local business

I have a review of a new book - Down Detour Road by Eric Cesal - in this month's RIBA Journal - you can read it here. Cesal's book is a good one and asks some very relevant questions about the role of the profession of architecture post the financial crisis. Some of the same issues - namely how architects ascribe value to what they do and bring their skills and knowledge to bear on a whole range of activities - are also touched on in Amanda Baillieu's blog at BD this week, which kindly links to a post I wrote some time ago about risk. 

Needless to say, I disagree with the conclusions of Amanda's post, if not with all of the ideas within it, mainly because I regard the government's Localism Bill, like their Big Society idea, as a benign sounding sop to cover up massive public spending cuts and free market ideology. But ideas of localism divorced from David Cameron and co., and the role of architects in socially engaged design, is interesting and perhaps worth exploring in more detail here. 

Some of my scepticism about localism is touched on in this excellent article by Alex Andrews at the New Left Project, which is otherwise concerned with more pressing political concerns.

The Bob and Denise Show

My review of the What We Learned: Architecture After Las Vegas symposium at Yale is viewable over at Icon Eye. Sadly, the intended accompanying interview didn't exactly materialise. I managed a brief chat (which I'll try to edit and post up here) with a clearly exhausted Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown after their marathon three day symposium, but I am no Jeremy Paxman. I'm not even a Terry Wogan come to that. Scott Brown was, as usual, highly articulate, while Bob Venturi was clearly ready for his lunch. And who can blame him, it was lunchtime for one thing, and for another there were really no more questions left to ask.....

....particularly as it came after an informative seminar - A few More Words - hosted by Jimmy Stamp, of Life Without Buildings fame, who managed to ask all the best questions. The whole thing was also filmed as part of Jimmy Venturi's marathon odyssey documenting his parent's work. I'm the one near the front staring glumly at Paul Rudolph's orange carpet in the picture at the top of the post. Sean Griffiths is sitting beside me wearing a suede bomber jacket and looking interested.

A couple of mildly pedantic points. My review didn't quite make clear that the exhibition running alongside the symposium was actually two separate shows; a Yale commissioned exhibition of the work of VSBA, and Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, curated by symposium speaker Martino Stierli along with Hilar Stadler.

I would also have liked to have had space to mention Kurt W Forster, whose brief summing up at the symposium was hilarious and seemed to concern itself mainly with Otto Wagner's glass bath tub, of which, possibly, more later...

Out Now

A couple of self-important plugs for some things printed elsewhere, neither of which are available on line. I have some drawings (one of which is above) in the current issue of Icon responding to the recent ban on minarets in Switzerland. I won't say too much about them as they're fairly self-explanatory, I think, although it's worth stating that any aspects of the image above which resort to using tired national stereotypes is obviously intentional. I will also have a review of the recent Learning from Las Vegas symposium appearing in Icon, hopefully in the upcoming issue.

I have a short essay in the current issue of Architectural Review (now, like the AJ, minus Kieran Long as editor despite the fact that he improved both magazines enormously). It's about TV and suburbia and is really a more focused version of this post from a while back. It's a bit chopped around to be honest and the printed version is minus some (perhaps rather dubious) speculations on what a future suburbia might look like. Anyway, I promise to stop going on about Reginald Perrin now.

Dependency Culture

Here, for anyone who missed it in Icon, is my review of Jeremy Till's book Architecture Depends.

Jeremy Till has a neat spatial metaphor for the aloofness of architects from society. The School of Architecture at Sheffield University (where Till was until recently Dean) is located in the Arts Tower, a twenty-storey block that sits on a hill overlooking the city. The tower uses a paternoster lift where open compartments move up and down in a continuous non-stop loop. Jeremy Till suggests that architecture is like the occupants of this building: removed from the life of the city in an ivory tower, constantly moving but going nowhere.

I read this section of Architecture Depends whilst on a train to Sheffield to give a lecture in the Arts Tower. This is the kind of bizarre coincidental relationship between theory and the everyday that I imagine Jeremy Till would enjoy. His book contains a number of similar anecdotal stories that run like a parallel narrative alongside the main more academic text. These stories - frequently amusing and often self-deprecating - highlight the discrepancy between architecture conceived as a perfect, timeless object by architects, and architecture as part of the messy reality of our lives as experienced by everyone else.

This is Till's central thesis: that architecture constantly resists its own dependency on the outside world. Buildings have lives beyond their designer’s control. Not only are they formed out of a mess of compromises (despite the supposedly clarity of the RIBA Plan of Work) but they are also subject to constant change once built.

They get lived in, added to, refurbished, neglected and sometimes demolished. Their official function - office, house, museum - is disturbed by an infinite number of smaller unofficial ones. People write on them, fall in love in them, break up outside them and ignore them. Till contends that architectural theory actively resists these contingencies, preferring to believe in various versions of the autonomy of architecture and the architect instead.

My only criticism of this well written and entertaining book is that in order to discredit the figure of the autonomous architect, Jeremy Till has to make us believe in him in the first place. Much of the book is taken up with the construction of this straw man. Fragments of architectural theory from figures as diverse as Vitruvius, Le Corbusier, Ruskin and Sigfried Gideon are lifted out of history and corralled into this enterprise.

Yet I suspect these architectural myths are considerably less stable than Till allows. In a sense he is (over) stating a truism. The Barcelona Pavilion may have been conceived as having little to do with the everyday but that doesn't stop it from being rained on. Buildings simply ARE part of the everyday whether architects like it or not. The question then becomes how different are they when this fact is foregrounded in the design process?

The one concrete (well, straw) example Till offers here is ironically enough his own house. The self commissioned private house is one where the architect has the greatest control and autonomy. The radical qualities of his own design - the straw bale construction and 'messy' planning for instance - depend on exactly the kind of precise formal control that he admonishes architects for craving. If this is the everyday, then it is a highly refined version. If this is mess then it is artful dishevelment.

A meta theory of the everyday is an inherently risky business. In some ways it attempts to wrestle control back from all that contingency. So whilst this book hits most of its targets and successfully satirises the self-image of the architect, Architecture Depends depends itself on a model of architecture that is to a large extent wishful thinking.

A Narcissist Writes...

Original posts are in short supply here at the moment due to ongoing issues of being massively exhausted most of the time. A combination of work and a baby being to blame, not that I'm one to complain.....

However I have been busy elsewhere. My review of Jeremy Till's new book is in the current issue of Icon. I'll post it up here if it doesn't make it on to the Icon Eye website. I tried to avoid reading other reviews of Jeremy's book until I had written mine although I did listen to AJ editor Kieran Long discussing it on Radio 4. I have though just read The Sesquipedalist's excellent review, and there is a lot of overlap with my own (hopefully not the only reason I rate his review)

One of the things that Steve goes into that I didn't is Jeremy Till's role as an academic. Till initiated some very interesting things in his former role as Director of Architecture at Sheffield, including an attempt to abandon the ridiculous crit structure of teaching. I've thought for a while that architectural education is stuck in various ruts, although conversation around this seems to flit between either professional tutors who have a vested interest in it remaining the same, and blinkered professionals who regard all intellectual speculation as pretentious. Nonetheless Architecture Depends does clearly emanate from academia where myths of the architect's omnipotence flourish as a result of the unit system and its mini-starchitect structure.

Also in this month's Icon is my post on ice cream vans which has been published as their Icon of the Month. It looks lovely, much nicer than it does on-line. Thanks are due to Kosmograd and to Murphy at Entschwindet und Vergeht for their helpful comments on the post at the time, which have informed the slightly expanded version of it in Icon.

Finally, a reminder to any Manchester based people that I'll be giving a lecture as part of this tomorrow night. No support band I'm afraid but I will do encores. It starts at 6pm, and it's here: Room 303 Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Metropolitan University, Chatham Building, Cavendish Street, Manchester.

That'll be the justification for the gratuitous Smiths picture too, although it's meant to be self-deprecating given that this post is written by me about some other things I've written. Or going to say. And sorry people of Manchester if using The Smiths is like making gor blimey guvnor jokes about London.

The House Of The Past

Just what is it that makes yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? Over 30 million people visit stately homes annually in the UK. The National Trust has grown to 3.5 million members in recent years, making it by far the biggest conservation group in Europe. Countless period dramas further sate our seemingly endless appetite for gazing at the sumptuous interiors of historic homes. Clive Aslet’s book The English House is very much a part of this nostalgia industry.

The English House is a pretty loaded title for a start. It suggests something innately distinctive and valuable in both England and its houses. Immediately it puts us in the realm of a highly mythologised Englishness where country estates and the families that own them are seen as an organic part of our heritage.

