>> Yes, as I look out of the window while riding the bus to work I often
>ponder
>> on the terrible legacy of Beckett, Rilke, Boulez et al: the rubbish piling
>> up in the streets, the tacky billboards, the boarded-up local shops and
>> garish hypermarkets, the pain and stress on the faces of passers-by. Damn
>> those Modernists!
>>
>> Ken Edwards, Reality Street Editions
>> 4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London SE15 3PH, UK
>> Tel: 020 7639 7297
>>
>I seem to recognise those words Ken quotes. I dunno about Rilke as a
>'modernist', anymore than Yeats or Blok,say, but I do know that architecture
>exists in concrete and plaster as well as verbal architectonics and that the
>mass-produced urban spaces of the city centres are as much the progeny of
>modernism as Becket's dying embers (Imagination dead imagine) _ I respect
>and at times even like Becket's writing but would not want to work or live
>in a space that physically brought to form the spirit of his work. Would
>you? I wasn't trying to make some ostrich-head-prospecting- in-the-sands
>point about oh no modernism undid us, rather that it is a given that's
>occasion is over and it's time to try to move on. assuming that is there's
>anywhere to move on to. maybe there's nowhere left but your bus, ken, maybe.
>
>regards
>
>david
>
David - So what do you propose? Prince Charles-style pitched roofs, poems
that rhyme and music that has a tune, as a solution to our contemporary
socio-political anomie?
Our mass-produced urban spaces are the products of: capitalist greed /
misguided centralised bureaucratic "socialism" / chronic underfunding of the
public sector becoz people vote for less taxes. Take your pick. Or shall we
just blame the architects?
Of course, modernism is to be moved on from, just as inevitably as the 20th
century is to be moved on from. To what? ah, that's what perennially
intrigues me. To what has no name yet.
Ken Edwards, Reality Street Editions
4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London SE15 3PH, UK
Tel: 020 7639 7297
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