Leo Ornstein

Really, thank goodness for Marc-Andre Hamelin. A player of such terminator-like technique that it completely disappears as an issue in the rendition of the music, a performer of such calmness and lack of pretense, and a promoter of repertoire that I had no idea even existed. Today, I was lucky to learn about Leo Ornstein, a composer who straddled the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, one of many who shied away from their early fire towards a later neo-romanticism, and one of the lucky few whose obscurity was reversed during their own lifetime.


Danse Sauvage (1913)


Impressions of the Thames (1920)


Suicide in an Airplane (1918/9)

Wu-Note records

After the Penguin-Pop sleeves, somebody's done these, and, well, they're fun, and brilliantly executed, although this aesthetic cannibalism surely cannot go much further. That said, I can imagine this as the aesthetic that an American companion to Ghost Box would work with...

As seen here.


ps - I have just remembered that a few years ago I was creating work that was based around the 'Edition Peters' aesthetic, which I suppose, you know, at a stretch, might be considered an example of this method.

Architecture of Failure II

This is, apparently, the only colour photograph of the Crystal Palace still in existence. To me it has a number of resonances;

It looks exactly like the kind of photograph that people manage to find ghosts in, the slight lack of focus, the over-saturation of the colours, the proliferation of life-like objects, they all seem to contribute to the atmosphere in which the shadow of a long-dead face appears in the background. (Note that 15 workers were killed in the 1854 construction of the C.P. at Sydenham, when scaffolding collapsed - could it be one of them? spooky!)

It is busy with objects and yet strangely empty, more than a little forlorn, which by all accounts was the condition in which it spent its last remaining years, as this quote, from Bell-Knight's homage to the C.P. will testify:

a most woe-begone picture, peelings and sun blistered paintwork, the glass grimy, ironwork encrusted with rust and stonework suffering from erosion. Overall was a film of black dust that seemed to invade everywhere, caused by the cinder ash which arose in clouds from the racing track [...] . It really was a sad and sorry sight – as if the old palace was about to give up the ghost (as indeed it did not very long after) – but at least it went out in a final ‘blaze of glory’.

If this is the case, this would qualify it as an example of the sublimity of 'rattling around', of being stuck with a space that can never again be filled in the way it was designed to be. This is a jarring, unheimlich feeling however, as if we haven't lived up to ourselves, our own promise.

Speaking of which, it also looks a bit like some old work of mine, how uncanny. For those of you who don't already know, my thesis project (which I finished drawing exactly a year ago, the realisation of which fact sent a shock of horror down my spine, oh what a year it's been since, oh boy!), was a rather pathetic attempt at approaching a few problems, problems which I thought were architectural, but were mostly cultural all along, problems of memory, the archive and melancholy, and how they relate to space, through the medium of a very forlorn iron & glass palace that spent a very short time on this earth before being torn down and sold for scrap. The resultant project was a soup of conflicting and overstressed ideas, basically three or four projects all occupying the same bloody space, but then, what can you do... Anyway, if you look closely you can see similar columns in the background, and also the rather dejected looking chairs, framing empty, under-utilised space, where something once, maybe, might have happened, under Benjamin's 'dirty and sad' light. I could have done with more flags in mine though...

Get over yourselves...

You're beginning to sound like this guy, at his most flamboyant, expressionistic, and lacking in content...
IT is right on this one, and if I get a second to myself I'll try to explain why I, cretin that I am, might think so...

UPDATE- no, of course I have not a resounding, definitive statement to bring closure to this problem, not even a quiet, inconclusive one, although this little thing from the interwebs is perhaps a very appropriate comment. Like it or not, thinkers - even thinkers of the pure multiple - have proper names, and there is a messy wake of cultural capital that these names drag behind them. People seem to have been arguing over jetsam rather than the fucking boat, to stretch the metaphor... There are under-identifiers, oh lord there are under-identifiers, anybody who has spent time in an architecture department will know that, and there are those who over-identify. Intensity of attachment is no guarantor of quality of argument, however, no matter how impassioned you are.

Family Resemblances

-for the record: don't go out and kill Nick Griffin, this is not an incitement.-

Architecture of Failure I

The secret is the very ash of the archive. . .

