politics or ethics of what JM says (which have been touched on a bit above).

re aesthetics, I am quite happy to think that eg function, efficiency, rationality are good principles which might make eg 'modernist architecture' better for certain purposes. I live in a nondescript block of flats myself.

JM's defence of 'brutalism' though seems to be less about that (healthy social-democratic principles, etc) and more about eg 'the terror of the sublime', which I think is a terrible principle for architecture or life.

I could describe your block of flats pinefox!

:D

in a Conradian style I hope

As it happens, PF, the agreement I was imagining between you and Nairn was more on matters of principle than of taste, really (I reckon you'd get along with his lines on e.g. sense-of-place and character and what-people-like, I'm not sure I know about your taste in architecture).

I'm not sure I do!

JM's defence of 'brutalism' though seems to be less about that (healthy social-democratic principles, etc) and more about eg 'the terror of the sublime', which I think is a terrible principle for architecture or life.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 5 March 2014 14:11 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the principle is apt for collossal multistorey carparks and university libraries and for the modern residents of the trellick tower who spend half a million on a poky flat of their choosing, maybe less so for mandated social housing

as towho exactly hates brutalism, nevermind quinlan terry or pusillanimous pols, there are evidently lots of people who fucking hate the stuff, mostly the sort of boors who buy those 'crap towns' books

even so

dismissing their esthetic sensibilities is fine but you can't dismiss their existence

"the problem of architecture in the 21stC: public negotiation of private spaces." an unwritten paper.

(like the actual paper i had to deliver a couple of years ago: I have somewhere I picture of me trying to finish it off in a square in Antwerp ten mins before I was due to give it.)

I do not see how 'terror' is a good principle for a car park, library or other amenity.
I think terror is pretty much always a bad thing.

I think utility, function, efficiency, eco-efficiency etc are good principles.
Though Meades does not believe in anything ecological, another way in which I think he is very wrong.

yeah his air of "it's PC gawn mad" whenever anyone raises concerns about environmental impact is bizarre, as are sweeping generalisations about how "eco architecture has failed"

In a sense whether it has failed or not is irrelevant to whether it is, in principle, a good thing, which it is.

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/culture/concrete-poetry-by-jonathan-meades/8658865.article

a response to pinefox and company

Nairn's London being reprinted by in November, a little penguin tells me.

:)

meadesy shd not interview

It's not a real interview is it? It's him and Paul Finch (i would guess) mucking about.

Pola Fringuello was selected by Jonathan Meades to conduct this interview on behalf of the Architects’ Journal

meadesy shd not interview

His defence of anti-environmental thinking in that interview is as wrong and bizarrely ignorant as it is in the programme.

He is intelligent so I suppose he cannot really be that ignorant. He just likes to provoke.

you could charitably read him as suggesting that environmental piety that doesn't serve human need is an empty gesture. i wouldn't wholly disagree with that, altho i think his fundamental issue is really an aesthetic one that wants to ignore environmental imperatives.

I would lay money on him being a covidiot