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