One-Way Street

Vertiginous Heights and Flesheating Bloodthirsty Bunnies

Here's a follow up on some topics I've already considered in this space, and where I'll be looking next.

The Royal Society of British Architects reports that a fifth of all architects are unemployed, about another fifth are underemployed, but when they find work, UK architects can expect a 7% salary increase.

The Twitter Revolution may be here after all: Yesterday's protests were organized almost entirely online and succeeded in rattling the authorities, despite government attempts to restrict Internet access--and a sandstorm. 

Colm Tóibín hates writing. You know what? It shows.

I don't think this is a comprehensive list--there are no East Asian cities--but here are the ten oldest continually-inhabited cities in the world. Oldest city? Damascus.

The presentations from last month's 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism aren't online yet, but there's a feature on an urban infill project in Denver's old Stapleton airport.

Tonight's viewing in Chicago: "flesheating bloodthirsty bunnies" in Andrea Eve and Mark Gavin's Vamphoppers, which will make its world premiere tonight at the Portage Theater as part of the Bang-a-Thon festival. Stick around for the Q&A session with the film's directors and a Britney Spears Toxic Karaoke competition. 

On Monday I will be downtown to take a look at Ben van Berkel's pavilion for the Burnham Plan centennial. Alas, Zaha Hadid's pavilion, also located in Millennium Park, won't be completed until August 1. And, if I have enough time, I'll stand on the Sears Tower ledge and look 1,353 feet straight down.

The Wrong Woman

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is set in a run-down place during run-down times. The novel tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in a small town in south-east Ireland in the 1950s. The novel has all the elements of a story of youthful restlessness, but Eilis is actually rather well suited for a life of limited prospects. She’s stubbornly decent and without any visible trace of personality. However, she has a head for numbers, which, in her wind-swept town, qualifies her as something of a genius.

Enter Father Flood, delivered by divine provenance from Brooklyn Heights to Enniscorthy. Eilis has a part-time job as a clerk in a small shop run by the wickedly prim Nelly Kelly. Father Flood sees a smart young woman in a tiny shop and dares to dream big: he imagines a smart young woman in a much bigger shop. He promises to arrange passage to Brooklyn, where Eilis can work in a department store.

Characteristically, Eilis recoils at the notion. Surely her more glamorous and prettier sister Rose—the Katharine Hepburn of Wexford—would be a better candidate for immigration. Indeed, throughout the novel there’s a feeling that the wrong woman ended up in Brooklyn. Little outbursts of life go off around Eilis like firecrackers, but Eilis is a passive vessel for others’ designs. Really, the woman who should have gone to Brooklyn was Isabel Archer.

In Brooklyn Eilis is taken care of by a gaggle of women who make sure she has everything she needs to succeed in the New World, which, as it turns out, is a good pair of shoes and a properly fitting bathing suit. Eilis wins the heart of a young man who finds niceness erotic. She visits Coney Island and Ebbets Field. She attends night classes at Brooklyn College. African-Americans start shopping in the store in which she works.

This under-dramatized world goes against type. No rollicking drunks, no squalor—this isn’t Far and Away. Eilis was born and will die in the petit bourgeoisie. The flatness of her world is reflected in Tóibín’s prose, which can sometimes work itself up into small fits of bitterness, but otherwise remains spare, each sentence wrapped in a brown paper bag.

She was nobody [in Brooklyn]. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday.

This small world contracts even further when Rose dies suddenly, compelling Eilis to return to Enniscorthy. In this last section of the novel Tóibín picks up the narrative pace, injecting some dramatic tension that the Brooklyn scenes often lack. Eventually, the sense that the wrong woman was sent overseas begins to resolve itself. Rose’s death frees Eilis to choose her own destiny.

Just as the action alternates between the Old World and the New, Brooklyn alternates between Henry James and William Trevor, between psychological nuance and dogged realism. The novel gradually builds in power, like a James novel, yet remains true to its characters’ modest virtues. Supposedly, Brooklyn was to be Tóibín’s Atonement, but instead it is closer to McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Brooklyn could end up a really good Terence Davies film, or be remembered as something William Trevor could have written had he a touch more talent.

What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?

