Architecture of the Soul

Last week I met a hero of mine. I was rounding a corner onto Shoreditch High Street when a figure, wrapped in dark overcoat and trademark scarf, passed me at a crossing. My feet carried me on a few paces before I did a double-take, turned and began a rather embarrassing though totally unintentional Alan Partridge impersonation.”Dan! Dan! Dan!” I called to the figure I recognised as Dan Cruikshank.

Dan Cruikshank

The meeting was brief. I simply told him how I’m a fan of his programmes and how nice it was to meet him and that was it. Simple pleasures. But a pleasure none the less. And all in the knowledge that come bed time on Thursday 2 April, I will have met (well, been in the presence of) another of my academic heroes – Alain de Botton. I’m attending a talk at the National Theatre but that’s sure to be a post for another time.

I remember clearly watching his 2005 series Around The World in 80 Treasures religiously, the timing being particularly fitting as in May of that year I would begin my own Odyssey around eastern Europe so the excitement, intrigue and wonder of travelling was extra strong in me. The combination of my own enthusiasm for the adventure ahead of me and that of Dan’s for the many places and things that he visited and bestowed with his unique vitality helps me remember that specific time in my life as a very happy one. All, of course, contributing to my love of Dan Cruikshank who had already won me over with his effervescent and rather dandyish tendency to always wear a scarf and a hat whatever the native climate. Often resulting him to drenched in sweat. Eccentric bastard.

Though our meeting was swift, I know he’s have approved of my other highlight of the week: visiting the Barbican’s  Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture exhibition. In another life I wouldn’t mind being an architect. The idea of creating something that is then built, lasts and interacts with its environment appeals to me. I also like looking at plans of cities/buildings, their lines, avenues, streets, corners and elevations coming together to create, to my mind, quite beautiful forms and shapes that I’d happily hang on a wall.

Le Corbusier's grand vision for central Paris

Being the last truly Utopian urban planning project in London, and being very much inspired by the man himself, Barbican was a great setting for the exhibition. It was also my first ever visit to a museum/exhibition centre’s late-night opening slot which also gave a nice feel to it all. A whiff of intellectuality and slight pretention was detectable – and I’m all for that; if you’re gonna do it, do it properly (and yes, my partner in architectural adventure for the night, Mr B.Lewis, and I were dressed in black. Bren even had his glasses on which tipped things in his favour).

The Barbican

The exhibiton itself was very cool. Monsieur Le Corbusier is one of the most influential, celebrated and maligned architects of history. To laymen such as myself he’s the Daddy, the name that we all know. Bren and I spent a good two hours learning about Modernism, L’Esprit Nouveau, concrete, the house as a machine, and Le Corbusier’s conviction that a rationally planned city, using his standardised housing types, would offer a healthy, humane alternative to the foetid ‘prisons’ that were the old Victorian cities.

Looking back from 2009, many of his plans looked too related to the maligned everytowns of 60′s and 70′s Britain, or even the Orwellian “social condensers” of Soviet Russia to leave me convinced. But, of course, hindsight is a very distorting looking-glass and such a criticism (as well as being totally lacking in expertise) is pretty unfair.

Le Corbusier’s stuff reminded Bren of a town in Holland he visited called Bijlmermeer and me of a town called Nowa Huta that is to be found to the north-east of Krakow. Nowa Huta means “New Steel Works” in Polish, and has become a suburb of Krakow although it was created to first rival the great ‘bourgeois’ city and then devour it. Of course, that never happened.

Bijlmermeer

Nowa Huta is one of the only surviving places on Earth that was designed along the tenets of Social Realism, an architectural style where form was subservient to function, socialist ideals were to be embodied and expressed and the individual was to be transfigured into the Community. The architects therefore were expected to be “engineers of the human soul.”

Nowa Huta: The social condenser

Rather unsurprisingly, the human soul could not be caged by its ‘patriotic avenues’ nor its symmetrical grid plan nor its huge industrial folly (the steelworks was built hundreds of miles from any iron ore or coal deposits). Instead, it rose to bite the hand of its creator and Nowa Huta became a hotbed of politcal unrest and was a major player in Poland’s push for freedom from the Communist yoke under the Solidarnosc movement of the 1980′s.

