-Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism
I can no longer describe the droning songs as performed by the machines deep within the black bowels of the cities. I cannot accurately convey the process in which these gleaming threads bind me to the city’s ribcage spandrels, their domes sprawled out like menisci on the surface of cosmic oceans.
An infinite array of cities swim through a sea of stars, megalopoli pass overhead adorned in streets and inhabitants and sputtering lights that inevitably blink into darkness. Klaxon horns scream with the enormous shriek of rusting metal, groan with the voice of split concrete. Ophanim wheels grind, propel existence into infinity.
My thoughts still drift to that day when the passage of time was still comprehensible. I remember the Alexei building pulling at our car like a maelstrom swallowing a boat. I remember clots of pedestrians wandering the sidewalk, aimless, heat damaged brains animating bodies like automatons. Even then they were alien to me, a multi-celled thing fidgeting on the surface of a Neubauer slide as I pretended my camera was a microscope.
I remember how it came to be that my soul was subsumed by architectural integration.
It was an unbearably hot summer day. Julia was driving. I saw something duck into an alley off of San Pedro Street. Of course it was just an emaciated dog with a disorder that made its skin appear wrinkled and shiny like a black plastic bag.
“We still shooting the haunted warehouse?” Julia sounded lethargic. The inflection in her voice made me yawn.
“It’s not haunted. Ghosts are just how a city dreams about what it used to be."
“It’s too fucking hot to get all metaphysical, sweetheart.”
I laughed. “Of course we’re goin’. Long as you got someone meeting us there, right?”
“Promised us the grand tour.” Julia had stumbled across the Alexei building while collecting research material for our latest documentary Landscape of Open Eyes. A dream come true.
Alexei hadn’t been a particularly prolific architect; he’d only crafted a handful of privately funded projects back in the mid 50s. His claims that his designs were drawn from dreams as well as his openly practicing a hodgepodge of occult ideologies branded him enfant terrible in the world of architecture. The stigma was understandable given his predilection for ignoring client’s requests and adorning ambries with goat-headed cherubs or lunettes with ornate foliage and variations of Priapus, each progressively more lascivious. His mysterious disappearance in ‘68 and demolition of most of his works by the late 70s only exacerbated his reputation as a decadent architect and controversial artist.
I found it hard to believe there were undocumented examples of his craft tucked away in the heart of L.A., moldering into the compost heap of history. Every building he’d been associated with was tainted with a degenerate mystique, occupied by the ghosts of subversion and secrecy. This one had somehow escaped any scrutiny. Alexei’s architecture was perfect fodder for Landscape’.
Filmmaking was Julia’s calling, but architecture had always been my passion. In our college days the two of us would go on for hours about architecture and the theurgical expressions manifested in the world’s structures. Initially we both romanticized what we were going to accomplish once we’d graduated and collaborated on various projects. We imbibed as many drugs we could afford on our limited budget, focusing on psychotropics which we saw as particularly effective in inducing altered states of awareness as a means to explore outsider art. We dabbled in mysticism, built increasingly convoluted Gysin machines, hallucinated while staring at prints of Karl Junker’s murals in hopes his muse would touch us.
Our first film collaboration was Thicket of New Veins. In Thicket’ we made the case that psychogeography had failed to enact any appreciable change in architecture. Footage of my vandalizing the Antilia building as a critique of wealth inequality and a nod to Chtcheglov’s plot to destroy the Eiffel Tower got my visa to India revoked. Dissecting plastinated corpses to debunk Vitruvius’ claim the human body was the epitome of architectural insight invited the grumblings of a criminal investigation. Thicket’ had gained quite the cult following.
But our work in progress was different. In Landscape’ we proposed that architecture was a brain template, cities neurons in the caudate. If one were to accept that sentience was predicated on matter, and cities were some of the most complicated structures ever built, emergent properties were the inevitable consequence. Aqueducts, avenues, sewers and axons; dendrite slopes, every street a glial cell. Infrastructure was just another ghost swarming with parasitic denizens, humanity a pack of animals dancing on the head of a flèche in the dreams of cities.