The topic of revolution has suddenly become relevant again, primarily because of three recent developments: the worldwide economic crisis, the election of Barack Obama, and the uprising in Iran. Eric Alterman compares our current predicament to the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt and finds Obama insufficiently bold compared to FDR, perhaps, Alterman suggests, because FDR didn't have to contend with an army of lobbyists working on the inside against him and constant braying from right-wing demagogues working on the outside. Alterman says bolder action to combat the current economic crisis is hampered by "a political discourse that ranges 'from the moderate left to the far right' with no room for the kind of bold 'persistent experimentation' needed to rescue America from the catastrophes it faces after eight years of incompetence, extremism and corruption enabled by a proudly clueless but uneducable punditocracy."

Putting aside the issue of exploiting an economic crisis to push through a radical agenda, which the left has long accused the right of doing, the question is this: Is communicative rationality enough to solve our collective problems?

Arguably, communicative rationality is the source of Obama's revolutionary potential. Has Obama failed to take sufficiently bold action because he could only come up with $800 billion to rescue the economy, or because he hasn't led a purge of all conservatives from government and the public sphere?

Last Monday Slavoj Žižek gave a speech in which he dismisses liberal faith the incremental change brought about by communicative rationality. (Watch the speech on YouTube.) In "What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?" Žižek calls for radical action against what he sees as the totality of the capitalist system. Ever the Lacanian, Žižek regards capitalism as a sort of obsessive neurotic giant desperately clinging to its problems--everything from ecological disaster to Islamic fundamentalism--just to reassure itself that nothing will change. He cites Walter Benjamin's dictum that every fascism is an index of a failed revolution to make the claim that right-wing demagoguery in the US and Islamic fundamentalism are both symptoms of a deeper problem within global capitalism. Žižek would argue, for instance, that Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation, which enlists starchitects to rescue the poor of New Orleans, is insufficiently bold because does nothing to address the underlying cause of substandard housing. Although Žižek doesn't explicitly make this claim, he suggests the Iranians are rebelling against their cultural and political mandarins so that we don't have to rebel against ours.

As usual, Žižek veers between the sublime and the ridiculous in his talk. After telling a vulgar joke he abruptly calls for more modernity, more rationality, not less. To take Benjamin's remark about fascism one step further, we should look for the moment of truth buried within the shouting from the "proudly clueless but uneducable punditocracy." Sure Rush Limbaugh is a blight on the republic, but in his backhanded way he recognizes there's a madness in the system that's experience at an individual level as alienation from modernity itself.

It would be gratifying if the president could smite Limbaugh and his fellow bloviators like Obama crushed that fly in the MSNBC studio, but simply dismissing them from the national dialogue would be irrational. It would be the difference between boldness for boldness's sake, and genuinely thoughtful action.

Up North

I'm off to Wisconsin with the family. See you July 7 July 8.

“A little old lady, pleasantly plump”

That's how Agnes Varda describes herself. Once she even went to an art exhibit dressed as a potato. Her new “subjective documentary” The Beaches of Agnès came and went already in Chicago and I missed it, but it's now playing at the Film Forum in New York, among other places.

Varda has been regarded as the grand-mère of the Modernist French cinema since before she was thirty years old, and her dowdy image and impish smile seems to be designed to make us forget what an exemplary filmmaker she is: restlessly innovative, always pushing the medium to its limits. Too many young American filmmakers have made a reputation for independence and artistic integrity by relying on a set of recognizable tropes that say "indie film": ingénue lead actress, hand-held camera, pervasive mumbling. Varda could have made a comfortable career repeating Cléo de 5 à 7 over and over again, but like the heroine of that film, Varda made her statement and moved on.

Cracks in the Wall

After appearing to buckle under the vicious crackdown by the government, dissidents in Tehran are trying to revive the protests. One front on the war against the government is the walls of Tehran. Security forces have been frantically clearing walls of anti-government graffiti. But Tehran Bureau reports, "Persistent street artists have already scribbled 'honk your horns!' on the fresh white canvases, hoping to revive the rebellious cacophony of evenings past."

The battle over Tehran's walls is a metaphor for the struggle to control Iran's post-election reality. Blaming the US and the UK for the protests is an effective strategy because, as Tehran Bureau puts it, "it is easier to convince a population raised on paranoia and government-vetted news to believe that they are under attack from the outside than it is to allow open debate on important social and political changes occurring on the inside."

Meanwhile, in the West, there's a debate about how Iran has shaped journalism's post-print reality.

The End of Spain and Other Events

The latest issue of the online journal MAS Context is out. Some online journals have a very irregular publication schedule, but editor Iker Gil and his staff have produced their second issue less than three months after their first one.

