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The Brutalist, a very long movie by Brady Corbet about a Bauhaus architect who survives the Holocaust and arrives in America to toil for years as a day laborer before finally getting one shot at building a spectacular edifice, is one of most critically acclaimed movies of the year and a front-runner for end of year honors.
I finally found another critic who recognizes that, as history, it’s hooey.
From Curbed, the real estate extension of New York magazine:
street view
Dec. 18, 2024
Architecture Is an Act of Vengeance in The BrutalistThe field becomes a metaphor within a metaphor about trauma and mediocrity. The result is murk.
By Justin Davidson, New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic
… The actual Bauhaus alumni did not arrive in America after World War II emaciated, indigent, and alone. Instead, they decamped en masse from Central Europe in the 1930s, stopped and in some cases stayed in England, where they reshaped British architecture, and emigrated to America armed with useful contacts. They knew each other, installed themselves at Harvard (Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer), Yale (Josef Albers), the Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies van der Rohe and Konrad Wachsmann), and won over a large swath of the educational, civic, and corporate Establishments. You would never know that from the movie’s presentation of class and privilege. Van Buren’s son Harry sneers at Tóth, delivering a haughty message from the American privileged class to the whole cadre of émigrés with accents: “We tolerate you!” he shouts, with an implied barely. The truth is, though, that era’s particular we lionized the likes of Tóth’s you. In real life, a hypertalented Hungarian modernist with a portfolio of completed buildings would have found himself with tenure and a commission for a government building, not a subsistence-level job shoveling coal.
Corbet doesn’t actually know much about architecture, history, Jews, the Holocaust, or much of anything else besides making movies.
It think brutalism could have been a better style if the building architects had also been good landscape architects or worked closely with landscape architects. Austere buildings can work nicely with lush landscapes, but generally few of the famous brutalist architects seemed to grasp that at the time. For example, finally in 2023, the city of Boston put in some pleasant gardens in front of its 1968 brutalist city hall, which certainly couldn’t hurt.
But why did it it take 55 years to figure that out?
But don’t expect to see discussions of aesthetic questions like that in the movie The Brutalist.
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“Corbet doesn’t actually know much about architecture, history, Jews, the Holocaust, or much of anything else besides making movies.”
But perhaps he also does know who his intended audience is for his movie. After all, why would ordinary goyim moviegoers care one way or the other about midcentury architects who are painted as underdogs, when according to historical facts, they were anything but?
Who? And Whom? is this movie’s audience for? Also, who is the film’s message intended for?
SIDE NOTE:
Andrew Lauren Productions (ALP) provided the financing and developed the screenplay with Brady Corbet.
Google? Is there anything you’d like to add on the subject?
“Andrew Lauren: Born in 1969, Andrew is a film producer and actor known for backing projects that are considered commercially unviable.”
So then, who’s this film’s intended audience?
Andrew Lauren. Related to Ralph Lauren of Polo fame.
Oh, he’s THAT Lauren.
Steve?
How can this be, when the movie was just released this week in the USA, and is not yet released in most countries?
Oh.
“(Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer), Yale (Josef Albers), the Illinois Institute of Technology (Mies van der Rohe and Korad Wachsmann)”
Of the five, only Breuer and Wachsmann were Jewish. The others don’t appear to have been.
On Breuer: “It was Gropius who assigned Breuer interiors at the 1927 Weissenhof Estate. In 1928 he opened a practice in Berlin, devoted himself to interior design and furniture design and in 1932 he built his first house … In 1935, at Gropius’s suggestion, Breuer relocated to London.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Breuer
On Wachsmann: “In 1938 he emigrated [from Germany?] to Paris and in 1941 to the United States, where he began a collaboration with Walter Gropius”
Neither had to personally endure *the* Holobunga, but Wachsmann did help commit one:
“In 1943 [Wachsmann] assisted the war effort by helping the US air-force construct the German Village (Dugway proving ground), a simulation of German working class dwellings to be used to perfect fire-bombing techniques on German residential areas.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Wachsmann
My vague (admittedly unstudied) impression is that while a lot of the degenerate art of the era was quite decidedly Jewish (in funding, production and/or promotion) – there was little reason to view Brutalism in particular as being so. It just more just a style of the times, and perhaps the result of innovations in steel reinforced concrete technology – every fancy “new” tool gets overused at first. Come to think of it, wasn’t Albert Speer’s work rather austere and almost quasi “Brutalist”?
Some Brutalist stuff is actually rather cool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Carre%C3%B1o_Cultural_Complex
The movie is mostly about how the financiers of movies are horrible people.
Tom Wolfe did the best job of skewering the Bauhaus movement in one of his books, From Bauhaus to Our House. America had its own home grown architectural genius, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was far superior to any of the Bauhaus architects. Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead novel was loosely based on Wright. Rand even asked Wright to build a house for her but it never got built because he was asking for too much money and she couldn’t afford it.
“The reception of Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle…. [T]hey are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses – who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant: The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!”
–Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)
It’s cool that architecture remains the go-to muse profession for ideologues. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) remains the gold standard in axe grinding.
I doubt this new movie is more entertaining than the movie they made from Ayn’s novel. When the movie was screened for architectural students they died laughing. The styles of Rebel Roark’s buildings were sub-modern kitch — probably the last design a real individualist would have been doing. But it was a fun movie, and Gary Cooper’s individualist points in his court summation are still valid.
The movie probably doesn’t appeal much to a public who was really touched by the Holocaust and feels vengeful. But it appeals to a public which feels as if it has been abused and has a right to revenge. There are a lot of that kind of people around us. On the other hand, can Brutalism on the long run survive, if it is framed as a style of revenge against the WASPs?
Modern artist Josef Albers was apparently not related to the Albers map projection Albers. Wikipedia says Philip Johnson, then at the Met, helped get him a job as head of a new art school near Asheville after he emigrated in 1933. Looks like he was part of Musk’s 0.1% of worst artists, putting out crap Americans wouldn’t do, so he was the first living artist to have a solo exhibit at the Met much later.