Ode to the Bundesliga

Willkommen to German football. Stay a while...

I love the Bundesliga. I love its great games, I love the huge crowds but most of all, I love it’s personalities. And this picture of Steffan Effenburg from the ’94 World Cup sums up the Bundesliga for me: “Fuck you”

The Bundesliga consistently enjoys the highest average attendance of any football league in Europe, eclipsing even the self-titled “Biggest League in the World,” the English Premier League. To those who put down the ‘inferior’ Bundesliga, it shrugs: “Fuck you.”

Currently, there have been a massive 2.96 goals scored per game in Germany’s top division. The Barclay’s Prem has a figure of just 1.23/game, Italy 1.22/game and Spain 1.47/game. But is the Bundesliga generally considered as exciting or as glamorous as the others? The Bundesliga says,”Fuck you.”

Who’s got the joint highest goals scored in the Champions League this season (24) AND broken the record for the highest aggregate win ever (12-1)? Bayern Munich of Bundesliga fame. “Fuck you.”

But the best part of German football cannot be conveyed in mere statistics: the personality cult of the Bundesliga.

Contrary to jingoistic national stereotype, I do not ‘hate the Krauts’. I love Germans. Never met a wrong’un and they have always made me laugh. They just do things differently in Germany, a place that seems always to incubate oddity and humour. They posses rogue elements in their collective character that rise to the surface so much more readily than in Britain. And this, of course, shows in their premier football league.

While watching yet another captivating match (Wolfsburg 4, Schalke 3) last week Daniel Keane Esq and I were honoured with the appearance of one Herr Danny Latza, a young whippersnapper who clearly adheres to the vera moda strictures of, what I like to call, Der EuroBorg. Sure, I’ve made that up. But if it were a real style I’m sure you’d agree it’s befitting of the man whom would surely be its poster boy.

It’s awful isn’t it. Frankly it’s ridiculous. But it made me smile. You just don’t see this sort of thing in the Premier League. Naturally, we began Googling him to find more public displays of his hideous creation. And we found them:

But we also stumbled across another disciple of Der EuroBorg, one who may even eclipse Herr Latza. May I introduce to you Timo Kunert:

I strongly suggest that, quite apart from whichever team you adopt as your own (and you should; the team I adopted is Hertha BSC Berlin who have shot to top of the division, in blatent disregard of their pitiful history – zero championships), everyone ought to keep tabs on both Latza and Kunert. Kunert especially. I like to think that Kunert is the more maverick, the man whom Latza looked up to and learned from at Scahlke (Kunert is now at Hamburg). A kind of Teutonic Mr. Miyagi.

Plus they, especially the older Kunert, are displaying all the hallmarks of becoming Journeymen (ie. piss-poor appearance figures).  This is excellent news. I often think that the Journeyman is the most interesting character to follow. By virtue of the fact that he never really have the talent nor inclination to stick around in one place very long, he often takes on the roles of the Outsider, the Wanderer, the Flaneur. Throw in the fact that these guys are German and there’s all sorts of scope that only too rarely befalls your average English leagues tinker.

Before long I expect Latza and/or Kunert to be embroiled in steamy Art-House cinema scandals, forays into exitentialism, or even a sudden disappearence followed by a dramatic return 2 years hence. When asked where he’d been the reply will be something like: ‘I gave all my possessions to a blind Turkish gypsy in Oldstadt before hitch-hiking the silk-roads east where I finally settled as a monk in the Tibeten foothills. I’ve returned because, as it turns out, my failure to have ever started 4 league games in a row prevented me from finding inner peace.’

Basically, your emotional investment in the Bundesliga goes far beyond the agony and the ecstasy of results. They become wrapped up in the enigmatic persona of the league at large. A league that distills the wit, arrogance, flagrant individuality and many, many idiosynchrasies of the German character and blends it with a myriad of traits and tropes of all sorts of nationalities, from Albanian to Japanese to  Somalian. This and the fact that there are some stupid haircuts, fashion statements that make grown men look like the fifteen year old foreign-exchange kid at school (peruse any of the pics from this link to see what I mean. Also, be aware of the two odd uber-fans, whose raison d’etre seems to be stalking the poor bastards, and the fact that faces never ever change. Chilling). Oh, and silly names also feature (Jan-Ingwar Callsen Bracker is a current favourite).

