Shutter Island

Image from photoshoplooter.

The post-8/11 city hoves into view; it galvanises, if you will, its metal carapace dull in the late summer sunshine. In response to the riots of last week (only last week?), the government's "chief planner" has asked councils to consider easing planning regulations for metal shop shutters. Pause for a moment to reflect on what British "planning", a term that used to entail a degree of thinking ahead, has been reduced to: a measure so reactive it serves as an update to the old saying "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted".

Reactive and, it seems to me, futile. One of the most arresting images of the looting that accompanied the riots was of metal shutters being yanked off shopfronts by dedicated teams of youths*, a sort of "unboxing ceremony" for those perhaps unable to derive regular doses of fulfilment from consumer technology. Of course shopkeepers have a right to not have their goods stolen, but this alteration does nothing to reduce the risk of future riots. It is little more than security theatre - allowing shopkeepers to make a feel-good purchase that will help them sleep a little easier without doing much to aid them in the event of resumed rioting.

For the neoliberals in government, it must be ideologically appealing to respond to the riots with an act of deregulation, however minor. For the rest of us, it is significant that this intervention takes place in the space between the things that are for sale and the people who want to buy or steal those things. This space is called the street - it should have other functions as well, but one of the most depressing aspects of the recent unrest was how it rammed (ramraided?) home the fact that consuming is increasingly the only thing that can be done in a street, even during a riot. This domination by commerce, and the dwindling of public space that goes with it, must be seen as one of the key causes of the riots.

Anyway, here come the shutters. My hunch is that this alteration to the rules will have most impact outside the great cities, in small towns and villages where the mob looms large only via the Mail and the Express. In most of central London, the night-time streetscape is already heavily metallised, so it's hard to see what difference will be made in those areas that actually experienced riots. The shutters are such an established aspect of East London's streets that they have prompted their own subgenre of street art. The king of the shutter artists is Ben Eine, whose giant colourful capital letters adorn scores of after-hours shopfronts in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. They're very likeable, bright and pleasant, undeniably an improvement on unadorned (or rather tag-spattered) steel, but also deeply safe. Their jolly colours and the Smarties-cap collectability of the letters give them an infantile edge; there's something sedative about them, the aestheticisation of a hardened landscape, a harbinger of hipsterisation.

Eine's shopfront graffiti is so safe, in fact, it comes with a government endorsement - a Conservative government endorsement, no less. A year ago David Cameron presented President Obama with one of Eine's paintings as a gift. The name of the painting, spelled out in those cheery vintage shuttercaps, was "Twentyfirst Century City". The steel shutter thus emerges as the perfect symbol of the Cameronian cityscape, open for business and closed for everything else. Even then, the symbol must be carefully tuned; we wouldn't want to be too edgy. "Twentyfirst Century City" was the most appropriate text Eine could find in his studio at short notice - rejected paintings included "Monsters" and "Delinquents", which would have sent quite the wrong message.

Update: I completely missed this post with some views on shutters, which has some interesting points of view on the subject, particularly in the comments. Via Sam Jacob's Twitter feed.

* Precisely the sort of coordinated effort that has in recent days been condemned as "mindless".

Riot Thoughts

Rough, off-the-cuff, not an expert, not an eyewitness, just a Londoner, just thinking what I've been thinking.

1. "This is criminality, pure and simple" - D Cameron. Theresa May said something very similar. Criminality, maybe, but not very simple. Criminals are not the sole source of criminality. It can be manufactured in wholesale quantities by the state and applied to sections of the population who might not actually be directly involved in criminal activities. I think most of us who live in the centre of London are aware of large groups of young people who exist in a semi-criminalised state - they are essentially close to being illegal for who they are, simply because of their age, their background, how they dress, where they live and how they carry themselves, before any crime or "antisocial behaviour" is actually perpetrated. These young people face almost unimaginable restrictions on their freedom of movement. They are policed by displacement, being moved on. The fabric of the city is increasingly built to deter and exclude them - "mosquito" sonic alarms drive them out of shops and they are unwelcome in shopping centres and privatised public space like Spitalfields. ASBOs operated spatially, banning people from certain areas. Perhaps as a consequence of this displacement and exclusion, they have become ferociously territorial, and their movement is further confined by gang allegiances and nasty little "postcode wars". (Something I've touched on before: 1, 2, 3)

2. Yesterday the containment efforts failed. At around 5pm, watching the live coverage of the start of the night's violence on Mare Street, it struck me that things were kicking off in broad daylight. The disturbances on Sunday seemed opportunistic, "copycat" - people taking advantage of the overstretched police to launch a relatively minor spree of theft and destruction. On Monday, this "opportunism" had become a strategy. A daylight confrontation meant open defiance of the police, not simply taking advantage of darkness and overstretch. It was as if, all of a sudden, groups across London realised that the police could not be everywhere.

3. It looked as if the rioters were revelling in their mobility, flowing from place to place without pattern but simply because they could. It looked like a kind of sudden freedom. Call it mob rule, call it Hobbesian anarchy; condemn these robberies, the arson, the assaults on passers-by, the destruction of small businesses. All those things were disgusting. But the kids doing them were clearly dizzy with a kind of liberation. The visible breakdown of the rule of law frightened me because I benefit from the rule of law. So do most people. But this group who wanted to rip it down, who were boasting of their desire to fight with the police, who were setting fires and snatching phones - this group clearly has a different conception of what that rule means, and (whatever "community leaders " and our political class might claim) it isn't a tiny nucleus of habitual criminals.

4. People marvelled at the stupidity of people setting fire to their own neighbourhoods. And because this behaviour cannot be simply comprehended it is called "mindless", and the rioters are called "animals". Attacking your own neighbourhood by fire and attacking your own neighbours as animals are cousin impulses, in my opinion.

5. We have done our best to make these people, our neighbours, the angry ones, go away. Now more efforts will be made to get them back in their zones, and move those zones further out into the periphery, but we're only storing up more trouble for the future. After three nights of fire, and one frightening night of chaos, people are screaming for punitive policing, which can be understood. But once the situation is back under control, punitive policing is only going to store up more trouble for the future, too. How to break the cycle? I don't know. But I know that the solution will be expensive, it will take time, and it will be hard to reduce to a slogan as simple as "bring back the birch". Difficult and complicated it may be, but we are going to have to do it eventually.

