Without the state

In Which It Comes To Our Attention That Many British Architects Are Schmucks

A trenchant (and pretty accurate) dissection of the way in which the architectural profession is obsessed with style above content.

It even includes an intelligible (and again accurate) quote from John Prescott!

I know that some of our leading architects have criticised [Poundbury], but I also know that it was architects who gave awards to the concrete monstrosities that were built as homes for ordinary people.

(To be fair to Prescott I think his problem is that his enthusiasm runs faster than his tongue. )

ADDENDUM

I followed up one of the comments to this post which came from a British architect. I don't know if this is because of an unfortunate experience (see the section on Upton in Northamptonshire) but the description of a design code doesn't entirely gell with my understanding of how they would work.

Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to progress to the second stage because two out of the two hundred houses on our plan were designed as three storey when the design code had specified only two 2 storey on that specific street.

If a design for a development of 200 houses has got to the level of detail where the layout of streets is known, it seems rather silly to invite submissions for a design competition to build those houses. Good practice I would have thought would require the spaces between the buildings to spring from the buildings, not the road layout. It looks more like a misapplication of the idea to me, unless I'm missing something.

Falling standards

Fings ain't what they used to be

Closing down sale

My other blog was set up for one purpsoe - as a vehicle for selling my images. I thought perhaps that adding some writing and commentary on arts matters generally might help that objective. I have to say it hasn't! Quite reasonable I think, anyone expecting to buy something looks for a proper on-line store or goes to ebay.

In addition maintaining two blogs simply iosn't practical and is a diversion of effort.

So - now that I have copied over posts of more general value to this blog, we are closing for business at Panchromatica Too. You will of course still be able to buy copies of prints!

From today, photography is dead

I always believed that photography could stand on its own feet as an art form without needing to emulate painting. The earliest photographers of course only had painting as the measure. Rejlander for example seems to have explicitly set out to replicate the big set piece paintings so beloved of the Victorians.

These days it seems that the worst insult you can throw at a painter is to call his work photographic - look for example at the hoo-ha over Jack Vettriano.

[An even greater insult is probably 'illustrator' but I'm not going there!]

The art elite however dismiss so called popular culture out of hand - these are amusing commentaries on this tendency. They try to force photography into that same strait jacket by an obsession with limited editions.

Now however the position is different - just as photography freed painting from the need to be representational (if there ever was such a need), the availability of digital imaging now offers the chance for the difference between painting and photography to become largely a distinction based on media - no more than between oils and watercolour.

(The post above originally appeared on Panchromatica Too)

My post (above) about the value of photography as an art form in its own right came back to me as I read this The New York Times piece.

I think I agree with the comment posted here on Fotolog that:

I think originally the size was an entry point to "art photography" market rather than anything else. Galleries need to make the objects, as valuable and noteworthy even aside from any intrinsic pictorial merit. Sales gimmick. So a contrarian will go small and get ahead of the curve.

It makes me wonder if I should spend quite so much time trying to get my digital images up to the larger sizes when I print. Why not print at 10 by 8 or even smaller?

Whatever happened to Susan Maughan?

When I was young I wanted to be Fred Astaire (and here). I'm not sure whether I was attracted to the dancing or the idea of getting my hands on Ginger Rogers (and here). (For some reason I never seemed to grasp that these movies were some 30 years old and she didn't look like that anymore.) Then one day I saw Fred in a movie with Cyd Charisse - oh those legs! After that I'm afraid it was all over between Ginger and me. Later on I wanted to be a singer - this time attracted I think more by the charms of Helen Shapiro and Susan Maughan than any realistic chance of making it.

At the same time however I was still listening to Duke Ellington, Debussy, Charlie Parker, Stravinsky, Sonny Boy Williamson and Fats Waller although for some reason I just didn't 'get' Lena Horne. I didn't at the time see any contradiction in this - music was music. I still don't. I now love Lena Horne but I am just as happy listening to Victoria de los Angeles, Celia Cruz, Cecilia Bartoli, Amalia Rodriguez and of course Billie Holiday.

I was drawn to these reflections by a stray memory of a conversation years ago, when I expressed a preference for Fred and Ginger above Nureyev and Fonteyn.

The person I was talking to was I think at heart a snob. His expressed preferences were probably not based on what he really felt but on what he thought they should be. At the time, and even more so now, I wonder however why he felt the need to express his snobbery in this way?

In Private Lives, one of Coward's character's says "Strange how potent cheap music is" while playing a recording of one of his own songs.

Why though did even a master like Noel Coward feel the need to denigrate his own work in this way? Why is the virtuosity of Hendrix in some way less than that of Jacqueline du Pre? Why should I be met with incomprehension when I call Ellington one of the greatest composers of the 20th Century? Why are the wonderful lyrics of Johnny Mercer somehow felt to be inferior to the appalling librettos tolerated in opera.

