Speaker 1: Well, the you know what the little detail is. Uh,
Speaker 1: you've probably heard this is Hunter Biden is claiming millions
Speaker 1: of dollars and losses from the fire of our work.
Speaker 2: I mean it's supposed to a few original hunters.
Speaker 3: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
Speaker 3: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister gorbuschaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles W. Cook and Steven
Speaker 3: Hayward doing James Lillas. Today we're going to talk architecture
Speaker 3: and then the future of arts in America with Justin Schubau.
Speaker 3: So let's ever sols a podcast.
Speaker 1: You know they call it a film business, but money
Speaker 1: is the last thing.
Speaker 2: A person should be thinking about.
Speaker 1: In my book, my family is here today, my boys,
Speaker 1: my girls, My kids used to do things aggravate me too.
Speaker 1: I'd take them to a game and they'd want to
Speaker 1: come home with a different player.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast and if you can
Speaker 3: believe it, it's a podcast once again. And if you
Speaker 3: know what I'm referring to, you're wondering are they going
Speaker 3: to get around to that at the end of the show.
Speaker 3: I certainly hope so. In the meantime, we have sparkling
Speaker 3: conversation as ever here with Charles C. W. Cook and
Speaker 3: Stephen Hayward. Gentleman, Welcome morning, James.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: That desultory acceptance of my good wishes. You can at
Speaker 3: least attempt.
Speaker 4: To jin up a little enthusiasm for the.
Speaker 2: Charles, No, I just thank you so much.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a remarkable day.
Speaker 1: We have a.
Speaker 3: New constitutional amendment apparently has been ratified. Is this true
Speaker 3: that Joe Biden is that the National Archives about to
Speaker 3: set himself on fire if the National Archivist doesn't adhere
Speaker 3: to our norms and just a wave of.
Speaker 4: The ratification of the er into the Constitution? Am I
Speaker 4: getting this right?
Speaker 2: No, you're getting it wrong, because he has declared it.
Speaker 2: That was the word he is.
Speaker 5: He actually put out a graphic and it said I
Speaker 5: declare on the graphic.
Speaker 1: Did he also declare bankruptcy?
Speaker 3: Because I remember there's an office scene where Michael Scott
Speaker 3: does the same thing, believing declaring it to be sufficient.
Speaker 3: He declares it a we'll touch it on the way out.
Speaker 2: So good, James, it's so good.
Speaker 3: Will tell us a little bit about it, Charles, dis
Speaker 3: I do you.
Speaker 5: Think This is my favorite thing that has happened in
Speaker 5: a long time. And it's made even better by the
Speaker 5: fact that one half hour after he declared it, there
Speaker 5: was a piece up at Crazy Jennifer Rubin's new website,
Speaker 5: The Contrarian, written by Lawrence Tribe saying it's true, he's
Speaker 5: declared it. It's the twenty eighth the memo, that's all
Speaker 5: he needed to do, and explaining why it's now the
Speaker 5: twenty eighth Amendment. You can't write this nexus, Joe Biden,
Speaker 5: Jen Rubin, Lawrence Tribe, the twenty eighth Amendment. If somebody
Speaker 5: had proposed writing this as a parody for me, I
Speaker 5: would have said, this is too absurd.
Speaker 2: But it's not so for those who don't know.
Speaker 5: The background here is that in the nineteen seventies and
Speaker 5: eighties there was an actual debate over the ratification of
Speaker 5: the Equal Rights Amendment. I think we may have been
Speaker 5: to this on a previous podcast. Anyhow, it expired in
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty two and it wasn't ratified. Philish slafefully one.
Speaker 5: And whether you think that's good or bad, it's a fact.
Speaker 5: Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it out loud that it wasn't ratified,
Speaker 5: and the dj has said it for years, and Barack
Speaker 5: Obama has said it, and everyone has said it, and
Speaker 5: the National Archivist has said it, including today.
Speaker 2: It didn't get through, But in the.
Speaker 5: Last three weeks or so, there's been this real push
Speaker 5: that has built atop this percolating desire pretend that it
Speaker 5: just passed, because subsequent to the deadline, some states ratified
Speaker 5: the amendment.
Speaker 2: I never thought though this would culminate in Joe Biden
Speaker 2: publicly say it's in the Constitution.
Speaker 5: I mean, Kirstin Gillibrand, fine, we expect that from but
Speaker 5: the President of the United States pretending he has this
Speaker 5: authority is just such a great story.
Speaker 3: And those are our norms and they have nothing to
Speaker 3: do with any sort of autocratic bending and shaping and
Speaker 3: perversion of the laws and statues at all. Stephen, you know,
Speaker 3: don't have some thoughts about this, as well as other
Speaker 3: farewell items that Biden has said on his way out.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, my view is, why stop here, Why
Speaker 1: don't we just proceed on a Harrison bergerin style to
Speaker 1: the tenth, two hundred, eleventh, and two hundred and twelfth
Speaker 1: Amendments to the Constitution giving us complete equality right with
Speaker 1: the handicapper General if you know that great story from
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one. Well, I mean, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, except the
Speaker 1: horse won't die. Just give you one example of the
Speaker 1: plasticity of the law and the Constitution for the left.
Speaker 1: So you know, my dean at Berkeley Law, who's very
Speaker 1: nice to me and the nice to John Hugh, but
Speaker 1: he's way out there. Irwin Chemerinsky. He has argued with
Speaker 1: a straight face that the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: should declare the electoral college in the United States Senate
Speaker 1: are unconstitutional. Why because they violate the one man, one
Speaker 1: vote principle in the text and the equal protection clause.
Speaker 1: So in other words, you know, never mind the theory
Speaker 1: behind and all the rest of that. They think that
Speaker 1: it's perfectly legitimate or whatever note of power can be
Speaker 1: controlled by the left to say one principle of the Constitution.
Speaker 1: Trump's others that are stated in playing black and white text.
Speaker 1: That's how literally really think about the text of the Constitution.
Speaker 1: So you know, the left wants what it wants, and
Speaker 1: they want the Equal Rights Amendment. And then my final
Speaker 1: word is I do like to ask the people worked
Speaker 1: up about this. Can you name anything any right that
Speaker 1: women have not achieved through the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection
Speaker 1: Clause and other ordinary legislation. Maybe one or two things
Speaker 1: you can think of, but it's almost all the things
Speaker 1: they've wanted in the Equal Rights Amendment have been achieved
Speaker 1: by other legal means over the decades.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, plasticity, the Constitution being living and breathing. So
Speaker 3: it was Kim Kardashian, but I'm.
Speaker 4: Not exactly sure. We're talking factory parts here.
Speaker 3: The other thing, and you might call it hypocrisy. Some
Speaker 3: dare that struck me this week was Biden coming out
Speaker 3: in a series of tweets and talking about the importance
Speaker 3: of veracity and social media. And everybody knows he didn't
Speaker 3: write the tweets. Somebody wrote them for him. He's not
Speaker 3: sitting down there steepling his fingers and thinking what exact
Speaker 3: point do I want to make about misinformation and truth
Speaker 3: on the variety of Internet platforms that we had no
Speaker 3: somebody just typed it out in his name, saying that
Speaker 3: we have to be wary of things that are not
Speaker 3: true on the Internet, and one of those things being
Speaker 3: not true on the internet is that Joe Biden said this,
Speaker 3: So I enjoyed that, joyed the pardon of the non
Speaker 3: violent drug offenders. Now what sticks out for you guys
Speaker 3: about that When you think about partnering of non violent
Speaker 3: drug offenders, what do you think? What? What series of
Speaker 3: thoughts go through your mind?
Speaker 1: Well, my first thought is I'll bet the overwhelming majority
Speaker 1: of them are not nonviolent or are not in fact
Speaker 1: substantial dealers. And we know how this game is played, uh,
Speaker 1: to avoid going to trial, which is long and costly
Speaker 1: and uses a lot of resources. You get, please, you
Speaker 1: plead down people into possession or other lesser charges and
Speaker 1: then give them the maximum sentence for what the statute says.
