…Orgies Sans Frontières… The DSK trial is already turning out to be a gold mine for language lovers.
Here’s a look at how the man who was deemed a shoe-in for the Elysée Palace, rose to almost the top, before his dramatic, disgraceful fall.
Auburn University. As always, the standard-bearer.
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Take an obviously ugly, unloved, unused or underused public building. A grotesquely out of place building (urban, it has been placed in a rural setting) loathed for decades – since its inception – by virtually its entire community (they after all have had to look at it every day). Finally the community is about to be able to blot it from the landscape – or, more precisely, to alter it so radically that they’ll probably be able to live with it going forward without hating themselves and the world. All good, right?
Well, no.
Architecture remains the realm of The Great Man, and Paul Rudolph is part of that crew, so every building he designed must be defended, even if that building – as is the case with the Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y. (two hours directly south of UD‘s house in New York) – gives off the rank sweat of an unseam’d bed. And not just defended but stuck there, dammit, forever and a day.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm, student of prose, now examines the New York Times architecture critic’s attempt to keep Rudolph in the Land O’ Goshen. How do you write against the obvious? How do you avoid revealing any off-putting elitism? How, as a dynamic modernist, do you deny the validity of change itself?
You want to avoid this gambit, tried by an earlier defender of the place:
“It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollock because he splattered paint,’” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.”
Hop away from the hog oiler and listen up – you might learn something.
No, Michael Kimmelman will take a different tack. Let’s scathe through his piece.
Headlines:
A Chance to Salvage a Master’s Creation
Paul Rudolph Building in Goshen, N.Y., Faces Threat
Master, Threat. But there’s a chance to Salvage. Faces Threat: Immediate Drama. Urgency. We are alerting the troops.
Unless county legislators act quickly, a paragon of midcentury American idealism will be lost.
Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, N.Y., announces itself as a civic hub. It’s made of corrugated concrete and glass, organized into three pavilions around a courtyard, like an old wagon train around a village green.
First move: Go folksy. Go Americana. Ignore the fact that the photograph that accompanies your article fails in any way to resonate with paragon, idealism, civic, pavilion, courtyard, old wagon train, and village green. Press forward.
And that’s the approach SOS is going to note in Kimmelman’s piece. When you got nuthin’ your only option is to go all out. Know what I mean? It takes balls. It takes writerly skill.
A county proposal would tear down huge chunks of it, flatten the roof, destroy windows, swap out parts of the textured concrete facade and build what looks like an especially soul-crushing glass box. Goshen would end up with a Frankenstein’s monster, eviscerating a work that the World Monuments Fund, alarmed by precisely this turn of events, included on its global watch list alongside landmarks like Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China.
A building made of huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing concrete is now threatened with transformation into a building with huge chunks of monstrous soul-crushing glass. So far not a strong defense. Still, he’s jammed some very pretty scary words – SOS likes the lip-smacking eviscerate – into this, and he’s just getting started.
Plus, whatever it looks like, this thing is up there with Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China. Damn hayseeds don’t appreciate what they’ve got.
Haters in Orange County government have been contemplating its demise for years, allowing it to fall into disrepair and shuttering the building, citing water damage after Hurricane Irene in 2011. Pictures of the interior from the early 1970s, when the center was still new, show a complex of animated spaces, by turns intimate and grand. Later renovations ruined the inside, making it cramped and dark. Rudolph was a master of sculpturing light and space, following in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose emotionalism he married to the cool Modernism of Europeans like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.
Haters is also scary stuff. Haters. When Kimmelman, a man of strong opinions, writes with hatred about buildings he hates, he’s not a hater. He’s a… what… a potent discriminator…
Now we get some familiar archi-adjectives – animated, grand, intimate, cool. All are there to create a vague flush of excitement in us as we contemplate inhabiting this paragon of light and space; all are there to obliterate the obvious impossibility of attaining anything like a sense of grandeur or intimacy in this building.
And since when are grandeur and intimacy things anyone associates with county government? Since when are Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China continuous with the Goshen New York municipal building?
Still, The Great Man was continuous with earlier Great Men. We are to be impressed with this lineage (Corbu, Wright, Gropius).
His style, unfortunately, came to be branded Brutalism, and turned off many. But the government center was conceived with lofty social aspirations, making tangible Rudolph’s concept of energetic governance as a democratic ideal. It was a beautiful notion; and while the architecture may never win any popularity contest, it was beautiful, too, with its poetry of asymmetric, interweaving volumes.
This is what SOS means by just going for it. When you’ve got nothing going for you, go for it. Acknowledge the bizarre, motiveless ascription of the name Brutalism to this sort of building; insist that if a building means well, it looks well (“conceived with lofty social aspirations”), and then stick in some patriotic cliches to keep the flush of vague excitement going (energetic governance as a democratic ideal). The awkwardness here is that central to democracy is the will of the people, and in regard to Paul Rudolph’s building that will is overwhelmingly clear.
