Saturday, February 06, 2010

not a glimmer, but a gift

David Schaengold's fine first post at The League fills me with the urge to visit a cathedral/skyscraper hybrid like the Tribune Tower or the Woolworth Building. His heartening and refreshingly original insight that there are many ways in which "modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages" does not, however, require positing that "nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble." Or so it seems to me. Here's the wonderful Edward Grant on the matter:

The idea, and the habit, of applying reason to resolve the innumerable questions about our world, and of always raising new questions, did not come to modern science from out of the void. Nor did it originate with the great scientific minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries... It came out of the Middle Ages from many faceless scholastic logicians, natural philosophers, and theologians... It is a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world, a gift that makes our modern society possible, though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged.

But this is only to bolster Schaengold's point that the "civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history." We've made good use of the gift.
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Wednesday, February 03, 2010

The New Prometheus

Herewith a nomination for our most hideously vindictive piece of public statuary, the Samuel Rea monument in Manhattan's Penn Station. The 1910 sculpture by Adolph Weinmann is fine enough. What makes it unbearably cruel though, is the backstory.

Samuel Rea had been working for the Pennsylvania Railrod since he was 16. He rose up in the company, and under his Vice-Presidency glorious Old Penn Station was completed in 1910, the crowning achievement of American architectural trinity McKim, Mead and White. Rea's likeness, and that of a previous railroad President Alexander Cassat (brother of painter Mary Cassat), were installed in niches of the newly built architectural wonder. When Rea assumed presidency of the Railroad two years after the station's completion, it was his job to defend this superb American accomplishment from those who called it a wasteful extravagance. Rea succeeded. Visually speaking, we can imagine this was not that hard to do.

But the conceits of architectural modernism combined with the triumph of the automobile (which had supposedly "eclipsed" the train), led inexorably to the destruction of Old Penn Station in 1963, resulting - because trains turned out to be not so outmoded after all - in our freakishly hateful present replacement. The new Penn Station brings certain Bible verses to mind. As Vincent Scully famously remarked, "One entered the city like a god. Now one scuttles in like a rat." Other worthies testify to their extreme dissatisfaction as well, hoping for the success - may it be granted! - of Moynihan Station.

I spend a lot of time at the current Penn Station, and I often see people screaming and fighting, cursing and hitting each other. Would the old terminal have prevented such spiteful behavior? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't rule out the fact that overwhelming grandeur has an ameliorative effect on public behavior. And yet, as disturbing as it may be, there's something appropriate about snubbing one's neighbor in such a hellish setting. New Penn Station makes it feel right to be rude.

Following the destruction of Old Penn Station, the two aformentioned statues were preserved and placed on the new sight. Alexander Cassatt has since been mercifully removed, but not Rea. He is there today, and every day, forced to witness our undoing of his life's work. Once his likeness looked upon Roman grandeur, now it stares at an ATM console. Decades have passed - he cannot look away. Had I the choice between this fate and eagles picking at my regenerating intestines for all time, I'd be on the fence.

Labels: architecture, urbanism

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Monday, February 01, 2010

Complicating Localism

"I'll take the falafel with Thai sauce over curry with a side of jambalaya sushi and a Brooklyn Lager, please." This is what I imagined myself ordering at the Giraffe Restaurant at Heathrow airport, which promises "international cuisine." In a fit of localist conviction, I "protested" the well-marketed but pretentious Giraffe and ate, full of self-satisfaction, at the same terminal's "English pub." Even if Heathrow was barely recognizable as London, I was going to be true to place. I was then served my Fish n' Chips by a Checkoslovakian. On the next trip through, too tired for my principles, I surrendered to the superior menu of Giraffe, and it was a decent meal. Such a restaurant, I realized, can actually highlight local foods worldwide that might not otherwise have been noticed. Considering the people coming through Heathrow airport, Giraffe may have been being most true to place. I'm glad, however, for the sake of non-airport localities, that the chain seems to be limiting itself to flight terminals.

Similarly, consider celebrity American chef Bobby Flay. At first glance, what could be more destructive to localist principles than Flay's show Throwdown. He's the perfect villain set on assaulting America's neighborhood variety - and he hits where it hurts: in the stomach. American towns may have cultivated their own, culinary oddities: Texas chile, Kansas City Barbecue, Maine lobster sandwiches, Buffalo wings, etc. But here comes the big city chef with network executive back-up, sexy assistants, and a film crew to beat these local chefs at their own game. The aim of this program - so it would seem - is to humiliate. Flay and his crew roll in to show those silly non-New Yorkers that there's nothing they can cook up that iron chefs can't just as easily accomplish with their razor-sharp mandolines and ten-thousand dollar ovens.

Problem is, that's not what it's like at all. The actual result of Flay's show is to highlight American localities, who might not get the attention otherwise. It certainly helps that Flay is not a jerk. Often he just can't top local recipes, and he's a good sport about it. Even if he does top the recipes, the result is a new level of attention to a worthy hometown chef. Flay's show, furthermore, is his own kind of localism. Born and raised in NYC, this is one way he seems to have grappled with the country coming to him.

When American urban elites, in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, mock the ideals of localism by caricaturing small town America, they are rightfully criticized. But Sinclair is one option among several. In the case of Flay, the potentially oppressive apparati of the big city media machine does not minimize localism, but magnifies it. In fact, Flay, and Heathrow's Giraffe, are dependent upon vibrant localism for their success. The word for this is not "colonialism," but symbiosis.

Labels: food, localism

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