Plus you get brilliant quotes, rather than the regular post match blandness from anyone in our media-trained charisma-drained league. Such as the pearler from Hertha’s star srtriker Andriiy Voronin (yes, star!) who claimed his goal at the weekend was due to his “sexy chest” and that a slimmer player than he could never have scored in the fashion he had – basically, the ball hit him and bounced off his ample frame and into the net. It beats Michael Owen dribbling into Garth Crookes’ mic any day.

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful” said Friedrich Nietzsche, but it could also be applied to the Bundesliga. It may appear, in some ways, frightful because it’s so different in all it’s many sided aspects to what we in England are used to. This is why it should be embraced. It’s the other side of the coin, it’s football outside the box. It’s brilliant.

And if you disagree? Well, I refer you to the top of this post: “Fuck you.” The Bundesliga is as the Bundesliga does. Your loss.

Just want to finish with some images as they say a picture is worth a thousand words (judging from the length of this post you probably wish I’d used more):

Evidence that Bayern Munich is the most fun club to be a pro for - Attendance at Oktoberfest is mandatory.

Ok so there may not be much else to do in the Ruhr valley but this is still impressive

Before plumping for Hertha Berlin I briefly thought about adopting Hansa Rostock. Given that Mike Werner once graced their rostas I'm almost tempted to go back on my decision. WOOF!

Me, the moon & Carlton Palmer in a bath

I have been abroad – abroad in the badlands of Nottingham. And I have had a revealation: Television sans adverts.

At my brother’s house they have some sort of Virgin-Sky package. With it comes the ability to watch programmes that have already been shown. Now, I realise that this is hardly new and such technology has been around for ages. Indeed, I first experienced Sky+ around 4 years ago. Never-the-less, the option to catch up on stuff that you may have missed at the time is great.

And it got better! For when part one of Heston’s Medieval Feast came to an end, the outtro scene merely played out again (“Hold on,” I thought, “we’re having an ITV moment”) and Heston’s large head was back infront of me. Wonderously, all trace of an ad had been circumnavigated – or else I had been sat in the chair way longer than I realised and Heston had simply entered into my unconscious mind buy osmosis or some other form of dark artistry concocted (no doubt) in one of his nitrogen cookers…

Nah, it’s just there were no adverts. Bloody brilliant. BLOODY BRILLIANT! With my first fumblings with Sky+ all those years before I had exitedly, fumblingly, been able to fast forward through the bog rolls, the insurance bastards, the perfume morons etc and just skipped to the end – or, rather, the start. But this time it was different. It was more mature. It felt like we both knew what we were doing the, TV and myself, we just hit this thing, this rythm time and time and time again. With each climax of another shot of Heston’s massive head another surge of his ridiculously entertaining brand of wizardry thrusted back onto the screen. Unrelenting and uninterrupted.

When it was over – the actual viewing experience as much as the programme itself – I felt euphoric. Of course, my mind slowly started to shuffle these feelings aside, replacing it bit by bit, with musings and the moment was gone. In its place my brother (who had now entered the room) and I began talking about how this great technological turn-on kind of spells the end for TV as we know it. I mean, now that you can just tailor it all to exactly what you want when you want it, factoring in the internet options of BBC i-player or C4 On Demand, the idea of breaking off whatever it is you’re doing at 9pm of a Tuesday evening seems ridiculous. It’s a Mary Antoinette moment: I’ve been allowed my cake and I’m eating it (actually, I wish to rub it on my body a little before devouring it – but C4 On Demand doesn’t work on Macs. This is a thorough and very much surprising annoyance).

