Jonathan Meades c/d?

Anyone else watching his series on Scotland, Off Kilter, 3rd episode now airing on BBC4?

Predictably pseudy (even more so in this series?), but always interesting, and he manages to do good things with the travelogue format. His approach reminds me of Patrick Keiller, with the big difference that the documentary maker is front centre rather than absent.

All time indestrutible classic. You'll learn more form watching his programmes than travelling.

He just coined the word 'blingstead' for footballers' homes.

also good to hear that Calder books were funded by drink

He also reminds me of Iain Sinclair, if he (Sinclair) was any good on TV.

All time fave Meades moment: him skipping down the beach in his trademark suit throwing a beach ball around outside of the enormous, deserted Nazi-built holiday camp on the Baltic coast.

Worth noting he's probably Britain's best architectural critic, at least to my limited knowledge.

Massive classic, the Isle of Rust had visionary moments and I'm very impressed by his ability to pull of authoritative and compelling rambling, but really it's just because he's excellent at thinking.

It also struck me that he's a very good example of a British public intellectual, a supposedly rare breed.

This guy is never not hugely classic.

Surprisingly bracing to find someone speaking in multi-clausal sentences on telly these days, and I do always enjoy his shows, but watching the Rust episode last night I was turned off once more by his staggering condescension. And after the first two or three times, could have done with slightly fewer tirades against the "infantile delusion" of faith.

I know he's a card-carrying humanist so I think this tone comes with the territory. But don't get him started on vegetarians, Stevie.

I really, really like him though. And I've got his phone number. (/Suzy)

Watching the first episode of his series on France. Really excellent so far. Did anyone else see it when it first aired?

No, but saw it was on. Will watch it this weekend; thanks for the reminder.

I enjoyed it, although i enjoy pretty much everything he does. He did seem to be trolling a little hard at points. Although it was part of an attempt to undermine the received view of history, and show how much of a morally grey area post-war French politics was, the end result was a show that came across as much more sympathetic to the OAS than the Algerian separatists.

The throwaway attacks on human rights law and child-centred learning lacked the humour you normally get when he's being deliberately provocative. It was good, though.

Yeah, agree almost entirely with that view. Still a great show, but I found some of the inaccuracies-for-the-sake-of-a-troll to be more grating than usual.

Massive classic, the Isle of Rust had visionary moments and I'm very impressed by his ability to pull of authoritative and compelling rambling, but really it's just because he's excellent at thinking.

― ogmor, Thursday, September 24, 2009 12:00 AM (2 years ago)

this is probably his single best film

yeah, it lacked that dispassionate, ornate curiosity and enjoyment of the whimsical sidetrack that's made other things he's so appealing. This was comparatively didactic - possibly because he feels very strongly about his adopted homeland?

Still good to see him back on the television tho. As I was saying at the Book FAP earlier this week, it's nice to see Someone interested in art and architecture and history given space to breathe, rather than the repetitive axes of interpretation of Newsnight Review, say, or rather facile and ever-repeated representations of post-war Britain and Europe.

xpost, yes, it's v good. Liked the one about his father and also the two-part North very much. But I thought all three about Scotland were excellent as well.

Caught up with the final two episodes in the series. Flashes of interesting material, lots of apologism for French colonialism. Again, didn't seem to have the usual wit.

Apparently the BBC issued a warning prior to broadcast saying that the show contained views that people may find objectionable - which i think must be a first for a straight-to-camera video essay.

the brandwagon... mindblowing. what a brain.

until he talks about anything you actually have any specialist knowledge of

a lot of my friends who are architects are quite big fans. but yeah i can sort of imagine that might be true.

he reminds me of Clive James: he can be really funny but it seems to me there is an undercurrent of received opinion there that is nothing to do with the angle of pediment, and nearer to Jeremy Clarkson than Iain Sinclair.

he is a million times more interesting than clive james and a thousand times more interesting than jeremy clarkson

the only time i detect clarkson is the vegetarian show, but he's still far more interesting. the amount of thoughts and ideas in one show is incredible, even if you don't agree with his central thrust he crams huge amounts of detail into each sentence, i find myself replaying bits in the same way you'd reread a particularly good paragraph in a book.

