Back in the 1950s, Mies van der Rohe, then at the height of his superstardom in the world of modern architecture, was one of those rare architects who, for better, and occasionally worse, was able to see just about every design he drew up on paper built in the real world. One of the very few buildings that Mies never saw completed in his lifetime, was his monumental early-1950s column-free design for a convention center in his adopted hometown of Chicago.

Around 1977, when New York City proposed a convention hall on the Hudson River, Dirk Lohan, Mies’s grandson, heading Mies’s successor design firm, responded by transplanting a virtually identical copy of the old 1950s design from Chicago to Manhattan. As architect Stanley Tigerman noted in the 1986 book Mies Reconsidered, published in the centennial year of Mies’s birthday:

By doggedly repeating the brilliant Chicago exposition hall proposal in another location because he was requested to do so, Lohan makes a joke of the earlier proposal by implying that one concept destined for the Chicago lakefront is equally useful on New York’s West Side. Ironically, by such an action, Lohan confirms the long-held popular suspicion that Mies’s “glass boxes” are, after all, repeatable.

Sadly, for too many of today’s self-described “liberals,” it’s the most of the ideas from the 1970s that seem repeatable, long after they’re proven outdated. As E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute writes in Newsday, “Cuomo’s big idea looks like 1970s:”

‘The largest convention center in the nation, period” — in Queens? Is he kidding?

Nope. In his State of the State address Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did, indeed, tout the same sort of white elephant already being chased by states and cities across the country.

Cuomo envisions a “state-of-the-art” facility at Aqueduct Racetrack nearly 20 percent bigger than the 3.1 million square foot McCormick Place convention center in Chicago — which, as it happens, is reported to be running at only 55 percent capacity after a costly expansion of its own. In fact, as Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute think tank points out, there was already a nationwide glut of convention-center capacity even before the recession put a big dampener on the entire sector.

Elsewhere in the country, taxpayers are being stuck with the bill for underused, publicly subsidized convention-center and hotel space. Cuomo, however, said the state would pursue the Queens project as a $4 billion joint venture with the private operator of the Aqueduct racino.

This expectation, in turn, is surely based in part on the governor’s hope that New York voters in 2013 will approve a constitutional amendment expanding casino gambling — one of his other top economic development priorities.

“It will be all about jobs, jobs, jobs, tens of thousands of jobs,” the governor said.

As job-creation strategies go, convention centers and casinos are straight out of a 1970s playbook. In this respect, Cuomo’s “New NY” agenda looks more like “Old NJ” — Atlantic City, N.J., that is, if on a much bigger scale.

Without specifically addressing Cuomo’s proposal, in City Journal, Steven Malanga describes it as little more than “Convention Wisdom — Cities keep squandering money on hotels and meeting facilities:”

Boston exemplifies double-down madness. The city shelled out $230 million to renovate its convention center in the late 1980s. After the makeover produced virtually no economic bounce, Boston concluded that it needed a new $800 million center, projecting that it would help the city rent some 670,000 extra hotel rooms a year by 2009. The new center, which opened in 2004, fell far short of expectations: the actual number of room rentals that it generated in 2009 was slightly more than 300,000. Now Boston tourism officials are proposing to spend $2 billion to double the center’s size and add a convention hotel, to boot. The officials optimistically predict that the expanded facilities would inject $222 million annually into the local economy, including an extra 140,000 room rentals a year. Despite these bullish projections, officials claim that the hotel needs $200 million in subsidies.

Boston is far from alone. Hoping to help its limping convention center, Baltimore paid $300 million to build a city-owned convention hotel, which opened in 2008. The hotel lost $11 million last year and has barely been able to pay its employees or its debt service. Yet Baltimore is now considering a massive $900 million public-private expansion that would add a downtown arena, another convention hotel, and 400,000 feet of new convention space. The projected cost in public money: $400 million.

Rinse and repeat ad nauseum, until the tax payers are too broke to shakedown for more building funds. Or not. After all, New York’s proposed convention center in 1977 came only two years after the New York Daily News’ infamous “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” cover.

Curious isn’t it, the disparity between how broke a city or state is, and its ruling class’s ability to dream gigantic collectivist projects to help take their mind off the ongoing fiscal nightmare they created?

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We interrupt our usual blogging for a look back at how we spent our Thanksgiving vacation. There are a bunch of photos here of Your Humble Narrator meeting some of his Imaginary Internet Friends in person on the following page. They’re somewhat big files, so I’m putting in a page break to keep them off the homepage to minimize bandwidth if you’re not on a peppy broadband connection.

Packing for a two week trip in two very disparate climates is quite a challenge. Fortunately, my wife approaches these things in much the same detail that Eisenhower planned continental invasions and Von Braun approached lunar landings. Multiple Excel spreadsheets and pre-flight checklists are involved. (You think I’m kidding.)

And they’re needed, too, since we were about to head off to first a week on the National Review Caribbean Cruise, and then a week in South Jersey to visit my mom – and then a weekend excursion to New York before finally returning to California.

We flew out of San Jose Airport, where some bright spark has gotten the idea of placing a player piano in the parent/child waiting area just before the TSA line. Picture in your mind music by Hieronymus Bosch, and you begin the harmonic possibilities of nervous, fidgety five year olds banging on a player piano. It’s just what you need to hear while you’re worried about the TSA-induced small horrors to follow. You can feel the contempt of the TSA agents as you make your way through the line. They hate us – they really hate us!

Our flight from San Jose to Dallas was relatively uneventful, but the next leg, from D-FW to Miami was interesting. The stewardess had an unusually anal retentive briefing, perhaps because of how little Miami-bound tourists pay attention when it comes to opening the emergency exit in the unlikely event of a water landing. She started the briefing by referring to the Boeing 737 we were encased in as the “Lamborghini of the skies” – considering the aircraft’s high horsepower, low gas mileage and cramped leg space, I guess I can see that.

