{"id":2123,"date":"2014-03-07T15:23:05","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T23:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2123"},"modified":"2014-03-07T15:23:38","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T23:23:38","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e26-new-meant-better-with-jonathan-meades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2123","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E26: New Meant Better with Jonathan Meades"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2124\" style=\"margin: 5px; border: 0px;\" title=\"jonathanmeades\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/jonathanmeades.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/jonathanmeades.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/jonathanmeades-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Marseille, France, specifically in the Le Corbusier-designed\u00a0Unit\u00e9 d&#8217;Habitation, with <a href=\"http:\/\/jonathanmeades.co.uk\">Jonathan Meades<\/a>, writer and broadcaster on architecture, culture, food, and a variety of other subjects to do with place. In his latest film, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b03w7b7x\">Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindness<\/a><\/em>, he looks at architectural styles once- and currently maligned. They discuss how much his residence in Marseilles has to do with his residence in the\u00a0Unit\u00e9 d&#8217;Habitation, to which &#8220;caprice&#8221; brought him not long ago; unapologetic building versus pusillanimous building; the lack of centralized planning that afflicts France, and what kind of built environment it has brought about; what makes Marseille &#8220;no longer the city of Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey&#8221;; the phases of the\u00a0Unit\u00e9, from its rejection by the workers for whom Corbusier intended it onward; the larger reaction to 20th-century social housing in France and Britain, and what it means that those countries have no taste for the sublime; which European borders he crosses and most immediately notices that &#8220;someone cares&#8221; about the buildings; what you miss by never having seen Portsmouth&#8217;s Tricorn Centre, which rose in a rebuilt city in a time when &#8220;new meant better&#8221;; how he finds no place boring, an attitude for which he may have received inadvertent training traveling through England with his salesman father; places as gardens of forking paths, leading to all manner of other things; real places, and the fiction places you by definition invent when you try to describe them; the &#8220;persona completely apart&#8221; he uses to contrast against the variety of places on display in his films; his ideal of satirizing everything; what went into his upcoming book <em>An Encyclopedia of Myself<\/em>, beginning with the &#8220;lie&#8221; of its title; whether he has ever felt fascinated by American places; what the French consider too &#8220;difficult&#8221; about his un-methodical work; and what hope we should hold out for a future Jonathan Meades film on Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_S4E26_Jonathan_Meades.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Marseille, France, specifically in the Le Corbusier-designed\u00a0Unit\u00e9 d&#8217;Habitation, with Jonathan Meades, writer and broadcaster on architecture, culture, food, and a variety of other subjects to do with place. In his latest film, Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindness, he looks at architectural styles once- and currently maligned. They discuss how much his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,58,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france","category-marseille","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2127,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions\/2127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}