I have never learned so much from so little of a book as I have from The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks. I have the third edition (B&W photos, bad type) from the library and bought the current revision, reëntitled The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism (colour photos, bad type).

I think I’ve read about four full pages. Everything else I am getting from photographs and cutlines (not “captions”). Can you write this dense?

• FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT [whom I pretty much cannot stand], Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 1959–64. The great Pont du Gard made out of cardboard, gilt, and golden bauble, surmounted by an Aztec minaret, with interior bowling alleys of space, and a bay-blue, opaline roof with cookie-cutter hemicircles. An excellent piece of Kitsch modern, unfortunately unintended.
  [LoPMA 18:23]

• The CAMBODIAN PAVILION, Osaka, 1970. Designed with the advice of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, this typically nationalist pavilion echoes Khmer architecture and Angkor Vat. Most World’s Fair architecture has an air of pastiche about it which could offend convinced nationalists, but it conforms to mass standards of propriety. This manifestation is overlooked by serious critics and remains undiscussed.
  [LoPMA 28:43]

• LE CORBUSIER, Ronchamp Chapel, France, 1955. […] The building is overcoded with visual metaphors, and none of them is very explicit, so that the building seems always about to tell us something which we just can’t place. The effect can be compared to having a word on the tip of your tongue which you can’t quite remember. But the ambiguity can be dramatic, not frustrating – you search your memory for the possible clues.
  [LoPMA 48:73]

• JIMMY STEWART’s house, Beverly Hills, ca. 1940. A very fastidious mixture of Tudor and Japanese architecture with Swiss accents. The clarity of outline, the black and white alternatives, the very studied informality of massing and planting send out a clear message. Such houses, often exposed in films, have confirmed if not created the American Dream House. Similar examples can be found outside every major city from Boston to Los Angeles, and since the norm is so invariable it almost constitutes a “language without speech.” Put another way, one could say that the language itself does the talking and the designer is a mouthpiece of this language.
  [LoPMA 57:94]

• MICHAEL GRAVES, Benacerraf house addition, Princeton, 1969. A cubist syntax is used to call attention to itself. This heightening of our perception of doors, stairways, balustrades, and views from a terrace is complex and masterful. It is so rich here that one forgets to ask what the functions are (actually an open terrace above and a playroom and breakfast room below). Note how the structure, sometimes unnecessary, is pulled away from the wall. Railings and cutout wall planes also serve to define a net of rectilinear space. The front balustrade is, conceptually, a column lying on its side – a play on syntactical meaning, as is the whole addition.
  [LoPMA 67:109]

The backlighting straddles the border between two greens, 1980s-condo/bridesmaid-taffeta sea-foam and minty-fresh.

“Literary Review: Pro-celebrity cookbooks,” Private Eye, 2006.12.22–2007.01.04:

The proliferation of large-format cookery books [sic] may have something to do with our native love of elaborately-prepared victuals, but that is certainly not how they are designed to be used…. Tom Aikens’ Cooking… is a case in point…. His recipes may well be interesting and original; some of them may even be feasible in the average domestic kitchen. But the point is academic since the pale-grey sansserif text is almost impossible to read. You obviously aren’t meant to actually use it, silly.

The International Compliant Style crosses over? (Cf. “Gr[e]y text revisited.”)

Ƭȟëřè åṝé ƫŵõ ķïńđš óƒ ƥèöṗḹȅ: (ã) Ṁÿ ľȭṽȩ ȃňḓ İ; (ḇ) Ṑȶḧḛṟ.

The letterspaced Century caps are an oldschool embellishment to this tanker o’ obesity.

Sometime in the mists of the ’90s, I wrote an article for Publish on large-format printing. I became something of an expert, and I really wanted to see bus wraps used for some kind of artistique purpose, particularly if applied to a postmodernist vehicle like an Orion II. It never happened. Babs Kruger’s bus wrap (1997; later co-opted) was a disaster: Never send a polemical feminist artist to do a typographer’s job.

Nonetheless:

In order, I would use the current lexicon to describe these colours as violetred3, yellow3, lightslateblue, and sandybrown.

After an interregnum of two full years, I finally went to a movie: Children of Men.

Children of*RWC/DVS*

I had previously spent gruelling years going to every MoPixed movie that played in Toronto (save for two) and writing detailed reviews that were almost completely ignored. Every third visit to the cinema chain found another equipment breakdown, another arsehole staffmember calling me rude for reporting the broken equipment, and, later, a functionary and a vice-president actually calling me up to complain about what a cunt I was, in so many words.

And I had no choice but to file a privacy complaint concerning the chain’s demand that we hand over ID just to borrow caption reflectors and description headsets that had no cash value that couldn’t be used outside a dozen of its own theatres. And every movie had a captioning or description error.

These years destroyed whatever pleasure I had ever had in going to the movies. I don’t even really like watching discs at home, though I do it. Every time I’ve run across a movie I wanted to see, I thought of WGBH ignoring me or, separately, actively trying to harm me; getting yelled at by the functionary and executive and lectured by floor staff; and schlepping way the fuck out to these goddamned movie houses to watch some piece of shit. But mostly I thought of all the people who made me miserable. I flashed on their faces. (The chain has since been sold; did my tormentors get golden parachutes?)

I went stag tonight and, after much thought, decided it was worth a try. But no fucking way was I going downtown. I went to Scarborough instead (not hard to get to via subway), where I’d never had an argument and where the equipment almost never broke down. I was really quite uneasy. I resolutely didn’t bring a notebook; taking notes at a movie makes it impossible to enjoy. I decided not to go for captioning, because that’s kind of coin of the realm by now, whereas the description writers at WGBH simply cannot be beat. (Shop around. Compare. Prove me wrong.)

I asked for a headset and, after being initially offered a reflector, the lady behind the desk just handed one over like none of that privacy unpleasantness had ever happened. I tried duct-taping the too-bright red LED (another deterrent) and it worked.

Four minutes into the movie and, first of all, I was amazed how much better things look on the big screen (not a myth, I had forgotten) and I was just very moved by the lovingly-crafted descriptions, read, almost as usual, by Miles Neff. It’s like those news segments where the person overcomes a tragic disability and gets to dance again, or whatever. Except here it is overcoming other people’s getting in my way of enjoying accessibility.

WGBH once told me I couldn’t talk to its staff because this was their life’s work (false, given the staff I knew personally). This is my goddamned life’s work. No matter what else one may think, I am an honest, teetotaling vegan who works for disabled people. I have reason to be proud, as I have to remind even myself sometimes.

I dropped off the headset no problem, and went to the can, and it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t just walk out of there. I had the guy summon the lady behind the desk, forcing me to get very committed to my plan while I waited. With some hesitation, I told her this was the first movie I’d seen in two years. I’d been to all the other locations and something always happened. I told her I’d never had an argument here, and maybe now I have a safe place to watch movies again. I thanked her and managed not to cry and shook her hand and went on home.