Nina has written her cruise notes, and James Lileks has plenty of notes on the NR Cruise, so I won’t rehash the trip at sea, except to provide some photos, which start on the next page.

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“San Francisco Explores ‘Bird-Safe’ Building Standards,” CBS reports. But of course they are:

Legislation in San Francisco designed to prevent birds from deadly accidents involving high-rise windows has passed a Board of Supervisors committee and will be presented to the full board.

Proponents of the “bird-safe” building standards told the board’s land use committee that clear glass window panes pose a hazard to migratory and local birds because they don’t necessarily recognize that glass is in their flight pattern, resulting in dead or injured birds upon impact.

The proposed legislation would require builders to install treated windows on any new construction determined to pose a great risk to birds.

But what will they do to reduce the growing risk of bird porn?

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The World Trade Center was not an especially popular building during its lifetime amongst New Yorkers, but given its size and its location, it certainly appeared in lots of movies, sometimes as the star (such as the abortive mid-’70s King Kong remake) but more often looming in the background. Something tells me that this popular montage is nowhere near complete:

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James Lileks responds to a fellow Strib-writer’s defense of a brutal, Corbusier-inspired 1970s concrete apartment tower in Minneapolis:

If I’m a detractor, it’s because this complex embodies everything wrong with utopian urban planning. The author calls it “vibrant,” a word you always find associated with neighborhoods that have an edge (my old DC neighborhood was called “vibrant” as well as “romantically multicultural,” two terms I saw in an Amtrak magazine story a few days after the riots of ’91), but explain how living on the 38th floor contributes to street-level vibrancy. It doesn’t. You want vibrant, you want community, you want people to care, build ‘em low and make them look like they’re part of the long historical – dare I say classic – vocabulary of residential housing.

We once knew this instinctively, prior to the arrival of Corbusier and the Bauhaus. But then, they don’t call it the Great Relearning for nothing.

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“London is no longer an English city, says John Cleese. Is he right?” Ed West (no relation) of the Telegraph asks:

David Cameron’s speech on immigration may not have gone down too well with the parliamentary Liberal Democrats, but I can think of at least one Lib Dem supporter who probably agreed with the PM on this one. In an interview with Seven magazine, the Lib Dem-supporting comedy legend John Cleese explained why he had moved from London to Bath:

Cleese also spoke about the shift in British attitudes away from a “middle-class culture” and the emergence of a “yob culture”.

He said: “There were disadvantages to the old culture, it was a bit stuffy and it was more sexist and more racist. But it was an educated and middle-class culture. Now it’s a yob culture. The values are so strange.”

He added that he preferred living in Bath to London because the capital no longer felt “English”.

“London is no longer an English city which is why I love Bath,” he said. “That’s how they sold it for the Olympics, not as the capital of England but as the cosmopolitan city. I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.”

It is certainly true that London explicitly sold the Olympics on the fact that the city, while less pleasant than Paris in every conceivable way, was multicultural. And while there are many positive things about cosmopolitan London – a dark-skinned Frenchman once told me that London was paradise because nowhere in France could he go about his business without fearing his skin colour might cause some problem – it is certainly not English in the way that Bath still is.

And Bath is English in a particularly liberal way, in the same way, I suppose, that Monty Python was. In fact, one of the strange things about immigration and enforced diversity is that it destroys the very things that liberals love about this country – its egalitarianism, its secularism (including the ability to laugh about religion), an unarmed police, a public willingness to pool resources to pay for publicly owned libraries, arts services, education and health care. Personally, being a latte-sipping European girly-man, I quite like those things, and yet they are slipping away (could Life of Brian even be made today? I’m not too sure).

John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

But what did he expect? (Cleese of course. Dalrymple saw this coming ages ago.) Besides being, at times, one of the greatest comedy shows ever, Monty Python was a weekly assault on the values of post-war England. And England’s societal bedrock of wisdom and knowledge proved in retrospect,  to be surprisingly fragile.  If you’re throwing traditional values onto a bonfire every seven days, isn’t the inference you’d like to see them changed?

Of course, you shouldn’t be all that surprised if change for its own sake doesn’t go quite as planned. Or that, as West hints at above, the new era turns out to be, in many ways, less tolerant than the old one.

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In his Thursday Bleat, James Lileks wrote:

Was given a link today about Art, and being interested in Art, I followed. Stopped. When it quoted that tired old lie by Bakunin:

“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”

Sure, sure. And the act of defecation is an act of consumption. The quote came up in a manfesto about how certain people of limited skills should pursue the goal of being terrible, something they would probably manage to attain without a manifesto behind it. The very idea of manifestos is quaint, isn’t it? The idea of reading something in a dank candlelit cellar with your comrades hanging on every word, their chests expanding with every declaration of society’s perfidy. Hey, I’m glad Europe isn’t ruled by kings anymore, and happy we could help out wherever possible. But Bakuninism and other forms of anarchy are adolescent fantasies that lead directly to rule by terror; once you unleash the people who’ve been assured that destruction is, in its special way, creative, you’ve armed them with the sort of vapid intellectual justification that elevates the street thug into an Agent of Change, and even better, an artist! Because artists are the soul of any society, you know, the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Society is their canvas; fire is their medium. The people to whom the quote really appeals are the ones who never quite get around to the creating part. Hey, I destroyed something; what else do you want?

Bunk. Plus, he was a Jew-hater. Anyway, the manifesto was written by some people I know, or have met, and I like ‘em, so leave it at that. No, I can’t. So. As supporting evidence for the Bakunin quote, there was the observation that every 20th century art movement has involved destroying the previous standards or prevailing aesthetics, and while that’s true, it’s an example of Bakunin quote, backwards. The creative passion is also a passion for destruction. Which is a totally different thing. Unfortunately, when you destroy the old norms to hasten the arrival of the new, you legitimize the destructive part, and elevate it above the usual growth and evolution that used to guide art. Representationalism is dead! Blocks of color are the only true form! Okay. But you’ll have no argument when someone says Blocks of Color are the dead hand of the past, and monochromatic triangles are the only true expression permitted in these existential times.