Aslet is the former editor of Country Life a magazine so this should be no surprise. Country Life occupies a very particular place in British culture as the in-house journal for the land-owning classes. It’s the place to look if you are planning to purchase a few acres outside Cheltenham, or want to announce the forthcoming marriage of your daughter, accompanied by a picture of her fondling a horse. Only the former editor of Country Life for example could describe Milton Keynes as “occupying 22,000 acres of formerly good hunting country". As a sentence it’s hard to top for sheer beside-the-point snobbism.

From this lofty vantage point the author uses a gently novelistic style to tell the stories of a number of individual houses in the manner of an invigorating country ramble. He begins in the 12th Century with a Norman Manor and strides on, flat cap on and walking stick in hand, past a Tudor mansion, a castle by Vanbrugh, a Georgian townhouse, a worker's terrace in an industrial mill town, Edwin Lutyen's Marshcourt, an early 20th century semi and a post war pre-fab.

It sounds on the face of it a plausibly eclectic selection. But there are just two entries from the 20th Century: the suburban semi is from 1905 and the pre-fab is a curiosity within the wider scheme of things. There is a gaping hole in this book and it is modernism. Its high points are mentioned only in passing, almost as an aberrant phase when England became temporarily influenced by obscure continental notions. Aslet dismisses a vast swathe of the history of houses, as they don't fit into his quaint geneology of "Englishness". It's a shame because I would like to see one of the book's delightful pencil sketches depicting a nice bit of Brutalism.

"Little about the English House was colourful in the 1950's, ‘60's and ‘70's" Aslet declares, sweepingly. It is Thatcherism that, according to him, brings the colour back to England's cheeks. The percentage of home ownership in the UK went from 54% to 65% during the 1980's as a direct result of Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy policy. Aslet suggests that this policy together with our obsession with home ownership is the logical end point of the English love of houses.

The English House is more an example of this obsession than an analysis of it. The final chapter is entitled Whatever Next?, a phrase epitomising a very English penchant for mocking innovation. Nothing in this book is allowed to be in the least bit disagreeable. Instead, the author remains in thrall to a self-perpetuating myth of loveable English eccentrics and their charming houses. This amiable conservatism hides an ideologically driven fear of change though. In that sense, the books startling lack of interest in the architecture of the last century is entirely consistent. It is a lament for a lost England.

Museums of the World – No 1 In An Occasional Series

The Cuban Museum of the Revolution weaves its way in and around the former Presidential Palace in downtown Havana. It is a curious mixture of hectoring monument and modest local museum. The exhibits are a little forlorn: slightly dog eared wax works, patchy Hornby style models illustrating strategic military campaigns, curling photographs, assorted memorabilia.

Every conceivable detail of the revolutionary struggle (Che Guevara’s pyjamas, avacado production statistics from 1976) is included almost without discrimination, certainly without regard for entertainment value. The text is bracingly partisan and inscrutably detailed. All of it is contained in utilitarian vitrines within the beaux arts interiors of the palace which, ironically, dominates the exhibit it houses.

The friendship between Che Guevara and Fidel Castro is sentimentally told and retold throughout the museum, the bonhomie and mutual respect built up to saccharine proportions. The two are endlessly photographed embracing, sharing a joke on the ramparts, leaning over battle strategy diagrams, chomping cigars.

Outside the palace a 1960’s honeycomb structure shelters various revolutionary vehicles: an armoured car made from agricultural equipment, the fuselage of a US U2 plane shot down (allegedly by Castro himself of course) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Inside a glass box at the centre of the pavilion is Granma, the famous boat in which Fidel and 100 others travelled from Mexico to Cuba to kickstart the revolution in 1956.

I love museums. The more down at heel the better too. I've no time for sophisticated animatronics or interactive screens. I prefer musty exhibits mouldering under glass. The Museum of the Revolution’s incomprehensible diagrams of long forgotten battles and modest mementos have an eerie poignancy. In its own indifference to entertainment and its belligerant self-belief it is an exhibit in itself.

Talking Mies

Russel Fernandez very kindly sent me this. It's a collection of conversations with Mies van der Rohe dating from the late '50's to the mid '60's - i.e. his well established American years. Mies (as I feel obliged to call him) is in predictably opaque form on the whole. His answers have a stately, elegant emptiness and a refusal to be drawn on straightforward issues. There is a gathering cloud over some of his comments as he seems to detect the decline of his influence and the coming of more extravagant and expressionist buildings, but mostly he takes a fairly lofty disinterest in issues such as legacy or influence.

I was surprised by one of his answers though. This suggested that Mies' architectural approach was formed somewhat abstractly, through theory and through reading. "My architectural philosophy came out of reading philosophical books" he states at one point, contradicting much of what I thought I knew about Mies, which is that he learned architecture as a primarily practical art from his father, who was a stonemason (or so the myth goes) and that he had little time for theory.

Perhaps I was wrong - or at least a little ignorant - but Mies' architecture has aways seemed to shun words, bringing out a kind of awed silence in critics and onlookers, encouraged by Mies himself who also said: "I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good". Goodness, or quality perhaps, is assumed here to be something that eludes verbal description. Interest is equated with novelty and the superficial interest of the eye-catching rather than the deep structure of the profound. To silence one's critics is normally to trump their mere words with innefable art. But Mies admits that words proceeded, even defined, his structures.

Mies' interest in theory proceeding design seems extremely unfashionable today when architecture has put its faith in flamboyant self expression and personal signature. Mies allows that actually building buildings might have tested his theories, maybe extended them, but certainly not disproved them. It also contradicts his own teaching methods which focused rigorously on technique and technical skill and very little, if at all, on theory.

When I studied architecture in the early 1990's Mies was still - just about - held in speechless awe. Now, no one seems to talk about him at all. His work once spawned a thousand imitators but now seems impossible to replicate and the emphatic clarity of his towers has become literally unfashionable. A home grown piece of Mies on London's Pentonville Road has recently been re-clad by architects AHMM (you can see it literally being covered over here). It was always one of my favourites because it was such a perfect homage, so contentedly unoriginal. AHMM's scheme is like a cover version but with the same backing track, replacing Mies' grave voice with an altogether jollier one. Perhaps the distant rumble of theory still echoes from the structure though.

Crisis? What crisis?

The latest, sixth, volume of architecture ‘boogazine’ Verb begins with a familiar kind of declaration: “Faced with unprecedented political, social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges Verb Crisis recognises that architecture cannot carry on as usual.”

It’s easy to affect a jaded cynicism when faced with this kind of rhetoric. After all, haven’t we always been faced with unprecedented challenges? When did anyone ever say: “Don’t worry, the world’s fine as it is, lets all go back to bed.” But Verb backs its claim up, eschewing the usual suspects and focusing instead on some genuinely thoughtful and provocative work.

The book is divided into three fairly self-explanatory sections: Places, Positions and Projects. It focuses on a few key cities: Dubai, Madrid, Detroit and Tijuana. Detroit in particular is fascinating and represents the diametrically opposite problem to that of Dubai. Instead of relentlessly spiralling levels of development there is depopulation and an emptying out of the city. New York based architects Interboro Partner’s contribution not only documents this process but finds, hidden below the surface, a new kind of development occurring there.

They describe the process of what they call ‘blots’, newly vacant plots of land where the houses have been knocked down. These blots have then been absorbed (mostly through legitimate purchases) into neighbouring properties, becoming home to garden overspill, additional parking, recreation areas and, in some cases, complex architectural extensions. As the city empties little bits of ad-hoc DIY urbanism grow back between the cracks. As Interboro say, this is important “however unspectacular”. Theirs is not strictly a proposal, more a process of observing and, to borrow a phrase, learning from what is going on.

This combination of empirical research and actually looking at the city to see what it is like - as opposed to wishing it was something else – is a strong theme in all the work included. There is a valuable sense here of architects actually engaging with the processes by which cities develop, and with the needs of their inhabitants. A healthy criticism of some of the more banal thinking within the profession comes across in most of the contributions.

Geographer and architect John May describes the Staten Island landfill site of Fresh Kills, recently the subject of a high profile architectural competition to turn it’s vast and festering piles of trash into a new park. May raises pertinent and uncomfortable questions about architecture’s complicity in such boosterism, and its role in supplying the glossy images to go along such venal developments. He also exposes the hollow posturing of the profession, the endless posing as ‘radical’ or ‘cutting edge’ by an architectural avant-garde long since removed from any sense of social purpose.

The most impressive project included is perhaps also the most modest. Elemental Architecture’s social housing scheme in Chile allows residents to expand and adapt their homes over time. This approach allows more homes to be included simply by building less of each one and letting the residents fill in the gaps when they can afford to do so. The photographs of this project show the spaces filling up with lean to’s, diy bay windows and bolted on extensions. It reminded me of Le Corbusier’s housing scheme at Pessac after the residents had added window boxes and pitched roofs, except here the adaptations are a deliberate and positive part of the story.