YHWH may have offered up redemption through Jesus, but the demiurgical whim that sparked all of creation did so through the architecture of the physical universe.
The car’s a/c wasn’t strong enough to combat the heat. Sleep pulled at me insistently. A klaxon’s scream reverberated in my skull, damaged stereocilia made my eardrum throb. I’d suffered chronic ear problems since I was a child but the intensity of the pain was debilitating. I glanced out the car window. A massive face crept up an abandoned building half a block away.
When I removed my sunglasses the face became a heap of soiled cardboard boxes and battered shopping carts strewn from an open door onto the sidewalk.
But I recognized it from my dreams.
I often dreamt of alien lands, obelisks wrapped in parasitic vines, foliage leeching minerals from the stone; glass and resin buildings shaped into spirals of filigree; mile-high mounds of compacted soil, crumbling surfaces pocked with networks of tunnels. I’d catch furtive glimpses of unusual folk, presumably masked, peeking from strangely configured clerestory windows or behind columns sculpted from enormous vertebrae.
I never forgot those faces.
When I was a teenager I feared these dreams were a symptom of mental illness, but I eventually accepted the visions as the alchemy of my subconscious at play. Just another source of creativity.
I compiled volumes of notes in my secret book, covered the pages with poems and illustrations reminiscent of A.G. Rizzoli’s art, though I could truthfully only give vague descriptions of my dream palaces. All too often I had to fall back on ambiguous observations like cyclopean masonry vibrating, the architecture tasted like perfume, or hyperboloid ceilings with infinite expansion.
The places I visited were overwhelmingly intricate and filled me with a kind of transcendental awe. As such my book was far more than a journal- it was a reminder of the various landscapes I’d explored and an attempt to capture a hint of what I’d experienced in those ineffable realms.
The car’s monotonous whine colluded with the heat and my fatigue to keep snatching minutes away. I winced in pain. The klaxon horn’s wail filled my head again. A thin shirtless man stood on the sidewalk urinating into a beer bottle. Julia maintained a stoic mask as she drove.
I thought we were in the Central Industrial area but I couldn’t be sure. The street was dominated by rows of corrugated metal warehouses, the pavement strewn with burst trash bags and discarded clothing. A woman pounded her palm against the car as we drove by, her face contorted with rage. Everything felt wrong—I knew the homeless weren’t feral animals squatting in waste, I was certain the city hadn’t always been so tainted or misaligned. Exhaustion whipped up my anxiety.
We turned onto a block where the street signs were so encrusted with filth I couldn’t read the names. “Any chance I could get some caffeine? I’m fadin’ fast.”
“Sure thing, princess.” Julia muttered.
She parked next to the only convenience store we’d come across in the neighborhood. A few men across the street swapped cigarettes. I casually nodded at them. They didn’t respond.
“Where are we?”
Julia shielded her eyes from the sun. “Skid row.”
“Yeah, I know. But how close are we to the Alexei place? I’ve never seen this part of the city before.”
“Not even in your dreams?”
Of course Julia meant it as a cynical joke about urban blight. I’d never mentioned my dreams to her before much less my dream book. I trusted her implicitly. Julia reminded me of who I used to be before the therapy and drugs and pressures from working on Landscape’ dominated everything, before my life began to fade like chalk sidewalk art after thousands of feet had scuffed it away.
I checked my phone’s map to see where we were but it loaded something that looked like a stain gasping for air. The street signs were covered in plastic trash bags duct taped to hold them in place. “You notice the signs?”
Julia stared down the block at something I couldn’t see. She tapped her temple. “Sacred geometry Carla. Cities can mess with your head.”
The sunlight left a grimy film on my skin. I realized I hadn’t seen any traffic for awhile. Not even any parked vehicles.
“I’m goin’ in. What you want?” Julia asked.
I told her. The store’s windows were covered from top to bottom in yellowing posters advertising cigarettes and foreign beers in a script I didn’t recognize. Several minutes passed. I debated following Julia inside to escape the sun.
