Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, a documentary about the Memphis rock band Big Star. Their only album, release in 1972, was an unusually adventurous example of post-Beatles rock. Critics loved their music, but their record company, the great soul label Stax, never figured out how to transfer rock critics' praise into an effective marketing and distribution plan, and the band went defunct after their first album. Big Star has become a cult band, but one of its key members died in a car crash in 1978--he was working in a fast food restaurant at the time--and the film asks the question: Was their brief moment of fame worth it?
A similar tale is told in Sacrificial Youth, about a band of skateboard punks who attract the interest of a major label, much to their chagrin. The band embraces a number of low-fi genres, none of which you will recognize. The director Joe Losurdo has only a vague notion himself, but his camera sorts through the sub-subcultures for memorable images, if not narrative coherence.
Richard Florida, head of the Creative Class Group and chief advocate of the hipster approach to urban renewal, now admits cities shouldn't count on the creative class to revive decaying neighborhoods.
[T]he benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, [Florida] notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”
The failure of the creative class to move the needle much on rescuing declining American cities may also have to do with the isolation of hipster neighborhoods in places like Cleveland and Hartford. It's much easier to revive a distressed neighborhood when it's surrounded by healthier zones than it is to revive one neighborhood that's far away from anyplace else of comparable value. Wicker Park in Chicago in the 1990s worked because of its proximity to lakefront neighborhoods. The area around Temple University continues to struggle because it's marooned in blighted North Philadelphia.
Richard Florida's response to Joel Kotkin: Bollocks, you got it all wrong.
A very rare U.S. instance of German Expressionist architecture has been discovered in an old German neighborhood in Chicago. Expressionist buildings are not common even in their native land. Most of them were designed by the group of architects associated with Bruno Taut and the Arbeitstrat für die Kunst. The Weimar Republic period was the most fertile for the movement, when the mostly leftist architects hoped a socialist revolution was imminent yet felt powerless to help it along or even build much--hence their buildings' free-flowing lines at cross-purposes with each other.
On the near northwest side of Chicago, there is an apartment building which has a unique feature in its brickwork that Larry Zgoda speculates may be a connection to the German Expressionist architecture of the early 20th Century. The multi-unit apartment building is on the 1800 block of West Patterson and has several elements of romantic architecture including barley twist downspouts, ornamental iron, and carved stone shields. On one corner of the entry there a treatment in the brickwork that is reminiscent of the vertically dramatic compositions of German Expressionist architecture, especially the Chilehaus-Spitze, in Hamburg.
It's all over except the wrecking ball for Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Woman’s Hospital. Today Northwestern University confirmed that the building will be demolished to make way for a biomedical research facility. As a nod to the fury of preservationists and architects who objected to the demolition of Prentice, the university claims it will "invite many of the world’s best architectural firms, including Chicago firms" to compete for the chance to design the replacement structure.
Whatever. The best architects thought Prentice should be preserved. Anyway, I've followed this story for a long time, in part because Prentice is a perfect example of how modernist buildings get no respect these days. (Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Center also has a date with a demolition team.) If Prentice was a phony neo-classical pile it would have a better chance of survival. I also followed the story because my son was born in the hospital in 2004 and I remember being struck by both the structure's beauty and its neglect.
Alas, Prentice was perhaps too well-designed for its intended purpose, so it couldn't be re-purposed for anything other than what it was--a maternity hospital. Now I know how distinguished buildings get demolish despite all the protests.
Augusto Contento's Parallax Sounds is unlike any music documentary you've ever seen--and unlike any documentary you've ever seen. The film looks back on the post-rock music scene in 1990s Chicago, intercutting interviews with musicians with a Walter Ruttmann-style urban image montage. Contento, who co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Kênya Zanatta and co-produced with Giancarlo Grande, focuses on five key musicians: Steve Albini, David Grubbs, Damon Locks, Ken Vandermark, and Ian Williams. The interviews are filmed in Contento's trademark tracking shots. Most often the subjects appear on a water taxi chugging back and forth on the Chicago River. The musicians emerge as distinct characters, each with their own story. Although all of them are still working musicians, they seem a bit forlorn, a little lonely now that the scene is largely dead. (In fact, more musicians were originally scheduled to take part, but they had left Chicago long ago.) Only Vandermark seems still energized by his work. He's definitely the star of the film, his intensity cutting across Contento's languorous visual style.
