#i just realised that i mixed up the dub and sub names

[where-them-kinomiya-at]

The cooking part, grev basically went: ok yeah time to ignore the all the imp Hiromi elements. And don’t even get me started on her launching a blade in the bus. That was UNFUNNY. 

I personally imagine Takao and Hiromi being childhood friends who eventually drifted apart due to their differences/ when Takao started going for regional tournaments, OR I headcanon something else (which will take another long ass post so imma stop here).  Hiromi seemed to be quite invested in supernatural stuff/fantasies as seen from her fortune telling books in vforce and her obsession with Greek mythology in g-rev. Guess that would be just her invested in reading, or maybe it COULD be related to her backstory? Who knows? I would’ve loved to see more for sure!

Haha you know, I feel like if Hilary ever became a blader, she would whoop the shit out of a lot of people. She’s practical (as you said), smart and physically strong as well. Mentality always varies in beyblading so I wouldn’t go there. She’s also determined, as can be witnessed from her ep 15 where she desperately wanted to see bit-beasts. So even if she’s not an OFFICIAL member of the BBA, she is still a Bladebreaker. 

Rei and Tyson always had some friction between them, so I get Tyson having more beef with him than with Max after they both quit the team. Apart from that, it’s the same rant again - G-Rev is a soap opera featuring Tyson and Kai, so not a lot of people (both in the anime and irl) appreciate Max and Rei’s presence in g-rev, including Tyson. Sure they did have a few essential scenes but it all eventually narrowed down to Tyson and Kai. Tbf I don’t have a major issue with some stuff: things got slightly awkward for them after they broke apart, so Tyson/Max being best friends had kinda faltered which was bound to happen.  Rei and Tyson were pretty much the same and as I mentioned earlier, he was one dude Tyson didn’t always get along with after Kai (although there is a major difference in both the dynamics). While their friendship mostly  consists of mutual respect and melodrama, they still admire eachother [Tyson also considers Rei as his strongest rival]. But it was again diminished because g-rev was basically Takao, Kai, Takao, Kai, blah blah...whatever, we nerf every other character, etc. They’re both my favourites, so take it from me when I say that they shouldn’t have had this much screen time in that season.

If there’s another thing that Hiromi is good at, it’s being a coach. And she was FAR better than Hitoshi. She and Kenny not only made them train their asses off but in retrospect also made sure that they were mentally doing okay, or at LEAST better than usual, while Hitoshi did not give two shits about Tyson’s poor mental health. And yeah g-rev never mentioned his backstory (they mentioned his dad but like...that’s it, not a single thing about his tragedy). And keeping the movie non-canon was kinda a bad move, I do agree.  Yeah I was going to mention the age thing earlier too, Takao being older in g-rev does make a difference. It’s just a phase in adolescence; you get it but you can’t explain it. Like if Ming-Ming appeared in vforce, none of the characters would’ve been as annoyed as they were in grev; they either wouldnt have given a shit or they would’ve passed on a few comments here and there. Also I believe that Hiromi would be very respectful to her and NOT jealous/annoyed by her presence. She would also tell the other boys to be nice.

Takao handled Daichi calmly and in a much more savage manner [it may not look like it, but vforce Takao has an older brother figure].

True, Tyson is the only one who can understand the pain of literally losing a parent (as he did with Max). 

I’m assuming Daichi was younger in the movie, so wasn’t an annoying preteen like in g-rev. And he didn’t go around calling Hilary ‘oba san’ and was actually sweet to her lol. Not that they didn’t have a hilarious dynamic in g-rev, but he was never respectful to her (was grev EVER respectful to Hiromi??) so once again, v force takes the W for me. And yes, Daichi was the another tyhil thirdwheel after Kenny.

I hate the banter v-force gets. It’s imperfect, but so is g-rev. The plot was messy as hell but if there’s anything I care about, it’s the characters. And v-force did an excellent job with it. And I’m tired of saying that no, they are NOT ooc ffs. I so badly want to rant about this. Again I understand that the jp characterisation was slightly inconsistent, but the dub did a better job at handling it. Again, it does not mean that the jp version was completely off.

An ultimate g-rev would have been vforce+s1 and not JUST s1. 

V-Force Hiromi will always take the W by a long shot. Also while I do like some appearances in the manga (such as Tala and Boris), there are several things the anime did better. But this is just a personal opinion. 

Also don't apologise XD especially if it's a vforce talk. I could read paras about it.

V-force Hiromi thank you for being the icon ever, being chaotic and silly (esp that punch like yas gurl throw hands!! <3) like the others while being the mom friend of the group and doing an actual good job at consoling Takao/keeping him in line while being mature about his feelings too, being a therapist to Kai and many more moments. She's basically the emotional stability the gang lacked previously. And lets not forget the boat scene in the movie when Daichi was telling Hiromi about how his dad died and why he was hell bent on beating Takao, her response was that of understanding as she got where Daichi was coming from as a kid who was trying to fullfill his father's last wish, that was very sweet of her ngl (Takao's response to Daichi's revelation was sweet too, in his own way. I might make another post on that. Personally I prefer their dynamic in the movie than in G-revolution tbh. Also the idea if the team randomly adopting a tiny homeless redheaded gremlin is wayy funnier, like "oh, he's not gonna leave us be, and he doesnt have a home to go back to, guess he's staying with us now huh. Welcome to the gang bud" *daichi proceeds to latch onto them like a leech*)

[otemporanerys]

Spectre Requisitions 2022 Exchange Letter

Hello friend! First of all, I’m so stoked for the exchange. I’m sure I’ll love whatever you write: please don’t feel like the prompts/likes are limiting you in any way. They're more suggestions than an exhaustive checklist.

Just got a few things to elaborate on in my requests:

What sort of fic do you like?

Good question! I mainly read/write Shakarian: my fics and my bookmarks can be found here. I’d say that my ideal fic combines romance with character. I love smut, but particularly I enjoy it when it illuminates something about the people involved. I love romance/smut fic that doesn’t take itself too seriously and allows for humour/awkwardness: but on the other hand sometimes I just want to read something sordid and dirty. I’m much more of an angst person than a fluff person, but I will not say no to something sweet as long as it’s not, you know, toothache inducing. 

What are your general porn preferences?

I’m fairly vanilla tbh, I prefer more direct references to genitals (cock/dick/cunt/pussy), like a good mix of actually talking about the action and also thoughts and feelings. I like some BDSM but definitely more on the “tying people up/slapping them around” side of it rather than verbal humiliation. I’m very happy with PWP, but I do like the sex to be rooted in character and emotion. 

I’m also fine with Mature/Teen/Everyone rated fic - smut is a nice bonus but not a necessity.

You say you like most AUs. Even high school/human/mundane?

YES ALL OF THOSE. But my favourite thing about AUs is when they kind of rhyme with canon - so I’m probably more likely to appreciate a Mass Effect sports AU than a coffee shop AU, if that makes sense. But honestly, yes, love them. (If you’re keeping the canon setting, I don’t see the point of human AUs, but species swaps are fun!)

Your preferences around Shepard?

I feel like I covered it in the letter, but just to be clear: I don’t really like it when people refer to their Shepard exclusively/mainly by their first names. (ESPECIALLY when Garrus does it, I think it’s different with Kaidan/Ash, but never mind.) I’m fine with different appearances, but that’s the one thing that does throw me out of a fic. 

I do love a good Renegade, but fuck space racism and fuck Cerberus.

What do you mean by feral turians?

My really big squick is the “biting during mating” trope. Really dislike it. Don’t think it’s wrong or anything, just not My Jam. I don’t mind rough turian sex, but I like it to be that and not anything inherent to their species or whatever. In terms of other turian headcanons, I don’t mind knotting, self-lubricated penises, stuff like that, but I prefer not to dwell on it.

I am, however, fully signed up to Team “All Turians Are Subs.” Well, maybe not Solana.

What about “no bondmates”?

I dunno, the word just gives me the heeby-jeebies. Just use spouse/partner!

What do you mean by dub-con?

I realise that this is kind of touchy territory and everyone has different limits! For me, what I’m mainly looking for is what romance novels used to call “forced seduction” - basically there’s a verbal or implied no but they secretly want/enjoy it. I am fully aware that this is a grey area between dub-con and non-con and you are under NO OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER to write it. I included alternative prompts for the requests where I’m OK with dub-con, and really, don’t worry about it. 

Any NOTPs?

I really am not a fan of Garrus/Tali (Garrus/Tali/Shepard is fine) - I’m all right with background references if you must but would rather you avoid. I prefer maleShep/Kaidan to femShep/Kaidan, but if you want to include either in the background that’s OK. 

Again, thanks so much for signing up to the exchange - I’m really looking forward to whatever you gift me! I allow anon asks if you have any questions.

[mrsmarymorstan]

Now Furuba S2 is over, what now?

I’m already seeing a lot of people asking for recommendations now the S2 Sub is over; so this is a list of series that I think you’ll enjoy if you like Furuba! 

All platforms listed are true for the UK, but might not be for other residences. More viewing options may be available in other territories. 

Unless specified, All Manga/Comic recs are available from regular bookstores and EBook Stores. If you’re in the UK I’ll suggest checking out Hive, which is an online store where a potion of each sale goes towards a Local Independent Bookstroe of your choice! They also have flat-rate free shipping! 

Okay, so the actual recs! (I got lazy in some places and used the official synopisis) 

Romance

Convenience Store Boyfriends Funimation (Dub) Crunchyroll (Sub) 12 Eps Total 

“Six high school boys hang out at a local convenience store where they talk about their daily lives. Haruki Mishima and Towa Honda are first year students looking forward to the high school experience. Alongside them, there’s Nasa Sanagi, the only member of the cooking research club. Natsu Asumi is a loner but has third year students, Mikado Nakajima and Masamune Sakurakoji, looking out for him.“

Kaguya-sama: Love is War S1 - Crunchyroll, Funimation (Sub) S2 Funimation (Sub/Dub) 24 eps - Ongoing Manga: 18/20 volumes available in English 

“Known for being both brilliant and powerful, Miyuki Shirogane and Kaguya Shinomiya lead the illustrious Shuchiin Academy as near equals. And everyone thinks they’d make a great couple. Pride and arrogance are in ample supply, so the only logical move is to trick the other into instigating a date! Who will come out on top in this psychological war where the first move is the only one that matters?”

Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun Netflix (Dub/Sub), Crunchyroll (Sub) 12 Eps Total Manga: 12/12 volumes available in English 

“High school student Chiyo Sakura has a crush on schoolmate Umetarou Nozaki. When she confesses her love to him, he mistakes her for a fan and gives her an autograph. When she says she wants to be with him, he invites her to his house and has her help on some drawings. Sakura discovers that Nozaki is actually a renowned shōjo manga artist working under the pen name Sakiko Yumeno. She agrees to be his assistant in order to get closer to him. As they work on his manga Let's Fall in Love they encounter other schoolmates, who assist them and serve as inspirations for the story.”