Sorry Carl...

Burial / Four Tet record in not utterly disgusting shocker!

regarding " who wants a melancholy, uptight dance music?";
I think that I do also, the contradictions inherent to that notion being especially delicious when it's a dance music that is so inextricably linked to 'the euphoric'. The track above fits rather well into that little vein of melancholic dance that's been around for the last few years, often Villalobos-related (Dexter perhaps being the first example, but with the Shackleton Remixes as the apotheosis). What to call it? 'Despondant-Techno'? 'Mournful Minimal'?, perhaps it should be known as 'Haunted House' (arf arf!)

Then again however, if you're not careful you'll end up enjoying utterly heinous guff like William Orbit... in fact, Trance in general always sounded to me like the harmony from early Radiohead songs played on a squelchy synth...

Out, Out, Damn Spot!

Birds in Symbolic Order shocker!

Criticism as a Substitute for Nostalgia

Appropriately enough, in amongst all this talk of nostalgia, and the palpably terrified condescension of self-styled gatekeepers pouring forth on the most imbecilic notions of ‘the Future’, there was a rare, rare, screening of Patrick Keiller’s quasi-documentary ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ at Birkbeck the other night.

‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ is jokingly referred to as Keiller’s ‘New Labour’ film, but for good reason. One of the most memorable themes of the two ‘Robinson’ films is the political despair that runs through them, as the post-Thatcher Tory government slowly grinds to a halt; in London (1992), John Major’s election victory is watched from the shadows, Robinson spitting out invective, decrying the English middle classes who voted Tory “because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so”. By the time Robinson in Space (1997) was made, things were changing, signs of Tory defeat are apparent, and Tony Blair’s name makes a cameo on a plaque on the outside of a travel lodge, a pertinent ghost of the future, but his time had not yet come. Bearing this in mind, it is only natural that a film commissioned soon after the election of 1997 might have a different political tone to it, the despondency taking a back seat to something more open to possibility, and although critical, the film is not despairing.

The film is not a ‘Robinson’ film, although it shares certain aspects of method with them. The camera is still mostly stationary, and the narrator is invisible (although this time voiced by Tilda Swinton), but the major difference is that it is a documentary; an experimental one, true, but a television documentary, with interviews, advert breaks and archive footage interspersed with the quasi-narrative elements. Keiller himself seems somewhat unhappy with the result, explaining to us the pressure he was put under to make a ‘Robinson’-esque film, rather than a purely didactic work, but it does not suffer unduly as a result. All three films are structured around single problems; London deals with ‘the problem of London’, the answer being that it is the first city to have disappeared; Robinson in Space poses ‘the problem of England’, coming to the conclusion, brilliantly stated by Keiller at the screening, that ‘British capitalism works, but is horrible’, and in the case of ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’, ‘why does the production of housing never get modernised?’, a more specific and, perhaps, a more academic problem than the first two.

The narrator travels around the UK interviewing various luminaries, including Martin Pawley, James Dyson, Doreen Massey and Cedric Price, with whose help she attempts to understand why Britain has the oldest and most run down housing stock in the advanced capitalist world, and why the housing economy produces so slowly and in such an outmoded fashion compared with other consumable objects. Keiller shows us footage of Bucky Fuller, Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys, representing avant garde approaches to the question of housing, and he visits faux-villages, Richard Rogers houses, prefabs and (surprisingly briefly) the architecture of Goldfinger and Neave Brown. Pawley answers the question of housing quickly and succinctly; using the remarkable and prescient metaphor of a bank note; an object made from the most banal of materials, and yet encrusted in detail; its symbolic value graphically reinforced with ideologically loaded imagery. What is the point of accelerating and modernising the production of houses when they are the locus of so many of our desires for permanence, the physical manifestation of much of our shadowy, spectral wealth (and even more ideologically, the place where our only valuable social institution (the family) resides)? It would not suit either the providers of houses, nor the consumers of them.

