Are we already living in the Death Race-age if you can get Dale Earnhardt Sr. footage on YouTube at “three angles amassing 88,251 views in just the first result, complete with a user-generated, slideshow-mashup hagiography to the tune of Freebird.”I tend to side with the Crashman on these matters. Yet the number of people who have accessed this site by searching “Christine Chubbuck” never ceases to amaze me. In the words of Frankenstein in the original Death Race 2000, as quoted by Jackson West, “Sure it’s violent, but that’s the way we love it — violent, violent, violent!”
Lisa Selin Davis has a story in Salon about the couple who lived in the Providence Mall (It was covered extensively on the blogs last year. See Ballardian and the artists’ website here.) The couple Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto crafted a secret apartment inside the massive Rt 95 eyesore. “The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn’t been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they’d still be camping out there today.” Davis smartly compares their experience to the $1m+ Natick Mall luxury condos just a few miles north in suburban Boston (I’ve been meaning to write a post about the hilarious pseudo-poshness of the “Natick Collection” — its ant farm like freeway chaos and American-travels-the-Continent decor. Eventually.) Of course JG Ballard and Romero allusions can be made, but what I think is interesting is that most science fiction visions of futuristic architecture tend to imagine a massive space — a city or multiple cities — enclosed. (Usually for the purpose of some nuclear disaster or space colony.) Is this a subconscious projection of the shopping mall of the future by the authors? A claustrophobic vision or one of a comforting incubator?
Five Books I Recommend to Everyone
I hate the idea of a canon of good books one must read “before you die,” or that sort of thing. Many of these are books aren’t beloved so much as revered. Has anyone ever felt passionately about “A Separate Peace?” If you do, it’s probably because you had a dog when you were nine named Phineas or some other subconscious sentimental reason. But besides the titles that only developed a reputation for substance, even the ones that are of merit and historical importance aren’t necessary to you, at least, not right now.
So many people make the mistake of plodding along with every sewer sub-plot in Les Miserables because they think doing so makes them smarter. One should be confident enough to call the “emperor has no clothes” on books that bore or fail to say anything illuminating. Many 19th century novels like Thomas Hardy’s were sold by word count. So don’t few guilty if you’re skimming through yet another description of the color of the fields for a scene with Eustacia Vye doing something crazy.
While it’s good to read popular and much loved books for a shared experience with the culture, how much like the rest of the world are you? Shouldn’t your reading reflect your personal fears and dreams and expectations? It’s sad to see how little readers demand of their writers. The experience I get with Anna Kavan’s or Steve Erickson’s novels seems to go way beyond anything I’ve ever felt about a book. I can’t say for certain that another reader might have the same feeling, but I hope you all come to love an author that much. Trial and error, really. Would you marry the girl you just kinda like, but find annoying sometimes, but guess is cute cause others say she’s cute? Then toss aside the book you’re not so into, and keep hunting for the right ones.
Here are several books I imagine anyone might like:
If you like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, try Christopher Priest’s Inverted World
Every once in a while the elder statesmen book reviewers let a cult writer in the canon of great literature like Beckett or, to a lesser degree, Burroughs. O’Brien seems to be the newest corronated one. The Third Policeman is great, but after a million retrospective pieces in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and so forth, and a mention on the tv series Lost you might want to try another book about riddles and shifting dimensions. This is a traditional science fiction book, but ingenious — very reminiscent of Ballard’s early earth-disaster SF. And it’s a mindfuck. An Escher sketch in novel form. I couldn’t put it down. Proof that Modern Painters is better cued in to good literature than most literary publications, they have a review of this book in the newest issue.
If you like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, try Anna Kavan’s Eagle’s Nest
As much as I like Burroughs, Naked Lunch is so full of 50s junkie slang it can be difficult to read. Anna Kavan, his contemporary, has a liquidy way of writing. Scenes are so full of life they seem to fall off the page. A heroin addict until she died in her sixties, with a truly heartbreaking lifestory, you can feel, with some bitterness, where the drug is influencing her writing as you read along. Adored by the likes of Anais Nin, Jean Rhys, Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Current 93’s David Tibet, and many others, why she isn’t better known here or abroad really baffles me.
If you like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, try I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
I can’t imagine anyone disliking I’m Not Stiller. It’s witty and so smart. Imagine the best parts of Confederacy of Dunces and the best of Nabokov, with a little bit of Chandler suspense and Kafka humor, all written so well the Dalkey Archive would publish it.