I guess my problem is that, after watching a lot of his show over the years - and, yes, for me I find him interesting enough to have done that - I find I really, really don't agree with his central thrust

namely?

seems to me that he's a Tory, when all is said and done

he certainly has his favourite tropes, which can get tiresome enough (i think varg vikerness would tire of his compulsive hatred of abrahamism)

yes i suspect so, but i think he covers ground between a sort of boorish libertinist toryism and a contempt for any sort of british rationalist politics

he is more sanguine about dirigisme, but then the french are more capable of being civilized

type i) is more questionable imo because it infects his esthetic sense, always on the side of the full blooded and demonstrative over the sotto voce or implicit

Hey: http://thequietus.com/articles/10502-jonathan-meades-interview

wow cool. I've been meaning to read his new book, and also to get this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jonathan-Meades-Collection-DVD/dp/B001110H14

enjoyed the interview a lot.

me too, it was great; stuff on his acid-pioneer civil servant science friend totally fascinating, would read more about that scene.

yeah really good. He seems much warmer in the context of an interview- not playing the character "Jonathan Meades" I suppose.

right exactly - his latest lrb bit is fine, very Meades, but it's nice to read him looser.

funny that that guy was 30 years his senior, when he was 12 or whatever?

wow cool. I've been meaning to read his new book, and also to get this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jonathan-Meades-Collection-DVD/dp/B001110H14

― Arvo Pärt Chimp (Neil S), Monday, October 29, 2012 10:11 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

Brothers got me that DVD for Christmas last year. It's kind of patchy, and everything's p much available on the extraordinarily extensive youtube collection.

But it is worth it for North alone, which I think is a fantastic double parter.

Looking forward to reading the interview.

I think they're the only ones I've seen on that DVD. His recent series on France, as discussed upthread, is also excellent IMO.

Excellent interview. Mostly doesn't comment on the music, not sure what its doing there? And the bit about Medway Towns *shudder*

lol@

Did you know Peter Christopherson?

JM: Yes, I did. What did he call himself? Scrawny or something…

the medway towns are miserable miserable places

yeah the music thing was weird... they weren't particularly interesting choices, and he didn't comment on them anyway. there wasn't a mention of what its purpose was nor what reaction he did or didn't give. it actually felt like a good interview despite slightly bad questions, without slating the interviewer.

Exchanged a few emails with the great man a few years back; we were having trouble researching some of his more obscure references for the subtitles on the DVD boxset. Turns out they were in-jokes... an area of Aberdeen actually being a corruption of a production assistant's name, etc.

obviously the music was supposed to be a structuring device but maybe doran had the music along as some sort of morale booster or psychic shield or something too. besides, it did spark off a couple of interesting tangents. reads like he didn't really need it though and he semi-abandoned it when he realised he wasn't going to get put through the mincer

I received the Jonathan Meades Collection for Christmas. Currently watching the rather excellent episode on Belgium.

1. jelous
2. The Belgium episode is one of my favourites.

I very much enjoyed it, the penguin dude and thrush counting were both particularly bizarre.

the bits of his book I read were very good and exactly what you'd expect. the scripts for his shows seem like an odd inclusion though

New show about Essex on BBC4 next week!
http://rationalist.org.uk/4020/the-joy-of-essex

Sounds thematically similar to the one he did on the Fenlands some time ago. He's still on typical form, by the sounds of it!

dis ting is on now

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.

the environmental stuff is either a joke or it isn't which doesn't serve human need v much

am i confusing the difference between having an "opinion" about something and things that have purpose?

how would one go about doing that

sorry, my processing might be disrupted today, feel like i've got a crossed line

get well soon

If you were to write a historical novel, which event or figure would be your subject?

watching 'on france' & my god he is wonderful

Saw him navigating his way around the Friday afternoon overspill of drinkers outside the Nellie Dean last week. I wonder if he'd just been to the Private Eye office?

I found this thread by searching for Ian Nairn, and seeing as there is Nairn discussion I may as well post here as anywhere else. I watched his 1975 documentary on Huddersfield and Halifax. He sounds so weary, especially at the end of the Huddersfield section, but seems to have an affection for Halifax, one which I can share (6 mins of Hudds and 16 of Halifax!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQfgA_6HLT0

I managed to rip all 3 ep's of Nairn Across Britain from iplayer, if it is not on there anymore I could share if you need it. I love this guy and actually get quite weepy watching him, he really is something else.

