White Album Masterpiece No 1: Dear Prudence

 

Perhaps it's vain to write about well-known masterpieces, white or any color.  What can I say about the White Album or "Dear Prudence" that someone better known, closer to the process of creation, including John Lennon himself, hasn't said better.  I know a thing or two about words, but when it comes to music, I can't play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the piano, and in fourth grade, my music teacher begged me not to play that on the recorder during a concert we put on for our parents.  "Just pretend" he advised and then proceeded to give me a demonstration in dishonesty.

 

Perhaps I've been trying to fake it ever since.  My mind sees beauty I can't put into practice.  Sometimes the images are visual.  Sometimes the images are auditory.  But they always add up to an effect--at least in my mind.  That's what this blog was about.

 

I just saw white, heard white, even smelled it, tasted it.  At first white sits silent on the tongue.  But after a while there is a slight grit and undertone, a speck of pollution, or as George Harrison put it, the "naughty notes," something slightly amiss or off-chord. 

 

To my knowledge there has never been a perfectly white billboard with the inside photo of the White Album on it, but there should be.  Except, like the original covers of the White Album, it shouldn't be quite white.  Almost, but not there.  Some raised letters stained from rain water would be good.

 

That is what makes "Dear Prudence" so perfect.  It's not song itself, although that I'm sure would be incredible by itself, but it's the song underneath the song, the soot beneath the surface that creates a deep, haunting connection.  It's what Mark Rothko was trying to do with paint.

 

I'd like to do that with words someday--images below the images, rhythm below the rhythm, rhyme below the rhyme.  It's in my mind but I can't quite get it on paper.

 

Always the kid who wants to play The 1812 Overture on the Recorder but can't even get out "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

 

And so I go on pretending.

 

 

Text © Steve Brown, 2015

 

 



He Entered the Poem

He entered the poem
through a long stairway of splintered wood
worn glossy black where heels
long ago chipped away
the white paint and shoes dragged

down to the concrete-
floored basement.

Heavy light dropped bars
of metallic dust.

He would have liked a poem of glass
and plush white carpet,
                                    cantilevered
                        over the Aegean

antiquity perched 
on an island across
a diamond-studded bay.

But the poem he had entered was the only one
      open that day
after a deafening sixth period class and a long 
      walk through
Vermilion Cliffs Trailer Court under the intense 
      Arizona sun,
poverty sweltering like puss.  So he did what 
     only he could do,
which is not much.  He added a stanza

An aquarium of glass water,
silver fishes swimming through soft light.

He almost transcended.

© 2010 by Steve Brown



Two White Wonders: The Douglas House and Smith House by Richard Meier

The Douglas House

I was through with architecture when I met the Douglas House.  It was the end of a dream.  I realized I didn't have it in me to be an architect.  It had nothing to do with the forms.  The play of spaces--light, air, volume--moved me, but I didn't like the people, the competition, the corporate mindset of the school of architecture.

My decision came the day one of my professors gave us the assignment to design a Utopian city based on medieval military fortresses.  The fortresses were beautiful if you only thought about shape, such as the example below:

But I couldn't get my head around Utopia being enclosed--even if only metaphorically.  When I asked, "How can you design Utopia based upon a structure of war?" my professor thought I was a smart A, which is fine, because I thought he was a dumb A.  

Meanwhile, I'd been skipping classes half the time, writing depressing poems in my gloomy dorm instead of designing closed utopias for a school that proudly announced the first day of class that "50 percent of you will drop out before the end of year; our job is to weed out all but the best."

I felt more at home in the English department, among those who questioned the morality of everything, even the family dynamics around the Thanksgiving dinner table.  I quickly immersed myself in classes such as Psychopathology in Literature, Bible as Literature, Women in Literature and American Fiction as History. Everything was about connections, context, history and cultural dynamics.  Nothing floated disconnected to the past.  Nothing was beyond questioning.

So, I never expected to have my breath taken away by a building again.  As far as architecture goes, I was an apostate.  I'd left the fold bitterly and had no intention of looking back.

But, then it happened.  I wish I remembered how, but I don't.  What remains is myth.  That is all there is. I believe I was looking through a magazine while sitting in a cold, dreary concrete block waiting room while getting the oil changed in my Plymouth Reliant.

Maybe the magazine was Architectural Digest, but it could have been any magazine.  I don't remember an article, so it was probably only an add.  Yet, it must have included Meier's name.  I knew of his work, but hadn't seen this house before.

I was stunned.  It seemed to cascade down the forested hillside like a waterfall of light and air, both tumbling down and soaring towards the heaven at the same time.

The home is entered from the top level via a flying bridge from a street that runs along the hillside.  You enter through the closed, walled private spaces that face the road.  The house then opens and drops in a series of spaces thrown open to the wilds through the huge glass planes.

The home perfects lessons learned from Meier's earlier design of the Smith House.  (See video below)

When I look out a window, any window 

in the world, from Brooklyn to Rome 

to Fatehpur Sikri, India, I see a concert 

of light and color working together 

in ways that cannot be contrived. 

In my work as an architect I cannot 

imagine a situation in which I would 

try to compete with or imitate 

the environment that surrounds 

my buildings. My job is to acknowledge 

nature, to create relationships 

between the interiors 

and exteriors, and to bring order 

in a way that substantiates 

the spaces we live in 

and move through.

--Richard Meier

Villa Savoye: Masterpiece in White, No. 1 (architecture, dream homes)

For over 30 years, I've had a this Utopian dream:  to live in the perfect white house in the middle of an alkali flat isolated somewhere in the American west.   The house would hover on piloti, as would the long concrete drive, and during the spring run-off the home would float over the shallow, broad lake.  The rest of the time, it would stand above the cracked, salt-crystallized flat. During the summer, the house would remain relatively cool despite its location due to its color and the color of the surrounding landscape--a modern beach house on a metaphorical beach. Beautiful.

It doesn't look like I'll ever have the money to pull off such a dream, and even if I did, most alkali flats in the U.S. are located on B.L.M. land, which is just as well, so everyone can enjoy the isolation, one lonely traveler at a time.

I have never bothered to design the perfect house for my dream site because that house was built between 1928 and 1931 in Poissy, France.  It is the brain child of Swiss Architects, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.  There is simply no way I could improve upon it, other than move it to the perfect site.  

As I doubt this will be last post on this masterpiece in white, I'll keep this short and share a wonderful video to let you experience it for yourself.

Space and light and order. 

Those are the things that men need 

just as much as they need bread 

or a place to sleep.

--Le  Corbusier

Why White? (Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, Snow, the White Album, Richard Meier, The Cliffs of Dover, Marble, Greece, Beaches, "Café at Night" by Paul Blackburn)

Why white?  I don't know.  Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier.  Snow.  The White Album.  The architecture of Richard Meier.  The Cliffs of Dover.  Marble.  Greece.  Beaches.  "Café at Night" by Paul Blackburn:

The men are white
the wine is white
                            Two
women come in, they order hot

milk.  Everything is still white
                                                  (white)

White.  The word has amazing sound.  Pure. Beautiful.  Blanco doesn't cut it. 

 

*

But white is also ugly, dangerous:

                                                        K.   K.  K.

                          WHITE SUPREMECY.

                                                      W.A.S.P.

                         Straight jackets.   

                                                        White Van with

                                                        DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS
                                                                                                       (black print)

Just seemed there should be a blog dedicated to all things white.

Below is a giant white 9.  Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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