Verb Crisis is deliberately un-glossy. It comes in a brown plastic wipe clean cover, like a welding manual. It is simply and straightforwardly laid out. But, if you ever wondered whether there were any architects left with any sense of critical or social engagement, or an interest in the wider political and economic realities of their practice then Verb is worth a look.

History Today

Book review: Intelligence Made Visible, by Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran

“…Certainties about standards of taste…(have) in recent times disappeared altogether” write the authors of this updated A-Z of design. Well, it doesn’t seem to have affected them much. Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran remain certain of their own standards of taste throughout, even if they are a little baffled by society’s unwillingness to toe the line.

Throughout this book what comes across most is the authors’ fear of design without rules, of there being no accepted standards and no official canon of good design. Digital culture and the sprawling landscape of contemporary consumerism promote a deep unease about how to quantify and qualify what is going on. Not only that, but as much contemporary design no longer conforms to the authors’ ideology of mainstream modernism, they see the situation in slightly apocalyptic terms. “Ugly, inefficient, depressing chaos” starts one chapter. “Taste” they write, “is directed not by Domus or the Architectural Review…but by what comes down the broadband connection.” Indeed, a paranoid fear of bad design, or possibly bad taste, lurks in all their pronouncements.

On the one hand this is a perfectly straightforward book. It lists designs and designers in alphabetical order. There are few surprises. The notion of design here is basically high modernism and so the cover blurb of this being “an indispensable guide to the contents of the modern world” is predictably misleading. An indispensable guide to the contents of the Design Museum would be more accurate. You certainly won’t find much new in it. There is very little on popular culture, fashion, graphics, or the kind of everyday objects that slip through the net of design conneursureship. There are no entries on current design with the exceptions of Jonathon Ive and Thomas Hetherwick, although Studio Job, Tord Boontje and Droog are mentioned briefly, and negatively, in passing. So, the plot line on modern design trotted out here is a very familiar one.

But there is a more interesting and entertaining sub-text which is the author’s relationship to the evolving design world around them. Inevitably, with two such big personalities writing what is meant to be a general guide, their adopted mask of objectivity constantly slips. The Arts and Crafts for example get a terrific mauling for their presumed culpability in the UK’s obsession with the past and with what the authors call the ‘Cotswold effect’. Fair enough, you might say, except that ridiculing our desire for the county lifestyle would be more reasonable if Sir Terence’s own historic country pile were not so well published. Somewhat randomly, some designers - such as C.R. Ashbee and Philipe Starck - are ridiculed while other equally preposterous characters such as Carlo Mollino or Joe Columbo are treated reverentially. In fact the entry on Mollino is one of the best and written with unalloyed enthusiasm for an idiosyncractic character.

Ultimately, despite all their protestations to the contrary and their stated desire for objective truth in design, this book conforms entirely to the taste of its authors. It is far more about them than it is about design. So, the two appear pictured at the beginning and end of the book, somewhat gratuitously enjoying a nice glass of wine together. They even write a short biography of each other, although, oddly, while Stephen Bayley’s tribute is generous in its praise, Sir Terence’s reads like a less than glowing reference. Indeed, there is a slight underlying sense that they might not have wanted to write this book together,

The tone of the book they have written is nostalgic, slightly mournful, occasionally a little bitter. It mourns the passing of the simplicities of an earlier era, or perhaps, the simplicities of youth. Things have changed, say the authors, and definitely for the worse. Where design used (apparently) to be about simplifying the world it is now about making it more complicated. Where it was once straight it is now perverse. Where there were once solutions now there are more questions. The fact that it never was simple is not the point. Design, like nostalgia, is just not what it used to be.

Nothing Left to Loos

Book Review: Adolf Loos; Buildings and Projects

Adolf Loos occupies a strange place in the history of modern architecture. Hugely influential as a writer, his sloganeering essays were often seen as far more radical than his architecture. The didactic rejection of ornament and historicism in his writing was far easier to assimilate than the curious mix of modern and traditional forms he used in his buildings. Today though, it is precisely this ambiguous relationship to Modernity that makes his work so compelling.

Loos’ designs are tense with contradictions: between bourgeois comfort and avant-garde radicalism, between luxurious interiors and austere exteriors, between symmetry and asymmetry, between traditional rooms and unfolding interconnected spaces and between structural coherency and spatial dissolution. The rigid cubic forms of his houses were like vitrines in which disembodied fragments of traditional domestic architecture - fireplaces, inglenooks, wood panelled dining rooms and marble clad hallways - were re-combined into strange new configurations. These elements were organised like free floating signifiers along tortuous manipulations of circulation and vista so that his houses became elegant commentaries upon, or representations of, domestic family life. None of this though fitted particularly well with Modernism’s tabula rasa approach and Loos’s designs remained comparatively under published,

This new book by Ralf Bock goes a long way to correcting that. It is something of a labour of love, begun as a project to photograph the surviving works of Loos and developing into a documentation of everything he ever built. For that reason it doesn’t feature some of his most interesting but un-built work such as the bizarre Chicago Tribune Tower proposal, or the designs he made when Chief Architect in the Housing Department in Vienna, although the author makes a single exception to the rule by including the fabulously suggestive but speculative house Loos designed for Josephine Baker. What it does do is to beautifully illustrate the work that he did complete.

It begins with a series of essays covering Loos’ work and life and then goes on to feature each design in some detail, using historical and wherever possible new photography by Philippe Ruault. Some of the projects have never to my knowledge been photographed before. It also contains new photographs of buildings that have been impossible to access for many years, including the exquisite Villa Moller, previously only known through a handful of black and white images, Here, ironically, it looks staggeringly contemporary.

The research on each project is painstakingly thorough and includes biographies of Loos’ clients as well as newly drawn plans, sections and elevations. These drawings cleverly highlight the plan’s innate complexity, indicating routes and vistas as well as Loos’ use of mirrors. These are often strategically placed to both aid the scopic control of the owner and to add spatial ambiguity. For instance, the writing desk in the study of the Rufer House is placed over a tiny internal window that looks over the entrance stair to a mirror reflecting the front door. Similarly, the stair in the Knize tailors shop in Vienna has a mirror placed on the half landing, making where you are heading to appear to be where you have just come from. Such games in spatial ambiguity seem to radically forsee the work of artists such as Dan Graham and find a contemporary echo in the use of video screens and CCTV by architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Diller and Scofidio.

It is often said that Loos’ work was essentially un-photogenic but the old photographs included here have a luminous, almost liquid quality. Light bounces off polished cherry wood, cipolin marble, brass and mirrored surfaces and filters mysteriously through translucent glass and opaque curtains. The traditional nature of these materials meant that Loos’ work was seen as a less radical proposition than that of Le Corbusier or Mies. But Loos arguably did something much more radical than either. He confronted the contradictory impulse of the 20th century: the fact that we could desire to be radically modern and remain deeply tied to the past. Loos’ houses avoided both a sentimental reproduction of history and an uncritical search for the new and instead explored a tense negotiation between the two.

This book is a worthy tribute to that achievement. It also shows how very beautiful his work could be.

Kylie - The Exhibition

I’ve always found the debate over high and low culture slightly stale and irrelevant. Contrived stand offs between Bob Dylan and Beethoven bore the pants off me. Besides, I’ve swallowed enough post structuralist critiques of elitist hierarchies of value to know that popular culture is a valid subject for intellectual reflection. Plus, Put Yourself In My Place is, like, one of my favourite songs ever. So the debate about whether the V&A should put on a show about Kylie Minogue struck me at first as a non-issue, pandering to the worst kind of lazy middlebrow snobbery. Then I went to the exhibition...

Kylie: The Exhibition consists of a display of stage outfits and costumes, ranging from the mechanic’s overalls she wore in Neighbours to the bizarre Dolce and Gabbana designs of her current Showgirl Homecoming tour. Alongside these are displayed Kylie’s record covers, tour artefacts, videos, a re-creation of her dressing room and a vending machine of Kylie endorsed mineral water.

Aside from a number of text panels, there’s little commentary or interpretation and the objects are displayed in a flatly literal manner. Such labelling as there is makes a pretty lame and unconvincing case for why Kylie Minogue’s costumes should be in the V&A in the first place. Words like ‘icon’ and ‘phenomenon’ are bandied about but these terms are now so lazily over deployed as to be almost meaningless and their use here seems particularly half-hearted and pointless. The costs and logistics of putting on Kylie’s tours are listed but not contrasted with anything that might make them make more interesting or compelling or anything other than blandly impressive. Her dressing room is re-created but not to make a point, just to fill up some space. The labelling for this reaches a zenith of banality. It is, we are told; “…very special, a home away from home”. Even better than this is the information that: “..road cases are the best way to transport her extensive wardrobe”. Gosh.