I think they're all on youtube, I watched Trans Pennine Canal, and part of Leeds to Scotland (as far as Appleby), but not London to Lancashire yet

I had never heard of him before today, hes good in the across britain ones, but the halifax/huddersfield one is something else, though im realizing the first 10 mins is missing, as they would obviously get equal billing

He hates the ABC cinema building which was built over the bullring market, glad he never lived to see the Sainsburies supermarket. Then he he is looking down towards where the Queensgate is and says "the hills are all that redeem it" that comment still stands!

halifax is a football town?

Halifax draw supporters from places as disparate as Brighouse, Elland and Rastrick. Massive fucking club!

there's a very intense sadness about him and in his silences, there is a bit in one of them where is on a suitably desolate moor and pauses just to emphasize the roar of the wind

this sadness is probably accentuated by having read his wikipedia page beforehand

The football is just a tag, theres not really any mention of it!

I suppose historically its been an RL town, but I dont know if RL attendances are declining or not. Brighouse leans Huddersfield, not sure at what point west it becomes Burnley. Definitely after Hebden Bridge its Burnley

I had forgotten Speedway even existed

I actually installed emergency lights at the Town Hall about a decade ago so I when I see the interior shots I find myself reminiscing about 2nd fixing mineral insulated cable at some awful heights on wobbly tower scaffolds, thinking fuck me I hate this fucking job!

The Nairn docs on iPlayer had an expiry time of 99 years when I looked so I guess they are still there.

Nairns Across Britain 1-3 are on the iplayer but not football towns

Football Towns huddersfield/halifax is on youtube (obv!), but I havent found preston/bolton or wolverhampton/walsall (though i havent looked that hard as I only even found out about him while searching for Halifax on youtube)

If anyone could find a torrent or link to his football towns it would be good. I love the way the football link is so tenuous, to the point it is a penalty shootout between architecture and town planning in the end with barely a mention of the football clubs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_uqoHZk4R4

There is an awesome bit here 6 minutes in where he rails against the vulgarity of amateur part time yobbo boozers with genuine disgust "This is animal!".

you've seen Nairn's London has been reissued?

I have ordered the Darly/McKie Words In Place book for a fiver, probably go for Nairn's London next.

it's good. like his series it's as much a documentary of a time as anything else, and a frustrating read in some ways. but walking down electric avenue this morning is an example that his words still hold true in many places, and where they do it's because people can live there and efforts have been made to ensure a city is what it should be - a place for everyone.

wonder whether electric avenue will be the same in ten years. (there's lottery money to do it up, and renovate the flats - and I still can't find out whether those renovated flats are intended to be public housing. they certainly need to be.)

It would seem completely corrupt to use lottery money to renovate private housing but saying that lots of private Victorian terraced houses in my area got free NT work done on them, which was a complete surface restoration and nice new wrought iron fences.

On Nairn's funeral, quite a poignant paragraph and reminds of some family funerals I have attended. I am sure I have been to St Georges Tavern before, whilst staying in Pimlico about 20 years ago.

There were few mourners that August day;in his last silent melancholy days (in reality, some years) he had been almost forgotten. But their number included both Nairn's widow Judy and his ex-wife Joan (Liz). The Group then repaired to his favourite haunt, St Georges Tavern, Pimlico. Peter Baistow's photograph showing Nairn wreathed in cigarette smoke with an army of empty beer glasses jostling on the table in front of him, was installed above his customary seat.
In the cemetery, Nairn lies beneath a standardised iron tablet, one of many, laid flat on the grass. But the legend on this one is most particular. At the top it reads Hora e Sempre (Now and Forever) and then, below the dates of birth and death, little more than 50 years apart, comes the phrase A Man Without A Mask. The words were chosen by Samuel Palmer to describe William Blake. They could have been written, with equal justice, then and forever about Ian Nairn.

