In which the pond turns to the y'artz in the Athens of the south ...

 

As a herpetology student, the pond never had time for matters aesthetic, or for that matter, ascetic. 

What could possibly be said about alleged lefties of the David Stratton or Phillip Adams kind, save that they were useful idiots, cogs in the Murdochian machine, a handy patina, a little camouflage, a soupçon of servile window dressing, attendant aesthetic lords, swelling a paper or two, starting the odd scene pretending to be on the other side, scraping and bowing to the chairman, no doubt easy tools, deferential, glad to be of use, full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse ... idle distractions from the important business of gutting climate science and such like ... but then that feeble painter Adolf had his Albert Speer, so the Chairman Emeritus had to have his ...

As a travel writer, the pond is free to roam and can spend whole posts ignoring the reptiles, savouring the sights of Athens down under. 

At first the pond couldn't make hide nor hair of the sign on Flinders station, Rising: ...

It turned out that there were y'artz going on right as the pond was in town, though it finished yesterday, according to its website ...

No matter, as a diligent tourist, the pond must do the y'artz, pausing only to admire the mighty Yarra, its emerald waters, shiny, bright, a glittering blue big sky country colour, explaining why Melbourne is passing famous as the emerald city of the south ...

Then the pond headed to the Potter, only to be confronted by an embassy for which the pond lacked a passport ...

Apparently the locals are realising that the actual building is something of an architectural monstrosity which doesn't really connect to the mighty shimmering emerald Yarra, but the tent did provide an alternative view ...

Then before reaching the Potter, the pond came across a series of whimsical art works. Sadly the pond's reproductions are no match for the colours in the original, what with the colours off and the angles skewed, but you can catch the drift ...

That seagull perched on top was an ominous sign of a Hitchcock reference to come ...

There were of course reptiles, which the pond immediately took as a metaphor for News Corp ... was there a HUN journo buried in there, ready to terrify the children?

After that bit of fun, it was time to praise the artist ...

The pond had suddenly developed a thirst for the political and was reminded of the way that ratbags still roamed Swanston street, wild-eyed and chanting to the sky ...

Oh it was a huge assembly of raging cultural warriors ... why, there might have been as many as 30, with some working the footpaths, handing guides to offensive TG bigotry (whatever happened to the notion it was a mall?)

As for the program, the pond took one but hesitated to include any of the actual text, given the bigotry enshrined therein, so this one will do ...

Kudos to the Matthew Flinders Hotel, which suddenly earned some respect by cancelling the mob; memo to self, make sure to avoid The Polish Club in Rowville at all times ... sometimes not even 30 pieces of silver is a decent price for the damage done.

A little further down the street, the Falun Gong were out and about, though under a different name ...

The pond was tempted to stop and ask how things were going at The Epoch Times ...

That NPR story will do ... or at least a sample of it, in full at the link:

The Epoch Times began as an anti-Chinese Communist Party newspaper founded by Chinese dissidents and later morphed into a global conservative multimedia company championing former President Donald Trump and conspiracy theories, claiming an audience of millions.
Now it is in turmoil.
Its chief financial officer, Weidong Guan, was arrested earlier this month for allegedly engaging in a multi-year money laundering scheme that federal prosecutors say helped drive the company’s skyrocketing growth in revenue in recent years. Days after the CFO’s arrest, the founder and CEO resigned and an interim management team is now running the media organization.
Guan has pleaded not guilty and is currently suspended from his job, according to a statement from The Epoch Times. The organization has said it intends to fully cooperate with the federal investigation.
In the latest twist, the founding leader of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement The Epoch Times is associated with, appears to be publicly scolding The Epoch Times for its alleged financial wrongdoing and embrace of partisan politics.
The spiritual leader, Li Hongzhi, has penned two columns since the CFO’s arrest that appear to address the media company’s embattled leadership directly and are posted prominently on The Epoch Times’ homepage.
“You were thinking that it’s hard to fight the CCP’s persecution without funds, and wanted to make money for this cause; and that the U.S. government would be understanding if something wasn’t handled quite right,” Li wrote in a piece posted June 5, adding, “But that was your own thinking.”
In a second piece that appeared on the homepage under the headline “Wake Up” that posted June 8, Li urged his adherents who work in media to stop launching personal attacks, “particularly not on important figures in the United States’ two major political parties” as they could result in retaliation.
“You have no business thinking that you will only try to help individuals who belong to one political party, and not the other,” Li wrote, cautioning those working in media from only focusing on “your click rate.”
A.J. Bauer, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, called Li’s columns on the homepage “so peculiar and remarkable” and said “they read like internal memos.”

