Entertainment can sometimes be hard

I'll also be belatedly launching Uncommon at Bookmarks on Tuesday the 27th September, at 6.30pm. The second actual print review of my largely unnoticed diamat book on Pulp is now in the Wire, and very sweet it is. If you would like to review it my email address is adjacent, but here are some online reviews that were very welcome - the wonderfully named Musical Urbanism, a great Hegel-quoting one at Red Mist Reviews, also ...i can stay and Adelle Stripe's Dark Satanic Mills, who also draws welcome attention to Lisa Cradduck's etchings that so enliven the book; Lisa is also offering signed editions of them via Adelle.

Here are some of the usual bits and bobs - not much in the way of new writing due to moving house and finishing my PhD (but viva still pending). More at Urban Trawl; a review of a compendious book on Communist Fashion in the current Radical Philosophy; a review of two oddly prescient books on the estates of Hackney, for Icon; see also this. There's also some contributions to anthologies or other people's books which I keep meaning to plug on here: I have a 'modest proposal' for Sheffield in Julie Westerman's lovely Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy; a long essay on Brutalism and Heritage for Regenerating Culture and Society; an essay on the early, good stuff in BDP's self-immortalising Continuous Collective; an interview with the artist on post-Soviet metropolis and wilderness in Ruth Maclennan's monograph Anarcadia; and an expanded version of the Soviet chapter from Militant Modernism (with added material based on, like, actually visiting Russia) is in the excellent Star City - The Future Under Communism. But more, much more than this, I've blurbed Andrew Jordan's very fine HMP Haslar socio-fantasy Bonehead's Utopia, which is essential reading.

Coming Home to Roost

Wrote this, from my current Safe European Home. Also, read these, this and this.

Signs of Life

There is below this now-customary round-up an actual blog post, unregurgitated, for the first time in a long time. It's on the hot topic of Simon Jenkins' favourite piece of Polish urbanism and why it is a great deal more complex and interesting than that might imply (or than he probably knows). I'm aware there's not much point in writing about anything now other than how they're all in it together, but here's a few things for light relief. A BD building study on the Unison building in Euston Rd is now up on the Urban Trawl blog; there's a review of Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk for the Independent; I can be found procrastinating about Renzo Piano's Shard in Artforum; and the Red Pepper piece on why big modernist council estates are in fact a good thing is now online. There's also a nice review of Uncommon in the Morning Star, perhaps fittingly the only review as yet in print. Finally there are lots of new things on Flickr, largely as a means of stopping my hard drive from dying horribly.

Some interesting other things worth drawing your attention to: Meet the Leeds Libraries, a set of public facilities left in disrepair in that Capital of the North; Sunlit Uplands, a set of haunting photographs of Midlands suburbia; a machine that makes the motor vehicle look sensible; a co-operative village skyscraper in China; and an excellent website previously unknown to me on the gentrification of Southwark. And Jones the Planner makes it to insurgent Southampton, site of course of one of the greatest town planning fuck-ups of the last thirty years. And there's stiff competition.

Reconstruction Time Again

I have spent a third to a half of the last year living in Warsaw at Dom Pyzik, and somehow have ended up not really writing about it (well, with let's say a few exceptions). Partly this is because I'm working on Something that will have lots and lots about it, partly it is because of having too many other things to do, but for whatever reason this is something that should be addressed. So this post will go to at least try and make up for this rather amiss situation. There's much, much there to write about, although almost all of it that I have planned will be saved for the Something mentioned above, here's a taster; and something to make clear that this blog hasn't completely become a glorified CV.

