History of Modern

We have had, Dear Readers, a relatively quiet, and not at all acrimonious, afternoon in the Beaker Community.

This afternoon's meditation was on the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album, "History of Modern". I found it rather patchy myself, lacking in the Kraftwerk-inspired sparseness of Dazzle Ships, for example. Eileen on the other hand rather liked a few of the tracks - "New Babies, New Toys", for example, she thought had just the right edge of menace, and the fade-out of  "The Right Side?" she quite liked. We have always split on OMD. I prefer things like "The Romance of the Periscope", or "Stanlow" - what could be more evocative than a song about an oil refinery in the early morning? Eileen has always been fonder of the "Joan of Arc" songs and "Pandora's Box". Again, Eileen has expressed her admiration for the preppie-boy looks of the young Paul Humphreys, while I was delighted to discover, in Andy McCluskey, somebody who was clearly paying homage to my dancing style.

But the album title of "History of Modern" itself, and its accompanying sleeve notes, were what caused our discussions this afternoon. The group kindly list a number of things that are "modern" and things that are "not". I will give some examples from their list: if you want them all, I suggest you buy the album.

The OMD List

Modern is	Modern is not
Dada	Rococo
Nuclear Power	Thomas Edison
Communism	Liberalism
Glass	Wood
Steel	Sandstone
Germany	France
English Electric Deltic Diesel	The blues

Immediately you see the deep waters we were in here - here, for comparison, are some from the list we "kicked around" in this afternoon's "Risotto Church".

My List

Modern is	Modern is not
Richard Dawkins	Brian Cox
WH Auden	John Betjemann
Carlsberg Lager	Henry's IPA
Biblical Fundamentalism	Messy Church
Thomas Hardy	Martin Amis
The Moog Synthesiser	Bass Viol
Phrenology	Homoeopathy

Of course, what we are looking at is a false dichotomy. For if "modern" is one option, there are surely more options in the world than "not modern" - for if France is "not modern" - is it mediaeval, or is it post-modern? And of course the answer to this will vary according to whether you are reading the works of Jacques Derrida, or trying to use the public lavatories.

But the battle between "modern" and "not modern" is out there, modernists, and we are losing. Those "air conditioned, bright canteens" of which John Betjemann wrote so memorably (and, incidentally, apparently he did not like them) are giving way to a coffee-shop culture, to people "eating at their desks", as if they are in cottage industries. Instead of people travelling in sweaty steel cans to work in gleaming offices, soaring over modernist cityscapes, we are confronted with the idea of "tele-commuting" - or "sitting around in your dressing gown all day", as I prefer to think of it. Yes, the Cold War was scary. But it was modernist scary - this was the fear of being blown to bits en masse in a thoroughly scientific way. Not small-scare, widely scattered, post-modernist fear like we have today. In the past, our solution to Global Warming would have been investment in massive CO2 capture followed by disposal around the Moon - today we think the answer is vegetarianism. Sure, the Shard is a wonderful icon, but it is an image of a modernist world that is passing away. Modernists, we must fight. And we must fight now, for our rights to hygiene, steel, space and minimalism. We have much to lose.

Vicar living in 1960s Comments on Modern Religion

Apologies, for I just noticed this news item, although I'm sure it was big news in Gloucestershire a week or two ago.

Apparently vicar Canon Dr Jeni Parsons has said that people these days keep church "for best" - baptisms, weddings and funerals. Which may be true. She could be right, though she doesn't offer many solutions - or else the BBC have removed them from the snippets they quote, of course. But it's this sentence that caught my eye - "People use church like the parlour, it's for best".

When I was very young, people did indeed have parlours,"front rooms" or "living rooms" for best in some working-class homes. The "other room" had a dining table, armchairs, electric fire and huge (even up to 18 inch) TV somehow shoe-horned in, while the "front room" was freezing cold and resplendent with fatally-shiny linoleum and stiff, upright-backed three-piece suites in exciting new plastic fabrics.

The "room for best" didn't last, of course. Modern living put paid to them. In the old three-bed semis the kitchens and dining rooms got knocked through into kitchen-diners, or they became studies, or ready-rooms. And modern houses are too, too small with lounge-diners or lounge-kitchen-diners and everyone eats with their hands with their plates on their knees while wearing 3D glasses in front of 42" plasma screens - and simultaneously playing on their DS'es while Facebooking their mates using their Smartphones and there's no room for best rooms any more.

Now I think of it, I feel a great light has gone out of our lives, and a regretful kind of nostalgia for living in black-and-white and eating your dinner off an oilcloth on a chipboard table. But I don't want to go back there. So I'm going to avoid Gloucestershire. Just in case Revd Dr Parsons is actually describing life as it's lived there.