A face floated down the street. A yellow clump in the sunlight, paper-thin expression kicked up by a slight wind that did nothing to alleviate the heat. The face fluttered closer.
I knew this thing, I’d seen it before. I wanted to run but felt ridiculous even contemplating the reality of any of this.
Two more floating heads joined the first, ochre colored and wrinkled as if mummified. Que diablos esta pasando aqui? A glob of sweat dripped from my eyebrow, stinging my left eye.
I laughed. The first face was just an old newspaper drifting aimlessly, its companion’s grocery bags, expanding and deflating as a gust nudged them along.
When Julia returned with the drinks I didn’t tell her what I’d seen. I was soaked in sweat, skin tight as if sun burnt. I guzzled the iced coffee. As we drove away Julia had to quickly swerve around a derelict poking around in the gutter. If she’d noticed his skin was wrinkled and bone white as a trash can liner she didn’t mention it. I closed my eyes. Too fucking hot. Hallucinations from lack of sleep.
Julia drove a few more miles before pulling over near the curb. She popped a piece of nicotine gum into her mouth. “There she is in all her glory.”
I was surprised to see that the Alexei building was just another corrugated metal warehouse surrounded by drab buildings, sheet metal peeling off in jagged layers. I paused, an overwhelming wave of nostalgia flowing through me as if I’d visited this place long ago. I took a few shots of the exterior as Julia gathered some film equipment.
“C’mon, look at it from this angle.” I followed Julia to the corner of the warehouse.
From this vantage point I could see the tented roof and ornamental mascarons on the cornice like the faces of the dead crawling through the structure itself. I was reminded of buildings I’d seen in my dreams though this wasn’t too unusual as Alexei’s works were often milling around in my head. I took several more shots.
“Where’s the guy we’re supposed to meet?” I asked.
“About that…” Julia looked guilty.
“You’re kidding me.” I wasn’t angry, Julia was notorious for little surprises like this.
“Property owner said the place is condemned or too dangerous or whatever for anyone to enter. Said if he let us in he’d be fined by the city or some bullshit.” She waved her hand in the air as if fanning away the inconsequential details.
We already had plenty of footage for our film, mostly of the Bradbury Building and the L.A. Public Library with its mystical sphinxes and The Star of Ishtar, all under a pyramid roof topped with a serpent entwined hand bearing a torch—Luciferianism at its finest. But I was disappointed. This Alexei find would have expanded our work from the pedestrian to avant-garde.
“It’s great and all from the outside but the inside has gotta be….” I trailed off.
“Agreed. We’re screwed if we can’t get the ok to film inside. But has that ever stopped us before?” Julia had a crazy grin on her face.
“Hell no.”
“Then let’s do this.” Julia was a juvenile delinquent trapped in the body of a 28-year old artist. She hadn’t changed much since we were kids.
We walked around the building. I was surprised to see there were no homeless people around. It was as if a city block radius around the place exuded a no-trespassing atmosphere.
“Found it!” Julia shouted.
She pointed out a rusty sliding shutter. Oddly enough it was the only surface free of any graffiti. There was no lock on the outside. Julia pulled on it but it wouldn’t budge so the two of us grabbed the handle and worked together. Something snapped and it slid up.
The interior was even hotter and smelled like an abandoned abattoir, ripe with traces of slaughter. We stepped in and Julia pulled the shutter closed behind us. A grimy window allowed meager light to intrude. Julia’s face was radiant in the dark.
“Ok lady. Ready for the grand tour?” Julia giggled in an uncharacteristically girlish manner.
I detected the faint sound of singing far off in the distance.
We checked the nearest doors but they were all locked. We explored a side hallway that ended abruptly, a pile of rusty equipment blocking the way. We backtracked and followed the main corridor which led us into a small dim room. A tall stack of wooden pallets lay rotting in the corner. Here the odor of dried offal was masked by a musky incense reminiscent of Mass. We stood before a massive metal sliding door that reached the ceiling high above. The handles were strapped by thick chains threaded through fist-sized holes plugged up with a leathery material.
