Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2018

“Bohemian Rhapsody”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the media phenomenon of “Bohemian Rhapsody” … which, in his opinion, isn’t all that good as a song:

… Queen wasn’t really a four-piece; it was a pansexual mutant alien athlete-hero plus three ugly, highly talented Englishmen. And “Bohemian Rhapsody” almost isn’t a song so much as a captured moment. Considered as a song, there isn’t much to it except as a showcase for virtuosity: it’s not among Queen’s 20 best. And ordinary people can’t take a crack at “Bohemian Rhapsody” expecting to do it nicely and competently, in the way they might do “Blackbird” or “Wonderwall.” To be used for performance by the general public, “Bohemian Rhapsody” basically requires a roomful of drunks united in the ironic, non-judgmental spirit of karaoke.

Perhaps there is not much more to be said of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by way of explanation. Queen enjoyed trying on American hats from time to time (ah, if only Elvis had stayed around to receive the gift of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”). But an American group could never have made anything that was weird in this particular way — wallowing in the pathos of a French gangster movie, then diving into a cryptic Dantean nightmare, piling up gestures and word-sounds into a unabashedly hokey panorama. There is no content at all to the thing, per se, except what the band members put into it as performers. In no way, I promise, will knowledge of Scaramouche’s place in the commedia dell’arte or the life of Galileo Galilei unlock some hidden layer of understanding.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is an exquisitely made thing whose intricacy and beauty everybody can appreciate on more or less the same level. That is the special formula for mass popularity in all of the arts. They will tell you the Mona Lisa has a zillion layers of biographical or political meaning, but the painting really is what it is for everybody, and in roughly the same way. Every ordinary grownup can participate in the intimacy and the mystery of it, and it is not really a superior experience, as many great paintings might be, for somebody with a bundle of university degrees. As often happens I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s praise for Coca-Cola. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

QotD: Burgundy

Filed under: France, Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.

Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.

December 11, 2018

Criticizing the left, from the left

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Matt Johnson discusses the phenomenon of devoted leftists being willing to criticize their own “side”, and includes a section on George Orwell’s willingness to critique leftists while still being a fully dedicated leftist himself:

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

Bruckner’s remark about “Stalinist blackmail” calls to mind a writer whose commitment to both left-wing politics and anti-totalitarianism never wavered in the face of threats and coercion from the Left.

In the summer of 2003, the BBC aired George Orwell: A Life in Pictures. About halfway through the documentary, Orwell (played by Chris Langham) says, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.” This is a line from one of Orwell’s best-known essays, published in 1946, “Why I Write.” But astute viewers may have noticed that something was missing from the reference — eight words that the producers decided to leave out.

Here’s the original sentence: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” After the sentence abruptly ends with the word “totalitarianism” in the documentary, Langham takes a long drag on his cigarette before jumping to a different passage of the essay. It was almost as if the producers wanted to accentuate the omission, taunting viewers with their own version of Orwell — one who didn’t have the courage to disclose his true beliefs.

There’s something simultaneously fitting and perverse about the manipulation of Orwell’s words more than half a century after his death (by the BBC, no less). Orwell’s anxiety about the falsification of history is one of the major themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four — as well as much of his other writing and later correspondence — and this is what the producers of the documentary were guilty of doing when they amputated one of his firmest ideological declarations and turned it into a much more palatable and anodyne comment on totalitarianism. No matter how badly some people want Orwell to be a polished and uncontroversial product for mass consumption, he was still the man who wrote these words as he speculated about the possibility of violent revolution in England: “I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary.”

Even when Orwell wasn’t in a mood that had him impatiently looking forward to the day “when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz,” he was always honest about his political beliefs. On November 13, 1945, Katharine Stewart-Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, wrote to Orwell asking if he would speak on behalf of an anti-communist organization called the League for European Freedom. This was a month after the publication of Animal Farm — a time when Orwell was worried that the book would be misinterpreted as a broadside against socialism instead of a narrower attack on Stalinism.

Given this context, it isn’t surprising that Orwell declined the duchess’s offer: “Certainly what is said on your platforms is more truthful than the lying propaganda to be found in most of the press, but I cannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British imperialism.” Even though Orwell was a staunch anti-communist, his essential political convictions remained immovable: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.”

Orwell was a socialist until the end of his life. For many people, this complicates his legacy and detracts from his pristine image as the twentieth century’s foremost foe of totalitarianism — an image that has been appropriated again and again over the past 70 years.

