by Ian Martin
I am sentenced to one year in an open prison, on condition that I don’t become disabled.
FRIDAY Brilliant luck. HMP Archer is very middle class, stuffed with distinguished fraudsters, tax-dodgers and insider traders.
Quite a few of us from the epic space industry, too. My cellmate is Gav, a ‘panterior designer’ who’s in for aggravated window dressing. By lunchtime we’ve formed a partnerhip with a view to rethinking the prison and maybe getting some time off our sentences.
One brainstorming session later, we’ve rebranded the whole place as a boutique kibbutz with scope for secure affordable housing, a permanent pop-up, or ‘stay-up’ craft fair and a civil partnership centre.
The governor’s pretty receptive. As he says, in a hypermonetised private prison sector it’s all about unlocking those doors to increased margin through innovation and outpush.
SATURDAY Five-a-side interdisciplinary prison football. Artistic Insularists 4, Professional Claustrophobes 5, after seasonal name-weighting and casual match-fixing.
SUNDAY Horizontal brainwork in the bunk. Am told unofficially I could be out by next spring if I behave myself, do the prison makeover with Gav on what the governor calls ‘a pro bono shareholdico basis’ and stop communicating satirically with the outside world. Fingers crossed.
December 20, 2013
Yesterday’s News Is Tomorrow’s
Emergency Clothing
MONDAY They say that after a few months in prison you have to come out one way or another and here I am, about to rejoin the free world. I’ve been released early from HMP Archer for good behaviour. And by paying a one-off fee under the government’s new Affordable Leniency scheme.
Thank God for the privatisation of everything. The seriousness of my crime – accessory to the murder of an ATOS assessor – diminished dramatically when ATOS announced they were ‘getting out of the disabled benefits game’. This was also good news for my associate Amy Blackwater, the ecomentalist and murderer.
Despite bumping off four bedroom tax inspectors Amy will be released later this year, unrepentant and unrehabilitated. She’s already planning another killing spree when she gets out, starting with private landlords and ending with people who call anything but a journey ‘a journey’.
TUESDAY I am being discharged with the random clutter I went in with. About to bin a copy of a newspaper from December 2013 (‘Good news at last as house prices surge beyond the reach of anyone who actually lives in Britain’) but decide to hang on to it.
For all I know my gaff has been repossessed by auditors. Or squatted by creditors. If I DO end up sleeping on a bench tonight I’m buggered if I’m buying a newspaper.
WEDNESDAY God, it feels like I’ve been banged up for half a century. The world has changed beyond recognition.
Another 65 skyscrapers in London since Christmas! All designed by budget algorithm generators in India, then shat out in situ by Chinese 3-D printers for fictional Russian owners. Soulless, pointless husks of calcified ennui, precisely engineered for a market that requires them only to remain empty and silent. The world of plasmic arts shrugs and having shrugged moves on.
Yes, the world has become busier in the last few months but also spectacularly stupider too. The BBC’s Newsnight had already turned into a parody of itself the last time I looked, but tonight’s timely investigation into the capital’s financial South Sea Bubble plumbed new depths of dumb.
Jeremy Paxman seemed very uncomfortable dressed as a Jolly Jack Tar in the nautically themed studio – ‘Pirates of the Caribbean Tax Havens’. Even more uncomfortable when he had to leave his desk and dance a hornpipe, singing along to a vulgar sea shanty: ‘What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin? What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin? What shall we do with the fucking Gherkin, it’s back on the market …’
There followed several verses of suggestions, including the statutory jokey one about converting it into a huge tower of high-spec, low-rent apartments for key workers.
Memo to Self: dig out proposal for turning the Shard into a giant vertical urban farm.
THURSDAY Whoa. Theatrical agent Victoria Spong has died. I never liked her, to be honest. Someone who WILL miss her is the celebrated architectural dachshund Bauhau. Spong acquired him, then fashioned him into a media personality. I wonder if he’ll now be auctioned off.
FRIDAY So much news to catch up with. I see the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects is in trouble for condemning the sequestration and development of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
I briefly consider applauding this moral stand. Just in time I remember that if I do, I MUST be anti-semitic. Clearly I don’t want to be that, so decide to keep quiet. On reflection, I agree with the RIPBA’s critics – you can’t possibly condemn the Israeli government as long as the administrations of Saudi Arabia and Syria are more horrible.
I’d better shut up about architects working for demented arseholes anywhere at all, just to make sure. Then I worry about how the Twittermind of my subconscious might link the phrases ‘Israeli settlers’ and ‘demented arseholes’. Resolve to stop thinking, in the interests of peace and justice.
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Macerated Relativism 1, Dynamic Nondeterminism 0.
SUNDAY Feels good to be back in the recliner after all those weeks in a prison bed. Although a little lonely, I have to say. I’d got used to the constant banter of my cellmate Gav, the ultra-butch panterior designer.
