Calling international rescue: the forgotten furniture of Changdigarh

To London on Friday to attend the private view of a rather unusual exhibition revolving around the furniture of arch-modernists Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret created for the Indian city of Chandigarh. Situated in P3, an enormous subterranean gallery beneath the University of Westminster, the exhibition tells the story of the timely rescue of furniture from the city’s public buildings created by the two cousins in the 1960s. Chandigarh, the administrative capital of both the Punjab and Haryana, was India’s first planned city and is home to several architectural projects by the two great Swiss architects.

The city is world renowned for its urban planning and building, but the pair also worked on the smaller details of public life, including many fine examples of modernist furniture. Over the years many of the original handmade pieces had fallen into disrepair and were being cast aside by the the city, or else being stolen and finding its way into foreign auction houses . Apparently the curators stumbled across several items being disposed of in the street and requested that they be allowed to save for posterity.

It’s a great exhibition, fittingly housed in the university’s former concrete construction hall. The examples of furniture differ greatly from our expectations of what constitutes modernist design: handmade, vernacular and largely constructed of wood. No two pieces are identical.

The hall also reconstructs a section of the city’s Palace of Justice, including a handsome spiral defendant’s dock. Much of the furniture on show is a reminder that we often fail to appreciate until we are threatened with its loss. Indeed, the Times of India has reported that now thathe t city’s heritage is being internationally recognised, the government has belatedly realised what’s been going on and issued an urgent directive instructing government departments “not sell or dispose of any heritage furniture to any person or agency.”

The Furniture of Chandigarh – Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, June 20 to July 12
P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London Nw1 5LS
+44 (0)20 7911 5876
http://www.p3exhibitions.com.com

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Ryszard Kapuscinski and the protests in Iran

The sudden protest in Tehran burst like a firework onto the internet last night. The Boston Globe published an impressive gallery of vociferous photojournalism within a couple of hours of the demonstration’s close (including the image above). Video of the protests taken on mobile phones arrived in an abundence, leading one source to argue that YouTube was providing better coverage than the major news networks (there was certainly more of it). The debate in Iran, over a protested election result, burnt so brightly that the microblogging service, Twitter, has even postponed rescheduled maintainance to allow Iranians to continue tweeting while the government shut down opposition websites and choked as many channels of communciation as it could.

Most commentators agree that it has been an extraordinary night, the likes of which haven’t been seen in Iran for 30 years. Back then, in 1979, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, covered the Islamic Revolution with a memorable economy. I decided to dig out my copy of Shah of Shahs, his splendid account the events in Iran in 1979, and found one passage that, give a word or two, could have been written today:

“Now the most important moment, the moment that will determine the fate of the country … and the revolution, is the moment when one policeman walks from his post toward one man on the edge of the crowd, raises his voice, and orders the man to go home. The policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd are ordinary, anonymous people, but their meeting has historic significance.

They are both adults, they have both lived through certain events, they have both their individual experiences.

The policeman’s experience: If I shout at someone and raise my truncheon, he will first go numb with terror and then take to his heels. The experience of the man at the edge of the crowd: At the sight of an approaching policeman I am seized by fear and start running. On the basis of these experiences we can elaborate a scenario: The policeman shouts, the man runs, others take flight, the square empties.

But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It’s a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that’s the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence.

We don’t know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid – and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman’s ally and the man in the crowd’s foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything.

Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddenly broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can now go their own ways.

Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy.

Ryszard Kapuściński

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The

What the BNP election brought home to me

And so I arrive in Manchester on the day after the election of the far right British National Party to the European parliament. It’s good to be back North, a place and an idea and a set of traditions that I’ve always been intensely proud of and so, naturally, I feel a heavy note of dismay about such a disastrous result.

According to some excellent coverage in the Manchester Evening News, the city is awakening to the grim realisation that its allowed Nick Griffin, the party’s leader (who can be seen above being pelted with eggs) as one of the region’s eight seats. David Ottewell, in a strident op-ed piece, summoned up the spirit of Edmund Burke, citing his well-known maxim that “all that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing”. This stuck something of chord with me. Although I couldn’t vote in this region, I had allowed my electoral registration to lapse and, therefore by extension, I am one of the many apathetic millions guilty of allowing this to happen: our inaction and complacency has allowed he far right a legitimate democratic voice.