The exhibition has been bought in from Australia where it was originally shown at The Arts Centre, Melbourne. It comes across as shallow hagiography without even the spitefulness of heat!, or the inadvertent vileness of Hello. It is, rather, the authorised biography.
Like her latest persona, Kylie: The Exhibition has a camp “Darling! You look fabulous” quality. This is only heightened by the cod surrealism of her Showgirls tour and her recent entry into the tragic diva hall of fame by becoming officially A Survivor. But the show achieves Susan Sontag’s definition of campness as an attempt at seriousness that fails. It wants to be culturally relevant and daringly iconoclastic, but lacks the courage or savvy to know how. It is also shamelessly sycophantic and utterly without critical reflection.

This is not about pop culture’s place in the museum. The V&A is full of pop culture already after all, and has a distinguished history of putting on exhibitions about costume and design. I didn’t dislike this show because I thought it too lowbrow, or too commercial or too vulgar. I disliked it because it was dull and po-faced and vaguely moronic. There is a thoroughly bathetic moment at the end when as you leave, you find yourself inadvertently wandering into the Medieval rooms of the V&A. From Kylie’s gold hotpants to Trajan’s column in a few steps. It’s not a flattering comparison.

Just before leaving, there is one more tribute to Kylie: a wall on which you can stick little heart shaped personal tributes. Thus in a faintly sinister way, you’re not even allowed express anything but love for Kylie. Alongside sycophantic quotes from the likes of Manolo Blahnik, Peter Huntley of the V&A has given us the benefit of his insight: “Kylie’s fun to sing along to.” Thanks Peter.

Sleeve Notes To An Imaginary Album

Note: I wrote this some time ago, but forgot about it. It's a review of St. Etienne's screening of their film Finisterre at the Barbican back in 2004. Tacked on the end is a short interview with Bob Stanley from St. Etienne, who was a very nice man.


“Took a tube to Camden Town,
Walked down Parkway, and settled down
In the shade of a willow tree,
Summer hovering over me.”

St. Etienne, London Belongs To Me

Film 1:

A Tweed suited gentleman prods his walking stick into the crumbling plasterwork of a dilapidated old music hall. On closer inspection the gentleman turns out to be James Mason. He proceeds to wander around a drab and surprisingly distant late 1960's London, uncovering bits of soon to be lost Victoriana, decaying slums and shocking dietary habits; the flip-side to the Swinging ‘60’s of popular mythology.

Film 2:

A plummy voiced chap incongruously recounts the joys of all-night clubbing and the pleasures of finding obscure white labels in back street record shops. A series of disembodied voices talk over an image-track of poignantly framed London scenery. Over it all, floats the music of St. Etienne - 60's girl-group harmonies, 80's synths, 90's house, out-of-time folk.

These two films were recently shown together at the Barbican. The first - Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows – depicted a disappearing1960’s London of slums and salvation army hostels and has itself, over the years, become a historical curiosity. The second - Finisterre - is a kind of extended album-long video by the pop band St. Etienne with directors Paul Kelly and Keiran Evans. If The London Nobody Knows is an archaeological fragment in itself, then Finisterre aims for a similar kind of archaeology of the present. It poignantly captures contemporary London Life as it is being lived, and is, like The London Nobody Knows, conscious of it’s desire to record things on the verge of obsolescence. A bit like a hip English Heritage. The Thameslink train, for instance, that crawls into a South London station at the beginning of the film and crawls out again at the end already seems an anachronism although I travelled on one only yesterday.

Finisterre’s journey - Victoria Station, Old Street, Primrose Hill, Soho - describes a day in the life. It shows London as a backdrop, constantly transformed and re-made by experience This, In a way, is what pop music does; celebrates escape from the ordinary and lends poignancy to the everyday. St. Etienne's music in particular can perhaps best be described as a mixture of the glamorous and the commonplace. Or, put another way, it moves between the generic and the intensely personal. Their songs take music that we have almost forgotten about – old bits of house music, English folk – and re-invest them with value. the lyrics also re-invent familiar places with intense personal narratives and invest ordinary areas with a kind of poignancy that Archway or Camden rarely attain.

Like the protagonists in the song London Belongs To Me finding something beautiful about an afternoon in Camden Town, this flitting between the apparent drabness of urban existence and its occasional epiphanies might have something to say about how we currently view urban space. It might also suggest ways we might conceive it counter to both the nihilistic doom-mongers and the sentimental piazza-lovers that dominate urban thinking today. Both lament a perceived loss of a sense of civic-ness and identity in the face of corporate, global space. Marc Auge's book Non-Place and Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junk-Space’ offer a similar analysis of our contemporary experiences as increasingly that of a homogenised flattened-out culture. This dystopian view might be usefully challenged though by pop music's belief that we continuously re-make the world around us. Although, it's true, our bodies can only inhabit one space at any time, our heads might be in any number of places. In this sense nowhere is really non-space because we inhabit a number of spaces simultaneously: social, cultural, economic, political. To put it another way, no space is inhabited neutrally and no space is the same for two people. It's different to be in DKNY rich than without money, to be in Trafalgar Square holding a banner or on an open-top bus. Equally, to be in love and on that bus is to be somewhere else again.

What both these films suggest is that urbanism is as much about how we look at it as it is about plans and strategic frameworks. Not only that but it is in how we 'read' the city and in the way that we identify with it, that we now regenerate whole areas. The transformation of London's East End is, for better or worse, more an act of will, a triumph of desire and demographics, than anything physical or the product of any strategic planning. In fact, not a whole lot has changed there, just the way we look at it.

In The London Nobody Knows, James Mason describes a London literally disappearing below new plans, suggesting that these lives might simply end, and be replaced by more perfect ones. The brave new tower blocks that spring up at the start of the film have been torn down, blown up, sold for a pound, bought again for a million, re-clad and listed by English Heritage since then. By re-investigating this ‘60's oddity - as out of its time as The Kink's Village Green Preservation Society – St. Etienne attempt to show that the city is both more resistant to change than we think but, also, always ready to be re-made by us everyday.



A conversation with Bob Stanley of St. Etienne.


When did you decide to make a film and why?

The idea came about mid-way into recording the album Finisterre. We’ve always been fascinated by London since moving here in the late ‘80’s. Making the film seemed like a logical extension of that.

In your film you cover similar places to the Geoffrey Fletcher one. Is your film a conscious mirroring of the earlier one?

No. It was an influence but we filmed the places that we know ourselves. We were interested though in the way Geoffrey Fletcher uncovers these weird forgotten bits of London. It’s almost as though he records them just because they’re disappearing, not because they’re even that important.

It’s unusual for pop music to celebrate old things isn’t it? It’s normally associated with being radical and rebellious. In rock mythology, caring about eccentric old tea rooms isn’t very cool.

We’ve never been interested in that classic rock lineage. I mean, even if Exile on Main Street was my favourite album I wouldn’t want to talk about it. What can you say that’s new about it?

Is it a conscious part of your music, this idea of recording or evoking places that aren’t that glamorous like Kentish Town or Archway?

Yeah, although growing up in Surrey, London place names were glamorous for me. I’ve always been fascinated by London. And architecture. I studied town planning but gave it up to be a rock journalist.

Good decision! You said you are fascinated by New Towns, which is the flip-side of rotten old London. Why is that?

It’s the idea of a blank canvas, the thought that you could create a perfect community. The job I wanted most when I was 8 was to be the person who thought of all the road names.

Still Life

Review: Patrick Caulfied, Tate Liverpool.

I’m looking at the interior of a 1970’s style faux-rustic bistro. It is almost completely deserted. A single figure, a bored waiter, leans dejectedly on a piece of furniture, contemplating the abyss of the afternoon. The entire space - with the exception of a kitsch Alpine scene hanging on the wall and some oddly luminous goldfish – is blue. A flat, featureless, slightly depressing shade of blue.

The desperate languor of this, or indeed any, empty restaurant is perfectly observed. So too is every object within it: the bulbous handle of the fondue pan, the generous swirl of the waiter’s sideburns, the curving chrome grid of the modernist chairs. It is somehow humorous too, as perfectly descriptive of a certain mood of dull ennui as those shots of a photocopier endlessly churning out paper that used to punctuate The Office. This is After Lunch, perhaps Patrick Caulfield’s best known painting.

Patrick Caulfield, who died last year, was one of Britain’s most celebrated painters. His work provides a link back to the post-war period when British artists began responding to the emerging consumer landscape around them. His paintings are, broadly speaking, Pop Art, with a certain, mostly superficial, resemblance to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book style. They are characterised by the use of a kind of pseudo technical mannerism – the thick black outline – to depict interiors and objects with a mixture of both exactitude and lyricism. They have something of the look of an architect’s drawing or a technical diagram mixed with the colour sensibility of Tex Avery.

