A goodbye to the Berlin wall

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. So far nothing has beaten the New York Times’s excellent interactive feature on the route of the Berliner Mauer (thanks Chris). The way you can slide between the images of then and now is one of the most inspired uses of interactivity I think I’ve ever seen on a newspaper website. It is distinctive because it has an almost Victorian slowness to it, like the kind of end-of-the-pier attraction you only ever come across in museums, these days.

Other coverage of note (I’ll hopefully add more later): Jana Scholze, writing in Icon Magazine, on the final demolition of another symbol of post-war Berlin. The Palast Der Republik (above) doubled as the DDR’s parliament building and, I kid you not, a discotheque.

“The “Palace of the Republic” was somehow the anti-symbol of the socialist reality while at the same time representing the ideals and visions of its people. The modernist glass and steel box by architect Heinz Graffunder seemed to represent a young country confidently looking into its future. True to its name, it was a house for the people. Its open doors and easy accessibility signified the intended audience: everyone, the whole republic. It was a place to go, to meet, to spend time. Not surprisingly, many visitors to the Palast seemed unaware of its main function: it was the seat of the DDR’s parliament.”

Also worth looking at is Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian, on the precise moment the cold war ended:

The first frontier crossing to be opened was at Bornholmerstrasse, on a bridge that goes over the S-Bahn, the overground city railway. My friend Werner Krätschell, a pastor of the East German protestant church which did much to shelter the East German opposition, was among the early ones to come across. It was soon after 11pm. The frontier guards put a stamp in his ID card, across his photograph. He checked with them that he could come back.

No, they replied, that stamp means you are emigrating permanently. He had left two young children at home, so he tried to turn round his car, to go back. But just as he was trying to turn round, in the narrow frontier crossing leading on to the bridge, a frontier soldier came running up and shouted to his colleague: “Comrade, a new order! They can come back.” So Werner drove on into the west.

share this
———————–

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The best cup of hot chocolate in Worcester

The best cup of hot chocolate
in Worcester

Originally uploaded by
seandodson

Anna and I are beginning to settle into our new life in Worcester. The city might be a little less roomy than Brighton, but it’s perfectly charming and, surprisingly, far more cosmopolitan than its provincial reputation led us to expect. Our latest discovery is Bolero, a lovely, little Italian-flavoured cafe tucked away on St Nicolaus Street. It’s all leather sofas, free Sunday papers and shelves full of hardback art and design books for you to peruse. It’s got Blue Note and Liberty record sleeves on virtually every wall, a delightful bedecked back-yard where the smokers hang out, and table service. Not to mention this very lovely cup of caramel-flavoured hot chocolate that I devoured this afternoon.

share this
———————–

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Classic album cover designs as postage stamps

Just love these classic album covers set out as a set of postage stamps. Particularly delighted at the inclusion of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies which was designed by the great Peter Saville. Inevitably there’s some great covers missing. At least two odd choices too: the inclusion of both Pink Floyd’s the Division Bell and Led Zeppelin IV (top left and bottom centre respectively). To my mind, neither sleeve is a classic while Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin would seem much better choices. It’s still a nice set, mind. Sure to be as successful as last year’s British Design Classics when it’s released in early January.

According to the Royal Mail:

This issue celebrates the work of the album sleeve designer, not the music. Royal Mail began with very extensive research of existing lists and polls of ‘Greatest Album Covers’ in books, music press and the web. This trawl of literally thousands of albums uncovered many that were common to most lists.

The editors of three of the UK’s most influential music publications together with a number of graphic designers and design writers were asked to independently list the most significant album sleeve artwork used on records by British artists.

Royal Mail reviewed all the research to assemble a shortlist of albums that spanned the decades from the 1960s. Some albums could not be included for operational reasons (for instance, designs that were too dark), after final deliberation the ten albums were arrived at.

share this
———————–

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Politics and the English Language and Nick Griffin

I enjoyed watching Nick Griffin flounder of BBC Question Time last night. David Dimbleby handled him beautifully, like an experienced barrister might toy with a petty rogue. He snared Griffin about 14 minutes in, using a speech the leader of the far-right British National Party made (alongside David Duke, leader of the KKK) in the US, where he said:

“If you put that [expelling non-whites from Britain] as your sole aim to start with you are going to get absolutely nowhere. So instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity. We use saleable words: freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can attack you on those ideas.”