I realise I’m saying all this out loud to thin air. Sad. Idiot. Maybe I should get a dog …
May 9, 2014
The Emptiness Between All Particles
MONDAY Sketch out a protomeme for Expo Nano, the microbuilding and microdesign fair being held at a mirrored site on the Dark Internet.
Nanotypes are hoping the market improves soon. The average price of a bespoke nano-construction has fallen again, this time by 12 per cent in a year. To be honest, interest in the exciting new frontier territory of microscopic construction has pretty much been shoved aside by the whole 3-D printing business. Expo Nano’s a desultory affair these days. A lot of exhibitors’ avatars look unshaven and seem to be wearing the same outfits as last year.
Well prepare for an micro-earthquake, Expo Nano. Because my latest protomeme is about to bring sexy back to the under-underworld. How? By shifting focus AWAY from nerds in high-tech welding helmets fixing one tiny thing on to another tiny thing and waiting for a Nobel Prize, TOWARDS the exciting new world of nanofracking.
That’s right. I’ve brilliantly combined the traditional world of nanotechnology with the exciting new world of detonating the fuck out of shit that’s buried deep in the natural world. In partnership with my old friend Beansy the nanofuturologist, I have been exploring the possibilities inherent not just in ‘stuff’ but in the ‘absence of stuff’.
Look at overcrowded-yet-empty-at-the-same-time-in-the-expensive-parts London. Nobody really gives a toss about quality architecture, it’s raw space that’s at a premium.
Well here’s a fun fact: matter is not just particles, it’s also the emptiness between. Simply by nanofracking all the spare space from the molecules in a Hammersmith bedsit, the canny nanodeveloper can create (theoretically) enough room to fill the O2.
Watch this expanded space.
TUESDAY Seminar on the Contemporary Lexicon of Epic Space. Lots of thirtysomethings here looking suspiciously like skateboarders.
One of the speakers is a London architect wearing a sort of rubber tube. He gets an appreciative snigger from the audience when talking about building occupants by using the acronym TMTs for ‘trendy media types’, despite demonstrably being one himself.
I resolve to have it out with him at the coffee break but things escalate quickly and I somehow manage to asphyxiate him with his own rubber tube. Oh bollocks, I CAN’T go back to prison. I’ve only just started an anger management course and they’re aggressively strict about refunds.
WEDNESDAY
Overnighter in the cells but my brief, Legal Brian, is upbeat. Apparently everyone hates the metropolitan elite now, including those newspapers responsible for sentencing guidelines.
THURSDAY Marvellous. Case dismissed. Ten minutes in and out. Pop-up magistrates court during the day, really nice Lebanese restaurant in the evening. Guilty of manslaughter, but only in the technical sense. Probation, with time off for the deceased’s rubber tube clothing and generally elite demeanour.
Got a wink off the judge, too. Legal Brian was bang on about my wearing a suit and a Ukip rosette in court.
FRIDAY Lie low like a bungalow.
SATURDAY Fantastic vibe at Crouch End’s World Squalidarity Day.
The Peter Mandelson Memorial Park looks splendid. Lots of local people have turned out in their most striking shabby chic clothes to articulate the plight of the world’s poor. The children look adorable in ‘cast-off’ Euro 2004 T-shirts and ill-fitting camouflage trousers.
An educational favela has been set up at one end of the park, allowing visitors to explore the gritty urban reality of a Rio de Janeiro, or a Tottenham without the guns but very much with the delicious street food. Local actors – one of Crouch End’s largest indigenous groups – are in exquisite favela costumes, interacting with members of the public as ‘misunderstood drug gang members’ and ‘corrupt police’.
There’s a bouncy Greek jail and a collection of Improvised Toilets of Asia, with local actors guiding visitors along the toilet spectrum through the medium of mime.
A Caribbean tin and plywood shanty house is presented as a ‘show home’, with a local actor playing the part of a shanty town estate agent but – very important, this – making the satire unmistakably clear. Throughout the park, casually arranged on the grass, are members of Crouch End’s singer-songwriter community, the area’s second largest social grouping: a fat Woody Guthrie here, a mumsy Pussy Riot there.
The sun sets. Local actors return to houses that have increased in value by two grand during the afternoon, wiser but guiltier.
SUNDAY Abandon recliner. Too much cynical reflux.
May 30, 2014
Fuck Shitter
MONDAY To Seaquest Detention Park, on a PFI stretch of the Lincolnshire coast. It’s the flagship of the new ‘free prison’ fleet, run by secure accommodation provider Capitcha. I’m here to see my old friend, the ecomentalist Amy Blackwater.
Amy’s getting out next month on semi-compassionate grounds. As a wheelchair user she’s more expensive to keep banged up at Her Majesty’s Indifference. The parole people have decided it’s better for everyone if Amy’s sent home, declared fit for work and has her benefits cut. Again.
She seems very cheerful when I meet her in the prison soft drinks bar. She’s been guzzling Virgin Marys and they’ve left a lipsticky smile on her balaclava. I wonder briefly why she’s wearing a headscarf as well. What’s she planning to do when she’s released? She points firmly to the ceiling. ‘That is in the hands of ALLAH!’ The nearby ox-faced teenage security guards move away a little.
