“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:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

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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Last fall, Theodore Dalrymple wrote a damning piece on Le Corbusier titled “The Architect as Totalitarian.” The fun started right at the opening sentence:

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

And then there’s Corbu’s own writing. He was extremely prolific self-promoter; or as Tom Wolfe quoted Frank Lloyd Wright in From Bauhaus to Our House, “We’ll, now that [Corbu's] finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.”

(And boy, did he ever.)

But the problem is that “the Machine for Living In” was built by a man who was meshugeneh. Or as Eric E. Johnson, assistant professor of law at the University of North Dakota writes at the PrawfsBlog:

Recently, I’ve been taking a peek at the writings of Le Corbusier. He’s one of history’s most celebrated architects, and he has had a profound influence on the modern cityscape. He has designed buildings such as the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium in Iraq. These are buildings that don’t exactly exude warmth. Basically, Le Corbusier is the creative genius behind the concrete box.

What’s that? You’re not a fan? Well, you should know that Le Corbusier provided lengthy philosophical justification for his concrete-box style of building. Here is how he begins his argument in the book Toward a New Architecture:

The Engineer’s Aesthetic, and Architecture, are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression. The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony. The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit … he determines the various movements of our heart and our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.

Here’s another passage:

Eradicate from your mind any hard and fast conceptions in regard to the dwelling-house and look at the question from an objective and critical angle, and you will inevitably arrive at the “House-Tool” the mass-production house, available for everyone, incomparably healthier than the old kind (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same sense that the working tools, familiar to us in our present existence, are beautiful. It will be beautiful, too, with the vitality that the artist’s sensibility can give to its strict and pure organism.

I’d quote more, but you’ve got a flavor for it: It sounds like a brief from one of those pro se litigants who is suing the president. If you’ve clerked, you definitely know what I’m talking about. In a word: CRAZY.

Sometimes you get the feeling that behind every lawsuit-against-the-president-pro-se brief, there’s an unsuccessful cult leader. That’s where Le Corbusier was different. He was not unsuccessful at all.

From the quoted material, you can see a central claim Le Corbusier is advancing here: My architecture is beautiful because I proved it is beautiful in writing. (A ranting, disconnected, pro-se-litigant-who-is-suing-the-president kind of writing, but that’s beside the point.)

An argument such as this one, if it thrives in the fine arts fields of literature or painting, can only do so much damage. But because we are literally overshadowed by the creations of architects through out our day, architecture has the potential to injure. And Le Corbusier’s style of architecture has damaged cityscapes the world over.

Governments, universities (law school’s included), and public housing authorities in the United States got hit especially hard by the brutalist architecture hysteria in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. People think lawyers are clever persuaders. But what about architects? How did they persuade people to actually erect such monstrosities? Gerry Spence, eat your heart out.

Philip Johnson was an American architect with a similar totalitarian bent, who admired Corbu sufficiently that he eventually “borrowed” his trademark thick owl-like black eyeglasses. Corbu wanted to build for the Soviets, and got to build (after his death) for Saddam Hussein. In the 1930s, Johnson had an even more murderous tyrant than Saddam he worshiped — and not from afar. A few years before Johnson’s death, Hilton Kramer quoted Marga Barr, the wife of Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, where Johnson, as its first architectural director, would help to put Corbu and similar modernist European architects on the map in the 1930s:

In responding to difficult questions, Marga had a way of turning away for a few moments while she composed her thoughts and then facing her interlocutor with a very determined look. This is what she did that morning as she said to me: “I feel about Philip today the way I would feel about a beloved son who had gone into a life of crime.”

Perhaps Corbu was his own jailhouse attorney.

(H/T: Walter Olson)

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In 1973, Patrick Moynihan said, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.”

The 1960s began with a presidential election between conservative cold warrior Richard Nixon…and the surprisingly conservative cold warrior John F. Kennedy. In terms of the similarity between the two candidates, and the public they represented, this was a high point in national unity.

The assassination of JFK began a process that ultimately shattered that unity. During the course of the 1960s, Americans witnessed the split between the liberalism of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ, and the rise of the  punitive New Left that emerged in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination.