Ralph Lauren (worth $8B and no relation to me, dammit) is Andrew’s father. Andrew’s two siblings have their own Wikipedia pages, but he doesn’t: “Andrew Lauren (b. 1969), a film producer and actor,” is all it says.
It’s a bad idea to get your history from movies. Or many historians for that matter.
The Brutalist architects didn’t collaborate with landscape architects or otherwise embrace the concept of surrounding their ugly buildings with serene landscapes because they were opposed to beauty. The purpose of their architecture was to bludgeon the senses into submission, to demoralize and alienate. It took years for enough of the strivers in the municipal governments who commissioned these monstrosities to notice that despite all the high falutin’ sales pitches, the buildings were plain ugly and their PTSD-inducing presence could be moderated somewhat by obscuring them with soothing natural forms and colour. Hopefully someday they will be aware and courageous enough to tear them down.
I’d like to point here that the general Conservative Narrative as put forth by Tom Wolfe and endlessly regurgitated by uncritical conservative types at places like Instapundit about the Bauhaus and modern architecture is wrong. The Bauhaus didn’t destroy American architecture because it was Socialist and its bad Socialist ideas made bad architecture. Van Der Rohe wasn’t political, and was the product of trade schools, not European academia.
The Brutalist style is fine. The only addition I might suggest is the occasional large caliber cannon barrel poking out, facing in the direction of the anticipated cross-channel Allied invasion force.
“But don’t expect to see discussions of aesthetic questions like that in the movie The Brutalist.”
Don’t worry, I don’t expect to see it… at all.
“Who? And Whom? is this movie’s audience for? Also, who is the film’s message intended for? ”
Perhaps it’s intended for the millions of newly arrived Americans, who without the luxury of a childhood American education, aren’t yet sure about… well, you know, what the pecking order is when it comes to feeding at the sanctified victim trough.
The movie is about immigrants – very relatable too our new and better citizens. But hang on Pajeet, Chang, Jose, and Ulifandia.. it’s best you know your place.
Some 30 years ago during “another life”, I was at a post-Christmas holiday party in Marin, California, where I made the acquaintence of an alumnus of Wright’s Taliesin school for architects.
I remarked to the man about the half-round window as a “trope” in new house construction at the time. Hearing that he was an architect, I took the risk of offering that this was regarded as a pseudo-retro “Colonial” architectural feature offered as push-back against “Modern” architecture, but I thought it was kitch. I triggered this latter-day Howard Roarke about his hate of the half-round window, his clients insisted on having a half-round window and how he was standing his ground and never putting a half-round window in the subdivision for which he was the designated architect.
Judging by my affect when I finally found someone who understood the round window, the woman who had brought me to this gathering came to the realization that I had met my architectural style soul mate, but she wasn’t that person.
The Fountainhead loosely based on Wright, indeed!
Here is the answer I got from Google AI:
Beauty is antisemitic. Therefore, the world must be filled with ugliness.
When I was a kid growing up in the DC metropolis in the nineties I used to hear about how we had the best metro system in the country. Three decades later you don’t hear that anymore, what with all the repairs and fair hikes you hear about instead. But I would have to say this, that our metro system still has the coolest look in the country: Brutalism fits in naturally underground.
Video Link
Andrew Lauren Productions (ALP) provided the financing and developed the screenplay with Brady Corbet … “Andrew Lauren: Born in 1969, Andrew is a film producer and actor known for backing projects that are considered commercially unviable.” … Andrew Lauren. Related to Ralph Lauren of Polo fame.
Maybe Andrew should have taken after his sister Dylan and sold expensive candy.
Instead of lush landscaping perhaps we should have deported the talentless brutalist hacks and designed attractive, inviting buildings? Maybe our cities wouldn’t look like giant prisons?
Interesting that Brady Corbet chose László Tóth as the name of the protagonist as Don Novello chose the similar Lazlo Toth as his nom de plume when he wrote his fake-sincere complaint letters to companies in the 70’s. Novello would later become more famous as Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live.
A movie about architects? What’s next, a movie about the heroic black ladies at the post office?
So true. Albert Broccoli’s and Harry Saltzman’s biographies (of the James Bond productions) make for some interesting reading what with the organized crime, psychological warfare and myriad other hinky connections.
Rand and some of her cell visited Wright at Taliesin only to discover that he was a dedicated socialist.
I got to the movies to be entertained. If I want historical accuracy I’ll read Robert Caro.
It’s so enjoyable to read the comments from the obviously well read and intelligent
OT: University of Minnesota is paying children to play with transgender dolls as part of an effort to groom them.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-minnesota-offered-to-pay-five-year-olds-to-play-with-transgender-dolls-with-genitals?topStoryPosition=5
On the subject of smart-but-questionable-in-other-ways immigrants, and touching on your latest Substack thereon:
https://www.unz.com/article/india-its-worse-than-you-think/
Nikki Haley tears into DOGE’s Vivek Ramaswamy after shocking claim about Americans
Nik vs Viv– I see merit in both their positions, but reason for fear were either is taken too far. Nikki’s is kind of an American spin on the old “playing fields of Eton”. And the last thing we need are more amorals with brains– that is not a job Americans won’t do!
Get this: our parish priest, neither an immigrant nor a parent, and a perfectly harmless fellow, is forced to return to India to renew his work visa. Since appointments at the consulate in his state capital are booked into 2026, he has to fly from there to New Delhi for one at the US embassy.
Whereas hordes of the amoral, sadistic, beyond-Machiavellian scum described in the speech above are waved right through, because “tech”…
These are bugs, not features, Viv!
OT – the new liberal grift: We’re going to tax you for things you did that we’re unregulated up to yesterday, and we’ll decide how much you’re on the hook for. Because “Climate Change”:
Vermont already enacted such a law. Now New York. Other Blue states – California, Maryland, etc. – are following suit.
