BAGDContext CSM

This is a post about food, catering, fine dining, and trains. For those of you old enough to remember, the “British Rail sandwich” was a thing of legend – not good. It wasn’t always like that.

This is the dining room of Le Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon, Paris. It’s one of the greatestBelle Epoque interiors that survives. Maybe only the Paris Opera is better…

I’ve posted about French restaurants and railway stations before, here

http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2011/04/18/steak-frites-11021581/

One of the great pleasure of trains in France is the high quality of the restaurants and hotels that you find around railway stations. At Gare du Nord, for example, there is the amazing Terminus Nord. This is a classic brasserie style restaurant. That means you can eat at any time during the day. The menu usually comprises  the classic selections of shell fish, grilled meats and sauerkraut and desserts.

This is a brochure produced by SNCF (French Railways) in 1954. It advertised all their main-line station buffets. Great store is placed on the regional specialities and a handy map is provided which shows the kinds of produce which can be anticipated.

Anone who has travelled around France will be familiar with this. The good news is that the redevelopment of St Pancras in london now includes a number of excellent restaurants. The new King’s Cross station will also have an improved food offer. That’s certainly an improvement on the usual fast-food outlets and fried chicken shops that you get around UK stations.

Here’s a picture of me about to tuck in to lunch in Paris. This is roast bone marrow at the Europeen, opposite the Gare de Lyon. You can check out the menu, here

http://www.brasserie-leuropeen.fr/bewax/fr/home.html

You can check out Terminus Nord, here

http://www.terminusnord.com/carte/

Both of the excellent restaurants are part of larger groups…Bon appetit.

This is  a post about the American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy. It’s also about locomotives and streamlining, and about book design and art-direction.

The pictures in this post are taken from Loewy’s book on locomotive design, published in 1937. Not surprisingly, Loewy uses the book to promote his own idea of what successful design would be when applied to railway engines. It’s called “streamlining.” Guess what, he does it best!

The centre-fold image is this fantastic shot of Loewy’s design for the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1936. There’s another photograph of him posing on the front of the engine…

The book was published by The Studio and was part of a series of books, collected under the title, The New Vision. The other titles in the series were by the famous architect Le Corbusier and also by W Watson Baker. Le Corbusier wrote about Aircraft design and Watson Baker about the World beneath the Microscope. 

Ostensibly, these books are about science and technology and the idea of progress through design. They are also books about photography and about how the new camera technology and film stock would allow us to see the world in new and exciting ways.

You can think of the themes of these books as exploring the visual language of speed, height and scale…That’s all very 1930s. So, the books are about the visual language of progress.

Because it’s the 1930s, the implicit message is of a new type of mechanical image making and mass-production. This is what Walter Benjamin was trying to promote in his essays on image production and politics.

You can see that, even at the end of the 1930s, art-direction was though of in terms of black and white photography. Using images to tell a story was quite new in book publishing. Loewy’s book is like a slide presentation by Alexey Brodovitch. Nowadays, this is what we do on powerpoint; except not as well.

Here are some more pages from the book…

This is a post about Steve Reich, trains and the music of slaughter. The post carries on from my recent post about American trains (Sheeler) and about my previous post about music and trains (Pacific 231). We begin with Steve Reich.

The engineering of steam railways gave the experience of train travel a distinctive and musical rhythm. This was based on the sound of the engine, the clickity-clack of the wheels on the rails and the visual punctuation of the telegraph wires along the track.

Nowadays, nearly all this has disappeared. The trains power along in an undifferentiated roar; the tracks are welded and the train slides along them; the telegraph has gone. Anyway, back in the 20c, it was natural for composers to respond to the industrial beat of machinery and rhythm of speed.

The sounds of trains were especially attractive to the East Coast minimalist composer, Steve Reich. In 1988, Reich created a three section piece called Different Trains. You can find out about the piece here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Trains

Reich used sampled loops of spoken voices and superimposed those onto his distinctive, and percussive, repetitions. Some of the voices recorded by Reich are station announcers. Other voices speak about their recollections of the journeys and announce different trains and their destinations. The music also includes whistle sounds and mechanical noises.

The three sections of the piece contrast the luxury rail service, between NYC and Chicago, of pre-war America with the European rail services that provided the machinery of despotic deportation towards the Nazi death camps.

A number of writers and film makers have explored the connection between railways and brutality. Nowhere was this more evident that in Europe during the 1940s when millions were transported towards their death. The Nazi administration of the Holocaust was a simple recasting of the railway and stock systems designed, at the end of the 19C, to supply the Chicago slaughterhouses.

Lars von Trier made a film, Europa (1991) that deals with this theme of industrialised slaughter. You can find out about the film, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier

The working conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses were notoriously harsh. At the end of the 19C, American intellectuals and the political elite began to express an anxiety that these conditions would provide ideal conditions for the emergence of a radicalised American working class. Upton Sinclair described the exploitation, degradation and misery associated with these material conditions in The Jungle (1906). You can find out more about this book, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#The_Jungle

One of the great mysteries of American politics is the stubborn refusal of the American working class to become radicalised and to demand a different politics from Washington. The story of the American Labour movement was told in Warren Beatty’s film, Reds (1981).

If you’re interested in the historical development of this integrated industrial system of transportation, administration and slaughter, you should read Daniel Pick’s book, War Machine (1993).

The development of the refrigerated freight car in the 19C was at least as important as that of the luxury Pullman car. You can find out a bit more about this technical exploit, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car

If you think that we have advanced beyond all this. Think again. It’s just that this system has moved beyond the usual experience of supermarket shopping and so on. In fact, the concentrations of resources required by the scale of supermarkets has made the system even more brutal. You can read about how the contemporary iteration of this system has been developed in Canada inIan MacLachlan’s Kill and Chill (2001).