The purpose of Parallax Sounds is not to recreate the local music scene of the 1990s as if one were there. Contento was a big fan of Chicago post-rock, which he heard as a young man in Italy. He's recreated that experience--listening to the music from afar and imaging the city that produced it. No peripheral figures appear in the film: no journalists who covered the scene, no one from Thrill Jockey Records, no fans. Despite its bustling air, the film has a solitary feel to it.
If Contento is uninterested in creating a conventional documentary, he really captured visual experience of the city, particularly the downtown area and lake front. The movie begins in deep winter--the frozen lake shore is chilling, literally--and ends in high summer when the city really opens up.
Contento seems to thaw himself. His Strade d'Acqua (Roads of Water, 2009) consisted almost entirely in long tracking shots, mostly of a boat traveling on the Amazon River. In Parallax Sounds he uses the same basic technique--he must have bought a monthly pass to the Chicago Water Taxi--but with greater attention to composing within the frame. At times he approaches the abstractions of Ruttmann and Alberto Cavalcanti in Rien que les heures (1926), but warmer than the former and less playful than the latter.
If you're looking for a film that captures the post-rock scene of the 1990s as it once happened, then you'll be disappointed. Instead, Parallax Sounds traces the music's coming into being, its origins in the city itself. The film is a way of listening.
The media is still trying to process the results of the U.S. election. Most of the commentary considers what the Republican Party should do now that it's lost the popular vote in five of the six post-Cold War presidential elections. David Frum, for instance, already has a book out about it.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Republicans are master rhetoricians and they'll figure something out. They've already sold tax cuts for the rich to poor rural whites. All they have to do is figure out how to sell misogyny to women, homophobia to gays, and xenophobia to Hispanics. Then they're all set, except for one more problem.
Occasionally David Brooks comes up with a good column, and today he uses sociological approach, usually deployed to show how liberals are getting something wrong, to tell Republicans immigration reform isn't going to be enough to make Hispanics and Asian-Americans to come running to them. For these groups,
when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.
For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.
The fundamental Republican equation, more government=less opportunity, doesn't make sense for people outside their core constituency of white Protestants. I'm a white Protestant--my family has been on these shores since the 1660s--and it's never made sense to me, either.
Now that the presidential election is over and the New York City subways have been mostly dried out, it's time to turn attention to less dramatic events.
Parallax Sounds is finally coming to Chicago in commercial release. I've written about this film before, more than once as a matter of fact. It's a documentary about the post-rock scene in 1990s Chicago. Director Augusto Grande has a languid style heavy on tracking shots, which is unusual in an interview film. Grande's long-duration shots make landscape into an expressive element. In Parallax Sounds the setting is the architecture of Chicago, especially downtown along the river. It's an unusual combination, the confluence of music and architecture, and Grande pulls it off. Parallax Sounds plays at the Gene Siskal Film Center November 16th and 17th.
With New Jersey's infrastructure washed out to sea and New Yorkers eyeing the surrounding waters more warily, more attention is being paid to the arcane art of city planning. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association is staging an exhibit, exhibition, "Grand Reductions: Ten diagrams that changed urban planning." Diagrams can be powerful precisely because they reduce the complexities of landscape into something that can be understood in a single sweep of the eye and, therefore, subject to large-scale change--much like a storm.
Traditional urban planning regards the city as something embedded within a certain region, connected to its immediate physical surroundings. Greg Lindsay is the chief proponent of the view that cities are nodes in an abstract global network. The model for the contemporary city, which Lindsay calls an aerotropolis, is the airport. In the introduction to the BLDGBLOG interview with Lindsay, Geoff Manaugh explains,
The remarkable claims of John Kasarda's and Greg Lindsay's new book are made evident by its subtitle: the aerotropolis, or airport-city, is nothing less than "the way we'll live next." It is a new kind of human settlement, they suggest, one that "represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities." Through a kind of spatial transubstantiation, the aerotropolis turns abstract economic flows—disembodied currents of raw capital—into the shining city form of tomorrow.
The world of the aerotropolis is a world of instant cities—urbanization-on-demand—where nations like China and Saudi Arabia can simply "roll out cities" one after the other. "Each will be built faster, better, and more cheaply than the ones that came before," Aerotropolis suggests: whole cities created by the warehousing demands of international shipping firms. In fact, they are "cities that shipping and handling built," Lindsay and Kasarda quip—urbanism in the age of Amazon Prime.