The thing about Warsaw that everyone knows (other than Joy Division or Bowie references) is that 85% of it was destroyed in 1944, and that it was then reconstructed to the letter after 1945. Strangely, this coexists with another idea of Warsaw as a centre of wide streets, towers and general Warsaw Pact monolithism. Accordingly, for a certain type of architectural critic or historian, Warsaw is irresistible. It is, for traditionalists, the road not travelled - a city where, instead of modernism, we got a dignified reconstruction of the old world. In fact, neither of the statements is exactly true. Recent research makes clear that the 85% figure includes much that was more damaged than irretrievably destroyed, and it's also clear that the reconstructed city took frequently huge liberties with the historical fabric - how could they not? And after some acquaintance with it - ie, through coming here to eat at Pod Samsonem - it's also clear that the modernist objection to the place - as a Disneyfied simulacrum of interest only to tourists - isn't quite right either.

The Old Town is a place of paradox - a project of the Communist Party, it is loved by nationalists; the only 'authentically Polish' part of Warsaw, it is anything but authentic. Here, you can see every one of the four orders of simulation described by Jean Baudrillard in 1981, occurring in Stalinist Poland between 1946 and 1976. It is the sheer inauthenticity, and the only Soviet trimmings that are visible only slightly below the surface, which stop it from being merely cute. Although cute it undoubtedly is. Well, mostly.

The best way to reach the Old Town, or rather the Stare Miasto and Nove Miasto (both are quite impercetibly linked) is via the Trasa W-Z, a West-East promenade that was very much part of the project, and was later lined with tower blocks. Its sandwiching function gives its name to a still-produced local cake. Even before the edges of it started being filled with high-rises, it was a project far from the usual notion of historically scrupulous reconstruction, using as much as possible of the original fabric and street plan. Instead, in order to make the whole apparation of the destroyed city's re-emergence into something functionally viable, a road was cut under and across it. The city's 1950s Stalinist Victory monument was moved here (rather than being demolished) at some point in the 1990s, to the point where she now seems to guard the reconstruction.

Then you get to a glowing, tile-lined underpass, as modern as can be inside but clad in heavy, psuedohistorical masonry, an example of what Vladimir Paperny describes as the heavy, earthbound nature of Stalinist 'Culture Two', where speed itself must of necessity be weighed down. There is, however, a pedestrian route to enter the Old Town from ground level as well, and it is equally unexpected:

It is an underpass with a connecting escalator, and it's a piece of the Moscow Metro in Warsaw. Literally so - the project was designed and built by employees of Moskva Metrostroi. The lamps are Soviet in derivation, showing that peculiar heaven-in-the-bowels-of-the-earth style that was fundamental to Soviet underground systems. the statues, too, are of, first, the People's Army, and second, the builders, who are always also the Builders Of Communism. Both of the sets of statues are under glass panels, very probably to stop them from being vandalised - this protection is also very unexpected in a country which prides itself on anticommunism. So you emerge, in theory, from 1950s Moscow into 17th century Warsaw:

This is the vestibule for the 'Metro'. There was, in fact, a Moscow Metro-style Metro being planned and in some cases even dug around the same time. It was cancelled when the relatively reformist Gomulka regime took power as an expensive vanity project. Gomulka wasn't particularly keen on historical reconstructions either, and said that the Royal Castle would be rebuilt over his dead body. It was, a couple of years after he died - it's the building with the lovely (pre-patinated?) Slavic copper spire in the photograph above. It was built in 1976, although unlike many of the other reconstructed buildings, it doesn't declare the year of (re)construction on it, as if confidence in the illusion had lessened somewhat. From there, you come to the tourist bit:

When the reconstructed Warsaw is praised, it's usually this which is meant - a giant great cobbled square, surrounded by a jagged skyline of sweetly marzipanlike Mitteleuropean buildings, with a market inside. When it is written about, especially by a certain veteran British political commentator/architectural writer, it is usually presented as the Polish capital's agora, its real city centre. Yet it has no tube station, no real facilities other than often very expensive restaurants and stalls with nick-nacks, and hence is surely the Disney city centre that it is often accused of being. The centre of Warsaw, at least in my experience, is defined by the modernist geometry of the Eastern Wall, Stalin's 'gift' of the Palace of Culture and the futurist Central Station - all nearly a mile away. This place is an adjunct, an oddity, divorced from the city's everyday life. Or at least this is what it seems to be, but complexities multiply when you get away from the square.

