Architecture in its broadest sense concerns itself with the uprooting of structures that are permanent, cementing themselves in the greater cultural context.
Architecture in its broadest sense concerns itself with the uprooting of structures that are permanent, cementing themselves in the greater cultural context.
The afterglow of this communion extends into the final, much-anticipated delight: a “cultural boat ride” promising “ten thousand years of Indian Culture in ten minutes.” This air-conditioned funfair ride begins, appropriately enough, on the mythic “banks of the Saraswati” (a now unknown or extinct river celebrated in the Vedas) festooned with tableaux of ten-thousand-year-old “Vedic” agriculture, Vedic universities, Vedic bazaars, Vedic elections and even the “first conference on embryology.” Never mind that the prevailing historical consensus is that the earliest Vedic “texts” (they were originally orally transmitted) are little more than 3,500 years old. Further downriver, things get weirder as we witness the Indic invention of everything from plastic surgery to the airplane.
The police showed up to the event. At first they were just interested in what it was we were up to. We told them that this was something like a support group which was accurate, as it happens. They left and then returned with officers from the Criminal Investigation Department. There were three CID and two or three police officers. They started checking everyone’s passports. I was told that my passport was in improper shape it was ripped, allegedly and I needed to go see the police station so they could confirm my identity. I asked if this meant that I was under arrest, and whether I could not go to the station. They responded that I couldn’t not do that.
In my mind, Geller I always pairs with Casablanca, another instant classic that would have been in theaters when Breuer started drawing it up: a work of high-low insider-outsider hybridity, expressing a very particular old-world immigrant’s dream of the character of modern life among the Americans. Geller I remains somehow poised at that postwar moment of collective trauma and redemptive domesticity, in its contemporary description by House & Garden magazine forever “the house of tomorrow, today.”