Imagining East Kilbride as Chandigarh
Sep. 15th, 2008 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSo, I've reached the point in my Book of Scotlands where East Kilbride becomes Chandigarh. East Kilbride was designated, in 1947, the first of a series of New Towns which would later include Glenrothes (1948), Cumbernauld (1956), Livingston (1962) and Irvine (1964).
Built from scratch with Modernist-utopian town planning principles in mind (for instance, houses were staggered on the street so that each one sat in its own landscape, and schools were placed on hills so that they elevated views and minds alike), East Kilbride was the setting for the early 80s comedy Gregory's Girl. Oh, no, wait, that was Cumbernauld. But, frankly, they all look pretty much the same.
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It was also the hometown of Alan McGee, Primal Scream, and other Creation Records bands, who revived forms of pop music as quintessentially 1960s as the architecture of their graph-paper new town. As the Canadian artist Sylvia Grace Borda points out in her project on the town, a lot of the original buildings in East Kilbride are now threatened with demolition. When that happens, a certain Keynesian-utopian vision (no matter how milquetoast) of post-war socialist bliss will vanish off the map of Scotland.
Much as I like the idea of post-war socialist Scottish new towns, though, I can't say I'm too enthusiastic about the drab results (Basil Spence's Duncanrig High School is okay, I guess). So in my parallel Scotland, Le Corbusier -- the master of Utopian degree zero town planning -- is called in to do the job right, as he did for the Indian province of Punjab when, between 1951 and 1965, he helped them construct a monumental and, I think, gorgeous Modernist utopia called Chandigarh.
Nehru, who commissioned the project, said he wanted Chandigarh to be "unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future". And so the greatest symbol of uncompromising Modernism got built in a poor third world country, not in Europe, America or Japan. (Parallels there with Brasilia, of course.)
My task is to imagine what kind of music Creation Records releases in the parallel world in which East Kilbride is a place like Chandigarh. And I suppose the answer is that their catalogue is like a better version of Mute! But wait, weren't Depeche Mode from Basildon, designated a New Town in 1948? So why aren't the Mute and Creation sounds identical? Why don't they both have the graph paper feel Mute bands tended to embrace? I guess I'm going to have to stop being so culturally-determinist about this and admit that genes play a part. In particular, Alan McGee's ginger genes.
Built from scratch with Modernist-utopian town planning principles in mind (for instance, houses were staggered on the street so that each one sat in its own landscape, and schools were placed on hills so that they elevated views and minds alike), East Kilbride was the setting for the early 80s comedy Gregory's Girl. Oh, no, wait, that was Cumbernauld. But, frankly, they all look pretty much the same.
[Error: unknown template video]
It was also the hometown of Alan McGee, Primal Scream, and other Creation Records bands, who revived forms of pop music as quintessentially 1960s as the architecture of their graph-paper new town. As the Canadian artist Sylvia Grace Borda points out in her project on the town, a lot of the original buildings in East Kilbride are now threatened with demolition. When that happens, a certain Keynesian-utopian vision (no matter how milquetoast) of post-war socialist bliss will vanish off the map of Scotland.
Much as I like the idea of post-war socialist Scottish new towns, though, I can't say I'm too enthusiastic about the drab results (Basil Spence's Duncanrig High School is okay, I guess). So in my parallel Scotland, Le Corbusier -- the master of Utopian degree zero town planning -- is called in to do the job right, as he did for the Indian province of Punjab when, between 1951 and 1965, he helped them construct a monumental and, I think, gorgeous Modernist utopia called Chandigarh.Nehru, who commissioned the project, said he wanted Chandigarh to be "unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future". And so the greatest symbol of uncompromising Modernism got built in a poor third world country, not in Europe, America or Japan. (Parallels there with Brasilia, of course.)
My task is to imagine what kind of music Creation Records releases in the parallel world in which East Kilbride is a place like Chandigarh. And I suppose the answer is that their catalogue is like a better version of Mute! But wait, weren't Depeche Mode from Basildon, designated a New Town in 1948? So why aren't the Mute and Creation sounds identical? Why don't they both have the graph paper feel Mute bands tended to embrace? I guess I'm going to have to stop being so culturally-determinist about this and admit that genes play a part. In particular, Alan McGee's ginger genes.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 11:29 am (UTC)Have you seen My (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2wyXJiIwjk) Architect (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOcHJxgq9nA) ? Louis Kahn did some amazing work in India too.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 11:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 11:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:52 pm (UTC)And doesn't Harry Potter -- in his non-magical interludes -- live in Stevenage?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 12:55 pm (UTC)Magazine
Date: 2008-09-15 01:51 pm (UTC)http://www.barflyclub.com/theforum/whatson/event/19772.aspx#MAGAZINE
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 01:51 pm (UTC)Max Schiffermiller here from Taschen publishing. We are prepared to offer you an £80,000 commission to write "1000 nights with 1000 Japanese women". We will cover all the costs for you to live in Tokyo for 3 years while you do your research. All we request is that you bank wire our Nigerian office a £10,000 check to hold until the deal can be finalized. Thanks, Mr. Currie for your time.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 02:11 pm (UTC)My bank account is:
Lehman Brothers / Merrill Lynch
A/C 666131313
The cheque's in the past.