Of course, the passion for destruction wasn’t limited to the arts once the 20th century rolled around:

“After the destruction of beautiful Dresden, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture. Onward!…Now we march toward the German victory without any superfluous ballast and without the heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage.”

– Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis’ Labor Front, as quoted in Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945.

Yet another example of Starting From Zero.

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As I mentioned at the Tatler late last night, CNN posted a horrifying clip from the inside of their Tokyo office the moment the earthquake hit:

I don’t know what floor CNN’s office is on, but here’s how the Tokyo cityscape looked from street-level, where office buildings can be seen visibly shaking:

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I know Japan’s architects and engineers have decades of practice refining how earthquake-proof their structures are; I wonder what magnitude they’re typically built to withstand?

And finally, one more clip; video of the tsunami wave hitting Sendai Airport, about 225 miles north of Tokyo, and much closer to the epicenter of the earthquake:

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As one of Ace’s co-bloggers writes, “Considering all of the security cameras in Japan that this will be the most well documented disaster in human history, at least in terms of video evidence.”

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At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez explores “Saving the village in order to destroy it” — the unintentional hell of mid-century public housing:

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project. It was once regarded as the vanguard of public housing.  In two decades it would be the symbol of urban failure. It died, but like many things deceased, there was debate over why it expired.

St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project is arguably the most infamous public housing project ever built in the United States. A product of the postwar federal public-housing program, this mammoth high-rise development was completed in 1956.

Only a few years later, disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. In 1972, after spending more than $5 million in vain to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, in a highly publicized event, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and razed the remaining buildings.

Hoffman claims that nobody ever thought the project was a good idea in itself. Rather, this grandiose development was seen as a levee that would stop the tides which were slowly destroying the city of St. Louis. By building a glittering prestige project, the urban rot could be reversed and the city reinvigorated. With the confidence of those who believed that government money could make a losing proposition into a profitable one. Mayor Joseph Darst believed high quality, low-cost public housing was the answer and decided to build a “Manhattan by the Mississippi”, engaging an architect who was later to build the World Trade Center. So up went Pruitt-Igoe.

In 1951 Architectural Forum praised Yamasaki’s original proposal as “the best high apartment” of the year. … Architectural Forum praised the layout as “vertical neighborhoods for poor people” … Each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a “river of trees”. … “Skip-stop” elevators stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors, forcing residents to use stairs in an attempt to lessen congestion. The same “anchor floors” were equipped with large communal corridors, laundry rooms, communal rooms and garbage chutes.

Being unable to live on its own merits, nothing worked out. The stairwells which were supposed to lessen congestion turned into places where muggers could lurk. The “community” whose lives were planned out according to the latest theories never attracted more than 60% occupancy. It became the victim of the “tragedy of the commons”. “When corridors were shared by 20 families and staircases by hundreds, public spaces immediately fell into disrepair. … I never thought people were that destructive.”

For my own take (with big assists from Tom Wolfe and Theodore Dalrymple) on the horrors of post-war public housing in both America and England, and their shared grandfather, French modern architect and disastrous, self-styled city planner Le Corbusier, click here.

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Establishing a foothold in the world of art and design isn’t easy, but watching your career become exiled to Siberia certainly is. A pair of new posts this week explore what happens when épater le bourgeois goes horribly wrong.

We’ve referenced the concept of “épater le bourgeois” a few times around here over the years, but for those unfamailar with the term, let’s let Roger Kimball explain:

It’s a lot of fun being an artist these days. Only a tiny percentage makes any money, but there is a big consolation prize in the form of attitude. Back in the late 19th century, many aspiring French artists were out to “épater le bourgeois.” The great problem going forward was that almost all artists were themselves part of the much-maligned group, the bourgeoisie. How, then, to amaze and startle oneself?

Early in the last century, Marcel Duchamp pioneered the two main strategies: the boring and the bizarre. To the first category belongs such “ready-mades” as “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” a “work” that consists of an ordinary snow shovel which, because Duchamp had the wit (or was it only the effrontery?) to exhibit it in an art gallery, suddenly achieved the transfiguring nimbus of Art with a capital “A.”

Duchamp’s second innovation aimed not to anesthetize viewers but to shock them. “Fountain,” an ordinary urinal displaced from the bathroom to the exhibition hall, was the founding gesture of that large gift to perpetual adolescents.

We’re much more sophisticated — at least, we’re much coarser — nowadays, so we are no longer shocked by the exhibition of a plumbing fixture. But in its time “Fountain” was every bit as shocking as (e.g.) Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine.

There were plenty of titters, and probably other, less agreeable, sounds when Duchamp pulled his pranks, but what a large opening he created for those coming after him!

Of course, these days, there’s no traditional bourgeois left to shock, and to build on Roger’s comments above, with a century of repetition behind it, épater le bourgeois is better described in Yiddish than French. It’s shtick, and I dare say that most of us on the right are long-since immune to these techniques. And these days, it’s the art world itself that’s far more bourgeois than bohemian these days, to borrow David Brooks’ bobo formulation. (QED.)

First up a look at how to do it the horribly wrong way. Found via the Manolo, Linda Grant of the Guardian describes how former Christian Dior designer John Galliano epatered himself right out of the business:

According to fashion journalist Melanie Rickey, of the Fashion Editor at Large blog and Grazia, for years the industry has pushed Galliano to greater and greater extremes: “All everyone has ever wanted from John is transgressive fashion, and to use his excessive ideas to sell nice handbags and perfumes,” she says. And once you are set on a path to break taboos, it is almost impossible to find new ideas. So how on earth do you shock, when you have already exhausted S&M dungeons for ideas for haute couture? The great taboo in France and Germany is antisemitism. On this ground Jews were murdered or transported to be murdered. Watching the video of Galliano slumped alone at his bar table hurling insults at a woman who evidently asked why he didn’t make clothes that all women could wear, he spits out rage. She is ugly, he loves Hitler, he invokes the gas chambers. It’s a toxic mix of hate-speech, of racism and misogyny. How is it possible to go further than this?

If you are breaker of taboos, then antisemitism is only another taboo, no different from any other. It’s the saying of the unsayable. It has become the last frontier for those demanding freedom of speech, for whom everything, even the Holocaust, is fair game. Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock.

It’s Galliano’s fortune and misfortune to have been named as a genius. He wants to go to the S&M clubs of the Parisian underworld and bring back chains and put it over a black leather bag and call the bag Bondage? Why not? Who would dare tell him that he has no idea what he is talking about when he says he loves Hitler, or that there is something the matter with abusing women in bars? Around him are innumerable yes men and women, bowing to his great thoughts.

Which highlights how old and boxed-in the game of épater le bourgeois has become, and how tired and exhausted those who wish to practice it seem these days.

And speaking of boxed-in, here’s how to do it right — or at least, from the right. But first, some background. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Painted Word back in 1975, an artist who hope to make a name for himself had to abandon whatever pretenses he had towards developing his own style, hop a Greyhound from Ohio or Iowa to the Village, and begin what Wolfe described as the “Apache Dance:”

During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall . . . and, well, I mean, my God—from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie . . . They’re coming! . . . And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:

Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me . . . O damnable Uptown!

By all means, deny it if asked!—what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things! So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As we’ve just seen, the ritual has two phases:

(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.

(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.

By the First World War the process was already like what in the Paris clip joints of the day was known as an apache dance. The artist was like t he female in t he act, stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning indifference the next, resisting the advances of her pursuer with absolute contempt . . . more thrashing about . . . more rake-a-cheek fury . . . more yelling and carrying on . . . until finally with one last mighty and marvelously ambiguous shriek—pain! ecstasy!—she submits . . . Paff paff paff paff paff. . . How you do it, my boy! . . . and the house lights rise and Everyone, tout le monde, applauds . . . The artist’s payoff in this ritual is obvious enough. He stands to gain precisely what Freud says are the goals of the artist: fame, money, and beautiful lovers. But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of the act? What’s in it for them? Part of their reward is t he ancient and semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the arts—the museum boards, arts councils, fund drives, openings, parties, committee meetings—have completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there is more!

There is, but you get the gist. (You can read more from an excerpt of Wolfe’s The Painted Word online at Wolfe’s Website.) But woe betide the artist who shines a light upon the whimsies and peccadilloes of his benefactors or his peers. Remember, you’re in the club — the rest of the world outside is fair game, but never your fellow club members.

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Back in 1978, architectural critic Peter Blake wrote a book titled Form Follows Fiasco. In retrospect, it was sort of Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House played straight, except that unlike Wolfe, Blake, who for a time ran the architectural department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was once a true believer in modern architecture; to the best of my knowledge, The Master Builders, his early 1960s hagiography of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright is still for sale to this day in the MoMA bookshop.

But by the mid-1970s Blake, no relation to the British pop artist of the same name, observed that much of modern architecture, which promised to Start From Zero (to coin a phrase) and revolutionize the living conditions of the world via a utopian transformation of aesthetics and construction, was essentially a bust. Corbusier’s massive apartment designs, transplanted to America in the 1950s and sold under the rubric of “Urban Renewal” razed poor but functional urban neighborhoods and replaced them with concrete nightmares. Before, the streets and stoops of the old neighborhoods allowed parents to see what their kids were up to; the huge parks that Corbusier loved to place his buildings in became no man’s land war zones at night.

Similarly in England, Theodore Dalrymple wrote a few years ago:

Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe. I imagined that the cheap and charmless high rise buildings which so disfigure the city-scape had been erected of necessity in great gaping holes left by Heinkel bombers. I had spent much of my childhood playing in deserted bomb shelters in public parks: and although I was born some years after the end of the war, that great conflagration still exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of British children of my generation. I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.

“A great shame about the war,” I said to the store assistant, who was of an age to remember the old days. “Look at the city now.”

“The war?” she said. “The war had nothing to do with it. It was the council.”

The City Council—the people’s elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering’s air force. Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the most minimal visual sensibility.

Still though, some mid-century modern architecture worked out reasonably well — ironically for the socialist-oriented Bauhaus and their champions, in the form of steel and glass corporate office towers. Just check out the swanky offices of the gang on Mad Men, or drop by the Lever House or the Seagram Building on Park Ave.

Today, as Jonah Goldberg, Michael Malone, Joel Kotkin and James Lileks have each recently noted, America as a nation doesn’t build in anywhere near the quantity it did during much of the 20th century. But will we look back at the follies of the similarly Start From Zero “green revolution” in much the same skeptical way as Blake, Dalrymple and Wolfe have documented the utopian pretensions of modern architecture?

Maybe, as a couple of recent blog posts highlight, along with a great new video from Politizoid to put it all into perspective, after the page jump.

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If the Krell from Forbidden Planet, or the civilization just offscreen that built the monoliths in 2001 celebrate Christmas, this has to be one of their more festive numbers. It’s “Silent Night” performed by Robert Fripp of King Crimson, using his “Frippertronics” technique of tape loops, and a Les Paul Custom run through a fuzz box with all of the treble rolled off the guitar, for a sine wave-style analog synthesizer sound. (No wonder he and Adrian Belew loved their Roland guitar synthesizers in the early 1980s incarnation of King Crimson — Fripp was playing with a similar sound several years before Roland bundled it as a preset.)

