Source Code of Reality:
The Bulletin of Fabulist Surveyors
December 2008
Of Fab Labs and Boiling Hippos
++++++++ J. G. Ballard's 1963 story "The Subliminal Man" Comes True
5 September 2008 saw the building in Lancaster, California, of a "melody road" that sings - or hums roughly - the Lone Ranger theme (occasionally known as The William Tell Overture). Built on behalf of a commercial -- as is anything of practical human importance -- it is a rare example of a commercial that inspires the imagination to action (helpful if driving is your thing).
Corrugations are cut into solid tarmac so that when cars drive across it, pits reproduce the tune ---- a handy recasting of the whole dipping stylus-in-the-pits number. Presumably, driving slowly or in reverse will gain you originality points.
Some residents complained about the sudden incessant musicality of the nearby road. The killjoys got their way: the council spent truckloads scraping the road flat, until it was fit to meet the spiritual needs of the tone-deaf. That's when the complaints really hailed in. The novelty had become a bona fide - therefore consecrated -- tourist attraction. So, at renewed expense, Lancaster regrooved a road, but this time further away from residents, creating, in effect, a cosmetic road --- a road for people to drive to, not on.
The onramp onto the utopia of abstraction.
(Or "darn good way to enforce speed limits").
Then again, depending on how recent reports are, maybe the governing visionaries decided to plough that sexy idea the only way they knew how, which was to strip-mine it, put all that rare and precious tarmac back in circulation for reasons of "safety concerns regarding all of the u-turns." Of which how many had been reported? ---Nada. So it goes, aye?
But, if you go exactly 28 miles per hour on a certain road in Gunma Prefecture, Nihon, you can reclaim that loving feeling.
Winding roads are the sworn enemies of music. They Doppler-warp the engraved tune like a pedal arm downshifting through the Badlands of chord-change, stunted and grey. Behold the reliability of the straight road.
Not that the Nihonese have a monopoly on melody roads (or any strange ideas, for that matter). Two Danish artists -- Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus -- did the original deed, creating their Asphaltophone in October 1995. And then there's the Anyang Singing Road in South Korea.
Torrential use is allegedly already wearing down the Nihonese Asphaltophone. Not that it's a highway or anything, just a road that probably ten people a year use. "Torrential use" is a bit hard to credit, but don't give them ideas, 'cause motive, method and opportunity spell a real killing, and these days killings tend to spread out from the marketplace.
And don't let them read the J. G. Ballard story "The Subliminal Man". After all, if anyone knows how to put far out ideas into practice, they do.
In Ballard's (thankfully fictional) autotopia, the roads are grooved to different purposes. Economies of standardization have pared back the makes and models of cars. This opened the door to inbuilt obsolescence - with a vengeance. 12-lane expressways are everywhere, and they take a toll on cars:
"Ostensibly an aid to lane discipline, the surface of the road was covered with a mesh of small rubber studs, spaced progressively farther apart so that the tyre hum resonated exactly on 40, 60, 60 and 70 m.p.h.. Driving an intermediate speed for more than a few seconds became nervously exhausting, and soon resulted in damage to the car and tyres."
In other words, B. F. Skinnerian behavioural control of the populace, without their cluing into what was occurring --- not quite willing assent, but as close as you can get via abrogation of responsibility. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon inverted, gridded up, laid out across the waiting roadways so that everyone can police themselves openly, on and on, without ever discovering how this was their secret worst hobby.
But another genius angle Ballard tucked in was to use the above system as a basis for accelerating reliance upon inbuilt obsolescence:
"When the studs wore out they were replaced by slightly different patterns, matching those on the latest tyres, so that regular tyre changes were necessary, increasing the safety and efficiency of the expressway. Most cars over six months old soon fell to pieces under the steady battering, but this was regarded as desirable."
The ultimate in disposable societies: "The areas on either side of the expressway were wasteland, continuous junkyards filled with cars and trucks, washing machines and refrigerators, all perfectly workable but jettisoned by the economic pressure of succeeding waves of discount models." Given such a variation and selection process at work upon society, it's easy to foresee the coming of homo obsoletus....
