Image by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez.

The influence of BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh is spreading far and wide, so much so he is now featuring in a personality profile (disguised as a walking tour) in the Los Angeles Times in which the colour of his hair is discussed! Luckily, the writer, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, leaves space for Geoff’s thoughts, which as always are impressively concise, intelligent and jargon-free:

And that means he thinks of L.A. as a historical place?

“Yes! Not in the human history sense but in the sheer sense of Earth time. And as dumb as that may sound, I feel that you can actually see it — you can see it in the species of trees and in the natural landscape. In the Grove, for example, where the shops have methane meters, because gas is leaking out of the tar deposits.”

We walk back toward his apartment, along surprisingly crowded sidewalks and past a hulking SUV with a license plate reading “00 MPG.” We pause at the intersection of Washington and Keystone. At the northeast corner sits a collection of building-sized satellite dishes, crammed like huge barnacles on a small pier. They are responsible, Manaugh says, for sending most of Sony’s programming to China. He turns in the direction of his apartment building.

“They send the signals basically in this direction, so the whole time we’ve been living here there’s been this constant stream of movies and TV shows going above our heads as we sleep, across the Pacific.”

Also, check out Geoff’s recent BLDGBLOG post on ‘Climate Change Escapism’, which looks at artists’ renditions of a drowned Spain exposed to climate change, as commissioned by Greenpeace. Far from seeing these as the warning they are intended to be, Geoff sees a Ballardian, transcendental beauty:

What we see is a world transformed, made unearthly, like something from a J.G. Ballard novel. Where there once was a pristine beach, the sea has returned, giving us modern ruins: sandbars in the lobbies of hotels, tide pools accumulating on the boardwalks of towns you didn’t like in the first place. What appear to be coral reefs are the underwater remains of marinas. What look like atolls are lost subdivisions, or banks at the bottom of the sea.

[Geoff includes a quote from Ballard's The Drowned World here]

Lush, science fictional, Romantic: apparently this is the future of climate change.

My point in saying all this is simply that these images don’t shock; they’re more like posters for tomorrow’s specialty tourism firms.

Fabulous stuff. We need Geoff back here on Ballardian.com to deliver more of these funhouse-mirror-image world views. Especially with killer blows like this:

Only half-jokingly, I might even suggest that the real way to scare people about climate change – assuming that fear is the correct tactic to use here – is not through referring to landscape at all, but through threats involving 1) sex and 2) children.

All that pollution… so much carbon in the atmosphere… dirty water, social unrest, lack of food…

Well, your prostate will swell with metal and your kids will all drown.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh

Britain’s J.G. Ballard once wrote a book called Hello America. Now, if pressed to decode the value-weighted “gist” of that book without having read it, you might find all the data you need in the previous sentence. The two cited countries bear a grammatic-critical relationship, with Britain as the subject, America the direct object, and any number of transitive verbs not very nice indeed. Would it surprise you, for example, to hear that the Ballardian U.S. has become a continental sewage dump which 22nd-century Europeans set out to explore like hazmatted Everest junkies? Or that the Manhattan skyline – let us tread carefully here – has been blotted by a “200-storey OPEC Tower which dominate[s] Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca”? The arid West gets the elemental treatment (always a J.G. hobbyhorse), with Las Vegas turned into a half-submerged Atlantis of wading fluorescent kitsch, “a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America.” (Yeah, I lost a bundle last time I was there, too.)
…
Up for grabs, however, in the What-The-Fuck department is Ballard’s latest book — of quotations. Yes, quotations, which some twit called John Strausbaugh at the New York Times is good enough to review this week.

Why Ballard above, say, Asimov or Heinlein or LeGuin, for a Book of Quotations is unclear except to Mr. Strausbaugh.