Now make your boldest move: Call an ugly building beautiful. Go ahead. You’ve gone this far; the only place to go is yet farther. Call it poetic.
Okay, so we’ll skip a little.
Demolishing Penn Station seemed expedient to politicians and other people a half-century ago, when only a noisy bunch of architecture buffs and preservationists pleaded for its reprieve. Back then, Rudolph was a leading light in American architecture, his work the epitome of American invention and daring.
The original Penn Station was beautiful, monumental, and deserved every bit of the effort devoted to salvaging it. But here we’re back at the Machu Picchu/Great Wall of China problem. Machu Picchu, Great Wall of China, Penn Station, Goshen County Building. Seriously?
Final paragraph.
History is on the Government Center’s side, too. Here’s hoping county legislators are.
Another grand statement for a small subject. Goshen must be on the side of history!
Actually, Goshen, with energetic governance as its democratic ideal, can be wherever the hell it wants. Goshen seems to see itself as a place of vernacular buildings which express its actual history, rather than as a Mount Rushmore of all-American, world historical architects like Paul Rudolph, who, after his early work met with hostility
turned inward to lavish interior-design projects, evincing through the 1970s a comfort with the extravagant that was out of tune with professional norms. Then he turned away from the American scene altogether, to rework old ideas in a series of large projects overseas, such as the Colonnade apartments in Singapore and the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong…
… trust. For much of today, she’s been working up some remarks.
She was asked to structure her remarks around a work of literature, and she chose John Updike’s short story, “Trust Me,” a man’s recollection of his father having failed (for a few terrifying moments) to catch him as he – three or four years old – jumped for the first time into a swimming pool. “Trust me,” the father had said, and the child trusted him, but because the father in fact was not able to catch him right away, he came who knows how close to drowning.
Years later the narrator realizes that despite this abject failure of trustworthiness, and despite his mother (who was sitting nearby during the incident) having flown into so intense a rage that she violently slapped her husband’s face as he helped his son recover (her anger, writes the narrator, “seemed directed at him as much as at his father”), it’s his father he ended up trusting all his life. “It was his mother he distrusted, her swift sure-handed anger.”
The rest of the story recounts later failures of trusting and being trusted in the man’s life: He assures his girlfriend she can ski on a slope that’s in fact too challenging for her, and she falls apart – the two of them have to walk down the long icy run. His seventeen year old son assures him some hash brownies friends made for the son’s birthday “won’t do anything” to him, so the narrator eats one and becomes seriously and hilariously high as he tries to take the subway back to his apartment. He’s on a pleasant comfortable jet leaving Rome, and as he’s settling in for the flight the plane runs into bad trouble and has to return to the airport.
In most of the recalled incidents, the trauma involves a menacing uncontrollable world of water, ice, and snow: the “lapping agitation” of the swimming pool; the Atlantic ocean which “visually interlocked with the calm silver edge of the [airplane’s] wing: Olympian surfaces serenely oblivious of the immense tension between them;” the snowy woods that circled the man and his terrified girlfriend as they made their way down the mountain:
[T]he woods around them, perceived at so unusually slow a speed, wore a magical frozen strangeness, the ironical calm of airplane rivets.
Ironical because those rivets too, the narrator muses, say “Trust me, [yet] in his heart [he] refused, and this refusal in him formed a hollow space terror could always flood.”
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He expresses no anger at his son for feeding him drugs, but when the narrator calls his girlfriend and tells her what’s happened, she flies into a rage (“Oh, that’s disgusting!”) and hangs up on him.
The story ends with him once again musing.
The click [of the phone] sounded like a slap, the same echoing slap that had once exploded next to his ear. Except that his father had become his son, and his mother was his girl friend. This much remained true: it had not been his fault, and in surviving he was somehow blamed.
It seems not so much the fact of survival, though, as his lack of “sure-handed anger,” his failure to believe that when you get right down to it life is a risk almost not worth taking, that makes the narrator an object of blame. The narrator is more willing to assume the risks of life, more willing to be vulnerable in the ways you’re vulnerable when you trust someone, than some of the other people he encounters. (His ex-wife, for instance, has a fear of flying.)
Despite everyone’s inclination toward terror when they realize (as the narrator did, age three) their frailty in relation to a betraying human and a menacing natural world, the point is to persist in trusting, to resist one’s tendency to be “flooded” with terror. “There are few fates worse than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human environment,” writes the philosopher Annette Baier. “The worst pathology of trust is a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust.” The various rages against the narrator disclose, perhaps, elements of this pathology, and he rightly shrinks from them.
And when absence of trust becomes not just personal, but social?