Snow White With the Red Hair Funimation (Dub/Sub) 24 Eps Total Manga: 9/22+ volumes available in English. Anime ends Vol. 8 

“In the kingdom of Tanbarun lives an independent young pharmacist named Shirayuki. Shirayuki is a plain girl, save for her shock of beautiful apple-red hair. Her stunning mane gets her noticed by the prince, but instead of romancing her, he demands she be his concubine. Shirayuki chops off her lovely locks, and runs away to the neighboring kingdom where she befriends a handsome stranger.”

Tsuruedure Children Funimation (Dub), Crunchyroll (Sub) 12 Eps Total Manga (Ebook only) 12/12 Volumes available in English

“Short and charming comedic vignettes offer a quick glimpse into the unique and funny situations, misunderstandings, and all around confusion that can happen in a high school romance. For starters, there’s a story about a delinquent girl and the student council president, and one about a stoic boy confused about an emotional girl. Relive the charm of high school romance!”

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Amazon Prime (Sub) 11 Eps Total Manga: 4/9 volumes available in english 

Looking for a slice of life romance but you’re an actual adult now and don’t want to read about teenagers? Try Wotakoi! It combines office romance with childhood friends-to-lovers. Narumi is a Fujoshi who doesn’t want anyone to find out the truth of her ways, Hirotaka is a Game Otaku who doesn’t care what anyone says about it, together they go about the ins-and-outs of dating as an adult. 

Coming of Age

BOFURI: I don’t want to get hurt, so I’ll max out my defence Funimation (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Ongoing 

“She may be new to gaming, but Maple has found the secret to invincibility! Just put all your skill points into defense until you can't even move. That works, right? She doesn't want to experience any pain in the VRMMO game she started playing, and somehow it works better than anyone expected. Now she's got followers??”

Brand New Animal Netflix (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Total 

“Set in a world where humanoid animals (known as beastmen) inhabit Earth, the series centers on Michiru Kagemori, a young teenage girl who one day suddenly starts turning into a tanuki beastman. Running away, she seeks refuge in Anima City, a city built for beastmen to be able to live peacefully as themselves, and ends up meeting a wolf beastman named Shirou Ogami. Together, they investigate how and why Michiru became a beastman, becoming mixed up in even stranger events in the process.”

Hyouka Funimation (Dub/Sub) 23 Eps Total 

“A worthy addition to any animation fan's collection, Hyouka is a stunning masterwork that spins a charming tale of high school romance and mystery. After disenchanted student Hotaro Oreki joins his school’s Classic Lit Club, he meets Eru Chitanda, a kindhearted and inquisitive girl with boundless curiosity and a knack for getting him caught up in all sorts of trouble.”

Koto Oto Tomara! Sounds of Life Funimation (Dub/Sub) 24 Eps Total 

“Down to its last member, the koto club will accept anyone who is interested in the traditional Japanese instrument. But when a delinquent and a prodigy player sign up, finding harmony isn’t going to be easy—especially not with ensemble competitions looming around the corner. With enough time and some incredible skill at the strings, perhaps this motley crew can strike a chord with the judges.“

O Maidens in your Savage Season HIDIVE (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Total Manga: 7/8 volumes available in English (8th available for pre-order) 

The series follows a High School Literature club as they make their nervous first foray into the nature of sexuality. What is the difference between sexual attraction and romantic attraction? Does watching porn mean wanting to have sex? What are these strange feelings I am having down below? Why are boys so gross and girls so pretty? Each girl undergoes their own journey and finds their own destination, a brutally honest yet heart warming look at teenage female sexuality. 

CW: Sexual Assault, pedophilia (both portrayed as BAD AND TERRIBLE things) 

Our Dreams at Dusk Manga: 4/4 volumes available in English 

IF YOU ONLY CONSUME ONE THING ON THIS LIST MAKE IT THIS!!!!! The series is the VERY DEFINITION of “It Gets Better”. 

After his classmates discover some gay pornography on his phone, Tasuku Kaname contemplates committing suicide. Just as he’s about to jump, he spots a mysterious figure parkouring down a mountain. Shocked out of his moment, he decides to go and investigate what’s happening and finds an LGBT+ Drop In Centre. The series follows the lives of the people in the drop in centre, from Haruko who wishes to marry her closeted girlfriend, to Misora who is still trying to figure out what their gender is but has the threat of puberty hovering of their shoulder. 

It’s very clear that Kamatani-sensei has written this story FOR the Queer Community. It’s a truly beautiful story. Please give it your money if you can, so that Kamatani-sensei can actually earn some money, and so that Seven Seas know that there is a viable audience for these stories! So that we may get more content!

Reverse Harem 

Fruits Basket is NOT a reverse Harem, but i figure there’ll be some fan crossover. 

Kiss Him, Not Me Cruncyroll (sub) Funimation Dub available on DVD etc. 12 Eps Total Manga 14/14 volumes available in English

“Kae Serinuma believes one thing—princes belong together! As an avid boy’s love fan, she loves nothing more than fantasizing about faux relationships between the boys at her school. But when she loses weight due to the stress of her favorite anime character dying suddenly the boys want…her?! From pretty average to prettiest girl, Kae just wants these boys to date each other, not her!”

Sub uses an irritating “Silly Fat Person” voice that the Dub doesn’t. CW for Sexual Assult, though it is depicted as a BAD thing and used for Kae to question why she is so into it when reading BL, when IRL it is terrifying? 

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom Crunchyroll (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Total 

A TRULY Bisexual harem! After bumping her head, young Katarina Claes awakens with all the memories of her past life... and promptly realises she’s been re-incarnated as the antagonist of her favourite Otome Game! Determined this time to live past the age of 17, Katarina starts to make plans to turn all her enemies into allies through the power of kindness and understanding! Throughout the series, she tries harder and harder to avoid her doom flags... without realising that she’s turned those doom flags into romance flags! 

Katarina lives out the fantasy of going to magic school and eating cake as all the pretty people fall head over heels for her. A pity she’s too dim to notice.

Ouran High School Host Club Funimation (Dub/Sub) 24 eps total Manga: 18/18 volumes available in english 

Set in the high class elite private school of Ouran High, the Host Club exist to provide entertainment for the ladies of the school. Looking for a quiet place to study, Haruhi Fujioka, stumbles across the Host Club and in their haste to leave they knock over an ¥8,000,000 vase. Now she must earn that money back by working for the Host Club, all the while disguising the fact that she’s a girl. Not that she ever felt much like a girl before hand anyway. Along the way, she gets to know better the Cool Kyoya, the flamboyant Tamaki, the Mischievous Hikaru & Kaoru, the Strong and Silent Mori-senpai and the adorable Honey-senpai. Comedic Hijinks ensue! 

Slice of Life

The Emperor and I Manga: 4/4 volumes available in English on Shonen Jump App 

One day Kaho returns home from school to find an Emperor Penguin in her fridge. He quickly becomes a beloved part of the family, but a secret to the rest of the world who would want to take him away from them. Hijinks ensue. 

Kakushigoto Funimation (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Total 

Doting single father, Kakushi Goto, is determined to hide the fact that he writes echhi humour manga for a living. He couldn’t bare it if his daughter were to ever find out the truth, the shame of his profession only alienating her. A laugh out loud series that will suddenly cut you deep as it explores the nature of grief and familial love. 

My Brother’s Husband Manga: 2/2 volumes available in English 

“Yaichi, a stay-at-home single father, lives with his daughter Kana in suburban Tokyo. They are visited by Mike Flanagan, the widower of Yaichi's estranged twin brother Ryōji, who has traveled from his native Canada for three weeks to learn about Ryōji's past. Kana is fascinated by Mike and is immediately accepting of him, though Yaichi is hesitant to accept Mike as family.

While Yaichi is not overtly homophobic, Mike suggests that his tacit discomfort over his brother's sexuality drove a wedge between them that led to their estrangement. Mike's interactions with the family and neighborhood over the subsequent three weeks prompt Yaichi to confront his own prejudices around sex and sexuality, as his growing tolerance and eventual acceptance of Mike parallel his overcoming of his own homophobia.”

Whilst the trope of “the gay brother dies and the heterosexual brother learns not to be homophobic” might be over done in western media, the same is not true for Japan. It’s a heartfelt and honest look at grief and acceptance, as well as how the nature of family is changing all around the world... but attitudes are maybe conservative attitudes aren’t as quick to catch up. 

Nichijou: My Ordinary Life Funimation (Dub/Sub) 

So apparently everyone went “this show is undubbable! It relies too much on puns and untranslatable humour!” and then Howard Wang said “hold my beer” and did it. A bizarre comedy series set in a high school. It’s probably best known for the ongoing fight between the deer and the principal.  

Way of the Househusband Manga: 4/5+ (ongoing) volumes available in English  

After he meets and marries the career driven Miku, Tatsu AKA The Immortal Dragon decides to give up his life of crime to commit to being the worlds’ best husband. You’d be surprised at the transferable skills between a Yakuza enforcer and a house husband. From knowing how to efficiently cut up a slice of meat, to how to perfectly clean a bathroom of all evidence. Hilarious and heartwarming, Taki and Kyoko would be best bros. 

Slice of Life + Supernatural 

The Disastrous Life of Saiki K S1 Funimation (Dub/Sub) 24 episodes Netflix S1 (Dub/Sub) S2 & 3 (Sub) 50 episodes total 

“Saiki Kusuo is a typical 16-year-old high school student… except he has psychic powers. He can use them to get whatever he wants, but he also knows everything that people are thinking. Everything. No surprises, no secrets, no normal human experiences. He’s kept his powers in check since childhood, but with the temptations of high school now on his mind, he’s bending the rules—and spoons.“

Sabrina The Teenage Witch (2019)

Writer Kelly Thompson wears her magical girl influences on her sleeve in this new take on the Archie Classic. Sabrina is your regular teenager, except she is also a witch and so are her aunts. Hijinks (and Card Captor Sakura References) ensue. 

Toilet Bound Hanako-kun Funimation (Dub/Sub) 12 eps total Manga 13/13 Volumes available in English 

“Kamome Academy is rumored to have many mysteries, the strangest of which involves the mischievous ghost of Hanako-kun. When occult-loving high schooler Nene Yashiro accidentally becomes bonded to him, she uncovers a hidden world of supernatural beings. Now the two of them are conspiring to keep the peace between student and supernatural—that is, if they can only stay out of trouble themselves.“

Jughead (2015) 4 Volumes total

Bought to you in various parts by the creators of Squirrel Girl, Jughead combines slice of life with spy thriller, time travel and the joy of a good burger. Hilarious and heart warming, this run holds a special place in my heart as the one where Jughead was confirmed as canonically asexual and continues to express various aro/ace moods throughout the series. There’s a REASON my friends say I’m a Real Life Jughead.... 

