I stayed in on Saturday night to watch this programme on Stalinist architecture that I had been looking forward to all week. Joe Building: The Stalin Heritage Trail was presented by the über-pompous Jonathan Meades, who absolutely shunned this fascinating architecture with a string of showy adjectives – institutionalised mendacity, repressive uncouthness, epic emptiness etc etc. He didn't tell us anything about the history of the buildings, or even their locations and at one point I didn't even know if he was in Russia or the Ukraine.
On Stalinist buildings:
"They're as much a lie as heaven on earth."
On socialist-realist painting (which is of course neither socialist, nor realist):
"The proletariat responds to hyper-kitsch"
On Moscow:
"a stage waiting for the anarchy of capitalism"
All highly entertaining and beautifully shot and, in the moments where Meades wasn't spouting his nonsense and shoving his puss in front of the camera, quite stunning to watch.
Jerry Building, his documentary on Nazi architecture, is on BBC2 this Wednesday 3rd May at 11.20pm.
Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, St Petersburg (2002)
01-May-06 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
Does anyone else find the photo uploading tool a bugger?
01-May-06 at 3:19 pm | Permalink
> uploading
It can be a bit too clever, yep. I think they took their AJAX ideas a bit too far here, the usability suffers.
And still no obvious way to get a thumbnail to popup a full image, which is pretty poor.
> repressive uncouthness
*wince*
> spouting his nonsense and shoving his puss in front of the camera
Ha ha ha
Oh and dates 'fixed'. What's wrong with ISO 8601 then eh?
01-May-06 at 3:24 pm | Permalink
>It can be a bit too clever, yep.
I do appreciate the nice black border effect.
>AJAX
That sounds more like an industrial cleaning fluid.
Do not get me started on the ISO