As we explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, the alpha and the omega of those two forms of American liberalism came less than a month apart, in the summer of 1969:

Tune in for our take on:

• How Jackie Kennedy retroactively created Camelot, and the death of the New Frontier.
• We’ll look back at the “Helvetica World,” both in real life and at the movies.
• The end of New Deal-era optimism.
• The death of modern architecture, and the mansard-roofed canary in McDonald’s coalmine.
• The Malthusian doomsday pessimism that was a hallmark of Hollywood science fiction after 1969.
• The song remains the same.
• What does it all mean? Watch to find out!

And for almost 60 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.

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Of course with the “The Architect as Totalitarian,” it’s hard to tell the difference; but in any case, don’t miss this photo-essay tour of “The Ruin of Ruins: Battleship Island in Japan.”

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Hey, at least George Lucas and David Lean waited two or three decades before re-releasing special Director’s Cut editions of their movies. But as you may remember back in February, I ran a video podcast featuring an interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. While Jennifer’s interview was great, I was more than a little unhappy with the quality of my finished video. I had sort of reached the limit of what my chain of software for longer segments such as this one. But with the new plug-ins built into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, I went back earlier this week and re-rendered just about all of the video elements from the clip, into something that I think is of a much higher quality.

In any case, judge for yourself at the bottom of this post, following the original intro to the video.

Jennifer Burns, the author of the best-selling late 2009 book on Ayn Rand’s remarkably contentious history with the American right stopped by the vast Silicon Graffiti production facilities last week to discuss her book and the research that went into it. We’ll explore Rand’s resurgence last year with the members of the Tea Party, who can pick and choose which elements of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy they agree with in a way that Rand would have found anathema while she was still living. We’ll also discuss Rand’s tempestuous relationship with both the right and the left during the 1940s through the early 1970s, including her look at what she described as JFK’s “Fascist New Frontier” in 1962. Plus some thoughts on what the Fountainhead had to say about Rand’s take on modernist aesthetics, and the socialistic milieu in which they originally emerged, along with clips of the 1949 movie starring Garry Cooper.

And finally, Burns will discuss what Rand would have thought of 2010, a year which pits, on the left, arguably the most collectivist president since FDR, and on the right, the growing Tea Party movement, and their calls for a return to free-market capitalism, the unknown ideal (to coin a phrase.)

Approx. 12-minutes long:

And for almost 60 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.

Related: And speaking of Rand, as the Rhetorican notes, “’Atlas Shrugged’ Movie Gets A Start Date.”

Let me know when it gets a release date — given that Rand’s book is over a half century old, this is the ultimate example of Hollywood’s development hell.

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While I was flying back from New York City a couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to watching the DVD of the 2007 movie Helvetica. Simply put, this is The Greatest Movie Ever Made About a Type Font, but then, the roster of this cinematic genre wouldn’t take all that long to assemble. (Hopefully someone is shooting Font Wars: The Zapf Dingbats Strike Back even as we speak.)

Helvetica certainly does a fun job of explaining its titular subject’s history, and interviewing those who have used it in design work from the late 1950s through the present day. But to better place the font into context, it helps to go back a few decades from when it was first created in 1957, to understand the design world in which it functioned, its architectural ideals, and the politics from which those aesthetics flowed.

Bear with me for a few moments; I promise we’ll get back to Helvetica the font and the documentary in just a bit. But first, as Tom Wolfe has noted on a few occasions, one of the leitmotifs of the last 100 years was the idea of “Start From Zero.” The communists who took over the Soviet Union in 1917 believed that they could start from zero, and that history no longer counted. Shortly thereafter in Germany, as it emerged from the rubble of the First World War, the Bauhaus was founded, the fabled architecture and design school, which similarly banished the past. The stated goal was to provide architects, designers, and artists of all sorts with creative freedom, but as Wolfe noted in From Bauhaus to Our House, a few decades on, the result was a stultifying architectural conformity:

The country of the young Bauhausler, Germany, had been crushed in the war and humiliated at Versailles; the economy had collapsed in a delirium of inflation; the Kaiser had departed; the Social Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism; mobs of young men ricocheted through the cities drinking beer and awaiting a Soviet-style revolution from the east, or some terrific brawls at the very least. Rubble, smoking ruins — starting from zero! If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero referred to nothing less than re-creating the world.