Re: Magazine
Date: 2008-09-15 02:19 pm (UTC)I almost bought tickets just now. But the thought of Ryanair waiting rooms, and a standing-only place on the Forum balcony gazing down at tiny figures far away, gave me pause. I'll probably just watch it on YouTube. The view's better.
Louis Kahn
Date: 2008-09-15 02:46 pm (UTC)http://www.artificeimages.com/buildings/First_Unitarian_Church.html
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 03:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 04:22 pm (UTC)A follow-up study of Chandigarh in the 1980s found that, yes, the roofs were a bit leaky. But that people, asked if they liked living there, said yes, absolutely. They felt part of something big and futuristic and glamourous.
Re: Magazine
Date: 2008-09-15 05:30 pm (UTC)How can it be the same without Mcgeoch?
I saw them with Simple Minds supporting or was it the other way round?
Clouds, Edinburgh. Were you there?
Do you remember the guy who dropped a bag of powder in the foyer?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 05:35 pm (UTC)Re: Magazine
Date: 2008-09-15 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 06:11 pm (UTC)Years ago, when I was young I dreamed of making harsh, uncompromising electronic music similar to that of Nitzer Ebb and getting signed to Mute... I'd shout into the microphone minimalistic lyrics about powerstations and metal things and do my best to scare people.
*sigh* Sadly the demands of parents and the 9-5 meant that my (limited) musical ability got stifled and shoved into the shoebox of spare time, and I ended up in a crappy job at a 'Leading Insurance Company'...
Not that I'm bitter or anything, but it speaks volumes about the repression of my regrets in this deprtment that the first time I ever publicly acknowledge it is on the blog of a guy I've never met whose music I used to listen to in sixth form.
I'm going to be unemployed soon, so I may see if I can conjure something wicked up, but don't hold your breath.
Hm. Feel better for that. Catharsis. Or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 06:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 07:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 07:46 pm (UTC)It gradually became clear that no matter how 'corporate' and professional I tried to be, I'd hit the Glass Ceiling of the Weirdos, which is substantially lower than that for women.
Being considered somewhat 'eccentric' (for example by wearing a rather plush two-tone chocolate/indigo shirt rather than one that looked like it was made out of graph paper - I don't really like blue) had put a bit of a limit on my career, and I was getting stifled, so a year ago I took the first passing Voluntary Redundancy I could in a last ditch effort to get myself into a career I actually enjoyed.
Something funky.
I'm going for Web Design, and my current contract's coming to an end shortly. I have an interview tomoz, so wish me luck...
If I start creating Industrial Electronica you'll know I'm on the Dole. :o)
Now, just in case: where'd I leave my drum machine and distortion pedal?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 08:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:31 pm (UTC)ReidDreid" gets left behind as part of its unfettering from the past, but what replaces it?(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:32 pm (UTC)Watching the beeb here, I see Hirst is still stacking those wads up however...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:48 pm (UTC)Where Mute and Depeche Mode stand in all this is questionable. You could see DM as *anti*-Basildonian, with their very consciously "Teutonic" sound ("Master and Servant" as a conscious - and to me highly successful - attempt to take Einstuerzende Neubaten and turn it into pop music). And the originators seemed to respect it: although to me there was always still that air of a "foreign" sound as reimagined from a southern English new town - albeit a European one rather than the usual American one - DM became immensely successful in Germany, more so than in Britain in fact, and this spread to Eastern Europe where Glasnost-era tastes were largely dictated by whatever was big in the old West Germany circa 1987.
