Reality leak

[hirez]

They're building a vast new shopping thingy in Bath, which will no doubt remain half-empty for a couple of years. It's made of steel and concrete and big low-loaders trundle up with great flat plates of Bathness that they bolt to the outside so it looks like the rest of the pretend buildings there. They could be making the same thing in a different town with a different local stone and the flat plates of locality would probably come from the same factory.

It's pish, of course.

I walked through the edge of the Slaver's Market at the weekend. It was as if a copy of Grazia had come to life and been invaded by shoppy-shoppy people. It'll be just like that. Fucking nowhere.

Anyway.

For the thingy in Bath, they dug a massive pit and planted some green tower cranes. Now it's dark in the evening, the cranes are spotlit from below. They looked a bit odd on the walk back to the station; there was something wrong about the scene that I just couldn't place.

On the way back home from London the other week, I dozed off for a while. I woke up when the train stopped at Bath, leaning against the window.

Looming over me was a lit-from-beneath green tower crane with a great glowing object at the one end.

It took me several seconds to work out that I hadn't accidentally fallen into the plot of 'Quatermass and the pit'.

The crane with 'Seasons greetings' in a yard high lit up sixties font at the counterweight end still gives me the fear.

Comments

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I hate those bloody things. The evil gnomes who run our world won't be happy until every city is a carbon copy of Milton Keynes and every person is vain, mindless, shallow zombie obsessed with rubbish, w*rk*ng all the hours that Satan made to fill their miserable, empty lives with plastic junk. Like in that Philip K Dick riff in "A Scanner Darkly" when he ruminates on roadside architecture...

“In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when finally you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald’s hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born, and in addition bad people- liars- said it was made out of turkey gizzards anyhow.

“They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale “How the Sea Became Salt”. Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.”

And now it's actually happening. Shivers.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Someone has applied to give the centre of Milton Keynes listed status.

I suppose it's a good idea, if only to show future generations how not to do it.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

The centre of Milton Keynes is aligned with the Summer solstice.

Otherwise no-one would be able to find it.

[reddragdiva]

I understand at least one hideous Communist concrete tower block in London has been given listed status for precisely this purpose: to preserve one example of our mistakes as a horrible warning.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

"The evil gnomes who run our world"
Oh, don't get him started...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Profit!

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

It took me several seconds to work out that I hadn't accidentally fallen into the plot of 'Quatermass and the pit'.

I thought as I was reading your description that it was very Quatermass...

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

It's a little-known fact that malls are not really about the shopping.

Quatermass's team run a seismographic station in Wapping, from which they keep track on the Mole Men throughout western Europe.

Whenever a breakthrough seems possible, they scramble the Mock Retail Team. Their task is to dig down to bedrock over a couple of acres around the predicted breakthrough, and then lay a vast ferroconcrete plug. Obviously, this activity has to be disguised, and the best cover-story from a town-planning point of view is always retail. You can plonk a couple of hundred shops on top of the plug, call it a mall, and nobody bats an eyelid.

It has been going on for so long that it seems perfectly natural, even when the site requires demolition of the middle of a picturesque town or is stuck out on a remote and desolate heath. It's really quite brilliant.

[dghaem.livejournal.com]

I just want to know how you know what Grazia is and what it contains. We need to be told your subscription number!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

9/16ths.