Do a search on the word “individual” in the Kindle edition of Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism, and you’ll quickly find a slew of quotes from early 20th century “progressives” who thought that the idea of the sovereign individual was just much primitive bunkum:

[Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic magazine] was an unabashed nationalist who craved a “national reformer…in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight,” to redeem a decadent America. This secular “imitator of Christ” would bring an end to “devil-take-the-hindmost” individualism in precisely the same manner that the real Jesus closed the Old Testament chapter of human history. “An individual,” Croly wrote, sounding very much like Wilson, “has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” Echoing both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Croly argued that “national life” should be like a “school,” and good schooling frequently demands “severe coercive measures.”

* * * * * *

Croly constructed this worldview out of what he deemed vital necessity. Industrialization, economic upheaval, social “disintegration,” materialistic decadence, and worship of money were tearing America apart, or so he—and the vast majority of progressives—believed. The remedy for the “chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization” was a “regeneration” led by a hero-saint who could overthrow the tired doctrines of liberal democracy in favor of a restored and heroic nation. The similarities with conventional fascist theory should be obvious.

* * * * * *

We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. [John] Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom…We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.” If the war went well, it would constrain “the individualistic tradition” and convince Americans of “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.” Another progressive put it more succinctly: “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”

* * * * * *

[Walter] Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were “mentally children or barbarians” and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, “order.”

* * * * * *

For the most part, the progressives looked upon what they had created and said, “This is good.” The “great European war…is striking down individualism and building up collectivism,” rejoiced the Progressive financier and J. P. Morgan partner George Perkins. Grosvenor Clarkson saw things similarly. The [World War I] war effort “is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.” The regimentation of society, the social worker Felix Adler believed, was bringing us closer to creating the “perfect man…a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any…that has yet existed.” The Washington Post was more modest. “In spite of excesses such as lynching,” it editorialized, “it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

And so on. Occasionally, these quotes would rebound rather ironically upon the utterer. In the early years of the 1920s, Mies van der Rohe, the pioneering modernist architect and last director of the Bauhaus, the Weimar-era German school for modern artists would write, “The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.” This in the midst of earning a living designing houses for wealthy individuals and only a decade before the Nazis came to power, who disliked individualism much more than Mies did, shuttered the Bauhaus and eventually forced Mies to flee Germany to teach and practice his profession in Chicago.

A century that revolved around the horrors of collectivism in all its forms doesn’t stop similar talk today. Scientific American reviews a new book titled The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, and queries:

Although Hood believes the self may be the greatest trick our brain has ever played on us, he concludes that believing in it makes life more fulfilling. The illusion is difficult–if not impossible–to dispel. Even if we could, why deny an experience that enables empathy, storytelling and love?

“To justify fascism,” Smitty, Stacy McCain’s co-blogger tersely responds:

If you want to factor out any theistic concept of a soul or notion of free will in one fell swoop, this sort of materialistic reduction is the way to go.

And it’s cool, too: once we’ve got life reduced to measurable bits of matter, and have nuked the idea of a ‘self’, we can set about the elimination of the individual and manage society through a series of spreadsheets. The molecules made us do it–how could there be a Devil?

This is not an evangelical pleading, though. My secular answer to this discussion is that the self, and freewill, have got to be taken as an assumption. That is, barring clear genetic-level defects like Downs, free moral agency has got to be the default position for the individual. Otherwise, we remain a societal collection of infants, forced into heroin addiction and inter-species romance because we’re, you know, victims.

Or to use the preferred word of Mayor Bloomberg, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama — constituents.

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Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20^th century, American universities  had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’

Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.

And when you’re done watching, check out David P. Goldman at his “Spengler” column (and that nom de blog dovetails remarkably well with our theme, doesn’t it?) on “Philistinism and Failure,” and follow David’s link to Fred Siegel from the April issue of Commentary, for his brilliant article on “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” for much more on this theme.

A handy, portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.  The script of this week’s show, with plenty of hyperlinks to the books and blog posts that inspired it, follows on the next page.