I posted this back in July when I stumbled over it via the Truveo video search engine, and thought it was a hoot — Mike Meyers’ old “Sprockets” sketch from the Saturday Night Live of 20 years ago could have had lots of fun with this as well:

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And for those who’d like to bring similar sounds home for the holidays, why not turn your Xbox into the perfect video Theremin interface?

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Joe Carter of the Catholic Education Resource Center explores “The Fountainhead of Bedford Falls.” As he writes, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Frank Capra’s George Bailey aren’t often discussed in the same breath, but the two fictitious characters, immortalized by Hollywood via Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, two legendary mid-century leading men, have a surprising amount in common.

“To anyone familiar with both works, it would seem the two characters could not be more different, ” Carter notes. “Unexpected similarities emerge, however, when one considers that Roark and Bailey are variations on a common archetype that has captured the American imagination for decades:”

Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s book, is an idealistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision by conforming to the needs and demands of the community. In contrast, George Bailey, the hero of Capra’s film, is an idealistic young would-be architect who struggles in obscurity because he has chosen to conform to the needs and demands of the community rather than fulfill his artistic and personal vision. Howard Roark is essentially what George Bailey might have become had he left for college rather than stayed in his hometown of Bedford Falls.

Rand portrays Roark as a demigod-like hero who refuses to subordinate his self-centered ego to the demands of the community society. Capra, in stark contrast, portrays Bailey as an amiable but flawed man who becomes a hero precisely because he chooses to subordinate his self-centered ego for the greater good of the community.

Read the whole thing, found via Kathy Shaidle, who has her own thoughts on the comparison.

And for my video interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, in which we discuss The Fountainhead, along with other aspects of Rand in postwar America, just click here.

Incidentally, say what you will about Rand and Capra, Roark and Bailey, and Cooper and Stewart; the Hollywood of World War II and its immediate aftermath was undoubtedly made of sterner stuff than its current iteration.

Related: Since this is a movie-related post, I might as well hang this here: a movie Easter egg so cool, it goes to 11.

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Or, from Bauhaus to Trudeau’s house.

Who hasn’t once said to himself, you know what I’d like to see? A remake of the early 1980s art film Koyaanisqatsi, with all of the visuals replaced by shots of Montreal in the 1960s! Well, other than pretty much no one. But still, that didn’t stop this documentarian from giving it a go. Ending with shots of Montreal’s Expo ’67, and with over 40 years of hindsight, you really sense the demise of crisp mid-century Mies van der Rohe-style modernism, with the brown polyester hell of the 1970s just around the corner:

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Oh, and speaking of Expo ’67, a new post at the Ultra Swank Website has lots more on that topic, with additional vintage photos and videos. Maybe Don Draper and his new Canadian fiancee will visit there in the next season of Mad Men, just before 1968 brings the curtain down on the swank, mod, mid-1960s.

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Personally, I’m not sure if this is the most appropriate font for this post:

You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport

You watch the superbowl just for the commercials

You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away

You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas

You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes

You are completely immune to subliminal advertising

You look upon a well-designed project with either:
sympathy OR extreme jealousy

Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse

You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride

You practically take caffeine intravenously

You have an appreciation for everything unique

You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like s***. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.

“You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”.
(even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”

“…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”

“… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”

Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.

You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.

You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.

Back in the 1990s, I wrote a piece for Modernism magazine on Mies van der Rohe’s pioneering MR10 tubular steel chair (sadly the text isn’t online, but it’s mentioned here), before writing an article on Mies himself for National Review Online. Does that count?

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According to Mashable, The Gap has given up on its new logo:

Gap has announced on its Facebook Page that it is scrapping its new logo design efforts, acquiescing to a torrent of criticism coming primarily from Facebook and Twitter users.Last week, Gap unveiled a new logo, one it called “a more contemporary, modern expression.” The retailer’s customers were not so thrilled about the change, and Gap decided to ask users for their logo design ideas instead. However, that course of action has now been reversed, as well.

“Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback,” the company said on its Facebook page. “We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowdsourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight.”

According to Gap, the original logo will make its return “across all channels.”

The logo looks exactly like it was created by designers obsessed with the one-size-fits-all look of Helvetica in the late 1960s; James Lileks created an amusing parody of it here.

On the other hand, to paraphrase Allahpundit’s response to The Simpson’s dark 1984/Metropolis parody in its opening yesterday, when’s the last time the Gap has gotten any buzz at all? Is bad news actually good news for the Gap, simply because it got people talking about its product?

Incidentally, between such Bobos in Paradise icons as The Gap, The Dems, Restoration Hardware and MSNBC (not to mention The One) all producing rather questionable branding campaigns in short succession, you really do get the sense the old order has officially run out of steam.

You say you want a revolution?

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“Why I am a black Tea Party patriot opposed to Barack Obama:”

Here is my personal story.

A urine smell permeated the stairwell. In the darkness due to smashed light bulbs, the sound of broken wine bottles underfoot echoed off the concrete walls. I was nine years old. With the elevators out of service half the time due to vandalism, I was forced many times to take the scary trek into the shadow of death up the stairwell to our sixth-floor apartment in the projects of east Baltimore.

This was a far cry from the brand spanking new building we had moved into just two years earlier. I remember our excitement when my parents, three younger siblings and I moved in our apartment. It was a dream come true – moving from our leaky-roofed ghetto into a place where everything, including the appliances, were new.

We were one of the first in the 11-story, all black residents building. While a few people kept their apartments lovely, most seemed committed to destroying the building.

All I kept hearing was that everything was the “white man’s fault”. Even at the age of nine, I sarcastically thought to myself, “how can we stop these evil white people from sneaking in here at night peeing in the stairwell, leaving broken wine bottles, smashing the light bulbs and attacking people?”

– Tea Party anthem composer Lloyd Marcus, in — astonishingly enough — England’s Guardian. (Read the whole thing.)

