More Meades

[Thropplenoggin]

YeGods! A trail on The Radio 3 Forum! The world totters!

You are Roger Wright and I claim my 5 gold sovereigns.

--

SA: thanks for this. It was also 'trailed' in a piece on today's Guardian site: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...-brutalism-a-z

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

we don't trail ... we point

[Serial_Apologist]

Just a reminder that this is on BBC4 tonight at 9 pm

[muzzer]

I see that Meades is cheekily recycling the occasional shot from previous progs. Marvellous.

[jean]

I did find the pretend handwriting across the screen and the hanging up of portraits on washing lines this evening tricksy and irritating and a distraction from complex and thought-provoking content.

[aeolium]

I did find the pretend handwriting across the screen and the hanging up of portraits on washing lines this evening tricksy and irritating and a distraction from complex and thought-provoking content.

Yes, as is his constant appearance on screen. Whether or not this is intended as a quirky ironic commentary on the presentational style of others, it is just as much a pain in the neck.

I thought this was a pretty mixed effort from Meades. On the one hand there is the advantage of his elegant and witty prose, which easily surpasses that of any other screen documentary these days, and his wide-ranging knowledge of artistic and architectural history, enabling him to make thought-provoking insights into the lineage and inspiration of any architectural style he discusses. On the other is his now constant and repetitive bellyaching about all kinds of bêtes noires, from the common man, environmentalism, interfering bureaucracy etc etc. And there is his aristocratic, or perhaps neo-romantic, adherence to the glorification of the individual artist above everything else. It does not matter to Meades that architecture differs from the other arts in generally having some public function and serving some public need. For him its importance is solely in its expression of an individual aesthetic style, like an artist using a canvas. So he wasn't really interested in discussing the public function of a building, whether a gun emplacement or block of flats, or even seeing the inside of it. The building was considered as an artwork, its ornaments and geometry and material being the expression of its style, its aesthetic quality the only criterion of merit, never the functional.

In his philosophy, and particularly in his celebration of the inhuman quality of architecture (and the brutalist style he was in part discussing), Meades recalls an earlier intellectual tradition: those early C20 intellectuals discussed by John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, contemptuous of the masses, some attracted by authoritarianism and eugenics, all conscious of their intellectual (and genetic) superiority to the common man. And perhaps this tradition was influenced by the Nietzschean philosophy - born of Romanticism - of the superman, the supreme artist elevated from the mob and contemplating like Harry Lime the ants scurrying below.

As a writer Meades reminds me of Evelyn Waugh, also a master of witty prose, but one who used his work - and the "wireless" he despised - to attack the many aspects of the modern world he disliked. Meades' tastes and interests seem more wide-ranging than Waugh's, but to me he comes across like Waugh as a wonderful writer with unpleasant views.

Two cheers only from me.

[eighthobstruction]

....erudite wallpaper....


....but not instantly forgotten....sticky <in the glue manner.... not twiggy>

[Serial_Apologist]

Hmmm. I remember Meades speaking on radio abouts his obsessions, a few years ago, talking of identification with edgelands and (his notion of) the denizens thereof, and of similar such places blessed by being marginalised from the common lot of officious strictures and, his word, "mercantile" targetting. He's an old-fashioned anarchist, I think - someone who probably thinks society runs best when left to everyone's devices, free of busybodies, and bemoans the way that its outsiders are often its (ie capitalism's) unacknowledged heroes. Often hard to say whether in his bombast he is satirising puritanicism or championing its obverse by way of sensory overindulgence, vicarious or not, (there exists no better advocate for vegetarianism than Meades), rather playing into critics' hands.

[mercia]

there seems to be a collection of archive architecture programmes on the iplayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/collections/p01s0hpy/post-war-architecture

[eighthobstruction]

These archives of all sorts are to be applauded....as times go on they will be so valuable both to the casual observer (me), and students....perhaps some of that £100 million was not wasted....

[jean]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio3/F6643901

[Serial_Apologist]

I was confused by the end of the second programme: agreeing with many of Meades' conclusions while questioning of his premises.

Anyway, we were invited to look at this rather fine collection:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/collections/p01s0hpy/post-war-architecture

The Nairn programme mentioned, b/cast last night and well worth watching, examined a standpoint totally opposite to that of Meades.

[clive heath]

One of the buildings in last night's entertainment brought back memories: described as "Imperial College" it showed the residential Hall "Southside" which had only been in use a few years when the I.C. Jazz Club started up its Wednesday night fortnightly "South Side Stomps" almost exactly 50 years ago in January 1964, according to the archives of the college rag "Felix". "...more than 250 people made the scene with hot music from the Kensington City Stompers and cool from the Clive Heath Quartet" . It was demolished in 2005. Starting up on a Wednesday meant negotiating with the Catering Manager, Mooney, who, initially resentful at having to find extra staff, grew to appreciate the extra business we brought in, so that when some years later I ventured across the dance floor/dining hall he looked up from a row with his staff (normal) and said "Hello, what are you doing here, getting married?" which is how we ended up having our wedding reception in the Senior Common Room of said building, a bright modern room at its east end.

http://www.ribapix.com/image.php?i=21356&r=2&t=4&x=1&ref=RIBA4197

[eighthobstruction]

Luckily many have a lack of appetite for second grade pastiches of the great Brutalists....and in most cases that nibbling scrunching piece of plant was well used....(in a few cases perhaps not). Once again a romp through a succession of visual and verbal semiotics....is it Meades wish to be an intellectual niche comedian, I couldn't help but see him in my minds eye delivering to camera while performing a Bernie Clifton Ostrich act, or as Groucho Marx....Some lovely long eccentric lists in answer to his own rhetorical questions....An experience I never had but many did was the regrowing (around him) of London post War11 from the ashes as it were and in many metropolitan hubs....Can't say that I agree with many of his opinions about the masses (a premise to far, I thought)....Still far far far better than Alvar Lidell in Southport....

[Don Petter]

Great parody!