Jeanne Gang's proposal to build a tower above Prentice hospital is an original idea, which isn't to say it's a good one yet or can't be reworked into a good one. Bertrand Goldberg's design makes upward expansion easy. The core of the building can support a much taller building than it does today. Gang drew up a 31-story tower springing from it. It's a quick sketch and not a finished proposal, so a detailed evaluation isn't possible. The initial renderings, however, look jarring and awful. The distinct shapes of Goldberg's cantilevered cloverleafs are overwhelmed by the mass of the addition. The original building looks like a mistake, as if someone pulled the building up from its foundations and exposed an odd structural underpinning. Already straining to stand out from the towers of Northwestern's hospital campus all around it, Goldberg's cloverleaf appears even more lost in the glass.
It's certain that Gang can improve the design. She's a tactile architect greatly sensitive to materials. Surely she can devise a better interaction with Goldberg's cement forms. Her design's main value in its current state is as a concept: a way out of the impasse between preservationists who want to preserve the building and Northwestern University, which wants to demolish it to make way for a research lab. An architect of Gang's stature buys time--for the mayor to delay his final decision and for preservationists to present a viable plan to preserve the original hospital. It provides cover for the Streeterville alderman to continue to block the demolition.
Most of all, if Gang's design is ultimately built, the success gives credence to a set of preservationist arguments with implications beyond a Prentice: that late Modernism is no longer the architectural equivalent of go go boots and that hospital design can take another form besides big box institutionalism. If Prentice goes down, then any building from that era will remain imperiled.
Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, flying against all conventional urban planning wisdom, proposes making it harder to ride a bike in the city. He puts forth a plan to tax bike riders in every way they could possibly be taxed. Details are here, but don't bother reading because he's not serious about the proposal as a revenue source. Here is his real point:
How can anyone argue that the city should spend cash to create bike lanes for pedaling One Percenters while not having the cash to hire enough cops to protect neighborhood folks dying in gang wars?
The Rahmfather isn't the mayor of Portlandia. He's the mayor of Chicago. But his sucking up to bicyclists seems less about serving Chicago and more about appealing to hipsters on the East and West coasts as he stokes his national political ambitions.
Kass is a conservative posing as a swaggering populist in the Mike Royko mold. He calls bicyclists the "One Percenters of the Commuter Class," appropriating Occupy Wall Street language to serve the phony anti-elitist ends of the Republican Party. Kass complains Mayor Emanuel wants to build 450 miles of new bikeways by 2020, but Kass never mentions the benefits of bike lanes--benefits that extend well beyond the relatively small number of people who use them. His column is all about the mayor and Kass's campaign to position himself as Emanuel's antagonist. It's about reducing a complex urban issue to a clash of egos.
Kass is completely wrong about the cost-benefits analysis of urban bike lanes, but his column is a cautionary lesson about the gap between urban planners and the populations they serve, particularly the shot-and-a-beer crowd of older American cities--Kass's intended audience. Community involvement is a new buzzword in architecture and urban planning, but it's more complicated than handing over the pencil to residents. Urban communities can be riven with factionalism and parochialism, but these divisions can be overcome, or at least tip-toed around. The manipulation of these divisions for political ends, however, is much harder to overcome.
We're having Wages of Fear weather in Chicago right now, so it's hard to think of anything fun to do except diving into a pool. After three days of temperatures over 100 degrees you start to think something, somewhere, has gone awry and we're starting to leave normalcy behind. Here are two examples of men who are showing us the way to the upcoming madness.
In the New York Times Sam Anderson announces, "There comes a time in the life span of every culture when it becomes necessary to think obsessively about LeBron James." As hard as this is to admit, Anderson may be right. In Anderson's view, James is the first truly dialectical athelete.
LeBron James has been a flying contradiction — a man whose every positive virtue contains its own negation. He is (according to the popular narrative) both lovable and odious, a ball hog and too deferential, incredibly clutch and a choke artist. He is Schrödinger’s superstar: simultaneously one of the very greatest players of all time and a fundamentally flawed squanderer of talent. If anything, his championship this year will not simplify this story. It only makes it more complex.
James isn't a model sports hero, like Michael Jordan. he of the "impossibly coherent narrative." Rather, James is a conundrum for our culture to solve.
One possibility is that James represents the end times for American sports, it's dialectical development from elegant clarity to a proliferation of contradictions. It's a train of thought Slavoj Žižek might pick up on--how James is absolutely peripheral to the culture yet somehow embodying its central contradictions. Maybe, if Žižek could focus on the topic long enough.