(H/T: Kyle Smith)

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In one of the early chapters of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man, there’s a sort of prologue that sets the scene for many of the actions Washington would undertake throughout the 1930s that made a financial depression in 1929 and 1930 into the Great Depression. It would last until (take your pick) the start of World War II — that economic “miracle of the 1940s,” as Paul Krugman would put it. Or, as Michael Barone recently noted, until a newly minted Republican Congressional majority rolled back the worst of the New Deal’s punitive legislation in 1946, thus launching a post-war economic boom that wouldn’t completely run out of steam until the mid-1970s, before President Reagan and Paul Volcker jump-started the economy once again.  (Funny how their efforts worked so much more quickly than those of either FDR or the troika of Polosi, Obama and Reid, but I digress.)

It’s a shame that Shlaes’ book will likely never been made into a movie, because there could be a nifty Barbarians at the Gate sort of HBO film here, if someone with Larry Gelbart’s screenwriting chops, but still sympathetic to the material, could be found to adapt it with a deft satiric touch and be and brave enough to deflate liberal history’s most sacred cows.

Shlaes’ prologue concerns the famous voyage in July of 1927  to the then-nascent Soviet Union by a gaggle of intellectuals who would soon be bringing America the New Deal, once they had a major financial crisis they hated to see go to waste. In our imaginary HBO movie, the cruise to the Soviet Union would make a perfect extended visual metaphor, in much the same way that the prehistoric apes or the Marines in basic training on Parris Island lay down the subtext for the rest of what’s to come in 2001 and Full Metal Jacket, respectively. Or as Steven Hayward summarizes in his 2007 review of the Forgotten Man:

Two things propelled FDR’s New Deal beyond the depredations that would have come from Hoover’s social-engineering mentality: the presence of the intellectuals and political operatives whom Shlaes calls “the pilgrims,” and FDR’s own intellectual instability combined with his political opportunism. “The pilgrims” refers to the handful of future New Deal intellectuals, Rexford Tugwell being the most prominent among them, who made a junket to the Soviet Union in 1927 that culminated in a six-hour interview with Stalin. Here Shlaes’s prose is at its understated best. She does not portray the pilgrims as crypto-Communists bamboozled by Potemkin tours, though an element of that gullibility is inescapably present. Rather she discerns the “dreamy” cast of mind that was soon to create the New Deal’s belief in vague, non-Marxist central planning. “The heroes [of the USSR] were not precisely their heroes,” Shlaes writes. “Still, the meetings had their effect. The travelers were now transformed from obscure analysts of the Soviet Union into bearers of news. . . . The conservatives were having their day, and the planners would get theirs.” Giddy with excitement, the pilgrims returned to the U.S. on the steamship Leviathan, “and the irony of that name may not have escaped some of them.”

Actually, it’s even better; the ship on which they departed was named the President Roosevelt — for Teddy, America’s original “Progressive” president, who did much to propel the initial thirst for Big Government. Which truly would evolve into a Leviathan under the pressure of the socialist “pilgrims” and another President Roosevelt, waiting in the wings for his four terms to begin.

As Shlaes noted, it was during an earlier pilgrimage in 1921 that Lincoln Steffens wrote, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Which calls to mind P.J. O’Rourke’s famous line from the early 1980s, when he accompanied a bunch of die-hard true believers on a river cruise through the Soviet Union, 60 years after Steffens and the rest of the “pilgrims”:

These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

Call them what you will, what is it about self-styled intellectuals, “liberals,” leftists, “progressives” who loathe America and think that real progress exists in some far off land, preferably with top-down centralized state-run planning? During the first two decades of the 20th century, American men had built the first mechanized airplane and were spreading electricity throughout the nation, the first big radio networks were going up, skyscrapers were rising ever higher, affordable mass-produced automobiles were rolling off assembly lines, and nascent television technology was being created, all via private enterprise. But instead, the intellectuals of the period look to totalitarian nightmare states thousands of miles away such as the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy, and want to cut and paste their ideas into the American firmament.

This trend would get repeated again in the 1980s, when left-wing economists (when they weren’t still praising an exhausted Soviet Union tacitly begging for President Reagan to help toss them into the ash heap of history) looked to the future of business and saw it in…Japan. Central planning, corporatism, orderly and neat top-down control — this is where it’s at, boys!

Well, until Japan’s decade-long recession arrived right around the same time that Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes were starring in Rising Sun. And of course, every leftist goes through his bearded Marxist phase and embraces the fantasyland ideal of Castro and Che’s Cuba. More recently, Thomas Friedman has had his heart set on China as the Next Big Thing, though he’s not quite ready to abandon his mansion just yet. (Or to borrow another PJ O’Rourke quote, “You can’t get good Chinese takeout in China and Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba. That’s all you need to know about communism.”)

A century ago, H.L. Mencken dug the Kaiser’s Germany, making him, as Fred Siegel perceptively noted a few years back, one of the original 20th century anarcho-authoritarians. In the 1930s, Charles Lindbergh and Philip Johnson saw the Third Reich as the Next Big Thing. Le Corbusier would soon join them, supporting France’s collaborationist Vichy government. But it’s rare that Germany is thought of in such sweeping terms these days.

Well, until now. In a recent interview on PJM Political, James Lileks noted that the media produced by the right and the left are generated via non-contiguous information streams, which is why an article or a blog post that makes perfect sense to the right sounds like craaaazy talk to those on the left-hand side of politics.

And it works both ways, needless to say. Arguably it’s worse on the left since they desire to control so many more aspects of individual lives, and have an information cocoon that often serves as a forcefield to information from outside. In contrast, conservatives and libertarians need only turn on a TV, go to the movies, or read a newspaper to be exposed to ideas from the left.

Or read a magazine, which brings us to an unintentionally hysterical article in the middle of the September issue of Condé Nast’s Traveler. In between page after page of ads for Louis Vuitton luggage, Ralph Lauren menswear, sleek Jaguar automobiles, and first class cruises, train trips, and airline flights to all corners of the globe comes an article written by Marc Barasch titled, “How Green is My Berlin.”

