From The Independent: “there’s an equally strange phenomenon occurring on the web these days: a profound disbelief that things are what they claim to be. Wary of being seen as gullible, people simply assume that everything is fake.” (via.) Previously.
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
A Hundred Chances: White Lies Post-Facebook
If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards, in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hamsphire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1814
Growing up I wanted to be a Hitchcock blonde. Not only because they were witty and beautiful and were dressed by Edith Head, but because they would happen upon a vault of cash, stuff it in a bag, drive off in a Cadillac convertible to
start an entirely new life — or try to.
I don’t advocate breaking the law, yet the possibility of reinventing one’s self seems a dying art. Human resources checks all your references and degree credentials. And the Internet means all your lies will be exposed provided someone cares enough to learn the truth about you. Only professionals — con men — can really get away with it.
Last month, NBC aired a Dateline episode on con artist 2.0, Gemase Simmons. The extent of his reality tv charade is almost unbelievable. Pretending to be a former model (his height and appearance alone contradict his claimed experience in the industry,) he recruited a dozen people to appear on the so-called television model search using Craigslist and Myspace. Services were provided free in exchange for advertising when the show was to air. A full crew was hired (they left after a few weeks, when they didn’t get paid,) so all of his bizarre antics are caught on tape. He had them stay at a campground, and made them go through the kinds of optical course challenges reality tv is known for. People grew suspicious even before he made sexual advances on the participants — male and female — when the cameras weren’t rolling.
Simmons has spent his life reinventing himself. He wasn’t just a “model/actor” but a political consultant, a writer, an R+B producer –with ten outstanding arrest warrants, (a mugshot showed him with a Catholic priest’s collar.) This guy was born to lie, and dreamt big enough to get away with it (And he would have, if MSNBC hadn’t heard of him — the only reason they did is one of the cameramen he hired had a connection to the news program.) Simmons, by the way, denies every charge.
Compare that to story of Hope Ballantyne, recently profiled in Radiolab’s “Deception” episode. She’d move in a new place, write a bad check and move again. She conned dozens of Bay Area residents out of thousands of dollars. From a 2000 article in the San Francisco Examiner:
[A former roommate] led the search for Hope after finding spiral notebooks scrawled with names and phone numbers amid the woman’s left-behind bags of designer clothes and make-up.When Nuccio began contacting the people listed, she learned that complaints about Hope stretched back at least three years to Los Angeles - giving a frightening context to her own rental rip-off…
“What’s frustrating about the whole thing is that she continues to screw people,” said Mara Soucie, 30, who works in production management at cable music channel VH1 in Los Angeles. “She seems so normal, a bright girl. Always could think on her feet.”
I don’t think Ballantyne could get away with those things in today’s San Francisco. A few blog and Facebook posts could prevent her from ever striking again. But that there’s no further news on Ballantyne, following an arrest in 2004, doesn’t mean she’s changed her ways so much as that she may be using another name.
For the rest of us, lying just doesn’t pay off. Even with the best intentions — say your boss is a sexist pig and fired you for some arbitrary reason — you can’t explain it in a resume, and you can’t lie without the risk of getting caught (Your former boss, on the other hand, is entirely welcome to lie to a human resources manager about your work ethic and skill set.) It’s only going to get harder, as web presence becomes a necessity. The white lie is dead.
The hoax, of course, persists, but with many complications. “Myth-busting” is such a popular blog sport, that truths to the tales are thrown out with the falsities. Barack Obama isn’t a Muslim… but his father was. Similarly, Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk, who I even posted about earlier with some confusion, isn’t entirely a hoax. The trouble with that meme starts with his name: it’s written both Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk or Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas, or some variation of either, so googling with quotation marks only gives you a sample of the results. There’s a petition to ban him from Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008, which doesn’t appear to exist. Or is it the Central American Biennale? Google suggests, “Central American Biennial.” Lesson one: don’t trust sources in translation.
There is a Central American Biennale and there is an artist named Guillermo ___ Vargas, but the dog didn’t die (the most likely sources say.) What’s missing in the cries of “hoax” is that he did starve a dog in an art show (or maybe he did?) He did it, apparently, to drum up exactly the kind of protest he’s receiving now: to show that people will care about an animal dying in a gallery, but not the billions dying in the streets. World Society for the Protection of Animals has some updates on it.
And I wonder how the Internet is impacting espionage. One of the best episodes in Errol Morris’ First Person — The Little Gray Man — is about Antonio Mendez, former spy. He talks about being an invisible man, the kind of guy you just never look at — if you’re used to the checkout lady noticing the person behind you in line before you, then you’d be a great spy. He’s written two books, and his life story is soon to be a movie. Twenty years from now, when even middle aged office employees are in social networks — will we still be able to create false identities for CIA operatives?
Related link:
- Doublethink on The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastic Adventures of the Ivy League Imposter James Hogue.
Previously: Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Would you take up an offer from a company called Fake Design addressed “Dear Mr/Ms Architect”? A hundred architects were called to build houses in Ordos, China’s “Texas” with “wide open spaces, the frontier attitude and the seemingly endless flow of money (an annual economic growth rate of 40 percent) from natural resources.” Artist Ai WeiWei organized the project. It either meant, as Lebbeus Woods explains, a promising project like Weissenhofsiedlung or stage as accidentals players in Ai’s performance art. (Slideshow)
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