Across the way the pond was tempted to ask the stall workers about Hamas ...

But it didn't seem fair, because there was no balancing stall to ask Zionists about the ongoing genocide.

No, it was time to finish up by focussing on the y'artz and here the Queen Vic gardens offered a corker ... a certified genuine Ando ...

Immediately the pond was transported back to fond memories of a ripper story in the current The New Yorker, Ian Parker's Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix, How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin. (Sorry, likely paywall and the original has vivid snaps).

It's too long a tale and too well told by Parker to replicate here, just a few tasters instead, as a certain Tony Saxon, a wiry tattooed man in his early thirties and blessed by a "Jersey gonzo" work ethic (here's to Joisey) was hired by Ye to demolish the building's interiors ...

A coffee-table survey of Ando’s houses, to which Ando supplied a foreword, has the Sachs House on its cover. The photograph was taken at the top of the wide outdoor staircase. The photographer, facing the sea, was perhaps standing in the concrete hot tub. Below, on the house’s main level, is the little courtyard. To the left, two cylindrical stainless-steel chimney pipes, serving an indoor fireplace, run up the side of the house, rising several feet above the upper terrace. The chimneys seem to quote a similar crowning gesture at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
Saxon’s videos include one in which he’s helping topple one of the chimneys. Another shows someone swinging a hammer at a bathroom’s black-and-white marble walls. A third demonstrates how a handsome glass balustrade, the kind you’re almost bound to find in a modern museum, shatters into windshield fragments when you tap its corner with a sledgehammer. In a fourth, Saxon and another man are demolishing the hot tub with two jackhammers. “There was so much rebar in the concrete,” Saxon told me. “It was absolutely brutal.”
Saxon had been hired to carve an oceanside Turrell out of an angular fifty-seven-million-dollar Ando. Ye revealed to Saxon—although not all at once—that he wanted no kitchen, bathrooms, A.C., windows, light fixtures, or heating. He was intent on cutting off the water and the power (and removing the house’s cable and wiring, which ran through the concrete in plastic tubes). He talked of clarity, simplicity, and a kind of self-reliance. “He wanted everything to be his own doing,” Saxon told me. In one cheerful text from Ye to Saxon, in response to a report of the day’s demolition, he wrote, “Let’s gooooo . . . Simple fresh and cleeeeeean.”

In Melbourne, the trademark concrete Yando markings were to hand ...

The exterior had the sort of pillbox quality that suggested,with just a few of them above the Normandy beaches, there might never have been a successful D-day to celebrate ...

Back at the Malibu House, work had progressed ...

...By the end of October, demolition was largely complete. The process had been interrupted by only occasional moments of confusion. Once, Saxon thought that he was following Ye’s instructions by smashing up the fire pit in the courtyard. He sent Ye a photograph of the pit reduced to a circular stump. “This is not a good job brother,” Ye texted. He’d wanted Saxon to take out the living-room fireplace instead. It hardly mattered: all of it had to go.
The project was now starting to focus on additions and enhancements. Saxon found this phase more fraught; it required engineering—and some planning. What did Ye want? Writing to Censori, Saxon observed how odd it was that, “no matter how tight we are with Ye,” they remained unsure of his intentions. He added, “It’s always an adventure.” Censori replied, “LMAOOO I know isn’t it crazy.” Saxon developed a solidarity with Censori born of these conditions. He encouraged Ye to have her take on a larger role at Malibu Road; in turn, she helped Saxon compose texts to Ye, who had complained of verbiage. (“I don’t read long text,” he texted.) Saxon and Censori once had a jokey exchange about marrying, to allow her to stay in the U.S. legally. Censori: “I’ll get the best wedding dress.” She added a bride emoji. Saxon: “Fine but we need to have an Elvis impersonator.” Censori: “Obviously!!!!” (for those wanting to know about the aptly named Censori, there's a short rip of the story here).

In Melbourne all was peace and reflections ...

In Malibu, things were still ramping up ...

...A few weeks earlier, Saxon had shown Ye a part of the Malibu Road house that he’d never seen before. In the garage, Saxon opened a hatch in the floor, then led Ye down a ladder into a space that, although on the same level as the laundry and the lower-floor bedrooms, couldn’t be accessed from there, and was basement-like in its lack of natural light. As Saxon recalled it, he explained to Ye, “Look, there’s your water purifier. There’s your A.C. systems, there’s your boiler, there’s your water softener. You know, this is the guts of the house.” Ye, looking around, replied, “This is going to be my bomb shelter. This is going to be my Batcave.”

Ye’s hopes for the house, at least at this moment, call to mind the Atlanta stadium setup. There’d be a cell-like capsule to provide for some basic human needs, from which one could emerge into a big, semipublic space that was open to the sky. This was a vision less of a home than of a refuge within a striking concrete art work. One of the people on the project had discussions with disaster-proofing specialists. Ye sent Saxon various drawings showing an arrangement of amenities within a small space. One image contained spherical and ovoid objects—“cooker,” “pump,” “fridge”—but no mattress. Another included three crates, a “flat pack shower,” and a “robot platform.” Ye wrote, “Let’s make this in real life.” Saxon texted, “I love this—it’s genius,” but he had no idea what he was meant to do. There were similarly desultory exchanges about recycling rainwater and cutting a hole in the floor to make a toilet.

Ye remained adamant about disconnecting the house from the grid; he also opposed installing solar panels. In Saxon’s view, it would be unpleasant (and loudly indiscreet) to operate tools like concrete mixers using gas or diesel generators. Ye was unsympathetic. His usual boosterish tone—“What’s up, brother? Good morning. I love you. Let’s get this shit done,” in Saxon’s summary—gave way to peevishness: “Why is there still power here?”

By the start of November, no work had begun on the ramps, or slides, that had always been a part of Ye’s conception. Although Ye had been open to the idea that paint could blur the difference between concrete and wood, Saxon recalled him recognizing that the foam had looked shoddy on the stairs. Saxon had then asked an acquaintance to design a ramp scheme. A rendering, which Saxon forwarded to Ye, featured new walls and a slide made of stainless steel, like in a playground. Ye didn’t like it. On November 5th, Censori sent, in a chat, three renderings of a concrete ramp with Ando-style tie holes. Ye, in another chat, wrote, “When will this be done? I’ve been asking for this for over a month.

Back in Melbourne there was a chance to contemplate the Melbourne reflections ...

In Malibu the mystery mounted ...

...It’s hard, however, to think of another esteemed house that’s been left exposed to the elements, and to the public’s gaze, after being jackhammered halfway to ruins. Saxon told me, “It’s funny—and not funny, in a way—to say, ‘I’m the man who single-handedly destroyed this architectural masterpiece.’ But I pretty much did.”
Ron Radziner recalled the first time he saw photographs of the changes made to the Sachs House. “We were all devastated,” he said. “It was this beautiful piece of architecture, and it’s really destroyed.” Toward the end of last year, he heard again from Ye’s office. In Radziner’s recollection, he was asked “to put it all back together.” He expressed interest. He told me, “I’d be thrilled to have the opportunity to bring it all the way back.”
Radziner gave Ye an estimate. (He declined to share the figure with me, beyond acknowledging that it exceeded ten million dollars.) As before, Ye didn’t reply. “The next thing we heard is the house was on the market.”
In December, the news broke that the Malibu Road house was being listed by the Oppenheim Group, which is both a real-estate brokerage and the setting of the hit reality show “Selling Sunset,” on Netflix. The Oppenheim Group listing used the same photographs that Sachs had used when selling it: balustrades, sun loungers, windows. Ye’s asking price was fifty-three million dollars.
In February, I spoke to Jason Oppenheim, who runs the company with his twin brother, Brett. Jason gamely tried to close the gap between that imagery and the cavernous reality. Stress-testing real-estate rhetoric, he argued that an Ando structure is “ninety per cent concrete” and that what has been lost on Malibu Road is “just, really, finish work,” which was already a decade old and ripe for replacement. “So you’re going to be getting, essentially, a brand-new Ando.”

One last glimpse of Melbourne reflections ...

Back in Malibu came the subtle hint that maybe the rising seas would sort out the whole mess ...

...A few days later, I walked along the beach in Malibu. It was around high tide, when you’re forced to pass right by the pillars that support the houses looming over you; you’re close enough to read sour, threatening little signs urging you to go away. Waves occasionally reached beneath Ye’s house. On a narrow staircase that leads down to the sand, the bottom six or seven steps were wet.
Up on Malibu Road, it looked as though someone had attempted to force open the freestanding concrete mailbox in front of the house, near where Saxon had once tried to hide a porta-potty. But the street-facing side of the house was otherwise in unaltered condition and delivered the usual Ando contrast of high precision—holes and lines—and the subtle disorder of the concrete’s shading, with bruises of dark gray, or yellowish gray, set against paler gray.
Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing.
I looked around for half an hour. The seagulls kept their distance. The sun shone. Oppenheim was not quite wrong: the house was still here, in a way that another architect’s work might not be, given Ye’s thoroughness and more than two years of salt and rain. But the fireplace was now a hole between the living room and the courtyard; the concrete hot tub was just a scar. The staircases were as pitted as the floors. It was a scene of violence, even if you could still identify the spot where Sachs once hung a Cindy Sherman. The walls often showed where someone had aimed a blow at a closet or a sheet of marble but instead hit smooth concrete, contributing a rogue mark to Ando’s tie-hole pattern. At some point, on the beach side of the house, where there were once windows and glass balustrades, safety barriers were installed. They quickly rusted, and the concrete beneath them was stained red.
Downstairs, an internal concrete wall, which once stood between a bedroom and its bathroom, lay on the floor in fragments, with rebar poking out of it—I saw this against a backdrop of perfectly blue sky, suggesting an Anselm Kiefer sculpture on vacation. I walked through the former laundry into the control room. Almost no daylight reached this corner, and there was no cross-breeze to dry it out. I was splashing through an inch or two of standing water that looked gray in the dim light. Ye’s Batcave was on the other side of the wall in front of me.
In mid-April, he reduced the price to thirty-nine million dollars.

Indeed he did, and if you head off to the Zillow listing you can read the enticing details:

$39,000,000 24844 Malibu Rd, Malibu, CA 90265, 4 beds, 5 baths, 4,021sq ft, Est $252,470/mo

The pitch was compelling:

An architectural tour de force and only one of the few private homes in the United States designed by the renowned Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect, Tadao Ando. Best known for his minimalist structures and his assured use of reinforced concrete, Ando's trademark design of "smooth-as-silk" concrete is wholly present in the structure and surface of the home. Constructed of approximately 1,200 tons of concrete, 200 tons of steel reinforcement, and 12 massive pylons driven more than 60 feet into the sand with AD100 architecture firm Marmol Radziner acting as executive architect and general contractor, the structure is an everlasting beacon of permanence on California's coastline. Natural light is used creatively throughout the space, another signature of Ando, to manipulate a warm feeling throughout the building and harmonize with its natural surroundings. The home spans +/- 4,000 sq. ft. of interior space and approximately 1,500 sq. ft. of outdoor decks with ocean views from every room. Currently all interior finishes have been removed from the property, and work is needed to either restore or reimagine the interiors. Thoughtfully located on the prestigious and quiet Malibu Road, with easy access and close proximity to the finest restaurants, shopping, and entertainment in all of Malibu. An exceedingly rare architectural achievement that should be seen as a masterful work of art, rather than just a residence.

Melbourne and Malibu, joined by the hip across the Pacific ...

It's a funny world, and the pond's only conclusion ... the y'artz are a funny game. So on tomorrow to continue the quest for Melbourne y'artz, with the pond finally making it to the Potter ...

The pond realises all this means neglecting reptile highlights ...

As for domestic politics, best left to the 'toons in a reptile-free zone ...

Here's looking at you, lucky, lucky Lithgow ...

Here's to the planning ...

Here's to the bots ...

And here's to the infallible Pope catch-up...