Thinking It Over and Over

Things are likely to be a little quiet around these parts for a while as an onerous work load (oh poor old me) takes its toll. I will at some point pop up in various places writing on topics as varied as the return of James Wines to the architectural consciousness, the geography of heavy metal and why suburbia isn't funny anymore, but for the moment all I can do is point you in the direction of some good writing elsewhere.

Entschwindet und Vergeht is superb as usual on the uses and abuses of the Crystal Palace and yer Owen Hatherley is terrific on the joys of dancing to the digital angles of electroclash. Also, check out his link to an intriguing and (to me) unknown lost monument in the excellently titled Iron, Glass and Failure post.

Slightly redundantly I will echo Murphy's endorsement of the Sesquipedalist's excellent series of photo's of the ruins of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia's St Peter's Seminary. Mockitecture has a convincingly Venturian post on decorated Brutalism, as well as a fine collection of photos of Burger King's Whopper from around the world. And I've been enjoying this site a lot recently. It slightly does my head in visually, but has a fabulous collection of interior photos ranging from Sol Le Witt's house to a collection of empty and desolately beautiful nightclub interiors, all velvet seats covered in cigarette burns and scuffed dancefloors.

The AOC have another new blog site for their latest teaching outpost, this year looking at the Thames Valley. I'll be spending a lot of time in the wilds of Kent myself, as the expansion of Lydd Airport into the otherwise silent marshes of Rainham is the setting for a project I'll be teaching at Canterbury architecture school this semester. In this - if not in all other senses - I'm not as glamorous as my colleague, who is teaching an Intermediate Unit at the AA this year entitled the Pop Vernacular Research Laboratory.

Also, when FAT make their much heralded return to Yale in the New Year, we will be bringing our students over to see the lovely East Kent coast (lucky them) where we will go on a booze cruise, draw sections through cross channel ferries, attempt to dissect the various dubious notions of Britishness bound up around the place and generally roll in the clover on the White Cliffs of Dover.

The photo at the top of this post shows the extraordinary infrastucture of Dover. Note the road into the harbour, which descends past Dover Castle before sweeping you over the edge of the cliff, around the town and down in a loop onto the bleak concrete forecourt of the terminal itself.

From there you can drive onto a boat full of nutters playing fruit machines on their way to France to buy inordinate quantities of cheap booze. Trundling the other way is an ever increasing number of container lorries full of washing machines, clothes and children's toys. Countless B&B's cater for asylum seekers and their tabloid mirror image, illegal immigrants. The town is a locus for national pride and - sorry to say - a bit of a shit hole. This is, in some senses, England.

Incidentally, while researching Dover I came across this.

(Image at the top of the post is via)

Suburban Frontyards International

Not the title of my forthcoming album - although if I had one it probably would be - but a fabulous flickr set. I'm particularly taken with the deadpan joys of this one.

In the absence of original post material here are some other links:

Zone Styx Travelcaard, an excellent new (mainly) music blog that I initially thought might be this man, although I've now been reliably informed is not. Good recent posts on old faves Swans and a kind of continuing conversation with Kpunk on nostalgia. I'm planning a future post (sic) that takes some of the same themes but in an architectural direction...nothing to do with grainy jpegs on blogs and everything to do with the wholly pejorative use of the term within architectural debate. It's always worth trying to pick apart something so regularly deployed as an insult.

Mammoth, a blog devoted to BIG urban, infrastructure and architectural issues.

The pithily titled Cosmopolitan Scum is shaping up well, even though he has a fairly caustic pop at the generally excellent Bad British Architecture.

Finally a sad fairwell to one of my favourites blogs. Emmy Hennings/Anwyn Crawford has not only stopped writing Aloof From Inspiration but expelled it out of the air shift and into deep space. Deleted the entire thing in other words, hence no link, as it ain't there no more. I shall miss it.

Six Trick Pony

These period films (dug up by A Daily Dose of Architecture) of the various stores that Site architects designed for the Best supermarket chain in the 1970's are fascinating. Fabulous incidental music too. (via Progressive Reactionary).

Baxter

I dunno, you nip off for a couple of days to, say, have a baby* and all manner of exciting things happen on the interweb!

First, and as if to rubbish my suggestion that he had packed up and gone home, The Impostume returns with several quite brilliant posts, the best of which is his glorious tribute to Abba. No mention of Hey Hey Helen, however, my favourite Abba break up song, particularly for its glam rock guitar, barrelling piano chorus line and the finely balanced morality of the line; "...the price you paid, to be a woman of today".

Some of this seems a response to a slew of posts at Simon Reynold's Blissblog, including this one on The Sweet.

A456 has this fascinating look at the problems of object classification when it comes to planes.

Mockitecture has a highly amusing series of comparisons between buildings and songs, my favourite of which is the collision of Peter Eisenman and Prince.

Lastly, there is a fascinating (if rather stilted) interview with the late great Charles Moore to be found down the left hand side bar at No2Self. I'm also loving Rob's AD covers, (following The Sesquipedalist's example) including the wonderful Post Modernism lift-off one linked to above (complete with perceptive Charles Moore review of Charles Jenck's Language of Post Modern Architecture -must be Charles Moore week, as he also gets twinned with Soul Train in Mockitecture's Arch/Music post) and an earlier and rather lovely Milton Keynes one.

I've learnt my lesson on billing future posts as they tend to be the ones that I never finish, but I will be up and posting properly soon........possibly.

* Yes, he (Baxter) has arrived! Many thanks for the kind words, especially from people I have never met (but now feel I should). I promise that's the last you'll hear about it. Very bad form to go on so.....I'm still a little delirious in case it isn't obvious.