It was over 50 years ago that George Orwell (right) in Politics and the English Language remarked how such words were often used by politicians with the intention to deceive:

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. 

share this
———————–

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Factory days: the Hacienda must be rebuilt!

I have been sailing through Peter Hook’s The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club his account of the decline and fall of the Factory empire. Although he is not exactly Tom Wolfe or Nick Kent he tells his tale with some wit and much stoicism. The legendary club nearly ruined him and the rest of the band, as they sank in many millions of pounds to keep it going. Hooky reckons that for every person who came through the door of the Hacienda, it cost him and the rest of New Order around £10. So buy him a drink next time you see him.

The books full of anecdotes and quotes from many famous factory figures (Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Mike Pickering et al). Here’s the club’s former DJ Dave Haslam on the Hacienda’s wonderful music policy:

“Whereas music in clubs is now pigeion-holed and segregated, in those first years of acid house, the dance floor was open minded. In retrospect DJs have tried to convince us of thier purist underground credentials; that wasn’t really the case. In the acid-house era you would have heard hous, and techno, but also hip-hop records like ‘know How’ by Young MC, New Order and Euro-disco tracks by Italian production teams.”

Are you ready for the internet of things?

Thought it might be nice to mention the launch of  Council, spearheaded by my sometime collaborator (and all round top man) Rob Van Kranenberg. He describes as a “thinktank for the Internet of Things”. Rob’s been building a formidable network for this for ages and will officially launch in Brussels on December. According to Rob:

“The Internet of Things (IOT) is a vision. Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role – however small – in the larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance at item level and in public space. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory budgeting, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans and other humans, human and things and human and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies – the noise – is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with ‘total’ connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable in.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Where: Imal, Brussels
When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00)
Workshop 185 (including lunch and dinner)
Register: here

Black swans seen

I recently returned from a weekend in London where Anna and I found this delightful pair of black swans in St James’s Park. They are beautiful birds, as tame as pets, with long, looping necks and bright red beaks the colour of post boxes. They reminded me of the poem by the late James Merill:

Illusion: the black swan knows how to break
Through expectation, beak
Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,
And move across our lives, if the lake is life,
And by the gentlest turning of its neck
Transform, in time, time’s damage;
To less than a black plume, time’s grief.

Defying yesterday’s ‘super injunction’ is a victory for the twittering classes

I’ve always thought that the libel lawyers Carter-Ruck sounded like a euphemism or, perhaps, a piece of forgotten cockney rhyming slang. Anyway, I’m delighted that they have dropped their attempt to prevent the British media from reporting on the proceedings of parliament. It is, in part, a victory for the chorus of twitterers that defied the ban yesterday. Only hours after the ruling was announced the full report as made available on Wikileaks and transmitted across the internet by hundreds of users of the microblogging site Twitter. Carter-Ruck, acting on behalf of the oil firm Trafigura, were attempting to prevent the Guardian reporting on a question tabled on Monday by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly.

The rule of prior restraint has been gaining ground in recent years, despite misgivings from European Court of Human Rights, as judges seem more willing to allow last moment injunctions against the publication of exposes. But the kind of injunction used on Monday (a so-called super-injunction) not only prevents publication, but also makes the injunction itself secret. It is a type of censorship that recalls Apartheid-era South Africa, when newspaper editors were not allowed to leave pages blank or blacked-out when they had been censored by the government.

Interviewed in the Guardian, Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, said:

“The injunction against the Guardian publishing questions to ministers tabled by the Labour MP Paul Farrelly is an example of a chill wind blowing more widely through the press. In increasing numbers, aggressive lawyers, who used to use libel law to protect their clients, are now using injunctions to secure privacy and confidentiality. They have found it is a legal technique which shuts stories down very quickly so that now it is not a question of publish and be damned, as it used to be: we are now finding that we can’t even publish at all.”