I mulled all this over while enjoying a delicious belly of pork at the New Emperor, a Cantonese restaurant, all piped jazz saxophones, polystyrene ceiling tiles and watercolour wallpanels, and wondered what the BNP would do with a wonderful places like this, if they ever got their grip on some real power.

So it is worth reminding ourselves that the BNP are all about: that it wishes to repatriate all non-ethnic Britons, including owners of Chinese restaurants.  That Andrew Brons, the BNP’s elected candidate for Yorkshire and Humberside, was once belonged to a neo-nazi group whose members were found gulity of firebombing Jewish synagogues; and that Nick Griffin, elected in the North West, believes that the gas chambers found at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Majdanek (and hasitly disassembled elsewhere) as a “nonsense” and a “total lie”.

So, like the egg throwers who pelted Griffin at Westminster today (worth it alone for the image, bottom centre, where Griffin’s pantomime mask of dignity falls from his face), I’ve decided that I can no longer do nothing. It’s been a while since I’ve attended an anti-facist demonstration, but this trip back to the North, and this splendid dinner in one of the quarters most threatened, has really brought the threat of the BNP home to me.

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My father’s family tree

It was my father’s 60th birthday back in April. To help him celebrate Anna and I presented him with this family tree (high-res here). The whole project took about two weeks to complete and although we still have some gaps on the Dodson line (Irish records being less complete than English ones) we did manage to trace our ancestory back to 1582, to the small hamlet of Noke in Oxfordshire. Other branches stretch out to Licolnshire and through our home county of Yorkshire. My darling Anna drew the image above, adding much attractive detail to the drawing.

On a self-depracating note, as part of my research I did uncover the origins of the name Dodson. According to the Internet Surname Database, Dodson is “a patronymic of the Middle English given name “Dodde, Dudde”, from the Olde English pre 7th Century personal byname “Dodda, Dudda”, And its meaning? Ahem, Dodda or Dudda is ultimately from a Germanic root “dudd, dodd”, meaning “something rounded” and used to denote a “short, rotund man.” Which delighted Anna no end.

Can I also add a note of thanks to both Paul Weaver, who through the shared ancestor of Thomas Stokes I was able to trace our Oxfordshire roots as far back as to Queen Elizabeth’s reign; and Jacky Clarke, who through our shared ancestor, Camack Lammyan,I was able to trace our line through Coningsby in Licolnshire to discover that one of our forebears, Peter Desforges, was a huguenot refugee who landed in Tower Wharf, not far from my old stomping ground of Brick Lane in east London, in 1681. Many thanks to you both.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: sixty years on

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may or may not be the most important novel of the 20th, as claimed on the front page of the Times earlier this week, although it is a very important one. The novel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its first publication on June 08. Naturally all the papers have been full of it. Here’s a rundown of the best bits:

The Torygraph offers a handy A-Z of Orwell, which includes the delightful vignette about the Queen Mother sending a Royal Messenger to Secker & Warburg to buy a copy of Animal Farm. They’d sold out. So off he goes in his bowler hat to the Freedom Bookshop, the anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel.

It also backs up this coverage with this splendid collection of Orwell quotations and points towards clips from this excellent BBC documentary on his life and words, now available on YouTube.

Over at the New Statesman, which once spiked Orwell’s eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War, Keith Gesson praises Orwell’s “eternal vigilance”, while DJ Taylor claims that his novels of the 1930s were even more frightening.

Robert Harris in the Times offers this more general piece which suggests, erroneously in my opinion, that 1984 would have lost some of its “unassailable posthumous integrity” if Orwell hadn’t have suffered an early death. Really?

The LA Times takes the tourist route: you too can go on a Orwell holiday.

While I might go and see Orwell: A Celebration at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall.

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Bookmarks for May 27

Castleford gets this spectacular S-shaped bridge over the River Aire.

+ Futher evidence of the “Berlinification” of London. Wayne Hemmingway, of RedorDead, proposes a “pop-up shop” to serve up outside City Hall.

+ Johann Hari lays into David Cameron and reminds that he once said his wife is “highly unconventional” because “she went to a day school.”

+ First look at the Velo-style bike hire scheme for London (thanks Zlata), including a nice graphic of how it will look in Spitalfields.

+ The New Socialism. Wired identifies the revival of the left.