Of course, in 1933, the Bauhaus was shut down after an infinitely more oppressive socialist Start from Zero campaign swept through Germany. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus’s founder, Mies van der Rohe, its last director, and other Bauhauslers decamped to America, and re-re-started from zero again after World War II.

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The modern artists of the first half of the twentieth century basically came in two flavors: there were the reasonably serious fellows such as Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, often trained in the traditional methods, but genuinely looking for new forms and techniques to express the world in the early years of a new century.

Then there were the artists such as Marcel Duchamp, whose idea of art was a urinal, the predecessor to the “art” that would be created later in the 20th century using the mediums that are found within the men’s room. Or as James Lileks wrote eight years ago, “If art contains sh*t, we should take it at its word.”

Instead of being considered “modern”, this latter group of artists can now be better understood as increasingly reactionary examples of the ancien regime of the avant-garde art world, whose motto was “Épater le bourgeoisie,” which Wikipedia defines thusly:

Épater la bourgeoisie or épater le bourgeois is a French phrase that became a rallying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late 19th century including Baudelaire and Rimbaud.^[1] It means to shock the middle-classes.^[2]

The Decadents, fascinated as they were with hashish, opium, and absinthe found, in Joris-Karl Huysmans‘ novel À Rebours (1884), a sexually perverse hero who secludes himself in his house, basking in life-weariness or ennui, far from the bourgeois society that he despises.

The Aesthetes in England, such as Oscar Wilde, shared these same fascinations. This celebration of “unhealthy” and “unnatural” devotion to life, art, and excess has been a continuing cultural theme.

But after witnessing crucifixes in urine, the Virgin Mary “painted” in dung, and similar examples of artistic finger painting (so to speak), the bourgeoisie have seen this game played so many times that they’re now immune. As early Saturday Night Live writer Rosie Shuster once quipped, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”

Nearly a century after Duchamp’s Urinal, the audience is finally turning the tables on these stodgy old artists and the plutocratic establishment that funds them, as Tim Blair notes:

Interactive art in NYC:

Visitors to the eyebrow-raising new exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art got a little too grabby with the show’s naked performers.

Female performers in Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” complained about groping, while other models said they were pushed, prodded and poked, the New York Post reported …

An unspecified number of patrons were ejected for groping performers after the exhibit opened on March 14 … The exhibit features 38 performers in rotating shifts of eight facing each other at a doorway or lying under a skeleton or posing in other pieces, mostly in the nude.

Performer Amelia reports an onion incident:

She said the oddest thing she experienced since the retrospective of Abramovic’s work began was seeing a man drop a spring onion beside her as she lay under the skeleton.

“He said he wanted to add a little bit of life” to the work, [Amelia] said.

Onion-man was ejected.

But why? After a century of épater le bourgeois, why on earth can’t le bourgeois épater l’artiste primitif? And why is the bourgeois and reactionary management of the Museum of Modern Art stifling the artistic creativity of its customers?

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As James Lileks wrote last September 11th:

Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.

Steven Crowder explains what happened in the interim, and compares and contrasts between the shiny neo-Miesian Tower #7, which was rebuilt in less than four years without outside government interference, and the void that remains ground where the original two towers stood. Crowder ends with an interview with National Review’s Deroy Murdock, who contrasts the nearly ten years that Manhattan has wasted quibbling over mindless quotidian details at the WTC site, and the length of time it took in 1930 to build the Empire State Building — 13 months:

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So much 20th century modern art, in just about every genre, including music, painting, architecture and sculpture was purposely designed to be incomprehensible to the layman. In the mid-1970s and early-1980s, Tom Wolfe made sport of the entire enterprise with From Bauhaus To Our House and The Painted Word. The title of the latter book explains how badly art had degenerated by the mid-1970s. Whereas once any layman could instantly appreciate the beauty and craftsmanship of say, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, or a great classical symphony, modern painting in particular had almost become merely an excuse for the artist and his champion critic to write a treatise explaining the work of art in the first place.

John Derbyshire has a fascinating essay, which ran almost a  year ago, but recently relinked by the Derb at the Corner, which does much to explain why this divergence occurred, and its mid-19th century origins.