Companies should just get out of those states. Don’t do business there. Don’t make cars or any other products according to their asinine dictates. They want to live in the stone age………let them live in the stone age.
I never equated Bauhaus with Brutalism, necessarily. I think the Bauhaus style, or at least some manifestations of that style, looks good on some buildings: factories, office buildings, schools, etc., in the right setting. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it, but it’s okay in moderation.
Brutalist monstrosities like Boston City Hall or Pruitt Igoe – yeah – those are awful.
I don’t think Jews were even particularly prominent among the Bauhaus architects.
I’d be interested to see how heavily represented they were among the critics who promoted modernism, but among the architects themselves? At a casual glance — not very heavily.
It think? It think it doesn’t spell.
This sounds like them doing the same thing they always do — say, in their twisting and maligning of the actual life of Alan Turing, or their “rehabilitation” attempt for Jack Abramoff — only they’ve completely lost any trace of storytelling ability, credibility, historical knowledge, or grace. I might have to see this. A Zoidberg level flop, about an angry Jew who invents architectural ugliness, deliberately and explicitly as a big FU to the disgisting goyim who were dumb enough to save his life, sure sounds like propaganda, but certainly not for that side.
I am sooo sick of “holocaust” movies!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
Seriously! This is just goddamned ridiculous! They are literally getting more frequent! They have to break-up the list up into decades, and also “movies” vs “documentaries”, just to make this near endless list manageable.
We are reaching peak jew saturation. If it gets any worse, every single movie made will reference the holocaust somehow. Because that list is just films ABOUT the holocaust, so it doesn’t count movies like “Inglorious Basterds”, or even the fucking X Men digressing into holocaust bullshit.
I just watched “The Zone of Interest”, and after 90 mins of just showing how the guy and his family lived, they just cut to the pile of shoes, and janitors cleaning up the museum! They are literally running out of ways to rehash this same tired bullshit story.
Honestly! How about “Never Again!” in regards to making more holocaust films!?
Steve:
1. Why didn’t you work in a plug for Tom Wolfe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
2. Trump had an executive order forbidding brutalism in new government buildings.
Indian tech workers…the guy telling us we need lots more of them comes from a place where public utilities look like this.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/11785144/Power-to-the-people-The-lethal-tangle-of-electrical-wires-in-Old-Delhi-India.html
There are two ways to speak, homme and femme,
with distinctions between us and them.
Viz., you won’t hear a homme
vocalize the word “mom”
like it’s “m-a-u-g-h-a-m.”
WaPo on the controversy and acrimony over the Vivek Ramaswamian “Replace Lazy-and-Mediocre Native Losers with Superior Global-Elites” immigration-plan:
Article contents reposted at PeakStupidity.com (entry No.3159; see comments).
On this matter of the “Christmas H1b war of 2024,” as so often the case the Sailersphere was much earlier to the party. Others catch up days, weeks, months, or years later.
The movie is mostly about how the financiers of movies are horrible people.
So factually accurate then…..!
Hitler did so much damage to the West, that this is merely a minor quibble. And I realize Hitler’s job was to look after the interest of Germans, not Americans. Nonetheless by closing Bauhaus, which caused these people to scurry over to America and abuse us, would be on my charge sheet.
More candidates for your National Immigration Safety Review Board, Steve.
One question is “Why modern architecture so bad?”
Designing a really great building, that is awesome for people and highly functional inside and beautiful outside does strike me as a genuinely difficult task. Something would indeed require a lot of talent and is worthy of being a field of study.
But creating something–that is functional, reasonable pleasant for the occupants, decent to look at and reasonable in cost, does not strike me as all that difficult to achieve at all. I’ve lived long enough and been in enough buildings–pretty and ugly, pleasant and un–that I think I think given a patch of ground and intended purpose I could take a half decent stab at it myself. And with a few years of study and practice, be doing buildings better than most of the stuff I see. And I claim only a “better than average” design sense. (AnotherSon is a much better design sense.)
So why does so much stuff just suck? Often times having very kludgy, half-assed and unpleasant aspects and spaces, where I think “c’mon, that was entirely predictable and avoidable”, if not being downright ugly.
“Look at me!” is clearly one factor. You make a name not by doing actually good work, but by being kind of dick, that gets all the useless cretins cackling your praises.
But end-to-end, modern architects have not been impressive.
Great, another “Holocaust” movie.
There are so many of them they’re ranked in “Top 10” lists:
“Holocaust Classic Films — 10 Must Watch Holocaust Movies of All Time”:
Video Link
“Top 10 Holocaust movies”:
— https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000052831/
(Imagine Hollywood doing its first “Holocaust” debunking movie.)
The big 3 modernist architects — Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe — were gentiles. Jews were better represented among 2nd tier modernists like Gropius’s protege Marcel Breuer, who is the best fit for the movie’s protagonist, but who came to the US in the 1930s and was instantly made a Harvard professor rather than a homeless laborer.
How must liberals view the world? Like, it’s really too bad the finance side of Hollywood is dominated by cruel, sodomite WASPs. I bet if the film industry were more Jewish, Corbet would have got plenty of funding. Instead he had to scratch up whatever plucky Belarusian outsider Andrew Lauren could dig out of his couch.
I’m reminded of the 1988 film The Accused, about a public gang rape in a Rhode Island bar. In the film, the rapists were Anglo-American rednecks, the prosecutor was a woman, and the defense attorney was a man. Back in the real world where this actually happened, the perps were unassimilated Portuguese, the defense attorney was a woman, and the prosecutor was a man. This was 36 years ago and the narrative has never changed, never deviated, since we began the slide from a near 90% white majority to 64%.
The 60% non-white majority has already been born; what do you think the narrative will be by then?
Roman Catholic priest – a job Australians [and Americans] won’t do anymore.