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In Andrew Klavan’s latest post, on “The Left’s Con Man Logic,” one of the cons he notes is the left’s selective utterance of the phrase, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” As Andrew writes:

The Wall Street Journal this weekend had two writers of opposing opinions address the question: Has the sexual revolution been good for women? The feminist who answered yes began her argument with this masterpiece of disingenuousness: “Here’s the thing about revolutions — you can’t take them back….If you feel that the sexual revolution destroyed the American family by giving women power over their reproductive choices, and that power turned daughters and wives… into a bunch of wanton hussies, well, stew over your feelings all you want, but you might as well give up thinking that it is possible to herd us up and drive us back into the kitchen….”

Do lefties really fall for garbage like that? Why? Everything about that argument is meant to make you stop thinking. I need hardly point out that the relative chastity of the Victorian era in Britain followed the relative promiscuity of the Restoration period and was in turn followed by the roaring twenties which were followed by the fifties — so that, while, yes, there’s no going back, one can always go forward in a new direction. Nor need I point out that some of us who feel the Sexual Revolution hurt women may have our fellow creatures’ good at heart. The only thing you really need to know is that the writer is trying to obscure, not illuminate, the situation. That alone should make you start asking questions.

Like this one: Are you stupid…  or what?

Beyond the example of promiscuity waxing and waning that Andrew mentions, hasn’t the entire mission of the Left been one attempt after another to either “take back” a revolution, or put the toothpaste of civilization back into the tube — or both? In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared God is Dead — and Time magazine would take their own whack at Him 84 years later, just for good measure. During the same period that Nietzsche was upending religion, Karl Marx rifled through the millenia of experimentation and accumulated wisdom that made up commerce and the marketplace, called it “capitalism,” and declared it similarly dead. (It certainly would be, wherever Marx’s ideas were implemented.) In the 1920s, the Bauhaus in Germany and Le Corbusier in France decided that a millenia of  accumulated wisdom in architecture could be swept aside to “Start From Zero” — and Corbusier believed Paris as a whole could be swept aside to Start From Zero — a decade later, Albert Speer and his chief patron entertained similar notions about Berlin. Likewise, in the 1950s, American urban planners, explicitly following Corbusier’s lead, would bulldoze whole neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal,” which proved ultimately disastrous. In the 1930s, FDR and the New Dealers thought that the American Revolution, which gave birth to the most laissez-faire federal government ever known to man could be yoked under an endless alphabet soup of agencies and stifling regulations. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, which sought to judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of skin has been upended by the left into tribalization based on skin color, and in academia, a de facto return to Separate But Equal.

What is environmentalism (which Andrew addresses earlier in his post) but staring down the freedom that the Industrial Revolution brought to the American middle class, including comfortable homes in suburbia, electric light, cars and planes to transport them everywhere, and endless information and entertainment at the press of a button, and taking it all back in the form of higher energy prices, even more regulation, less reliable energy generation systems, and the overall ennui that the true believers of global warming want to foist upon all of us?

No wonder the MSM and the left (but I repeat myself) wadded their panties into such a tight bunch when the Tea Party emerged — they know better than anyone that while it’s not easy, how entirely possible it is to reshape society and how fragile their own hold on power could ultimately be.

Related: At the Tatler, Robert Wargas spots a writer at the far left New York Review of Books railing against the failures of the American education system in a similar — if screedier — fashion as Woody Allen shouting about New York City’s downhill slide in the ’60s and ’70s, without stopping to consider that in both cases, it’s his ideological brethren that controls the terrain. As David Solway adds, “The decline of education, which means also the fading out of historical memory and the dimming of literate curiosity, has been the case for some considerable time now. The insistent question is: how does one go about trying to rescue a culture in the throes of custodial dissolution?”

Update: Related thoughts from Kathy Shaidle.

More: From the comments, “As people living in today’s progressive utopias like Cuba or North Korea might ask, ‘What’s toothpaste?’”