Weathering With You - available digitally/physically 28th Sep. 2019

In June 2021, first year high schooler Hodaka Morishima leaves Kōzu-shima in order to get to Tokyo. When his ferry to the city is hit by a rainstorm, he is saved by Keisuke Suga, who runs a small occult magazine that’s looking for an assistant. As Hodaka becomes broke and struggles to find work, he meets Hina Amano, an employee of a McDonald’s restaurant. She takes pity on him and gives him food. After agreeing to work with Suga, Hodaka learns about the legend of the “sunshine girl” who can control the weather! It turns out that the newly unemployed Hina is a sunshine girl! And with her little brother, they start up their own business to bring sunshine to the never-ending rain of Tokyo. 

Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches Crunchyroll (Dub/Sub) 12 Episodes Total Manga: 22/28 volumes available in English 

After tripping on the stairs, School Bad Boy Ryu Yamada and Top Student Urara Shiraishi discover they can swap bodies with a kiss! They then learn that they’re not the only ones with magic powers in the school, and with the help of the Supernatural Studies Club they begin to track down the identities of the 7 witches of Suzaku High. 

This series really stretches my limits on fan service, but at least it does proceed to get a little even in terms of gender. It’s still a really rather sweet and romantic series, once you get past the boobs and panties. 

Your Name Netflix (Dub/Sub) Spin Off Manga “Your Name: Another Side: Earthbound” - 2/2 volumes available in English 

A modern take on the Red Sting of Fate mythos, Mitsuha and Taki are two teenagers tied together. Three times a week, Mitsuha will wake up in Taki’s body and live the life of a Tokyo School boy. In turn, Taki will wake up in Mitsuha’s body and learn what it is to be a Rural Shrine Maiden. A look at the bonds that tie us, and how fate won’t let two young people fall apart before they can meet. 

Also the animation is BEAUTIFUL and it made me cry. Like a lot. There’s a spin off manga called “Your Name: Another Side” that follows the same story but from the POV of Mitsuha’s friends and family. It really brings new light to the events and made me very emotional.

Mental Health 

Green Lanterns: Rebirth (2018)

Jessica Cruz suffers from PTSD and severer anxiety, seeing her utalising her will power to overcome those problems and harness that energy to help save the universe is so incredibly powerful and moving. 

Hawkeye (2012-2015) 4 Volumes 

The Fraction/Aja/Wu/Hollingworth Hawkeye run is widely considered one of the best superhero runs of all time. Fraction and Aja perfectly capture “functional depression” at its finest, and we watch as Clint Barton slowly burns all his bridges before being forced by his friends to sort his shit out and put them back together again. There’s also a whole issue that’s primarily written in sign language too. 

My Roomate is a Cat Funimation (Dub) Crunchyroll (Sub) 12 eps total 

“Mystery author Mikazuki would rather live in total isolation than deal with others. Getting a roommate is the last thing he’d ever do, until a stray cat sparks an idea for his next novel. After plucking the little killer off the streets, this four-legged muse inspires Mikazuki in ways he would have never expected. And for the street-wise cat, this human just opened the door to a whole new world.”

A Silent Voice (Manga/Movie) Movie: Netflix (Dub/Sub) 

“A former class bully reaches out to the deaf girl he’d tormented in grade school. He feels unworthy of redemption but tries to make things right.”

CW Attempted Suicide, bullying

Please watch the dub. Lexi Marman Cowden, who voices Shoko, is an ACTUAL hard-of-hearing actress. It makes for a more real and vulnerable performance that avoids the mild ableism of the Sub hiring a Hearing Actress and robot-ising her voice. 

Yuri!!! On ICE Crunchyroll (Sub) Funimation (Dub) 12 eps total 

“Yuri Katsuki makes his way to the Grand Prix ice skating competition as Japan’s top representative with his eyes on the prize. However, instead of celebrating, Yuri walks away defeated and ready to retire for good. But a run-in with champion Viktor Nikiforov and rising star Yuri Plisetsky ignites a new fire within him. With the two of them close by his side, Yuri will take to the ice once more.”

Yuri’s defeat sends him into a very relatable spiral of lack of self belief that he slowly starts to regain thanks to the help of Viktor. Part sports anime, part love story, all full of feels. 

The Dub is considered hit or miss depending on whether you like accents or not, but honestly it’s worth it for Sabat’s Christophe giacometti. Ayame walked, so Christophe could strut. 

Generic 

I’m gonna start by recommending the Shonen Jump App, it’s £1.99/month and gives you access to all their recent publications as well as their back catalogue in English! So you can read all of Boys Over Flowers, Nisekoi, Naruto, One Piece, Haikyuu, Assassination Classroom, My Hero Academia etc. for a fraction of the cost of buying the physicals! SO much manga at your finger tips! No, they don’t sponsor me but i wish they would. 

Astra Lost in Space Funimation (Dub/Sub) 12 Eps Total Manga: 5/5 volumes available in english, available on the Shonen Jump App

A group of teenagers on a school trip become Lost In Space and quickly discover a conspiracy is a foot. Part thriller, part comedy, saying anything more about this series would count as a spoiler given the number of plot twists throughout. 

Radiant Funimation (Dub) Crunchyroll (Sub) 42 eps total Manga: 13/13+ volumes available in english (ongoing series)

A french manga turned into a Japanese Anime.

“Seth, a sorcerer destined to find Radiant, sets his sights on Caislean Merlin for answers. He’s desperate to find out what the Knight Sorcerers know, but can he trust them? In the wake of all that is unknown, he digs deep within himself for the wisdom and confidence to control his powers. And as the world around him continues to grow with more magic and power, he gains strong new allies.”

The series has BIG Saturday Morning cartoon vibes. My 12 year-old self would have been ALL OVER this.

Batman Ninja (Netflix)  

What if a Japanese animation studio asked DC if they could make a batman movie? And then just threw a Japanese history book at it? What if there was time travel? What if the main batman villains were all feudal lords in Japan? What if everyone were Samari? What if Damian had a small animal companion he could communicate with using a flue? What if Jason’s hood was made out of wicker? What if Penguin had a penguin shaped mecha? 

A wild ride from start to finish that makes no sense but really, do you care? 

[izupie]

Ask meme! 2, 16, and 21!

aaa thank you for the questions from these writers asks!! <3 <3

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

ahhh - this is definitely the werewolf thing I was talking about in one of my previous answers.  

I just want to write that the werewolf is in love but the person they’re in love with doesn’t know they’re a werewolf, and then BAM we get the REVEAL. 

And then I get the aftermath of that too - which will be some delicious angst and a cute moment petting animal ears because don’t tell me anyone would be able to resist cute animal ears okay. And I have plans for even more angst and just, I really can’t wait to get into the meat of that story. All this set up and I’m neeeaarrlllyyy there.

But also, I kind of want to write that time travelling thing I wrote about before too. Like, I’m really really considering it now even though I feel like that would be an intensely big project to commit to.... I’d like to write time travel shenanigans.

16. Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

Well anyone who is still following me will know I did a fandom 360 and went from My Hero Academia, with its shonen anime highschool superhero hijinks, to IT, with its 80s aesthetic of a group of misfit kids going to beat up a child eating space clown. (and then their return 27 years later, still absolute disasters, going to bully the same clown.)

I couldn’t have jumped from two fandoms more different from each other.

And it’s a weird story how I got there, but it happened and here I am I guess

The biggest problem, that probably nobody even knows is a thing unless you’ve jumped from an anime like MHA to a ‘real’ setting of a live action fandom, is that the way you have to describe actions and write dialogue has to change or it just doesn’t read right.

In anime they often say each others names a lot. Don’t know why - must be a Japanese thing. But if you pay attention, especially in the sub, don’t know if they change it for the dub, they’ll say the name of the person they’re talking to a lot. Seriously - google it ! It’s just, a thing in anime.

But in American movies and such, that doesn’t happen. So characters constantly repeating names becomes a habit in my head while writing dialogue and trying to break myself out of that habit is actually harder than you’d think. I have to comb back through and delete out any times that I’ve repeated a name for no reason other than if this was anime they’d have said it there.

ugh

Also the movements and expressions in anime are very exaggerated - because it’s animated, and then when you move to a ‘real’ kind of fandom you realise that these ways of describing how a character moves or expresses is too cartoonish for ‘real life’. 

Basically writing fanfiction for an over the top shonen anime for three years broke the way I write in general. Going back to a real setting was a painful adjustment that I feel like I’m still in the progress of getting it right a whole year after switching fandoms. rip

also, I tried writing in present tense for the first time ever last year and that was fun! Difficult, because I’m so used to writing in the past tense, but fun. 

I like to challenge myself sometimes!

I’ve done really conversational kind of narrative voices, really impersonal ones, being really flowery, being really simple, I just like to mix it up every so often.

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Beep Beep Beep would make such a great cheesy Hallmark Movie - a 90 minute made-for-tv load of fluff. Tropes everywhere! Romantic leads that you know are going to get together as soon as they meet! The overdramatic angst! The way it all comes together at the end! The sort of movie my mum would watch but I’d scoff at and be like ‘soooo predictable’. Love it. someone tell a studio who likes to make these things that I have a script for them

My current wip [barks] would be such a great teen TV show - like Vampire Diaries or Teen Wolf. I injected those kinds of shows into my veins when I was a teenager. Supernatural romance? SIGN ME UP. Except this one would finally be set where the characters are all college ages, so you can actually get twenty-something actors to play twenty-something characters. It always cracks me up when they got actors in their twenties to play highschool kids.

There’d be an edgy theme song, and loads of cool practical makeup and effects, because that’s the stuff that holds up over the years, not the hokey cgi. Just use cgi to enhance practical effects pls. Or you know, I guess, when you can’t have people actually turning into wolves practically, then you gotta throw out the cgi.

but yeah, all the relationship melodrama and cool supernatural creatures would be so cool in a tv show.

oh! and how cool would it be to see one of my oneshots as a webcomic though?? (only cool to you, I hear yelled at me from the back of the audience) 

But okay, hand on heart, I am deadly 100% serious when I say that I have any and all fanart I have ever received from any of my stories saved in a folder. I open that folder sometimes and I think, somebody spent time making this because they were inspired by words that came out of my head. And it really makes me emotional. I mean, I’ve also commissioned some works based on my fics and those also mean the world to me - because the work, even paid work, is is still work and time and effort. Like, yes, there was money involved, but the artist still MADE this. They used their knowledge of their craft. It’s beautiful.

But yeah, fanart just hits me in this special place and seeing my ideas as a picture - a thing I can actually look at!!! - is the strangest coolest thing in the entire world.

[yeonchi]

Dub Logistics Part 29: Toxicity and Hypocrisy (Retirement Speech Part 1)

“I may have been a toxic hypocrite, but at least I know who and what I’ve been fighting for.”