Enter the curry munchers!
Lauren was born on October 14, 1939, in the Bronx, New York City,[3][4] to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants[5][6][7][8] Frieda (Cutler) and Frank Lifshitz, an artist and house painter,[9][10] from Pinsk, Second Polish Republic (now Belarus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lauren
Replies: Jack D, Jack D, Jack D, Jack D, Jack D, HA, Jack D, Jack D, Art Deco
I missed the first vetting of non insta “moderated” (really they are unmoderated, since they are just instantly approved) .
What did I do to incur your wrath this time, dear Steve?
This is the narrative now.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/26/maga-civil-war-ramaswamy-musk-loomer-cernovich
So three paper Americans, as you say, are top advisors to Trump, and they want a pipeline of immigrant tech workers. Which, to no one’s surprise, has riled up the MAGA base. And free speech Musk promptly restricted the MAGAheads from commenting.
—Elon Musk’s X is the town square for the MAGA movement, and by stepping into that square and firmly criticizing American culture — while praising the immigrant work ethic and parenting model — Ramaswamy threw down a gauntlet.
Musk spent most of the afternoon trying to defend his DOGE co-leader and explain his argument, framing it as using immigration to supplement, rather than replace, American workers.
“Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote.
The problem for many MAGA adherents, though, was accepting the very notion of immigrants telling them America needs more immigration to fill lucrative jobs in America.—
Perhaps Mr. Sailer will NOTICE?
Yeah, right.
So, will Trump put his foot down and intervene on behalf of his base?
Wonder what’s going on behind that one way glass?
So how do true conservatives view the world?
—Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and close Trump ally, said that X had demonetized her — cutting off her ability to collect subscription fees and other revenue on the site — and had revoked her blue verification checkmark, about two days after she began criticizing Musk over tech industry visas.
“Looks like Elon Musk is going to be silencing me for supporting original Trump immigration policies,” she posted on X, calling the actions “retaliation.”
Loomer has 1.4 million followers on X, and earlier in the week, she had been among the first prominent conservatives to criticize Trump’s appointment of Krishnan to an AI post.
Some other right-wing accounts including @rawsalerts, which has 1.1 million followers, also said they lost their verified status Thursday. The news account did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Musk did not respond directly to either Loomer or the others claiming censorship, but earlier in the day, he posted on X about Loomer’s anti-immigration commentary.
“Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore,” he wrote. —
Yet, she is a trusted confidante of Trump.
Your boy Musk has some explaining to do.
A lot of D.C., including the Metro and the Capitol, has concrete interiors inspired by Hadrian’s great Pantheon interior.
Don’t forget Frank Lloyd Wright.
Mies stuck it out in Nazi Germany for 5 years hoping Hitler would come around to his view of architecture. Corbusier got along fine with Vichy. Gropius was a man of the left after the Great War. Philip Johnson was a literal Nazi in the 1930s. Some of the others were far leftists.
“One question is “Why modern architecture so bad?” ”
Here we go again. You guys don’t know much art history, and you don’t know much architectural history, and you temperamentally don’t know much about art, just what you happen to like.
— Waah! We used to have architecture that was A, and now we have architecture that is B. I don’t like B, why are we doing it?
Sigh. Because what you call B is not really B, it is more like F. And its genealogy is not A –> B, it is…
Because A –> B, then B –>C, C –> D, –>E, –> F. Except that in that long trudge, people mostly forgot about B and D and their influence, and C and E mostly used inferior materials that didn’t last so well, so what we see now is mostly F, so that is what’s on our minds and annoys us. Plus people forget that F is just cheaper to build (a *lot* cheaper), God somehow stopped making whole villages full of skilled Mediaeval stonemasons and gargoyle-sculptors, then whole armies of non-union half-competent Mexicans showed up to replace them, and so on. Plus people forget that glass and steel and concrete buildings are generally hideous from the exterior, but the interiors are full of air and lift and sunlight, thanks to all that glass. Would you like to be a modern-day Bob Cratchit-style scrivener working a Wang terminal by candlelight inside the dank and gloom of a 60-story Westminster Abbey?
The longer answer to “Why is modern architecture so bad?” kind of has to do with the phenomenon that architects are temperamentally artists, but architecture is and must be a social good before it is art. (Same thing is true about movies in a way, the “auteur” theory is only partly true — Victor Fleming did not “make” Gone with the Wind, David O. Selznick and Lady Luck did.)
Architecture needs to reflect its place in the human social world and also the contractor’s bottom line, before it starts to stroke the ego of the guy at the drafting table. The 20th century moved very, very rapidly, a lot of big decisions got made on the fly and without thinking about the long term; hopefully as things move on and Brutalist buildings simply collapse because they suck, and everyone will learn better. “Some day we’ll look back on Corbu, and it will all seem funny.”
Don Novello chose the name after a real Laszlo Toth. The real-life Mr. Toth was a schizophrenic who thought he was Jesus Christ-while viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta statue at the Vatican he chose to smash it because he didn’t recognize the Mary portion as his mother. The Pieta was later successfully repaired and Mr. Toth, like Herostratus who destroyed the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order to enter history, …well entered history. Novello thought the name Laszlo Toth (a perfectly good Hungarian name although very bizarre to English-speakers) about the funniest name that could ever be hence his nom-de-plume in the complaint letters series. Not really sure why Corbet chose that name except perhaps architects, especially untalented controversial ones, tend to have a Messianic complex.
Corbusier’s Chandigarh is regarded as desirable. More of a government complex than a true city, it is built more red brick than concrete.
With plenty of gardens and roadside trees, it is a very pleasant place to live ( for those fortunate enough to find a place).
Likely, the director cagily realized that to get his serious art film about an artistic-genius-tortured-by-Big-Money movie he needed to make it about Jews as victims, the Holocaust, and Evil White Gentiles. ((Hollywood studio execs)) throw money, Oscar, and accolades at any film about the Shoah that depicts them as underdogs fighting Big Whitey and not the truth about them being overdogs exploiting goyim with cheap thrills.