And this led us to return to talking about adverts, our joint bête noire. Basically, we’ve decided that while the PR gurus of this world have been missing a trick, it is surely just a matter of time before we get adverts beamed onto the moon. A few satellites (funded by Coke, or Tesco etc) will be sent into orbit and will transmit the gaudy logo onto that blank celestial body that has hitherto been a beacon for human kind to gaze at, ponder over and wish upon. Unfortunately, it will most probably return more than just dreams and wonderment but also a strange urge to buy a can of syrupy-sweet tooth rot.

Girl: “Wow. Just looking up there, at the stars and the moon, it really gets me. Straight in the heart. To think, there could be so much out there. And to know I have you here, with me tonight, looking up at all that possibility, it’s so inspiring. It’s so romantic.”

Boy: “Bloody hell! Bog roll’s now only £2.68? I’m off down the shops. Catch you later Cindy, yeah ?”

Well I don’t want to be Cindy!! What’s worse, we decided that on overcast days when you can’t see the moon, we’ll just have ads plastered over the underside of the clouds. Lord knows we have enough cloudy days in the UK so this is even more of a shoe-in than the moon. And it can’t such an expensive endeavour – so for the most part we’ll just get all the really toss, cheapo ads (the Moonpigs or the thrush creams) in our faces, taking up that vast unused expanse above our eye line.

Needless to say this depressed me. And all because I dared to dream of a life without the things I want to watch being interrupted with shit, annoying, inane adverts. My only hope was this: In the near future, all ads will follow suit of the programming and just as my ‘TV’ becomes personally tailored to my exact likes, so the advertising will become more personalised. Ergo, my life will become devoid of ambulance chasing lawyers and Kerry Katona. Hopefully. In their place will be loads of football gumf. Not ideal but given the recent attempts by Paddy Power (who have somehow stumbled upon my love for the more bizarre and tragi-comically glorious aspects of footy nostalgia) perhaps not too bad, all things considered?

Red Riding

Just watched the first of Channel 4′s Red Riding Trilogy, adapted from the novels 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983 by David Peace.

Peace also wrote The Damned United which was absolutely brilliant so I was really looking forward to watching this programme. And it was awesome. I rarely sit down and watch a drama but this was really worth it. I totally recommend you all see this first episode (beg, borrow, steal just do it) and stay tuned for the rest.

I’m off to order the novels online.

Jade Goody & Cancer

Good evening everybody. Now, I had an interesting conversation in the office today. I raised the point that I’m left emotionally confused by Jade Goody’s illness – or rather, it’s very public documentation.

When Jade’s cancer was initially diagnosed my first reaction was one of sympathy but also with hope, hope that it wouldn’t be splashed all over the papers for weeks. I thought that would be inappropriate and distasteful. I still do, I suppose. But my natural reaction to reading/hearing about anyone’s cancer problem would, I’m sure, prompt a bit of the “Ooh, too close the bone, I don;t want to hear it” – but is that healthy? I mean, cancer is a big deal. Surely it’s good to pay it more attention, meet it more head-on and not cower from its very name. After all, many people suffer it bravely, surely the rest of us can summon the courage to be more open about it?

Like I say I’m confused. Now, although hers is a dubious kind of celebrity, Jade is a modern day celeb. If her plight – which, by the way, I want to say up front that it absolutely is – means that the screening age for cervical cancer is lowered and girls and ladies everywhere suddenly give extra consideration to the getting screened for cervical cancer as a routine cervical check-up, or people think to do it more often, or the screening age is lowered and thus catch any potential illnesses earlier, then surely that is a “good thing” to come of this very public display?

Similarly, one could say that Jade is willfully making money from selling these stories/pictures/exclusives to pass on to her kids. If it makes her feel a little better in her last, painful, days to think her sons will be a little better off because of a few column-inches then who am I to argue.

But I still feel a bit strange. Of course, this story isn’t about me at all. But, then again, it’s in my face everyday to and from work, during work on the net, on the radio. Everywhere. It is in the public domain so I do have an opinion, I can have an opinion – albeit confused.

