Beware of the Insomniac

It is always dangerous to read what I write after midnight. So be warned. I was in my messy studio working on a lettering project (yes, I will do scribe work, but generally only for friends, as nothing is more tedious than that - it hurts the hands, hurts the eyes, makes the scribe paranoid (WAIT, I must QUADRUPLE check that spelling), and is one of those crafts that only experts really notice the nifty stuff in (make my day, notice the letterforms I invented, praise the balance of the ascenders, go ahead, it won't hurt)) and thinking about the great scribes, the monastics who have left us all those glorious illuminated manuscripts.

If I think that my eyes and hand hurts after two hours, what must it have been like without balanced electric light, without the ease of a steel pen, without the relatively easy to use modern inks (no tedious grinding for me, thank you)? Yet, for all of their difficulties, they produced much better work than most of what any of us moderns will ever do.

Likewise, we live in an era where our modern machinery should allow us to run circles around ancient builders, but we get that garbage that they keep throwing up nowadays. There is a school being built in Oakland, called, fittingly enough, given the Commie bent of our school district (housed in the Paul Robeson Administration Building), International School. It looks like a postmodern concentration camp. I doubt that the poor children, who really are international in their makeup, will get the irony that they are being incarcerated (good word to use, keeping in mind the Oakland School District and what passes for teaching here) in a showpiece concentration camp. "Look!" seemingly says the District, "at all of our International students! The diversity! The languages! The dress! And here they all are, safely behind chainlink fences (for their own protection, of course), for you to admire!" BLEAH! Of course it is International because the City, ever wanting to look hip, renamed E. 14th St. International Blvd. Locals still call it E. 14th St., especially people who live on or near it.

I am sure that the folks at the Paul Robeson Building love to go to International Blvd. to feel the vibe or whatever leftists do these days.

But I digress (see, I told you). Architecture. Yes, that's what I was thinking of.

There are exceptions. I actually find myself consistantly admiring much of high modernism (although I have yet to see a modernist house that I would really want to live in - great lines and proportions on some of them, though), and even some post-modernism (The Portland City Services Building is one that I keep finding myself wanting to look at when I am up in Portland), but most of what is out there is really bad.

Modernism works when it is either extremely well-proportioned or absolutely cheeky. I love the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. I walk under it at least once a week, and there is something dazzling about it. When they light up the Embarcadero Center it is an absolute feast for the eyes. But most of it is just more unremarkable cheap building, hiding its cheapness in a veneer (or anti-veneer) of faddishness.

The latest fad to assault the eyes is the slanted window, looking like the top of a control tower. It is supposed to be a reference to the industrial past, a reminder of an age of men with thick necks and rough hands. "Remember, passerby, that steel was fabricated in this neighborhood!" But nothing screams effete technogeek better than phony industrial trappings. They forget that the managers were the ones who sat up in the offices with the slanted windows. In their rush to distance themselves from the white collar world, they have enshrined it, but in a silly and patronizing way.

It seems that every other new building in the City is full of these goofball slants. What, pray tell, are the inhabitants supposed to be looking down on? The alleys below? The airshaft? Well, nothing, as the windows are there to show the outside world how hip and trendy the builders were.

Latin America is full of bad modernism. It always looked old and worn, even on the day that it opened. There is nothing like tropical weather to severely test ideas worked out in the Temperate North. Concrete can really look awful when subjected to daily rains and rusting rebar.

And this is where we get my test of art and architecture: is is beautiful when it decays? Think of the Colloseum. Think of da Vinci's Last Supper (without all that nonsense that is floating around as a result of the stupid book). Then think of the Pan Am building. I admire a lot of Gropius, but that one looks (last I saw it, which was a few years ago) to be in about the same shape as the airline it is named after, or at least it is headed in that direction.

I firmly believe that we must tend to the cultural before the political, because that is the only way to turn our society around from the direction it is going. We must ask ourselves why we cannot do better, given the great tools we have. We should not ask ourselves why THEY cannot do better, rather why WE cannot do better. In whatver pursuits we are in we need to ask this. Artists need to ask ourselves: "why can't we paint as well as Piero della Francesca, given that we know how he did it, we have better materials (well, no one has improved that much on fresco), we have better lighting, etc.?"

For Catholics (especially Italians) it is too easy to point the finger on the rest and say, "well, what do you expect from artless Protties/secular nihilists/etc." But that will not do. We have been commanded by the Sacred Council to engage the culture, and we cannot do it by pointing fingers, nor by retreat. I know that when I look at my work and then contrast it with what our culture once did, I do not come out on top.

Anyway, enough late night musings/ramblings. Comment away!