Meades making a record w/ Mordant Music!

http://thequietus.com/articles/17394-jonathan-meades-announces-album

There is actually a random mention of Meades on the last eMMplekz album (You Might Also Like) on the track 'Bedrheum Raver 78', which also namedrops 0PN and seeing David Tibet in the laundrette.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4ZLKd3krJw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZGy3SQuPek

A rare old B S Johnson bbc rip. I recently watched his short tv film Fat Man On A Beach which I thought was a masterpiece. It is a shame he didn't make more television because he was suited to the medium.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ch7TreaWEAQFTQ6.jpg

Fabulous!

hahaha

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07d7nj9

His film about the architecture of Mussolini is on tonight.

wow, can't wait to see this.

that's this evening sorted then

his thoughts on "Mussolini's love of a fancy uniform" should be entertaining

I didn't even realise Il Duce had left a significant architectural legacy so it will be interesting. I always think of him as the bumbling incompetent of the axis powers without really reading much about him.

this was one of his in rome...

http://uk.phaidon.com/resource/fendimussoliniromelead.jpg

intriguing de chirico-esque quality to it

is that outside the city?

not outside the city but a bit south of the centre

ah cool, i am visiting rome soon...

will leave that derail for elsewhere!

it's the new hq for fendi:

http://cdn.harpersbazaar.com.sg/2015/10/SB1115Fashion_Fendi-TR477_HARPERS_SHOT_1_129_f10.jpg

Yes, it's in EUR. It's the most sinister building i have ever seen though it's difficult to put your finger on exactly why.

lol @ fendi. fashists.

didn't the Italian Fascist party have several futurist/surrealist artists as members in the 20's?

Albert Speer's dad, after seeing the insanely proportioned models his son had made for Hitler's proposed monumental Reich capitol of the world said "you two have gone mad".

yeah marinetti who founded italian futurism was famously fascist, similar thing with wyndham lewis here

I didn't even realise Il Duce had left a significant architectural legacy so it will be interesting. I always think of him as the bumbling incompetent of the axis powers without really reading much about him.

Not sure if he built the first motorways in the world or he just took the credit for them (see Boris' Bikes).

Wow he managed to build the whole Autostrada network without any Irish labour:p

EUR is fascinating - was there a couple of weeks ago. Also staying in Garbatella, a really idiosyncratic 1920s planned garden community. Plenty of these experiements across Europe, representing a form of social and political hope that feels a bit fucking distant these days.

forgot about this. have set recorder for the 3am repeat. i expect there'll be a little man in the corner waving his hands.

Mussolini amirite

the link upthread mentions he previously did programs dedicated to Soviet/Nazi architecture, wtf the are they called? i can't find them on torrents nor i-player. Fwiw I thought this was one of the best things he has done.

they're called 'Jerry Building' and 'Joe Building', they're both up in full on youtube

nice one thanks. God I still have i-player on in the background and Marr is burbling about Churchill's Sunday painting, how fucking stagnant in comparison.

This was brilliant - he definitely seemed a bit more fired up.

I still can't believe his opening line, to scenes of people gathering to see Mussolini's corpse and sound effects of swirling winds, was "God, Allah, Yahweh, these nightmarish psychopaths attain immortality without ever having lived". Like that's pretty wild for primetime on the Beeb. It made me laugh out loud.

He has always had those provocations in his films, though he has seemed notably more cantankerous over the last ten or so years and more invested in baiting the left as well as the religious. This was great, though, and one show every three or four years is nowhere near enough.

He is definitely better suited to the more expansive hour and a half length type program.

Yeah I guess it's always provocative, I still felt as the opening line that was bolder. There are always things he doesn't flesh out which seem vaguely disagreeable but the sum of the parts and the style is so brilliant. The humour is unique to him.

only had time to watch half of it. maybe i don't watch the right documentaries, but it was good to watch a bbc arts programme that wasn't an stream of random talking heads. otoh it would have been p funny to get mani's views on what a top lad benito was in the studio.

Actually "all for one, one for all, if we all join hands we can build a wall" would be an apt soundtrack to a programme on fascist architecture

Did catch a bit of these new puritans though

fascinating as ever but flawed in his analysis of the (anti)politics of fascism IMO, it was much better when he was actually talking about the architecture

the sign language for 'hitler' is just as you'd imagine:

https://www.dropbox.com/sc/yk8342wl9066y34/AAC7y64BexyWCH6IdV27HzpRa

and iplayer reminds me there are 23 programmes about post war architecture available for viewing in their archive

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p01s0hpy

ooh good find, that Ian Nairn series looks worth a watch

Definitely. It is a delight.