Kate Winslet and Ricky Gervais stated this in a hilarious way in the Extras (Gervais created the series):
Video Link
Put another way, the director made the movie about making the movie (metaphorically) but depicting the bad guys as the good guys –and the director seems bitter about having to do it.
Ralph Lifshitz, you mean?
To what am I supposed to be replying?
Kikusikitishacho?
Because they don’t compete with Mother Nature. You might pull off great architecture in Santorini or Oporto or along the Canadian National Railway, but it’s tough.
Whereas bland nothingscapes such as London, Paris, Moscow, Manhattan, Chicago (to say nothing of Houston!) demand eye-catching architecture– and are no longer getting it. Brutalism is just Dollar General writ large.
Here’s an array of cities where natural beauty is a good setting for plain buildings:
Priests traditionally came from large families. Thus the problem, like so many others, can be traced a generation or more further back.
Now that city is wired!
Good thing that’s not what Tom Wolfe said.
Go see “Complete Unknown “ about Bob Dylan and tell us what you think please…
“I finally found another critic who recognizes that, as history, it’s hooey.”
exactly like Oppenheimer.
and so, the eternal tug of war between making something for entertainment versus making a documentary.
max realism ( —– sliding scale of ticket sales —– ) max entertainment
as editors say: “Every equation in the book cuts sales in half.”
a person’s movie going experience is not unlike the experience of reading a newspaper. the subject matter expert reads a story involving his field and realizes it’s all hooey, then turns the page and reads about a topic where he’s not an expert and believes whatever the journalists are selling. is the newspaper’s job to entertain or inform?
and as always – why watch any new movies at all at this point? they’re obvious garbage. except The Substance. now that was crazy. like those old Carpenter and Cronenberg classics.
Getting red-pilled diminished my appreciation of Dylan, but I’m still a fan who wondered about his early career — that curiosity is now satisfied.
Seeger, Guthrie’s hospital companion & gatekeeper, allows the unknown Dylan into Greenwich Village’s folk scene after Dylan passes a bedside audition of sorts. Baez calls Dylan an asshole, Dylan agrees. Booze & cigarettes, illegal stuff only implied. Effortless acting, era convincingly recreated. Woke kept to a rare minimum. Not a comedy but still some laughs.
Dylan actually likes the way he’s portrayed, which was certainly not guaranteed.
To be honest- Adorno’s ideas are crap. Even his readable “Minima Moralia”. That’s the case with all Heidegger’s disciples, including “the banality of evil” Arendt, which is another high- falutin’ nonsense.
Fake depth of people who didn’t seriously study phenomena they were writing about & were caught in the web of their own projections and impressions.
To this point, the swastika did not come from Nazism, therefore the swastika has nothing to do with Nazism. When you see one, you should be thinking about the Big Dipper rotating around Polaris, over a primitive man who is worried that the sun will not necessarily return in springtime.
—-
Related note: Nazis hated fraktur because they saw themselves as more modern than modern and German script as old-fashioned. They often ended up using it anyway, politics and preferences be damned, because Germany had a ton of fraktur resources and it was just quicker, cheaper, and easier than properly converting.
Whattam I, chopped liver?
It’s like Fightclub. The first rule of instamoderation is we don’t talk about instamoderation.
OT — STEVE — WRONG THREAD BECAUSE OF THREE COMMENT LIMIT — DATA I SAY AGAIN DATA — TWITTER COMMENTATOR BLOWS H1B THE MUSK UP —
Tough to argue with that.
Thanks. It’s amazing how much Wolfe (and others) could get away with back then.
Sounds good.
If it’s framed that way, it’ll be the State Religion from here to eternity.
It may be a bad idea but it’s exactly how merkins are educated. And if you travel much overseas you’ll see that ((merka’s) #1 cultural export “educates” people just about everywhere.
White anti-whites loved Dylan, Seeger, and Guthrie. But that crowd can only exist inside a larger white majority society. Kind of like hipsters would never do their schtick in a black neighborhood, they can only do the anti-bourgeois act in a larger white society.
Both Guthrie and Seeger were proud anti-American communists. So natch, Sailer thinks they’re groovy. Every SWPL loves traitors. Gotta prove they’re more hip than the masses.
Dylan didn’t buy into the communist stuff and later become a centrist. Dylan also lied about his early history to create a marketable persona. More of a hustler than a true believer. Dylan figured out there was gold in appealing to the vain SWPL type.
Can someone please help me with *extremely* skeptical of how this program works. There is a lot of data, but I don’t know what inference can be drawn to induce skepticism.
It’s hard to transport oneself back to Early Dylan’s time and place, particularly if we weren’t even born yet. So I’ve no way whatever of judging how accurately they are portrayed in a book or movie.
But take a song like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” We’ve all heard it a thousand times by now. Trite, hackneyed, almost twee? Maybe so; after all idealism is in short supply nowadays.
But was it an entirely cynical gesture on Dylan’s part, or was he largely sincere? I’d say the latter, though if he were really honest he’d have admitted that it also helped him get laid. He was 21 btw.
The movie’s somewhat honest about all that.
Mangold is a solid director: his “Ford v. Ferrari” was one of the better movies of 2019, a fine year for movies.
As far as I can tell, Bob Dylan’s main political stance was being anti-Jim Crow. Once that was achieved, he mostly shut up about politics. He appears to have been pro-Vietnam War and pro-Israel.
But I could be wrong about this.
OMG how have they all not been cancelled for this blasphemy!!! LOL
Trying to build stuff on the cheap with air conditioning and yet to make a huge profit. Corruption in contracting in general.
Universal use of cars in the US makes vast parking lots the most important feature of any new building.