6. Those who are calling for the army to be sent in have taken leave of their senses. Unless we really are going to solidify this failure, to carve it into stone, and exclude the angry ones from the citizenship altogether, to declare them to be something more than criminals: our enemies, the enemies of the state. I don't want to live in a city in a state where that happens.

7. Fortitude now; later, along with everything else that will follow these events, let's have some curiosity, a spirit of inquiry, of exploration. Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out ... isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind.

8. Stay safe out there.

British Paradoxes

"London, where the streets are paved with gold, and the gardens with cement", leads a Guardian article on the loss of wildlife habitats resulting from people paving over their front gardens.

The biggest survey ever conducted of private space in the capital, taken by the London Wildlife Trust, shows it is getting greyer – threatening its reputation of being one of the world's greenest cities because of its extensive public parks and gardens.

The city is losing the equivalent of two-and-a-half Hyde Parks of greenery a year from its private, domestic gardens – about 3,000 ha (7,410 acres), says the report.

Lamentable. So what is to be done? Legislation, perhaps, or biodiversity conversation areas to go with the existing system of conservation areas? But what about the Briton's inalienable right to do whatever he pleases to his home? But of course we are in the fork of a defining British paradox. We have this generalised sense of a shared patrimony that must be protected, which we sum up as our "heritage". And yet we also have this pugnacious sense of private property and natural justice, of rights and entitlements. So the very person who might complain about the loss of butterfly habitats and deterioration of streetscape caused by his neighbour's concreting of his front garden might be apoplectic at rage if the council stopped him putting up a shed in his back garden. Both sides of this paradox are of course "common sense", and reason buckles under the distorting pressure of its internal contradictions.

Similarly, everyone wants a home with a garden - surveys repeatedly show that this is the national preference. If this is what people want, then it must be right, that's just common sense. And everyone wants total protection of the green belt, and indeed all undeveloped green space. Where are these homes going to go? So we end up with absurd, cramped brick boxes on ludicrous coasters of turf - an attempt to meet a typological requirement in defiance of all reason. We very obviously share many things - our cities, our countryside, our past. And yet we despise the idea of dealing with them in a communal manner.

These paradoxes - and there are dozens like them, on everything from the "nanny state" to the BBC - are the logical outcome of 30 years of government according to the vindictive petty jealousies of the Daily Mail. They are rooted in that poisonous discourse, in which it seems every politician talks to you, personally, as an individual - you are of course responsible, hard-working, ordinary - in order to warn you about the others, the ones who are taking advantage and ruining everything. It is a mean, small-minded pattern of thought, the politics of Gollum. It has stacked this country with lose-lose paradoxes and zero-sum games, and at times it feels as if these paradoxes are about to block out all light from above and hope of change. Like when a Labour leader stands up and - instead of announcing a national programme of housebuilding, which would allow thousands more to share in the benefits of a council home - announces that "hardworking, responsible" people (like you!) would be given preference for the existing tiny number of council homes, over the "shirkers" (you know, the others).

The Image Accumulator

This is part of Tim Maly's 50 Posts About Cyborgs, a collaboration between blogs celebrating 50 years of the term "cyborg". Here, I'll be talking about David Cronenberg's film Videodrome, and there'll be some description of sadomasochism. Consider yourselves warned. It's also an imperfect effort to bring together thoughts on a number of subjects, and as such has a slightly unfinished feel. For that, my apologies.

What is the secret of the Videodrome signal? Not its origins or its meaning, which are the objects of James Woods' quest in David Cronenberg's film Videodrome (1983). I mean the secret of its shiver. We get the shiver when Max Renn, played by Woods, is introduced to the signal by his colleague Harlan. The signal was sniffed out by the pirate satellite dish operated by Renn's cable network - Videodrome is a brutal sadomasochistic television programme apparently emitting from Malaysia. Nothing but torture and snuff, filmed in a studio with walls of wet clay. Wet clay - absorbs sound, and it can be electrified. How's that for a deviant architectural detail? You have to love Cronenberg. An illicit television programme, operating beyond the reach of any risk of penalty and specialising in savagery, is a sinister enough premise. And then he goes and throws in a baroque, left-field detail like walls of wet clay. It just emphasises the otherness of the signal - the fact that it is a product of thought processes that are not like ours. We think.

Videodrome.

And there's the shiver. An illicit television programme. Something we aren't meant to be seeing. But it's right there, on the spectrum, just waiting for an ear cocked in its direction. It's inherently fascinating. Broadcast television is a rigid, hierarchical, top-down, hermetic system, a trumpeting modern edifice. Underneath a veneer of raucous diversity, it's monolithic and monopolistic. Breaches in that monopoly are at once unnerving and exotic - such as the sinister surrealism of the Max Headroom signal intrusion incident (video).

Finding this hotline to depravity, Renn does what any sensible person would - he pirates the programme and puts it on his own channel. He also becomes obsessed by it, and discovers that not only is it not faked, it is also being broadcast from no further away than Pittsburgh. As Renn gets closer to the source of the signal, he suffers from terrifying hallucinations. His television warps, swells, pulses and erotically reaches out towards him; his abdomen splits into a maw like a VCR cassette slot; he learns that the signal has a direct physiological effect, causing brain tumours. It's a product of the military-industrial complex: weaponised television, designed to destroy the minds and bodies of undesirables.


Body horror is of course what Cronenberg is best known for. The director had previously shown the boundaries of the body collapsing (most memorably in 1975's Shivers) and mind control (in 1981's Scanners). But Videodrome is I think the first proper foray into cyborg transgression - the merging of flesh and technology, a catastrophic breakdown in the separation we take for granted.

Or do we take it for granted? It makes sense that the vector of this breakdown is a broadcast signal. We are, as a species, not entirely convinced that visual information has no power over us - photosensitive epilepsy is of course real, and Videodrome-like mind control has seeped into urban legends, always a good barometer of modern pathologies. (The arcade game Polybius is a particularly fine example of this line of mythmaking.) We feel sensitive to the non-visual electromagnetic spectrum around us, even where it doesn't affect us - witness the pseudoscientific health scares over mobile phones, phone masts, electricity pylons, "electrosmog". Television was the first electronic love-object, the focus of an extraordinarily widespread devotion. As a consumer item, it has consistently adopted different strategies to get closer to us - reproducing, breaking out of the living room and into different rooms in the house, and also attempting a more intimate connection. First it experimented with miniaturisation (portable TVs, pocket TVs, wearable TVs); now its preferred method is immersion, giant screens, clearer images and sound, refining the purity of the signal rather than its portability. The relationship of the 20th-century consumer to the television signal has always been a kind of romance - a ferociously close but off-balance, sadomasochistic romance. Renn is simply acting out the atavistic dream-journey of the 20th-century consumer - he is getting inside his television, letting it get inside him, finally breaching that air-gap and bathing in the electromagnetic spectrum. In an ecstatic climax within the film, when all the distinctions between reality, television programe and hallucination have disappeared, Renn finds himself inside the orange chamber with the wet clay walls. There, he whips a television; on the screen, Debbie Harry's lips moan and cry out approvingly.


Clear-eyed and unsentimental as always, JG Ballard was on top of this relationship. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), contains the shadow of Videodrome - it's filled with giant screens, with broadcasts, with violence as entertainment. While the discourse around social change was mostly fogged with petty conservatism, Ballard saw deeper psychological instincts and pathologies being acted out in our relationship with consumer goods.

In fact, too few things are bad for us, and one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes. It's curious that these puritans strike such a chord - there is a deep underlying unease about the rate of social change, but little apparent change is actually taking place. ... Real change is largely invisible, as befits this age of invisible technology - and people have embraced VCRs, fax machines, word processors without a thought, along with the new social habits that have sprung up around them.

-- JG Ballard, notes to "Death Games (a) Conceptual", The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard, one feels, would have approved of Renn's self-destructive line of enquiry - his advice in The Atrocity Exhibition is that we should "immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim"; he thought there should be more sex and violence on television, seeing it as a powerful catalyst for social change. Videodrome is a thoroughly Ballardian film. And Renn really does immerse himself in himself - his tool for becoming one with the Videodrome signal is the Image Accumulator, a kind of helmet; in this helmet, reality, television and hallucination are the same non-judgemental flow of electrons.

The Image Accumulator.

The Image Accumulator is profoundly reminiscent of works by the German artist Walter Pichler. Attempting a critique of television, Pichler combined the device with prosthesis and architecture, fashioning "rooms" that are in fact helmets with integrated televisions. Pichler exposes the dependence in the relationship with television, its total demand on the user - the helmets are not convenient or liberating, they are blinding and immobilising. He gives us the cyborg endgame of devotion to television. But the astonishing thing about his helmets is that they manage to be appealing - they have the finished surface of consumer products, and despite ourselves we're curious about what's inside, how the experience works. The risk of course is obvious - it's not that we'll find these absurd contraptions uncomfortable and debilitating, that's a given; the risk is that we'll find the payoff worth it for final oneness with the signal, the warm umbilical with the machine, and that we'll come to forget we're wearing the helmet.

"Portable Living Room", Walter Pichler, 1967

"Small Room Prototype", Walter Pichler, 1967

Children of the Bunker

This is part of 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

The Mark 3 Travel Device.

The end of a thousand-year war. Two races locked in the embrace of murder-suicide. Technology in reverse. Attrition on a planetary scale: every living thing, every scrap of life-sustaining environment, must be destroyed to deny it to the enemy. The triumph of nihilism, genocide as business-as-usual. Few Doctor Who serials have even come in sight of the creative peak represented by Genesis of the Daleks, Terry Nation's 1975 story. Throughout its 47-year history, Doctor Who has continually shown a frustrating lack of economy with its own reserves of imagination, flinging away fascinating concepts after only the briefest examination and then eking out unoriginal stories far beyond their natural life. The series had a routine disregard for its own continuity even before the baroque absurdities of the post-2005 "New" series. Genesis of the Daleks is different. An extraordinarily powerful scenario is thoroughly explored, and the existing Dalek timeline is enriched and extended with what is essentially a super-prequel.

As the name suggests, Genesis is the beginning of the Daleks. What's striking about it is that it feels like an ending. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker, arrives on the planet Skaro at the tail end of a millennial war between the Thals and the Kaleds, two sets of humanoid aliens. The world is devastated by centuries of atomic and chemical warfare. The armies of the two races are reduced to ragged bands of skirmishers with mismatched, salvaged equipment, the detritus of a technological civilisation that has all but totally unravelled. The combatants are in regression, on the path back to the bow and arrow. The exhaustion is palpable.

Technology in retreat.

On arrival in this apocalypse, the Doctor is informed by a senior Time Lord that, in the distant future, the tyrannical cyborg race known as the Daleks has come to dominate the universe. This outcome must be prevented, so he has been sent back to the moment of the Daleks' creation to interfere with their development - either he must snuff them out at birth, or intervene to steer the race in a less belligerent direction. There have been too many times when the Daleks were thought to be defeated and came back stronger than ever, like a hospital superbug. The Doctor has been sent ad fontes to pre-empt a Dalek universe. Even the possibility of a Dalek universe is too great a risk to take.

This might sound like Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, but a viewer familiar with the Daleks' later exploits is immediately on the Doctor's side. The Daleks are near-perfect villains, "gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them" in Jenny Turner's beautiful description from 2006. They don't just talk like Nazis, they talk like the angriest, barking, spittle-hurling Schutzstaffel creep; they are Nazis reduced to their perfect essence, in a wheeled tin can. Tinned extract of Nazi. At the moment the Doctor arrives on Skaro, we already know a little of their origins - inside their armoured shell, the "real" Dalek is a degenerate mutant, just a ball of squealing, mucus-covered malignancy. If you had one under your foot, your instinct would be to stamp down, hard. They are bad news. Wipe them out before they do any harm? Sure.

But our trip to the nursery with a flamethrower can also be educational. What could cause that kind of debasement? What sort of florid developmental trauma could lead to that sort of galaxywide psychopathy? If this is the child, what are the parents like?

Trekking across the devastated surface of Skaro, the Doctor and his companions see, in the distance, the first sign that civilisation of some kind is still operating: a domed city. They encounter a network of trenches - manned by corpses - and the entrance to a bunker. They are surprised by a raiding party, captured, and led into this underground world: the Kaled headquarters.

Inside the Kaled bunker.

Terry Nation does not play down the parallels with the Nazis. Although the Kaleds are exhausted, near total defeat, down in the bunker they're still bleating on about huge offensives and Wunderwaffe that will bring about victory. Armies are confidently moved about a situation map, although from the depopulation we've seen on the surface it's clear they represent handfuls of soliders, if they exist at all. Peter Miles plays the security chief Nyder, an SS officer down to his Iron Cross, licking his lips over lines like "The Kaled race must be kept pure!". Great faith is placed in the charismatic chief scientist Davros, promiser of the Wunderwaffe, the man whose genius has kept the Kaled war machine going, and apparent source of the Kaleds' racial rhetoric.

Nyder. The parallels with the Nazis are not subtle.

This is the first appearance of Davros, a recurring character in later Doctor Who serials, inextricably tied up with the Daleks. We, the viewers, know that the wonder-weapon he is promising is the Dalek, and his appearance tells most of the story of this creation. Davros is crippled, confined to a transport device that resembles the lower half of a Dalek; he is blind, able to see only through an artificial eye mounted on his forehead; a single withered arm operates the switches on the chair that allow him to interact with the world around him. The Daleks are, it is immediately clear, simply elaborations of the cyborg technology that has kept their creator alive. He introduces the Daleks as the "Mark 3 Travel Device" - obviously he is sitting in the Mark 2. The Dalek is presented to the Kaleds as the only possible way to survive: it is designed to travel over the toxic surface of the planet, and will accommodate the "ultimate" form of the Kaled race - what the race will mutate into when the chemicals and radiation in the environment have completed their work. Davros has, for experimental purposes, hurried this process of mutation along on a few test subjects, and the results are not pretty. The Kaleds only have Davros' word that his test subjects are really the genetic destination of their race, but their chief scientist has brought them this far, and his own state (ruined, but alive and pugnacious) is a kind of guarantee - a sort of Hitlerian brinksmanship, which says "I'm prepared to go this far, to sacrifice this much, why aren't you?"

Davros: proto-Dalek.

The Kaleds are quite captivated by Davros, and impressed by the obvious potential of his creation to wreak victory, but they are not yet so far down the step-free path to Dalekhood. There are qualms, doubts, power struggles. Some of the scientists, quite understandably, don't much like the idea of ending up as one of Davros' future-slugs. It's not necessary to relay the entire plot here: there is much (too much) toing and froing across the wasteland between the Kaled dome and the Thal dome, many captures, escapes and recaptures, a lot of intrigue and moral calculus, some unintentionally comic encounters with giant polystyrene clams, and eventually the Daleks are unleashed and do what they do best: Ex-ter-min-ate, Ex-ter-min-ate. What's fascinating about Genesis is the way it explains so much about the psychology of the Daleks and how they ended up as such compelling villains, simultaneously terrifying and pathetic, "utterly evil and utterly childish" in Turner's phrase: "What is ‘Ex-ter-min-ate! Ex-ter-min-ate!’ but the most notorious command of the 20th century, done as a comic turn?"

The Daleks confer with their creator.

The childish edge is key: the Daleks are erratic, hyperactive, prone to tantrums. Their debasement could also be seen as under-development. In Genesis, Davros orders chromosomal alterations to the mutant Kaled test subjects. A scientist objects that the change will mean significant defects: No compassion, no conscience. Not defects, says Davros, enhancements! Deficiency is passed off as improvement, just as a slimy residue is being passed off as the apogee of the Master Race. Alongside under-development, the Daleks' hysteria and insanity also has an edge of claustrophobic panic, almost a horror at its own situation, trapped in a metal shell. Their superiority compex is Napoleonic, based on inferiority.

The Kaled super-race.

So they are trapped - just like the Kaleds, just like the Thals, confined to their bunkers, unable to venture out onto the planet they're fighting over without gasmasks, radiation detectors, helmets and other technological enhancements. The bunker can be seen like a kind of super-Dalek, the dome of the head poking above the surface of the planet, while the remains of each race desperately operates the controls inside. The Daleks are the products of the psychosis of the bunker.

Going further back into the rear of the fortification, you meet once again the system of staggered nearby defenses, with its small firing slits—one along the entrance axis, the other on the flanks—with low visibility, through which the immediate surroundings can be seen, in a narrow space with a low ceiling. The crushing feeling felt during the exterior circuit around the work becomes acute here. The various volumes are too narrow for normal activity, for real corporal mobility; the whole structure weighs down on the visitor’s shoulders. Like a slightly undersized piece of clothing that hampers as much as it enclothes, the reinforced concrete and steel envelope is too tight under the arms and sets you in a semiparalysis fairly close to that of illness.

That's Paul Virilio describing a Nazi-built fortification on Europe's Atlantic Coast ("The Frightening Beauty of Bunkers", The Morning News 2 February 2009, an article distilling the ideas laid out in Virilio's classic Bunker Archaeology) - the kind of structure that the Third Reich put its faith in as its manpower dwindled and defeat started to press in on all sides. Internal volumes too narrow for corporal mobility, the structure weighing down on the shoulders, semiparalysis close to illness - it's inescapably Dalekoid. The Dalek vehicle, the "Mark 3 Travel Device", can be seen as a sort of mobile, personal bunker, complete with its own raging, raving Hitler inside, screaming and commanding. It even looks like a pillbox, with the slits at the top, the swivelling weapon, the domed top.

The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks in Genesis. They keep coming back, again and again - hardly a surprise, as they are in many ways a more powerful creation than the Doctor himself, a perfectly tied knot of 20th-century pathologies, one that is for the time being quite at home in our own century as well. They're a warning about desperation, about wonder-weapons, about giving away too much for victory. Genesis of the Daleks is full of destruction and evil, but it ends on a resoundingly humane note. The Doctor plants explosives in the Dalek nursery , among the specimen jars containing the Kaled mutants. But when given the live wires that will trigger the detonation, he can't bring himself to do it. It's a striking moment - the Kaled blobs are after all, helpless, no matter how bellicose they might be. The Doctor agonises, and chucks away his chance, endangering the whole universe just to prevent himself sinking to the Daleks' level.

Genocide anxiety.

Rather than destroy the Daleks, the Doctor settles for blowing up the entrance tunnel to the underground complex, setting back their progress a few centuries, hopefully enough to tilt the scale of history against them. The Daleks are left to trundle about the Kaled bunker on their own, shrieking and plotting. Even after they dig their way out, they will never, ever escape.

Airport Dream

Copenhagen Airport. Image from my Flickr stream.

Other people's dreams, like other people's holidays, can be fascinating to hear about, but often they're tedious with a capital Zzz. So I'll keep this brief. Writing a review of the Christopher Nolan film Inception (scheduled for icon 088), I've been thinking about dreams. This has had a curious effect: either I'm dreaming more vividly, or I'm just a little better at remembering them at the moment.

Last night, it was an anxiety dream by the numbers, but it had interesting architectural overtones. I was at an airport - I had a flight to catch. I believed it was Gatwick (my wife flew into Gatwick yesterday), but the terminal building looked more like Rogers' Terminal 5 at Heathrow: a vast shed with a curved roof. I had checked in (somehow) but needed to get into the building to get through security and to my gate. But I couldn't find the door. At street level, the terminal building was an endless inscrutable wall of heavily fritted glass and anodised zinc. I found openings, but they where the exits or service entrances of shops, guarded by security. It was an utterly inhospitable landscape, clearly the wrong place to be, but I had no choice but to continue trekking around the endless perimeter. Eventually I ran into colleagues or peers who I knew would be catching the flight, heading to their gate (suggesting that the trip was work), but I couldn't follow them because there was something I had to do first. Also, they had coffee, and I wondered where they got it from.

That's all. Because it wasn't directed by Chrisopher Nolan, the dream did not deliver a vast surge of catharsis. At no point did I see or hear a plane. Hey, I didn't promise this was going to be worth reading.

Radio Alarm

A 500-word short story written on a plane using an idea destined for another project. This was written for the Campaign For Real Fear competition, where it didn't get a place on the longlist. Because of the hugely unsatisfactory last line, I imagine. Or because I screwed up the formatting of my entry, which I did. Or any number of other reasons. Photo from my Flickr stream.

Around the time he stopped drinking, he started seeing the bottles. They had probably always been there, left in the gutter outside his building, but now he noticed them. Just soft drink bottles, Coke and Pepsi mostly, but filled with yellow liquid. It was easy to imagine what this fluid might be, but hard to guess why it was being bottled and abandoned like this. The question preyed on his mind.

Many things troubled him like that. He had cut out the drink one hundred percent, the coldest cold turkey. His days were filled with slow clocks watched with a racing pulse, and anxieties that clawed at him. The nights were worse. With no drink to knock him out, he had forgotten how to fall asleep. Instead he lay in bed, between sheets that felt filthy even when clean, sweat on his face and the palms of his hands, back taut like a bow. As he stared at the ceiling, stained sodium-orange by the streetlights, terrible thoughts came to visit. Every twinge was the warning sign of painful and terminal disease. He would fail, continue the fatal trajectory the drink had shown him.

In this limbo, jaws clenched, small distractions became intolerable. The radio alarm was worst. It was old, and in its senility it had become promiscuous. When it was quiet, and he lay next to it, he heard soft voices emitting from its yellowing plastic shell. The radio was off, volume at zero, but still there were the voices. Often it was the jarring electronic bleating that comes from a speaker before a nearby mobile phone rings. Only turning it off at the mains, killing the clock, could silence it.

Presently he was able to connect the interference with the bottles. It was minicab drivers parking in his street off the main road late at night between their calls. The alarm picked up their radios, and they were leaving the bottles in the gutter after filling them in their cabs. After that, when he heard the radio alarm crackle and voices speak across the electronic gulf, he would go to the window and find the parked car, its driver visible in the light of the dashboard, waiting out the night with him.

One night, after a day spent watching his hands quivering and feeling his heart tighten, an electrostatic bark again broke into his sleeplessness. He listened to it hiss and rip, longing for a second's rest. With the clock past three, he crossed to the window.

The street was empty.

Returning to bed, the static was joined by a voice, quiet and insistent. Angry, sick, he pulled the plug from the wall. The digital display went dead. He closed his eyes.

Still the voice went on, repeating its message into the night. The plug lay on the floor, but the radio alarm spoke, buzzing and whistling through space. "You will die, you will die, I am patient, I can wait, you will die.”

Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us

I was in the Independent yesterday, mounting a weak defence of a heavily defended building.

A 30m-wide "stand-off zone" will make the new US embassy stick out like a sore thumb. "It could have been a lot worse," says Will Wiles, senior editor at Icon architecture and design magazine. "We already knew that security was paramount in the design – it's a big factor in the Americans wanting a new building in the first place. Any design would have this 30m setback, defined by the blast radius of car bombs."

This "stand-off zone" is one part of what's called "hostile vehicle mitigation" or "HVM" - a field of building I'm pleasantly well informed about, having attended a conference on designing for terrorism last year*. There are such things, for instance, as armoured trees; a growing tree can absorb steel bars that will help it stop or slow a rogue vehicle. These hostile vehicles are the car- and truck-bombs that give security planners sleepless nights and twitchy days. As I told the Indie, they're the reason the Americans have decamped to Nine Elms (they wanted a site with the necessary space for the defensive zone). The defensive zone itself was always going to be heavily landscaped, because if vehicles can just drive into your stand-off it's not much of a stand-off. And so all this "it's a fortress behind a moat" talk is old news - that is what the Americans wanted and what Kieran Timberlake has delivered. It's what all the other architects delivered as well.

Kieran Timberlake's winning design for the new US Embassy in London.

I don't see anything particularly fortress-like about the building itself, although the vaguely Corblike pilotis do suggest the hem of a skirt raised against scurrying al-Qaeda mice. Its apparent isolation and aloofness are products of the defensive zone. The contradictions built into the brief must have been impossible - welcoming but defended, open yet closed, War is Peace. This inscrutable International Style Cube is a suitably ambivalent response to that. A winsome and civil bit of Scandinavian modernism, all civic manners and democratic openness, would have been duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. As I said to the Independent, but they didn't quote: "The symbolism seems rather appropriate to me: a shining city on a hill, surrounded by the most formidable defensive network ever known." And that skin also has potential. A complicated double-surface like that, with its brise-soleil, makes me think of fractals, and the way they contain a small area within a long boundary. It's as if the surface of the embassy has the potential to cover a far larger building, perhaps up to the street edge, but the building has shrunk back. Forgive the simile, but it's like the wrinkled skin of a detumescent penis. I mean that in a good way. Really.

New security structures outside the existing US Embassy's building in Grosvenor Square. Image from the embassy's own Flickr stream.

Duplicitous to the point of being highly sinister. I had to visit the American Embassy on Grosvenor square to get a media visa shortly before Christmas last year. Interfacing with the State Department's bureaucracy is an unpleasant and intrusive business at the best of times, whatever their efficiency and politeness (and they were efficient and polite). But progressing through the improvised security perimeter outside Arne Jacobsen's Eero Saarinen's embassy building was frankly dystopian. Part of a London square was militarised, with heavy hard defences. One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realise that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years.

The new embassy is at least designed with these contradictions in mind, and is consequently fascinating. It's worth taking a step back to really admire what we're looking at: a building designed with explosions in mind. A shape formed by the manipulation of spheres of destruction. It could be the first London building built with attack from the ground in mind since the Second World War. (It's also a testament to the extraordinary power of terror: the fact that a few hypothetical malcontents with A-level chemistry and a driver's licence can race to the head of the queue ahead of a whole gang of other diplomatic considerations.) So, what new forms are these? Going back through my notes from that terror conference is a dispiriting experience; the bureaucratic jargon like "hostile vehicle mitigation" and "exponential decay of blast effect" does not exactly induce good cheer. There are some aspects of HVM that might give pause to Londoners. Firstly, it doesn't stop attacks, it just makes them more difficult and limits their impact. Secondly, it's primarily meant to protect facilities, rather than people. Obviously some people are protected into the bargain - I'm not saying that to make some Spartist the-Yanks-care-more-about-their-office-furniture-than-the-lives-of-honest-cockneys point, it's just a fact of life. 30m stand-off will prevent a truck bomb causing massive structural collapse, but said bomb could still cause horrific death and injury. Thirdly, HVM only protects the one facility, not the buildings around it. The plans for the new embassy show new glass blocks surrounding it at street's edge. Will they still be glass when they're built, I wonder.


That's something important to bear in mind: the effect of the new embassy's security measures extends beyond the perimeter of the embassy itself.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Chapter 1; emphasis mine

The HVM landscaping creates what can be called a "hard zone" of security. There are also nested "soft zones" of security in and around the building: the sight arcs of CCTV cameras, the streets on which you are more likely to be stopped by police or prevented from taking photographs, maybe a "no-protest" radius around the building like the one around Parliament (now scrapped), no-fly zones. The electronic haze of listening devices and broadcasting devices, security down to the ions in the atmosphere. And there are the streets on which one may feel uneasy and prefer not to linger.


The now-scrapped Parliament no-protest zone. Image: BBC.

The hard defences of Kieran Timberlake's new embassy don't bother me in the slightest. They are obvious, they invite an architectural response, they can be well-mannered and attractive, and they are in their way honest. (I'm reminded of the temporary barricades around Parliament here - unattractive black slabs that were partly reclaimed when people started sitting on them to eat their lunch.) The new US embassy has the potential to be one of the most interesting buildings in London, and I would love to visit it once it is finished (although it's possible I'm now blowing my chance). Hard zones aren't such a big deal - no one complains about the Tower of London, a fortress behind a defensive setback on the Thames. It's these CCTV-covered, drone-overflown soft zones that we need fear. Although ID cards might not be here yet, ID card culture is. We face the slow advance of soft-zone ambivalence, that creeping sense of being unwelcome on the street, a desire to look over one's shoulder. Soft zones are easy to introduce and difficult to shift; they exist in the mind as much as in the city. A bollard is just a bollard, and it can't strike half as much fear into one's heart as the sudden sense that one has brought along the wrong piece of paper.

* "Places Not Fortresses: Can and Should we Design for Terror?", New London Architecture with the Association of Consultant Architects, at the Building Centre, 27 January 2009.

Two Very Short Stories

Houses in Ixtapaluca, Mexico. Image taken from the Flickr photostream of jmb1977 and used under a CC Licence.

[These are two stories written for the Ballardian/Savoy Books microfiction competition, the results of which have now been announced. Stories written for the contest had to explore Ballardian or Savoyard themes. "Live-Work" got an honourable mention. The second story, "Unruins", was inspired by the above image, first seen on this Things post some months ago. It's now the basis of a longer, more elaborate project, to be announced at a later date.]

Live-Work

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so ...”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

Unruins

The machines were still moving somewhere on the surface of the mutilated planet. They still extruded the epoxycrete frames of suburban houses, open at both ends, windows gaping. In some places, the land was eight deep in rapid-rendered family homes, jumbled in the upper levels as walls intersected with pitched roofs and the detritus of civilisation. Pictures from the ocean floor were discouraging. The hunting party had found a pocket of stale air in a second level subdivision. A car radio was embedded in the wall, and snarled the signals of new lifeforms emerging in the unruins.

Bunkerlust

Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

More ruins, and a touch more retro-future. Here's a review by me of Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker installation at the Barbican. It was in Icon 078, and went online on Friday. Bunker is more subtle than it first appears - as I say in the piece, it's a highly ambiguous work. Emergency or wartime bunkers are symbols of catastrophe - the last resort, the futility of the Sheffield bureaucrats in Threads, the impotent rage and nihilism of Hitler's last hours. But as well as being a bunker, it's a ruin - another pessimistic environment, tied up with (stop me if you've heard this before) melancholy and the shadow of mortality.

Put those two negatives together, and what do you get? Well, an interesting installation for a start. But do they cancel each other out, or compound the darkness? A ruined bunker could suggest that the danger has passed and the bunker is no longer needed - or it could suggest that the war has gone badly, that the crisis is terminal, that the last refuge has been breached?


Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

Or a third alternative. The text accompanying Bunker stresses Kusmirowski's obsession with the past and the nostalgia that characterises his work - so the bunker may be obsolete, and one kind of danger might have passed, but it could have been replaced with other dangers that call for different responses. A quote from Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology is reproduced in the texts that come with the installation: "The essence of the new fortress is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in." Perhaps we can't even imagine a planned response to the dangers of the new world - we can't build bunkers, long-range rader networks and DARPAnets to anticipate it, so we dream of bunkers. Or perhaps we're already holed up in the fortress - a worrying thought as Virilio saw stepping into the bunker to be the first step towards the death that the bunker was ostensibly built to prevent. Whatever the cause, bunkerlust - or bunkernostalgia - certainly seems to be widespread right now.

Ruins, the future becoming the past, the disintegration of expectations of progress - these thoughts point in the direction of JG Ballard. This is from High Rise:

Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this - sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Centre.

Another stray thought from Bunker. I was wandering around the installation, nodding thoughtfully, stroking my chin and trying hard to look like I was thinking about Paul Virilio and the nature of melancholy and the horror of war and all that. But in fact, more often than I would care to admit, I was thinking: "Wow, this is very like Resident Evil/The Suffering/Silent Hill."

Those are all computer games in the "survival horror" genre. In a typical survival-horror game, the protagonist - that is, you, the player - stumbles around in dimly lit and poorly maintained spaces being pursued by monsters or zombies. You can generally speaking fight back, but the mood of the genre relies on a strong and persistent feeling of intense peril - there's never quite enough ammo, or you might as well be flicking rubber bands at the armour-plated drooling thingy coming towards you down a gloomy hospital/prison/insane asylum corridor. (The lighting is key. In "survival horror" games, the dimmer is always down, or the energy-saving bulbs never quite warm up.)

Silent Hill.

I've been thinking about these games a lot lately - I recently wrote a review of Christopher Payne's beautiful book Asylum and its photographs of 19th-century mental hospitals and long corridors in advancing desuetude also led to reflections on the genre. The review is still unpublished - I might return to the architecture of survival horror when it goes live in the New Year, since this blog post is long enough already.

A Zone of One's Own

My review of Anna Minton's book Ground Control is at long last up on Iconeye.com. But the delay* hasn't made it any less timely - I fear its subject matter is only going to become more and more relevant. It cover the sorry (and under-examined) story of what has happened to Britain's cities under the fluttering banner of Regeneration - a selloff of public space, the erosion of ancient civic rights, the self-destruction of local democracy, the rise of gated communities, and the astonishing extension of police powers into every aspect of the lives of people who have mostly done nothing more than make other people feel uneasy. It's sickening stuff, and Minton has done a good job of bringing it all together in one book.

What Minton makes clear - although she is never wholly explicit about it - is that the decline of urban liberty is a largely spatial phenomenon. Control over the city by the authorities - increasingly private authorities - is arranged by carving the territory into zones and policing individual access to those zones. As I say in the review, things like ASBOs and dispersal orders are spatial in effect. "Order" in the city is being enforced by depriving certain groups and individuals of access to certain areas.


Zones are going to be a very important part of the future. Their use has cropped up in a number of books I've read recently: Keller Easterling's Enduring Innocence, Mike Davis' Evil Paradises, and The Invisible Committee's infamous The Coming Insurrection. (These are all heartily recommended reading.) This is what The Coming Insurrection has to say on the subject:

The unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis last July 14th - as the police later confirmed - presents a much more vivid image of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear indication of the road we're headed down. Territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. ...

I don't agree with what's advocated in The Coming Insurrection, but as an analysis of the present situation, it's often extremely insightful. A future of privately owned city centres and gated communities is no future at all. This extraordinary story from the United States (via) is a sample of why privatised, gated estates don't deserve the name "community".

*The book has been out for a few months; my review was originally slated for Icon 076 but became snarled in a scheduling problem, and held for 077, when it finally had the ignominy of being bumped to make way for Mr Philippe Starck's Design For Life.

The images for this post came from my Flickr stream.

Deviancy and Domesticity

In Gore Vidal's "Pornography", an enthralling and clear-eyed survey of the erotic landscape of the United States circa 1966*, he makes some connections between emerging patterns in American sexual literature and the changing living circumstances of Americans:

The decline of incest as a marketable theme [in pornography] is probably due to today's inadequate middle-class housing. In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

This theme is being supplanted by sadomasochism, Vidal says, continuing:

In the film The Collector, a lower-class boy captures an educated girl and after alternately tormenting and boring her, he says balefully, "If more people had more time and more money, there would be a lot more of this." This got an unintended laugh in the theater, but he is probably right. Sexual experiment is becoming more open.

A certain kind of sexual outrage needs space, privacy and time to percolate. This occurred to me when I read on BoingBoing about the internet activity of Philip Garrido, the kidnapper and rapist who - among other crimes - abducted an 11-year-old girl in 1991 and held her captive for 18 years. Growing participation in the internet - and the curious durability of many of the traces we leave on the net - mean that when crimes like this emerge, we now have the dubious honour of being able to see what the culprit wrote on his blog and elsewhere. Even more chilling is the fact that Garrido's house in Antioch, California, is clearly visible on Google Maps:


And can be seen on Google Street View:


In the aerial view, the complex of tents and structures in which Garrido kept his victims can be clearly seen. Apparently the neighbours heard nothing from these installations, which suggests a degree of solidity. If the neighbours can be believed.

There are obvious parallels with the equally abominable case of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who kept his own children captive in a purpose-built cellar/dungeon. Last year Nicholas Spice wrote a superb essay in the LRB exploring the Fritzl case through the writings of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian Nobel laureate. Spicer explores the implications of what Fritzl was doing in building his cellar:

Above ground, Josef Fritzl obeyed the rules of ordinary time and causality, the rules that say actions have consequences and are subject to the constraints of conscience (das Gewissen); but when he went down into his cellar, he left all this behind to enter the timeless underworld (das Ungewisse) of his desires. As long as no one found out, it was as if what he did down there had never happened (if he’d killed his children and grandchildren, he said, no one would have made a fuss). Jelinek calls what Fritzl did to his daughter a ‘performance’, the addictive acting out of a pathological need. In building his cellar, Fritzl was building a compartment of his own mind, a theatre for the nightly performance of his fantasies. Elisabeth Fritzl’s grotesque misfortune was to be imprisoned in this compartment, to be trapped inside her father’s head.

It's almost as if there's an architectural typology associated with these cases. A certain kind of structure is created by a certain kind of mind - explored in art in John Fowles' novel The Collector, the film of which Vidal mentions above. They make the space, this microcosm of their desires, and the space gives them the privacy and time they need.

What potential is there to expose cases like this through examining land use? Last year I briefly explored writing a feature about Detroit, the poster child of urban degeneration, with regard to urban farming and re-ruralisation. In the course of this research I spoke with Interboro Partners, a New York-based architecture practice that contributed an intriguing project to Actar's Verb: Crisis. Interboro's interest is "blots" - places where homeowners in semi-abandoned neighbourhoods of Detroit have taken over vacant lots next to their houses, disrupting the suburban grid. Interboro told me about how they use Google maps to look for "blots", and how they were getting better at identifying them from above. Could homes like Garrido's be identified similarly? Or could the process be automated, in the same manner that the police now use thermal imaging cameras to identify suburban homes that have been turned into cannabis factories? Researching "augmented reality" for the new issue of Icon, I was intrigued to hear that the same technology that is used to "recognise" faces on CCTV cameras could be used to recognise buildings - so if you were wondering what a building was, you could take a picture of it on your phone and an internet application could tell you who built it, when, why, and what it does now.

This is utterly fanciful as camouflage is second nature to the psychopath and the abuser and they'll cotton on to Google Maps and crowdsourced detection soon enough. One of the reasons these cases are so disturbing is the way the abusers apply surface touches of domesticity to the nightmares they design and build. I'm also struck, again, by Spice's description of Fritzl building a model of the inside of his head, a space in which his fantasies could be acted out for real. There's a curiously memorable B-movie thriller from 2000 called The Cell in which Jennifer Lopez travels into the subconscious of a comatose serial killer. What makes the film memorable is the depictions of what the inside of the killer's head is like - surreal, Byzantine palaces and landscapes. But what seems more likely than that sort of landscape is a kind of perverted domesticity, like Gregor Schneider’s terrifying 2004 Artangel installation "Die Familie Schneider", or the "village" in Jerome Bixby's similarly terrifying short story "It's a Good Life". (Be warned that the Bixby story, if you don't know it, is the kind of thing that haunts you for life - it shook me up terribly when I first read it in my teens.)

I don't mean to linger too long on these matters for the obvious reasons. My interest is that we all attempt, on one level or another, to turn our homes into models of the inside of our heads, and this is to some extent one of the themes of my book. In Care of Wooden Floors, a control-freak minimalist invites a more lackadaisical friend to look after his flat while he's out of the country. The flat is the precise reflection of the control freak's desires and ambitions, and as such leaving it in the hands of another is a difficult thing to do. His reluctance to let go manifests itself in compulsive note-making - everywhere, there are notes explaining the contents of drawers and what is and what isn't permissible behaviour from the flatsitter. It all leads to disaster. By stepping into someone's home you're stepping into a kind of myth of themselves, a hard projection of their psyche into the physical world. Once you start seeing homes like this, they can be pretty unnerving places. Maybe this is why I like hotels so much.

* New York Review of Books, 31 March 1966; I'm quoting it from United States: Essays, 1952-62.

They Use the Train

Pudding Mill Lane DLR Station.

"Spies, terrorists, smugglers and other stealthy types use trains in Western Europe because they are fast, cheap and efficient," says Sebastian Rotella in this mysterious column in the LA Times, first spotted by Geoff Manaugh. As Geoff discusses in his post on the subject, Rotella uses the fact that railways and stations have been a venue for intrigue in popular culture for many decades as a starting point for a discussion of the alleged fondness of modern terrorists for trains. And by "modern" Rotella means Islamist, drawing murky cconnections between recent terror plots and the fact that "train stations tend to be in working-class immigrant areas where desperadoes find shelter, weapons, false documents and other tools of the trade". There follows some borderline-Orientalist musing about the exoticism and hidden danger of one such neighbourhood in Brussels. "Campaign posters of local politicians with first names like Ahmed and Fatima ... a music shop blaring desert rhythms ..." You get the picture.

Aside from its cultural insensitivity, what's really perplexing about this column is its suspicion towards the train. Rotella, an American, might find mass train use something of a novelty, so the thought of terror on rails caught his imagination. It must be the train's inherent cosmopolitanism, its relative classlessness, its blurring of individuality, that makes it suspect. Cars and vans are also very popular with terrorists - so are planes, and concealing clothing, and all areas of public assembly. This is what terrorism is: it's the weaponisation of the public domain. As Peter Sloterdijk says in his study of terrorism and modernity, Terror from the Air (my review): "Terrorism can only be understood when grasped as a form of exploration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility."

I'm not drawing a comparison between Rotella's insensitivity and an ideology that has killed millions, but reading his article, I thought of Norman Cohn's extraordinary book Warrant for Genocide, an exploration of the history of so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". This was a notorious antisemitic forgery that was among the inspirations for the Holocaust. If you ever fancy staring into the heart of hatred at its most surreal and malignant, Cohn's study of these documents is the book for you.

The Protocols claim to outline a Jewish plot for world domination, and - in line with the fascist ideologies they inspired - are fiercely anti-modern and hostile towards the city and modern technology. An aspect of this hostility is the author's specific concerns about underground railways (cutting-edge technology in the mid to late 19th century), which according to the Protocols were built by the conspirators in order to plant explosives under capital cities.

As is standard for the Protocols, this is paranoia on steroids. The author doesn't just fear that the conspirators might use subways, he suggests that the subways have been constructed specifically for the purpose of destroying industrial capitals. Their usefulness as a form is mass transit is purely a ruse. What a ruse!

This kind of fear remains current. Even before the 11 September attacks, the "conspiracy community" attached much significance to the fact that the Bin Laden family made much of its fortune in construction and therefore had the ability to mine infrastructure. A near-identical claim has been made about Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. In these different modes of thinking, two different kinds of paranoia are evident. There's conventional terror-paranoia, fear that the environment is being exploited by rogues intent on destruction; and enhanced terror-paranoia, fear that the environment was designed and built by rogues intent on destruction. Paul Virilio's "integral accident" gone bad; gone worse.

Virilio explores the use of simulators to probe technology for potential accidents - accidents are, after all, built-in to technology, the invention of the aeroplane was the invention of the plane crash. If you're designing and building something that's meant to self-destruct, use of simulators and the machinery of "health and safety" becomes, in effect, what Sloterdijk called terrorism: "A form of exploration of the environment from the perspective of its destructibility." The machinery of "health and safety" and contingency planning involves the mass-manufacture of conceptual terrorist attacks.

Mention of the "health and safety" complex brings me to a point related to all this infrastructural anxiety: high-vis jackets. High-visibility jackets are fascinating, and almost certainly a subject I will return to, so I'll keep my thoughts here brief. It is a strange facet of our modern society (in Britain at least) that the construction, maintenance, transport and security industries have adopted the same uniform. There are entirely practical health-and-safety reasons for this, of course. But while the high-vis vest makes you more visible to moving machinery, it has the opposite effect for society at large. As one of the photographers on my recent stroll around the Olympic site said, "if you ever want to be invisible, wear a high-vis vest". And, in a curious way, they are the uniform of capital interacting with the environment. As Iain Sinclair suggested in Sorry Meniscus, the Thatcherite-Blairite money shot is a group of men with hardhats on and "tweetie-pie waistcoats" over their suits breaking ground with a gleaming shovel. "Britain is working. Hands-on management. Optimism. Good humour."