Keiller’s investigation often returns to questions of nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, with the former being associated with radicality and modernity (Massey suggests that the housing world will not change unless domesticity is revolutionised) and the latter with oppression and reaction. This argument is all very situationist, Constant’s New Babylon being a perfect example, but I’m unconvinced by it, perhaps partly because of the demeaning of the concept of nomadism over the last decades, becoming as much a signifier of the contemporary international jet-set bourgeoisie or the insecurity of work as the urban radical, uncovering the beach beneath the stones (be careful what you demand of capitalism, for it may grant your wish, but never in the way it was asked, Virno is good on this). Having said that, Keiller successfully manages to refrain from obvious politico-aesthetic judgements; this is not a polemic for the egalitarian value of fair-faced concrete, in fact it is disparaging of attempts to revolutionise domestic architecture with ‘wet’ construction. What is dealt with strongly is the economic structures and systems of the housing market, and it is this that sets Keiller the documentarian apart from Jonathan Meades; ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’ covers territory that Meades has often dealt with, such as the origins of the reactionary traditionalist aesthetic in the socialism of William Morris and the garden city movement, but of these two idiosyncratic critics, Keiller is the one more prone to take on the numbers of a situation.

One thing that Keiller appears to approve of in this film is the functionalism of the figures he draws from. Throughout the film, ‘modernisation’ seems to stand for the kind of technological modernity exemplified by Bucky Fuller, or Archigram, a notion of progress whereby aristocratic technologists will identify the material and functional problem, solve it, and thus the problem will no longer exist. Modern architecture is plagued by this ‘Solutionism’, a wilful simplicity of understanding, a naïve optimism that every suffering in the world is merely waiting for a tool to be invented to fix it. It ends up in question begging, such as when Archigram ask; we can build aeroplanes, cinemas that travel at 500 miles an hour in the sky, why don’t offices do the same? Or when they decide that a society of electronics and informational networks requires an architecture that reflects this; is it too much to ask of architectural theorists that they have ideas more nuanced than attempting to embody the ‘spirit of the age’? How does a figure like Richard Rogers go from the complexity of Lloyds, or the valuable attempt at radicality that is the Pompidou, to Chiswick Park, whose main architectural USP is that the stairs are on the outside, thus optimising the net-to-gross? ‘Solutionism’ is a functional way that architects can continue working, a symbolic narrative that excuses them from asking any difficult questions. Keiller is obviously not a wholehearted subscriber to this attitude, but the cautious optimism of the particular period that the film was made means that the claws were kept retracted, when knowing what we know now…

And this brings me to perhaps the main problem I had with ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’. Failure, or the lack thereof. One of the greatest aspects of the Robinson films is the attempt they make at outlining and describing an architectural melancholy; the disembodied narratives are played out against the unique urban landscape that Keiller’s camera captures so well, the viewers gaze is unmediated by significant bodies. “You and I are deeply disillusioned people”, Robinson tells the narrator after they visit the haunts of Robert Burton, and he might as well be talking to us. The lack of corporeality, the materialism of the narratives, the disconnection as well as the incessant focus on the political, rather than any emotionally introspected lugubriousness mean that the Keillerian melancholy is not that of the simple idea of haunting, spaces of individual memory tied to space; rather they begin to abstract this melancholy into something universal, a glimpse of what you might call architectural failure. It is this quality that the structure of the documentary sadly lacks, but then at the same time the aesthetic, the Keillerian picturesque, which contributes so much to the other films is here amplified by the use of video rather than film stock. Where film bestows a certain cinematic heroism to the mundane images of the Robinson films, video removes the last hint of conventional aesthetical pleasures; it takes Keiller’s quotidian romanticism and amplifies it, lending an almost unbearable poignancy to even the most boring of images.

So, anyway; not his best, but still brilliant.

Tumbleweed drifts slowly by...

I'm sorry for the long silence but all of a sudden, and for what will probably be a brief period, I've become awfully busy with having my labour exploited. The world is still falling to pieces and all the usual shenanigans that I normally write about, and I've got some half baked texts on, among other things, Zizek's recent blunders into architectural theory and the 'dum dum dadum' funeral rhythm, but in the meantime I'd like you to listen to these; 'Four pieces on a single note', by Giacinto Scelsi.

Back soon, I hope...