Speaker 1: So we're not we're not letting out of prison, oh
Speaker 1: somebody who's just caught with, you know, half a pound
Speaker 1: of marijuana for personal use or something like that.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And so that's why you know, we're again being sold
Speaker 1: a false narrative of who it is who's in prison
Speaker 1: for drug offenses. And so I you know, my guess
Speaker 1: is we're going to see a lot of these people
Speaker 1: return to the drug trade and end up getting arrested
Speaker 1: down the road. Here.
Speaker 3: Well, Trump did the same thing if I recall, do
Speaker 3: you unit, and it is if there's one federal prison,
Speaker 3: you know, Barabbas Prison, which is stocked with people that
Speaker 3: they can conveniently pardon at the end and maybe in
Speaker 3: order to make themselves look magnanimous and generous. Charles, I
Speaker 3: know you're eager for a war on drugs conversation.
Speaker 2: No, I just you know, and irritates me about this
Speaker 2: so much?
Speaker 5: Is Joe Biden spent the vast majority of his career.
Speaker 5: In fact, his main contributions to American law while he
Speaker 5: was in the Senate were in the realm of.
Speaker 2: Drugs and firearms.
Speaker 5: These were the two things he wanted to regulate, and
Speaker 5: he was particularly interested in regulating the intersection of drugs
Speaker 5: and firearms, people who had firearms, who used drugs, people
Speaker 5: who sold drugs and used firearms. There are quotes going
Speaker 5: back to the late nineteen seventies from Joe Biden, throughout
Speaker 5: the nineteen eighties, in the early nineteen nineties when he.
Speaker 2: Told George H. W.
Speaker 5: Bush that he was a squash soft on the issue,
Speaker 5: and then especially in the early nineteen nineties when he
Speaker 5: helped write the crime Bell, in which Joe Biden says
Speaker 5: all manner of things, including that he doesn't care why
Speaker 5: anyone commits a crime like this, that he doesn't care
Speaker 5: what problems people have, that he doesn't care if it's
Speaker 5: an addiction or not. The role of the federal government
Speaker 5: must be to put these people in prison. And in
Speaker 5: the last couple of years he has pardoned his son
Speaker 5: for committing a crime at the intersection of drugs and guns,
Speaker 5: and is now issuing these pardons and talking as if
Speaker 5: for his entire life he has been a critic of
Speaker 5: incarceration per se. And I just find it irritating, not
Speaker 5: because people can't change their mind, they can, but because
Speaker 5: he's never accounted for a single single shift.
Speaker 3: It was the popular thing back then, and he also
Speaker 3: had He also had less hair before the plugs, right,
Speaker 3: So I think that actually the sweat accumulating on his
Speaker 3: scalp from the mirror from the lights of the television
Speaker 3: cameras made him very, very able to feel where the
Speaker 3: wind was blowing. Some people use a wetted finger. Joe
Speaker 3: Biden used a wetted scalp. But then as he got
Speaker 3: more hair, inexplicably he perhaps became politically deaf to the
Speaker 3: ships in public.
Speaker 2: Because the hair came down over his ears.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Nolo, possibly it. Well, he'll be gone soon. But
Speaker 3: he has warned us, however, about an oligarchy that is
Speaker 3: taking shape in America within a tech industrial complex, hoping
Speaker 3: perhaps that he will go out, or maybe the person
Speaker 3: who's writing his speeches, hoping that he'll go out like Eisenhower,
Speaker 3: somebody who whose warnings will be echoed and referred to
Speaker 3: decades later as being remarkably prescient. I was more worried
Speaker 3: about the tech industrial complex and it's it's intertwining with
Speaker 3: government when there was an actual concerted effort to suppress information,
Speaker 3: to suppress information, true information in the name of public safety.
Speaker 3: Truth than the other thing. Of all people to talk
Speaker 3: about the worries that we should have with technology in
Speaker 3: the industry, coming from Biden, it's rather rich. But then again,
Speaker 3: who knows if he was responsible for any of that
Speaker 3: stuff at all.
Speaker 4: I tend to think not.
Speaker 3: I tend to think that we're promulgating all the COVID regulations.
Speaker 3: He was back with a dish of soft served somewhere
Speaker 3: watching clues confirmation hearings. Rubio impressed. Now you may say, well,
Speaker 3: here's the guy who who was sort of all on
Speaker 3: board with all the neo Kon stuff before and now
Speaker 3: he's changed to And I don't really know that much.
Speaker 3: All I know is that you can tell what is
Speaker 3: being said, what people are being allowed to be said
Speaker 3: right now. And if we're tossing off this fiction of
Speaker 3: a transnational identity, this sort of post post national star
Speaker 3: Trek federation world in which all are subsumed in one
Speaker 3: glorious conglomerateive individuals, if we're getting rid of that in
Speaker 3: favor of pure bald naked self interest again, yay, I say.
Speaker 3: I mean, I want everybody to get along, don't get
Speaker 3: me wrong, But the idea that the United States should
Speaker 3: bend an e been a knee because the EU decides
Speaker 3: that this is the way the world should be ordered. Nah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So well, I don't know which part of that
Speaker 1: you want us to grab hold of and run with.
Speaker 1: I don't care.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I watched some of the confirmation hearings this week,
Speaker 1: and it's been some great theater, mostly about how completely
Speaker 1: lunatic the Democrats are still about the matter. I mean,
Speaker 1: there is this old custom going back decades now that
Speaker 1: a new president usually gets one cabinet member rejected. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if that your own party has the Senate.
Speaker 1: It happened under Reagan, happened under the first President Bush,
Speaker 1: the second President Bush, happened for Bill Clinton. And they
Speaker 1: see to be having trouble picking your target this time.
Speaker 1: It looked like it was going to be HEG. Sath,
Speaker 1: but it looks like he's going to go through. There's
Speaker 1: It looks to me now like the two people who
Speaker 1: might be in jeopardy of being rejected are R. F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy Junior. RFK Junior and maybe Tulsey Gabbard. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's on the substance of Gabbard or
Speaker 1: or if there's on the one hand, anger the Democrats
Speaker 1: that she switched teams after having knifed Kamala Harris five
Speaker 1: years ago in the primaries, or if they really have
Speaker 1: doubts about her views because which you have changed over
Speaker 1: the years. And then RFK, I mean, he's just a
Speaker 1: wild card, and I don't think anyone knows quite what
Speaker 1: to do about that. I have to say it is
Speaker 1: genius of Trump to get Democrats to hate to Kennedy.
Speaker 1: I mean, Republicans have been trying for sixty years with
Speaker 1: no success, and now Trump's done by nominating him to
Speaker 1: the cabinet. And then finally, maybe we have RFK all
Speaker 1: wrong all these years when I heard him attacking big oil,
Speaker 1: it turned out he was attacking big seed oil.
Speaker 3: And so here we are, well, we already have Red
Speaker 3: number three band or Red number two. So obviously the
Speaker 3: RFK influence is there. Charles, you are closer to Rubio
Speaker 3: than the rest of us. Are you impressed with his performance?
Speaker 3: You think he'll be a good Secretary of State?
Speaker 5: Yes, and yes, I would know that the shift that
Speaker 5: you observed is pretty typical for Rubio. Now our prefaces
Speaker 5: by saying I like Rubio. He's been a really good
Speaker 5: senator from Florida. He has his flaws. He is, for example,
Speaker 5: in the pocket of big sugar. It's one great thing
Speaker 5: about Rohn de Santis is he's not He told them
Speaker 5: on day one to pound sugar.
Speaker 2: I guess. But Rubio is granular.
Speaker 5: Other than that, though, he's done really well as a
Speaker 5: senator from Florida because he does what Florida wants him
Speaker 5: to do. But he is and always has been somewhat prottean.
Speaker 5: If you look back to the Rubio of nineteen ninety
Speaker 5: eight when he was Speaker of the House in Florida,
Speaker 5: and the Rubyo of two thousand and six, and the
Speaker 5: Ruby of twenty ten, and the Ruby of twenty eighteen
Speaker 5: and the Ruby of now they're all different. Rubio became
Speaker 5: a tea partier. That wasn't who he was. He wasn't
Speaker 5: a Thomas Massey type who has believed the same thing
Speaker 5: for thirty years, for good or ill. Rubio became a
Speaker 5: tea partier, and then when he saw the politics of
Speaker 5: the party in the country who were moving, he shifted
Speaker 5: away from it. So he's moved to fit with the moment.
Speaker 5: That is in part of criticism, But at another level,
Speaker 5: he is going to be serving as a Secretary of State,
Speaker 5: which is a role that is subordinate to the president.
Speaker 5: And if he had all these ideas that didn't comport
Speaker 5: with those of Donald Trump, who's the guy who won
Speaker 5: the election, that they wouldn't work very well. So when
Speaker 5: I see people say, well, this person or that person
Speaker 5: is clearly trying to please the president. If their job
Speaker 5: is to work for the president, that doesn't bother me
Speaker 5: in the slightest. Pam Bondi, who's up for Attorney General
Speaker 5: has said some things about guns that I don't like
Speaker 5: as a Second Amendment advocate. But the villain there was
Speaker 5: Rick Scott, because she worked for Rick Scott, and Rick
Speaker 5: Scott was the one who was pushing certain laws and
Speaker 5: it was her job to defend them and enforce them.
Speaker 5: So I think we'll be able to do a good
Speaker 5: job because I think he is interested in the area.
Speaker 5: I think that he has good diplomatic skills. And the
Speaker 5: last thing I say about Rubia is this is really important.
Speaker 5: Although his politics has changed somewhat over time, he has
Speaker 5: always loved America and seen its role in the world
Speaker 5: as being indispensable. And you need that in a secretary
Speaker 5: of state. Unfortunately, especially given some of our recent secretaries
Speaker 5: of state, they don't always have that as a virtue.
Speaker 3: Other words, when we talk about whether Van's like Rubio
Speaker 3: and Joe Biden, we might say, hmm, there's a word
Speaker 3: for that, and the word is politician. But people, Hugseeth
Speaker 3: doesn't strike anybody as a politician. I mean, he may
Speaker 3: be dabbling in it, but he doesn't strike you as that.
Speaker 3: He strikes you as sort of the Ramrod straight type
Speaker 3: who can keep a straight face while he's being hectored
Speaker 3: by some handwaving herodance. That did not make for the
Speaker 3: best political theater I thought for the Democrats.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know, I have three or four
Speaker 1: favorite smackdowns from the nominees this week, and maybe the
Speaker 1: top was when Elizabeth Warren said, in a typically imper
Speaker 1: his way, well you have said generals shouldn't be allowed
Speaker 1: to be on corporate boards, and are you? But you
Speaker 1: won't apply that to yourself? And he just says, I'm
Speaker 1: not a general senator, right. And then I have to
Speaker 1: say the Treasury nominee, Scott Descent, I knew nothing about him,
Speaker 1: but what I watched I was quite impressed with.
Speaker 3: The guy, I would say.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of my favorite smack down there
Speaker 1: was Ron Wyden of Oregon has been around forever, and
Speaker 1: he says, you know, we're in this clean energy race
Speaker 1: with China, and Descent said, no or not. China's building
Speaker 1: one hundred coal plants this year, ten nuclear plants. We're
Speaker 1: in an energy race, not a clean energy race with China.
Speaker 1: And about you know what's Biden gonna do. I mean
Speaker 1: that's a pretty definitive SmackDown, and the boy talk about
Speaker 1: leading with your chin. Oh find Mazy Hurano asked every
Speaker 1: single nominee, have you ever, you know, been a sexual harasser?
Speaker 1: Have you ever demanded sexual faith? I don't, I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, are you now or have you ever been
Speaker 1: a male? I mean, it's just astounding the way she
Speaker 1: conducts herself.
Speaker 3: Indeed, indeed, when you bring up China, you bring up
Speaker 3: the imminent rejiggering, reconfiguration, reselling, whatever is going to happen
Speaker 3: to TikTok, And we should probably get to that at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the hour after we meet with our guests,
Speaker 3: because that is fascinating, especially when you have all these
Speaker 3: TikTokers in America fleeing.
Speaker 1: To Little Red Book or Red Book, which.
Speaker 3: Is the Chinese equivalent, which apparently I was providing them
Speaker 3: with this incredible look at China, and the scales are
Speaker 3: falling through their eyes and they're realizing they've been told
Speaker 3: lies about communism. China's great, we'll get to that. Hey,
Speaker 3: want to tell you one thing.
Speaker 4: My wife has gone.
Speaker 3: It's been gone for some time.
Speaker 4: She left me. She left me for Arizona to be
Speaker 4: with her mom. Don't worry, she's coming back.
Speaker 3: What this means However, in the afternoon sometimes I want
Speaker 3: to take a nap, and since she's none in the house,
Speaker 3: I have the heat down. I have the heat turned
Speaker 3: off in all kinds of rooms because it's just me
Speaker 3: living in the big house now. And that means I
Speaker 3: go to the I go to the guest room because
Speaker 3: it's got a little electric blower heater, and I turned
Speaker 3: that on and I have a nice little nap. Well,
Speaker 3: I did the other day, and I realized, while yes,
Speaker 3: it's warm in here, b.
Speaker 1: These are bad sheets.
Speaker 3: I got bad sheets in this room.
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Speaker 4: And how's it going?
Speaker 5: Pretty well? I do enjoy them. My wife chose them.
Speaker 5: I think I say this every time, but it is true.
Speaker 5: My wife chose these sheets because when I was in
Speaker 5: the process of buying them, I thought, is this the
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Speaker 5: And it's very important that they're breathaball in Florida because
Speaker 5: it's cold at the moment. James, I'm sure you're very,
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Speaker 5: not normally fifty degrees. And they are breathable and comfortable
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Speaker 3: the podcast. Justin Schubou, President of the National Civic Art Society.
Speaker 4: I like the sound of that.
Speaker 3: He serves as the chairman of the United States Commission
Speaker 3: on Fine Arts and is on the shortlist of candidates
Speaker 3: to head the National Endowment for the Arts.
Speaker 6: Justin welcome, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: We've been undergoing a civic uglyfication process here in the
Speaker 3: United States for some time. Even though we had glimmers
Speaker 3: of hope in the eighties with a return to postmodern
Speaker 3: architecture that brought back some old styles and some flourishes
Speaker 3: and touches that touched on the great civic Western heritage,
Speaker 3: we have been done poorly by our city planners, by
Speaker 3: our architects, by our artists, who have inflicted one brutalist
Speaker 3: non entity after the other on us. Donald Trump tried
Speaker 3: to do something of the last administration with a series
Speaker 3: of executive orders I believe, which said, hey, you know what,
Speaker 3: going forward, it's not going to be ugly. It's not
Speaker 3: going to be a bunch of concrete. It's going to
Speaker 3: have some columns, okay, and maybe a pediment or two.
Speaker 3: Reversed by the Biden administration. Since everybody believes that modernism
Speaker 3: and I like, don't get me wrong, I like modernism,
Speaker 3: but we've had a paucity of beauty in the public
Speaker 3: sphere for some time, almost by design. What can we
Speaker 3: do to change that? What would you do to change that?
Speaker 7: Well, as you mentioned, President Trump issued this revolutionary executive
Speaker 7: order reorienting federal architecture, which had been almost entirely modernists
Speaker 7: typically ugly since World War Two. And Trump Trump's executive
Speaker 7: order required that new federal buildings ennobling, be inspiring, be
Speaker 7: liked by ordinary Americans.
Speaker 6: As opposed to architectural elites.