If you like Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, try by The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
Winterson’s novel is a good book about gender and androgyny and all that, with pretty poetic language, but you can get all of those things plus a post-apocalyptic setting and a bunch of fun in The Passion of New Eve, Carter’s best and inexplicably most obscure novel. Were I handed a few million dollars, turning The Passion of New Eve into a musical would be on a short list of things I’d do with the money.
If you like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, try Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai
Ok, I don’t like Safran Foer’s book at all, but a lot of people whose opinions I respect seemed to enjoy it. A better book about a young braniac, chock full of random information and done in a sweet, never cloying way, is The last Samurai. Of the 80 people reviewed it on Amazon, 56 gave it 5 stars, which should give you an idea how much people love this book.
Fashion photography by Alix Malka
Oh, to be in Barcelona with the beautiful people, tiny alleys, tapas, Zara outlets, Palau de la Musica, Gaudis, and the new JG Ballard exhibit. Ballardian has a great review of “Autopsy of the New Millennium” –”The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital.” The show also includes Ballard-influenced art by Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord, and others. Nice quote from Bruce Sterling in the program: “Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities–how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you’ve read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that’s the best the SF genre will ever do–and no more should ever be asked of it.”
Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum
Yesterday afternoon, my father took my sister and me out rock climbing in the Quincy Quarries. He has climbed nearly every weekend for the past seven years. My sister never had, and I’d only climbed indoors and that was a few years ago.
The rocks in this suburban Boston climbing park are completely covered in graffiti, unfortunate as it makes the surface slippery and more difficult to grip. Visually though, it is interesting.
We think of graffiti as an urban thing. And nature as something separate. But the nature that exists not too far from the city is usually a pale substitute. Graffiti is always found in transportation centers — subways, trains, bus stations — the stations, the bathrooms, or the cars themselves. Marking a place you’ve been and don’t intend to return for a sense of permanence.
But we also unintentionally leave traces of ourselves in the near wilderness. Maybe JG Ballard’s themes are the concerns of children. As a child in suburbia, the same woods that seemed so expansive, contained random traces of civilizations like long abandoned rusty tricycles with the tires removed and moss growing over the handles. Trash and shattered glass, a bobby pin, a sock, a condom wrapper — the outside world is rarely experienced as something pristine — people always leave something behind. This may be why the longer you live in the city, the more likely you are to shun nature entirely. It is never as pure as you imagine it to be.
Rock climbers become obsessed with the surface textures, not unlike how in bicycling you are much more aware of little bumps or pieces of gravel in the road. It is similarly an individual’s journey and an intellectual sport. Just like you dodge the cars on your bike, you need to think about where to position yourself and how to grip. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were to become a fad the way biking is now.
Plus, it’s emotional. It’s fear rather that physical exhaustion that prevents me from ascending any higher than 20 feet. When we visited my grandmother a half-hour later for blueberry pie and ice cream, I was still feeling the rush. My hand was shaking as I lifted my fork like I had too much coffee.
In May, I read the quarries were cleaned of graffiti in order to film a Tina Fey movie. Can they really clean the paint off? Or do you paint the rocks granite grey?
Anyway, they didn’t do much of a job. I can’t imagine this much graffiti only collected in the two months since. But I’m not complaining. If only it were less haphazard — really beautiful work that respects it’s surrounding, and is mindful of those good nooks climbers need to get their feet in. Like, what I wrote about tagging houses, if only it were work as good as Swoon, Imminent Disaster, Conor Harrington, Armsrock… If the rocks will be covered with paint, why not graffiti that’s really great? The state could turn it into a legal graffiti park and maybe attract real talent. Think of it as an induced-Stendhal Syndrome.
Quincy quarries images by The Urban Pantheist, art by Swoon
Previously:
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]
Related links:
- Quincy Quarry Panorama
- The Battle Over Central Park, New York magazine.
One of my favorite parts of any novel is in The Drowned World. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature (this isn’t a spoiler by the way, it happens in the middle of the book.) So it’s funny to see that these images from squint/opera, so obviously inspired by the book, are getting a largely positive reaction: “Look at what these people are doing; fishing, swimming, DIY, playing and tinkering within peaceful contexts. All positive things within buildings that have seen their day within this scenario,” says one comment. “That water is crystal clear. Looks like a wonderful place to live,” says another. You must take a look at the images by the way. The film and media studio’s “Flooded London” set is part of the London Festival of Architecture.