The entire Jonathan Meades Collection is all out there in the torrent world as well, although for some reason that doesn't include his Nazi/Soviet architecture episodes.

there was a dvd box set but they had trouble with clearing some of the music iirc

it would have been p funny to get mani's views on what a top lad benito was in the studio.

didn't meades call franco a "lad" at one point in this? i was going to try post that on nakh's wall. felt like he'd been reading ilx.

dank meades

It's the throwaway details, like the fact that he bought half a dozen plastic plates because they had a craquelure design pattern, that I love.

"surely everyone knows milk is poison unless turned into cheese"

http://www.entschwindetundvergeht.com/nairns-journeys/

Some Nairn films at the BFI followed by a conversation between Meades and the socialist writer Douglas Murphy. Should be interesting.

Sold out v swiftly I think - we certainly missed tickets some weeks back.

anyone here in essex?

https://twitter.com/RadicalEssex/status/763053538532548608

https://unbound.com/books/the-plagiarist-in-the-kitchen#synopsis

he's releasing a book of recipes, which is pretty exciting to me. i ate at the restaurant he cites for the first recipe on that page, last year. it was fairly quiet, which i guess added to how much i enjoyed it.

u feeling those excerpted recipes? not i tbh

the first one definitely. the second one not so much but i don't eat chickpeas/lentils etc. i like the taste fine but diarrhoea is less enjoyable.

not what correlates with yr personal palate. the recipes

idk i get the thumb-in-the-eye brutish curt charm but the signature crass/refinement matrix seems a bit strained forced into this rarefied format? erbs and seasoning arent bourgeois affectations big man

distinctly familiar whiff of nakh's dairylea lunchables w/ chateauneuf du piss or imago's xmas papa johns

i honestly feel like the first one would be good - seems pretty hard to imagine that failing to taste nice.

the second seems a bit more unusual but i guess it's all about a good broth.

I quite like chick peas as a bit of protein ballast to add to my godawful chilli con carne/curry dishes. I will probably try a chickpea broth at some point, but definitely not that one - it is missing the ingredients for starters!

Meades is one of my fave tories, but I don't respect his cooking.

is he definitely a tory? i guess he must be.

he's without representation atm, I'd guess

about a 97% chance probs, I mean A A Gill was a lifelong labour member - but I still considered him a tory.

it's hard to imagine him liking the current government, but i guess he could be one of those elder tories who pick and choose different beliefs or causes while still remaining tories.

wonder what his favourite administration of his lifetime has been

or what he thinks about brexit.

second churchill prob lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=230&v=evCvKbn0NWU

Yeah I can't find anything on brexit, butfrom 3 mins 30 here you get some very sarcastic Meades on Trump

i was just watching that the other day. sad!

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-6b9e-Shooting-yourself-in-the-head-three-times-is-quite-an-achievement

But Meades is unwavering. “Politics is taste,” he barks. “One has a taste for Mister Cameron or for Mister Miliband, I don’t have a taste for either of the fuckers.”

Still, he says, anything is preferable to Tony Blair. “He thought he was answerable to God or someone, God being a kind of fiction. Rather than answerable to the people who put him in power.

“I do think that he should be on trial and so should Alastair fucking Campbell.”

Is there any hope for Britain? “I’m not familiar enough with the generation of politicians after little George and Dave, I don’t know who they are,” he groans.

“I hope that fucking buffoon Boris Johnson never gets anywhere because he isn’t just a buffoon, he’s a calculating bastard.”

When he is in sarcasm mode, like on Trump there - he has me in stitches, lowest form of wit and all that + probably not really that funny - but he has that effect on me.

so I'm probably definitely harsh calling him a Tory.

hastily reading the wikipedia pages of various leaders, he'd probably have been heavily influenced by macmillan?

seems like he's sort of similar to the rest of us, politically.

yeah i doubt that he's Tory in any meaningful sense

not that i think it would dent my admiration if he were

I feel the same tbh

we're all allowed up to three conservative voters we like unreservedly

I always got the impression that he was right-libertarian leaning?

I thought he would be more that way inclined. I could imagine him criticising austerity for it's negative effects on culture/buildings/arts, but not much gaf about actual people!

That Football Pools Towns episode from Off Kilter is hilarious, sad + brilliant and it gets quite angry with Thatcherism. Loads of shit food and bad public housing sadness and ace football grounds. Brilliant. Also probably not exactly Nostradamus level when he predicts Gove and BJ would stab Dave in the back, but still very otm in the context of '09.

"Animal lactates are poisonous, unless they are transformed into cheese" and the one about Scottish chip shops offering a better euthanasia service than Switzerland!