Speaker 7: And he said there should be a preference for classical
Speaker 7: and traditional design for buildings across the country. Both terms
Speaker 7: defined very broadly, so for instance, classical included Art Deco
Speaker 7: and as for Washington, d C.
Speaker 6: The order was at its.
Speaker 7: Most stringent, requiring that new federal buildings be classical. You know,
Speaker 7: I would love to see that order be reissued. In fact,
Speaker 7: I'd be shocked if it is not.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think it.
Speaker 7: Was one of the most popular things he did during
Speaker 7: his first term, and I think, you know, he's a builder,
Speaker 7: and he has his sense, his fingers on the pulse
Speaker 7: of the American people.
Speaker 3: It's not just that the architecture was modern. It's not
Speaker 3: that the United States and WPA buildings in the nineteen
Speaker 3: thirties build a lot of post offices around the country,
Speaker 3: and most of them were in a modern style, federal modern,
Speaker 3: which you don't have sort of quity quasi fascistic overtones.
Speaker 3: But we did it better. We humanized that style. And
Speaker 3: the other half was frankly colonial style stuff. So the
Speaker 3: government is adept at doing that and can do that.
Speaker 3: But we're not in a period right now where the
Speaker 3: government is building an awful lot of buildings scattering embassies
Speaker 3: of post offices around the country anymore. So how would
Speaker 3: this actually play out? Is this something that even if
Speaker 3: they redo the Trump orders, that we're not going to
Speaker 3: see an awful lot of it. That really probably what
Speaker 3: matters most is on the ground in local museums, in
Speaker 3: local arts funding, where the NEA could change what it
Speaker 3: funds to reflect perhaps more the mood and tastes of
Speaker 3: the people, or should the anya's position be to instruct
Speaker 3: those people that their tastes are archaic and kitchie and
Speaker 3: they ought to really pay attention to a banana tape.
Speaker 4: To the wall.
Speaker 7: Well as for federal buildings, and I guess I should
Speaker 7: say that my organization had a hand in instigating and
Speaker 7: drafting the order. At times, the federal government has been
Speaker 7: the largest patron of art and architecture in the country,
Speaker 7: not just architecture with all the buildings, but one half
Speaker 7: of one percent of all construction funds must go towards
Speaker 7: art installations out these buildings, and you add that up
Speaker 7: and it's an enormous amount. So the order i think
Speaker 7: applied only to buildings costing over fifty million dollars in more.
Speaker 7: And it's not as if there are dozens and dozens
Speaker 7: of buildings being constructed.
Speaker 6: But when it comes to.
Speaker 7: Some of these buildings in significant cities, they have tremendous
Speaker 7: symbolic importance. And one place that would be of great
Speaker 7: importance is the site of the FBI building on Pennsylvania
Speaker 7: Avenue in Washington, d C.
Speaker 6: As you may know, that building is coming down.
Speaker 7: It's a brutalist design, horrible design from the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 7: and it's falling down. Trump himself has said that he
Speaker 7: wants the FBI to stay at that site, and given
Speaker 7: the fact that he wants a classical architecture for DC,
Speaker 7: we could get a magnificent new FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue,
Speaker 7: which is one of the most important streets in the country.
Speaker 7: As for the NEA, I think there is incredible opportunity
Speaker 7: to change the direction of the agency.
Speaker 6: Just to be clear, it's the.
Speaker 7: Largest funder of the arts and arts education in the country,
Speaker 7: with a budget of around two hundred and ten million
Speaker 7: dollars a year. My vision for the NA comes from
Speaker 7: Dana Joya, the masterful poet and translator who ran the
Speaker 7: NA under George W.
Speaker 6: Bush.
Speaker 7: He said, a great nation deserves great art, and I
Speaker 7: couldn't believe more. I think that the highest art is
Speaker 7: that which is beautiful, profound, or moving. And when I
Speaker 7: go into a contemporary art museum, that is not what
Speaker 7: I'm seeing.
Speaker 6: Too often.
Speaker 7: It's things like that banana duct taped to a wall,
Speaker 7: that artwork that sold for six point two million dollars recently.
Speaker 7: And I think the NEA, through its patronage, could help
Speaker 7: instigate a new renaissance in American art.
Speaker 4: One more for me.
Speaker 3: Yes, of course, the duct tape banana made everybody's eyes rule.
Speaker 3: But of course we were instructed that this is in
Speaker 3: a fine, long tradition that going back to Greet and
Speaker 3: the rest of them, the surrealism and confounding expectations of
Speaker 3: questioning what is art et cetera, et cetera et cetera,
Speaker 3: installations being the plague of.
Speaker 4: Museums for all of these years.
Speaker 3: So let's say we.
Speaker 4: Get a new broom, we get a new people in
Speaker 4: the NEA, and.
Speaker 3: They say, you know what, what we're going to fund
Speaker 3: in the future are the classical, the painting, the sculpture, music,
Speaker 3: the rest of it, things that work in the rich
Speaker 3: vein of Western tradition. And that's great, we do that,
Speaker 3: but as anybody who's been to a recent museum knows,
Speaker 3: there is, at the sort of elemental base intern level,
Speaker 3: an ability to take these arts of beauty and to
Speaker 3: turn them into something else. I remember being at the
Speaker 3: Hogarth exhibition at the tait a few years ago, which
Speaker 3: they'd famously given all the interns the opportunity to write
Speaker 3: the descriptions in terms of oppression, colonialism, grievance studies, gender ideas, whatever.
Speaker 3: So you were not allowed to just perceive a Hogarth,
Speaker 3: which itself is richly detailed with story. You had to
Speaker 3: be informed about the coded messages of the wood being
Speaker 3: used in the chair, because it spoke to the slave
Speaker 3: trade and the rest of it. So in other words,
Speaker 3: you can say the museums will be beautiful again, and
Speaker 3: define beauty in a very broad sense, but you're still
Speaker 3: going to be dealing with a museum culture which seems
Speaker 3: to be opposed shall we say to just simply letting
Speaker 3: aesthetics speak for themselves, because even saying esthetics speak for
Speaker 3: themselves is to them a political decision, a political statement
Speaker 3: in a wrong one.
Speaker 7: Well, there is a sister agency to the NEA, the
Speaker 7: Institute for Museum and Library Services, that has an even
Speaker 7: bigger budget, and you know, with money can come strings.
Speaker 7: So perhaps the IMLS can work with the NEA to
Speaker 7: ensure that when the best.
Speaker 6: Art is on display, it's done in the right way.
Speaker 7: But I would say that, you know, even if the
Speaker 7: curators put all kinds of texts besides the work of
Speaker 7: art on the wall, sometimes the art speaks for itself
Speaker 7: and there's nothing that the curator can do to undermine it.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's not quite the same thing.
Speaker 7: But you know, when it comes to literature and philosophy,
Speaker 7: I went to college at Columbia University, which has a
Speaker 7: great books program, one of the last remaining programs, and
Speaker 7: you know, everybody reads Plato, Aristotle, Homer, all the way
Speaker 7: up to the present. And yes, it may be true
Speaker 7: that your professor is a Marxist, is trying to subvert
Speaker 7: the meaning of these texts. But at the same time,
Speaker 7: you've read them, and there's no matter what professor says.
Speaker 7: You know, if you read Plato, if you read Homer,
Speaker 7: if you read Dante, you might take away from it
Speaker 7: your own personal.
Speaker 6: Meaning and interpretation.
Speaker 7: And so thus I don't think that the arts, you know, mandarins,
Speaker 7: can shape everything in a deleterious way.
Speaker 1: Justin it's Steve Hayward out on the left coast. I
Speaker 1: want to stick with architecture for a minute. You like
Speaker 1: to quote one of my favorite Churchill lines that first
Speaker 1: we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us.