Caulfield’s work describes the everyday: pubs, Indian restaurants, offices, wallpaper, neon signs, beer glasses, clocks on the wall, cinema foyers: places and objects that are experienced normally in a ‘blur of habit’ and go unnoticed. Images like Morning, Noon, Evening and Night are so spare they could be utterly banal - like an Ikea assembly diagram or the dummest of architectural perspectives. But it’s an Ikea assembly diagram bathed in melancholic light or an architect’s drawing that has been subtly caricatured.

More recent pictures are less literal in their depiction of architectural space. A painting like Interior With A Picture for instance, is no longer based on a single, stable, perspective view. Various techniques - cubist and collage-ist – break up and fragment the traditional domestic interior. A painting on a wall (rendered in a super realist style), a bit of architectural moulding, a splash of light from an opened door, are all set within a dark painted field of shadow. The balustrade of a stair, more bulbous than real life, suggests some ubiquitous Victorian hallway. Crucially, Caulfield is not interested in making value judgements about the places and objects he depicts. They are simply part of the world we inhabit and therefore rich in associative but overlooked meaning. This kind of festishisation of the familiar and the everyday has of late become a popular part of design. Look at something like Habitat’s new Spindle lampstand and you can see Caulfield’s subtle exaggeration of the generic. Now that the playful evocation of kitsch and homely objects is acceptable (in design, if not in architecture), Caulfield’s technique suddenly seems rather prophetic.

Caulfield’s art has sometimes been dismissed as lightweight, chiefly I suspect because of its approachability. The depiction of familiar scenes and the use of an easily understood designer’s shorthand marks him out perhaps as not being ‘difficult’ enough. But this technique is used not just to depict objects in the way that a designer might, but to include emotional as well as technical content. And he subverts the authority of this mode by slipping into different styles, brief moments of painterly expressionism, perfectly coloured and detailed patterns and fragments of other paintings. By showing the world in subtly shifting and eliding codes (figurative, abstract, painterly, cartoon, technical) Caulfield shows us that nothing is ‘authentic’ and everything is in the eye of the beholder, even, and perhaps especially, the idea of unmediated experience. He also shows us that the most familiar objects and places can be made uncanny and remarkable all over again.

Goodnight Mr Bond

Review: The James Bond Films. Yes, all of them.

This is an attempt to write a review of every single James Bond film from memory. I was tempted to watch some of them again but thought that might be missing the point, such as it is. (N.B. Since writing this I have actually watched a number of them and was pleased/scared to find my plot descriptions were largely accurate. The one amendment I would make is that Moonraker is actually considerably worse than I remembered.)

Dr No

Based on one of the best books (not saying much admittedly) and, possibly, the only film to feature Sean Connery with his own hair. Set mostly in Jamaica, Bond spends a lot of time in a fetching terry towelling bathing gown/trunk combo. He also wears a trilby, although unfortunately not at the same time as the bathing gown/trunk combo. The book is casually racist about Jamaicans and the film features a terrible Uncle Tom caricature in Bond’s assistant Quarrel, only too happy to die for his honky master. Quarrel first appears in the books in the chronologically earlier Man With The Golden Gun, where his relationship with Bond is described as that between a Scottish Laird and his head gamekeeper. Which tells you most of what you need to know about Ian Fleming. More positively, Ursula Andress emerges from the sea with some shells. The ridiculous villain sets the tone for camp evil-ness that every subsequent film follows. He has no hands and channels a look somewhere between Chairman Mao and Joseph Stalin.

From Russia With Love

Widely regarded as the best Bond film ever, perhaps because it least resembles a Bond film and most resembles a quite good spy movie. Depending on where you stand this is either a) not really the point at all, or b) a blessed relief from the usual nonsense. Bond is sent to Istanbul (to the banks of The Bosphorous, as people invariably have it) to get hold of a Russian decoder machine type thing. This is obviously a trap and the bait is Russian KGB agent Tatiana Romanov. The scenes with her are oddly touching and smartly written with lots of double entendres and are by far the best bits of the film. There is also a strangely viscious protrayal of lesbianism in pointy toed villain Rosa Kleb who belongs in another, less plausible Bond film. .

There is an excellent unmasking of the villain by way of his ignorance of the correct wine to have with fish, and a fight with two gypsy girls. Which is nice. Bond sets the tone in this film for his habitual incompetence, constantly wandering into dangerous situations and getting everyone else shot. It ends with a slightly interminable boat/helicopter chase which most people prefer to forget when discussing the films merits. Other than that though, it’s really very good.

Goldfinger

Bond hits the Motherlode with Goldfinger - everyone’s favourite movie (except My Mother, who professes to hate this and every Bond film every made. For some reason though she particularly hates this one, claiming both to be heartily sick of it and to have never watched it all the way through). It’s got everything in it you could possibly want including the scene where Bond emerges from the water in a wet suit with a duck strapped to his head. There is some witty banter with Pussy Galore (mostly minus the homophobic undertow of Fleming’s book - she was raped by her brothers as a child and as a consequence ‘turns’ lesbian. One look at Bond’s schlong though and like any good lesbian she turns back, presumably only revisiting for the sake of male titillation). Be that as it may, it’s a great movie. Connery looks super cool throughout, although his coolness is slightly illusional. In a telling detail, when Bond is tracking Goldfinger across the Alps, he is torn between jeopardising the mission by haring off after a woman in a sports car, or continuing on his way. He decides not to give chase, muttering “Discipline, 007, discipline” to himself. As Antony Burgess has pointed out, Bond’s hedonism is second to his sense of duty, marking him out as a product of the ‘50’s not the ‘60’s. Equally tellingly he makes a joke about hating the Beatles in this film. For all his cool wardrobe and ‘60’s’ glamour, Bond is a deeply reactionary establishment character.

Thunderball

A bit crap this one involving endless very boring underwater scenes (always hated underwater scenes, except ones featuring Jacques Cousteau). Features Bond looking silly in a jet pack. (Note: never put James Bond in a crash helmet, he always looks a knob - see every Roger Moore film). Like most Bond films the early bits of Thunderball are the best when very little is happening plot-wise and Bond is spending most of his time trying to seduce the nurses at a health farm.

This was re-made as Never Say Never Again, to no great note, except for some funny jokes about Sean Connery’s age and Kim Basinger acting very badly. In a thoroughly bathetic moment a supposedly high octane duel to the death is played out between Sean and the baddie on one of those table top space invader games that used to be in the lounges of cross channel ferries.

You Only Live Twice

Another excellent film, much mocked (rightly, it has to be said) for Sean Connery’s rubbish attempt at impersonating a Japanese person. This is unintentionally funny, but the film is also rather good and has an excellent theme tune and genuine all round groovy ‘60’s-ness. It revolves around a totally ridiculous plot by Spectre to capture American and Russian spacecraft in a bid to pit the superpowers against each other. For reasons I can’t recall this is sponsored by the Japanese. There is a long section towards the end of the film when virtually nothing happens for about twenty minutes. Also, of some note are Bond being “killed” at the beginning of the film and Bond flying a mini helicopter and, again, looking silly in a crash helmet. The volcano rocket base is probably the best Ken Adam set as well. Blofeld appears for the first time in a film and turns out to be Donald Pleasance. The film is, incidentally, far better than the terrible book which has Blofeld growing poisonous plants on an island and wearing a suit of armour.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Much underrated. I actually quite like George Lazenby and the film is, like From Russia With Love, a plausible thriller. Diana Rigg is splendid as his short-lived wife Tracey. Telly Savalas plays Blofeld, and Louis Armstrong sings We Have All The Time In The World. It’s a bit darker in places than normal Bond films although Bond does blow his cover as an academic bore by sleeping with all the women. Good skiing scenes and some particularly unconvincing blue screening. The mountain scenes were filmed in the Swiss resort of Wengen, just next to the Eiger where I once went on a skiing holiday myself don’t you know.

Diamonds Are Forever

Connery is back. A little older, with bigger side burns, but back all the same. This is the Las Vegas one, also featuring THE MOON BUGGY. Tiffany Case, starts off as a cool, smart criminal and ends up a dim bikini clad floozy and the plot is unspeakably rubbish. Very good start but it really runs out of steam and the final scene set on an oil rig (for some reason) is really dull. The ‘amusing’ homophobic running ‘joke’ of the two gay hitmen is just about the only connection back to Ian Fleming. There’s a good continuity fuck up when Bond roles a car onto two wheels in one scene and then emerges on the other two which exemplifies the slightly lazy-all-round approach of this film. For architecture bores some of the action takes place in a John Lautner designed house in LA.