Fans of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which explored how deeply intertwined all of the various strains of progressivism were and are over the last 150 years, will love the unintentional irony of an article that begins with the sentence, “Germans want to save the world.”

What could go wrong?

Again?

But first, the author lays down his greener-than-thou bona fides:

Personally, I’m into green about up to my eyeballs. [And how-- Ed] I run a global tree–planting foundation called the Green World Campaign. My friends are “ecopreneurs” and flora– and fauna–hugging activists. The enviro stuff is my whole–grain bread and apple butter. But I’ve gotten wind of something unique happening in Berlin, something beyond the pages of the clean–tech, sue–the–polluters, always–buy–organic American green hymnal. [Hymnal is a quite an interesting word choice -- Ed] I want to see for myself.

But of course. I have been over to the future — behold the eco-eschaton!

I am heading for the city’s most iconic building, the formerly bombed–out Reichstag, once tagged “do not resuscitate” and now the most eco–tricked–out seat of government on earth. Behind the facade of pompous Prussian bas– reliefs (mostly nude Brunhildas with lions rampant), a modernist geyser of mirrors erupts to a glass dome. The sparkling cone funnels in natural light while doubling as a vent for stale air (every bloviating legislature should have one). The building is warmed by geothermal heat; the solar array is augmented by a basement generator running on—wait for it—locally produced canola oil. Sustainable architecture doesn’t quite say it: This is Pimp My Parliament, Green Edition.

Great — just what the world needs is a Potemkin Reichstag, which may count as the ultimate example of Blair’s Law in action. But didn’t the Reichstag get pimped out enough in the 1930s?

But wait, Barasch is just getting started:

I reach the Reichstag dome’s upper platform, its glass floor doubling as the ceiling of the legislature. This democracy–under–glass is more than just window–dressing: Years of freewheeling multiparty debate have produced a remarkable national consensus. At an earlier press conference, I heard the impressively well–nourished federal minister of economics and technology boast that his conservative government would “march at the forefront to solve the mega–issue of climate protection—other nations can just follow!” He itemized the eco–Anschluss on stolid fingers: German wind farms in the North Sea; German hydropower plants in the Balkans; German windmills in Romania; German solar thermal projects in Spain; a vast half–trillion–dollar complex of solar turbines in the Sahara that will surge gigawatts to whole swaths of Europe. The goal of a carbon–free economy by mid–century may be, as one local enviro put it to me, das Blaue vom Himmel—“a hopeful blue sky”—but when the minister uttered the phrase “to rescue the world,” it sounded like he meant it.

Did I really just read a paragraph that referred to the “the eco–Anschluss?” I think we may have just gone a boilerplate moral equivalence of war analogy too far. Will bio-diesel powered Panzers roll into Austria, followed by the Prius Brigade’s long drive into the Sudetenland?

The photo caption on the Conde Nast Website actually includes the sentence, “the Reichstag—the world’s most eco-efficient parliament.” Well, gosh. There’s nothing quite like seeing the words Reichstag and efficient in the same sentence. But fortunately, our own Neville Chamberlain has his umbrella ready, just in case he needs to declare eco-peace in our eco-time.

More from this episode of Springtime for Algore:

I meander east to Alexanderplatz, where the Wall once slashed the city raggedly in half, to visit a more retro icon, the 1,200–foot Fernsehturm (“television tower”), erected by the Communist German Democratic Republic as a thumb in the eye of the West. I take the elevator up to the viewing deck and gaze out at a sprawling municipality ten times the area of Paris. I’m struck by the azure and emerald of the Spree River and the Tiergarten district. From here, Berlin stands revealed as a city in a forest, cut by canals, surrounded by distant, glistering lakes. At least thirty percent of the city consists of nature itself; it would be the world’s greenest capital if no eco–activist ever lifted a finger. Out to the north is a stand of white Popsicle sticks with spinning pinwheels—wind turbines scything the breeze for power. To the east are the Plattenbauten, stacks of prefab gray concrete Lego blocks; but from my bird’s–eye view, I see verdant patches in the courtyards where residents, masters of make–do, have ripped up stone for grass, trees, gardens, and playgrounds.

Making do is what Berlin does best. It was Klaus Wowereit, its famously gay fifty–six–year–old mayor, who coined the term poor but sexy to describe the city’s flamboyant, post–Mauerfall indebtedness, then nearly $80 billion. Known fondly as Wowi, he has focused Berlin’s identity away from its aging and shrinking population, double–digit unemployment, fraying social safety net, and ethnic tensions (it is the second–largest Turkish city after Istanbul) in favor of Young! Hip! Creative! A famous photo shows him drinking champagne out of an actress’s shoe.

Why, an aging European nation that ignores the ticking time-bomb of its demographics and the increasing tensions of two remarkably divergent cultures living together — somebody should write a book about that. (I hope the famously gay mayor of Berlin keeps in the mind the story of the famously gay mayor of Paris. He survived a stabbing in 2002 by a Muslim immigrant in 2002, who, according to Wikipedia, reportedly told police that “he hated politicians, the Socialist Party, and homosexuals.”)

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As the Examiner notes, “Think the economy is bad? Worse is coming.” And as always, Manhattan leads the way, with “Homelessness Up 50% In New York City” according to this article.

Meanwhile, the Zero Hedge Website is ready to party like it’s 1923, exploring what 21st-century Weimar-style hyperinflation would look like, and noting, somewhat reassuringly, “Civil society will stumble about like a drunken sailor, but eventually right itself and carry on with a new normal.” As the Gipper would say, that’s an insult to drunken sailors, but the scenarios, and the methods to survive them are still worth reading, as this excerpt highlights:

A banker friend of mine manages the assets of a fabulously wealthy 70-something gentleman, whom I’ll call Alfredo. In 1973, Don Alfredo was a youngish man, just starting out, with a degree in engineering but no money—until he inherited US$3,000 from a deceased aunt. Alfredo realized that the $3,000 were in a sense worthless: He couldn’t buy anything with them, and it wasn’t enough for him to leave the country and start over someplace else. After all, even then, $3,000 was not that much money.