Speaker 1: And for listeners who don't know the context, that's part
Speaker 1: of that long and very eloquent speech he gave explaining
Speaker 1: why the House of Commons needed to be rebuilt exactly
Speaker 1: as it had been after it had been bombed by
Speaker 1: the Germans, when all the modern architects wanted to have well,
Speaker 1: let's use this as an opportunity, you know, to have
Speaker 1: a modern semi circular Parliamentary Building, and Churchill said, no,
Speaker 1: here's why we should stick with it. It's I recommend people
Speaker 1: who are interested to go find that speech. It's on
Speaker 1: the internet. So I look around Washington, d C. And
Speaker 1: I look at the old federal buildings that go back
Speaker 1: to the time of the early Republic. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's not a coincidence that Madison and Hamilton and j
Speaker 1: picked Publius as they're suited in for the Federal's papers, right,
Speaker 1: And I think not a coincidence that the founders chose
Speaker 1: Romanesque style architecture for the Capitol. And so let't behold today.
Speaker 1: The joke I like, which I borrow from Larry Arne,
Speaker 1: is you walk down the street in Washington. If you
Speaker 1: see a building that has an agency in it with
Speaker 1: Romanesque architecture, like the Department of Treasury, that's a constitutional office.
Speaker 1: You look at one of the newer off of buildings,
Speaker 1: the Forestall Building for Department of Energy, the Hubert Humphrey
Speaker 1: Building for Health and Human Services, likely any modern building
Speaker 1: is doing something unconstitutional.
Speaker 3: That's the architectural realm. What I'm looking up to is this.
Speaker 3: I want to interject pedantically just to say that when
Speaker 3: you use Romanesque, Romanesque is actually a style of the
Speaker 3: building which is distinct classical or bose art. Okay, is
Speaker 3: probably the term that we should use, because we're going
Speaker 3: to have some architecture nerds saying no, Richard Sonian Romanesque
Speaker 3: with its heavy rusticated stone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's probably right.
Speaker 4: I see.
Speaker 1: I have no great expertise in architecture except to say,
Speaker 1: and here's the question, and I'm senior slideshow. I've seen
Speaker 1: some of these awful federal courthouse buildings that are often
Speaker 1: quite large and quite lavish and expensive, and you know,
Speaker 1: never mind the bureaucracies in Washington. They look like they're
Speaker 1: intended to make brain people's soul out of them. They're
Speaker 1: not things of beauty. You don't even know which door
Speaker 1: to go into, and they don't really have a recognizable front.
Speaker 1: And I can't it's hard to believe that. I mean,
Speaker 1: what is wrong with these modern architects that they want
Speaker 1: this brutalist style and is it really a philosophical core
Speaker 1: to this outlook, which is what I'm suspecting, Or am
Speaker 1: I being paranoid and overreach with that complaint?
Speaker 6: Well, that's a huge question.
Speaker 7: In the early days of modernism, which was founded in
Speaker 7: Europe after World War One. There was certainly an ideological component,
Speaker 7: the idea that they're going to build a new kind
Speaker 7: of architecture for a new man and a new society.
Speaker 7: And thus they were drawn, these modernist architects to extremes
Speaker 7: on the right or the left. You're not going to
Speaker 7: find many nice liberal democrat modernist architects from that time period.
Speaker 7: And then over the years after World War Two, you
Speaker 7: start getting brutalism, which is known for raw expanses of concrete,
Speaker 7: these imposing, sometimes sinister buildings, and some of the architects
Speaker 7: behind that talked about how what they were looking to
Speaker 7: achieve was an ethic, not an aesthetic. In other words,
Speaker 7: they were trying to achieve something to look to show
Speaker 7: the harsh truth of nature and reality, as opposed to
Speaker 7: build something that is beautiful. They just had a completely
Speaker 7: different agenda. And then later on, more recently, when you
Speaker 7: get the rise of something called deconstructivism. These are buildings
Speaker 7: that look like they're going to fall down, that look
Speaker 7: like they've been invaded by alien parasites, that are chaotic,
Speaker 7: and you laugh, but you know, I would ask people
Speaker 7: to look at the San Francisco Federal Building as an
Speaker 7: example of one of these designs. It looks like an
Speaker 7: alien spacecraft that's going to kill you with laser beams.
Speaker 7: I mean, some of these deconstructive, deconstructivist architects openly say
Speaker 7: that they're nihilists. You know, Ram Kojas, this notorious Dutch architect,
Speaker 7: has said that beautiful buildings give a false sense of
Speaker 7: existential security. Right, that's that's an ideological move that is
Speaker 7: reflected in his buildings, which actually include the headquarters of
Speaker 7: the communist televison in China, and he said that that
Speaker 7: building is not supposed to be beautiful.
Speaker 6: He has a completely different agenda.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I thought it was one of the
Speaker 1: great ironies of the first Trump administration that you know,
Speaker 1: this this flamboyant man who likes to boast of his
Speaker 1: gold plated faucets in his bathrooms and on his airplane,
Speaker 1: and you know it was in the casino business and
Speaker 1: all the towers and so forth. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: was the champion for a classical architecture. And then on
Speaker 1: the other side of this was I believe President Biden
Speaker 1: rescinded Trump's executive order on the first day in office,
Speaker 1: what was the hurry. I mean, boy, somebody really wants
Speaker 1: to really wants to roll back that architectural guidance as
Speaker 1: a priority item for the first day in office. That
Speaker 1: to me was, you know, as shocking as the underlying
Speaker 1: arguments you can make.
Speaker 7: Well, the architecture establishment, which is almost entirely modernist, had
Speaker 7: been lobbying extremely hard. I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 7: money at stake, and there is also an ideological ideological component.
Speaker 7: Are we going to build in styles that harken back
Speaker 7: to the past that look back to the Founders, for
Speaker 7: instance in their use of classicism, or are we going
Speaker 7: to build alien spacecraft or globalized buildings that have no
Speaker 7: local character whatsoever. And at the same time, not only
Speaker 7: did you have the architectural establishment, you had cultural elites
Speaker 7: like the New York Times. They published an editorial titled
Speaker 7: What's so great about Fake Roman Temples? Saying that, well,
Speaker 7: the Founders had to wear borrowed clothes, but we Americans today,
Speaker 7: we don't need to do that kind of thing. I mean,
Speaker 7: the implication of that editorial is that the US Capital,
Speaker 7: the US Supreme Court, the Jefferson Memorial, these are all
Speaker 7: fake Roman temples, right, none of these buildings are two
Speaker 7: thousand years old. And then you also had elites, especially
Speaker 7: at architecture schools, saying that classical architecture is racist, it's
Speaker 7: white supremacist, all sorts of crazy to me, entirely laughable arguments.
Speaker 7: But you know, obviously people in the Biden White House
Speaker 7: were listening, and thus Biden rescinded the order. There is
Speaker 7: although Biden didn't give an explanation about.
Speaker 6: Why he did that, he did take other.
Speaker 7: Action that he gave an explanation for which I think
Speaker 7: sheds light on the issue. So President Trump appointed me
Speaker 7: and six other commissioners to the US Commission of Fine Arts,
Speaker 7: which is the sthetic review board for Washington, and we
Speaker 7: were appointed to four year terms. Biden removed me and
Speaker 7: three others in violation of the law and certainly in
Speaker 7: violation of one hundred and ten years of history in
Speaker 7: which no president had removed a commissioner. And at that time,
Speaker 7: the White House said that Biden took that action because
Speaker 7: our strong support of classical architecture did not comport with
Speaker 7: the President's values.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one last question for me is sort of a
Speaker 1: broad one, and it's that mentioned that new York Times
Speaker 1: article which I'd forgotten about, brought it back to mind.
Speaker 1: You know, I noticed that, especially when you know, fancy
Speaker 1: liberals like to go overseas as travelers. Where they want
Speaker 1: to go. They want to go to the old medieval cities.