All buildings should be made out of granite, it even makes blocks of sandstone look like cheap Spanish air-bricks.

I have been re-watching the awesome Magnetic North tonight, would love a Euro trip to some of the locations and sample the architecture, beers and foods.

also "Germany without potatoes is as unimaginable as a repetitively re-offending suicide bomber" !

I couldn't get very far with the Encylopaedia of Myself. Far too solipsistic (which I know is the point, but...).

Search: Magnetic North, The Absentee Landlord. I love the show he did on Brussels most of all.

Tried watching his show on France but turned it off after his rant on the self-hatred (yes, France, that most self-hating of countries) that lead to a former French Algerian independence fighter who blew up a cafe getting a place in French academia in women's studies, "ironically, since most of the people in the cafe had been women".

I know blowing up a building with people inside is a somewhat graver sin than being a bit dim on gender but it still felt too Daily Mail Comments for me to stick with it.

New Meades anthology! https://unbound.com/books/pedro-ricky-come-again/

Jonathan Meades on Jargon definitely going out 27th May 10.30 BBC4 after slight delay due to 'sensitive' content - being rude about the political class - clashing with pre-local election broadcasting rules. pic.twitter.com/2cwBehjcaW

— Francis Hanly (@FrancisHanly) May 18, 2018

hurrah!

wondering if this is going to be like francis wheen's mumbo jumbo book

can't question JM's Goal setting, achievement orientation, and intrinsic motivation here.

stoked for the madness

xxp

slight difference in thst Meades is clever

yeah but pomposity - meades’ cookery book p self-satisfied.

shit recipes as well! I'll start boiling bones and Parmesan rinds as an alternative to eating bark ftr!

but still love him.

This is so dated and banal. It could have been made twenty years ago.

forgot it was on, shit is it really that bad?

It’s on iPlayer.

I love Meades but this is pretty much a hodgepodge of Dad opinions (footballers have stupid hair, modern art is rubbish, things were better when people on tv enunciated properly, etc) that makes no real attempt to engage with the 21st century.

idk, plenty of people seem to have liked it so maybe I am a grouch but it was enormously disappointing.

business jargon is bad is also like a 90s bad comedian level type of thing

I've enjoyed bits of this tbh, but when he said Duchamp was a bad joke then, that get's worse with the re-telling - that's tired old great great granddad opinions ffs!

It's easy to show a load of wank modern-art to back up a shit opinion.

Dressing himself up as a Benny, too.

The further he gets from architecture, the more he becomes a "rugged individualist" has often been a feature of his work. But not in a good way at all on this one - in places.

The idea he seemed most interested in is the one he outlined in the Radio Times - that RP is a tool of self-improvement and homogenisation is a positive thing - which has echoes of his challop about how good it was for Algerian children under occupation to be rote taught obscure facts about the amount of rainfall in different parts of France with a view to making them more French and therefore more likely to succeed, etc. That could have made a provocative hour of television but the material obviously didn’t stretch that far.

His mid 20th century modern art challops might have been intended to wind up certain types of pseud arseholes, but that doesn't stop it being really played out and wrong willful philistinism.

when I say mid 20th c, I sort of meant they probably would have passed as mainstream opinions back then.

In music terms what he did would be like trash-talking John Cage and then showing footage of britpop arseholes to back up his prejudices.

was looking forward to iplayering this, maybe I'll pass :(

I bet he could be very witty + funny on footballing dimwits with tribal tattoos, but he wasn't in this and also perhaps it is a bit of a shooting fish exercise for a heavyweight like him.

which has echoes of his challop about how good it was for Algerian children under occupation to be rote taught obscure facts about the amount of rainfall in different parts of France with a view to making them more French and therefore more likely to succeed, etc.

I couldn't get through his show on France. He diagnoses it as suffering from self-hatred (FRANCE, of all countries!) and talks about a dude who started off as a terrorist and ended up a professor in women's studies "ironically, since most of the victims of the bomb he planted were women". There aren't enough eyerolls in the world.

If you're hunting something architectural to watch from lockdown, an anonymous hero uploaded almost every Jonathan Meades documentary here: https://t.co/SqtJxAfMQ6 - I wrote about Meades during my MA, so I might share some choice transcribed quotes and screenshots below pic.twitter.com/Vxi6gs7jgR

— MatthewLloydRoberts (@MatthewLloydR) March 31, 2020

Somebody linked it on another thread. Great stuff.