Similar prejudices exist in the visual arts - dare I say Jack Vettriano again?

So what, without getting too pretentious, is 'Art' ?

(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)

Fats Waller

Thanks to 2Blowhards I learned that this year is the centennial of the birth of the great Fats Waller (1904-1943).

As Michael says:

If tracks like "Honeysuckle Rose" and "The Joint is Jumpin'" don't raise your spirits, well, then you might as well give up now because you're already dead.

My own favourite? - too many to choose really but "My very good friend the milkman" or "Your feet's too big" must be up there somewhere with Michael's choices. This CD is a good introduction.

(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)

Electic Nougat

This wonderful phrase isn't mine I'm afraid, but comes via the Editorial to the latest issue of Poetry Review (published by the Poetry Society). The writer Iain Sinclair appeared on the Radio 4 programme Today to discuss the work of J H Prynne [poem here] and Philip Larkin.

Sinclair... questioned whether such comparisons - Larkin v Prynne - served any purpose beyond a journalistic desire to polarise every issue into a two-party fight. He said "you might as well compare nougat to electricity". The phrase is a good one; neither is fairly judged on the other's terms. Poetry can be very simple, very direct, and memorably rhetorical; it can also be properly difficult, in the senses of complex, intricate, uncoercive, abundant. To pretend it has to be one or the other is to fall into the increasingly unproductive adversarial approach of journalism, with its need for swift reductive judgements and the macho frisson of combat and domination. Poetry, above all the arts, should be beyond that.

Hear hear - but why limit it to poetry? Why can't we have more journalistic recognition of complexity?

(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)

Hugh Masekela

I recently bought a CD by the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela - grrr . It isn't new - the sleeve notes are clearly from a vinyl LP and refer to both Stereo and Mono versions. It is however vibrant and fresh and a great reminder of the musical talent in South Africa which never saw the light of day because of apartheid. Miriam Mkeba and a few others made it, but who outside of South Africa knows about Dolly Rathebe these days? See also here for photos from the 50s and 60s of the apartheid era (including Dolly Rathebe).

(Originally posted on Panchromatica Too)

A moral alternative to the street

Back at the beginning of May this item appeared on the Neighbourhoods blog.

Round about the same time I found this on Rebecca Blood's blog.

By the time I got to Bedford Hills, I had listened to more than six hundred people, some of them over the course of two or three years. Although my method is that of the bricoleur, the tinkerer who assembles a thesis of the bric-a-brac he finds in the world, I did not think there would be any more surprises. But I had not counted on what Viniece Walker was to say. [...]
It was she who responded to my sudden question, "Why do you think people are poor?" [...]
"You got to begin with the children," she said, speaking rapidly, clipping out the street sounds as they came into her speech.
She paused long enough to let the change of direction take effect, then resumed the rapid, rhythmless speech. "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown."
I smiled at her, misunderstanding, thinking I was indulging her. "And then they won't be poor anymore?"
She read every nuance of my response, and answered angrily, "And they won't be poor no more."
"What you mean is--"
"What I mean is what I said--a moral alternative to the street."

The full report of this project is both stimulating and touching - and probably inconceivable in teh UK. Can you image the reaction to a funding submission for a project which had this in a lesson plan?

MEETING VII
Kant and the Categorical Imperative: the search for a principle of duty binding on all rational beings.
All people can know what is right, no matter what their condition of life.
Reading assignment: Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals p. 9 to the middle of 13, and p. 16 through the middle of 21.

or this from the Literature strand

SESSION 5: Tuesday, April 9
Nature as a Diving Board (Paper 2 due)
William Wordsworth-- “The World Is Too Much With Us”
Denise Levertov-- “O Taste and See”
Walt Whitman-- “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” “The Soul Reaching”
Gerard Manley Hopkins-- “God’s Grandeur”
William Carlos Williams-- “Spring and All”
Emily Dickinson-- “To make a prairie,” “Volcanoes be in Sicily”
William Blake-- “The Clod and the Pebble”
Introduction to A Doll’s House

Remember this is being taught to people with no qualification other than being able to read a tabloid newspaper. Assuming this approach works (which appears to be the case) doesn't it put a very different gloss on our obsession with vocational training? Does getting an NVQ level 2 in Customer Service - however desirable or useful that may be - help you to think; to be a citizen?

The full syllabus for this course is here

Home and other zones

The idea of home zones (or Woonerf) is at last beginning to gain a foothold in the UK. This however is a report of a visit to locations in Holland and North Germany where these ideas are being extended and applied in much wider ways. It looks like we still have much to learn. (Registration - free - needed)