Speaker 1: They want to go to the feat Sea Gallery and
Speaker 1: marvel at this wonderful architecture and culture, while having contempt
Speaker 1: or complete disregard for the culture that produced those works
Speaker 1: of art and produce those towns in architecture. And that
Speaker 1: to me is one of the great inconquerors. I simply
Speaker 1: don't get that that you simply can't The light bulb
Speaker 1: seems to never go off. That all these things that
Speaker 1: you know, they all want to go and hang out
Speaker 1: and uh, you know Lake Comb all the rest of that,
Speaker 1: And I don't know that to me is as baffling
Speaker 1: as this, this passion for brutalist architecture and contempt for
Speaker 1: classical the classical heritage and classical architecture. That's the only
Speaker 1: question that's kind of a rant.
Speaker 3: And you're right, and and he's right to point out,
Speaker 3: you know, brutalism has subsided the whole brutalism we attached
Speaker 3: that word. The things that look brutal, but actually it's
Speaker 3: a French term. It has to do with the raw
Speaker 3: concrete and the rest of it. He's right about the
Speaker 3: deconstruction of stuff that desire to not only ignore the
Speaker 3: context of a building of building surroundings, but to actively
Speaker 3: mitigate against it. When he mentions alien embassies, he's absolutely right.
Speaker 3: The number of buildings I've seen in Europe where you
Speaker 3: have some elegant, beautiful, old detailed building to which a
Speaker 3: modern architect has attached a jellyfish or a spaceship or
Speaker 3: something like that. It is an act. It is an
Speaker 3: affront to what the thing is intended to diminish and
Speaker 3: demean it. We had the gut through theater here in Minneapolis.
Speaker 3: Jean Nouvel came in and in an area that is
Speaker 3: nothing but old brick warehouses devoted and dedicated to the
Speaker 3: river and the grain traffic and the rest of it,
Speaker 3: he puts this blue glass thing in that has nothing
Speaker 3: to do with anything. And for a theater, it has
Speaker 3: two chimneys that words go up the chimneys. If it's
Speaker 3: burning Shakespeare in front of our very eyes, and everybody
Speaker 3: loves it. And I'm wondering, maybe you can tell me
Speaker 3: justin exactly is it going to take somebody to point
Speaker 3: out that the emperor actually is parading around the town
Speaker 3: square clop clop clop, with not a stitch of clothing on,
Speaker 3: and then everybody will be free finally in the architectural
Speaker 3: profession to say, yeah, too much, too much ugliness. Is
Speaker 3: that what it's going to take or are they just
Speaker 3: institutionally incapable of thinking, oh, I got to go back
Speaker 3: to the old forms and produce something beautiful again.
Speaker 7: Well, first, you know, you talk about some of these
Speaker 7: ungodly editions. There's actually something called parasitic architecture, which is
Speaker 7: when additions look like they are devouring or crushing or
Speaker 7: splintering beautiful historic buildings. It really looks like an attempt
Speaker 7: to demolish the past. I mean, as for the emperor's
Speaker 7: new clothes, I don't think it's a great secret that
Speaker 7: ordinary people dislike modern architecture. I mean, it's been widely reported.
Speaker 7: My own organization did a survey by the Harris Pohle,
Speaker 7: you know, highly reputable, nonpartisan company, that of two thousand Americans,
Speaker 7: finding that seventy two percent of the people surveyed preferred
Speaker 7: classical and traditional design for federal buildings in US courthouses,
Speaker 7: and there were widespread majorities across every demographic, whether it's gender, race,
Speaker 7: socio economic and.
Speaker 6: Political party affiliation.
Speaker 7: So I think honest architects, including the honest Modernists, know
Speaker 7: that much of their work is not popular with the public.
Speaker 7: But they are elitist in the worst possible way, just
Speaker 7: wishing to impose their what they think is right on
Speaker 7: ordinary people. And you know, buildings are not paintings in
Speaker 7: the wall of the museum. You're forced to see them,
Speaker 7: you're forced to live with them or work in them.
Speaker 7: And so therefore architecture has this small key political component,
Speaker 7: unlike other forms of art.
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Speaker 2: I wonder who's getting it right. There's a lot wrong.
Speaker 5: Many of the buildings that we revere are older, the
Speaker 5: US Capital, Lincoln Memorial, the Empire State Building.
Speaker 2: Who's getting it right at the moment.
Speaker 7: Well, there are some incredibly talented contemporary, classicol and traditional architects. So,
Speaker 7: for instance, there is the Tuscaloosa Federal Building.
Speaker 6: It's a new classical.
Speaker 7: Greek revival building in Alabama done by HBRA.
Speaker 6: The only reason that building.
Speaker 7: Exists is because Senator Shelby used his power as chairman
Speaker 7: of the Appropriations.
Speaker 6: Committee to get it built.
Speaker 7: He had to fight the General Services and Administration, the
Speaker 7: agency responsible for federal buildings, which wanted to give him
Speaker 7: a glass box. Some other great architects in this country
Speaker 7: include David Schwartz.
Speaker 6: There's also Bob Stearn's.
Speaker 7: Office, which has been doing a number of large buildings
Speaker 7: around the country, including some apartment buildings in New York.
Speaker 7: There's Peter Penoyer in New York, and then in England
Speaker 7: we have other bright spots such as Quinlan Terry. So
Speaker 7: there is the talent out there. The University of Notre
Speaker 7: Dames architecture school actually teaches classical architecture. It's one of
Speaker 7: only a handful of architecture schools that teaches people the
Speaker 7: principles and how to design. So there is the talent
Speaker 7: out there, and you know, in fact, in residential architecture,
Speaker 7: classical architects are still getting lots of commissions. When rich
Speaker 7: people build houses, they very often want something you know, traditional,
Speaker 7: So there's work there. The challenges to find the larger
Speaker 7: public buildings or university dormitories, things like that, and I
Speaker 7: hope ultimately more federal buildings in US courthouses or even
Speaker 7: agency headquarters like the FBI, where you know, the best
Speaker 7: architects can get the job.
Speaker 5: The other thing is what other than architecture needs reform.
Speaker 5: You are interested in heading up the NEA. It's not
Speaker 5: just buildings, it's other things too. What's the biggest problem
Speaker 5: we face?
Speaker 6: Well, that's a huge question.
Speaker 7: I mean we're talking about we were talking about visual art,
Speaker 7: which is very rarely beautiful, profound, or moving. Too much
Speaker 7: of it is this conceptual stuff that's sort of the
Speaker 7: art world being so self conscious of itself that it's
Speaker 7: the end of art, right, This goes back to Marcel
Speaker 7: Douchamp's Fountain, which was a urinal that he signed his
Speaker 7: name to. That in so many ways, it's almost as
Speaker 7: if visual art has.
Speaker 6: Come to an end.
Speaker 7: But you know, the same thing can go for you know,
Speaker 7: contemporary music. I mean I'm not talking about you know,
Speaker 7: pop and rock, which can pay its own way and
Speaker 7: take care of itself. But the source of music that's
Speaker 7: played in concert halls. You know, our great Symphony is
Speaker 7: still being written. You know, our composers willing to write
Speaker 7: in a total tonalist you know medium. It's not it's
Speaker 7: not clear to me that that is the case. And
Speaker 7: also there are big problems in literature as well.
Speaker 6: So the problems are all across the board.
Speaker 7: I mean, the NEA is not going to you know,
Speaker 7: change the direction of Western civilization. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 7: that key uses of patronage can have enormous symbolic impact.
Speaker 7: I mean, we don't need a thousand great paintings across
Speaker 7: the land, but you know, ten really good ones, or
Speaker 7: two really good symphonies or operas or five novels, things
Speaker 7: like that can make a difference.
Speaker 3: There are those who say that the government has no
Speaker 3: business funding the stuff in the first place. Really, if
Speaker 3: there's a great symphony out there to be written and
Speaker 3: let somebody commission.
Speaker 4: It as they did in the old days, maybe we
Speaker 4: don't need.
Speaker 3: A symphony at all because we have the symphonic tradition
Speaker 3: retreating to movie soundtracks where it's flourishing, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: We don't need the government to pick winners and loser.