General lack of interest in aesthetic issues or in building an environment that people will like. Lack of civic pride.
You might as well ask why a lot of modern churches look like Dollar General stores with a pimple on top and not like medieval cathedrals.
Bob Dylan was/is remarkably apolitical for a folk music enthusiast. Most famous folk musicians, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, were eager to pontificate about lefty politics. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dylan sold a lot more records and tickets than they did.
I got an idea-what about a movie about black women calculating the orbit trajectories of Mercury astronauts without which the astronauts would burn up? Sure it’s silly, although I’m sure there were real life black women doing calculations for NASA in the early sixties but let’s make a movie where those black women were absolutely vital to the space effort instead of being a minor thing. I think it will work, after all modern day America doesn’t care what really happened in the past, they just want to see blacks and women being totally awesome in the here-and-now.
en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/Hidden_FiguresGenerally architecture criticism can become really convoluted. You bring up several good points but even so I would like to point out that most old buildings had lots and lots of big, really big windows (really take a look at photos of 19th and early 20th century office buildings) so the workers inside were not really subjected to a Bob Cratchit lack of light situation-the image of Bob Cratchit slaving away in dim light is largely a creation of movie set designers who were emphasizing the dismal state of Bob’s environment so we would feel sorry for him and feel mad at Scrooge before Scrooge recognizes the true spirit of Christmas and that he needs to change.
The architects of pre-Bauhaus buildings knew that there was a need for light so designed their buildings accordingly given the technology of the time-its not like glass skyscraper architects suddenly discovered a need for light that previous generations did not know about. The need for light was recognized… well… since forever-that’s why medieval cathedrals had those big glass planes-“let there be light”.
Au contraire, you are a consistently “value-add” commenter.
“He appears to have been pro-Vietnam War”
No, he decidedly was not. Blowing In The Wind
and Tombstone Blues clearly shows his opposition to American meddling in Southeast Asia.
“and pro-Israel.”
Don’t know about that one. Although, in this verse from Neighborhood Bully (1983), my vague impression is that he is on the side of Gazans.
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land
They got him outnumbered about a million to one
He got no place to escape to, no place to run
He’s the neighborhood bully.
The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighborhood bully.
Universal use of cars in the US makes vast parking lots the most important feature of any new building.
==
(1) The lots do not have to intervene between the building and the street or be constructed as an asphalt moat around the building.
==
(2) You seem to have never heard of parking garages.
That’s why I always go to Dollar Tree:
You ain’t seen ugly until you’ve seen a Walmart parking garage:
“…my vague impression is that he is on the side of Gazans.”
Taken as a whole the song sides with the Israelis.
Anti–brutalists and other skeptics might enjoy the YouTube channel the Aesthetic City, by a young Dutch archi-reactionary. Surprising places for a counter-movement in the British Crown and at that other Notre Dame:
https://www.youtube.com/@the_aesthetic_city
Video Link
Video Link
Gentrification and new traffic patterns in the least likely of places:
Video Link
The movie has oddly little to say about Dylan himself. There are two main plots, the first being how BD destroys the communitarian folk music scene that had survived since the 1930s by bringing the individualistic principles of rock ‘n’ roll stardom to it. The other is a love triangle between Bobby, Baez and ‘Sylvie’, a fictional shiksa girlfriend based on Suze Rotolo. This is uninteresting because the movie’s take on Dylan is that he’s something of a vampire who doesn’t care about other people but just uses them, and because he doesn’t end up with either one. There is nothing about the woman he ended up marrying, Sara, or about the Hawks/the Band, so this becomes more true by omission…
Chalamet does a convincing impression of one aspect of Dylan, his ennui and sneer… really he’s doing an impersonation of one of Dylan’s teenage heroes, James Dean. But there’s much more to the Dylan persona in the early 60s that isn’t shown, primarily his clownishness. One reason that he became known and loved so quickly in the Greenwich Village scene was because people found him hilarious to be around. Chalamet comes off as a drip, and an inarticulate one at that, which if you’ve seen the Pennybaker documentaries just doesn’t sit right. He also can’t really do Dylan’s singing voice with its ability to switch rapidly from high notes to low notes and intimacy to foghorn/buzzsaw (Tyler Cowen said it was influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, which I like), but that’s less of a criticism, since Dylan has one of the unique voices.
The movie has very little to say about where Dylan’s words come from. Mostly it just shows songs arriving fully formed. Nothing about his Jewishness or life before New York. Nothing about books he was reading (his memoir of those days is full of concealed quotations from Jack London) or not really even much of the wide-eyed small town boy adjusting to the city. Makes you wonder what kind of movie the Coens would have made, but of course they already pretty much made their version with “Llewyn Davis”. On the plus side the recreation of NYC in the 60s was excellent and the first half of the movie at least was dramatically powerful.
Don’t know about that one. Although, in this verse from Neighborhood Bully (1983), my vague impression is that he is on the side of Gazans.
Hey dummy… have you heard of irony?
Calling Israel the ‘neighborhood bully’ is meant to be ironic, i.e. the Jewish State is surrounded by hostile countries but is blamed as the ‘bully’.
As for the Vietnam War, Dylan didn’t say anything about it. He was anti-war during his folkie phase, but that wasn’t about Vietnam per se but the Cold War in general.
Dylan grew cynical about politics in general but had his core personal convictions that he kept to himself.
Though a good song, “Hurricane” is a total disgrace when it comes to facts. “Joey” is downright fantastic.
No, Dylan’s music was more fun than anything by Guthrie and Seeger.
Plenty of Rockers were political but sold tons of albums. Bruce Springsteen for example. REM became more popular during their brazen political phase. U2 was always pontificating about this or some other issue but sold lots too.
Haven’t seen the Dylan movie yet, but it does sound like it could be promising.