The Celebrity Atheist List reads like a roster of The Tomorrow Museum’s favorite people: J.G. Ballard, Bjork, Ingmar Bergman, Vic Chesnutt, David Cronenberg, Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Stephen Fry, Rachel Griffiths, Diane Keaton, Mike Leigh, Stanislaw Lem, Cillian Murphy, Gary Numan, Bruce Sterling, and Angelina Jolie too! The page on Heather MacDonald is especially interesting, as she is a conservative. I adored her book The Burden of Bad Ideas, and many of her City Journal columns…ermm, well, right up until she started writing about why we don’t need civil liberties anymore. (via Technoccult, who adds, “And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.”)
The World’s Strangest Housing Communities
“People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriends, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbor’s wives, no time ever for friends,” Wilder Penrose says in J. G. Ballard’s Super Cannes. The “great defect is that there is no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.”
Many of Ballard’s later novels investigate the coven-like nature of suburbia — gated communities, high rises. The architecture and technologies designed to save us time and make our lives easier, only dull our senses. Or, as Gang of Four put it, “The problem with leisure, is what to do for pleasure.”
Penrose, the psychiatrist in Ballard’s fictional French business park, believes there’s a science to it: “Part of the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You’ve entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”
Ballard isn’t the only writer to explore these themes. Jingoism at the backyard level is the target in TC Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. Neal Stephanson wrote about “burbclaves,” lots of franchised nations in suburbia. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower takes place in a walled Los Angeles suburb. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino sees housing communities optimistically as chocolate boxes. Then again, every example comes from the main character’s imagination. Here are several examples stranger than fiction:
The Dystopia: Alphaville, Sao Paulo, Brazil
A housing community has to be equal parts elitist and oblivious to take its name from a dystopic film. I first read about this on Ballardian, appropriately as Ballard has long championed Godard’s film. This Alphaville is a walled city in the world’s fourth-largest metropolis. Hundreds of residents helicopter in and out over electric fences. Over a thousand security guards are employed. Residents watch “TV Alphaville,” a twenty -four hour monitor of people entering and exiting the premises. The reason for Alphaville’s militarized facility is clear: income disparity. From a 2002 Washington Post article: “the richest 10 percent of the population controlling more than 50 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 10 percent control less than 1 percent.” The article also explains Brazil’s $2 billion-a-year security industry. “Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war.”
The Rumor: Wedderburn, “Midgetville,” Vienna, Virginia
Spend time in Northern Virginia and you’ll eventually hear of a community of little people in little houses…but no one ever knows how to get there. Given Fairfax County is a clown car of suburban landscaping — between two main drags three blocks apart, the tract housing seems to go on for miles — it’s entirely believable.
Wedderburn was built in the 1930s, in a wood along the W&OD Railroad. These cottages –some the size of small sheds — could be seen from the train, leading many to wonder if they were home to retired circus performers. That neighboring town Bailey’s Crossroads is connected to the Ringling Brothers collaborator made it believable.
Over the years, the rumors tended toward the sensationalistic. People said the “midgets” would attack your car if you drove near it. In 2004, after deciding to sell to a land developer, Wedderburn’s true identity was revealed. George Wedderburn’s relatives, who lived in some of the cottages and rented the others, said they were sick of teenage “midget hunters” vandalizing their property. See Nathan Rustlethwaite’s Flickr set for more. Sadly, it was torn down in March of 2008.
Update: From the comments on Hit and Run, I learned there’s a similar rumor about a neighborhood in New Jersey. Wikipedia says those small houses have no occupants, but does not give any history of its construction. There’s another community of “midget houses”in Oakdale, Long Island, New York. And this website claims there are a number of real gated midget communities in Kentucky, California, Ohio, and elsewhere. Maybe.
The Utopia: Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India
“Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” Mirra Alfassa, “The Mother” said, announcing the city’s incorporation in 1968. Most forms of private property are forbidden. Residents use electronic cards, rather than paper or coin currency, although visitors can pay in cash. The enormous golden golf ball is Matrimandir (”Temple of the Mother,”) the “soul of the city.” It is located in a large open area called “Peace.” If this is sounding like Jonestown or the Heaven’s Gate community, it might surprise you to learn religion too is banned. “The Mother” said, “The failure of religions is… because they were divided. They wanted people to be religious to the exclusion of other religions, and every branch of knowledge has been a failure because it has been exclusive. What the new consciousness wants (it is on this that it insists) is: no more divisions. To be able to understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force.” Among the community’s other quirk’s — public drinking fountains have “dynamised” water, water that has “listened” to Bach and Mozart.