Speaker 3: When it comes to books in local theater, people wanted,
Speaker 3: they should pay for it. Zuer all valid points, and
Speaker 3: maybe the best way to avoid conflict in what we
Speaker 3: fund is to not fund anything. So you've got about
Speaker 3: ninety seconds here make the case well.
Speaker 7: I would quote Theodore Roosevelt who said that a national
Speaker 7: greatness wholly divorced from artistic production is but a one
Speaker 7: sided malform greatness. If the American government is known to
Speaker 7: have produced great works of art, it redounds to our
Speaker 7: national greatness, in the same way that when the French
Speaker 7: rebuilt Notre Dame in Paris, it said something about their civilization.
Speaker 7: There are market failures when it comes to the arts,
Speaker 7: and I think the government can play a role in
Speaker 7: those areas well.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Justin, and thank you for reminding me. And
Speaker 3: what you said before that I actually meant to say
Speaker 3: do shomp instead of greet and do Schamp was not
Speaker 3: wrong to consider the urinal to be a piece of
Speaker 3: art and recontext joining it as such was a brilliant move.
Speaker 3: Thing is you can only do that once, and it
Speaker 3: seems as if we've been recontextualizing urinals for the last
Speaker 3: one hundred or so years. Good luck, hope you get in.
Speaker 3: Look forward to what you do if you do so,
Speaker 3: and you know, maybe after you've been in the Italier
Speaker 3: government and you've changed the cultural shape of the nation,
Speaker 3: you'll come back and speak with us about what you've
Speaker 3: done and what needs to be done.
Speaker 6: Still, thank you, justin thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: I didn't mean to give the impression I think that
Speaker 3: everything should be a classical temple, because I don't. One
Speaker 3: of the things that I love about early American twentieth
Speaker 3: century skyscraper architecture is, yes, it's classical details, and yes,
Speaker 3: Cass Gilbert could ladle on the frosting and it looked great.
Speaker 3: And Woolworth Building is fantastic with its Gothic style. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but the greatest American skyscrapers are the ones that came afterwards.
Speaker 4: The ones that.
Speaker 3: Became some new idiom. The flat iron building is very early,
Speaker 3: but it's very modern. The buildings that arose because of
Speaker 3: a change in the zoning law. They built the Equitable
Speaker 3: building in New York, huge gargantuan structure early part of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century, in like nineteen ten, nineteen twelve, forty
Speaker 3: seven stories or something, two file cabinets. It cast a
Speaker 3: shadow forever and they said, you know what this is
Speaker 3: again and out of hand, we need zoning. And the
Speaker 3: zoning laws that they passed mandated setbacks so the light
Speaker 3: could trickle down to the street. Well, because New York
Speaker 3: architects were the most influential, the style of setbacks was
Speaker 3: picked up all across the country. And you'd have a
Speaker 3: building in Fargo, North Dakota that had setbacks, didn't need them,
Speaker 3: but that was the style, and we developed this American
Speaker 3: idiom that is the most one of our greatest contributions
Speaker 3: to twentieth century culture. You know, people say are deco,
Speaker 3: I call it modern whatever. Sky scrapers of the early
Speaker 3: thirties before the crash finally took out the business are
Speaker 3: just magnificent examples and they're anything but severe, and they're
Speaker 3: anything but classical. They're uniquely distinctly American.
Speaker 1: Now that set.
Speaker 3: Everybody yells at the you know, the seagrum building style,
Speaker 3: the international style. It's boring, and yeah, it has its
Speaker 3: boring manifestations. Chicago is full of them, but it does
Speaker 3: have a lightness and a beauty to it when done right.
Speaker 3: I've always said that a town that has one lever
Speaker 3: house or seagrums building is lucky. A town that has
Speaker 3: ten is cursed. So there's beauty to be found in
Speaker 3: all of these styles, but not so much in the
Speaker 3: brutalist and the deconstructionist. And if we can get back
Speaker 3: to those things which flourished at a time of American flourishing,
Speaker 3: I think our cities will be more beautiful, and I
Speaker 3: think we'll be happier to be walking around them. That
Speaker 3: is my speech, and I have nothing more to say
Speaker 3: on the matter.
Speaker 1: No, I can't top that, so I will I will resign.
Speaker 3: From this conversation too, all right, And Charles, I believe
Speaker 3: you have another conversation that can be found elsewhere with
Speaker 3: the gentleman, probably about in detail, about some other things.
Speaker 3: So we've had we've had a justin justin frenzy here
Speaker 3: at the old Ricochet pop cast network. Well, gentlemen, before
Speaker 3: we go out, at the top of the hour, I made,
Speaker 3: in a strange voice of pronouncement that it was a
Speaker 3: Friday once again. And that might be familiar to a
Speaker 3: few people who used to listen to David Lynch, who
Speaker 3: would get on YouTube every Friday and give the weather.
Speaker 3: That's all.
Speaker 4: He just gave the weather.
Speaker 3: And David Lynch giving you the weather is one of
Speaker 3: those things that was a mainstay for me until he
Speaker 3: stopped doing it. And I'll miss it. I'll miss him.
Speaker 3: You could say that there are two Americas. There's the
Speaker 3: America that was bummed when David Lynch died and the
Speaker 3: America it was bummed when Bob Ucker died. I'd like
Speaker 3: to think I straddled both. I contain multitudes, but I
Speaker 3: was more hit by Lynch than Youker, But either one
Speaker 3: great Americans.
Speaker 4: Gentlemen, what say you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think I agree with that. I mean, Uker was
Speaker 1: a one joke person, right, and it was a good
Speaker 1: joke and he got a lot of mileage out of it,
Speaker 1: kind of like Rodney Danger's Field.
Speaker 4: I don't get no.
Speaker 1: Respect business, whereas Lynch, I don't know I don't know
Speaker 1: what to say about him. I mean, I he was
Speaker 1: certainly unique, you know, and nobody has been able. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we all remember, if you're old enough, Twin
Speaker 1: Peaks on TV back in what was that nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: ninety ninety one, and I've never seen anything like it,
Speaker 1: and it did kind of fizzle out at the end.
Speaker 1: More can be said about that problem with filmmakers. I
Speaker 1: think the coin runners often don't know how to end
Speaker 1: their movies sometimes. But that was and I think people
Speaker 1: who try to copy that style, they're.
Speaker 3: Not even close. Nope, nope, And I'll tell you why
Speaker 3: in a second.
Speaker 4: But I want to get Charles take first.
Speaker 5: Wow, I'm a movie it is, and I've seen almost
Speaker 5: no great movies. I've been slowly rectifying this, but I
Speaker 5: haven't extended my journey to Lynch. So the last time
Speaker 5: I saw anything that David Lynch did was at the
Speaker 5: end of the Steven Spielberg movie The Fableman's where he
Speaker 5: plays John Ford, which was really good, really memorable moment
Speaker 5: in that movie, which which I liked. That's my film analysis,
Speaker 5: by the way, is I liked it or I didn't
Speaker 5: like it, and I like most of them. But I
Speaker 5: did see an interview with David Lynch that made me laugh,
Speaker 5: and this I think sums up the man, at least
Speaker 5: what I know about him. He said it Raise Ahead
Speaker 5: was his most spiritual movie, and the person interviewing him says,
Speaker 5: elaborates on that, and he says, no, yes, ye.
Speaker 1: Well I love it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 1: There's one lingering controversy from Lynch's filmography, and I bet
Speaker 1: James you can anticipate it. It was his first attempt
Speaker 1: to make Doon.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, I remember seeing in a theater and
Speaker 1: I remember walking in and being given a sheet. They
Speaker 1: give a sheet everybody came in a theater with all
Speaker 1: the different names and some explanations, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 1: this can't be good. They need to give you a
Speaker 1: cheat sheet to get through the movie. And of course
Speaker 1: he didn't like the way that. I guess the studio
Speaker 1: forced him to make cuts and put out the version
Speaker 1: in the theaters and within a couple of years, if
Speaker 1: you ever saw the movie on DVD, it was always
Speaker 1: an Alan Smithy film. If you know what a went
Speaker 1: smith was always when you want to take your name
Speaker 1: off something, And I know there are some people who
Speaker 1: say his original cut or what he had in mind
Speaker 1: would have been genius or would have been great. And
Speaker 1: and I don't know if you have an opinion on
Speaker 1: that or not, but as someone who loved the Doing books,
Speaker 1: well at least the first one.