And of course, because the roads regulate human travel so well, attached industries seize the opportunity to erect massive subliminal advertising hoardings, so that the tired and susceptible populace feel obliged to briefly make a pit-stop and pick up cigarettes and snacks and whatever consumerist crap suddenly being stocked by the boundless auto-marts suddenly cropping up alongside every roadway, along with standardized purchasing ranks ready to harbour drive-through customers by the dozen, a specialty shop to service each craving.... "Everyone entering the supermarket was buying cigarettes."
This, the ultimate in programmable societies. 24/7 shopping hours. "The desire to be the highest spender in the neighbourhood was given moral reinforcement by the system of listing all the names and their accumulating cash totals on a huge electric sign in the supermarket foyers. The lowest spenders were regarded as social criminals, free-riding on the backs of others." (Consider Bush's first message to New Yorkers after 9-11? "We can't let them beat us. Spend spend spend . . . ") The Subliminal Advertising Society tolerated - then accepted, in a coup d'etat on the central nervous system - as the best way to increase social participation and thus productivity. To Spend is to BE.
Another thing Ballard predicted in 1963: you attract price discounts for phone calls so long as you put up with commercials.
---Then watch as the ratio of ads to call-time becomes 10:1.
Well, maybe spiritual value can no longer be found outside the visa card. These plastic rectangles are the finest soul-catchers yet devised. "Ultimately we'll all be working and spending twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." Launch Culture Vers 4.34 (Post-Boxing Day Discounts Season. Test-to-destruction).
To paraphrase Ralph Nader, Utopia is safe at any speed....
+++++++ Joyous Fascism of Kenworthy Real Estate--Circular Issued Reads:
ALL tenants please be advised: ONLY 60 WATT GLOBES TO BE USED IN ALL LIGHT FITTINGS
----Why worry about excessive intervention by The State when your real estate owners presume to instruct you on what kind of light bulbs you're permitted use inside your rented accommodation?
No rationale, no explanation accompanied this circular (for instance in deference to environmental pressures). No appeal was made to preference high-efficiency fluorescent lightbulbs. Just keep using the old, wasteful lightbulbs if you like, but don't get pretentious: You'll be okay long as you stick to under the eye-straining 60 watts).
Ah, will wonders never cease? What next? Caps on what kind of bin liner you're allowed? Will we have to present our shopping bags to the real estate receptionist for approval? "Sorry, semi-matured cheese ain't on The List. Go back and exchange it for fully-mature." "Those aren't regulation tampons are they? That's a Breach Notice for irregular variation from signed lease. You have one week to vacate."
Utopia has never been sunnier. Book your ticket now.
++++++++ Interstellar Peekaboo
300 exoplanets may have been discovered already, but 14 November 2008 marks the historic date when one -- Fomalhaut B -- was first seen by visible light.
Not that that's the same as by naked eye: as a hot, white Class A3 star and close stellar neighbour at 25 light-years, Fomalhaut is visible with the naked eye, but the planet is a Jovian (i.e., in the Jupiter class), and graphically outshined by the star. Still, to look upon an alien planet through a telescope is at last possible. Woo-Hoo.
We just have to hope NASA has the guts to keep on funding the Terrestrial Planet Finder. That's when we get to spy on exoplanets just like Earth.
++++++++Support Your Local Fabulist Savannah
Shanghai has drained its surrounding watertable so much, $10 billion (and not Yen) worth of sea water has had to be pumped in to bolster the low fresh-water levels . . . and prevent the CBD's skyscrapers from falling over. (Maybe Al Qaeda finally got their hands on some weapons of mass erosion: huge water pumping systems. Terrifying.)
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a City of Leaning Towers . . . a Fabulist Savannah indeed.
++++++++Top 10 Films of the Year (from best to least):
-- The Dark Knight
-- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
-- WALL-E
-- Hellboy 2 -- The Golden Army
-- I Am Legend
-- My Blueberry Nights
-- American Gangster
-- Cloverfield
-- The Darjeeling Limited
-- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(Uh, it should be noted that this Top 10 list was stringently culled from an extended menu of . . . just 11 films. This year, more candidate-good-films have been missed than seen. In ANY other year, that bottom film would not have made any list, so effortlessly crap-house was it. (Almost as bad as Quantum of Crappiness.) And God help us all, Harrison Ford is craven in his determination to get yet anOTHER Indy filmed.
On the plus side, Ridley Scott is finally lensing THE FOREVER WAR!!!!!!!)
