Dumb Riffs

My review of Michael Sorkin’s very good book on New York urbanism, ‘Twenty Minutes in Manhattan’, is on the 3:AM Magazine website here.

Glenn Beck on The Coming Insurrection here.

My article about the history of St Patrick’s Well is in today’s Irish Times here.

My review of Owen Hatherley’s book Militant Modernism is online at 3:AM magazine here.

Reading Owen Hatherley’s enjoyable and timely polemic Militant Modernism, I came across this critique of the work of Alain de Botton:

Perhaps the most irksome of Ikea Modernism’s products was Channel 4’s The Perfect Home, presented by Alain de Botton, promoting his The Architecture of Happiness. Perambulating about the place with an expression of casual intellectuality and immense self-satisfaction, he encapsulates all that is malign in British intellectual life. De Botton personifies the faux-naïve stance of the televisual idiot-expert, who ventriloquises thinkers from Proust to Boethius to Le Corbusier, emphasising how they can enhance (but certainly never truly change, or question the purpose of) the lives of the administrative classes of terminal capital.

Laura’s started a blog about caricatures, looking at contemporary chaps what draw (Steve Bell, for example) and auld fellas from years ago (Daumier, for one). Expect a post on why noted pioneer of photography, Nadar, was also an underrated cartoonist, and other engaging tales from mid-19th century Paris. Read her blog here.

My interview with legendary ex-NME writer Nick Kent is available in full from 3:AM Magazine here.

We’ve been in Paris since last Monday (the day after Phil Jagielka scored a penalty against Manchester United to put Everton into the FA Cup final; a few days before he got injured against the might of Manchester City).

The first thing you notice when you arrive at the none-more brutalist Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport is the smell: you’re underground, on a travelator bringing you towards the baggage claim, and the smell of wet clay hangs in the air. Immediately, the smell is familiar, and immediately you know you’re in Paris.

Obviously there are other smells that hit you later: like the somewhat forbidding odour of glue and bleached paper that you get when you enter la Hune bookshop in St-Germain des Pres; the pong of sewerage in the courtyard of your apartment block, telling you something about the difficulty of splicing the technology of 20th century hygiene onto mid -19th century design; the acrid smell of cheap aftershave and body odour on ligne 2 of the metro, as you pass through the Stalingrad and Barbes-Rochechouart stations. And the sharp smell of stale piss in the latter station as you change from one line to another.

There are other places which pretend that these common spaces don’t exist: what immediately springs to mind is the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale, which takes an age to enter because of a complex procedure of bag-checking, card-validating, escalator-riding, place-booking, and book-ordering. The design of the place seems to be in part a joke on the puny scale of the average human being: ‘you want to use the bathroom, or take a break? First you must walk half a mile to the nearest exit.’

While it’s a very interesting building, and quite pleasant to work in, the BnF is as far from the everyday realities of Parisian pungency as you can get: clearly it’s positing itself as an astringently Cartesian mind, opposed to the rest of Paris’s bodily funk.

Last night myself and Laura went to see David Byrne in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It was a quite brilliant show - drawing on Byrne’s work with Brian Eno, but transcending the fashionable concept of clapped out artists retreading classic albums in the name of nostalgia. First of all, it was a real spactacle: the band were all dressed in stark white outfits, and they swapped dance moves with three roaming dancers throughout the show - even Byrne himself. Also, Byrne performed a particularly silly version of ‘Burning Down the House’ - tutus and all - near the end of the gig (video from the Paris performance here). I also wrote a preview of tonight’s Belfast concert for last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph here.

David Byrne on the Colbert Report here.

Humans are creatures of habit, but those habits are often placed on the flimsiest of foundations: I think here of my morning routine, which consists of grinding some coffee and switching on the water for a shower, followed by a quick check of emails and a scan of the internet. What if any of these actions don’t happen, or even just happen out of sequence? Then there’s a certain disconnect between my environment and me, which takes a while to refocus. Strange stuff.

Although, these bright mornings are making it much easier: Ernesto talks about those clear mornings in London here.