Le Corbusier Interview

Self indulgence week continues, with an interview with Le Corbusier when he was in his 70s, speaking in English. If Robert Moses was the Stalin of architecture, then Le Corbusier was its Marx: a genius who shouldn’t be imitated.

The amazing thing about Le Corbusier is that despite the fact that almost everything he built was a masterpiece, it is a very good thing that most of what he designed did not get built. Otherwise we would have gotten what the English satirical magazine, Private Eye, called the “Cite Lunatique de Ciel”.

Actually – I’m not finished on the subject of Corbusier. What is it about architects that they rebel in such overtly repressed ways, wearing a conventional suit but a flamboyant bow tie, and always having funny glasses? Did “Corbu” start this messed up behavior and was it anything to do with being Swiss? In this interview, he seems utterly devoid of what is referred to as a sense of humor.
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1 comment important dead people, self indulgence week

W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse

Yeats is extremely interesting because his life-span ran from the American Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War. He was at one time both Victorian and modern. This recording is from a few years before he died in 1939.

I am fascinated by accents and how they change and this is a perfect example. The interesting thing here is that professional Irishman, Mr Yeats sounds Scottish. Yeats is reading his own poems as he wanted them to sound and therefore the poetic inflection accentuates the accent.

This is not an Irish accent that you hear very often today and in many ways is similar to a West Coast (Gaelic native) Scottish accent, with a touch of Edinburgh sophistication, rather like the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps I am imagining this of course, but that parallel perception would fit well with the reality of Yeats as both a West Coast (Gaelic) Irishman and Dublin sophisticate.

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7 comments Uncategorized

This week is Self Indulgence Week on Smashing Telly

In an attempt to lose readers, and to celebrate self indulgence week, I will be posting items that I find interesting, which either have audio but no video or video but no audio.

3 comments Uncategorized

Leaked Christiantology Video

Is Scientology really that much weirder than the Abrahamic religions? Its total membership is less than the number of people actually killed by them, so it is less dangerous by any objective measure. Its existence as an non-accepted cult, is far more short lived. Its world view is much closer to the size and age of the known universe and its threat to science seems to be tragi-comically confined to psychiatrists. But it is much weirder, right?
Wrong.
This was the most amusing preacher video I could find, to illustrate the point. It makes Tom Cruise look like Thomas Paine.

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1 comment clips, religion

Vaccination – The Hidden Truth

This terrible movie is another great example of FEBL (Fucking entertaining Big Lie) media. For some reason, in recent years a bio-luddite movement has formed against one of the greatest, proven, scientific discoveries in medicine and biggest sources of the relief of global suffering, the process of vaccination. A growing cult has chosen to identify vaccination as some kind of grandiose conspiracy and in doing so, they are engendering paranoia and endangering lives.

The format of this paranoia is very similar to both the Scientologists war on psychiatry or Evangelicals war on Darwinism. Rather like the fact that there are a small minority of biologists who believe in Intelligent Design, this documentary shows the views of some of a small minority of physicians who have problems with vaccination. There are risks with vaccination as there are with almost any medical procedure, and people who do not believe in it, but that does not mean that vaccination does not work, or that the benefits so vastly outweigh the risks that they are overwhelmingly worth it.

In the United States, the place of Tom Cruise for a war on physicians rather than psychiatrists, is taken by the quack radio host, Gary Null (who is not in this Australian documentary but is a popular anti-vaccination extremist). Null’s method is to setup vaccination as some kind of faceless government conspiracy compared with touchy feely alternative medicine, an argument which he delivers with a pleasant, soft, reassuring voice. This is an easy way to persuade people, because it is not comparing like with like.

Rather like the way that natural child birth surrounded by candles is a preferable environment to a sterile linoleum floored hospital room, but is a more dangerous one, vaccination only works if everyone does it, so vaccination tends to be delivered through the somewhat anti-septic environment of government organized vaccination programs. It is because government programs tend to be more faceless and sterile than private ones that they raise the suspicions of those who are susceptible to paranoia and equate truth with personal desirability.

The solution to damping this paranoia was spectacularly shown when we visited our pediatrician, Michel Cohen, as group of prospective parents, before our son was born. At the end of a question and answer session, one man said that he was wary of governments and therefore wary of vaccination. Dr Cohen’s answer was that although it should be the man’s choice what to ultimately do, vaccination was not so much about the individual as about the community.

