Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.

For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths – helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.

Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:

photo credit: irina slutsky

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.

From their description:

“These 3000 ft mobile tower-cranes toddle towards suburban communities where they proceed to drill deep footings at the center of their cores into the earth and outstretch their tripod legs over a 2000 ft radius of suburb. The crane tears out homes from their plots and shelves them in 60 floors of open floor plates.  Breaking it up into five sub neighborhoods, commercial/public floors are packed full of the big box stores and strip malls that sustain residential communities …”

This got me thinking about how much I’d like to see Prince Charles take on one of these beasties!

“ELEVATED GEOTHERMAL NEIGHBORHOOD  SMASH PUNY ROYAL!” *stomp*

… And then I remembered some notes for something vaguely relevant, lurking at the back of a notebook -

[Micro-pitch: THE PHYSIOCRATS]

Set in a cyberpunk (ribofunk?) Duchy of Cornwall following the near-total collapse of suburbia, this [comic? TV mini-series? novella? machinima?] puts the reader/viewer in the heart of the conflict between the moneyed members of the pluto-gerontocratic military-agricultural-biotech complex and the last remaining fragments of the disenfranchised rural refusniks in a series of final skirmishes for the very heart & soul of the British countryside!

*dramatic chord!*

• Alistair Parvin‘s Agri-Noir facilities in white plastic, chlorophyll, and photovoltaic blue …
• Citizen journalists unearthing corporate espionage in the vat-grown meat industry …
• Rogue combine harvesters churning through suburbia’s greening ruins …
• Eurocrats turning a blind eye to organic biscuits made from people …
• The dodgy pharming practices at the heart of a highly contagious cross-species pandemic …

Basically, I think we’re looking at Gothic Hi-Tech (cf. Bruce Sterling) with silage & giant chickens. It’s Ghost in the Shell meets Countryfile, as a six-part mini-series.

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.

(Via Digital Urban)

I’d argue that this is what the internet does better than traditional broadcast media – empowers those with the skills to bypass the gatekeepers, plugging their output straight into an audience. As ever, the watchword is authenticity. Admittedly, I may be carrying a certain nostalgia for my own 6th form-era travel documentary exploits, but from the look of it, these guys deserve an audience.

These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful.  There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing.  And I like that.  A lot.

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

It should do.  He’s talking about SEZs, tax havens, and pirate ships (opens pdf). Kaliningrad, Somalia, and the self-declared Principality of Sealand.  Alter-urbanism in its rawest form.

*It’s kinda hard to imagine *cities* going away … short of a massive population crash. All the major cities in the Balkans are still there, even though the “nations” they conjure up have changed their flags, passports and currencies five or six times.

For more on the whole Balkan thing, check out Bruce‘s video from Belgrade.  Some interesting commentary on the commodification of heritage, the relationship between the past and futurity, and how this is realised in the “real” physical landscape.  I guess you could also look at the rapid emergence of the geographically tiny Republic of Montenegro – making the journey from union with Serbia to likely EU candidate & tourist-friendly film location.

*New York has a future. Chicago has a future. San Francisco is dynamic. Any place called a ‘creative class city” is very attractive. Life in American heartland Red States is cheerless and imperilled and getting worse… I’ve been to places where nations lose their primary loyalties… in a globalized world, they just… leach out.

So innovation in the Red States converge on the small blue islands – islands that swing elections.  Competition between  ideas drives innovation – which is the closest thing we have to “progress” in these post-modern times.  Perhaps we need a return to Mill‘s “experiments in living”; a seasteading stripped of its egos and sinister overtones.

*[S]ubcultures, countercultures and bohemias … generate a lot of strange ideas and alternative practices. A lot of those ideas turn out to be crap, of course, but at least they’re being pioneered by volunteers, they’re not crap ideas opposed from on high by the Stalinist Central Committee.

(image based on a photo by Guido van Nispen)

In the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, Chernobyl has been cast as a city reclaimed by nature. As to whether this portrayal is justified by the evidence, the jury’s still out … but whatever the truth, it certainly hasn’t been allowed to stand in the way of a good story.  Take the first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (based loosely on Stalker (1979), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky).  The game and its 2008 prequel – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – are both set in an alternate reality where a second nuclear disaster caused strange changes in the zone of alienation.

We’re talking a strange mix of historical fact, malevolent alien hive minds, and a multitude of mutant beasties. A reflection, then, of the symbolism lashed to Chernobyl in popular culture, public memory, and the collective unconscious?

So, what does this tell us about the alter-urban typology? This wild city isn’t simply anarchic, chaotic (as a “feral city”), or organised in a way which ignores / subverts the precepts of “Western” urbanism (as a “rogue city”) … instead, it actively endangers the bodies of those who would seek entry. Rather than amorality and ambivalence, the “wild” of the physical environment and its perverted forms of (un)nature approach the human intruders with absolute emnity.  For a better sense of this reading of the setting, have a look at this trailer for Clear Sky.

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(Image courtesy of Vivo (Ben))

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.