Scratching a similar Nairn-Meades itch but happening right now, there's this fellow, Dan Cummings, a similar mix of knowing, irritating, funny and interesting: http://www.youtube.com/user/CummingsYourWay/videos

He and his mate appear to be making these films and lobbing them on youtube. I hadn't come across him before this morning but it looks like he's been doing this a while.

Content warning: Black Country.

That's not a warning that's a recommendation

Quite so. But mostly I was trying to get your attention NV. The Hull episode's pretty good also.

three quick observations:

a) shame on you for making me want to go down to the pier when i can't
b) i think he's very knowingly riffing on Meades especially
c) these look brilliant!

pub montage at the end of the Hull ep is particularly cruel

good shout Tim, never seen a Youtube address so many of my interests in one go :D

Sorry. Agree (to what extent he’s knowingly Nairning it up also, I couldn’t say, could be both, couldn’t be Nairn only I think). Glad you’re enjoying them.

he obv doesn't like Wessies or at least he seems to have a preference for the more picturesque parts of Yorkshire. Mind you I think Nairn was driven to despair in Hudds and probably had an extra ten pints at dinnertime to fortify himself against the ugliness of such a heathen shithole, until Halifax cheered him up!

i am going on such a crawl if there's anywhere left after lockdown ends

no apologies necessary, these lads are a real find

The new Jonathan Meades book is out today from @unbounders. An incredible 900+ pages of his collected essays. I haven't even got past the dedication and I'm already laughing. #pedroandrickycomesagain #jonathanmeades pic.twitter.com/SH7uSD2FG1

— Alex Boyd (@AlexBoyd) March 8, 2021

Nice interview of a book I'd like to get hold of.

https://thequietus.com/articles/29856-jonathan-meades-pedro-and-ricky-come-again-owen-hatherley-interview

Meades v much the right-winger it's ok to like amongst leftist types, eh?

Pretty funny to see Unbound retweet enthusiastic reviews of this book that are all "this man warned us about the woke!"

How are you defining right-wing here? There are a lot of edgelordy comments in this, true.

Actually he comes across as leftier in this interview than I'd previously known him to be - there's a strong love of individualism in his thinking on architecture, thus the love of Belgium, and the complete contempt for any urban planners who thought people's needs and preferences should be taken into account.

Biggest challop in this interview so far is that France takes anti-semitism more seriously than the UK, a totally baffling statement to me both from my experience with the UK and with France.

He's great tho don't get me wrong!

His last couple of documentaries have displayed some pretty clear right-wing sympathies at points, iirc, but he's generally hard to pin down ideologically.

When he did the Yorkshire section of Nairn's Journeys, he, in his own words, "bumped into" the great bluesman Champion Jack Dupree whilst doing a section of the programme in Halifax. The two got on rather well and maintained a close correspondence almost right up to his own death.

very interesting detail from the Ian Nairn wiki!

I think being a restaurant critic at some point almost guarantees you are going to have picked up some tedious edgelord tendencies.

Further to the question of his being right wing: remembered the other day that his programme on France is some truly shameful stuff. Lots of sympathy for the soldiers of the Algerian conflict who went into far right terrorism, entirely unhinged portrait of France (France!) as a self-hating country where political correctness has gone mad.

that... doesn't sound great. Was this a recent show?

No, just popped into my mind the other day for some reason. It was already archived on youtube when I started watching it, probably close to a decade ago. Lemme check, it's from 2012.

Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia ?

I watched this recently too and some of his stuff about Algeria struck me as a bit ripe, albeit that if his claims of a massacre of French loyalists are even half-true then sympathy is more understandable

I forget the politically-correct riffing but every time I do watch one of his (generally excellent) programmes there's always a Provocative Bit

(or if it's the Essex one (which I still enjoy), Several Provocative Bits lol)

I think that's the one yeah calz. Made me angry enough to not check out the other eps.

Seem to remember one quip was abt a dude who'd been responsible for a pro-independence terrorist attack in Algeria that killed several women ending up as a women's studies professor, YoU CoUlDn'T mAke It uP!

The other episodes are good tbf. One of them is all about how weirdly American-aspiring France is

I would lay money on him being a covidiot