Harold Evans: On filleting the fishmongers

Nice to see Harold Evans back at it. The 81-year-old editor, who has a new book to promote (left), is interviewed into today’s Guardian. I’ve been re-reading his Newsman’s English recently, which includes this prize catch: “There is a joke about a fishmonger which makes the point [about the need for economy in writing]. It is an old joke, but perhaps we can regard it as sanctified by custom; and say it should be recited as initiation ceremony for text editors. The fishmonger had a sign which said:

FRESH FISH SOLD HERE

The fishmonger had a friend who persuaded him to rub out the word FRESH – because the naturally he wouldn’t expect to sell fish that wasn’t fresh; to rub out the word HERE – because naturally he’s selling it here, in the shop; to rub out the word SOLD – because he isn’t giving it away; and finally to rub out the word FISH – because you can smell it a mile off.

The King is dead. Long live the King of Hay-on-Wye.

My new job, as a journalism lecturer at the University of Worcester, started in earnest on Friday with a field trip to Hay-On-Wye for our new cohort. We set the students the task of tracking down two well known faces in the town. Lucy Powell, (above, centre) the former landlady of the oldest pub in town and Richard Booth, (above, left and right) the self-proclaimed King of Hay.

It was great, in particular, to meet Richard Booth (my new colleague Claire Wolfe spent the more time with Lucy Powell), who is widely credited as being the instigator of the world-famous “book town”. Now well into his seventies the King is still in possession of a keen mind full of lively ideas. His latest is to give away over 200,000 books to anyone who fancies establishing a book town of their own. On Sunday the town staged a mock execution an proclaimed that the Independent Kingdom of Hay was now an independent commonwealth instead. And the King’s reaction to all this? He stayed away but was seen drinking with Royalist sympathisers in the Crown. Where else?

The seven peaks of Azerbaijan and other architectual wonders

Bjarke Ingels of Danish architects BIG talks about three impressive projects. The third, a plan to design an island full of man-made mountains, blew my mind a little (via).

Concept for Zira Island, Azerbaijan by BIG architects

How we might live when the water runs out

Desert cities, for a generation raised on dreams of Tatooine anyway, are far from a new idea, George Lucas’s sand planet drifted in on a dust clouds left behind by Frank Herbert’s Dune. Before that, authors such as Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson mined the sands of Mars to create early environmental allegories that predicted Earth’s demise.

Lately, moreover, the fears of science fiction writers have given way to massive commercial enterprises on a scale that retains the capacity to dazzle. Desert cities from Dubai to Nevada continue to capture the imagination, perhaps because they appeal to both the something-out-of-nothing pioneer spirit and those with a desire to build eco-oasis for after the flood. Only today China announces its China-Vegas a 100 sq km “New World Resort City” in Inner Mongolia, although one presupposes that it will be the former model that will be constructed.

The picture above (via bldg) is from an exhibition entitled Out of Water | innovative technologies in arid climates at the University of Toronto and designed by Matsys, a design studio in San Francisco. Its founder, Andrew Kudless, regards the desert city as a new urban prototype. Here’s why:

“Although this science fiction novel sounded alien in 1965, the concept of a water-poor world is quickly becoming a reality, especially in the American Southwest. Lured by cheap land and the promise of endless water via the powerful Colorado River, millions have made this area their home. However, the Colorado River has been desiccated by both heavy agricultural use and global warming to the point that it now ends in an intermittent trickle in Baja California. Towns that once relied on the river for water have increasingly begun to create underground water banks for use in emergency drought conditions. However, as droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, these water banks will become more than simply emergency precautions.”

Sietch Nevada projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice. Cellular in form, these structures constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, and urban agriculture and aquaculture. However, the Sietch is also a bunker-like fortress preparing for the inevitable wars over water in the region.

