Round-up

A disconnected collection of links, with a vaguely unifying thread of corruption, architecture and surveillance. First, K-Punk on vintage form, on Alan J Pakula, business ethics and individualism.

Another link pertinent to the proceedings of the Socialist Lavatory League: Jim Schembri calls for a people's movement to reclaim the public loo. The critique of the atomised, automated idiocy of those single toilet pods is particularly sharp; a typically inconvenient neoliberal approach to the public convenience, created in order to efface the worrying collectivity of the truly public pissoirs and cubicles of our Victorian forbears. The public loo must be truly public, or it is nothing at all.

Shockingly enough, an interesting article in Blueprint - Peter Kelly on what has happened to architecture in Rome since the Mayorship was taken over by a 'post-fascist' whose victory was famously greeted by ah, 'Roman salutes'. Unsurprisingly, practically any modern construction has been halted, although it seems that, understandably, nobody is remotely interested in defending the corrupt, neoliberal legacy of former mayor (and Sinistra Invertebrate) Walter Veltroni, rather bafflingly here described as 'left-wing'.

At OpenDemocracy, prolific architectural photographer and historian Edward Denison on The Architectural Photographer as Terrorist - he was recently detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, for the crime of photographing a neo-Georgian police station.
City of Sound on the lack of ambient noise provided by the electric car, something which some lobbyists are rather appallingly planning to rectify by adding traffic noise. COS has some rather more interesting aural suggestions.

Nothing To See Here on Marine Court, the hulking concrete cruiseship which is currently second home to Iain Sinclair, who writes about it with typical overheated noir paranoia here.

More corruption, evil and skulduggery and its occasionally tectonically intriguing results: a photoset of John Poulson's still derelict Leeds International Pool. Brilliantly odd and clearly a film-set in waiting, although not answering the enormously pertinent question of who the Blair boom's John Poulson might be. Hmmm.