++++++++And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
Long rumoured, not thought to exist in manuscript copy, this collaboration between the two biggest Beat-associated writers was written in 1944/5, years before either of them successfully published anything. They write alternate character viewpoints, swapping chapters in a fictionalized tale of a real-life murder performed by one of their own friends, Lucien Carr. Only with Carr's recent-ish death did literary agents push ahead with publication.
Unlikely to be of great literary execution, but probably more than merely "historically interesting". Likely - because of the good ear for dialogue both writers had - an insight into the social scene and language of NYC in the War; as well as an example of an odd type of literary collaboration. Worth grazing through before reaching for the wallet anyway.
++++++++Postmodern Pilgrimage through a Never-ending Childhood
Back when Miyazake was researching designs for Kiki's Delivery Service, he globetrotted to various bakeries to make reference sketches, sleeping the night if he could. Nihonese fans have compiled tour lists of these travels and recapitulate Miyazake's path in a friendlily neurotic act of homage.
(Scamps have good muscle tone.)
So there's this huge kiln for baking bread in a tiny bakery smack in the middle of Tasmania which made it verbatim into the film. Its kitchen shelves boast a little smiling black plush-toy Miyazake cat, magic totem for all childhood sprites.
++++++++ Fab Labs and Cricket Caps
Take a trip to The Taj, Jalalabad (a stone's throw from Tora Bora), and you'll find the superfastest web access you've ever known. The CIA spooks and other corollary hangers-on of military strife have a black inflatable satellite dish a metre wide that does the job. Don't leave home without it. This is Afghanistan after all. Get even half an hour outside a relatively upmarket place like, say, Herat, and the only signs of technology you'll find are mobile phones and the occasional tv aerial. See, Afghanis have heard of the Siliconized West, they just haven't been invited. It's so close they can smell it, but they aren't a part of it. Naturally, that drives a lot of frustration.
Make it as far as the expatriate bar in The Taj and you are self-evidently "interesting". A self-selection process is at work here. Make it This far and you Can't be ordinary in the head.
Especially when the US Military repeatedly said "you're fucken nuts for wanting to drive to Jalalabad from Kabul! That's Sniper Alley!" That particular officer had a talent for understatement.
It's best to drive in the morning. That way, the shadows work for you, rather than in the afternoon, when they weave their treachery to hide any number of sniper nests. It's not exactly the Hindu Kush between Kabul and Jalalabad, but it is steep and mountainous, and the roads can pull hairpin turns. All of which makes it more thrilling and, well . . . competitive when it comes time to drive through. There's regrettably little scope for sightseeing if you happen to be attracted to the strange and moving spirituality of mountainous terrain, because the only way to deal with snipers is to drive as fast as you can the whole time, hairpin turns or no, overtaking breakneck traffic or no, keeping an eye on the steep canyon drop-off to the side or no. You quickly get used to it. For only five days or so do you expect your life to end at any instant. There are only three fatal car wrecks to pass on the way out.
That's because it takes about five days to flog it from Kabul to Jalalabad.
A sign above the expatriate bar in Jalalabad:
"May God Protect Us All --- Especially Our Snipers."
The US Military are the keenest Culture Jammers in the desert anywhere. Edge Jammers at the Edge of the Desert. They, and their Fab Labs. Teaching the Afghanis how to link their US-provided 3-D matter compilers to the web. Download a design for something they need (simple compounds for now; metalloids will come later), simple tools, plastics, templates, ceramics --- press
Native Hero: for the seven years Osama Bin Laden had a training camp out by Jalalabad - within camel's spit of the Tora Bora mountains - a man ran a school to teach women. This is an example of how the Taliban gender segregation worked on the women's side for once. They just didn't know this was happening a mere kilometre away. For seven years.
In 2001/2, the place was hit by US missiles presuming them to be affiliated with the nearby Al Qaeda training camp, which was completely taken out. -----It's heartening to know their missiles have a safe, proven ability to discriminate targets down to the nearest kilometre. Still, it was night-time, at least, so no-one was hurt. But you can't fault the US Military for trying.
Wine-tasting jaunts aren't exactly encouraged in post-Taliban Afghanistan. It's tolerated if kept discreet. Vineyards aren't exactly bashful - they're plantations after all. Resourceful people as they are (the average Afghan can field-strip an automobile - any automobile - and put it back together with twine and chewing gum), they've found resourceful ways to grow the vines.