Keith Waterhouse files his last copy

1783

Originally uploaded by mjkghk

I was so busy yesterday with my new job that I didn’t get time to write anything about the death of Fleet Street legend Keith Waterhouse. Although he could be as curmudgeonly as a police detective deprived of his dinner, he was a fine novelist and playwright
and an inspiration to me. Not least for his book, On Newspaper Style, which began life as the Daily Mirror’s in-house stylebook. Someone “borrowed” my copy a few years ago and I’m reduced to a photocopied version, which I still distribute section of to my students.

I would like another copy, but unfortunately his death seem to have rather inflated the price of the originals. Amazon is currently selling an original hardback for, ahem, £1000.

The Birdcage of Bedford Square

Delighted to see the restoration of Brighton Bandstand on the promenade. Originally known as the Birdcage or the Bedford Square Bandstand, it reopened last week as a working bandstand (holding proper tiddely-om-pom-pom concerts and all that) and a viewing pavilion overlooking the English Channel. There’s a nice cafe in the basement as well. The £850,000 needed to rebuild the structure, which had been left to the elements since the 1960s, was stumped up by the local council, after a campaign led by three local women.

Will the MCC’s masterplan for Lord’s stand the test of time?

I’ve had a small break from blogging brought on in part by the absorbing nature of this summer’s Ashes cricket. I was at Lord’s yesterday to witness a classic day’s play. England broke through in the morning, only to be frustrated by some admirable Australian belligerence later on.

The old stadium, like the tenacity of the Australian cricketers, never fails to impress me and its redevelopment is something that I find fascinating. I sat in the lower level of the Compton Stand, and once again admired the way that the ground manages to combine so much tradition and so much of what is modern. So it with mixed feelings that I learn that soon the old stand could be no more. The Marylebone Cricket Club, the ground’s owners, has recently commissioned Herzog & de Meuron, the architectural practice responsible for Beijing’s Bird Nest and Munich’s Allianz Arena, to design a masterplan for the ground’s redevelopment.

According to a report in Building Design, the plan is to increase the ground’s capacity by 11,000 to 40,000, with the existing Compton, Edrich, Warner, Allen and Tavern stands supplanted by “lectern-style edifices”. While The Times recently reported that the plan will also incorporate several subterranean levels and possibly incorporate the Victorian railway tunnels that exist beneath the ground. There will be a new museum and indoor school, as well as a further redevelopment of the pavillion.

Herzog & de Meuron were also responsible for the transformation of Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern, as well as the gallery’s extension, which is proving controversial. The redevelopment of Lord’s, while not without precedent, the old ground has always embraced new architectural styles, might prove even more divisive, but at least the increased capacity might make it easier to get hold of elusive tickets.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures at 30

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures

Originally uploaded by Littlepixel™

This week see the 30th anniversary of the release of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the New Musical Express has published an anniversary “special” featuring interviews with the surviving members (sadly not online), which we can probably take as a sign that the nation’s 16/17 year olds still think Joy Division matter an awful lot. Which is amazing for an album that peaked at number 71 in the album charts on its initial release.

The album was recorded in the winter of 1979 in an unheated studio in Stockport and it captures the mood of imposing decay of Northern Britain with its austere and dark production. Unknown Pleasures is firmly fixed in a time and place: the Manchester of the late seventies, and yet its appeal endures.

At the time Jon Savage, writing in Melody Maker in 1979, praised, ” Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss. …. [a] perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th century – seen gaping like rotten teeth from an orange bus.”

In remains, to my mind, one of the greatest albums of all time. From the deliciously minimalist cover designed by Peter Saville (which was recently parodied as a Pelican Classic, above right) to the equally minimal, and haunting, production by Martin Hannett, to the ten beautifully crafted songs which simply refuse to date. We are still in its axis, musically at least. Think of this way, we are as far away in time from Unknown Pleasures as Joy Division were from the music of Perry Cormo and Frankie Laine and yet still it features on the front cover of the music press.

share this
———————–

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::