friday night / saturday morning

concrete jungle

we went to coventry to find some brutalist buildings. of which, coventry has famously quite a few - but looking specifically for just one style of architecture, is a real eye-opener... there is here a very interesting e-book on the works of the architect john madin who designed birmingham's brutalist central library, which again is an eye-opener at just how much of this style has proliferated around the city i live in. i'm almost tempted to do a short tour of some of his buildings... coventry was a good day out though - i don't go there very often, but each time i do, i always come away with a new experience.

as i remember coventry from back in '94(when i used to visit to buy copious vintage fred perry's from the city centre thrift shops), it's a lot cleaner and more welcoming than it used to feel... coming-off the train into a modernist railway station is always a pleasure, then you have the now underpass-free walk through the older part of town, to get to the shopping centre and the environs of the cathedral beyond. they really don't push the brutalist architecture of the city - of which you will find no mention being made in any of the many local museums/exhibitions. there has to be a coventry equivalent of ben waddington for this, somewhere?

all things considered, my earliest experience of coventry, is via the song concrete jungle by the specials, the video to which, featured a young roddy radiation being pursued through underpasses by people of a dubious political persuasion. i have been drinking with roddy(in a bar in spain, no less), and he is good company of an evening, so i'm glad to be appreciating his hometown. he's mentioned in local museums however, unlike these buildings...

essential reading - c20society (music - Bach - Brandenburg Concertos No.1 - ii: Adagio)

international jet set

The businessmen are having fun are they on a different plane to me
I've lost touch with reality, they all seem so absurd to me
Like well dressed chimpanzees

Spend and spend and spend and spend
Will the muzak never end?

poor buggers... we spent an hour taking the piss out of these people, at the next table, in some generic coffee shop in barcelona's brand new airport wing(no pun intended), all super shiny floors, and over-priced generic coffee shops selling pastries well above the mark.
i was reminded of this following a tweet by that there david quantick about travel-taverns, and my own experience of meeting sales-reps over the years... i've stayed in a few travel-lodges over the years, strange familiar looking places, all brown and orange with oatmeal coloured carpets.
many years ago - i went for a job interview with a courier firm, and i was going to be working with the interviewer, a portly older-looking bloke, who had slept on a cot in his office for three months, trying to catch up on the work... the job was going to be 10 pm till 6 am... and despite them being keen to have me start right away, i got a better daytime offer, thankfully.

back to barcelona though... we'd just escaped the cultural madness that is BCN to find ourselves with an hour to kill in the departure lounge, and of course took to the well worn travel routine of taking the michael out of our fellow journeymen, for shits and giggles.
the businessmen in the photo were tucking germanically into beers and pastries at six in the morning... all dressed up with somewhere to go, still playing their arrogant office politic games with the airport people around them... and were slightly perturbed to find themselves being sniggered at by two tattooed scruff hillbillies(this is not the percieved wisdom of the cultural pecking order - mentally i suppose they were having us demoted to the postroom for six months... although i have worked in a postroom and it's not that bad a place to be...).
i kept having the specials song(see above) go around in my head... it reminded me of not long after i'd first heard the song, and i'd seen some businessmen in a restuarant, all walking timidly in single file, no one daring to take the step of breaking rank.
they did give us a few glances, and once they'd sussed out their powers weren't going to work on us went back to talking about mortgages, and projected business options, or some such guff(do tired businessmen dream of electric sleep?), and even we got bored and amused ourselves by taking photos of the napkin dispencer, as we concluded the character on it looked like a badly dressed transvestite.