You can listen to the music and watch a film, here http://vimeo.com/4226079

Supplemental, Tuesday 9th August 2011

The Guardian has included an editorial in today’s paper about Reich’s Train’s. It’s ahead of tomorrow’s Prom at the Albert Hall.

This is a post about art and trains and about an American artist called Charles Sheeler.

Charles Sheeler was an artist and photographer who worked in the 1930s. He embraced the industrial landscape of North America as a legitimate and, in its own way, beautiful expression of the machine age modernism of industrial capitalism. Not surprisingly, trains and tracks feature in Sheeler’s work.

Sheeler is usually associated with the “precisionist” school of painting. This was a form of painting that combined the formal conceits of cubism with observational realism.

Sheeler was also part of a wider American cultural project. This was to position North America as the end-point of the global cultural phenomenon of Modernism. This project, conceptualised by Alfred Barr, of NYCs MoMa, was an attempt to connect Moscow, Berlin, Paris and New York in a single coherent trajectory of progress and innovation. That’s quite a train ride.

Barr’s project established the terms by which America was able to leverage the scale and critical mass of its productive energy to project soft “cultural” power across the globe. The choice of explicitly “American” themes was, accordingly, an expression of cultural maturity and independence from the old world (Europe).

A note about the train… The 1930s marked the apogee of steam locomotion in the USA. The engines were distinguished by a combination of size, engineering, performance and styling. The engineering development of the engines allowed them to haul great loads at speed and over the great distances of the American continent.

The engine was a 4-6-4 Hudson (or Baltic) type locomotive made for the New York Central Railway. The numbers refer to the wheel arrangements of the engine. These engines were superseded, after WW2, by diesel traction.

The “streamlined” styling of Modernist America applied itself to everything from architecture and engineering to consumer products. The main figures associated with form of industrial design were Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes.

You can infer all of this (scale, styling and performance) in Sheeler’s painting from the details of the picture. The driving wheels, for example, are of a new design that replaces the traditional spokes with a disc.

As it happens, the wheel details are taken from the engine styling by Henry Dreyfuss for The 20th Century Limited . This service provided the rail passenger service between New York and Chicago. The streamlined styling provided for this train was an expression of the speed and comfort of the service.

The train service to Chicago was crucial in connecting the two most important business centres in the USA. Furthermore, Chicago marked the beginning of the rail network into the mid-west and beyond.

The train service was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, North by Northwest. I’ve posted before about Hitchcock and trains…

Here are some great poster images of the engine and train.

This is a post about a small book about big engines. There are thousands of books about railways; but most of them aren’t as nicely designed as this.

Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives, by LTC Holt, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1964 and designed by Higginbottom and Oubridge (Who they? If you know, let me know please). I know a bit about the history of illustrated books in britain and the developemnt of art-direction in magazines and books. I know the illustrated books of Hugh Evelyn from the early 1960s, but these books by Hamish Hamilton are new to me.

The square format of the book is a big clue. As is the use of a photographic image enlarged so as to become slightly degraded. This book looks like it comes form the early 1970s. In fact, it’s from the first pre-commercial period of pop art in England.

You can see bits of Peter Blake, The Sunday Times Magazine and Sargent Pepper in all this.

The Stirling locos were designed, built and developed for the Great Northern Railway towards the end of the 19C. They were distinguished by the large diameter driving wheel. In their time, they were the biggest and quickest machines known to man.

There are a number of other titles in this series of books. Well worth looking out for.

This is a post about the LMS Royal Scot class of steam locomotive. These are the engines that pulled the trains up the west coast route to Scotland.

The print is from the 1930s. Here’s a scale model of this type of engine. A classic.

This is a post about model trains and a trip to Margate.

We were driving over to Broadstairs on the Kent coast to have a cup of tea with Graham Ward at his Festival Cafe. On the way, we stopped off at the old Hornby factory which has become a visitor attraction.

Before I describe what we saw, here’s a bit of history…

Hornby was named after Frank Hornby, of Liverpool, who invented the engineering and building toy Meccano. It was a small step from there to tin-plate model railways. Hornby models were pioneers of the conveniently room-sized HO-OO scale. These models could be built into an impressive lay-out within the space and resources of middle-class families. By the 1950s and 1960s Hornby was the market leader.

Nowadays, they have a massive factory in China and build models for a whole host of international companies. These companies each produce a range of models that is appropriate for sale in their own country. The model train market is nothing if not chauvinistic.

Actually, that’s part of the model scene that I think is really interesting. When you see big layouts, they are a kind of utopia. Hornby now have a range of buildings, to scale, that can be used to fill up the centre of the lay-out and to add detail. When you look at the range of buildings available, it becomes obvious that there is something weird going on. All the buildings are relatively modest structures – terrace houses and workshops and so on. The favoured architectural style is definitely utilitarian; nothing too modern or too fancy here.

The towns build up to appear busy with lots of shops and workshops. There’s a lot of metal bashing going on. In fact, this is a scene that has more or less disappeared from Britain.

If you were to visit a big model engineering show with international exhibits, you would notice that each type and nationality of railway model has a corresponding form of utopia. Each one made-up in fantastic detail.

I remember that, at the end of the 1960s, BBC TV Blue Peter had a railway lay-out. It took me ages to figure out that the model included practically one-of-everything in the Hornby catalogue. Considering that, back then, it was impossible to buy anything else; it was product placement on a grand and unabashed scale. It was all a bit odd because, elsewhere, the BBC were busy removing trademarks and so on.

I’m especially interested in the trees… there’s a whole subset of model makers there.