I always sort of wished that there was a genre of bio-pic that consisted of a live-action, real-time, continuous uninterrupted depiction of say 90 straight minutes or 2 hours of the subject’s life in one, single situation — the moment that was sort of decisive for making that person who or what they were destined to become. For Dylan there are several times like that, but I think I would pick Dylan and his band in the studio up all night trying to record “Like a Rolling Stone” — specifically the moment where Al Kooper was annoying everyone with loud un-called-for runs and fills on the Hammond organ and everyone was wishing he would stop, and then Dylan just said, “No, let him keep going, I think he’s got something.”
Or the afternoon when Shirley Jackson came home from the grocery store with her toddlers in the stroller, and found 18 USPS mail-bags of hate mail on her front porch the week after the New Yorker ran “The Lottery.”
Maybe it would be a moment that was private, not famous and documented.
If you picked the right subjects and moments, could be a cool low-budget cable series (single set, limited cast). Wouldn’t want to have too many just-so-story Eureka moments, so it would be hard to choose the right time though.
The North Sentinelese are supposed to be uncontacted and genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years yet Marco Polo wrote about them, VOC and EIC ships resupplied there, the Andamanese archipelago used to be a source of slaves, the British built a penal colony on a nearby island in the 19th century and the Japanese occupied the entire archipelago in the war.
In the case of the two imperial occupants, it is unlikely that the Brits and the Japanese never sent out patrols into the interior of North Sentinel Island; the British looking for escapees and the Japanese looking for allied spy radio transmitters. Very likely a complete description of the North Sentinelese resides in some dusty colonial or military archive in the UK or Japan and also very likely soldiers of ‘er Majesty and of the Divine Emperor had sexual relations with the local women as is wont when soldiers with guns and natives desiring iron implements meet.
The historically uncontacted status and genetic isolation of the North Sentinelese is probably another one of those anthropological myth/hoaxes like Mead’s description of the sexual activities of Samoan teens, Chagnon’s exaggerated portrayal of the Yanomamo as ultra-violent, Laurens van der Post’s totally made-up Bushman culture, the Ik having no concept of maternal care or the discovery of the isolated, living in the Stone Age but gentle and atheistic Tasaday-all hoaxes or greatly exaggerated.
Just putting in my two cents in about a subject that elicits a certain fascination with the public but all relevant info is gated by a select group of social scientists that keep out independent verification, which is never a good sign.
Great idea.
The Peter Jackson Beatles documentary is a bit like that.
The Dylan biopic has a shorter version of the Al Kooper keyboard incident, but it has a lot of short Eureka moments from a 5 year span.
That’s ugly.
I’m a little struck by how little money has been spent to make parking garages look better.
A decade ago, I assumed that the news that the multi-billion dollar Apple headquarters building had devoted a few million to making its parking garage look nicer would start a trend, but I don’t know if that is true.
Rem Notsokoolhaus as it were.
I’m a great admirer of Jackson’s ability and craft, but she had, doubtless not coincidentally, a tendency to fantasy/exaggeration. Logistical considerations alone should tell you the 18 mailbags, a week later, were, in all likelihood, perhaps several, strongly worded letters .
Eh, the sheer form following function of it all would make Gropius weep with joy, were weeping not a bourgeois affectation, of course.
There was an interesting replay of their 1960s parting of ways between Dylan and Baez over Covid, with Joanie going all in on Fauci-worship and mask hysteria on Twitter, while Bob gave an interview to the NYT in which he continued to look at things sub specie aeternitatis, part of “the long journey of the naked ape”, and through the lens of the Bible. Dylan outed himself as a far-right Jeffersonian back-to-the-land Democrat in the liner notes to one of his 90s albums; said his favorite politician was Barry Goldwater; had a pro-trade union and anti-globalization song “Union Sundown” in the 80s.
I believe the term is “ plant it out” or cover up the hideous building with plants trees bushes any kind of plant to distract the eye from the hideous facade.
I don’t care much about public buildings. I care very much about residential architecture though. Why does every residential building built since 1940 have to be hideous with floor plans that make it impossible to keep a home tidy??
Don’t know you can do much with parking garage interiors. The facades do not have to be hideous. The utility of parking garages is that they reduce the footprint and allow ground space for other uses.
Another aesthetic crime is carports in the front of apartment buildings. Horrible. Back in the 1930s and early 1950s the carports were in back accessed from the alley.
Unfortunately a certain demographic lurked in the alleys and murdered the tenants after they parked their cars in the alley carports. Kitty Genoveves in NYC and actor Sal Mineo in Los Angeles were victims of carports in the alleys. Had those two and many others been able to park in a street front car port they might have gotten inside before a piece of black trash who never should have been born murdered them.
Unfortunately there’s been a big revival of brutalist architecture in the last 50 years. Including condos and apartment buildings that look like they’re built of Legos.
Latest thing in the dry brown and beige parts of S and central California is to paint all the houses in new developments the exact shade of ugly brown and beige as the surrounding desert. Truly depressing to drive through.
Brown houses look great in forest areas. The brown houses and brown tree trunks look great contrasted to the green leaves. A perfect combination. But a brown or beige house in a brown or beige desert is just awful. Especially big developments 50 identical brown houses on a brown desert mountain.
Ugly architecture is the least of the problems in America.
“Calling Israel the ‘neighborhood bully’ is meant to be ironic, i.e. the Jewish State is surrounded by hostile countries but is blamed as the ‘bully’.”
I can see how you, a Zionist, would desperately try to make that connection.
“As for the Vietnam War, Dylan didn’t say anything about it. He was anti-war during his folkie phase, but that wasn’t about Vietnam per se but the Cold War in general.”
The Vietnam War is part of the Cold War. So, yes, he opposed it.
“Dylan grew cynical about politics in general but had his core personal convictions that he kept to himself.”
OK. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in helping people to understand the injustices of our society in the 1960s.
“Though a good song, “Hurricane” is a total disgrace when it comes to facts.”
In what specific ways?
