Unconscious Cities

Me on the architecture of Red Riding for Building Design, overlapping a lot with the Fantastic Journal. I hadn't read the latter when I wrote it, but I think his description of John Dawson's house in particular is better than mine. I had also not realised that my mention of The Offence and Get Carter as 1974's forbears might have been subliminally influenced by an old k-punk post (itself inspired by this excellent piece of urbanist writing) which mentions them as the representations of the British city most akin to postpunk - it must have been unconscious, as I only saw The Offence for the first time a few months ago. Similarly, I hadn't realised until re-viewing The Parallax View a couple of days ago how much the portrayal of the Yorkshire post journalist, the exteriors, the architectural space, is indebted to Alan J Pakula's geometry of investigation and subterfuge. Regardless: what made 1974 so much more interesting to me than the rest of the trilogy was partly the Lynchian weirdness pinpointed by the FJ, but also the way in which all these Brutalist/70s paranoiac references suddenly make the British city brutal, fascinating and cruelly elegant, rather than just brutal in the man's-inhumanity-to-man sense. They approach it in the way that those of us who have grown up in these cities have always tried to see them, airbrushing out the aesthetically uninteresting - and then put that through an oneiric filter. They aren't mere replications, but a dream of Brutalism, with roughly the same relation to reality as a dream.

On similarly Yorkshire-related matters, am visiting Sheffield in two days, for my BD cities series. I'm increasingly aware that my idea of Sheffield, which is, via People's Republic of South Yorkshire/Cabaret Voltaire/Human League/early Warp/Pulp/Park Hill/New Brutalism, some sort of compendium of all that I hold dear, is going to bear very little relation to the reality. Sadly, I was never able to afford to visit it before they started demolishing everything. But if anyone has suggestions of things I should see when there, please please suggest away in the comments box below.

Post-punk Penguin images via