I put my hand on the door and felt a faint vibration as if there was some kind of activity inside. When I placed my head up against the corroded metal it was too thick to hear anything distinct. I was crestfallen. The place seemed to be nothing more interesting than a dingy abandoned warehouse.
I cranked my camera’s ISO as high as it could go and took some pictures but soon gave up. There was nothing here that attested to Alexei’s touch.
“Nowhere else left to go.” Julia said.
“What about up there.” I pointed to a wide lintel that ran the length of the room and ended at an Oeil-de-boeuf window above the imposing doors. “If one of us can get up they’d be able to crawl to the window and see what’s on the other side.”
We set our camera equipment out of harm’s way and dragged the decaying pallets closer to the wall near the window. In doing so we uncovered a large opening in the concrete behind them. A warm current pushed the sound of singing and the odor of greasy incense out of the gaping hole.
“You hear that?” I started filming in hopes of recording the sound. When I played it back there was nothing but white noise.
We moved the rest of the pallets and fully exposed the tunnel. It was a few feet wide and roughly waist high. A scattering of masonry powdered the floor. It looked like the passage connected to the room beyond the doors or at the very least ran next to it.
“I’m not turning back.” I looked to Julia.
“Down the rabbit hole?” She flashed her tomboyish grin, her pupils as big as lens caps.
I turned my camera’s flash on and took a few pictures of the tunnel to get a better idea of what was inside. We huddled around the image, the stark light exposing the crannies and fissures running through the concrete. I couldn’t tell how far back the hole went. It extended into blackness.
We crawled on hands and knees side by side. There wasn’t enough room for the film equipment so we each only carried a camera. About ten feet in the passage took a sharp right towards the room beyond the doors. I could see needles of dirty light poking through a grate not too far ahead.
The sing-song dirge grew louder.
We pressed up against the dead end, the gaps in the grate wide enough for us to see what was in the room. It was difficult to gauge just how large the area was for the shadows grew deeper the further t
he walls progressed and there weren’t enough candles to illuminate the entire space. At least thirty people kneeled in the center, chanting something that sounded vaguely Gregorian if not for an undertone of gasping. I was shocked to see they all wore torn yellow raincoats and plastic trash bags over their heads like a parody of a mantilla.
“What the fuck?” I was immediately embarrassed; the whole display had a solemn pious air and I felt as if I’d just pissed in the baptismal font and dropped the baby. I was lucky that we were too far away for any of the worshipers to have seen or heard me.
Julia sounded giddy even while whispering. “You getting all this?” I gave a dismissive nod and continued to film the bag-heads. I tilted my camera to the ceiling where scant illumination filtered through the pigeon shit stained windows. I turned my camera to the architecture itself and gasped.
There were a few Alexei flourishes here and there but I thought the interior was more reminiscent of Piranesi’s Carceri prints. Strange walkways that led nowhere swayed above, corroded cables and pulleys dangled from the darkness with unknown purpose- rusted metal staircases, rotting wooden ladders trailing off into nothingness. My heart pounded. I felt slightly drunk. The building stirred up something ominous inside me like silt disturbed at the bottom of a deep lake.
One of the bag-head’s accessories of rags and fat plastic grocery bags seemed on the verge of bursting, transubstantiation in an L.A. warehouse. I recorded the woman then tapped my LCD screen in annoyance. The video played back a blurry 20-seconds of a sepia smudge, movement twitching in the center.
“Did the owner mention anything about renting the building out?” I spoke quietly but so emphatically it came out as a hiss.
“Sacred geometry Carla.” Julia’s teeth were bright in the gloom.
I knew we should’ve just left right then but there was a certain elegance in the sheer weirdness of the situation combined with the thrill of being part of an experience I’d never imagined—not even in one of my most outré performance pieces. Julia leaned in close to my infected ear and whispered thank you.
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 5