Lots of fashionable words ring alarm bells, but the one that’s giving me the pip right now is “reimagine”. Sure, it’s fine to assert that in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys reimagines elements of Jane Eyre. But can the same ever really be said of an apartment block or a hamburger? Its deployment often reeks of desperation, an attempt to make the controversial or the unpalatable sound dreamy and magical. No, you may not be able to see the beauty in what lies ahead, but that’s only because you’re a philistine with no vision.
Near our house, a major “reimagining” is under way in the form of the construction of the borough’s first “livable neighbourhood”, the initial stages of which (faffing with pavements) have closed a major arterial road, pushing yet more traffic and several bus routes on to another, already-clogged thoroughfare – and the result is chaotic. Journey times have doubled; the air is thick with fumes born of traffic jams. Putting aside the fact that the neighbourhood in question is perfectly “livable” already, isn’t it always the case that these schemes inevitably make life very much less so for those who live or work just adjacent to them?
Thanks to this, I’m broadly on the side of the community groups who last week joined forces to lobby the government to ensure councils cannot in future introduce such changes without the consent of local people. I hope they’ll eventually succeed (and before you ask, I no longer own a car). But I wonder, too, if campaigners shouldn’t also call for the outlawing of weasel words in these matters. We want clarity! Haussmann’s Paris, like Joseph Paxton’s once revolutionary Birkenhead Park, constitutes a reimagining. A couple of planters and a slightly wider pavement do not.
Best seat in the house
I loved The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-tipped epic about the struggle of a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor to build a life in America. It’s so good that when its director-mandated interval arrived – the film is a bladder-stretching 215 minutes long – I was more surprised than relieved. Its hero László Tóth is played by Adrien Brody, and what havoc he wreaks on the heart; if his face brings you to tears so, too, do his delicate hands, in which cigarettes and pencils alike are nothing less than life rafts. Tóth is based in part on Marcel Breuer, and at one point we see him making a Breuer-style recliner of leather and steel – furniture the movie elevates, quite rightly, to the status of an altar. But perhaps I’m biased. In our kitchen is a set of Cesca chairs, designed by Breuer in 1928, and given to my husband long ago by an ex-girlfriend’s parents. For all that people complain they’re uncomfortable, I’ve always refused to give them up, and in the dark of the cinema, I felt vindicated. Let their bums ache! I thought (as mine did, by the film’s end).
On a good note
To continue the Mitteleuropean, modernist theme, last Thursday I listened to a brilliant conversation between the music writer Jeremy Eichler and the celebrated lawyer Philippe Sands. Eichler’s marvellous book, Time’s Echo, is about the effect of the Second World War on four composers, one of whom is Arnold Schoenberg, whose archive is reported lost in the Los Angeles fires.
But Eichler knew more about this than his audience. What burned, he reassured us, was mostly a collection of printed scores, the kind loaned to orchestras. The real archive, following a family row, was returned to Vienna some years ago – the city from which, as he also noted, Schoenberg, who was Jewish, had once fled another, quite different inferno.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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