Where a society has degenerated to the point that there are few institutions of trust, it is hard to see how things may be transformed so as to let trust in. Consider the society, for example, where trust is only found in small family groups: where there are few other examples of loyalty-based trust and few or no examples of trust based on habits of expecting virtue or prudence. Consider a society, in other words, where civic engagement is at an absolute minimum and utter cynicism prevails: where there is little of what James Coleman describes as social capital. In such a society, trust is likely to lack any dynamic and it may require dramatic developments or interventions if things are to be turned around.
The beautiful ongoing saga of Florida State’s Jesus, and America’s next hero.
But wait. Many of these guys attended or graduated from some of our better universities. Ray Rice, Rutgers. Aaron Hernandez, University of Florida. Richie Incognito, University of Nebraska. Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma. Our internationally acclaimed higher education system has taken these and so many other NFL players in and educated them.
Sure, once they’re retired at 29 or whatever, and once the brain damage they got playing for these universities (Motto: A mind is a terrible thing to waste; so we use it, use it, use it!) starts up, they won’t make big NFL money. But they’re college-educated! They went to storied schools like the University of North Carolina!
Bankrupt? Financial stress? They’re not even carrying college loans!
Well.
This line, which concludes an article announcing UD‘s own ‘thesda as “the next Aspen,” instantly made UD think of a couple of lines from Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
“The saved know each other by their neatness and reserve. He doesn’t have showy ways is how you know a saved person.”
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The Aspenization is happening
in South Bethesda; UD lives
in North Bethesda (the
Garrett Park part of North Bethesda),
which – given what it looks like when
you take a picture off of UD‘s
back deck on January 30, 2015 at 7:50
in the morning – isn’t very showy at all.
Looks downright rural.
Once again, Yeshiva University’s president – one of the highest-paid university presidents in the country – shows – in the statement above – his keen grasp of fiscal realities.
From Bloomberg Business, this morning:
Of [American universities] with endowments of more than $1 billion, only one lost money last year: Yeshiva University, which shrunk 7.6 percent to $1.09 billion…
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No wonder Yeshiva’s medical school faculty is in a funk.
The guy could be on his way to a lucrative sideline: Expert witness willing to testify that university athletes who rape unconscious women are innocent of the rape if the athletes are really drunk when they do it.
Forensic psychologist Dr. James Walker testified Friday that [Brandon] Vandenburg could have been so drunk that he had no idea what he was doing, The Tennessean reports.
“He was so intoxicated he was not his normal self,” Walker said. “He was doing things he would not normally have done.”
(A defense team also tried what George Huguely’s lawyer called the “stupid drunk” defense in Huguely’s case. That one was murder. He was a University of Virginia lacrosse player.)
So: Next up for Walker: Former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner. Same MO: Rape an unconscious woman. Apparently they’d both been at a party. She seems to have been very drunk. Let’s assume he was too. Get Walker on the stand!
A very postmodern trial. People have been raping women for a long time, but today some juries can watch the rape, because the postmodern rapists record it.
Of course the guys on trial had every right to do whatever they could to try to stay out of jail, but UD would like to say for the record that it was probably a bad idea for one of them to walk into court brandishing an American flag lapel pin, and for the other one to talk about having no memory of the event while preparing to go to church the next morning. It was probably a bad idea for their defense lawyers to blame events on Vanderbilt University, which turns out to be so utterly dissolute a location that anyone there – even patriotic, churchgoing lads – would rape an unconscious woman. It was probably a bad idea for their defense to rig up a doctor to claim that the alcohol did it, not the football player.
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I know. When you’ve got a recording of the rape, there aren’t any good ideas. Point taken.
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Oh. As you gear up for the trial of the two other former Vanderbilt football players accused of raping this woman, don’t forget: Their coach now coaches at Penn State.
You cannot make this shit up.
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From one of the jurors:
He said the “defense did an incredible job, they were essentially given unwinnable cases and turned it essentially into the longest, hardest-fought legal battle.” He said he did not believe Batey’s testimony that Batey did not remember anything because he was drunk.
“I think Cory Batey’s testimony probably did more harm than good… His intoxication defense came a little bit late and was pretty lackluster when he got on the stand. He had clearly been coached… “
Good old Offices of Teaching & Learning. They’re reading (they’re supposed to be reading) the same studies professors are reading (supposed to be reading). In fact, they’re supposed to be the campus experts, the highest campus authorities, on best teaching practices. But although more and more professors are banning laptops (the article from which my post’s title is taken is all about how more and more DU professors are banning technology) in the light of overwhelming evidence that they damage comprehension, attention, and participation, most university teaching centers seem to have no policy on the matter – or they think laptops are terrific, wonderful, great…
DU’s office still thinks it’s clever to compare distraction through looking out the window or dragging your pencil across note paper to having instant access to the entire world of movies, stores, news outlets, and social media.
Why can’t the Office of Teaching & Learning learn?
Wow. Talk about multi-tasking.
Didn’t Irving Berlin write a song about this?
I got the church in the mornin
And the rape at night….