Meanwhile, regarding the motion picture industry, one of the few 20th century artforms that any layman could appreciate, NPR looks back at 1962 and its abundance of cinematic riches:

The five Best Picture nominees that year were Lawrence of Arabia (the eventual winner), The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty and To Kill A Mockingbird. Not a bad list for any year, certainly.

But even if none of those pictures had ever been produced, the Motion Picture Academy could still have assembled a perfectly respectable 1962 list. One possible slate: The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, Days of Wine and Roses, The Miracle Worker and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Believe it or not, they were all among the year’s also-rans.

And if none of those had been produced either? There’d still have been plenty of worthy candidates: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Billy Budd, Divorce Italian Style, Last Year at Marienbad, Gypsy, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, Jules and Jim, Lolita, Advise and Consent, Peeping Tom and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance … just to name a few.

So: Is there a year that can top that?

Well 1939 wasn’t too shabby a year for American movies, either. And in both cases, we”ll likely never see quite a line-up of films that could appeal to the general public and contain such fine craftsmanship and (dare I say it?) art. But much like the love-hate relationship the Mad Men TV series has with the late ’50s and early 1960s, it seems sort of paradoxical for the boomers at NPR to praise an era that they themselves helped to destroy shortly thereafter.

Related: And speaking of movies, J.R. Taylor has some thoughts on the transformation of Roger Ebert from ingratiating middlebrow movie critic to the masses, to shrill archliberal wannabe-pundit.

Update: Speaking of which…

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1930s-style Keynesianism on mega-steroids? 1950s-ish nuke & pave urban renewal to the nth degree? Envy of North Korea’s infamous Ryugyong “ghost hotel?” Whatever the case, as John Derbyshire writes, “If You Build It, They May Not Come”:

You want reckless property speculation? China’s got it. And they don’t just throw up the occasional condo on spec: They build entire cities.

It’s a five-minute video but well worth watching. Note especially that masses of those empty apartments in this empty city have been bought “as investments” by Chinese speculators. Lots of luck there, guys.

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Incidentally, note that at one point, the narrator says that one group of speculators struck it rich overnight via China’s insatiable demand for coal. That’s quite understandable (and commendable) from my point of view, but Thomas Friedman could not be reached for comment.

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The Fountainhead/It’s A Wonderful Life connection, as revealed by the Anchoress. (I almost typed the “Aynchoress” just now. Heh!™ )

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Beginning with the first sentence of the great Theodore Dalrymple’s new article at City Journal, “Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform”, you know one of the most influential modern architects and one of the most disasterous city planners of the 20th century has met his match:

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

Yet just as Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all, so Le Corbusier continues to be revered. Indeed, there is something of a revival in the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier’s work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam. In London, the exhibition fittingly took place in a hideous complex of buildings, built in the 1960s, called the Barbican, whose concrete brutalism seems designed to overawe, humiliate, and confuse any human being unfortunate enough to try to find his way in it. The Barbican was not designed by Le Corbusier, but it was surely inspired by his particular style of soulless architecture.

At the exhibition, I fell to talking with two elegantly coiffed ladies of the kind who spend their afternoons in exhibitions. “Marvelous, don’t you think?” one said to me, to which I replied: “Monstrous.” Both opened their eyes wide, as if I had denied Allah’s existence in Mecca. If most architects revered Le Corbusier, who were we laymen, the mere human backdrop to his buildings, who know nothing of the problems of building construction, to criticize him? Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.

The two ladies mentioned that they lived in a mainly eighteenth-century part of the city whose appearance and social atmosphere had been comprehensively wrecked by two massive concrete towers. The towers confronted them daily with their own impotence to do anything about the situation, making them sad as well as angry. “And who do you suppose was the inspiration for the towers?” I asked. “Yes, I see what you mean,” one of them said, as if the connection were a difficult and even dangerous one to make.

From Karl Marx and the Soviet Union, to the Bauhaus, to National Socialism, to the hippies of the 1960s, the idea of starting from Year Zero, at Dalrymple notes above, has long been one of the central strains of the left in its various forms. And of course, it’s a theme that continues to this day.

Definitely read the whole thing.