Speaker 3: Because I'm the biggest day I'm a really really big.
Speaker 4: David Lynch fan.
Speaker 3: I would rather see Flash Gordon than Doing. I would
Speaker 3: rather see flesh Gordon than Doing. It's just it's just
Speaker 3: never ever done it for me. And that's fine. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't regard it as it was a you know,
Speaker 3: a work for hire doesn't mean it's bad. I mean,
Speaker 3: Coppola did work for hire and it was some of
Speaker 3: my favorite movies that he did. He just didn't do
Speaker 3: anything for me. Doesn't It doesn't. It doesn't have that
Speaker 3: Lynchian quality. And when you said that, other people in
Speaker 3: the you know, in the early nineties were trying to
Speaker 3: recapture that. Some of them did it somewhat successfully by saying, well,
Speaker 3: it's the quirky characters, but there has to be some underpinning.
Speaker 3: There has to be some underpinning goodness to it. And
Speaker 3: people just thought it was all dwarfs dancing backwards and
Speaker 3: stuff and the rest of it.
Speaker 1: No, no, not at all.
Speaker 3: People didn't get his ability to channel the language of dreams,
Speaker 3: the character of dreams. He was an uncanny master at
Speaker 3: presenting dream logic without I mean, every time you look
Speaker 3: at the dream sequences and the sopranos to see.
Speaker 1: No, no, no.
Speaker 5: He did one. Didn't he do one? Soprano's episode dream sequence?
Speaker 3: I maybe as a parody, I don't think I don't
Speaker 3: think so.
Speaker 1: I do not think so.
Speaker 4: I'll have to go back and check on that.
Speaker 3: But most dream sequences in television shows are there's one
Speaker 3: episode which is the whole thing is a dream sequence,
Speaker 3: and it's kind of close. It kind of gets the
Speaker 3: language right, but they're always too explicit, and people in
Speaker 3: dreams and television are always doing dreamlike things and they
Speaker 3: never accept the fact that they're actually maybe a monkey's
Speaker 3: pod just sitting on the table, I mean, which in
Speaker 3: dreams you do. It's odd, it's there, but you move along.
Speaker 1: And Lynch was just very, very.
Speaker 4: Very good at that.
Speaker 3: But the other reason that twin peaks and blue velvet
Speaker 3: and a lot of the other things work. And we
Speaker 3: had a discussion on this at Ricochet, by the way,
Speaker 3: which you should go to and join because it's.
Speaker 1: Not all politics.
Speaker 3: It's not all banging pots and pans about constitutional amendments
Speaker 3: and the rest of it. It's where we talk about
Speaker 3: things like this. It has to do with his genuine
Speaker 3: love of American culture. You don't have lunch at Bob's
Speaker 3: Big Boy every day unless you are truly a fan
Speaker 3: of the post war culture that produced large, fat, fiberglass
Speaker 3: statues of guys holding hamburgers aloft all over the country.
Speaker 3: He loved that stuff, unapologetically, unironically, and you get the
Speaker 3: sense of that that this is not a culture that
Speaker 3: he thinks needs to be shamed, but needs to have
Speaker 3: its best parts amplified and appreciated and treasured.
Speaker 4: And I always love him for that.
Speaker 5: Look this up, James, and I am indeed wrong. But
Speaker 5: there is one episode of The Sopranos where.
Speaker 2: There is a dream scene.
Speaker 5: That is very explicitly supposed to be a pastillecho of
Speaker 5: David Lynch. That's what I always remembering to have a
Speaker 5: car or something that's a slug.
Speaker 2: It's very weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it possibly possibly, But everybody's been trying to, you know,
Speaker 3: to match his vocabulary, his way of doing these things.
Speaker 3: For an awful long time, and they're not successful. I
Speaker 3: would if I was to be if my object, if
Speaker 3: my desire as a director was to do a perfect
Speaker 3: David Lynch dream scene, I'm not sure that the Sopranos
Speaker 3: would be one of the shots that I would attempt
Speaker 3: it to do, because you end up with Tony Soprano
Speaker 3: himself in gladiatorial gear, you know, having it from behind
Speaker 3: it some Italian maiden while they're going over there to
Speaker 3: talk business with the mafia. So no, but anyway, so yeah,
Speaker 3: two distinct Americans, and opposite sides of it, really, but
Speaker 3: both exemplars of the culture. And I'm glad that America
Speaker 3: is the place that that has both of them. I'm
Speaker 3: trying to think of something that happened in Britain that
Speaker 3: Charlie can chime in on today, only to remind us
Speaker 3: that he is glad that he is here and not there.
Speaker 5: And an American citizen and an American citizen.
Speaker 2: Seven years very proud.
Speaker 3: We'll end with this very briefly because I do have
Speaker 3: to run, and that is the government is upset that
Speaker 3: Elon Musk is interfering with their and calling for their
Speaker 3: government to come down because Elon Musk has some strange,
Speaker 3: bizarre fascination with with with sex gangs in England ten
Speaker 3: years ago. How creepy is that of Musk?
Speaker 5: Is this the contribution from British culture that we're going
Speaker 5: to have discussed on this thanks to that? So you
Speaker 5: get David Lynch, I get sex gangs. Yeah, the story
Speaker 5: is still a story because the British government has effectively
Speaker 5: covered it up and said that anyone who talks about
Speaker 5: it as a racist.
Speaker 2: The idea that.
Speaker 5: Elon Musk is being weird by talking about it is cheap.
Speaker 5: This has been percolating, bubbling for years, a decade more,
Speaker 5: and finally, not because of el Un Musk, although I
Speaker 5: don't think he's heard. Finally we're starting to get a
Speaker 5: few people who are not worried about being called right
Speaker 5: wingers or whatever saying no, we need to do something
Speaker 5: about this. And I would just say on this something
Speaker 5: I've said for a very long time, which is one
Speaker 5: of the big problems with covering this up.
Speaker 2: Aside from covering it up.
Speaker 5: Which is the biggest crime, is that it has given
Speaker 5: a handful of British white supremacists who are terrible people,
Speaker 5: who have terrible ideas something that they're right about. You
Speaker 5: want to avoid that in your culture. You don't want
Speaker 5: to give the people who are genuinely bad news something
Speaker 5: that they are right about and you are wrong about,
Speaker 5: and that you are actually covering up on a conspiracy
Speaker 5: that is actually true. So it's good from my perspective
Speaker 5: that El Musk has started to say this because for
Speaker 5: the first time in a long time, other people have
Speaker 5: started to say, actually, maybe we should do something about this,
Speaker 5: maybe we should talk about this in public, and it
Speaker 5: will take it away from the fringes, which is good
Speaker 5: in and of itself. That's the main reason, by a
Speaker 5: very long way. Also because it disempowers people who should
Speaker 5: never have been in a position to be said of,
Speaker 5: you know, oh well.
Speaker 3: But Steven, I'm sure you agree completely, which is why
Speaker 3: I'm going to say thank you, and we're going to
Speaker 3: eat the show because I have to go go let
Speaker 3: my dog out.
Speaker 1: Stephen Hayward, Charles W.
Speaker 4: Cook.
Speaker 3: We thank our guest justin hope he gets into the name.
Speaker 3: We thank all of you for tuning in, and we
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Speaker 3: can enjoy the life verve conversation sparkling with in the
Speaker 3: member feed. We'll see you next week, same time, and gentlemen,
Speaker 3: we'll see everyone in the comments, said Ricochet four point zero.
Speaker 1: Next week, Ricochet
Speaker 3: Join the conversation.