[…]

But as Orwell was at pains to demonstrate (especially after the publication of Animal Farm), he would have firmly rejected the Right’s attempts to appropriate his legacy. While Orwell is rightly celebrated for his refusal to accept the dogmas of the Left when he was under tremendous pressure to do so, his independence of mind is only one of the reasons why he remains so relevant today. His ability to maintain that independence without sacrificing his most fundamental principles may be even more important.

December 4, 2018

QotD: B.H. Liddell Hart and J.F.C. Fuller

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office.

George Orwell, footnote to “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

November 28, 2018

QotD: “Never interfere with the enemy when he is making a mistake”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s a line that the Rod Steiger character uses in the the 1970 film Waterloo. And it’s a line I have been repeating to myself again and again over the last few months.

My enemies in the Establishment, whether it be the media, communists, social justice warriors or the last-ditch Remainers have been obligingly making error after error. I could point out their mistakes and laugh but there is that danger – however remote – that they might listen and learn. You see, I don’t want them to learn. What I want them to do is to keep the gas pedal pressed down hard as they can as they drive the juggernaut of bad ideas over the cliff and into oblivion. In such circumstances it is best to keep ones counsel.

Patrick Crozier, “Never interfere with the enemy when he is making a mistake”, Samizdata, 2017-01-22.

November 21, 2018

Testing The Worst Tools On AMAZON

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Wranglerstar
Published on 24 Aug 2017

Testing The Worst and Most Ridiculous Tools On AMAZON.

November 19, 2018

QotD: How nationalism distorts opinion and judgement

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.

George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

November 6, 2018

QotD: Architectural modernism

Filed under: Architecture, Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In this scholarly, learned but also enjoyably polemical book, Professor Curl recounts both the history and devastating effects of architectural modernism. In no field of human endeavour has the idea that history imposes a way to create been more destructive, or more importantly destructive: for while we can take avoiding action against bad art or literature, we cannot avoid the scouring of our eyes by bad architecture. It is imposed on us willy-nilly and we are impotent in the face of it. Modern capitalism, it has been said, progresses by creative destruction; modern architecture imposes itself by destructive creation.

As Professor Curl makes clear, the holy trinity of architectural modernism — Gropius, Mies and Corbusier — were human beings so flawed that between them they were an encyclopaedia of human vice. They spoke of morality and behaved like whores; they talked of the masses and were utter egotists; they claimed to be principled and were without scruple, either moral, intellectual, aesthetic or financial. Their two undoubted talents were those of self-promotion and survival, combined with an overweening thirst for power.

Their intellectual dishonesty was startling and would have been laughable had it not been more destructive than the Luftwaffe. When they claimed to have no style because their designs were imposed on them by history, technology, social necessity, functionality, economy etc., and like Luther proclaimed they could do no other (which soon became the demand that others could do no other also), they remind me of the logical positivists who claimed to have no metaphysic. But if no given style or metaphysic is beyond the choice of he who has it, to possess a style or a metaphysic is inescapable in the activity of artistic creation or thought itself. And even my handwriting has a style, albeit a bad one.

In like fashion, as this book makes beautifully clear, the modernists were adept at claiming both that their architecture was a logical development to and aesthetic successor of classical Greek architecture and utterly new and unprecedented. The latter, of course, was nearer the mark: they created buildings that, not only in theory but in actual practice, were incompatible with all that had gone before, and intentionally so. Any single one of their buildings could, and often did, lay waste a townscape, with devastating consequences. What had previously been a source of pride for inhabitants became a source of impotent despair. Corbusier’s books are littered with references to the Parthenon and other great monuments of architectural genius: but how anybody can see anything in common between the Parthenon and the Unité d’habitation (an appellation that surely by itself ought to tell us everything we need to know about Corbusier), other than that both are the product of human labour, defeats me.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

October 31, 2018

Some Criticism of The Infographics Show – Best World War 2 Battleships and Battlecruisers

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

iChaseGaming
Published on 10 Oct 2018

There is something called Wikipedia. You can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

QotD: Pumpkins

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If it wasn’t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance.

Let’s. Review.

Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the air, dropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.

Many are midget pumpkins. This year I’m seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o’ pumpkin by the time they are “ready for the harvest.”

Sounds so pastoral, doesn’t it? “Ready for the harvest.” Except that when you actually “harvest” a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually going to eat the thing.

This is the fate of only a smidgen of the pumpkins harvested. And even among those that actually eat of the pumpkin almost all are lying through their seeds when they say they like it. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, even (shudder) roast pumpkin — all foul concoctions fit only for the martyr mothers among us.