The theme of the second issue is Events, with an emphasis on global events. In fact, the first feature maps the distribution of international events (Olympics, world expositions, World Cup finals, etc.) and reveals that virtually all of them take place in developed countries. Neither Africa nor South America have hosted a major world event, although South Africa will host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Of course, cultural innovation percolates all over the planet, but for official, sanctioned world gatherings the developed world generally prefers to remain at home.

Speaking of world events, Mateu Baylina and Xavi Ayala interview Benedetta Tagliabue of the Barcelona design firm Miralles Tagliabue EBMT. Tagliabue is the architect for the Spanish pavilion for the Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Her task is a daunting one: to “communicate Spain” without resorting to clichés, which are the quickest means of cultural communication. Tagliabue chose ceramic and wicker (above), which she says are typically Spanish materials, for the pavilion, overcoming Chinese worries that a wicker building would blow away in a typhoon. Although the purpose of the Spanish pavilion is to express Spain’s contribution to global culture, globalization is as much a threat to Spanish culture as an enhancement to it. Tagliabue gradually erased national symbols of flamenco and carnations as the design progressed and the qualities of the materials were elaborated. The end result is a “microclimate,” neither quite Spanish nor Chinese, a distilled version of localized experience within the grand abstractions of the world exposition. Although this isn’t Tagliabue’s explicit intention, her pavilion seems to aim for a vision of what urban space will like after the idea of the nation has passed.

Contrasting with Tagliabue’s measured optimism about the Expo 2010 is Chicago architect Doug Garofalo’s mournful pessimism about Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid. Commissioned to help design two high-profile venues, the Aquatics Center and the tennis stadium, Garofalo is caught between the city’s tradition of no-nonsense pragmatism and its “make no small plans” design traditions. Just as the design process for the Olympics proposal was taking off, city officials stepped in and declared, “Well there is no more design at this point.” The proposal was ready, they felt, and the architects put down their pencils while Madrid went ahead and starting building some of its Olympic venues.

Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid, it would seem, needs Bruce Mau. He is the Creative Director of the Denver Biennial of the Americas. His specialty is taking a good idea and making it into much larger, more ambitious idea. The purpose of the biennial is to sustain and elaborate the positive vibe of the 2008 DNC into a collective and sustained visualization of the possible. Mau is collecting people and groups trying to improve the world around them, from a couple of American teenagers who created a website Taking It Global to a group called !GuateAmala! which is dedicated to creating a positive culture in their homeland. The biennial itself, entitled In Good We Trust, will exhibit the possibilities for massive change across seven subject areas, including health, technology, energy, and education.

Another biennial is in the works. Sharon Haar and Iker Gil have proposed a Chicago Design Festival, starting in 2011. Doug Garofalo mentioned that Chicago architects haven’t come together on a set of unified design principals for the 2016 Olympics. (Tokyo did it by essentially assigning all design tasks to Tadao Ando.)  Haar and Gil want to rectify the lack of cooperation and communication within the city’s dynamic design community by creating "a permanent design network that pushes the design community in Chicago.”

The King of Pop Is Dead

So the King of Pop is dead. Actually, in a way he's come roaring back to life. He's been such a disgraced, spectral presence lately that it's something of a revelation to see images of him in his peak to remind us of what an amazing talent he was.

The first time I ever saw Michael Jackson was as a cartoon. There was an old Saturday morning series starring the Jackson 5. Michael was conspicuously younger than his brothers even in animated form, and while he was the star of the show, he was portrayed as an oddity of nature even then, like a dog that could talk.

As I recall, each episode included a performance by the Jackson 5. It was astonishing to hear Michael's voice in the context of animated performance. When I actually saw a live Jackson 5 performance on television, the impression was the same: that amazing voice leaped out of his slender body. Even his much-mocked speaking voice was mesmerizing. Only the four members of the Beatles and Elvis Presley had such a fascinating speaking voice. The gaps between their singing and speaking voices made their personas all the more intriguing. By contrast, Kurt Cobain's speaking voice was completely ordinary. It made him sound just another tense egomaniac.

On the other hand, unlike Cobain, or the Beatles for that matter, Michael Jackson remained a pure artifice. It's hard to imagine Jackson unplugged, or performing solo, or even just singing. He was a creature of the stage; even his MTV videos were filmed in explicitly artificial environments. He was the last great song and dance man, the link between the music hall and MTV.

