“Women are liked better when they lose,” - Gloria Steinem (via.)
“Martin, a 30-year-old Miami native with high cheekbones and a thin chin-strap goatee, rose from the two old chairs he’d pushed together to make a bed, brushed his teeth, and picked up a can of black spray paint. He used it to write just one word, which is still emblazoned—in giant letters—on the concrete embankment below the Julia Tuttle: why?” - Details magazine on the makeshift settlement of sex offenders under a bridge in Miami.
“Men slip on a mask that makes them all of a type. Women must always dress like individuals. It can be a privilege but it sure gets exhausting; adopting a temporary group identity can be a refuge and a relief.” - The Independent on “all-women power groups.”
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
We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
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