The Old Town is only one part of reconstructed Warsaw. There are a great many reconstructed 18th century classical buildings, and they are usually a lot less interesting, because this is high architecture, with blueprints, named architects, details that must be reproduced in order for the buildings to really exist as reconstructions. These belong to Baudrillard's first order of simulacra - just the remaking of something that already exists, as faithfully as the technology allows. These are usually just outside the Old Town, leading towards Nowy Swiat and to the city's real 1950s centre. So they're also often interspersed with the modernism of the Gomulka era. But there's another modernism of a sort etched onto the buildings themselves:

What makes the bulk of the old town buildings so interesting is that there isn't really an original, or at least not in the sense of something unchangeable - these were buildings that had been constantly added to and remade over the centuries, so the 1950s could so much the same. These are the second order of Stare Miasto Simulacra. The buildings are vividly coloured to the point where they don't look remotely old, and the sgraffito work, applied in the 1950s, is reminiscent of the animation of the era, the cut-out and montage films by the likes of Jan Lenica. Their cute, angular forms are hardly comparable with the heroic workers of socialist realism, but nor are they abstract. The one below is on the Old Town's only modernist building (ie flat-roofed and without historicist dressing), and it's notable that you barely notice the difference:

These drawings, etchings, paintings and mosaics are deliberately childlike things, cute pieces of 1950s design which have somehow ended up part of a project to evoke the 15th century. To think that they are separate from the ideology is a mistake, however. Look at the two images at the top of this post - one of them of the medieval city undergoing reconstruction, and the other of the Stakhanovite bricklayers who were doing all that work, and at record speeds - and note also that they're in the same cartoonish style as the Little Mermaids above (note also that the second of the two has not been restored - it's best we forget about the 20th century workers who built it). Sometimes they are figurative, neo-renaissance statuary, based on something historically significant that was there before:

and elsewhere, they're straightforward abstraction, of various kinds, either slightly disturbing dismembered bodies, with later and unsubtle additions.

Some of the sgraffito work is also sortof figurative, Disney stuff on some level, the sort of thing that might have been done in medieval Warsaw should they have wanted to do so even if they didn't:

and then there's a move into lush, shimmering, chromatic abstraction.

Step into any of these blocks and you find that they are actually part of another order of simulacra altogether. The majority of these pretty pseudohistorical facades are the masks for public housing, and that's coincidentally the reason why the place lacks the feeling of being a City Centre - because what it really is, is a council estate with sgraffito and restaurants. At times, this is really very vivid - as with the long deck-access block that marks the Old Town's southern corner. Take away the detail, and this is straight-up modernist municipal housing.

That this is a tourist destination, however, can be easily ascertained - the difference is that everyone is home in bed by a sensible time.

But if there's any doubt, just read the other etchings on the walls.

The fourth order of simulacra in the Warsaw Old Town is Mariensztat, a place which really didn't exist before, but which is aesthetically completely of a piece with the earlier orders of simulacra that make up most of it. It's a historical area, but it was completely replanned on a new pattern by the Communist authorities, and became their first showpiece housing estate.

The approach is exactly the same; the painting, now worn enough to almost look convincingly historic; the winding streets; the cobbles; and the sgraffito, which here too is surely the cutest thing ever implemented by the Six Year Plan of an iron-fisted Stalinist regime:

Mariensztat opens out to a large public square, with another very pretty bit of trimming (this time, a mosaic clock) at the corner. If being unkind, one could point out that this is not a style massively unlike that of Nazi architecture at its more vernacular and volkisch (rather than mock-Hellenic) end - Paul Schultze-Naumburg wouldn't have felt completely out of place here. What makes it most unlike the Nazi aesthetic is that strange, out-of-place cutesiness. Not the cutesiness of the carefully worn, and higgledy-piggledy, but of the very 1950s, wholly of-their-time clocks, paintings and drawings. The inspiration seems to come a little from Warsaw's one-time Prussian Gauleiter ETA Hoffmann, a child-like fairy tale uncanniness which is surely the most unlikely response to mass murder in the corpus of public art and city planning. Warsaw had, and still builds, gigantic monuments to its heroism, self-sacrifice and fortitude, but here everything is Lilluputian and pretty. The impulse seems to be comparable to that of post-war modernism, that was remaking the rest of the city by the time the reconstruction was finished - the urge to shake off all of that horrible weight and instead create something light, joyous and dreamlike.

The satellite dishes that line the houses, though, imply that those within the Old Town simulacra have other fantasies and simulations to think about.

Broken Biscuits

Uncommon - an essay on Pulp, is out tomorrow, on Zero Books - it's the pink one at the end just above. This article has a lot of the themes from it summarised, and an extract from the book, on the subject of 'Mis-Shapes', up at Up Close And Personal. and Richard King's Domino Radio show has me rambling about Pulp and playing their particularly outre numbers, followed by Dan Hancox saying much more important things about grime and student protest and then returning to filth via 'Ramping Shop'. The first review of it is, as ever, in 3:AM.

Mercifully not on the subject of Pulp, on the subject of Southampton council workers' co-ordinated strike - a (rare) pleasure to feel proud of the city.

(Bad New) Things

Or, rather, a post a bit like what you might get at Things, only somewhat less generous. It may or may not have escaped attention (though it has not escaped the attention of the Oxonian Review) that Zero Books is having an extraordinarily good run at the moment - so here's plugs for four I think especially worth plugging. Three books on film, in the loosest sense, which confront - just in case anyone was about to bandy about a word nearly rhyming with neuralgia - some current products of the culture industry at its most base and ruthless. Masha Tupitsyn's oddly dreamlike immortalisation of her twitter feed Laconia has been very well discussed by Giovanni Tiso here; two books which seem more precisely linked are Evan Calder Williams' Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect. Despite the cold precision of the latter and the dialectical poetics of the former, both seem to subscribe, while disassociating themselves from it as a political 'strategy', to a kind of accelerationism of aesthetics - a plunging into the sheer wrongness of the contemporary moment as a means of inhabiting and understanding it, deranging the senses so as to be more clear. Both are excellent, gripping books. (a post in the unwritten pile at present is an attempt to use Shaviro's analysis to talk about Night Watch and Day Watch; another time). More domestic, albeit deceptively so: Rosa Ainley's irascible, brief-yet-capacious 2 Ennerdale Drive, an 'unauthorised biography' of a suburban house in Colindale. Into this frame she crams a trenchant analysis of suburbia itself, both against those who would condemn it and against those who would celebrate it, an Angela Carter-esque saga of acting dynasties, and a smartly Benjaminian take on the ubiquitous family history genre. I took a picture of the house in question in Colindale for the cover, but it wasn't used in the end. So here's the road sign instead.

Given that I'll be disappearing down a thesis-shaped hole again quite soon, here's a round-up of recent things, mostly by me but thankfully not exclusively. An interview, in Russian, on the subject of Soviet and post-Soviet architecture, at OpenSpace.Ru. The interview itself was in English, as I am useless, and then translated, by the esteemed Oleksiy Radynski, editor of the Ukrainian section of the frankly impressive Polish broad left journal/publishing house/discussion group/etc Krytyka Polityczna (who now also have an English branch). I'll put the full English version up here soon, partly as a placeholder for some unwritten posts on Warsaw, Łódź, Kiev and Moscow - I've been amassing lots of pictures and notes on the former in particular which I've just not had the time to do anything coherent with, as yet. A far more informed take on the fascinating and horrible aesthetics of contemporary Russia than anything I can do is an excellent OpenSpace post on the neo-fascist/new urbanist/new rich/neo-Stalinist/neo-colonial porn that is being used to advertise the Sochi Olympics, translated into English by Thomas of Chto Delat.

