Modern Girls, Modern Boys; It's Tremendous!*

More of a checking-in than a proper post, brought about by a brief return to London to attend my brother's wedding, a splendid affair not even ruined by my reading of a Norman MacCaig poem, that ended up in the venue pictured above, the wonderful Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley. This fabulous ex-cinema (formerly the Crofton Park Picture Palace) was converted to a dance hall in 1957 and has one of the most beautiful interiors I've ever been in: plush red velvet, gold leaf ceiling, Chinese lanterns, a neon-deco facade and jive dancing. Not even the fact that Oasis played there has dulled its unabashedly vulgar glamour.

I flew in to City airport the night before. This has the most thrilling approach of any airport I've flown to (save perhaps for the now defunct Templehof in Berlin where the plane seemed to take the tiles off the apartment blocks on the way down) made even more impressive on this occasion by the steep ascent the plane had to take when another plane stopped on the runway in front of it. The following 360 degree swoop over the Thames afforded a sublime view that took in the mouth of the estuary, the Queen Elizabeth 11 Dartford Crossing, Tilbury Docks, the Isle of Dogs and the Millennium dome simmering hazily in the distance.

A few years ago when I was teaching at Greenwich University I set a project that involved taking a boat trip from Greenwich to Gravesend. I've been fascinated by that stretch of the river ever since with its vast container ships and mysterious sheds lurking on the edge of the marshland. It's a landscape captured by Jock Macfadyen in paintings like Pink Flats (below) and slated to disappear under the Thames Gateway development.



The trip was a mirror image of a second boat journey from Reading to Henley, a stretch of the river with a completely different mythology that takes in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat and a kind of English surrealist whimsy culminating for me in Mike (Archigram) Webb's bizarre Temple Island project. This fantasy project starts off as a series of doctored photographs of the Henley Regatta and mutates into the design of a strange, mutant submersible that travels up the Thames to Temple Island and the small Doric temple that sits on it.

Webb's project evokes the English picturesque and Sunday watercolourist's sensibility combined with something odder and more psychedelic. It's certainly one of the strangest projects ever to come out of the Archigram group, up there with David Greene's experimental Bottery and Webb's own Dreams Come True Inc. Like them, the Temple Island project took Archigram's twin loves of technology and English pastoralism but minus the boy scout positivism, replacing it with an altogether darker, more satirical sensibility.



I'll end this scattergun posting with a few links. There has been a series of superb posts over at Sit Down Man, including, especially, this one on Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and a sustained and angry rant on Southampton. Also good is The Sesquipedalist on why he twitters, which I have to say captures my ambivalent self-loathing on that topic spookily well. He also has a photo post on Sheffield's wonderful Castle Market, recently written up by Owen at Nothing to See Here (see links opposite).

I had my lunch at Sharon's cafe (ham, egg and chips since you ask) recently prior to a planning meeting for our Sheffield housing scheme. I can recommend it for all sorts of reasons, not least for its super compacted multi-programmed spatial qualities (Castle Market that is, not Sharon's ham, egg and chips) and the nicely expressed futurist style exhaust funnel that sticks out the top (ditto).


(photo courtesy of Mr Parnell)

I'm off to Bottany Bay, amongst other places, for the next week so will hopefully return with the blogger's de rigueur holiday post, as well as some other more edifying thoughts.

* BTW, the post title is a quote from Gregory's Girl which captures the film's decidedly modern optimism. I watched this the other day as part of a mini Scottish culture festival I have going on in my house which also includes listening to Stuart Murdoch's God Help The Girl ("Old episodes of Minder, I snuggled up beside her") and reading Simon Reynold's interview with a suprisingly call a spade a spade-ish Edwyn Collins in Totally Wired: Post Punk Interviews and Overviews.

From The Workforce Of The Bucharest Heavy Machinery Plant, With Love

I've been meaning to write about this for some time. Taschen's book of political souvenirs has been lying around on our office bookshelves for so long I can't recall who brought it in. It features photographs of hundreds of political gifts presented to the East German Communist Party leadership by visiting dignitaries from the fifties to the late eighties.

They are fabulous objects, combining political/military bombast with miniaturisation. Many of them take the format of elaborate retirement gifts (which some of them in fact are) or executive toys, but with the toys replaced by representations of rockets, heavy machinery or spaceships.

They are kitsch and full of bathos. Many of them serve an obvious function of declaring political obedience, or as examples of mutual back scratching or one-upmanship. They are baldly literal but put together with an eye for surreal juxtaposition.

My personal favourite is the "Desk Set" at the top, a gift from Lieutenant Colonel Kurkotkin to Erich Hoenecker on the occasion of his 60th birthday. I was hoping for something similar for mine.



The book is now sadly out of print. The objects are from the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin, and the photographs are Sebastian Ahlers.

Incidentally this post is also a kind of parting gift to you, People of the Blogosphere (alright then, Person of the Blogosphere), as I am off on holiday for the next couple of weeks to a distant land with no broadband. So there will be a break in broadcasting. No twittering neither.

Modernism, Historicism and Julie Christie's Eyes

As an oblique follow on from my previous post about 1970's DIY habits, I've been thinking about period dramas. In particular I've been thinking about different periods of period dramas. Even though their setting is historical, such films are often more about the period in which they're made than the one in which they're set.

Take a film made in the late 1960's such as Far From The Madding crowd. It's a great film, but one of the most striking things about it if you watch it today are Julie Christie’s eyes. And Terence Stamp’s sideburns. Neither appear remotely correct for the period. Christie's eyes in particular are smudged with Kohl in an iconically late '60’s manner and her hair is made up in a beehive. Stamp’s sideburns are equally à la mode. These are not so much deliberate anachronisms as evidence of a distinct lack of interest in historical authenticity.



Far from the Madding Crowd is a Victorian period drama in as much as it is based on Hardy’s 1874 novel, but in many other respects it's a 1960’s film. Despite its period setting it looks like a 1960's film. Equally, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor’s 1963 epic Antony and Cleopatra plays fast and loose with historical verisimilitude. The interior sets for this film are completely outlandish, more redolent of a lavishly vulgar Las Vegas hotel than ancient Egypt. The fact that the film's narrative echoes the real life love affair of Burton and Taylor only increases the sense that the setting for the film, for all its self-consciously historic-epic quality, is secondary to the real story.



The muted colours and artfully dishevelled haircuts of 2005's Pride and Prejudice will no doubt become as outlandishly dated in time as Stamp's sideburns. The film's historical authenticity may be just as bogus but it also seems emblematic of a distinctly different sensibility. Pride and Prejudice is overflowing with a reverence for the past. It is as in love with its setting as the characters are with each other, the camera drooling over distressed paintwork and marble statues as if they were the real subject of the film.


Pride and Prejudice (Image source)

Not only that but there is a direct collusion between films like Pride and Prejudice and the heritage industry. The buildings and landscapes associated with such films become objects of increased touristic value as a result. In this sense period dramas form a sort of aesthetic propaganda wing of English Heritage. It's difficult to disassociate the relentless recycling of Austen adaptations from a more general and pervasive historical genuflection.

Is there a connection then between an attitude that had no time for the niceties of 19th century make-up and a lack of reverence for historic architecture? Is there a relationship between a late 1960's building such as Robin Hood Gardens, with its indifference to ideas of contexualism or 'fitting-in', and the equally startling modernity of Julie's Christie's eyes?