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A few years ago, James Lileks summed up the archetypal Ikea shopping experience thusly:

The final step of the Great Reorganizing involved shelves, but since they’re in the closet I had no desire to spend a lot of monie on them. So I got in my car and drove to IKEA, where all the furniture has vaguely familiar names like Char, or Desq, or Bedd. When I reached the parking lot my jaww fell: what the fuug? It’s a Wednesday night and there are more people heading into this place than you’d see streaming into a Beatles reunion tour. The place is paqued. You enter from the parking level, take an escalator up to the next, then take another tall esky to the main floor. It’s all arranged so you follow a path through the endless maze, and at the end the Minotaur eats your head.

Well, if you’re going to Start From Zero, you might as well end there as well.

Mental Floss explores the checkered past of IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad:

While we’ve written about IKEA cloaking itself as a charitable institution, that isn’t the blue and yellow über-store’s only dirty secret. While Kamprad today is known as a frugal billionaire who drives a ‘93 Volvo, eats at middle-class restaurants, and outfits his home entirely in affordable IKEA products, his legacy is tainted by his past involvement with pro-Nazi organizations. Between 1942 and 1945, Kamprad joined, fund-raised, and recruited members for a fascist, Nazi-sympathizing group in Sweden.

All the more reason why Philip Johnson would have loved the Bauhaus style throughout the stores, and likely, so would Ingmar Bergman, curiously enough.

(H/T: Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk.)

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As Michael Barone and others have noted, Obama won the presidency via a high tech Internet-based campaign focused a message of  “Change”, but the actual policies being implemented by the neophyte executive are rooted in mid-20th century command and control Big Government ideas. For a case in point, the Washington Post notes:

President Obama is putting a new emphasis on revitalizing U.S. cities with a coordinated effort that involves stimulus funding and getting multiple agencies to work together to improve schools, housing and neighborhoods.

President Obama is putting a new emphasis on revitalizing U.S. cities with a coordinated effort that involves stimulus funding and getting multiple agencies to work together to improve schools, housing and neighborhoods.

The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. But the plan involves fundamental changes in the way federal agencies dole out assistance to urban areas, making its success uncertain.

What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, Obama looks to the strategies of LBJ’s successor for success in Afghanistan — because, of course, to the left, all wars truly are Vietnam.

(Via Maggie’s Farm)

Related: Jimmie Bise looks at how nearly 50 years of urban renewal has impacted one prominent midwestern city.

Related: Tying together several recent threads, Victor Davis Hanson explores “The Power of Payback”, adding, “Obama’s fiery campaign rhetoric is coming back to haunt him.”

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After escaping from Dessau Germany in the mid-1920s, (with a little assist from America’s Philip Johnson), it apparently established a toehold in the kitchen at some point in the 1930s, as James Lileks illustrates in the latest addition to his sprawling Website. Overall, a number of the designs (more “moderne” than Bauhaus-style modern, to be fully accurate) seem remarkably fresh, even 70 years later. But the busy patterns on the linoleum floor covering (then considered a surprisingly breakthrough product) are pretty frightening. Or as James writes:

Oh yeah. I’d live here, for several reasons: the color. The porthole. The machine-for-living aesthetic. The linoleum!

Well, maybe not the linoleum. You take a look at that some morning when you have a hangover and dropped your eggs on the floor, it would be trouble with a capital Puke.

Heh. As Lileks adds, these are “ultra-modern kitchens you could afford, as soon as they finished up with the Depression and Hitler.” And once they did, modernism would become, for better or worse (and often worse), the mid-century design aesthetic.

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“That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.”

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“I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself.”

– Barack Obama in 1990. The latter-day President Obama has plenty of company in that department amongst his fellow leftists: “Reversing our suburban, commuting lifestyle.”

As James Lileks wrote in 2000:

I’m reading, for review purposes, “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.” (Someday I want to write a book called “Subtitle Overkill: the Pointless Elongation of Book Titles and the Difficulty of Remembering All the Words.”) I face the same conundrum every time I grapple with the New Urbanist model – I agree with every argument about the aesthetics of suburban development; I deplore the barren landscape of post-war suburban America, and I completely, utterly distrust anyone else who agrees with me.