I’ve said more than enough about my trolls, haters and naysayers over the years; this time around, I’m going to be talking about myself and the roles I played in the past through my English dub rants.

At the start of this year, I announced my intentions to end the Dub Logistics series and my English dub rant posts with it. Among my reasons, I explained that last year’s feud has contributed to my decision, but it wasn’t the main or only factor. Much as I hate to admit it, the events and aftermath of the feud have affected me more than what I’ve stated; I was understating the effects of the feud in my recounts because I never let my haters dictate my life or what I do with it, whether it be online or in real life. That was true then and this is still true now.

Reeling back from the feud has made me think about how toxic I may have been over the years, particularly while responding to the comments and addressing the hypocrisies of dub haters and opinion-neutrals. More recently, however, I’ve come to realise that my ever-changing views may have made me look like a hypocrite, if anyone hasn’t called me out as such already.

In this special instalment of Dub Logistics, I’ll be reflecting on my toxic hypocrisy and hopefully, setting the record straight for people who may have the wrong idea about me, particularly those who have heard about me from the biased perspectives of my haters and naysayers. It’s going to be long, so you’ll have to bear with me here.

The main point that I realised about my hypocrisy is that I am totally fine with reading subtitles when my rants make me look like I don’t like or want to read subtitles at all. This is a common assumption that many non-dub fans make about dub fans without considering some of the deeper reasoning behind their decision. In actuality, I’ve had my fair share with both dubs and subs myself, so to set the record straight, I’m going to be stating a few anecdotes relating to my experience with subtitles and dubbing, along with my experiences of video games, particularly the Koei Warriors game series. In case you didn’t know already, “Azuma Yeonchi” is a persona I use online, I am from Melbourne, Australia and my family is from Hong Kong. You’ll see how this is relevant as you read on.

In Australia, television stations are required by law to provide closed captioning on their programs, which isn’t really a surprise. We also have a public broadcasting network known as SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) that specialises in multilingual and multicultural programming. In addition to programmes from Australia, the US and the UK, they have also broadcast imported programs from other countries with their own English subtitles. Admittedly, they haven’t been doing this as much as they used to, however I sometimes watch the Japanese game show VS Arashi if it’s on.

In Hong Kong, many programs on TVB’s channels are broadcast with Chinese, while some programmes are additionally broadcast with the option to switch to English subtitles. A lot of non-locally produced programs are dubbed and broadcast with dual audio options, namely Cantonese and whatever language the program was originally made in. In a sense, Hongkongers and by extension, other Chinese people (not to make a political statement) can’t get away from subtitles in their media. Likewise, gamers can’t get away without reading the text and/or subtitles in games, Japanese or not.

I’ve played Koei Warriors games, mostly Dynasty Warriors, on the PSP, PS2 and the PC with English and Japanese voices along with English, Japanese and Chinese subtitles. Hearing that WO3U and SW4 wouldn’t be dubbed (despite the 18-month gap since WO3) inspired me to start the Koei Warriors Rant Series in 2014, but when I discovered that Koei Tecmo had cheapened out on the dubs for Dynasty Warriors 9 (among other things, but granted, it wasn’t entirely their fault given the voice actor strike), all hope I had for them was gone and I decided to stop following them on social media for good. This, combined with other commitments and interests that popped up, have led me to lose interest in video games, including the Koei Warriors series.

I’ve watched a few dubbed and subbed animes, but in 2014, I stopped following new animes, again because of other commitments and interests, but also because of the flagrant (female-centric) sexism I noticed in recent anime works. The only reason why I’m still posting on my Facebook anime pages and the Yui Hirasawa Waifu Network nowadays is out of gratitude because some series have served as inspirations for my personal projects.

The void left by video games and anime was filled by Japanese tokusatsu, which I have started getting into in the past few years. Honestly, I prefer watching live-action works, including tokusatsu, with subtitles since it’s pretty much the only way to watch them. I’ve also been watching some episodes raw (without subtitles) right after they’ve premiered in Japan; I’ve come to loosely understand the plot and dialogue thanks to years of contact with the Japanese language and vice versa. I have watched Power Rangers in the past as a gateway into the world of tokusatsu, but to me, it doesn’t exactly fit under the English dubbed category as it is rather an adaptation, mixing dubbed fight scenes with original footage. I still sometimes watch clips for comparison purposes.

If you’re still hating on me without having read everything up to here, or if you’ve read all this and you still consider me a hypocrite, then congratulations for missing the entire point of my argument. If you’ve supported my views and opinions in the past and you consider me a hypocrite now, then maybe you should have a think about whether you have really supported me at all.

Contrary to what some people may have assumed, I never did all this for myself alone. I can adapt my views and opinions to be fair to everyone because I can understand why some fans have their own preferences for dub or sub. Aside from my fans, it is rare to find people in the same boat as myself because the haters and naysayers I’ve encountered are ignorant, short-sighted or just unable to understand the bigger picture behind things.

Given my position towards subtitles and dubbing, it was never my intention to derail the dub-sub debate and demonise dub fans. From the very beginning, I had high hopes and good intentions for my English dub rants and the fanbases involved or mentioned, but in most cases, I’ve either come short or had the opposite effect to what I wanted.

It has been difficult to talk some sense into the haters and naysayers because aside from being ignorant, many of them have been toxic to me or other dub fans as well. Therefore, the only way I was able to do that was by being toxic back at them. I’m not saying that any of these attempts backfired on me, but most of the time, those people just don’t seem to listen because they are unable to listen to the opinions of others without being offended themselves.

It was in that vein that my warped sense of self-justice led me to name-and-shame dub haters by screenshotting their comments and reposting them. This started following the announcement of DW8E being localised without English voices, after it was erroneously announced that it would be localised with dual audio. This practice spread to the #NoDubNoBuy page (now English Dubbed Game News) and it wasn’t until late last year that I realised that it was going against the spirit I wanted to create for the page, so I deleted the name-and-shame album after I ended the feud.

Looking back, I think the events of the feud brought out the worst in me and the other party behind it. During the initial debate, I tried to convince him and his fake sock-puppet accounts that he was missing the point about dubbing and localisation, but he later claimed to his fans/white knights (in an act of virtue-signalling) that I ignored his points completely when that was not entirely the case. And let’s not forget that time when he spread that hoax about that one game under the name of a fake company. Even though the hoax became true in the end (as he claimed), it didn’t excuse his actions on social media.

The turning point for the feud, I believe, was when I did the parodies of iDubbbz’s Content Cop and Content Deputy in an effort to expose him as a lolcow. This was an escalation on my part, and he retaliated by pettily editing the Sea Princesses Wiki and reporting my posts on him along with other unrelated posts (I’ll go into this in the 2018 review post in late December), leading me to be postblocked on Facebook three times. Yes, I effectively copied someone else’s criticism format (while missing the point of it as well) in the hope that it would start a witchhunt, but in the end, I think we both got off lucky since not a lot of people read the posts and nothing major happened as a result.

While I have long moved on from the feud, I must admit that I still feel some guilt over my part in it a year on. The only way that I’ve been coping with it is to convince myself that while I may not always be right, wrong or perfect, nobody else is either and that I should not let this hater affect me any more than he already did (and I never have). As far as I care or know, the feud is over, the page where the debate started was deleted (which was ironically karmic to see) and we have both moved on to other endeavours (though like Keemstar or RiceGum, I doubt that he really learned anything from this).

When we ended the feud, we agreed that while we would never mention each other by name again, we would be allowed to maintain our own views and opinions on it and that any posts that have not been taken down or deleted already will be kept up or deleted at our own discretions. This applies to my Content Cop and Content Deputy posts as well, because I want him to remember that he is not immune from criticism regardless of what he thinks.

There was another feud I had with the Undub page, but it was never really a feud with the page directly; it was more like the childish prattling of their ignorant fans/white knights who associated English dubbing and its fans to politics, political correctness and SJWs, which were totally irrelevant to the topic. When the Undub page first noticed us, they accused us of copying their posts, which in reflection, I believe is bullshit because of reasons which I outlined in a post at the start of the year. However, they came to accept us at the start of 2018, particularly following the rebranding of the #NoDubNoBuy page to English Dubbed Game News.

Speaking of SJWs, I’ve never considered myself to be one of them, but after reflecting on everything that has happened, I came to realise that I was no better than an SJW in denial. In regards to other political references, I’ve been called a “nationalist”, a “Trump supporter”, or even an “alt-right” when I don’t identify with those groups. These are merely buzzwords that people learn from the news and on the internet to insult people they don’t like, but then again, I’ve called dub haters and opinion-neutrals “cucks” twice this year. But hey, why don’t we go out with a bang by forcing a meme to associate people with!

You know how opinion-neutrals always tell dub fans that they are entitled and that they should be grateful to the producers for localising the games in the first place (among other things)? Yeah, in my opinion, these are the traits of an NPC and if you think that’s dehumanising, then you have missed the point behind my argument and you are part of the problem. Even if you try to deny that you’re being like an NPC, then you’re just making up excuses to defend the publisher’s decisions or not participate in civilised debate (like a cuck).

I have unironically advocated suicide to some parties in some of my older rants. I understand that suicide is a problem and wishing harm on others is wrong, but I just can’t respect people who make no effort to understand why people think the way they think. Luckily though, I decided to stop doing that at the start of 2018 following the Logan Paul suicide forest incident because regardless of how much respect I have for people, I wouldn’t want someone like Logan Paul laughing at your corpse either.

If you have ever thought anything negative of me because of my posts and rants, you are part of the problem as well. I’m not going to apologise to the haters and naysayers (or their white knights) I may have offended because I think it will only validate their flawed opinions or vitriolic insults. The onus is on them to enlighten themselves and learn that there are people who disagree with themselves or the status quo. Luckily however, I’m going to be nice and give you a few tips about how to do that, which I will cover in the next and final instalment. Our negative criticism should be directed at the gaming companies for letting their fans turn against each other instead of fuelling the fire ourselves. If you’re looking for an apology (or maybe even forgiveness), then the best thing to do is to forget about me and move on, knowing that I will do the same for you as well.

In Part 22 of Dub Logistics, I used this quote from The Dark Knight to refer to gaming companies in general - “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Portions of the past few years have been downward spirals for me and in thinking about everything I’ve done during that time, I must admit that this quote is starting to apply to me as well, though I wish my haters and naysayers (and maybe their white knights as well) could feel the same way about themselves. Aside from that, this is my way of atoning for all the drama I’ve caused and leaving with my head held high in the knowledge that my fans will remember me for my efforts.

If you have heard about me from the negative opinions of others, then I recommend that you take their words with a few grains of salt and see for yourself how I have been trying to help Japanese anime and video game fanbases get over such a trivial and prolonged problem. If you then find yourself agreeing with those negative people, then you should realise that you are becoming part of the problem. Or, like I said, you could just let go of your animosity towards me, because I’m a busy person myself and I don’t want to have to deal with anyone’s bullshit, let alone be the target of a petty witchhunt.