So he took those $3,000, went down to the stock exchange, and spent all of it on Chilean blue-chip companies: Mining companies, chemical companies, paper companies, and so on. The stock were selling for nothing—less than penny stock—because of the disastrous policies of the Allende government. His stock broker at the time told him not to buy stocks, as Allende’s government, it was thought, would soon nationalize these companies as well.

Alfredo ignored his broker, and went ahead with the stock purchases: He spent all of his $3,000 on buckets of near-worthless equities.

On September 11, 1973, the commanders in chief of the four branches of the Chilean military staged a coup d’état. Within a year, Alfredo’s stock had rebounded about ten-fold. Since then, they’ve multiplied several thousand-fold—yes: Several thousand-fold. Don Alfredo has lived off of that $3,000 investment ever since—it’s what made him a multi-millionare today.

He realized, of course, that either those blue-chip companies would be nationalized by Allende—in which case he would lose all his $3,000 inheritance, which really wouldn’t change his fortunes very much—or somehow a new normal would arrive in Chile. Since the $3,000 couldn’t buy him anything, he took a gamble—and won.

What do these two true stories tell us? Simple: Buy when there’s blood on the streets.

That’s Baron de Rothschild’s famous line—but it hides a key insight, one which should be highlighted perhaps even more forcefully than the line itself:

Even in the midst of Apocalypse, things will get better.

That’s something people don’t quite seem to understand. In fact, it’s why teenagers tragically kill themselves over some girl or boy: They don’t realize that, no matter how bad things are now, they will get better later. To repeat:

Even in the midst of Apocalypse, things will get better.

I’m not repeating this insight as an empty comfort to my readers—I’m saying it as a trading strategy. When things are at their crazy worst, when everyone believes the Apocalypse is well nigh here, that’s when thing are about to turn for the better. This applies to every situation—including and most especially in a hyperinflationary situation.

Why? Simple: Because hyperinflation—by definition—cannot last. Because people need a stable medium of exchange. So if the currency goes up in flames in a hyperinflationary fire, of course there will be a period of terrifying instability—but it will pass. Either the currency will be repaired somehow (as Volcker repaired the dollar back in 1980–’82). Or the currency will be completely and irrevocably trashed—and then be replaced by something else. Because—to insist—people need a stable medium of exchange.

If Treasuries tank and commodities shoot up so high that they essentially break the dollar, civilization will not come crashing down into anarchy. At worst, there’ll be a three-four years of hell—economic hell. Financial hell. But then things will settle down into a new normal.

This new normal might well have unsavory characteristics. I tend to be a pessimist, and just glancing through history, I can see that just about every period of hyperinflation has been stabilized by some subsequent form of autocratic or totalitarian government. The United States currently has all the legal decisions and practical devices to quickly transition into an authoritarian or totalitarian regime, should a crisis befall the nation: The so-called PATRIOT Acts, the Department of Homeland Security Agency, the practical suspension of habeas corpus, etc., etc.

But as I said in my previous post, and reiterate here: Speculations about the new normal are pointless at this time. The future will happen soon enough.

What I do know is, One, a hyperinflationary event will happen, following the crash in Treasuries. Two, commodities will be the go-to medium for value storage. Three, all asset classes will collapse in short order. And Four—and most importantly—civil society will not collapse along with the dollar. Civil society will stumble about like a drunken sailor, but eventually right itself and carry on with a new normal.

During that stumble, opportunities will present themselves. I hope I have explained why.

Hey, the Weimar Republic managed to right itself after its bout with hyperinflation — it just took a quarter century and a World War to do the job.

By the way, remember the infamous one million mark note designed for the Weimar Republic by Herbert Bayer, one of the pioneering modernists of the Bauhaus? After more than a century of Starting From Zero, the more things change:

The more they remain the same:

After plenty of “reeducation” from the Ministry of Love the regime the administration this new currency should seem even more doubleplusgood!

And speaking of Germany, high finance, and the more things change…

Related: “Running for Congress on an Amity Shlaes platform”?

That definitely works for me.

Elsewhere in the “All This and World War II” files, as I quipped when I wrote the headline for Kim Zigfeld’s article on the Pajamas homepage, “It’s Springtime for Stalin at Emmy-Nominated Russia Today.”

Related: “They told me if I voted for John McCain, America would be taken back to the 1920s. And they were right!”

Hey, at least it’s America’s 1920s, and not Weimar. Yet.

(And incidentally, miss him yet?)

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Danger! Serious font wonkery ahead! Proceed with caution!

At about the 10:15 mark in last week’s show, after first noticing Peggy’s gams of course, then the Eero Saarinen chair they’re resting on, I spotted an interesting poster in the right-hand corner of the shot. Click above photo to enlarge.

As the image wasn’t onscreen very long, all I saw were the words “Helvetica,” so I thought perhaps it was the poster for the 2007 documentary of the same name. But while Mad Men “plays fast and loose with period fonts,” as James Lileks once mentioned to me (and they do), I didn’t think they’d play that fast and loose with with their artwork in general.

Fortunately, it’s not the poster for the movie (which looks like this), but a poster advertising the font itself, from the early 1960s. Click here to see it full size.

But can the firm of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce avoid its siren call?

Don’t do it boys! You’ll be sorry! You’re about to watch “Starting from Zero” absolutely envelop the 1960s, culminating in the hell of Haight-Ashbury. You’re just helping the design world press the collective ctrl-alt-delete buttons as well:

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And for much more on Mad Men and the times it portrays, don’t miss my lengthy podcast interview with Natasha Vargas-Cooper, online here.

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