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

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Have you heard the news? There’s good rockin’ at midnight — of civilization, James Lileks writes:

Levitated Mass makes it to LA. I wrote about this idiocy for the National Review, one of them-there philistine-type arkticles what don’t understand the subtel-tees of modern art. Philistone would be more like it, perhaps. Hah! That’s a joke I said that’s a joke son. The rock in question is a 340-ton boulder dragged from the desert to a museum installation, where it will rest over a deep concrete-lined trench. I am unimpressed by the idea of putting a massive stone over a trench. Logistically, it’s fascinating; getting the rock from its natural habitat to the installation required a huge vee-hicle with 900 tires, or something, and it took forever, since the rock weighed slightly more than the pretense of the entire conception, and the truck only moved five miles an hour.

The WSJ had a piece about its arrival in LA. 200,000 people supposedly showed up to watch it pass. I don’t know how many came to see the immense truck, or how many came to see the Big Rock; if more came for the latter I’d be depressed. It’s just a rock. It’s a large rock, but . . . it’s a large rock. The usual explainers told us that it summed up the rich long history of Monument Moving, and while I suppose that’s true – Easter Island with its attendant ecological despoilation comes to mind – it also reminds us that this “monument” is not only unfinished, it has no intention of being finished. That would ruin the essence of the rock, I guess.

Time was a sculptor looked at a big slab of stone and saw the figure within he would liberate with hammer and chisel; time was, people gathered to see a monolith pass because it was a gift from Egypt, and stood for the power of another culture your culture had managed to subdue. Plus, it was cool; it was exotic. Time was, you valued something for what we could make of it, not the fact that you could just drag it somewhere else and say “now walk under it, and think things about big rocks.” Feh.

Just perfect. Not only has Jimmy Carter returned in the form of Barack Obama, but super-sized Pet Rocks now adorn museums. At least the seventies had Star Wars and Led Zeppelin to salvage the decade.

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“Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.”

– Gertrude Stein

Found via Commentary, Jewish Ideas Daily explores the notion of “Gertrude Stein, Fascist?” The article begins with an image of Picasso’s portrait of Stein from the start of the 20th century and a quote from him. “Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait. But never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it”:

This discrepancy between the imaginary Stein and the private Stein is, in a sense, the true subject of Barbara Will’s recent Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. Will’s book, the latest and most thorough investigation (and this is very much a detective story) of Stein’s political ideology, is extremely detailed and erudite, and brings to public attention what had previously been hidden in scholarly journals: Stein’s wartime translations of the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of France’s Vichy regime, with a highly sympathetic introduction that compares Pétain to George Washington.

Will combs Stein’s archives for clues about her “collaboration”—what it constituted, whether it was genuine—and comes away convinced that Stein is guilty of “commitment” to Pétain. But, as often as not, the evidence points to a fundamental murkiness. No matter how much the archive appears to answer and expose, questions always remain, and we frequently cannot say what Stein intended. What appears to be unassailable evidence of collaboration can just as easily be unassailable evidence of Stein’s survival instinct. Perhaps there is no difference.

Consider the Pétain documents themselves. What can we actually say about them? The book was never published, the translations were shoddy, and there are hints in Wars I Have Seen that she abandoned Pétainism. (Her Pétainism was originally genuine.) But Stein was also a Jewish woman (as was Toklas) whose life depended on the protection of Vichy officials, and there is the very real possibility that Stein’s self-styled role as Vichy propagandist was a fiction necessary for survival. Or it is at least an embellishment. Reading this way, we enter a second murkiness of morality, and approach the question of when self-preservation becomes outright collaboration. It is not a comfortable place.

In order to make sense of the Pétain documents, Will scrutinizes almost every shred of Stein’s writing, from articles, essays, and novels to private letters and notes, and reads them for what they might say about Stein’s actions. As Will writes, “It would be a mistake to simply dissociate Stein’s early ‘progressive’ experimental writing from her later ‘reactionary’ politics to excuse or compartmentalize. The tendencies that drew Stein toward both Bernard Faÿ and Philippe Pétain, we could say, were always there.”

Wow, a modernist artist in bed with the Nazis or their collaborators. That’s never happened before! (Or not, as we’ll explore on the next page.)

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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:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

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:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

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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