I know that many will claim to adore pumpkin pie, but that too is mindless. Give me any thick paste and let me pour tons of cream, evaporated milk, pounds of sugar, scoops of cinnamon and nutmeg into a butter-laced and crisp pie crust and you’ll love it even if the base plant was black mold from the basement.

No, the pumpkin is not an acceptable food. But do we plow it under and eradicate it from our list of things we use farmland for? No. Because anything worth doing in America is worth overdoing, we expand the acres devoted to this parasite.

Gerard Vanderleun, “The Big Pumpkin (Dump)”, American Digest, 2018-09-22.

October 27, 2018

The architecture of modern Paris

Filed under: Architecture, France, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple laments the degraded state of Parisian architecture, particularly the post-1945 monstrosities visible from the Boulevard Périphérique, celebrated in a recent New York Times article by David McAninch:

Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.

What is startling about McAninch’s description of his tour is its non-mention of what was perfectly obvious to my visitor on first glance, and which never fails to appall me each time I take the B.P., as regrettably often as I do: namely, that practically everywhere the eye looks beyond the confines of central Paris, it is greeted by a modernist mess of gargantuan proportions, and that every occasional building that is not a total eyesore was built before 1945. In other words, there has been a total and utter collapse of aesthetic ability, judgement, and appreciation in France, a country with one of the world’s greatest architectural heritages, extending back many centuries.

McAninch acts as a kind of handmaiden or praise-singer to this collapse, perhaps from fear of making an unequivocal judgment that might cause him to be labelled conservative, backward-looking, or naive. His article commences with a picture of the new philharmonic hall, built at a pharaonic cost, which resembles nothing so much as a vulgar Brobdingnagian silver lamé dress crumpled on the floor after a night of debauchery, as clear an example of modern architectural psychopathy as I know.

The article is full of equivocations, such as “I gazed in awe at some of the most ugly-beautiful Brutalist buildings I’d ever seen” and “I stared open-mouthed for a long while at the modular-looking Neo-Brutalist structure housing the Centre National de la Danse. Designed as a municipal building in 1972 by Jacques Kalisz, the gray concrete behemoth somehow radiated childlike exuberance and dystopian menace at the same time.”

The brutalist buildings at which the author stared in awe (horror would have been a more appropriate reaction) are not ugly-beautiful; they are just ugly, without any possible aesthetic qualification, and grossly dysfunctional, to boot. And anyone who can see childlike exuberance in the building by Jacque Kalisz is capable of seeing the milk of human kindness in a Nuremberg Rally.

The Centre national de la danse in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), designed by Jacques Kalisz.
Photo by Cinerama14 via Wikimedia Commons.

October 26, 2018

An old-fashioned Fisking

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:

In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:

    It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.

Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.

    More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.

    For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.

To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

[…]

Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,

    When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.

Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.

    There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.

Or possibly the reverse.

    The acts of soul murder had already begun.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

October 24, 2018

Temporal privilege

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses reading a recent historical novel that she nearly threw at the wall:

What brought about this rant is that I just read a Pride and Prejudice Variation written by someone who swallowed Dickens hook line and barbed socialist sinker.

Dickens was an amazing writer. What he was not was an historian or an impartial observer. What he put in his books has tainted people’s perception of the past and encouraged the cardinal “socialist virtue” of envy. It causes people to think those richer than themselves are callous bastards. It teaches people to see the past through that lens.

This book was almost walled when the woman assured us that the middle and upper classes did not care about the disappearance of a serving-woman.

It wasn’t many years after that the murder of a series of prostitutes set Victorian England aflutter, and yes, that included the upper and middle classes.

In the same way she waxes pathetic about how death was common among the poor in the Regency. B*tch, death was common in the Regency, period. If your entitled, propagandized ass were plopped down in a society with no antibiotics and uncertain house-heating, you’d learn really quickly how common. Young ladies in the upper reaches of society routinely made two baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. They were expected to lose at least that many children. And while we’re talking of children, yeah, death in child birth was really common too. As was death in any of the male occupations which, as is true throughout history, took them outside the house. Even noblemen were around horses a lot, and spent quite a bit of time — if they were worth their salt — managing their own lands, fraught occupations in a time when any wound could turn “septic” and any cold could turn “putrid” and carry you off.

Yeah. The people in these close-to-the-bone societies didn’t give money to people who’d waste it. They sometimes set conditions on distributing largesse. And they had definite opinions on what behaviors were “good” and which “bad.”