This was a particularly deep instalment for me to write, but I’m kind of glad that it’s nearly over. The second part of my retirement speech will be in the next and final instalment of Dub Logistics.

[itswritingphoenix]

Book Review: Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride and Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride Steamy Chapters by sassyroe

Okay, so. This is a book which I love and hate at the same time. I love the way it’s written and how it explores the thoughts and feelings of the main characters so you know EXACTLY what they’re thinking and feeling about the shit going on in their lives. But I hate it because of a plot twist that I’d never seen coming which made me put the book down and not pluck up enough courage to read on until about a week later, for fear of how the lead would react to said fuck-up.

But let me explain first, before I go on a rant about this amazing book. As you can tell by the book’s title, Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride is about Count Dracula (no shit) and his bride (really? id never have guessed). The lead character is an elf named Erinna. But Erinna isn’t just an ordinary elf, she is a Pure Being, which is like an elf on steroids and then some. She has literally ungodly amounts of power, if only she knew how to control it. She is like the most pure thing to ever exist, and thanks to a curse put on her (or rather, the next Pure Being to be born, which happens to be her) by a witch that Dracula SERIOUSLY pissed off over two thousand years prior, she is destined to be the one to kill Dracula. That is, not before they have fallen deeply in love with each other first, making his death at Erinna’s hands all the more painful. I think.

The reason for my confusion is because there is another curse put on them, or rather their species, not them specifically, which dooms any and all consummated relationships between elves and vampires. Basically, EVERYTHING that could ever tell them that they shouldn’t be together exists and yet they fall in love anyway. Hence my slight confusion.

But despite the confusion of the two curses and what caused them (both due to Dracula fucking up and pissing off the wrong witch or the wrong elves), the events in the book and how they’re written are brilliant and enthralling. Dracula and Erinna are as opposite as it is possibly possible to be, and yet they are clearly made for each other and complete one another. Two sides of the same coin and all that ‘opposites attract’ malarkey.

The thing I think I love the most about this book is that it explores Dracula’s past, shining light on the events that took place for him to become as controlling, murderous, and sadistic as he is. Essentially, the author (sassyroe) paints him very much as a victim and - as Erinna dubs him - a survivor, bringing things such as child abuse and rape into the mix. And I don’t mean him doing the abusing and raping (though he has done the latter in the past, but that doesn’t matter right now), I mean him being the one abused and raped.

And as for the plot, it takes time, but Erinna and Dracula do fall in love, a love that strengthens as time nears the Blood Moon falling on Erinna’s 18th birthday, when they need to consummate their Accorded Bond (basically like soulmates). The plot focuses on Vlad (Dracula) and Erinna - or Vlarinna, as one character dubs them - and how they interact with one another and their various compromises both of them make for the other.

It was all going brilliantly, Erinna had told Vlad that she loves him for the first time, but then he MAJORLY FUCKS UP in chapter 76 and it LITERALLY ALL GOES TO SHIT FROM THEN ON AND THAT PLOT TWIST WAS WHAT MADE ME PUT DOWN THE BOOK SO I COULD COME TO TERMS WITH IT AND I WAS SO MAD AT VLAD, THE GODDAMN ARSEHOLE WHO DESERVED WHAT HE GOT WHEN ERINNA FOUND OUT FROM LITERALLY THE WORST PERSON SHE COULD HAVE FOUND OUT FROM AND WREAKED FREAKING HAVOC ALL OVER HIS SORRY ARSE.

But it gets FUCKING WORSE! SHE GETS KIDNAPPED AND THERE’S TWO DAYS TO GO UNTIL THE BLOOD MOON AND VLAD NEEDS TO GET HER BACK FOR FUCKING FUCK.

I haven’t finished reading the book, and it isn’t even finished yet, but goddamn is it good. I’m halfway through chapter 86 and things aren’t looking good for Vlad and Erinna thanks to Erinna’s dad refusing to let her go and stay ‘trapped’ in Transylvania (even though she likes it there and has quite a lot of freedom actually) with the “leech” as Vlad is called by anyone who doesn’t like him.

But I can’t talk about Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride without talking about its sister book, Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride Steamy Chapters. This sister book is 8 chapters long and contains all the sex scenes between Vlad and Erinna, or if you prefer, the lemons or the smuts, depending on which phrase those ‘in the know’ prefer to use. sassyroe did this to keep her younger readers ‘pure’, as it is remarkably shocking how many users there are on Wattpad that are between the ages of 12 and 14. (though I am aware that there are users in their twenties, so it does balance out) Even more shocking is that there are some that have written material like this themselves at that age. But now isn’t the time for an argument like this.

Having read though all but the last chapter in the book (I haven’t read the chapter in the main book that leads into the last chapter yet), I can say that they are well written and flow well. The scenes are descriptive and the phrasing is well chosen. Now, I’ve read my fair share of smuts, I’ll admit, but unlike those others that use awkward words to describe the workings of the male and female anatomies, there wasn’t a single misused word amongst the chapters that could have had me jolting out of the scene, backed up by the lack of comments in which in any sub-par smut would be of people taking the piss at the terrible writing. So if you want a good smut/lemon to read and don’t mind the baggage of an intelligently written story, then I’d recommend this novel.

However, I must say that even though I thoroughly enjoy this intelligently written story, I think sassyroe is a bit too intelligent for her own good and has over complicated the story with the curses/prophecies and frankly the names too. For example, Dracula’s mother wasn’t a new character, but has only recently been referred to by her name (Katie) and I was like who the hell is Katie? until I realised OH Katie’s Vlad’s mum. But anyway, apart from a few confusing aspects, Dracula’s Tempestuous Bride is a good read and I’d recommend it to those who like fantasy novels.

~Phoenix xoxo

[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one husband changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals detested. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective minds can diversify, the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of great works about modern metropolitans even those is drawing up by people who debate Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this book that attracted so much of its initial publicity with startle price( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times re-examine headline) has obstructed its relevant through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it learn us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his vocation where reference is first visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads disliked Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian inventor and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this book, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such research projects and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham accompanied his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a affection, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Schooling at the University of Southern California, who applied him up in the Greene friends architecturally worshipped Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to investigate. But what he went go looking for, and the course he wrote about what “hes seen” and experienced, redefined the space the intellectual world and then the rest of the world comprehended the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he swore his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially located the city incomprehensible a response shared by many reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told to seeing how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular region to do a particular event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no area for collision even for happy coincidences. You strategy the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random encounters with friends and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of municipality life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like metropolitan contained out a promise: The unique price of Los Angeles what rouses, intrigues and sometimes fights me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every city hypothesi in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles leavings from traditional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a example “youve already”, in a 1959 essay, recommends to replace the age-old notion of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its eggshell separated open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic white-hot, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness disrupted merely by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same channel: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city hamlets, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham put another digit in the eye of conservatives who insisted that a city should have just one strong core with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised structures such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new agency towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything stances as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown vistum that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, creative energy, international force, peculiar way of life, and corporate temperament[ supports that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborate and expensive residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and enduring enough to are comparable to the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then infamous, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible region, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos expend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated scrap in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, described distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no sanction for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a immense cosmic detachment, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham learnt a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in extremity Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of grove and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, embellished up-front, emblazoned with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles urban id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented appearing of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and continue tension, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham attracted out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by venerating them , nor belittling them, but plainly by realise them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approach in their own city classic, Reading from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to prepare later finding most sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at least toward the aesthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photo: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, writer of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, disappeared thus far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hacks who do shopping mall, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of roadways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and run a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane culture where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers assault of the territory and the extend particles in kids of my own lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 video documentary that followed him through one day in the town that sees sillines of history and divulge all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that moving beyond gumption or rationale. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a wholly self-absorbed and perfected mausoleum) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently recognized on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown slice of the old-fashioned Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole big metropolitan together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham requested the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking commentator of American urban cliche, what public buildings a tourist should appreciate. Ruscha recommended gas station.

Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles urban chassis by claiming the shape subjects very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan flesh at all in the commonly accepted gumption. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has produced a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, adjusted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog fate finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial kills of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a stall and the private automobile is banned from wall street, quite a lot of craftily situated citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Picture: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the person who is announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English scholastics who educate themselves Italian in order to speak Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages listen on the streets of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that supposed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever downplayed has all but vanished. The experience of apparently boundless room to pander an obsession with single-family houses has given way to one of building cranes sprouting to satisfy the new demand for high-density vertical living. They accept not only over a downtown rise miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stuns any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to emerge almost 30 years after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, the planning and execution( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater labors of human but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway plan of my relationship, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better plan nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham detected downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short assembly dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving automobile, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that carries an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal additions in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental destitutions caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the pike, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated house, it very must fall out of favor, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that gleaned Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonor, moved fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, growing the subject matter of critical examine and architectural competitor.

Banham also encountered the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one stunning and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then almost unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the improved surrounding in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile projection involves re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other cities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect grew his adopted hometowns architectural emissary just one of the myriad channels in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan macrocosm.

These daylights, the rest of the city world also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, qualifies, ballparks and even bike-share organizations, did steps towards the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those thoroughly projected , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure groups cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive dictation to incorporate older metropolitan dignities and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Saving Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe regarded Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a seriously requirement renovation of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a users manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

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[magneticmaguk]

STRICTLY 140 INTERVIEW - A CHAT WITH JFO ABOUT MUSIC, HIS NEW RECORD LABEL AND HIS 'BFM' PARTNERSHIP WITH SATIVA

The second installment is with music producer and label owner Jack Flynn-Oakley (JFO). I've been following his work rate for quite some time now and I'm very excited to see what he's got in stall for 2017. Here's what he had to say...

Easy Jack, how you doing today?

"Yes yes, all good over here! And you?"

I'm good man cheers, so for the readers that don’t know you, can you just explain who you are, and what you do?

"I'm Jack Flynn-Oakley (JFO) and I'm a producer / DJ, making music mostly at around 140bpm. From Rochdale (large up), but currently living in Crewe whilst studying 'Creative Music Technology' at MMU. I dabble in other things, such as Drum & Bass from time too time but my sound seems too lie within Dub, Dubstep and Grime. 140bpm is such a versatile tempo and 90% of the time is what I set my DAW too."

Yeah I agree man, it's a very versatile tempo. So how long have you been DJ’ing and Producing for? What first got you into this kind of underground music?

"I've been DJ'ing (live) for only around 2 years at the moment, though I've been collecting records for considerably longer. It took me ages to afford a pair of 1210's, so I would just play my records on a shitty Hi-Fi at home. I actually got my first dubplate cut before I could even mix it on decks haha. I've been producing since I was around 15 - 16, so getting on 6 years now. I've always used Logic and still have some off my first projects, though I cringe when I hear them.