Extracts from Uncommon will be online soonish, but here's a small Flickr album of photographs taken from the propagandist literature of post-war Sheffield that I was going to use in the book but didn't, because they had a moire pattern on them. This might be a blessing in disguise, as it means the book isn't quite so much a product of a currently perhaps somewhat worn aesthetic, naming no names etc. More interestingly, here's Pyzik's take on it for the 90s' blog, via her blog and Lampa - aside from making it clear that she actually *enjoys* Freaks, which puts me to shame, the post has many intriguing things to say about the way that Pulp did and did not translate into the Polish context. On which note, in case you missed it, here's her Guardian piece on Polish art as alternately sold abroad and as an attempt to create new spaces at home.

I have a (not online) piece in the current Red Pepper on why the left should be advocating municipal modernist council estates rather than certain, somewhat over-romanticised 'bottom-up' forms of urbanism (which also entailed an audio interview with me along with Anna Minton and others, here). Something similarly offline but older that I've forgotten to link to: a piece on walkways for Landscape Journal, not online. Online is a short piece on the Pepys Estate in Deptford for The London Column, a topic better dealt with by Harry, from DAGE in his Resonance FM communiques. Some more southern Urban Trawls. On Brighton; with Croydon next, then Plymouth, then the Valleys, then back northwards to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and finally Belfast. Suggestions as ever are very gratefully received. You should also read immediately Douglas Murphy on Kate Macintosh's masterful Dawson Heights.

Three recent things in the Guardian - a double-review of Lars T Lih's brilliant new Lenin and Eagleton's workmanlike Marx, a piece on the BFI's new Kino early Soviet film season (on which note, those even remotely interested should rush without the slightest hesitation to see Pudovkin's virtually never-seen proto-Neubauten Germanic metal-bashing masterpiece Deserter); a short comment piece on the apparent demise of the property-owning democracy. Which led to this, which I don't really know what to say about.

Finally, Southampton!

Socialists! Where Is Your Vortex?

Among recent things which I have forgotten to plug is a piece for volume One of the new Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies*. It's an expansion and development of previous things on Vorticism, or more specifically the question of why and how Vorticism didn't become a British analogue to the continental avant-garde, despite distinctly looking like one in 1914. It contains, however, an opening attempt at counterfactual fiction, part of which I'm posting below, because a) there's a Vorticism show at the Tate and everything and b) as a way of making clear why I don't write fiction. Enjoy, or not, as the case may be).

1929, London, capital of the Union of British Socialist Republics. A decade after the end of a short and brutal Civil War, and 14 years after the British Expeditionary Force was driven out of Europe by General Ludendorff's victorious offensive. The capital of a devastated country, denuded of its Empire but now tentatively regaining some of its former prominence as the most industrially powerful of the Socialist Republics that now make up half of Europe - though trade between them is difficult, with the Baltic Sea cut off by the vast German Empire, its trade embargo assisted by the anticommunist United States. At the turn of the 1930s, the UBSR is starting to construct new cities.

This is not happening without controversy. Through much of the country, pastoral garden cities are rising from the ruins, the towns destroyed first by Zeppelin raids and then by the Black & Tans. New towns like Connolly outside Dublin, Maxtonburgh in Strathclyde or Morristown in Hertfordshire have been planned by Raymond Unwin using local materials, craftsmanship and winding streets, to the splenetic derision of the Vorticist International. Based in London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Leeds, but with corresponding branches in Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and Leningrad, this group has the ear of the more enlightened commissars of the UBSR's four constituent republics. Edward Wadsworth and Frederick Etchells' redesign of West Yorkshire into a model Vorticist Metropolis is proceeding apace, with their intricate, jagged structures of concrete and glass sprouting walkways and towers that criss-cross the factory chimneys of Halifax and Huddersfield. Wyndham Lewis, the group's chair, is finally completing his government commission to transform Regent Street, which was halfway through Reginald Blomfield's neo-baroque redesign when interrupted by of the 1919 Whitechapel Insurrection. Monumental sculptures by Jacob Epstein adorn the House of Soviets on the site of the demolished Houses of Parliament, though the 'compromised' classical-Vorticist design by Charles Holden was subjected to much Vorticist scorn on publication.