Live and Let Die

Awesome. On so many levels. Roger Moore makes his debut, strolling camply down the streets of Harlem in black gloves and Crombi coat, looking more like he’s walking onto the set of Parkinson. This is the blaxploitation Bond, which also features the fabulous Wings Teem Toon (Sample lyric: "In this ever changing world, in which we live in") and some deep south voodoo shit man. Roger Moore is equipped with a magnetic watch (YES! A magnetic watch!) which he uses to undo a lady’s dress zip, mainly. Possibly the one film in which Roger Moore is technically young enough to play the character. Also, features a fabulous boat chase which – according to my 1980 copy of the Guinness Book of Records – had the world’s longest jump by speedboat, a bus, an exploding man and Jane Seymour. Quite probably, in reality, terrible, but I don't care. Largely unfantastic plot which involves heroin smuggling and Roger Moore in a range of terrible outfits. Best of these is his baby blue flares and blouson with low cut vest underneath. Features also some choice dilaogue: "there's a honky on your tail". Also introduces largely unamusing Dukes of Hazard-esque sherriff Coalpepper, who also appears to unfunnier effect in....

The Man With The Golden Gun

Dreadful book, dreadful film. Christopher Lee is Scaramanga, Brit Ekland is his girlfriend and Maud Adams makes the first of her two appearances as a Bond Girl (the other is the also utterly rubbish Octopussy – see below). Basically this is a film long duel, with Moore following Lee all the way to his Island hideaway where he is waited on by the dwarf from Fantasy Island. Lulu’s song is absolutely dreadful and I honestly can’t remember much more. Lee probably has a fiendish plan but it is so routinely generic that no one remembers what it was. Oh, and he has three nipples.

The Spy Who Loved Me

Huge when it came out this one I remember. It’s the one with the Lotus that turns into a submarine basically. The plot hinges on an underwater re-hash of You Only Live Twice with a megalomaniac stealing British and Russian nuclear subs – “Observe, Meester Bond, the instruments of Armegeddon” he says proudly when showing Rog around his sub stealing oil tanker. The bit with the Lotus always worried me because when it drives out of the water, Bond winds down the drivers side window to deposit a dead fish on the beach. Given that the car/sub would need to be, presumably, waterproof, I always wondered where this fish came from. The Teem Toon is sung by Carly Simon.

Moonraker

Features the pay off line: “I think he’s attempting re-entry Sir”. As the person ‘he’ is attempting re-entry with is called Dr Holly Goodhead, you could conclude that by this point the series has descended into a form of utterly puerile creaky old hornyness. For some this might be a good thing. The totally batty plot has Hugo Drax attempt to destroy the planet and start a new super race in space. Although to be fair this is no battier than Ian Fleming’s original and largely unrelated plot. The film also has Roger Moore looking silly in a space suit, and uses the Close Encounters theme tune in a slightly desperate attempt at being contemporary but which only reminds you of what a good film this isn’t. The Spy Who Loved Me’s pantomime villain, Jaws, returns only to become an unfunny and unlikely ally of Bond. The writers also see fit to give him a thoroughly unpleasant ‘romantic’ liaison with what appears to be a school girl.

Any pretence at making a ‘proper’ film – good script, quality actors, a point, any sense of plausible character/plot/idea development – has apparently entirely left minds of the people in charge by this point, as if the production team have jumped out of a moving vehicle, leaving it freewheeling vacantly down hill to its doom.

For Your Eyes Only

Distinguished in my eyes (only) for two reasons: 1. I remember going to see it when it came out at the Chelmsford Odeon with my family, an exceptional, unrepeated moment of familial bonding and 2. The playground rumour that the Bond girl had previously been a man. The latter apparently, is actually the true but for one of the Bond girls in Octopussy. Other than that I can’t remember much thing about it, except for the marvellous Sheena Easton song. Considered a return to the more serious films (relatively speaking) of the ‘60’s it was an attempt to get away from the insufferable fatuousness of Moonraker.

Octopussy.

Total nonsense from beginning to end. An unfathomable plot (try reading it here. Someone has spent a great deal of time trying to write it down totally straight and it still makes no sense whatsoever), involving Faberge eggs, two villains, jewellery smuggling and a mad Russian general. A friend alerted me to an excellently vitriolic dismantling of the plot's many faults by the equally Bond obsessed Will Smith (which you should be able to find here). What else is there? Steven Berkoff! An all-woman circus! Roger Moore disguised as a clown! Indian tennis player V J Amritag fighting people off with a tennis racket! A bomb in a circus canon! A fight on the roof of a train! I’m making it sound good. Almost legendary in its lack of logic, continuity, sense, rhyme or reason, Octopussy is equal parts entertainingly dreadful and almost too boring to watch.

View to A Kill.

Not just the worst James Bond movie ever, but possibly one of the worst movies full stop. Roger Moore - looking increasingly like an elderly lady you might see pottering about the nursery slopes of St Moritz with his leathery tan, wispy rinsed hair and funny big glasses - waddles through a piss weak script that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a strange post-modern assemblage held together only through the utterly formulaic assumptions of what happens in a Bond movie. Overall, it has the feel of a particularly low budget TV detective show, an impression encouraged by the presence of The Avenger’s Patrick McNee who forms an unfunny double act with Roger Moore. Christopher Walken does his Christopher Walker thing only worse than normal. Duran Duran sing the song and Simon Le Bon wears a beret in the video. Any glamour the Bond series might have had has leaked out into a puddle forming at the base of Roger’s patent leather shoes.

Some of it seems to be about horses. There is an interminable scene set with Bond creeping about a stable. Then it’s somehow about Nazi’s and then it’s about silicone valley. It’s hopeless. It has a hot air balloon in it. At one point Bond is bound in a car and pushed into a pond. Yes, a pond. What happened to the laser beams, the anti gravity machines, the piranha fish? Now its death by water boatmen? It ends up in the San Andreas Fault for reasons too rubbish to go into. Bond also gets to sleep with Grace Jones which, due to heir age differential, is probably one of the queasiest couplings ever seen on screen. He also fails to catch any villains or cotton on to anything that is going on. His by now ubiquitous detective technique is to get invited to the villains lair under some utterly fatuous cover, provoke the villain in some threadbare macho contest (shooting, poker, starting a bar b q), sleep with the villains mistress (usually with the villains tacit approval – all villains are perverts who like seeing their girlfriends get it on with sixty year olds), get caught and bound up and tortured and then escape in order to come back and blow the entire place up. Not great.

The Living Daylights/License to Kill

I’ve lumped these two together because I can’t actually tell them apart. There is some kind of villain with an iguana and Timothy Dalton looks serious throughout, especially as he loses his 00 license and goes rogue for a while, although they are still silly enough to feature him escaping down a ski slope in a cello case. He has an Aston Martin that goes on ski’s too. But the bad hair and the era and the tuxedo’s just don’t seem to match. In many ways the 1980’s might have been an excellent decade for James Bond with a revived sense of glamour and consumerism, but for all that they were also a decade of strikes, unemployment and social unrest and an effete assassin in a bow tie probably didn’t seem that relevant. Equally, an attempt to give Bond both gravitas and some semblance of social conscience didn’t wash either. Later, the franchise would recognise this dilemma by attempting to bring Bond up to date through an ironic acknowledgement of his sexist (although not racist – that would be too troubling) cold war era proclivities in the general irony-overload of the 1990’s.

Goldeneye

This is quite good. Relatively. Pierce “Remington Steele” Brosnan is tremendously smug as Bond, Dame Judy “As Time Goes By” Dench overacts bearably as M, Samantha Bond injects a little life into hilarious desperate spinster figure Miss Moneypenny. It has an almost half decent plot with a twist. There is an enjoyably destructive tank chase through Prague and, probably for the first time since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it’s not actually total rubbish. Geoffrey “Slam in the Lamb” Palmer is also in it, as is the chap from Foyle’s War, bringing an enjoyably Sunday tea-time feel to global events. On the downside there is a fair share of “If it wasn’t for this purple cummerbund I would have split my copious sides” clubby jokes such as a femme fatale character called Onja Onnatop (Women on top? Goodness gracious) and more product placement than any film can really bare and still be the film and not the advertising break. More anally, it has a car chase between Onnatop in her Ferrari F40 and Bond in a 1964 (Goldfinger) Aston Martin which upsets my brother because the performance disparity between the two vehicles would render the chase highly unlikely.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Features a plot for Jonathon Pryce to take over the broadcasting rights to the Archers. Not dastardly at all. There is a good joke – delivered by John Cleese as R (Q’s replacement) - about a sandwich.

The World Is Not Enough

Features a female character called Dr Christmas Jones, and concludes in Istanbul, at the end of the year. This is mainly, or actually exclusively, so that Bond can say: “Always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey”. Having maneuvered the plot, timeframe, location and, indeed, named one of the main characters something completely improbable in order to make this joke, I’m troubled that it’s so rubbish. I mean, as a joke, it just doesn’t work. It isn’t a neat reversal of a popular phrase. It almost is, but isn’t. If it was an off the cuff remark made on the spur of the moment, this could be forgivable. But it seems to have taken the entire scriptwriting team and the whole length of the movie to get to it. It upsets me greatly.

Die Another Day

Traditionally, the final outing for each Bond actor is the worst (Diamonds are Forever, View to A Kill). This doesn’t buck the trend. Mostly rubbish for the following reasons: Terrible cgi, an invisible car, Toby Stevens’ villain, Madonna (singing and acting), an ice palace which Bond enters under one of his habitually rubbish covers. Pierce Brosnan has also become too irritating and smug to be bearable.

Casino Royale

Quite good, but that's not really the point is it?

The plot stays relatively true to the book by not re-locating the action in space or inside a volvano. Although, it has to be said, staying true to the plot of the books is no guarantee of plausability. Anyway, Bond confronts a money launderer over a game of cards and wins. Other stuff happens. Daniel Craig is thuggishly plausible rather than camply ridiculous. There are no gadgets. The jokes are wooden. In a way, it doesn't matter. You really have seen it all by this point. The film is battling a bigger problem, which is the strange pointlessness of making any more James Bond films.

As others have pointed out, the books contain an interesting portrait of the post cold war era and are more interesting as social documents than as thrillers. The plots were always silly and never quite held together. The diligent, almost anal, cataloguing of consumer products and menus and hotels and places at a time when contemporary consumer culture was just beginning is more interesting. Fleming frequently breaks off from detailing a chase sequence to give an oddly detailed account of Bond's lunch. Frequently this isn't even a remarkable lunch (valuable plot time is taken up in Live and Let Die with Bond ordering chicken sandwiches) but Fleming pedantically tells us anyway. This reads like a 1950's travel brochure, but it's still interesting for that. If you can get past Fleming’s rampant misogyny, homophobia and racism and somewhat puerile world view (not easy) they can still be fun. Similarly, the films have a nostalgia and period glamour which is principally their appeal. Nobody watches them for plot development or suspense. Acutally, we watch them for the opposite of suspence. We watch them I would suggest for their certainty, for the utterly formulaic way they unfold, as familiar and in some ways as rubbish as christmas.

So, perhaps the series should, at this point, finally end. At the beginning, with the first book finally made into a film. There are no more books, and certainly no more plots, left. James Bond is, ultimately, one man’s puerile fantasy that, for a while, became everyone’s puerile fantasy. But we’ve all wasted far too much time on it. I’ve spent too much time on it certainly, just writing this. It belongs in the 1950’s and 60’s and possibly, the silly 1970’s. But not now. Not any more. Enough already. Goodnight Mr Bond.

The Ideological Antecedents of The British Motor Show

Review: The British Motor Show 2006, The Excel Centre.

In his splendidly titled essay The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator, Erwin Panofsky compared the design of a Rolls- Royce to the English Picturesque tradition. Essentially, the radiator represented the Neo-Classical country house while the curvaceous body work represented the surrounding landscape. I mention this because, for the most part, car design hasn’t been written about by design critics and remains the preserve of people like Jeremy Clarkson. This is odd because for architects especially, car design has long represented a kind of pure technical dream, an engineering-led antidote to architecture’s stylistic vagaries. Le Corbusier famously extolled the merits of the motor car and included his own car in photographs of his houses; the two being yoked together as symbiotic arbiters of the new age.

Now, whilst I may be no Erwin Panofsky, I’d like to think I’m not exactly Jeremy Clarkson either. So, I thought I might start an appraisal of contemporary car design at the British International Motor Show. Housed in the new Excel centre (think massive retail shed meets Heathrow Terminal 5) it’s supposed to be the motor industry’s UK showcase. Initially though, it’s pretty disappointing. There are none of the kind of slightly absurd “cars of the future” one might expect, and it’s all rather humdrum in a new Ford Ka sort of way. No hover cars travelling on air, or solar panelled vehicles running silently for mile after mile on the energy of a light bulb. Nope, it looks at first like a glorified garage forecourt; popular everyday cars forlornly rotating on their plinths, buffed by an army of feather duster wielding attendants.

All the major manufacturers have displays, the designs of which are intended to subtly reinforce their brand values. So Aston Martin, Jaguar and Range Rover all have individual stands despite being part of the same giant Ford conglomerate. And whilst Aston Martin self-consciously deal in a slightly fusty, old school sophistication, the (basically identical) Jaguar goes for a slicker metropolitan chic with a stand resembling a fashionable bar circa 1997. The Ford stand, on the other hand, bludgeons the visitor with a ubiquitous car show aesthetic of multiple screens and crap music.



At the happening SUV end of the spectrum, the cars just seem to get bigger and bigger, regardless of functional reason, aesthetic restraint or ecological responsibility. Hummer, Chrysler and Range Rover compete to have their enormous vehicles drooled over by disturbingly Columbine style teenagers. The Range Rover Sport 4.8 V8 (with Ebony Sports seats, hand- polished, lined oak interior and Zermatt silver finish) for instance, costs £62,797, does 12.4 miles to the gallon and could wipe out an entire school bus in one missed gear change. The styling is a mixture of surgically enhanced utility vehicle and blinged up minibus. Even Bentley have recast their old fashioned gent’s tourer into a prop for an R&B video. One can imagine the salesman in HR Owen trying to flog the new and hugely ostentatious Continental Flying Spur: “Yes, Mr Diddy, the Connolly leather interior would indeed be most comfortable for one’s ‘bitches’”.

There is other stuff to keep the car buff happy too: automotive art (“I’m not a total philistine. Honestly, I like paintings too. Just paintings that have cars in”), personalised number plates, flying jackets, very large exhaust pipes. There are also stands selling badges, stickers and toy cars that are as likely to be bought by middle aged men as young boys – which pretty much describes the demographic attending. There are also a few Posh and Becks-like couples wandering around in expensive leisurewear, hoping perhaps to live out a Hart to Hart fantasy of high speed lane swapping on the M25 in matching Ferraris.

Having said all that, the enthusiasm with which I head for the giant eight lane Scalextric set is quite disturbing. As is the humourless way I set about demolishing the opposition in my race, the average age of whom is approximately eight. Yeah, car enthusiasm tends to encourage a collapsing of childhood and middle age. It’s the preserve of people for whom the car represents some kind of simplistic vision of freedom, presumably from the constraints of family. And perhaps this is why, as a form of escapism it also escapes serious analysis. People who enthuse about cars tend to enthuse about the same things: speed, cc’s chrome wheel trims. Either deeply dull or childishly enthusiastic, car writing is stuck between detailing luggage capacity or finding new ways to say: “Gosh, this is really fast!”. Lacking any serious critical discussion, car design hasn’t ever developed a language to describe itself or what it does.

Like Le Corbusier before her, Zaha Hadid has had a go at being a car designer and her eponymously titled Z.Car is featured at the Motor Show. Predictably enough, it’s a cheesily retro-futurist vehicle, a magic marker drawing from the 1970s brought to life. In Panofskian terms, it’s ideological antecedents are the space race imagery of the 1960’s mixed with the smooth surfaces of contemporary computer rendering. In Jeremy Clarkson’s world it’s merely a bit slow and slightly weird looking.

The British International Motor Show was at Excel, London, 20-30 July
www.britishmotorshow.co.uk

The Ideal Stress Free Sustainable Spotless 0 % Balance Transferred Life

Review: The Ideal Home Show 2006, Earls Court.

Since 1908 the Ideal Home show has charted mainstream British taste in houses and interiors. Not much has changed stylistically it seems, but the show has never really embraced architectural notions of progress, either formal or technological. If technology is celebrated here it is in the ability to minutely adjust your armchair or comes hidden in the pre-fabricated panels behind t+g cladding. Here, architecture – to the horror of architects – is no longer about abstract space or challenging geometry but psychological well-being and domestic comfort.

This year’s theme is sustainability and is represented by an enormous fake waterfall. Somewhere nearby lurk Channel 5’s Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister and their spectacular tree house in its “authentic rainforest setting”. Justin and Colin loom large over the show with their brand of metropolitan snobbism and shameless stylistic globe-trotting. Their Asian Influences bedroom (“Hey, even the paint used to decorate the walls is from the Breathe Easy collection by Crown”) typifies the show’s notion of sustainability as mainly to do with celebrating the earthy hues of exotic locales. So, their bedroom also uses “…fabrics woven in the far east by fairly paid workers” as if using fabrics woven in Brentwood by fairly paid workers would be utterly unsustainable.

Away from this billowy rhetoric the exciting action seems to be upstairs at the cheapo end where a furiously competitive market exists for highly toxic cleaning products and futuristic steam irons. Snake oil sellers of a never-to-be-achieved spotless domesticity demonstrate Amazing Pasta Storage Jars, weird robotic hoovers and Magic Saucepans. There’s also some sub Jack Vetriano artworks and vast armies of people selling you Spanish timeshares, botox injections, 0% balance transfers and eye massage glasses. Overall, upstairs as well as down, there is an astonishing number of products related to stress relief and relaxation. Much of the show is taken up by vast and slightly scary looking massage chairs, complete with digital consoles and heat sensors to (supposedly) locate your personal areas of pain and discomfort. Hundreds of jacuzzi’s lined like mother of pearl oysters and festooned with action packed nozzles and rubber water jets, take up much of the other half. What else is there? Well, some fairly anodyne furniture, the occasional bronze leopard or chrome nude, some celebrity chefs and a few bits of interesting new design. It’s not unlike 100% Design, 98% design maybe, but where the innovation is in cleaning products.

Ultimately, the Ideal Home show is about the home as a sanctuary from modern life: a repository for any number of labour saving devices and home spas and ergonomic dining chairs. As Adolf Loos wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, the modern house is a haven from the existentially alienating urban environment. Hence all the massage chairs and fish tanks. Outside, the world is creased, stained and stressful. Inside, all is steam pressed, deep down clean and profoundly relaxing. In its way it’s not that far either from Archigram’s 1960’s dream of the electronic cottage or the well serviced capsule home. It doesn’t look like that for sure – there are no roundy corners or space race styling – but the clapboard covered ideal homes on show are mass-produced, super insulated, custom fitted environments. Relax in your spotless Dyson hoovered Asian Influences front room, set the massage seat to 30 minute Shiatsu, sip some decaffeinated fair trade coffee from your super sized Crazy Frog mug and watch Desperate Housewives on the Plasma screen: the Ideal Life.

I Never Thought The Reviews I Read Were True Until...

Review: The Playboy Archives, Proud Gallery, Camden.

I’m starting to regret this now. I’m sitting in the pub explaining to a friend why I am reviewing the Playboy archives and it’s all sounding a little…..sleazy. “It’s about design” I say none too convincingly. I give up asking anyone if they want to come see the show with me and end up going alone, furtively shuffling ‘round the exhibition with a notebook like a teenager with a Pamela Anderson obsession. Having said that, once inside, the Playboy Archives is considerably less revealing than you might imagine. It consists of a collection of covers from 1953 onwards, some stand-alone photographs of famous Playmates of the Month (including, bizarrely, Katarina Witt) and some framed interviews with famous men. There are also various pictures of founder Hugh Hefner in the exhibition, usually shown wandering the near mythic Playboy mansion wearing silk pyjamas.

Playboy is generally regarded as upmarket soft pornography. In fact it is read by the sort of people who might baulk at the term pornography preferring euphemisms such as ‘gentlemen’s entertainment’ or, worse, ‘erotica’. In this, it aspires both to be something other than a humble porn mag, and to elevate the porn element to a civilised hobby on a par with pipe smoking and vintage motor-cars. For a start it has writing in it, and not just of the “I never thought the stories in your magazine were true until…” variety. It carries interviews with famous men (not women) and fiction from serious writers. It also though, unarguably, has lots of pictures of naked women in it. These pictures are either, depending on your constitution, rather tame or more explicit than you imagined. It’s not Razzle but it’s not The Lady either.

Time has given the 1950’s and ‘60’s Playmates an inevitable period charm – today they seem as de-sexualised as a bit of What the Butler Saw Edwardian saucy-ness. The period hairdos, moustaches (on the men, mostly) and clothes draw attention away from what was originally the point. In fact, hair is a key component in porn: at least of the pubic variety. In the 50’s and 60’s it was generally not seen at all. By the ‘70’s it is there in all its glory. In fact, given today’s tastes for depilation, it is perversely the hair that tends to shock most. The ‘70’s were also an excellent period for unusual props. Horses were a favourite, with naked women shown leading them through lens flare improved countryside like a porno Sandy Denny. By the 80’s, the bodies had become harder and, of course, more hairless. They also started to be designed for the job, leading to the purpose built caricatures of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Jordan. The ‘80’s also saw the rise of various famous photographers including Mike Figgis and Helmut Newton, both shown in this exhibition. Here, porn brushes up against art, but in a fundamentally rather naff way. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, if pornography has claims to art, then it is more through its potential for transgression than through arty composition or ‘classy’ imagery.

Alongside the excesses of today’s so-called Gonzo porn, Playboy seems relatively harmless: very much the product of a boy’s imagination that thinks new gadgets, well tailored suits, sexist jokes and, of course, lots of naked ladies, are the accoutrements of sophistication. All, of course, unthreatened by anything as troubling as sexual politics, female desire or un-airbrushed flesh. The spin-off from this veneer of sophistication was that there was a certain subtlety and inventiveness that went into the presentation. But, just as the bodies have become more designed the magazine has become less so. Whilst the covers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were often graphically striking in their own right, the latest ones merely list the magazine’s contents around yet another famous face. And, as the bodies themselves have become more ruthlessly exposed to the light, they have had to work that much harder to retain our attention: shaved, taped, pumped up and, finally, photo-shopped into a kind of freaky perfection,

See, it was about design. So, I return to the pub, suitably unembarrassed, but not before I have picked up some new silk pyjamas on the way.

Why Kiera Knightley Should Be Purchased By The National Trust

Review: Pride and Prejudice.

So, I’m in the Rio cinema in Dalston – possibly the most multi-cultural place in the world - and everyone here is white and middle class. Outside, the cars on Kingsland Road throb past with their neon glow and the kebab shops light up the street and yet, in here, all you can hear is the sound of horses hooves on cobbles and silver spoons clinking on china. The thought occurs: why would anyone want to make a film like this now? Isn’t it about as relevant as Quinlan Terry’s houses or Viscount Linley’s furniture? Well, I happen to have a soft spot for Quinlan Terry, but still, the whole idea of period drama is rather worrying: a curious fixation on a world of restrictive manners and social segregation. Is this what we should be thinking about in 2005?

Then there is the film itself. The whole thing is bathed in a honeyed autumnal glow. It begins with the sun rising over a misty swathe of English countryside and gets progressively more picturesque after that. This film is as stylistically intense as Sin City. The quality of light in it was so seductive that after it I felt like hiring a lighting crew to follow me around. What’s it all about? Well, basically, there’s the Bennet family who are farm people, a bit coarse but basically good sorts. They have five daughters and no son or heir, so the house and farm are due to be given over to a male cousin, who is, as Jane Austen put it, a bit of a knob. The father is an amiably sardonic farmer. The mother is a petty bourgeois social climber obsessed with marrying off her daughters to the highest bidders. The eldest daughter Jane is beautiful, honest and shy. The second eldest Elizabeth is beautiful, honest and sharp. Into this scenario rides Mr D’Arcy, an impossibly wealthy bachelor, and his friend, the only slightly less wealthy Mr Bigley. The Bennets and the two bachelors meet at the village disco – sorry, local dance - where Mr Bigley promptly falls in love with Jane, and Mr D’arcy and Elizabeth begin their tortuous and acerbic on-off courtship.

Most of the action – if that is the right word – takes place within a succession of house interiors where the manners are adjusted subtly according to location. The Bennet’s house is filmed in a succession of painterly scenes, somewhere between Breugel, Pieter de Hooch and the sort of sentimental pictures of young children chasing chickens that the Victorians used to hang in their nurseries. Pigs waddle in and out of shot, mud squelches underfoot and there is a rich choreography of honest farm folk and quacking wild fowl. The house, a mix of Queen Anne and Georgian with classical embellishment is lovingly pictured in all its flaking and scuffed glory: a sign presumably of both the Bennet’s near impoverishment and of our heroine Elizabeth’s straightforward honesty. Beginning with the girlish honesty of Jane and Elizabeth’s conversations at home, social interaction becomes ever more elliptical and strained as they move through a succession of ever grander residences. Basically, the posher the house the more mean spirited the people living in it. Except for D’Arcy who has the grandest house but also the best taste. In one scene, Elizabeth wanders through his copious hallways, her eyes lingering over the suggestive physicality of a series of Grecian statues. She is clearly the only other person in the film capable of appreciating such beauty.

Away from the claustrophobic civility of the interiors, Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for walking is seen as evidence of her free spirit. The countryside is depicted as free and natural – a naturalness, of course, that is mediated through the whole biscuit tin and tea towel world of the English picturesque tradition. When the camera is not focusing on the all round loveliness of the English landscape, it is focusing on the all round loveliness of Kiera Knightly. Her character is, of course, the moral heart of the story, showing that honesty and depth will win out over frippery and snobbishness. But, appropriately, her face is always perfectly made up, her ‘kohled’ eyes and flawless skin as ‘natural’ as the perfect countryside behind her.

Always a sucker for shots of rolling hills accompanied by swirling classical music, and entranced by Knightley’s triumphant goodness, I was utterly seduced by it all. Coming out, Kingsland Road was something of a shock. But, you know, in a good way.