I was originally a lot more into my Dubstep / 140 stuff. I first discovered the 'dungeon' sound that people such as 'Youngsta' were pioneering. Artists' such as; 'Biome', 'Kryptic Minds' and 'SP:MC' too name a few, where the guys making the stuff that I was really big into (And still are). I started getting into the grimier side off things through artist's like 'Kahn & Neek'. I remember first seeing the video of them playing 'Percy' in a car and thinking this is sick."

Yeeess I remember that video in the car, it created so much hype around that tune. So what were your first influences at the beginning and what are your current influences now?

"I grew up listening too metal, bands like 'Lamb of God' and 'Machine Head' along side loads more. I think that's why I'm more attracted too the heavier side off bass music. Metal and Dubstep can share a lot in common in terms off rhythm and other things, I think that listening too other artist's, for example: the badman 'Distance', that they realise this also. Currently I'm big into my 140 stuff, I'll always love Grime, but this resurgence in the Dubwise / Dubstep stuff is just me all over. Guys like 'J:Kenzo' and 'Youngsta' again are just killing it week in - week out with this sound and I love it."

Yeah man, I fully agree. So, we’re here mainly to talk about your E.P. coming out on your own up and coming all vinyl label and to talk about the label itself, can you tell us a little bit about it?

"Sure, It's a project I've been wanting to start for the longest… I always knew that the first release would be from BFM (myself & Sativa), It was just thinking of a name for the label and getting the money together to get it started. Originally 001 was set to be 'War Riddim" with 'Pulse BFM' on the flip, we get quite a lot of people asking for those two, so I figured it would be a good way to kickstart the label. However, being the eeeddiat I am, I somehow managed too loose the projects for both. Since this, we've rescheduled the release with two other tracks, which shall be reviled very soon, trust me they're big!"

Ahh, what a killer you lost the projects, I bet that was annoying. Yeah I've had the pleasure of listening to both tracks for the 001 release and I agree they are seriously big. So what's the Label called?

"Crystal Recordings. It took the longest too think of the name, I went through so many. Everything 'good' is taken, I had all my mates trying too help me out and everything we came up with was already in use. Eventually, in wetherspoons, we came up with 'Crystal'. The idea being that each releases artwork, features around a different gem stone. I'm a big fan of artwork, especially on the labels of records, luckily my man 'J. Whiteside' came through with some wicked ideas and really got the ball rolling on the art side off things. He's a good mate of mine and a wicked graphic designer, he also happens too have a very similar musical taste too, so when I told him what I wanted, he instantly knew what I was going for. I'm really pleased with the outcome. It was always going too be a vinyl operation also, I may branch out too the digital format in the future, but for me there is just something about the physical format, actually owning a record."

Sativa

Yeah wicked it sounds like it was a very organic way of working and to collaborate with friends is always a plus in my eyes, so how did the BFM partnership come about?

"Me and Sean (Sativa) have known each other for years, we met at a metal youth club when we where younger (believe it or not such a thing existed in Rochdale, big up the Back Door Music crew), then sometime later when I came up to uni it turns out he was already there! Similar to me he'd also got big into the 140 sound, obviously being both massive music fans with very similar tastes, as well as being mates, it felt right to make a few tunes together. We originally just put a few tracks out together on Soundcloud under 'Sativa & JFO', but as we kept on making more and more music we decided it would be best too create an alias for us both, BFM was born… I still crease when I hear that name."

Haha nah bro, I think it's a great name still. With regards to your music what's your preferred genre to both produce and play out?

"I know that Seans very big on his Drum & Bass and where both massive Dub fans, but again, Dubstep and Grime is definitely our thing. We both spin wax also, so it really helps that we have similar taste."

What artists and MC’s within the scene are you rating at the moment?

"There's bare, too many to mention. I can say that the underground is thriving at the moment. It's great, producers who aren't necessarily 'big' names are coming out with constant heat, the whole underground Dubstep / Grime scene is absolutely packed with talent. Gonna have to give a big shout out to the Rochdale gang also, man like 'Glix', 'Ron D' and the 'Lidster'… Make sure you check these guys out!"

Yeah, I'll defo check those artists out man, with regards to your own production, what's your favourite tune you have produced? If you have one.

"Hahaha, see I'm a proper picky producer, It's literally all I do, so I'm constantly learning new things. I listen back to tunes I made a week ago and think that they sound under-produced, even though I know I went in on them. That being said, the BFM stuff with Sativa, as well as some off the new stuff with 'Noble' I do rate a lot. If I had to pick, me and Sean built a exclusive dubplate for someone under our BFM name, it's more than likely never going to see light off day, but I draw for it near enough every mix."

Yeah, the stuff your making with Noble is on another level. So tell us about the tracks that you've picked for the 001 release, have you been sitting on them for a while or are they fresh out of the think tank?

"For sure, I think that the A-side may of even been made before we had a name together, so a very long time. The B-side is reasonably fresh, but people have heard it for sure. Overall I think that people are going too like this EP, I've sent a few test presses around to DJ's and what not… every things been positive towards it so far."

Below is a preview of the 2 tracks on the release...

You can now pre-order the new E.P. by BFM through White Peach Records here. Its out on the 1st May and features the tracks Gully Side, and on the flip, Distant Riddim. 2 absolute heavyweight tracks combining both grime and dubstep perfectly.

Judging on a lot of your previous creations there’s no denying your very skilled in production. Can you tell us a little bit about the method you go about producing tracks Do you just go in blind or are the specific steps you go through?

"Big ups. I don't really have a 'set' way of how I go about things production wise, I just sit there and see what happens. Literally all my free time goes into making music, I'm constantly pissing off my mates by sending them snippets of tracks I've started and never finishing them, It's just a learning curve I think. However, there are many un-written rules too follow in production land, I feel that little techniques; keeping your sub in mono, turning down the reverb (as hard as this may be) and tuning your drums amongst many other things, is important for making your tracks sound big, whilst also not hindering someone from creating their own signature style / sound. Which is very important. I'm constantly beatboxing or humming something, while I'm no good at either of them, I'll find myself beatboxing a drum beat and thinking too myself; 'get that on Logic quicktime'… that's probably how most off my tracks start. But it can be anything really, I might hear a sample I like and what too base a track around that, or just go in blind like you said… I really don't have a set formula."

Yeah, that seems like an exciting way of producing man. So what’s made you want to start a Vinyl only record label?

"It's something I've wanted to do for ages, it just happens to be that now is the time I'm able to do it. Vinyl sales have been popping of late as well, I have good hope... hahaha"

Yeah, I hear you man vinyl is popping off at an alarming rate at the moment, its great. So what do you think about the new digital age? has it kind of devalued releasing music? The way someone can just put an e.p. together and release it online.

"Not at all man… Things come round then fade out, then come back round again, it's an endless cycle (personally I'm still waiting for the mini-cd / floppy disk movement - yes yes). I've always got too big up the physical format, but if you look say 5 - 10 years ago, vinyl was being slaughtered by digital sales. iTunes, iPods / iPhones amongst other things make it so easy for people too listen too music anywhere at any time, which is wicked. There's so much talent too be heard, if digital releases help that happen, why not? Pressing vinyl is also an expensive task. The only thing that pisses me off about digital releases, is that if it's a slammer, I have too fork out 30 quid too get it cut…. ;)

Oh and streaming, bun streaming."

Slimzos Recordings line-up.

I saw you were on the bill for the Slimzos Recording's night at the Nest with a whole host of big names within grime. How did that go?

"Was sick! Although the journey back was dreader than dread (roundabout 7 hours on no sleep)… It was wicked too just actually meet everybody in person, the whole Slimzos Recordings roster is absolutely mental at the moment. Guys like 'Nurve' and 'Trends', among many others are just smashing it right now, it was just cool too actually speak to them in person and chat music for the night. Dubs where poppin' also, trust me!"

JFO.

Yeah, I bet it was a serious night man, now with Crystal Recordings, how are you going to go about choosing what artists you want on there. Will it simply be if you're feeling them you'll approach the artist? Or will other things come into play. Will you be going for a specific sound or is genre not an issue?

"Either or man, I'll work with anyone. There's no genre limits… I can see myself putting out more stuff at 140 don't get me wrong, but If I feel that somethings sick; regardless of a bpm or genre, there's a chance I'll release it. As it stands, I'm currently on Subtle FM bi-weekly on Wednesday nights (shout out the Subtle crew!), so I'm actually being sent quite a lot of material from various artist's already, which is wicked. I have my ideas for where I want to go with this label, but all I can tell people to do is send me music, if I like it, who knows!"

When can we expect the release then?

"Test presses for CRYS001 have been approved, all down to the press. The second I have a pre-order link I'll post the audio demo on Soundcloud. I've never been a big fan on people posting demo's before the pre-order date, which is why I'm keeping everything on the down-low until then."

Will the release be limited?

"The initial press will be yes. This is purely down too costs (I'm a student after all), 001 will have an initial press of 300 records with no digital at all. I'll never put a cap on the press, if down the line people want a repress and the demand is there, I'll repress it. But for the time being, yes.

All 180g by the way, this was massively important to me."

and is it gonna be strictly no digital releases?

"Down the line, I may look into it, I have nothing against digital at all, I may even look into giving away some of our lost BFM stuff digitally for those who don't do the whole vinyl thing. Vinyl is how I listen too music, the same goes for a lot of my friends… It just seemed right for me to keep everything in the physical format, no arrogance at all."

When can we expect the label to be fully operational?

As soon as. Everything is set and waiting, the second I get a date from the press, everything shall be revealed…

It's no secret that your sound is on my level. Directly bridging the gap between 2 of my favourite genres perfectly. One of my favorite producers at the moment and I am very excited to see what future holds for you bro, nice one for taking the time to do the interview, respect.