I remember that because I had a friend who grew up near that town. The rapists weren’t real White Português. They were Cape Verdeans. Africans on the Cape Verdean islands that are Português territories off the coast of Africa. Africans.
The great thing is that as word spread about the atrocity White men gathered and destroyed the tavern where the gang rape happened.
And no one even tried to defend the rapists. Probably because the woke progressive anti White Jews assumed the rapists were White European Português. Instead of the sub human African Cape Verdeans they really were.
The White Azores people and the black African Cape Verdean people. Very similar physical environments both Portuguese but what a contrast.
Just like America
I haven’t seen the movie, but if that is accurate, no great loss. That scene was as artificial as any other. The career of Phil Ochs made that grimly obvious.
Ann Pasternak Slater narrates a good one in her book about Evelyn Waugh: Waugh returns to London after nearly dying among the Indians in Patagonia, bathes in his club, finds a long-delayed letter from Rome confirming the annulment of his previous marriage (leaving him free to marry Laura Herbert), walks to the Herberts’ London townhouse, learns that she and her mother are at mass, walks to the church and surprises them by kneeling in the pew behind them.
Also, like industrial design, architecture has to be suitable for use, which is more concrete than social good. Buildings are built to be used, and have to work within physical constraints, available materials, construction techniques, codes, costs, etc.
That’s a really good idea.
I’m curious, what is the alternate interpretation of the song? Do you think the “Neighborhood Bully” is referring to the Palestinians/Gazans? Do you concede it is referring to the Israelis but it is intended as condemnation? Something else?
Ha!
Upon further research, this is a wee exaggeration on your part. Jackson herself writes that she received “300-odd” letters over that entire summer. For a sense of the disparity, a USPS mailbag is 35 pounds of mail. At sub 1 oz. per letter that would mean each mailbag holds more than 560 letters, perhaps double that. Nor were most of the letters sent to her house; this was 1948, there was no way to easily get her home address, and once gotten it would take time to get around – certainly a lot more than a week – they were sent care of the New Yorker and she picked them up when she went in to the magazine. The grocery shopping and the toddlers in the stroller seem to have been conjured from whole cloth as well (nice touch btw!)
“Forthwith spreads Rumor through Libya’s great cities…”
Aeneid
Hey man, I don’t write the gossip columns, I just pass it along. I went through a big Shirley Jackson period about 15 or 20 years ago, and I just remember hearing that rumor, things like that are too good to fact-check. (The idea was the readers wrote to the New Yorker, and they didn’t know what to do with all the mail so they just forwarded it to her en masse. Also that she didn’t even know that the story had run yet, what a way to find out.) I particularly like that she said she read every single letter, and was surprised how many people thought the town was real, and wanted to know where it was located so they could visit.
But come on, the scene writes itself: Shirley tickled pink, her pompous gasbag egomaniac husband fuming because his wife is a much more famous writer than he is; the kids rummaging through the sea of letters on the floor, asking what “c*nt” means and so on; Shirley on the phone with Ralph Ellison, comparing notes about hate mail, etc. Next time you don’t actually shoot Liberty Valance, we promise not to ruin it for you.
FORTUNE: Don’t apply for a job running a movie studio.
And Happy New Year!
Some listeners interpret it as a defense of Israel’s right to defend itself against external threats, while others see it as a critique of Israeli actions and policies. In an interview in Rolling Stone (1984), Dylan did not offer explicit commentary on the song’s meaning, leaving it open to interpretation by listeners. My vague impression is that he is siding with Gazans, given how his precious work on the oppression of minorities.
‘Brutalism’ sure does sound cool. Oh, it’s bare concrete? Maybe it could be a band name…
Neighborhood Bully is a very pro-Israel song. It’s so over the top, though, that the irony turns back around and one may wonder if Dylan was totally serious. He most certainly was. One can also wonder, if after he became a Christian (and then backed away from that) he felt he had to become a Super Jew and pay tribute to Israel — and if that accounts for the stridency of the song. It’s as though he had to let everything out in one song and become for a moment the kind of one-note folk singer that he scorned in the ’60s.
Dylan wasn’t vocal or passionate about denouncing the Vietnam War, but I doubt he actually supported that war. True, his opposition was more to war in general, but to say that he supported the war would be saying that he was in the bomb them until they submit camp, which he wasn’t.
Late to the party as usual…I’m not an admirer of Dylan’s folkie origins, but his music and lyrics are undeniable. There are an almost unlimited set of examples of how his music has been covered by my favorite musicians, but Johnny Winter’s rendering of “Highway 61 Revisited” from Clapton’s 2007 Crossroads Festival and Leon Russell’s of his “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and The Band’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” cement Dylan’s musical immortality.
The opening scene in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1975 “Rolling Thunder Revue” is Dylan expressing some extremely right wing America Uber Alles foreign policy views about the Vietnam War.
I don’t particularly take seriously any one thing Dylan says. After all, his classic personas are the joker and thief:
The Brutalist cleaned up at the Golden Globes. Not previously mentioned was that it was an A/24 film. They do some nice transgressive stuff, although thy seem to have lost their edge.
But I found a mere description of the plot line triggering. A wealthy white male rapes the protagonist’s disabled Holocaust survivor wife?
You really cant shoehorn that many tropes into a single movie.
Meanwhile, I liked Anora. Mikey Madison is filmed without clothing enough that it would be hard to dislike. The critics had a hard time with it. They wanted the Oligarch to be a gangster, but the family fixer was an Orthodox Priest of some sort. Anora’s love story was her love of money.
Sleeper small movie, Asleep in My Palm.
It coulda been awful, flirting with unbearable tropes but resisting.
Free on Amazon Prime.
Interesting links.
https://www.highly-respected.com/p/conservative-life-advice-for-young
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/
https://www.kickresume.com/en/press/europe-usa-work-survey/#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20a%20majority%20of,taking%2010%20days%20or%20less.