Opponents of the Vorticists are keen to remind them of their roots in a pre-revolutionary art movement. Commissar Harry Pollitt told the Daily Worker that 'not so long ago these were bohemians who sneered at the proletariat, who hoped to 'kill John Bull with art' when John Bull was trying to kill the British bourgeoisie'. Some mutter darkly about counter-revolutionary activity during the Civil War on the part of some in the group, with Edward Wadsworth under particular suspicion. But although their eager participation in the reconstruction has allayed the suspicions of many in the Trade Unions and the Workers' Councils, perhaps their antisocial reputation isn't completely undeserved. Interviewed on his work at Regent Street, Lewis, dressed in a far from proletarian dinner jacket offset by a hammer and sickle pin, told the Daily Herald ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would gain by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks.’

* (which can be obtained from here, and features several far less silly and more intelligent papers)

It may look to the untrained eye

Another apologies and links post. Normal service will not be resumed for some time - aside from doing lots of paid work, the need to actually finish my sodding thesis has sharply intervened. Anyone who wants some idea of what that is about should obtain a copy of the current (ie, number 62, colour pink) AA Files, which has an extended essay on the Gosprom building in Kharkov, taking in Eisenstein, mammoths, Felix Dzherzhinsky, Robert Byron and other such delights. Most of it is in the thesis, or at least the current draft of it. Some killing-2-birds-with-one-stone: I also give a short precis of what the building is and why it's important as the 20th Century Society Building of the Month.

Some other similarly short things: in Socialist Review on Arts Council cuts and collectivity; a rewrite of previous notes on Dublin for Ireland's CrisisJam; something on Matthew Darbyshire for the catalogue of this exhibition; a paragraph on BDP's website, of all things, on their best building (there's more on this to come, incidentally), and a couple of Trawls I don't think I've linked to here yet. I've also, in order to stop my computer from dying, uploaded lots of things onto Flickr. Some rather better pictures accompany some short New Ruins extracts at the new The London Column, for whom I did something else that I'll flag when it's up...

Further details about the Pulp book were promised. It will be out in the last week of June, just after the reformation entirely non-accidentally; it's not in any way a biography of Pulp, but an extended essay on class, mainly, through Pulp records. Given that it was his 1989 that I had in my head as a model when writing it, I cajoled Joshua Clover into blurbing it. It's nowhere near as good, but thankfully he does not say so. It is as follows:

This book is a small marvel. Even within the most ambiguous cultural flowering, something transcendent is cached. Owen Hatherley knows this. Possessed of an architect's clarity and a modernist's astringent vision, he draws forth the the paradoxical and brilliant core of Britpop, and restores Pulp's contradictory genius to its proper place in history. Behind the Blairite swagger of Cool Britannia and the spackle of commercial spectacle, Hatherley finds the truth of pop culture and social antagonism, entangled with the glory and oddity of Pulp's musical career and evanescent fame. Elegant about the songs, lucid about the band's warped trajectory, and incisive about the politics of daily life coiled within the sound and lyrics and moment, Hatherley chronicles the adventures of the Sheffield gang and their "class war casanova" who came forth as the truth of a deeply false moment, bad faith you could dance to, a dialectical verdict on a singular passage in time.

It can be purchased here, already, on discount and everything. Am planning to put a little bit online soon enough. Other than that, the pile of unwritten posts currently consists entirely of several city essays which I will probably write all in one binge in the summer, as well as a more general thing on the delights of chronic autoimmune disease called Flanerie with Crohn's, or something. In the meantime, those looking for bloggery that isn't on indefinite hiatus would be well advised to go here, here, here and here.