BBC recently investigated claims that some Aurovillians sexually abuse the children who live in poverty outside the city. The reporter called it a “brazen” practice, made worse by Auroville’s absent rule of law.
The Ruins: San Zhi, “Desolation Row,” Taipai, Taiwan
This pod city might have been a holiday destination for those who dream of living in a futuristic fairytale. But from what little is written about San Zhi in English, it appears construction was abandoned as the project was just weeks from completion.
There seems to be nothing wrong with the structure architecturally. Apart from the fabulous design, it seems a functional concept. Some speculate it was designed to build more pods vertically, if demand increased. Apparently, construction was halted as a number of fatal accidents plagued construction. Ghost stories abound, (but then again, there are bloggers who still believe in Midgetville.) The buildings have since been left to rot.
The web has its fill of ghost towns and urban ruins photography, but the obvious science fiction influence and its perplexing lack of use (I’ve heard more than several people say they’d love to spend the night there) make this the strangest example of an abandoned space yet. Google Sightseeing has a feature, and Craig Ferguson’s photographs are extraordinary. (More photos here.)
The Counterfeit: Orange County, China
China doesn’t just manufacture fake Louis Vuitton bags. They also copy United States gated communities. This Orange County is miles from the Beijing airport, and 45 minutes from the Forbidden City.
California McMansions developers were flown in to develop a replica of The OC, even taking its name. Ten miles from the Beijing Olympics facilities, when the New York Times reported on it in 2003, the six-lane highways were brand new and most of the land surround the OC had yet to be developed. It seems likely that space is under construction right now.
It would be unfair to criticize them just for ignoring their own culture. After all American architecture is just a pastiche of other traditions, and plenty of replicas like the windmills in Japan, are charming enough. Good magazine notes an “entire cottage industry has sprung up in academia to tar the development with the latest post-modern jargon…Other critics, with far bigger megaphones, see the development as emblematic of China’s burgeoning car culture and its wholehearted embrace of environmentally destructive growth.”
Rather Orange County, China is a mistake largely because it was built after suburbia’s failure was widely understood. Rather than embracing Jan Gehl and Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban planning, they implemented poor land use. If there’s anywhere China should be replicating, it’s Melbourne.
China, by the way, is home to another community living in the past: Nanjie Village, a re-collectivized land, nostalgic for the days of Mao Zedong.
Elsewhere
I considered including the proposal for Paulville to this list. It is an upcoming gated community for Ron Paul supporters. But I really doubt it will come to fruition. Previously, there was the Free State project, and New Hampshire still isn’t a major libertarian mecca. The same people who value individual choice, are unlikely to move specifically to join a community. It’s just not that high a priority to one’s personal interests
Other examples I thought of, like Celebration, Florida, Disney’s suburb, which opened its gate in 1997, are not so strange once one looks at the details. The people and the secrets may be unique, but the development itself differs not much from another planned community halfway across the globe.
Planned communities always hint at mob rule in its extremes — lynchings or what happened to Kitty Genovese. You may not agree with the Super Cannes character who believes that “places like Eden-Olympia are fertile grounds for an messiah with a grudge. The Adolph Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.” But it’s something to think about before signing up for a colony on Mars.
Related links:
- Fortress America, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder
- “Enemies Within, Gated Communities Unhinged” by Sarah Blandy
- ‘Gated Communities’ For the War-Ravaged, WP
- Most Expensive Gated Communities, Forbes
- Walls of Incompetence, Erasmus
Is Charlotte Roche the lady JG Ballard? The passages I’ve read are quite horrible (this from someone who adores Elfriede Jelinek, even at her most scathing) nevertheless, I’m delighted to see a book described as part Crash, part Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
Why not camp off the highway? “I don’t know off hand what commercial land near a major highway in the GTA goes for, but I am sure that speculators have stood on an overpass, cigar poised in frustration, at the thought of the wasted space. And have hungrily schemed of a way to generate revenue from it.” Already camping is contrived for a taste of danger, what better than the “abject terror at 4:00 am when the 18-wheeler veers onto the corrugated shoulder. He’s over duty-time and dozing despite the coffee and you swear his rig has your name on it. But the ridges wake him and he pulls the wheel just in time to save his life and yours.” - Raise the Hammer
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