This book regards suburbia as the equivalent of a Chemlawn gulag, a vapid archipelago into which Americans have mutely filed like sheep to the abbatoir. The authors hold up Alexandria, Virginia as a model for urban living – everything’s pedestrian-accessible, human-scaled, with mixed-use blocks and definable urban centers. All true. But I remember the apartment we looked at in Alexandria. It was twice the size of the room in which I now sit. And that included the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the bedroom, and a back porch. The ceilings were low, the stairs as narrow as a gnat’s urethra. I recall a friend’s apartment – the bedroom had room for the bed. That was it. A bed. Two people could not live in that place – well, they could, but only if no one wore nappy fabrics, because you’d get rugburn from rubbing against each other all the time. Now, if you want that – and it had its charm, once you stepped outside – then fine. It’s yours. But not everyone wants that. And here’s the dilemma: if the suburbs are such a horror, and inner-city life a clearly superior option, why do people live in the burbs?

I was thinking of this as I watched the end of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” last night; at the end, the movie turns into an anti-sprawl tract, of all things. In the curious mythology of our freedom-encumbered age, the post-war vision of freeways and big back yards has curdled into a dark plot imposed on people, not an option freely chosen. It all goes back to the streetcars, of course; once the shadowy forces of evil did away with loveable old Thomas the Tank Engine and poked us into autos , it’s been all downhill, Toontown traded for Toys ‘R Us. (Sniff.)

“The problem with suburbia,” says this book, “is that it is not functional: it does not serve society or preserve the environment.”

Hmm. Well, leave aside the environmental issue. Serve society? It serves the people who make up society, or they wouldn’t live there. People make rational decisions: I will give up X amount of hours in travel time to live in a place where I have a big yard, easy access to a wide variety of goods and services, and personal safety. As for me, I live in the city because I prefer to live around history, around scenic beauty, and because I am comfortable with this level of density. DC had history and scenic beauty, but it was too fargin’ dense for me; I left. Do I judge those who stay, who like it? No. Do I regard that particular model, with tall buildings full of people who don’t know each other, as “good for society?” Not necessarily. It all depends.

But I’m not going to pass laws to prohibit people from living in apartment buildings. Nor would I object to a municipality changing its zoning codes to prohibit large-lot developments, if that’s what the citizens of that town desire. Likewise, let them ban dense developments. I don’t care. I have no right to impose my urban standards on someone else – even though I’m generally right. As with all wedge issues: better to persuade through example.

The book frowns on gated communities, of course, because they’re exclusionary. Conversely, they praise urban developments with dense housing – which include, I presume, apartment buildings with doormen and security systems. Driving past a guard booth or getting buzzed up via intercom – what’s the difference? “The unity of society is threatened not by the use of gates, but by the uniformity and exclusivity of the people behind them.” Oh, blow it out your ass. Doctors will never live next to janitors. The streets of New York are full of people from all walks, races, creeds, colors; they are the antithesis of a gated sprawling suburban development. Does this mean that doctors invite their housekeepers to their parties? Or that racist morons cannot be forged in a big city? “A child growing up in such a homogeneous environment is less likely to develop a sense of empathy for people from other walks of life, and is ill prepared to live in a diverse society.” Boolsheet! If this is the case, then we’d best forcibly integrate North Dakota, right now. And Cabrini Green, as long as we’re at it. Make them more like Brooklyn. Why, everyone who was ever raised in Brooklyn is perfectly prepared to live in a diverse society; naught but harmony reigns in the boroughs.

This sort of fatuous moralizing can be found at the heart of most anti-suburban tracts, and it’s why I distrust the general idea. There are millions of Americans living happy lives in affluent comfort,never troubled by the aroma of cabbage wafting in from a neighbor’s window, never knowing the communal experience of being awakened at 4 AM by a siren and knowing that everyone else in the building is up as well, and this fact just galls some people. All that space . . . all that room . . . all those things! It just can’t be right.

In the authors’ “Eight Steps of Regional Planning,” the first step is: “Admit that growth will occur.”

Yes, friends, bite down and swallow hard: growth will occur. Admit it. In the future we can institute a one-child policy, but not yet. Think I’m exaggerating? I just discovered the title of chapter 11 in this book: “What is to be done.” Surely they know who made that phrase famous. Surely they know the author of that particular tract. You don’t sling that phrase around unless you’re confident the audience will appreciate the reference.

Maybe the authors were big Diane Watson fans.

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