"Large up man, means a lot! Out to you for having me! Jack"

[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one husband changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals detested. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective minds can diversify, the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of great works about modern metropolitans even those is drawing up by people who debate Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this book that attracted so much of its initial publicity with startle price( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times re-examine headline) has obstructed its relevant through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it learn us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his vocation where reference is first visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads disliked Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian inventor and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this book, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such research projects and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham accompanied his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a affection, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Schooling at the University of Southern California, who applied him up in the Greene friends architecturally worshipped Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to investigate. But what he went go looking for, and the course he wrote about what “hes seen” and experienced, redefined the space the intellectual world and then the rest of the world comprehended the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he swore his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially located the city incomprehensible a response shared by many reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told to seeing how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular region to do a particular event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no area for collision even for happy coincidences. You strategy the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random encounters with friends and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of municipality life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like metropolitan contained out a promise: The unique price of Los Angeles what rouses, intrigues and sometimes fights me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every city hypothesi in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles leavings from traditional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a example “youve already”, in a 1959 essay, recommends to replace the age-old notion of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its eggshell separated open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic white-hot, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness disrupted merely by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same channel: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city hamlets, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham put another digit in the eye of conservatives who insisted that a city should have just one strong core with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised structures such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new agency towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything stances as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown vistum that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, creative energy, international force, peculiar way of life, and corporate temperament[ supports that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborate and expensive residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and enduring enough to are comparable to the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then infamous, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible region, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos expend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated scrap in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, described distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no sanction for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a immense cosmic detachment, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham learnt a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in extremity Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of grove and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, embellished up-front, emblazoned with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles urban id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented appearing of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and continue tension, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham attracted out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by venerating them , nor belittling them, but plainly by realise them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approach in their own city classic, Reading from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to prepare later finding most sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at least toward the aesthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photo: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, writer of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, disappeared thus far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hacks who do shopping mall, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of roadways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and run a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane culture where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers assault of the territory and the extend particles in kids of my own lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 video documentary that followed him through one day in the town that sees sillines of history and divulge all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that moving beyond gumption or rationale. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a wholly self-absorbed and perfected mausoleum) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently recognized on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown slice of the old-fashioned Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole big metropolitan together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham requested the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking commentator of American urban cliche, what public buildings a tourist should appreciate. Ruscha recommended gas station.

Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles urban chassis by claiming the shape subjects very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan flesh at all in the commonly accepted gumption. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has produced a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, adjusted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog fate finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial kills of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a stall and the private automobile is banned from wall street, quite a lot of craftily situated citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Picture: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the person who is announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English scholastics who educate themselves Italian in order to speak Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages listen on the streets of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that supposed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever downplayed has all but vanished. The experience of apparently boundless room to pander an obsession with single-family houses has given way to one of building cranes sprouting to satisfy the new demand for high-density vertical living. They accept not only over a downtown rise miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stuns any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to emerge almost 30 years after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, the planning and execution( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater labors of human but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway plan of my relationship, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better plan nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham detected downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short assembly dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving automobile, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that carries an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal additions in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental destitutions caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the pike, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated house, it very must fall out of favor, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that gleaned Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonor, moved fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, growing the subject matter of critical examine and architectural competitor.

Banham also encountered the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one stunning and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then almost unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the improved surrounding in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile projection involves re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other cities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect grew his adopted hometowns architectural emissary just one of the myriad channels in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan macrocosm.

These daylights, the rest of the city world also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, qualifies, ballparks and even bike-share organizations, did steps towards the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those thoroughly projected , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure groups cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive dictation to incorporate older metropolitan dignities and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Saving Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe regarded Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a seriously requirement renovation of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a users manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

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[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one husband changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals detested. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective minds can diversify, the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since pamphlet, it has shown up on schedules of great works about modern metropolitans even those is drawing up by people who debate Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this book that attracted so much of its initial publicity with startle price( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times re-examine headline) has obstructed its relevant through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to familiarize themselves. But what can it learn us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his vocation where reference is first visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads disliked Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the merit of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian inventor and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this book, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such research projects and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham accompanied his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a affection, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Schooling at the University of Southern California, who applied him up in the Greene friends architecturally worshipped Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to investigate. But what he went go looking for, and the course he wrote about what “hes seen” and experienced, redefined the space the intellectual world and then the rest of the world comprehended the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he swore his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially located the city incomprehensible a response shared by many reviewers, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous cavity with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told to seeing how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental chassis and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental life-styles to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular region to do a particular event, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no area for collision even for happy coincidences. You strategy the working day in advance, curriculum your activities, and forgo those random encounters with friends and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of municipality life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like metropolitan contained out a promise: The unique price of Los Angeles what rouses, intrigues and sometimes fights me is the fact that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every city hypothesi in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham listed Los Angeles leavings from traditional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with obvious gratify. It seemed to legitimise a example “youve already”, in a 1959 essay, recommends to replace the age-old notion of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its eggshell separated open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic white-hot, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness disrupted merely by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same channel: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city hamlets, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham put another digit in the eye of conservatives who insisted that a city should have just one strong core with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised structures such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new agency towers in their standard livery of dark glass and sword, Banham wrote that everything stances as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown vistum that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The books contrarianism manifests the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it play-acts the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan mode, creative energy, international force, peculiar way of life, and corporate temperament[ supports that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and charts, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborate and expensive residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and enduring enough to are comparable to the cities of the Middle West) and the famous, then infamous, freeway organization he dubbed Autopia: a single comprehensible region, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos expend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated scrap in Banhams attentions. Picture: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between chapters on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys constituents, described distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no sanction for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a immense cosmic detachment, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham learnt a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in extremity Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … built of grove and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, embellished up-front, emblazoned with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles urban id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented appearing of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and continue tension, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham attracted out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by venerating them , nor belittling them, but plainly by realise them because they are. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would propose the same approach in their own city classic, Reading from Las Vegas, published the subsequent year: Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to prepare later finding most sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at least toward the aesthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Photo: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, writer of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, disappeared thus far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hacks who do shopping mall, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of roadways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and run a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane culture where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers assault of the territory and the extend particles in kids of my own lungs, the author are likely to be put up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 video documentary that followed him through one day in the town that sees sillines of history and divulge all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that moving beyond gumption or rationale. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a wholly self-absorbed and perfected mausoleum) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently recognized on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown slice of the old-fashioned Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole big metropolitan together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham requested the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking commentator of American urban cliche, what public buildings a tourist should appreciate. Ruscha recommended gas station.

Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles urban chassis by claiming the shape subjects very little, had now been written that Los Angeles has no metropolitan flesh at all in the commonly accepted gumption. Yet whatever it does have, he quarrelled, has produced a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, adjusted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog fate finally tumbles, he narrated over aerial kills of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached houses, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a stall and the private automobile is banned from wall street, quite a lot of craftily situated citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Picture: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the person who is announced Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased when you have, like earlier generations of English scholastics who educate themselves Italian in order to speak Dante in the original, “ve learned to” drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages listen on the streets of Los Angeles have proliferated, its own language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that supposed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever downplayed has all but vanished. The experience of apparently boundless room to pander an obsession with single-family houses has given way to one of building cranes sprouting to satisfy the new demand for high-density vertical living. They accept not only over a downtown rise miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stuns any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transit system, which started to emerge almost 30 years after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, the planning and execution( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater labors of human but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway plan of my relationship, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better plan nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham detected downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short assembly dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving automobile, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical expression sailing organisation dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that carries an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) “re coming with” difficulties that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal additions in economy through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental destitutions caused by destroying the residual misconceptions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the pike, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the separated house, it very must fall out of favor, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that gleaned Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonor, moved fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, growing the subject matter of critical examine and architectural competitor.

Banham also encountered the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one stunning and elegantly simple stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A particular Frank Gehry, then almost unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the improved surrounding in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile projection involves re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other cities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect grew his adopted hometowns architectural emissary just one of the myriad channels in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan macrocosm.

These daylights, the rest of the city world also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, qualifies, ballparks and even bike-share organizations, did steps towards the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those thoroughly projected , non-experimental metropolitans where, Banham lamented, warring pressure groups cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive dictation to incorporate older metropolitan dignities and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Saving Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the grim fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe regarded Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a seriously requirement renovation of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a users manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion

The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one husband changed the sensing of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world comprehended it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective beliefs can vary, the columnist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I guess LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major municipality in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since booklet, it has shown up on rosters of great books about modern metropolitans even those being prepared by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this journal that described so much of its initial advertisement with shock significance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times evaluates headline) has prevented its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his occupation when he firstly called, Banham knew full-well that his fellow intellectuals hated Los Angeles. How and why he himself arrived so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the value of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian designer and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this notebook, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham introduced his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who set him up in the Greene brethren architecturally loved Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what “hes been gone” go looking for, and the direction he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the path the academic world and then the rest of the world recognized the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Picture: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he testified his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially procured the city incomprehensible a reply said that he shared numerous critics, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham firstly attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous infinite with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental influence and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental lives to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular lieu to do a particular happen, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for accident even for joyous collisions. You propose the working day in advance, programme your activities, and forgo those random encounters with sidekicks and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of metropolitan life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city harboured out a hope: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repulses me is the fact that it gives revolutionary alternatives to almost every urban thought in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham itemized Los Angeles leavings from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with obvious pleasure. It seemed to legitimise a prototype he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned thought of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell smashed open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic grey, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness perturbed simply by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might sounds the city was indicated in simply the same way: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city villages, training exercises in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham made another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised organizes such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new office towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything stands as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown stage that started to deteriorate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The journals contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it plays the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan style, artistic power, international affect, distinctive way of life, and corporate identity[ attests that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles partitions its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive palaces; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and bearing enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the far-famed, then infamous, freeway plan he dubbed Autopia: a single intelligible region, a coherent state of mind in which Angelenos invest the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams sees. Photograph: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between sections on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys elements, drawn distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no beating for aesthetic crime; nothing but a immense planetary phlegm, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham saw a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in edge Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … constructed of timber and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but cheaply, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles city id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented form of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and persistent strain, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham described out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by adoring them , nor defaming them, but simply by realise them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would preach the same approach in their own urban classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, publicized the subsequent year: Withholding arbitration may be used as a tool to realize later conviction more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the esthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Picture: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles surely did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, columnist of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, departed so far as to name Banhams book dangerous: The hacks who do shopping center, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of routes, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and wield a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the extend molecules in kids of my own lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through the working day in the town that clears nonsense of history and smash all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that goes beyond feel or reason. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a altogether self-absorbed and perfected shrine) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown sections of the old-time Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole immense municipality together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham expected the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking observer of American metropolitan cliche, what public buildings a visitor should receive. Ruscha recommended gas stations.

Banham pre-empted dissents to Los Angeles metropolitan flesh by claiming the flesh concerns very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban chassis at all in the commonly accepted appreciation. Yet whatever it does have, he indicated, has made a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, mounted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog destiny eventually condescends, he chronicled over aerial films of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached lives, … when the traffic grinds to a halt and the private vehicle is prohibited from wall street, quite a number of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Photograph: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the man who called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure after having, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who school themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages sounds on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that expected affliction of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The time of apparently boundless seat to please an obsession with single-family habitations “ve been given” lane to one of creation cranes sprouting to satisfy the brand-new demand for high-density vertical living. They stand not only over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new runway transit network, which started to develop almost 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, planning and implementation( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater makes of boy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway organization of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham find downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short chapter dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving auto, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical articulation navigation plan dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that accepts an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with questions that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal incomes in efficiency through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the psychological destitutions caused by destroying the residual apparitions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the road, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached live, it extremely must fall out of promote, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that sucked Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonour, passed fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, becoming the are the subject of critical contemplate and architectural rival.