They weren’t tight-ass moralists, as the left imagines. They were following precepts and behaviors proven to lead to success. Mostly success in staying alive.

They were poorer than us and in that measure they were a lot more realistic.

They had to be. The other way lay death.

Spitting on our ancestors for not obsessing about gender-fluid trilobites is in fact the ultimate expression of “temporal privilege.” The left is yelling at people poorer, unhealthier and less able than themselves.

And they’re proud of it.

October 21, 2018

QotD: Footnotes

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The absence of footnote references from the pages of this book may aggrieve some readers but will, I hope, please a larger number, who do not care for the untidy and irritating modern fashion of treating any historical study as a card-index rather than a book to be read. Footnote references are an inevitable distraction to the reader’s eye and mind. The justification for omitting them is not, however, merely one of narrative smoothness and page cleanlinness. Such references are only of value to a small proportion of readers — as a means to personal research or composition. By direction the student’s attention to an isolated quotation or piece of evidence, such footnote references are apt to give this a flase value; and can also be the means of conveying a false impression. They may enable the student to find out whether the author’s use of a quotation is textually correct, but they do not enable him to find out whether it gives a correct impression. For the true worth of any quotation can only be told by comparison with the whole of the evidence on the subject. Further, the practice of littering the pages with references is not even a proof that the author has consulted the sources. It is easy to copy a quotation — complete with footnote references! — from some previous writer, and a study of books on the Civil War, especially, suggests that this labour-saving device is not uncommon.

B.H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, 1928.

October 16, 2018

Modernism and the “so-called international style … is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried)”

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the awful concrete-and-glass monoliths of modern architecture, especially those designs by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius:

The modernism and so-called international style that is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried, which is almost everywhere in the world), and which the author of the article appears to think is apolitical, was hardly without its intellectual, ideological, and political foundations.

And what hideous intellectual, ideological, and political foundations they were! The great figures of modernism — great, that is, in the scope and degree of their baleful influence, not great in artistic or aesthetic merit — were from the first totalitarian in spirit. They were toadies to the rich and bullies to the poor; they were communists and fascists (not in the merely metaphorical sense, either), and by a mixture of ardent self-promotion, bureaucratic scheming, and intellectual terrorism managed to gain virtual control of the world’s schools of architecture. Just try saying in a French architectural school what is perfectly obvious, that Le Corbusier was not a genius except in self-advertisement, that his fascist ideas were repugnant, that he regarded humans in his cities much as we all regard bedbugs in beds, that during the Occupation he suggested deporting millions of people from Paris because he thought they had no business to be there, that his designs were incompetent, and that his constructions were instinct with and the very embodiment of his odious ideas, and see how far you get up the academic ladder! (How, incidentally, were the world’s most beautiful cities and buildings erected without the aid of architectural schools?) Anyone interested in the ideological foundations, as well as effects, of architectural modernism should read James Stevens Curl’s recently published Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford), a magisterial and to me unanswerable account of one of the greatest aesthetic disasters to have befallen Europe in all its history. A single modernist building in a townscape is like a dead mouse in a bowl of soup, that is to say you cannot very well ignore it however splendid its surroundings may otherwise be.

Ah, you might protest, we have moved on from Mies van der Rohe et al., and so we have. (By the way, Professor Curl is very amusing on the opportunistic evolution of Mies van der Rohe’s name, as well as his equally opportunistic passage from being pro-Nazi to purely careerist refugee from Nazism.) Nonetheless two things need to be said about this supposed moving on from modernism to postmodernism and other isms: first that the damage, reparable only by demolition on a vast and inconceivable scale, has been done, and second that change is not by itself necessarily for the better. The capacity of eminent architects to spend vast sums of money to build aesthetic monstrosities fit to make Vitruvius weep is illustrated by the Whitney Museum in New York and the Philharmonie in Paris, the latter in particular of truly astonishing hideousness, that would have been almost comical had it not absorbed and wasted so much money, in the process becoming for many generations of the future as pleasing an aesthetic experience as a foreign body in the eye.

Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.

The mystery is how and why the patrons, those who choose the designs, stand for it. The key, I suppose, is to be found in Hans Christian Andersen — the Emperor’s New Clothes. The patrons are afraid to be thought by the architects not to understand: an accusation that Le Corbusier leveled decades ago at all those who did not approve of his plans to destroy old cities and cover the world with an ocean of raw concrete and a forest of almost identical towers. In other words, it is intellectual and moral cowardice that makes the world go round.

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