+ How Harold Pinter loved cricket. Maybe that was the origin of his obsession with pauses.

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Herb and Dorothy: the Medicis of modest means

I really want to see Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about an extraordinary couple who built up a major art collection on a humble postman’s salary. Despite their modest means they built up a superb collection of minimalist and conceptual art in their tiny one-bed apartment in Manhattan. After 30 years the collection was valued at several million dollars,  so they donated the lot to the National Gallery of Art in the US rather than sell it and be rich. The film by Megumi Sasaki is doing the festival rounds. Hope it comes to the UK very soon.

Google is the mountain and we are staring at the peak

I’ve been thinking a lot about this essay by Tom Slee. He writes about how the very tools that help us navigate the web are the very things that drive everyone towards the same locations. He uses a useful topological analogy, stating that the recommender systems, like Digg and Netflix and Amazon, allow everyone to see the most popular material out there: “customers can see further,” he argues “but they are all looking at the same hilltop.”

 “Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to “niche culture”. Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distill the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.”

The trouble he argues is that in staring at the peak we often miss material that is nearer to us.

But for me this paradox extends beyond recommender systems, reaching right into the heart of the internet itself. For what is a list of Google search results other than a mountain of indexed content with the first page or results representing the peak? The point being that although Google does try to weave a degree of immediacy into its search results, most people just bother to look at the summit of the search, ignoring the other material located further down the slope.

Of course nobody want to return to the days before Google made the mountain scalable in the first place. But we should be aware that the more successful it becomes the more monocultural the internet is likely to become. There may be more content out there, but increasingly most of us are seeing the same things which creates the opposite of diversity.

This monoculture of content then re-inforces itself as the material that finds its way to the top of Googles list and on to the likes of Digg and Facebook and Delicious et al, like successful football teams, the longer they stay at the top of the league, the more powerful and rich they become.

There are of course different ways to scale the mountain. Google’s advanced search option, for instance, allows you to filter your searches so that you can search for content uploaded only today, or only this week or only this month. Searching this way at least makes it easier to find content that is less established, but potentially more interesting.

I love its software and much of my life is in some way governed by it. But it has become so successful, so powerful, that its difficult to see over it. Maybe that’s why they set up office in hills northwest of San Francisco. In a little place called Mountain View.

 

* The image above is by Jon Klassen. You can buy a print here

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Bookmarks for May 14

I was among those who signed the original MySociety petition back in January which attempted to stop MPs from blocking a Freedom of Information request into their expenses claims. I still believe that a transparent system – where MP’s expenses are published on the internet – is the best way forward. The hysteria being whipped-up over MP’s snouts stuck in the allowances trough is deeply disillusioning though.  Thank heavens, then, for Stephen Fry who provided some welcome perspective on the scandal:

“Lets not confuse what politicians get really wrong,” he told Michael Crick on BBC Newsnight. “Things like wars … where people really die; with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession  of whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It isn’t important. It isn’t what we’re fighting for. It isn’t what voting is about.”

+ The Observer’s Robert McCrum on Orwell’s 1984 and how it killed him. Nicely timed to anticipate the 60th anniversary of its publication next month.

+ How the fall of the Berlin Wall, which also has an anniversary coming up, started with just a whisper.

+ Newspapers and coffee go together like Chinese and takeaway. So Czech newspaper group PPF have decided to put them together by opening a series of cafes-cum-editorial offices. The idea being that you order a latte then chat to the local reporters as they prepare the local paper. Great idea, although nothing is new under the sun.

+ Bit late on posting this, but Peter Preston advocating an internet licencing fee is still worth catching.

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Bjork’s new songs sound a bookish note

Two of my favourite things: beautiful bookshops and Bjork. Shame I couldn’t catch them both together on Friday when the Icelandic chanteuse previewed her latest work at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York. Thankfully the New York Times has a review, while YouTube is showing the inevitable handheld video. Bjork was accompanying the Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn-based ensemble led by Dave Longstreth. Naturally I wish I was there.

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Jon Klassen: the Burst of Beaden

My new favourite illustrator is Jon Klassen, an LA-based Canadian who has recently worked on Coraline, the new stop-motion (ie not digital) animation based on a novella by Neil Gaiman. Klassen worked on the film’s visual development and did some drawings for the sets and props. You can see more of his work on his website, the Burst of Beaden.