Banham also realise the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco container on La Cienega Boulevard. Its architect? A certain Frank Gehry, then nearly unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed medium in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile project implies re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased creek ), but other municipalities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad rooms in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan world-wide.

These daylights, the rest of the city macrocosm also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring under the illusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, civilizes, parks and even bike-share arrangements, prepared paces toward the liveability so demanded by 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham deplored, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive order to incorporate older metropolitan goodness and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles discounts the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Hindering Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dire fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental metropolitan spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe viewed Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a poorly needed modernize of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion

The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world comprehended it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective beliefs can vary, the columnist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I guess LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major municipality in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since booklet, it has shown up on rosters of great books about modern metropolitans even those being prepared by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this journal that described so much of its initial advertisement with shock significance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times evaluates headline) has prevented its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his occupation when he firstly called, Banham knew full-well that his fellow intellectuals hated Los Angeles. How and why he himself arrived so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the value of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian designer and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this notebook, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham introduced his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who set him up in the Greene brethren architecturally loved Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what “hes been gone” go looking for, and the direction he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the path the academic world and then the rest of the world recognized the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Picture: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he testified his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially procured the city incomprehensible a reply said that he shared numerous critics, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham firstly attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous infinite with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental influence and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental lives to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular lieu to do a particular happen, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for accident even for joyous collisions. You propose the working day in advance, programme your activities, and forgo those random encounters with sidekicks and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of metropolitan life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city harboured out a hope: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repulses me is the fact that it gives revolutionary alternatives to almost every urban thought in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham itemized Los Angeles leavings from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with obvious pleasure. It seemed to legitimise a prototype he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned thought of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell smashed open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic grey, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness perturbed simply by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might sounds the city was indicated in simply the same way: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city villages, training exercises in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham made another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised organizes such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new office towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything stands as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown stage that started to deteriorate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The journals contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it plays the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan style, artistic power, international affect, distinctive way of life, and corporate identity[ attests that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles partitions its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive palaces; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and bearing enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the far-famed, then infamous, freeway plan he dubbed Autopia: a single intelligible region, a coherent state of mind in which Angelenos invest the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams sees. Photograph: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between sections on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys elements, drawn distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no beating for aesthetic crime; nothing but a immense planetary phlegm, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham saw a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in edge Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … constructed of timber and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but cheaply, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles city id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented form of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and persistent strain, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham described out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by adoring them , nor defaming them, but simply by realise them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would preach the same approach in their own urban classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, publicized the subsequent year: Withholding arbitration may be used as a tool to realize later conviction more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the esthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Picture: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles surely did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, columnist of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, departed so far as to name Banhams book dangerous: The hacks who do shopping center, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of routes, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and wield a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the extend molecules in kids of my own lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through the working day in the town that clears nonsense of history and smash all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that goes beyond feel or reason. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a altogether self-absorbed and perfected shrine) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown sections of the old-time Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole immense municipality together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham expected the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking observer of American metropolitan cliche, what public buildings a visitor should receive. Ruscha recommended gas stations.

Banham pre-empted dissents to Los Angeles metropolitan flesh by claiming the flesh concerns very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban chassis at all in the commonly accepted appreciation. Yet whatever it does have, he indicated, has made a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, mounted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog destiny eventually condescends, he chronicled over aerial films of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached lives, … when the traffic grinds to a halt and the private vehicle is prohibited from wall street, quite a number of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Photograph: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the man who called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure after having, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who school themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages sounds on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that expected affliction of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The time of apparently boundless seat to please an obsession with single-family habitations “ve been given” lane to one of creation cranes sprouting to satisfy the brand-new demand for high-density vertical living. They stand not only over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new runway transit network, which started to develop almost 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, planning and implementation( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater makes of boy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway organization of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham find downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short chapter dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving auto, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical articulation navigation plan dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that accepts an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with questions that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal incomes in efficiency through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the psychological destitutions caused by destroying the residual apparitions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the road, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached live, it extremely must fall out of promote, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that sucked Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonour, passed fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, becoming the are the subject of critical contemplate and architectural rival.

Banham also realise the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco container on La Cienega Boulevard. Its architect? A certain Frank Gehry, then nearly unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed medium in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile project implies re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased creek ), but other municipalities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad rooms in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan world-wide.

These daylights, the rest of the city macrocosm also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring under the illusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, civilizes, parks and even bike-share arrangements, prepared paces toward the liveability so demanded by 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham deplored, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive order to incorporate older metropolitan goodness and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles discounts the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Hindering Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dire fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental metropolitan spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe viewed Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a poorly needed modernize of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion

The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham affirmed his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals disliked. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world comprehended it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective beliefs can vary, the columnist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I guess LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, “the worlds largest” uncomfortable and most uncivilised major municipality in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in book again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles volume further written. Ever since booklet, it has shown up on rosters of great books about modern metropolitans even those being prepared by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this journal that described so much of its initial advertisement with shock significance( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, gibed the New York Times evaluates headline) has prevented its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his occupation when he firstly called, Banham knew full-well that his fellow intellectuals hated Los Angeles. How and why he himself arrived so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his is currently working on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the value of business enterprises, he reflected in its last chapter, included a discriminated Italian designer and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this notebook, disbelieved that anyone who cared for structure could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham introduced his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who set him up in the Greene brethren architecturally loved Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what “hes been gone” go looking for, and the direction he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the path the academic world and then the rest of the world recognized the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth in 1968. Picture: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he testified his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially procured the city incomprehensible a reply said that he shared numerous critics, wrote Nigel Whiteley in such studies Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham firstly attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous infinite with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how “hes come to” tractions with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental influence and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental lives to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular lieu to do a particular happen, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the working day, he deplored in the third largest talk. The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for accident even for joyous collisions. You propose the working day in advance, programme your activities, and forgo those random encounters with sidekicks and strangers that are traditionally one of the honors of metropolitan life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city harboured out a hope: The unique cost of Los Angeles what excites, intrigues and sometimes repulses me is the fact that it gives revolutionary alternatives to almost every urban thought in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham itemized Los Angeles leavings from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the scholars of modernity, with obvious pleasure. It seemed to legitimise a prototype he had already, in a 1959 section, proposed to supersede the old-fashioned thought of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Photograph: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell smashed open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic grey, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness perturbed simply by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might sounds the city was indicated in simply the same way: as a system of nodes, a constellation of city villages, training exercises in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham made another paw in the eye of diehards who insisted that a town should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised organizes such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new office towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything stands as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown stage that started to deteriorate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The journals contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it plays the functions of a great city, in terms of length, cosmopolitan style, artistic power, international affect, distinctive way of life, and corporate identity[ attests that] all the most admired theoreticians of the current century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, ought to have wrong.

Filled with photos and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles partitions its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach cities of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and expensive palaces; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and bearing enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the far-famed, then infamous, freeway plan he dubbed Autopia: a single intelligible region, a coherent state of mind in which Angelenos invest the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated fragment in Banhams sees. Photograph: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between sections on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often purposely impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys elements, drawn distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic honour here , no beating for aesthetic crime; nothing but a immense planetary phlegm, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 years later, Banham saw a stylistic bounty of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in edge Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … constructed of timber and stuccoed over, all identical at the back but cheaply, elaborately, decorated up-front, decorated with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles city id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented form of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the central and persistent strain, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham described out the meaning of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable structures not by adoring them , nor defaming them, but simply by realise them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would preach the same approach in their own urban classic, Discovering from Las Vegas, publicized the subsequent year: Withholding arbitration may be used as a tool to realize later conviction more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the esthetics of American commercial-grade culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Picture: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles surely did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, columnist of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, departed so far as to name Banhams book dangerous: The hacks who do shopping center, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servant in the discord of routes, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and wield a lot harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more human society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers abuse of the ground and the extend molecules in kids of my own lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through the working day in the town that clears nonsense of history and smash all the rules, and stimulated within him a passion that goes beyond feel or reason. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a altogether self-absorbed and perfected shrine) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently differentiated on all the maps in his volume ); the overgrown sections of the old-time Pacific Electric Railways rusting rails that once tied the whole immense municipality together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham expected the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking observer of American metropolitan cliche, what public buildings a visitor should receive. Ruscha recommended gas stations.

Banham pre-empted dissents to Los Angeles metropolitan flesh by claiming the flesh concerns very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban chassis at all in the commonly accepted appreciation. Yet whatever it does have, he indicated, has made a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, mounted of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog destiny eventually condescends, he chronicled over aerial films of Wilshire Boulevards double row of towers and frame-filling regions of detached lives, … when the traffic grinds to a halt and the private vehicle is prohibited from wall street, quite a number of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though much of LA is not bike-friendly. Photograph: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold statements for the man who called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure after having, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who school themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages sounds on wall street of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How readable would Banham, who died in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that expected affliction of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The time of apparently boundless seat to please an obsession with single-family habitations “ve been given” lane to one of creation cranes sprouting to satisfy the brand-new demand for high-density vertical living. They stand not only over a downtown grow miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no recent development stupefies any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys brand-new runway transit network, which started to develop almost 30 times after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success of funding, planning and implementation( at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the two countries now appears to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public infinite in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of the greater makes of boy but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than numerous current commentators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway organization of my acquaintance, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham find downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short chapter dedicated to it. Picture: Alamy

Banham also foretold the rise of the self-driving auto, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical articulation navigation plan dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that accepts an uncanny similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with questions that Banham also prophesied all those years ago. The marginal incomes in efficiency through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the psychological destitutions caused by destroying the residual apparitions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles merely constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the road, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached live, it extremely must fall out of promote, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that sucked Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonour, passed fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has received a home in the future of the city, becoming the are the subject of critical contemplate and architectural rival.

Banham also realise the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one astonishing and elegantly simple stucco container on La Cienega Boulevard. Its architect? A certain Frank Gehry, then nearly unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed medium in not only Los Angeles( its most recent high-profile project implies re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased creek ), but other municipalities as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary only one of the myriad rooms in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the metropolitan world-wide.

These daylights, the rest of the city macrocosm also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring under the illusions of total exceptionalism which prevails in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, civilizes, parks and even bike-share arrangements, prepared paces toward the liveability so demanded by 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively contrived , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham deplored, warring pressure group cannot get out of each other hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of culture shrines and real estate values.

In its impressive order to incorporate older metropolitan goodness and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles discounts the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Hindering Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dire fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental metropolitan spirit.

The engineering-trained scribe viewed Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a poorly needed modernize of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a useds manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion

The post A ‘radical alternative’: how one gentleman changed the sensing of Los Angeles appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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