Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

How apt that Frank DiGiacomo's story on the "LEGENDARY" Star Wars Holiday Special and Christopher Caldwell's history of the weak revolt against Brutalism appeared practically at the same time. Here are pernicious artifacts of the seventies in all their vain ignominy -- the "windowless façades, [the] human-repelling scale, [the] masses of dirty concrete and their self-conscious wish to shock", a cheesy glitzy variety show prompted by the "unfathomable" success of a "gee-whiz" space epic, the Brutalists and Luke Spielberg defining the age in tinsel and dreck, both embarrassments in innumerable ways, the former ripped by Tom Wolfe, the latter hidden away by its license-holding CONTROL PHREAK. And each has its eulogy -- first from Caldwell:Modernist architecture does not give us new ways of seeing. It is an impoverishment, in fact. It ignores a varied cultural vocabulary accumulated over the centuries, because that vocabulary might endanger Modernism's political purpose. As a project, it resembles Kemal Atatürk's purging of the Turkish language to eliminate words with Persian, Arabic, or European roots.
And this one from DiGiacomo, from, a writer who worked on the Luke Spielberg bomb:

“I think in a bigger sense, it’s nice to know that Star Wars does have feet of clay,” he says. “Ultimately, when all is said and done, it’s an outer-space movie. It’s not sacred. And what has amused me the most is that somehow people think the special discredits the image of this sacred text.”

In short, architecture and movees have their deadly-obsessive adherents, with feet of clay and brains the match, who inflict visual pollution of all kinds, and whose cultural despotism the Republic can never rid, except perhaps through the passage of time, which can't come soon enough.