Taher Deghayes, Insight

Taher Deghayes’ brother Omar was illegally held in Guantánamo Bay for five years by the US military, and I drank tea with him on the day on after Omar's release, in his Saltdean living room while his brother slept upstairs in his bed for the first time in half a decade. One of the most surreal and, I'm almost ashamed to say, moving interview's I've ever done. Insight, March issue:


Community
For the last six years, our lives have been Omar. He has framed every family debate we have had. Our mother is the centre of the family and there has not been a night that she has not thought of Omar. However, it’s made us stronger as a family, because we have stuck together throughout all of this. The sense of community has been incredible – I never realised how many caring people there are around you, until this happened. I would always look at those people who handed out the Socialist Worker and I would think that they were nutters, but it’s these nutters who have been ensuring that our democracy is safeguarded that our basic values and human rights are observed. The sancity of human life and the appreciation of our fundamental rights and values is what makes us civilized in the so-called West. It’s the best system that I believe to exist, is this thing – above anything else – that makes me proud to be British.

Moral strength
As a family, we were always brought up to differ, to disagree, to hold different opinions. In Guantánamo Bay, it was the members of al-Qaeda who were released one year in, because they knew how to keep their head down and not anger the guards, they knew what to do in prison, but my brother, because of how he was raised, and because of the fact he was English and held a law degree, would not bow his head, he kept on criticizing the guards and pointing out abuse where he saw it. This is why they did not let him go. When I saw him, I was so worried that they would have broken his spirit – I mean, there were days when I thought that I could not cope with it – but when I saw him in court yesterday [we spoke to Taher the day after Omar was granted bail], and I saw that he standing proud with so much to say, I knew that they could not break him.

Faith
What has kept us going? Three things: our faith, our community and our belief in the rule of law. It is destiny. It is hard to explain, but if you believe in your destiny and accept it – not in a complacent way – then you can keep waking up in the morning. It is like when you have a bad day and nothing is going well, what keeps you going is the knowledge that one day things will be better. The community that the campaign has brought together, our friends, and the friends we never met [has been incredible]. I feel proud to have been a part of this.

Family celebration
We had a bottle of wine and a family meal last night. A bottle of champagne – non-alchoholic champagne!

The moment we saw him
Really, really good.

Cosmic architecture for insight

A quick chat with one of the most foremost architecture professors of his generation back in February 2008:

If you’re looking for insight into the world around you, you could do worse than speak to John McKean. After a lifetime teaching, practising and writing about architecture, the Brighton University professor was chosen for a once-in-a-generation job: to rewrite the architecture student’s bible, Banister Fletcher. He took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Charlie Jones about pyramids, the cosmos and why Brighton needs civic space.

What issues are shaping architecture in 2008?
Money. Money is incredibly important. That may have always been the case, but it is more obvious than it has ever been. The gap between rich and poor is massive and growing, but there is a huge quantity of money to be spent—this is a very affluent society, which means that the headline-grabbing buildings become more iconic, more extraordinary. But at the same time the cheap housing being built now is immeasurably sloppy. We really are building the slums of the future—there is no interest in the public realm.

So, what do you think of architecture in Brighton?
Brighton is a continually missed opportunity. It tries to be flash above being good. Places of value and quality get turned down, and shoddy, shoddy buildings are made in their place. There is a huge amount of attention paid to one-off “projects”, but the way that people actually interact with the space around them is made is largely oblivious to these set-pieces. The seafront, the traffic, the North Laine, The Level: these are the things that make up our environment and our experience of an urban space, and they are all handled very badly. The i360 is a perfect example of this—I don’t doubt that it will be quite fun if it ever gets built, but it stands right above a dreadfully dilapidated stretch of the seafront, and it is this—more than any single attraction—that makes up our experience of a city. Most cities develop from a very real geographic imperative—a harbour, a river and so on—but Brighton has none of this: we are a city largely by accident. We are now officially a city but we have no public space to enact public rituals, which is something that every city has. And needs. That isn’t to say that you can’t make big gestures—you should make no small plans, as Daniel Burnham said—but these have to be big, not hollow gestures.

At your lecture you spoke about the way that architecture’s purpose is to frame man in the cosmos. Could you expand on that idea?
Architecture was almost always seen as a setting for a ritual of human life, much the same as it is now the setting for our own social and secular rituals. What is important is that they serve as a setting for our required behaviours, which more often than not is concerned with locating us in the cosmos, understanding the world around us and negotiating what it means to be human. And it is architecture that can physically locate us in the cosmos—it’s common knowledge, but the pyramids were built in strict alignment to the stars, and the vast majority of Hindu churches are built with the door facing east, as are Christian churches, so morning light will flood into the space. This thirst for symbolism continues, albeit in a rather crude form.

Quick question to finish off: how can the ordinary person “read” a building, and can you explain the beauty of architecture?
How does one read a building? I suppose that looking around would be a start. Architecture is pleasurable and beautiful, but it has a communicative, historical and social element that no other art form has. A building will hopefully survive for many, many lifetimes, but at the same time it has to be viewed and used—the Victorian architect Pugin said that the history of architecture is the history of the world, and I believe that. It is how we communicate, with our ancestors, the people around us, and future generations. And that is beautiful.

These New Puritans: Complete Control for Dummy Magazine

I'm an absolute sucker for both high-camp and any band that recalls Marxist-Dadaists who battle brownshirts on the streets of Berlin. Dummy, September 2007:

These New Puritans – the band that brought you Heidi Slimane-approved numerology-obsessed no wave and blogs about boiling water and Jacobian tragedies – are playing around the country on the Blyk-backed Unitaur with Crystal Castles, The Teenagers and DJ Mehdi. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, is out in January.

What was it like recording the album? You did it with Gareth Jones [who produced Wire, Einsturzende Neubauten and Liars], didn’t you?
Yeah, he’s a genius; he’s like a professor. A load of this record is made out of sampled bits and pieces, and he really brought that out: things like recording underwater or in a park, or sampling knives cutting. We were having a cigarette on the roof of the studio and we started messing about with these barbecue tongs.

What kind of stuff were you listening to when you were recording it?
We were watching a lot of movies, unrelated to music, I suppose. We were listening to a lot of dancehall, dubstep and ragga and 20th century classical music.

There’s something quite elusive about your “online presence.”
Yeah, we started off as an internet-only band, just doing webcasts and podcasts and stuff. We do like to keep it quite elusive. I really like the aesthetics of terrorist videos – how grainy and far-off yet immediate they seem – there’s something about the fuzzy screen which lets you add layers of meaning. So it was weird when we first started playing around and about. Playing live still feels weird – I don’t really know how to react when someone talks to me afterwards.

What’s the reaction been like so far?
It’s going alright, interesting to see people responding to our music – and playing it to people who might be into different groups. It’s weird, though. People either seem to really like us or be, like, visibly disgusted. People often seem insulted by us.