Now that we can see his life story as a unified narrative, the appearance of his single sequined glove marks the beginning of his Baroque period, with its mildly alarming military imagery and flashes of arrogance. In his last years he performed in costumes that combined armor with bondage, as if he were growing an exoskeleton to support the vaporous being inside. 

I have a Facebook friend who had tickets for third-row seats for one of his London performances. She's pretty upset, but maybe it's just as well. Fifty performances in one place seems excessive and ill-advised. Jackson was always an elusive performer, best when he appeared on stage for a few songs, then leaving before he needed to catch his breath or to wipe sweat from his brow. Even his trademark dance move, the Moonwalk, imitated the act of leaving the stage. He seems to have understood the ephemerality of the spell he cast, but being an adult meant stepping outside the magic box, which he refused to do. Few performers in American history were so gifted, and few betrayed his gift so completely as Michael Jackson.

Ten Little Films, One Big Award

Poor Hugh Jackman. Assuming he's asked to host next year's Oscars awards, he'll have to sing and dance his way through 10 films nominated for best picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the number of nominees for best picture will be expanded from five to 10 films. The Academy noticed that ratings went up when the ceremony producers paid more attention to films that weren't nominated for best picture but were popular with filmgoers.

As Michael Cieply points out, between 1931 and 1943 the Academy generally nominated 10 films for best picture. There's nothing magical about five nominees. Five seemed about the right number when Hollywood's output fell below 100 films a year during the 1970s. Production levels are now around 300 per year. 

The Oscars will now be like the NBA playoffs, which were expanded so that more cities had a rooting interest in the playoffs. The worry is that that the larger number of nominees will dilute the value of a best picture nomination, which has been in decline recently. The Academy argues that a wider variety of films will be nominated--films like Wall-E and The Dark Knight and, who knows, maybe a Judd Apatow comedy.

How this expanded shortlist of best pictures will work out is anyone's guess. One clue may be the best foreign language film category. Here five nominees seem like too many considering the small number of people who have actually seen the films. Most years only one or two foreign films make any impact on the broader American consciousness. Consequently, this category is generally considered to be the hardest to predict. No one predicted Departures would win in 2009, primarily because no one in the US had seen it. Surprises can be good sometimes, especially if they bring attention to worthwhile films--like Departures. Generally, though, surprises are not good. Remember when Crash won over Brokeback Mountain?

The problem with the best picture category isn't that too few films are nominated. Instead, the problem is that the same kind of film is nominated. Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Reader were all well-crafted, generally (The Reader aside) noble films--and artistically timid affairs. They seemed made to be nominated rather than to be enjoyed. Only Slumdog Millionaire had any verve and daring. Slumdog's triumph aside, in the past variety has only revealed the narrowness of the Academy.

Urbanisms: Model Cities

The events of the past couple of weeks in Tehran reminds us that however much urbanism has changed, cities are still the incubators of revolutions.

Now that we’re pausing for breath in our rush to remake the planet into a giant generic city, many people are thinking about what kinds of buildings and cities we want to inhabit in the future. The latest issue of Triple Canopy, “Urbanisms: Model Cities,” examines the state of our cities right now at the end of a long period of expansion in global finance.

According to the editors, we’re now in a position to see the decade-long real estate boom for what it really was: “an agreeable daydream—of what could be bought, what could be built, and what could be justified.” Now that the credit lines have closed and the jackhammers silenced, we’re left with little more than “scaffolded remainders of hallucinated wealth.”

We’re also at a point at which urbanism as a concept has expanded to include “informatics and third-world slums, modular megachurches and modernist office towers, master-planned eco-cities in the American Southwest and midtown-Manhattan-themed condos atop the rubble of old Beijing.”

This is a good place to begin in an assessment of urbanism as it has developed during the last twenty years: the confluence of the abstractions of global capital and the concrete particularity of cities. Two articles taken together illustrate the theme. Angie Waller looks for a condo in a development in Beijing called Moma, named for the New York museum in the half-informed, free-associative manner of real estate developers. (That's her photograph above.) Jules and Romy Treneer tour an enclave of Chinese immigrants in the Sedaine-Popincourt neighborhood of Paris. The neighborhood has become a monoactivité, a site in which diverse economic activity has collapsed into a single one, in this case a collection of small textile shops with strange names like the Pull & Sweat Station. The shops are driving longtime neighborhood residents crazy.