Lots of influences in his work, 50s animation and surrealism, for sure, and something of Friz Freleng, the Warner Bros animator who created the animated version of the Pink Panther (thank you Anna). Interestingly, Klasson lists his influences as Pieter Breughel (the elder), the musicians Harry Nilsson and Burl Ives, as well as the great Stanley Kubrick. The picture you can see (above) is actually inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road.

You can buy prints of his work right here.

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How many stones did it take to kill Zhaleg?

We very rarely link to advertisments here at The Northern Light. However we will make a special case for this inspired poster (left) produced in Germany for the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR).

Designed by Leo Burnett agency in Frankfurt, the campaign highlights the use of stoning as a capital punishment. Well into the 21st century stoning is still being carried out in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia and Nigeria, often for seemingly trivial “crimes” such as prostitution and adultery.

(via Osocio)

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Dave Haslam on the rebuilding of Manchester

As part of its Changing Cityscapes series, BBC News has invited former-Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam to ruminate on the transformation of his adopted city. The three-minute video is a characteristically thoughtful look at the city’s reinvention.

Here he is on the recently completed 47-story Beetham Tower, now the tallest in the city:

“I love the fact that its a reflection of that steel-grey Manchester sky: solid and quiet and solitary,” he says.

(via Cerysmatic Factory)

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JG Ballard: his life in quotes

JG Ballard, who died on Sunday, will be remembered mostly for his fiction As noted in today’s Guardian he left a legacy right across the spectum of the arts, but he also left behind some of the most apt aphorisms and witty one-liners of the last century. Here is a sample of the most memorable:

On the legacy of science fiction:

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

On fear of the future:

“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”

On the internet:

“Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.”

On rockets:

“Rockets “belong to the age of the 19th century, along with the huge steam engines. It’s brute-force ballistic technology that has nothing to do with what people recognise as the characteristic technology of this century: microprocessors, microwave data links – everything that goes in the world at the speed of an electron.”

On space travel:

“The suspicion dawned that Outer Space might be – dare one say it – boring. Having expended all these billions of dollars on getting to the Moon, we found on our arrival that there wasn’t very much to do there.”

On the American dream:

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.”

On the American people:

“Americans are highly moralistic, and any kind of moral ambiguity irritates them. As a result they completely fail to understand themselves, which is one of their strengths.”

On American politics:

“The president of the United States bears about as much relationship to the real business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken.”

On his night at the Oscars:

“A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg’s film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: `Oh, oh . . . !’ and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defense of young [Christian] Bale.”

On the 20th century:

“The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.”

On novel writing:

“Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. “

On life:

“If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.”

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In remembrance of the great JG Ballard

Just want to pay my tributes to the great JG Ballard, who has died of prostate cancer. For me he was one of the most truly original thinkers around and one of our most gifted writers.

Some of the early coverage: The Times got hold of Iain Sinclair last night, which was the most appropriate thing to do, as well as pointing out that, if nothing else, he added at least one word to the English language.

Salon.com has put up a guide to his greatest work. The Guardian has put up an extract from Empire of the Sun, which seems a safe choice. Maybe they’ll put up the Atrocity Exhibition later. They’ll be much more up tomorrow morning, I’ll add to this list then.

AP have put out a story headlined “Empire of the Sun author dies” which is not on quite the same freeway as the Sun’s similarly reductive response to the death of Orson Wells (headline: Sherry Man Dies). Ballard was so much more than that. So much more of him to miss. His contribution to literature was just so immense, but I can’t yet fathom it.

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How Berlin will help you beat the recession blues

There’s an inspired post over at Berlin’s Click Opera about the “Berlinification” of cities around the world. The post cites the UK government’s emergency measures to distribute thousands of grants to people who find creative uses for vacant shops as evidence of this emerging trend. Such a move – if successful – they argue should create a creative flourishing or the arts and culture, as happened to Berlin after the fall of the wall:

“Since it’s a global recession, I also like to think Berlin has now become a sort of template for cities all over the world. Whereas we might once have looked like a museum of crusty subcultures past their sell-by date, this city now looks like the future of Tokyo, the future of London, and the future of New York. We’re your best-case scenario, guys, your optimal recessionary outcome. Everything else is dystopia, Escape-From-New-York stuff.”

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