On the money point, I’m uncomfortable. If Jade, on being told of the tragic news, thought: “Fuck it! I’m gonna make a shed load for the boys” then I suppose that would be ok. Maybe. It’s her life. However, I can’t help but imagine a rather long and very Max Cliffor shaped shadow looming across all that I see of this sad story. If Jade, was approached (not necessarily by MC – could I get sued here?) by someone, Mr X say, who told her: “Ooh, this is terrible news. Awful. But y’know what would be a great thing to do? Sell your stoy. Yeah, make a mint for your lads. Give cancer two fingers and make bloody sure you give those kids a bloody big wodge for their future.”

Cos if Mr X did, clearly knowing their own pockets would be lined by putting an idea into the head of somebody who history has proved to be somewhat stupid, ignorant, naieve, desperate even, if they did then does that not make reading all of it a bit.. immoral?

If so, does that immorality, that wrongness, does it negate the positive of some young girl somewhere going to get screened due to being touched by Jade’s plight? If that young girl lives a full and happy life because of that decision, itself prompted by reading some of this media coverage, is it all negated by its potential immorality? Does it matter? Journalists have kept cancer diaries in the past. Is this, perhaps, Jade’s own ‘cancer diary’ writ-large in the only way she knows how – after all, she was raised up by the power of publicity and has lived by it over many years?

I’m confused. Please contribute your thoughts.

Mmm, it’s Heston’s Victorian Feast

Woohoo, A midweek post – I must be getting better.

Just finished watching Heston Blumenthal’s Victorian Feast, it was fantastic. I love his absolute ridiculousness – I’m naturally a bit cynical, so to see someone who just indulges and explores their whims and fancies without machine-gunning them down before they’ve had a chance to even travel more than a couple of synapses is pleasurable for me, an escape. Cheers Heston (I know you’re reading), it was great fun. One bit I especially enjoyed (though I’m at pains to point out it was not schadenfreude, I do genuinely like Heston) was the inadvertent comedy arising from when some old girls tried his edible pot-plant and one piped up something like: “Ooh, I hope I’m not going to die of food poisoning before I die!” – , given recent events at The Fat Duck, it just worked on so many levels. Give that pensioner a gong!

At the end of the show, the announcer told us that we could visit the C4 website to find out how to make some of Heston’s recipes. Here’s a picture of my attempt at Absinthe Jelly à la Blumenthal:

Heston, correctly, pointed out that the great thig about jelly is that it’s ridiculous, it brings out the kid in us and makes you smile. It’s brilliant. So, while I was looking for a genuine pic of chef HB, I came across this one.

Like jelly, it made me laugh. It looks as though HB has just been caught, in mid stumble, while carrying something heavy. Now that’s schadenfreude.

All You Can Meat

On Thursday I went to a Brazilian BBQ restaurant in Angel called Rodizio Rico where a myriad of skewered meats are brought to the table and just keep coming until you throw in the towel. Frankly, it was ridiculous. Very tasty, but totally ridiculous. I got meat drunk – it’s a genuine medical phenomena, look it up. There was something primeval, carnal even, about the whole thing. The blooded plates, the reek of iron and the metallic taste on the toungue began, after a while, to evoke strange feelings. Feelings of blood lust, the scent of the battlefield in our nostrils. You could say it was the most macho of dining experiences, an animalistic display of base male stupidity and Ego.

Only, that wasn’t the case. To my surprise, there were more than a few couples on dinner dates. Flesh-feasts, it seems, are passable date destinations. There was even a table of svelte ladies having a girly evening somewhere under vast mountains of steak.

But this was not all. Here are some other weird things from the evening:

• The presence of a wedding reception complete with bride still in gown. Rumours of finger-feeding the groom barbequed chicken hearts is unconfirmed.
• Two members of said wedding reception hoovering up the china in the cubicle. Clearly wind assistance is needed when sitting down to an all you can eat meat buffet that someone else has paid for to truly ‘do it justice.’
• On entering the toilets I was confronted by a man who, unaware of my presence, was taking down his trousers and pants, exposing his bare arse to me. All done, by the way, while facing the sink and the mirror. Upon noticing my arrival, he casually pulled up his hosiery and turned the 180 degrees to face the urinals and continued about his business in the usual manner. Odd.

Clearly, consumed in extremis, meat will do strange things to the human condition.