great(ish) pt 43: modernist architecture, Cairo Station, hair like a weasel
Hello everyone! Today: a long read about Skopje's fantastic architectural history, a film set in Cairo's main railway station, a collection of Catalan short stories, symbolic substitute actions and 1 good tweet.
Article: Skopje’s 1963 Quake: From Ruins to Modernist Resurrection by Donald Niebyl, published in July 2021 on Spomenik Database
In a couple of decades, Vienna will be as hot as Skopje, which, when I was there more than ten years ago, was already extremely hot, though also extremely cool in the vibe department. A small part of the reason for both was the 60s and 70s architecture and city planning. Spomenik Database, which documents the former Yugoslavia's modernist public architecture, chronicles how Skopje was re-built after the catastrophic 1963 earthquake that demolished much of its built environment. Lots and lots of incredible photos if you don't feel like reading.
Film: Cairo Station (1958), directed by Youssef Chahine
Set entirely in and around Cairo's main station, this amalgam of Hitchcock-style psychological thriller and socio-realistic drama throws a lot at you in just 73 minutes. The main plot is this: Qinawi, an outcast due to a physical disability, develops an obsession with Hanuma, a woman who sells cold drinks to sweaty travellers. She is engaged to one of the railway station's main power brokers, who is trying to unionise its workers. Quinawi's obsession soon turns violent. In what is somehow both a melodrama (with a long musical interlude!) and a sharp observation of a specific social milieu, Chahine observes ableism and violent masculinity, women's and workers' rights, gender-based violence and suppressed sexuality, the competing allures of tradition and modernism. TW for all of the above. Streaming on Netflix as part of what I assume is a Youssef Chahine retrospective.
Book: The Song of Youth by Montserrat Roig, translated by Tiago Miller (1989/2021)
This collection of short stories by Catalan writer Montserrat Roig contains some of the best stories I've read in a while, including "Before I Deserve Oblivion", about a former censor and lifelong creep, and "Mar", in which the protagonist remembers her relationship with a woman who is now in a coma: "I couldn't take my eyes off her. (...) Maybe it was on account of her hair, which was as blonde as a barley field in summer and made me think of an androgynous Renaissance page with olive skin and small eyes, like a weasel in a forest at night. When I revealed this to her later on she told me that I classified things instead of seeing them, that I only got excited before beauty or mystery if I was expecting to be excited by it. I prepared myself too much, she said, as if, before tasting excitement, I had to rehearse it first."
Learning: Climate apathy and symbolic substitute actions
I recently talked to a friend about how we feel an increasingly strong sense of irreality: the climate is in crisis while we do our silly little tasks, and it feels stranger and stranger every day that life just... goes on. For now. In this summer of drought, as I watch the trees outside my window turn brown and shed their leaves early, I've been reading Kari Nougaard's research into our ability to ignore information we know to be true (for a short version, see this lecture on youtube), and Austrian researcher Reinhard Steurer's work on political tactics of delays and what he calls "symbolic substitute actions". As he explains in a recent interview (in English here), "this means that although almost everyone wants climate protection, they are willing to do or pay as little as possible for it. We satisfy the need for climate protection with things that are as easy and cheap as possible. In the case of individuals, recycling for example. But when it comes to tackling the big things, like cutting back on flying or eating less meat, things get more difficult. We see similar phenomena in politics. The simplest political substitute action is to announce goals. Being climate-neutral by 2040 sounds great and you can win elections with it because it doesn't hurt anyone today. In short: We like to fool ourselves when it comes to climate protection."
Other: Once in a blue moon twitter is good:
