Category: Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs (page 3 of 8)

Once upon a time there was a piece of paper through which the words printed on the other side could not be seen, a piece of paper so thick it might have been made of wood. Twice upon a time there was a transparent screen through which one could see the other side of the world, a screen so tantalising you almost wanted to stick your hand in it. Three times upon a time there was a window through which fish could fly, bursting out into daylight and dying right in front of you on the cobblestones. Four times upon a time there was a fish so smart it could survive out of water, flipping about and using its tail to order drinks, hail cabs and enter security codes. Five times upon a time there was a security code that was so secure it hadn’t even been thought of yet, but existed nevertheless, inside the brain of a super-intelligent fish. Six times upon a time there was a thought so rarified it could not survive in the human brain, and thus had to be thrown away, like a dead fish. Seven times upon a time there was a brain so soft and yet strong that it could have survived in the ocean, where it might have been mistaken for a jellyfish. Eight times upon a time there was a jellyfish that enjoyed computer games, and often wondered what lay on the other side of the screen. Nine times upon a time there was a computer game that could not help crying, blubbering through its start-up routines and causing the screen on which its menus were displayed to smudge. Ten times upon a time there was a cry so piercing, so utterly sad, that trains would stop, dripping taps would dry up, and ugly men would somehow become beautiful. Eleven times upon a time there was a train that dreamt of derailing itself and then did so, flying off into a rice paddy and burying itself there, in a hiss and storm of steam. Twelve times upon a time there was a rice paddy full of jellyfish and model aeroplanes, useless for growing rice but beautiful nevertheless. Thirteen times upon a time there was a model aeroplane called “Benny” that was attached to a piece of string and spent its days circling beneath a spinning ceiling fan. Fourteen times upon a time there was a piece of string that wanted to be a jellyfish but instead found itself reincarnated as a piece of cooling lava. Fifteen times upon a time there was a river of molten lava that smelt like burning incense but was, in fact, a reincarnated Buddhist temple. Sixteen times upon a time there was a Buddhist temple that a passing peddler mistook for a glass of cola and then proceeded to drink. Seventeen times upon a time there was glass of cola that a waiter brought to you free of charge but which tasted like petrol. Eighteen times upon a time there was a litre of petrol that refused to be burnt up in a fuel tank and thus chose to self-combust, killing the car’s occupants and several bystanders. Nineteen times upon a time there was an explosion that didn’t want to be thought of as a killer of innocent bystanders and so disappeared into the sea, leaving behind a note that said: “Give my love to Benny”. Twenty times upon a time there was a sea that was so sick it no longer responded to the pull of the moon and just sat there like a quivering mass of jelly. Twenty one times upon a time there was a moon that had no name and whose gravitational pull had no discernible effect on lovers or seas, so it span itself out of orbit and is now travelling somewhere in space, in search of lost satellites. Twenty two times upon a time there was a pair of lovers who were infatuated with satellites, and whose names cannot be spoken, for fear of dragging space probes back to earth. Twenty three times upon a time there was an earth where lovers arrived from outer space, seeking the comforts of radiant dawns and spider monkeys. Twenty four times upon a time there was a radiant dawn so beautiful it froze the hearts of lovers, spider monkeys and model aeroplanes, forcing the authorities to ban it from appearing at all. Twenty five times upon a time there was a spider monkey that dreamt of becoming an astronaut but settled eventually for a part-time job as a scrap-yard merchant, earning good money. Twenty six times upon a time there was an astronaut who bellowed operatic tunes to the stars, but whose space-suit was punctured by one too many peanuts. Twenty seven times upon a time there was an opera in which all the characters, as well as the orchestra members, died, somewhat muting the standing ovation of the (also dead) audience. Twenty eight times upon a time there was a dead city called Opa, and this is how many stories you will have to endure before anyone is willing to tell you behind which screen or on which page it even exists.

City that encloses many other cities, like a lunch pail filled with multiple containers, each of which holds a prescribed number of foodstuffs – nuts, sultanas, rice, meatstuffs, tapioca, croutons, larvae. An anticity formed from invisible matter, shifting its colours and contours, blown by desert winds and dream tornadoes. An atrocity filled with horrors, spikes and black smoke, spewing out deformed mutants and scar slogans, calling to the darkness within your ventricles. An audacity stretched like a dare from the limb of a still-green tree, or coiled in the bottom of a soul boat, ready to be thrown, fastened or used to hang other cities from. A basicity of which it is not necessary to speak, or even dream, hidden inside another city whose governmental complexes defy the bureaucratic imagination, if it even exists. A caducity so moribund its whimpers sound like stolen curses, hampered by sticky constraints and medical technicalities, falling through sleep into a deep well of madness, covered in ash. A capacity for evil that no one ever suspected still lives but does, in nature reserves and traffic islands, quarantine areas and no-fishing zones. A clonicity that attempts to duplicate even itself, leading to a long litany of missing parts, overpasses to nowhere, riffs on postmodernism and galaxies of cul de sacs. A conicity that sweeps up all in its path, even the sleeping terminal attendants, and creates new weather patterns, based on its architect’s original intentions, now buried beneath the horror of gated communities, rifle ranges and toxic spillways. A cubicity fashioned from rafts and steel wires, held together by desire, persisting as a tightly-strung circus tent, under which its animals graze and gaze. A duplicity that’s breathtaking in its grandeur, though the logic is wrong and the adjustments made by engineers will never obtain council approval. An edacity whose subway systems interconnect only on the hour, causing entropy and unexpected life encounters, especially a midnight. An ethnicity of which one can only dream, lodged as it is between the scions of restriction and the tremors of united stations, partly built, in space. A felicity like a feel-good balm upon the lips, pursed in preparation for the sanction of this candidate or that, but forever silent, alert, armed. A feracity of slow waltzes and miniature parades, submerged loudspeakers and surveillance blockbusters, concealed romantics and open-faced laughter, grinding down its teeth on the harbour’s edge. A ferocity astonishing even to its own inhabitants, in the way its snow-squalls whip the skin from the face, its rain lances the windshields of automobiles, its radiant heat blisters streetsigns, its moonbeams suck the very fluids from my body. A fugacity trenchant, exposing hypocricy and mending tortured limbs, beyond all meaning and enveloped in smog, blinking towers that glow and laser surgeries housed in shadow bunkers. A helicity whose blades puncture drums and contaminate dry zones, filled with the urgent squealing of atomic clocks, marked by its denizens’ wearing of orange armbands, and the bandannas of the military, striped and saturated with sweaty grease. An iconicity characterised by icicle statues, advertising rays and sugar bays, curled up like a homeless wish on the steps of cold justice, populated by boys with bloated stomachs and sorry wires. An intercity blown to smithereens by repeated invasions, now located somewhere in the asteroid bell we all call home but haunted, still, by the steel consistency of its barricaded islands, its musuem shell. An ionicity bombed and reconstructed, all of its former plans and colonies lost, piles of cardboard boxes in the central station concourse, blue paint in the air and sideways glances everywhere. A loquacity harbouring refugees from free thought, bunkered down in the eerie neon snow, diseased and canned, preserving only our final breaths in its shafts and risers. A lubricity that slips like chance encounters between the lips, down the throat and into the farthest reaches of our corpuscles, arriving finally at the fingertips, where it sits, like a spider monkey, and waits. A megacity etched from the walls of a giant transdermal prison, its ringroads and rotaries like omniscient eyes in the face of human traffic, cordoned off and blind. A mendacity cutting itself repeatedly on barbed wire, changing its name, denying its own complicity, saving that rebuttal for the final appearance of bone, shattered sinews and tendons of hope. A mendicity all of its own, a pride like a billowing blue cloud, a miasma of swamplands and flooded wharves, coming alive only after the heat of the day has vanished. A minacity deathless, frontierless, plain – existing only in the eternity-bound wagons of the last black train, housing prisoners from cities whose names cannot be uttered, tied with string and bound by codes of brotherhood, sisterhood, nationhood, belief. A multicity referring and cataloguing itself again and again, until even the patterns of its forced assimilations begin to resemble constellations, beehives, shrouds, lives.

The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. In the tunnels, on the wagons and under the stars. One more push and then the darkness will cloak us, or crack. Dreams of a black crow with a blade of grass in its beak. City of wondrous walls and far-up windows, through which candle light bleeds. Oh yes, it’s historical. It’s bathed in the blue skies of a post-plague morning. It’s covered in mist. It’s prandial. Esoteric balladeers pepper their sets with sidelong glances at hourglasses and mead. Fake beards … okay. Someone pours tea from a giant steel kettle and we settle into our familiar jousting positions. City of interminable consultations with oracles. City of bad news recirculated through flues. City of underfloor heat and head-high smouldering looks. City of jawbones and dialectics. Shutters whirr, somewhere. Outside a stillness prevails, lording it over the jackdaws and scarecrows out on loan. City inside a glass globe. The patter of lower court officials. Thatched straw roof, earthern floor: between us, a grim troll. Padded walls and slops buckets. Boisterous boys and mincing girls. Some religious delegation gets the boot. Black ships in a steel harbour. Bodies hanging from trees, vines encircling their legs and arms. Signs posted randomly along passageways leading to wooden mines. Outlaws and prosody. Middle time. Kingdoms and fiefdoms, spiralling defenses and natural redoubts. Evenings of yearning. Days of speed. Colossal dreadnoughts and battering rams. Machines. No doubt. Destiny. The importance of lineage and custom. Books made from older books. Libraries made from the songs of extinct birds. Paradise, in a nutshell. Spherical lanterns and high-pitched wails. Torture chambers, yes. Wells, filled with old boots and armour. Metal horses. Arrows and pitch. Wheels and grinders. Midnight sorcery. Flying warriors. Snakes and beetles. City of the underclasses. City of rosewater. Inklings of sorry tales, chainmail speaking in tongues. Museums of lard. Fantastic noodle trails. Glory and desperation. Assault and counter-assault. Chips and fingers. Odes and elegies, sung in minor keys.

City of dread, of shanties and loam. In a police state jacked on lonely clubs and bullet time, some streetwalkers trip the line, busting the bleeding hearts and painting skyscrapers red. The tenements by the disused stream are no longer reliably dangerous. Shadows swoop on crumbs of maize and shoot arrows into corporate plans but it’s all dead-beat, thrashed. Like the screech of Babylon in tremble bars, or the criss-cross of pseudo-mazes infesting the low town. Clamps on all my wheels, buttons on my bread. Time for more sugar. Anytime I might. Seeds and straw, beige monotones and super action. Walking the world into the ground. Plastic bags over plastic plates, on which plastic food is served using plastic implements. A small bowl of soup and three white plastic cakes in a sea of blood-red sauce from a plastic container. Plastic shoes of all stripes, boxes of plastic biscuits. Smashing into plastic signs, drunk as midnight on Jongno-gil. The barbituate of loneliness. Self-doubting keyboard shields, grimaces from graveyard shifters. Down an alley, well … what? I could hear that crooning even in my sleep. A small disturbance in the mystery room. It is a street. Clean machine warehouses. Crazed mimics. The poverty of dogs. City of dry-cleaning gases emitted in the early snow hours. This does not escape your attention. The yellow of mustard, the orange of tarpaulins, the green of soju glass, the sandy-white of fortune tellers. Roasted potatoes like crumbly eggs, served in sevens. Batons and barricades. Each mobile unit connected to the next, the water cannon. Log-off time. Fake plants and dead saplings. Shame meals. Booby-traps and curfews. Ideal of a dub soundtrack. Hello? What are you doing? He hangs his head, arms outstretched. His companion sleeps next to a small plastic basket containing three coins and one fluttering note. They call this jazz. For once I hear nothing.

City of the big one, the whopper and the raised eyebrow. City of tales so tall they call them riddlescrapers. City of a thousand hits and one junkie’s promise to tell all. City without a story arc. Follish little boys trundling barrels down to the px for spare candy. Two old men fighting in the street with a crowbar next to a construction pit while everyone else just looks on. City of two finger type pads and mouse recalls. Third floor activity hubs. Second floor restaurants catering to the mafia. First floor florists. Streets filled with newspapers telling of the latest academic to be hauled before the prosecution for supporting the non-existent enemy state. City of excruciating silences and barely audible whines. Factory timetables. Hawker routs. City of the tin whistle, the banana peel and the open mouth. Gags that flow like rivers through the food halls. City of girls who hold their hand over their mouth while speaking on mobiles, laughing or both. City of girls in short skirts who hold their handbags behind them as they ascend escalators to deny men upskirt glances. City of gas attack contingency plans involving orange facial hoods and a wan yellow light. City of re-run movies. City of motorcycles and grey steel poles. Backslapping the squat toilets, doing a runner as the kim chi courses through me. Elaborate hoaxes involving chaebol daughters and the sons of former military commanders. All hauled before the prosecution, never to be heard from again. Plum wine in heart-shaped bottles, vitality juices in forbidding metal cans. City of roaring hot plates. Hair dye and tooth bleach. Nature rooms. The rarity of disability access. The sanctity of dynamics. The over-inflation of production targets and the boo-hoo of parliamentary shame. Take what you want, give with a grimace. Too many falsehoods to halve in one day. Typical.