The talk of book reviews this summer is Slavoj Žižek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The book is supposed to be Žižek's masterwork, his attempt to finally get out from under his image as the Borat of philosophy. Jonathan Rée's review of Less Than Nothing is representative--and much like my own reaction to The Parallax View (2009), his previous masterwork:
Sad bookworms such as me, with rows of ragged volumes of Hegel and Marx on our shelves, will find plenty of well-made points in these pages, but many readers may find themselves lapsing into baffled torpor. Even if you are attracted by Žižek's Hegelian fundamentalism, you are bound to wonder how it connects with his spectacular radicalism. After all it never led Hegel in that direction: he was notoriously timid about political change. And if we accept that there is no truth without error, we may well conclude that it is better to cling to the habits that were good enough for our ancestors than to stake the happiness of future generations on a gamble with incalculable stakes and uncertain prizes.
It's been busy here in One-Way Street land. I spent a blazing hot Memorial Day weekend (Fourth of July on Memorial Day, as a weatherman someplace said) camping with the family--we made it through one of two planned nights. That blast of summer was followed by a forty-degree plunge in temperature, capped off with a miserable walk across the Loop this morning in a driving rain. I did manage to pause at Wolf Point long enough to wonder, again, how the Kennedys are going to cram three buildings into that site.
These past few weeks I've been on the front lines of the monetization of content struggle faced by virtually every media outlet on the Web. But I have been keeping an eye out for interesting articles that are worth reading more in depth.
First up this week is an interview with Paul Gyford, the man behind Samuel Pepys blog and Twitter feed. Pepys was a high-ranking government official in London who started keeping a diary in 1660 to record his recovery from intestinal surgery (without anesthetic). He recorded every event big and small until 1669, when he feared he was going blind. He saw some big events: the restoration of King Charles II, both a Great Plague and a Great Fire, along with several hurricanes of spousal fury (he would follow a pretty ankle pretty much anywhere). His approach to government administration and prose style were both modern: efficient and honest. English literature during the 1660s was especially lively and witty, and Pepys' diary is one of the most important literary artifacts from the period--and among the most enjoyable to read.
Another lively chronicler is Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist. Her droll humor seems very Atlantic corridor, but she's coming out with a book-length study of how the Texas approach to conservation and energy policies (basically, turn them over to a guy named "Smokey" to eviscerate them) went national. Collins recounts the time when the nation awaited the output from Dick Cheney's infamous National Energy Policy Development Group.
“We’ll have a strong conservation statement,” the president promised as the world awaited the Cheney energy policy’s arrival. Later that day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was also asked whether Bush would be calling on Americans to use less energy, and took the opportunity to clarify his boss’s statement a tad. “That’s a big no,” Fleischer said. “The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.” God, it seemed, smiled upon the Hummers in his flock. He looked upon the empty room with a burning lightbulb and found it good.
The on-again-off-again New City Reader project is back on. Architectural theorist Kazys Varnelis has decided not only to revive the printed newspaper, but also the old tradition of tacking up an issue on a wall in public space so that anyone can ready it. Varnelis and his team discovered that posting newspapers on a public building in New York City required cost-prohibitive permits. The wooden barriers around construction sites seemed promising until they were threatened by mobsters protecting construction workers, who you would think could protect themselves. Anyway, Varnelis remains committed to supporting the print edition of newspapers as a political object:
Newspapers [. . ] identify you. Reading one telegraphs the political implications of reading in space. When an adult opens one at the breakfast table, it signifies to children that news is important, something one attends to as a citizen. Reading a newspaper is not reading one’s e-mail for pleasure or profit. It is an engagement with the news, a declaration of interest in public matters. It is hardly an accident that reading has universally been a precondition of the right to vote, and that mass democracy could only take hold after mass literacy. Reading a newspaper in public, or even carrying it in public identifies you as a member of a community, often betraying your political affiliation and even, in the case of papers addressing a diaspora, your ethnicity. Newspapers are not just a public matter, common to all, they are a matter of diverse publics, joined by the common experience of reading the paper, an experience reinforced by the appearance of papers in the public realm. Reading a newspaper in public is a provocation, a call to action, to at least bury one’s nose in a newspaper of one’s own.
That's all from me this week. I'm about to hop on a train, where I will read a newspaper, via a paid subscription, on an iPad.
One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."
. The book is supposed to be Žižek's masterwork, his attempt to finally get out from under his image as the Borat of philosophy. Jonathan Rée's review of Less Than Nothing is representative--and much like my own reaction to 
(2009), his previous masterwork:
(1992) and 
(1999) when he was more interested in a teaching a set of texts, particularly Hitchcock's films. A brief and vivid view of Žižek can be found in 
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