By replacing society and government with ‘community’, telling the guy he had a choice and implying that lack of vaccination put the individual before the community, i.e. was selfish, Dr Cohen had pulled a Gary Null. He had expressed something in comforting terms, but this time it happened to be the truth. Brilliant, quite brilliant.

Vaccination Information Service/Taycare Pty Ltd
45 min 20 sec Jan 20, 2008
www.vaccination.inoz.com

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14 comments FEBL, religion, science

Story of English – An English Speaking World

Ooh this is good. How can you not be interested in a documentary about the English language that kicks of with the horrible neologism “Russlish” but is, in fact, part of a very thorough and engaging series. This is utterly compelling in both a post modern and classical sort of way. Totally appropriate for a series about language.

MacNeil-Lehrer
57 min 2 sec Jan 19, 2008
www.lethalthought.com

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3 comments series, society

Battle of the Somme

If America had been continuously fighting the Iraq War from before the Mayflower landed, the US death toll would be less than the fatalities in this single battle.

If there was a specific date for the beginning of American hegemony and the death of Imperialist Europe, it would be the first day of the Somme. The Somme was the most brutal of WWI battles with over a million casualties, part of a pointless conflict fought between one country whose ruler had known the others’ as his ‘grandma’.

The Commander in Chief of the British Army at the time, was Douglas Haig, an antiquated buffoon who refused to prepare for modern methods of warfare, calling the machine gun a ‘vastly overrated weapon’. Countless tens of thousands of people died as a result, yet Haig is the name embossed at the center of every poppy worn in Britain in commemoration of both world wars, every year, to this date. This is what one might politely call – a fucking disgrace.
1 hr 19 min 7 sec Jan 2, 2008
www.caltonradio.com

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5 comments history

Made in Huddersfield

Before the Sex Pistols came the US in 1977, marking the end of Punk in many people’s eyes, they played a gig in the North of England where Punk was still thriving in Huddersfield in 1981, when this film was made. This prompts the newscaster introducing the piece to remark:
“What now seems a peculiarly old fashioned cult, Punk Rock”.

Gawd bless whoever saved this 10 minute gem about Punk Rockers in Huddersfield, from obscurity. My favorite bit is the Punk girl serving tea in a retirement home. Which proves the point that theatrical manner doesn’t dictate reality – Frank Sinatra was always closer to real violence than most safety-pinned, gobbing Punks.

Someone should slap this in a titanium can marked ‘of anthropological interest’ and bury it under 6 feet of concrete for 1000 years. It sums up a time and place. That place being Geriatric’s Tea Serving Punk Land, not just Huddersfield.
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4 comments nostalgia, society

Richard Hammond Meets Evel Knievel

When Evel Knievel died last year it felt like Elvis had died, finally. Knievel wore the same satin flared outfits as late period, paunched and side-burned Presley.

He was representative of a peculiarly American Maverick adventurer culture that I remember from childhood, where conservatives like John Wayne seemed cool to us would-be liberals. Unfortunately these True Grit types have been passed away leaving the anemic, conservative, cultural window-dressing of Pottery Barn, McMansions and Evangelical Christianity.

The documentary is presented by Richard Hammond from Top Gear, a program which is being brought from the UK to the US, largely as a result of its cult following via YouTube. 48 hours before the film crew arrived Evel had a stroke, he died 4 months after filming and the program was aired afterwards. Like Top Gear, the film is interesting even if you are not remotely interested in things like cars or motorbikes, only its a tad more cerebral.

BBC
58 min 57 sec Dec 26, 2007

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1 comment biography, gear

Steve Jobs: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Playwrights and poets currently garner more cultural prestige than innovative computer makers, but this may be partly because the present rarely has the prestige of the past even if the here and now is where great art is born. The most prestigious art form of Ancient Greece was Lyre playing, hardly a venerated activity now.

I would argue that in a hundred years people will not have heard of most of the people that cover the arts sections of the broadsheets, but that Steve Jobs will be remembered not just as an industrialist, but as a cultural innovator – an artist.

Jobs is considered sartorially elegant, yet he dresses from the waist down in high waisted, beltless, over-length, bleached jeans and sneakers – like an average suburban mall shopper. He is though of as a great speaker, but his delivery is sometimes horribly rehearsed and his voice thin and nasal. But, listen to this speech from when he had just recovered from cancer, it is a masterpiece. For me this is the thing above all others, to show people who don’t get what all the fuss is about when he speaks at a tawdry trade show, tomorrow at the Moscone Center, and people cover it like it was the sermon on the mount.

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2 comments talks, technology