Take bare rock and hew into it for X months (or years) in parallel grooves of a certain width, say a plot of rock twenty metres by forty for starters. Erect walls so casual passers-by can't sneak a glance. (And even now, in "post-Taliban" Afghanistan, there are plenty of black turbans wandering the hills and plains, wondering whose business they can stick their beaks into. That's because outside Kabul there's nary any law and order - hence the gradual resurgence of the Taliban, like, everywhere. President Karzai knows as little about corruption as the Indonesians.)
The winegrowers take their grapes and drape them across these grooved ridges of rock, cut at a certain angle to facilitate the optimum amount of sunlight over a certain seasonal span of ripening. Hidden behind four walls, it's an odd and beautiful surprise to discover.
And there's a survival imperative to learn how to drink in moderation, too. Show up drunk somewhere and the Taliban can swipe your beard as punishment. Your head, too, while they're at it.
Not that Afghanistan is the only Islamic place that has a range of private responses to alcohol. Go to the top penthouses of any number of Dubai skyscrapers (haven't flashed on any Islamic Deco Cyberpunk? Their cyber-Samarkand aesthetics leave Western architecture for dead) and you will find a speakeasy where cigarette and alcohol fumes form a colourful second atmosphere in a secret yet relaxed space.
But if you get to used to such liberties, and happen to travel to say, Saudi Arabia (where it is still verboten for women to drive cars --- very shameful for everyone concerned), and you're still dressed for your speakeasy....
Such a guy got pulled over onto the side of the road by the moral hygiene police (their real name is too long to repeat, but means essentially exactly the same thing). Because his hair was a little too long. So they set to it and cut his hair to the appropriate length. Who says they're short on hospitality in what Wahabis consider holy land?
Nor is the Taliban short on hospitality, come to think of it.
++++++++ Al Qaeda Survival Tip # 41c: Talk Cricket.
Repeat this:
PontingHusseyKallisLeeHusseyLeeTendulkarSymondsMuralitheranPontingPontingPontingGayleGibbsPietersenLeeGayleVettoriLaxmanFlintoffSehwagLeeChanderpaulNtiniKallisAstleHaydenHaydenHaydenohwhereartthouHayden.
Actually . . . maybe not mention Indians --- not even Tendulkar. The Taliban will hang on your every word, even if you only talk about kiwi or aussie cricketers, but you'll soon notice extra jubilation if defeat of India is raised. Foreign devils such as Aussies are okay, long as India is the one they're beating. Proof, really, that the Taliban is essentially a Pakistani phenomenon.
But in the end, what of helping the Afghanis; what characterizes foreign relations with them? If you stay inside your cars, huddled away in protective carapaces, you promote a sense of fear, and even alien unease. Separation. Us-&-them. Implicit superiority, perhaps. Get out of the cars and stroll around the market awnings, eyeing bargains, and the whole situation immediately relaxes, for you're performing a known function, a legislated human function: Shopping.
Looking people in the eye seems to perform wonders.
--- Driving away in a panic doesn't.
Installing a water pump does even more. Few villages sport such contraptions. Organizing schools for women always goes down a treat too. If you demonstrate a modicum of respect you can gain entry into even a women's classroom. At first they may be shy before you, but go to work with the digicam and they soon become receptive to the camera's attention. Or do they? Flip the viewfinder of the digicam over so that they can see what you're filming - see, nothing secretive here, everything's safe and out in the open, no covert spying of the female form - and thereby let them relax before their images, grow complacent with the whole thing. Too complacent, perhaps. Remarkable, in fact, how little interest they actually do take in the whole photographic affair. Well, good for them.
Then you joggle the camera, or aim it at someone moving past who happens to be looking straight at the viewfinder. Oh! Exclamations galore! Surprise, belated realization, delight! They crowd round, shock and awe, giggle and awe. They experiment, pull faces, play peekaboo with the viewfinder . . . and you realize, this whole time, they hadn't understood the images in the viewfinder. They had no real grasp of their outward identities. Partially alien to themselves, they hadn't connected the images with their faces because they had been under the burqa so long they didn't know what they looked like.
++++++++++ RIP Harold Pinter
+++++++ RIP Earth Kitt {roaw}
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