DM probably had quite a few Tory-voting fans here, but the politics of German influence in England are highly complicated (lager and rottweilers are both hugely popular among Sun-reading Kraut-bashers), and I think you could see Depeche Mode as perhaps trying to recover some of the *original* New Town ideas - social democracy recaptured through sounding like they came from a place that was, even under Kohl, sticking relatively close to it in the midst of the 1980s (I know less about German politics than I should, but Thatcherites always gave the impression that Kohl was, at least in their view, quasi-Heathite and thus Not Really One Of Us). Hmmm, maybe that's too tenuous, especially because Basildon was probably *always* the least social democratic of the New Towns. But I think DM at least tried to answer, in their own confused way, the problems left by the vast gap between original New Town ideas and what they became when the heart of Toryism shifted from the outer shires, in a way the Creation bands never tried to do - but then, coming from a country which may soon have a permanent social democratic government as England has a permanent right-wing one, they didn't have the same need to.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:55 pm (UTC)If you work for an organisation, all your designs are going to have to strictly fit within your director's criteria. Not just that but you then have to contend with marketing restrictions eg. appealing to a demographic, etc. Before you know it, your designs aren't your own but an approximation of what you think your boss wants to see, and what you think your audience will like. You're alienated from your own work in a way you didn't think was possible. Ultimately, if your designs arent profitable, youre not worth anything to these people.
Same problem with working freelance. The reality is you can't make a living only taking on projects that you like. You need to pay bills and unfortunately, the only way to make regular money is to take on projects like designing 'low international calls!' poster and flyers to clubs you wouldnt be caught dead at.
I'm not trying to put you off web/graphic design, I just really wish someone had said all this to me before I misguidedly pursued it wholeheartedly. Completely naive and full of enthusiasm, I thought I was entering an industry that would allow me to express myself for a living when the vast majority of the time I was hired out to do what was essentially craft work, creating nothing but the trite imaginings of my clients to pay my bills.
I gave it up, and I now do an office 9 to 5 selling financial software.
Very few people ever make money expressing who they are artistically, It's the rare privilege of two types of artist -- the famous and the hyped. Every other artist struggles to pay bills or compromises their creative integrity heavily, that's just the nature of the game.
I've decided to go to university to study Japanese next year, this 9 to 5 is just to tide me over. Design as a career is over for me; Art to feed your soul and art to feed your belly are two totally different things. Good luck to you though man, I hope my words have given you something to chew over in this transitionary period of yours.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 09:56 pm (UTC)When Chris Bohn - also, of course, the main UK champion of the music Depeche Mode tried their hardest to turn into pop - interviewed The Cure for NME in '81, he commented that they were among the first true children of a new kind of lower middle class - a more rootless, radical-capitalist kind than the almost parodically *steady* lower middle class of the post-war years. He didn't mention that such changes would naturally happen first in New Towns, but I think he was smart enough to know it, and left it to his readers to make the connection (as NME writers back then often had the confidence to do).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 10:12 pm (UTC)I used to work as a compliance consultant for an insurance firm (legals and stuff, FSA rules etc) , and tbh I'm not expecting something that will allow me to express myself in an artistic fashion, I just wanted something more interesting and more creative.
This 'more' bit is sort of relative: I'm just far happier working on web design and graphics than with the rules and regs of the Insurance Industry!
...flyers to clubs you wouldnt be caught dead at
Hehehe... Done a few of those! I just consider myself to be helping people out doing that sort of thing.
For me artistic expression is a bit like sex: highly necessary in my life, but not something I'd expect to make a living out of... O_o
Thank you for your comments btw, and best of luck with Uni!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 10:13 pm (UTC)I used to work as a compliance consultant for an insurance firm (legals and stuff, FSA rules etc) , and tbh I'm not expecting something that will allow me to express myself in an artistic fashion, I just wanted something more interesting and more creative.
This 'more' bit is sort of relative: I'm just far happier working on web design and graphics than with the rules and regs of the Insurance Industry!
...flyers to clubs you wouldnt be caught dead at
Hehehe... Done a few of those! I just consider myself to be helping people out doing that sort of thing.
For me artistic expression is a bit like sex: highly necessary in my life, but not something I'd expect to make a living out of... O_o
Thank you for your comments btw, and best of luck with Uni!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 10:51 pm (UTC)It's a prospect rather similar to the secession of the Yankee states from the Confederate ones getting talked about now -- if only jestingly -- in the US: a way for a left-leaning population effectively subordinated to a right-leaning (if financially dependent) one to regain a political voice and autonomy, and develop a distinctive culture. Could "two new Swedens" emerge?
Best-Laid Plan, By Rem Koolhaas (Guest Editor)
Date: 2008-09-16 12:02 am (UTC)"When modernist architects dreamed a new form of public life, they imagined a liberated ground: Freed from the suffocation of narrow streets, people would roam among monuments, communing with a newly ordered nature that would receive them like an "open hand." At the Chandigarh Capitol Complex in northern India, architect Le Corbusier's hand hovers like a ghost above his decaying dreamscape. But don't be fooled by the emptiness: For half the day, this space is teeming with people, filled with the eclectic chaos of an informal economy. Every morning a market appears, every afternoon it disappears. And to this day, the jury is out on whether this daily injection of chaos is an architectural success or a failure. Public life in spite of architecture? Or public architecture as enabler for life? The emblem of yesterday's architectural heroism has become an icon for the insecurities of today's urban planners. When the space is vacated, as [not] shown here in a photograph by Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, all that's left from the Western imagination's most radical attempt to organize public space is a lesson in the sublime."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/public_spc.html ()
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 01:16 am (UTC)How would England fare with Scotland (and soon after it, I think, Wales and Northern Ireland) gone? I can see it struggling so badly that it accepts its thirty pieces of silver and becomes a US protectorate, probably with the dollar as currency, surrounded on all sides by members of the eurozone. I've recently been envisaging the neoliberal wings of Tory and NuLab merging (as they would do now if they were honest) into a single superparty called the Eastern Atlantic Union, which would have abolished the NHS and drastically cut all public funds, and would rule what was effectively a one-party state. Within twenty years, I can see English expatriates in Scotland (and I think there will be many more such than Scotland has been used to, invariably of the ever-more-marginalised English Left) finding their own country as different from their adopted one, when they return home, as American expatriates in Sweden would if *they* went home. There's a novel developing in my mind in which various people attempting to reverse this (including a moment advocating the incorporation of Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire into Scotland, reminiscent of those in the liberal-leaning northern US who advocate a merger with Canada) form an allegiance of convenience.
This piece (already proven partially predictive) is very good on the subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/26/scotland.boris
I would take pity on England, but I would not be able to feel any great surprise or even feel that it deserved anything better, because it doesn't. I can see the London elite trying to provoke and scare Scotland off because it stands in the way of their plans for their fiefdom, which I believe include EU withdrawal. Hopefully I will be elsewhere before the worst happens, maybe - along with many of my other left-leaning compatriots, I suspect - in that "new Canada in the north".
Of course, the Tory party - once the party of the Union - now stands to gain from its end. Labour, on the other hand, is desperately trying to keep the Union together for its own benefit (devolution, like Gorbachev's allocation of moderately increased powers to the other Soviet republics in the late 80s, was planned with the specific intent to kill off the SNP and strengthen the Union - and thus Labour's chances of forming a Westminster government - through giving *some* autonomy to the Celts: a classic example of the law of unintended consequences in politics).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 05:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 07:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 09:44 am (UTC)When I visited the V&A's Modernism show two years ago I wrote (http://imomus.livejournal.com/205778.html):
"Despite its 1939 cut-off point, the V&A show petered out with an interesting section on the quirky, diversifying regional flavours of late Modernism -- Czech fabrics, Scandinavian furniture, and Brazilian architecture setting the scene for the eccentricites of Post-Modernism. And -- whoosh! -- the Barbican show picked up where Modernism left off, flipping Mies' "Less is more" motto into Venturi's riposte: "Less is a bore!"
So what you see there is late Modernism merging into Postmodernism by exchanging the International Style for a series of national styles, exchanging rationalism for quirk, unity for diversity, and so on. At the same time, a conservatism and an already-finished quality prevented the great Modernists -- like Le Corbusier -- from working in their own countries, so they went and did projects in poor nations like India. Modernism spread outwards from its original hubs (Paris, Berlin, New York), becoming more infected with strangeness and exoticism the further it travelled.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 09:45 am (UTC)Kumakouji's post
Date: 2008-09-16 01:06 pm (UTC)But I wasn't going to post about that: Here are some beautiful images of 'Chandigarh' shot by my friend Gunnar Knechtel.
http://www.gunnarknechtel.com/pop_photo/chan_01.html
Re: Kumakouji's post
Date: 2008-09-16 02:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 05:54 pm (UTC)I guess the part on modernism was never supposed to explain more than just the basics. If someone had, during the "present art" part where we did a zine all together in my class, written about post-modernism it might've been included.
But this is all new stuff to me. We never got into the "turn of modernism" since it encompasses so many styles. Plus, our main focus was art and not architecture. We just saw some photos of architecture here and there.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-16 06:43 pm (UTC)i know how fond you are of fonts & stuff..
Date: 2008-09-17 12:58 am (UTC)Just click here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HrSN7176XI)!