TUESDAY Thank God, or Allah, for that. Amy’s new religion is merely a ruse, another way of making herself indigestible. The privatised prison whale does not want a Muslim in a wheelchair roiling around in its guts. It wants to spit her out into the privatised sea of social services as quickly as possible.
Once the guards were out of earshot yesterday, she explained that for the past few months she’s been corresponding with a billionaire anarchist. ‘Calls himself the Angel of Death. Used to be a developer in the 80s. Patron of the arts or some shit. Apparently Prince Charles and that lot stopped him building a load of skyscrapers? Now he’s watching all this bollocks go up in London and he is well bitter. Wants his revenge. Very interested in my past experience with explosives.’
I urge caution. People don’t get out of prison and then just start blowing things up. ‘He’s dropped a mil in my account. Mate, I’m bringing down the SHARD. You in?’ Oh God, I don’t know.
WEDNESDAY The secretary of state for work and pensions wants me to ‘rebadge the nanny state’. I’m wary.
The thing about Shitter is his capricious temperament. To his enemies he is a sneering Victorian melodrama of a man, an insufferable wanker, a sentimental yet spiteful bastard who greatly admires the work of Richard Curtis.
Friends, tenants, staff and employees all tell a very different, corroborated story. They say Shitter’s a compassionate man, that Richard Curtis films make him CRY. Ha ha. Sure. I remember when Shitter pulled the wings off a wayward sparrow during the launch party for his book on Christian morality, The Charitable Mind.
He’s a very quiet man. At meetings you can miss half the stuff he’s mumbling. Or you suddenly realise you haven’t heard him say anything for a while and there he is, hunkered down in a corner, finger to his lips, going ‘shhhh … shhhh …’
Amy must never find out. As well as blowing up the Shard when she gets out she has also sworn to take Shitter’s face off with a strimmer. I don’t want to be collaterally strimmed. I’m not telling her.
THURSDAY Difficult to see what’s left of the ‘nanny state’ TO rebadge. All benefits are now shame-tested. All non-free schoolchildren are demonised. All primary care patients are timewasters. All acute patients are bedblockers. With the help of the newspapers the Coalition’s already recast food banks as political acts of aggression, and the smoking areas outside job centres as terrorist training camps.
My solution: redefine ‘nanny’. Instead of being the sort of nanny who nurtures our most vulnerable people, let it be the other sort of nanny, who’s just died, and we’re selling off her bungalow and big back garden to a developer.
Shitter hits the roof, thinks I’m taking the piss. A row escalates. He says he knows people who could have me ‘roughed up’. I tell him I know someone who could take his face off with a strimmer.
FRIDAY That’s it. Fuck Shitter. And I am SO blowing up the Shard. Amy’s given me some contacts to chase up while she’s in clink. We’re calling ourselves the Space Avengers. As those riot policemen always say: bring it on.
SATURDAY Fifty grand’s appeared in my account, tagged ‘THX-AoD’.
SUNDAY Moment of doubt in the recliner, dispelled by feeling of equilibrium. And a much better balance.
June 13, 2014
The Epic Space Foundation
MONDAY I’ve been commissioned by a spiritual project manager to redesign the mental landscape of Tony Blair.
It needs a total reset. Decide to tackle the overgrown, gloomy ‘Mentalpotamia’ of guilt and regret by ordering a full memory airstrike. It’s not an easy decision, mind-bombing, but look, doing the right thing rarely is.
After the rubble has been cleared, a multivalent plasma barrier will be activated around the conscience, accessed by the owner via a reconstructed Euston Arch guarded by armed clowns, in order to make everything seem ‘less real’.
TUESDAY Idea: create London housing that’s instantly 50 per cent more affordable by doubling the number of inhabitants.
WEDNESDAY Very excited. My plan to restore the legendary Epic Space Foundation has finally won approval from the provisional wing of the Liberal Metropolitan Elite. Alain de Botton and his mates held an extraordinary general meeting last night at Gymkhana and I’ve got the go-ahead as long as I change ‘restore’ to ‘reboot’.
Oh, the Epic Space Foundation. This marvellous and erudite charitable institution, which did so much to keep alive the Festival of Britain in the fortnight after it closed, once dominated the world of architecture like a conversational Skylon of Excellence.
Indeed, many architectural conversationalists cite the absence of the foundation’s guiding spirit as a key factor in the general shitness of buildings since April 27, 1963. That’s when ESF chairman John Betjeman left its Charlotte Street headquarters to have lunch with Philip Larkin and never came back. The world of the built environment has effectively been in hibernation ever since.
I wanted to relaunch the foundatio
n with fireworks, champagne, the lot. Plan A was to persuade the Royal Institute for the Pop-Uption of British Architects to move out of its grand home in Portland Place into something more befitting an admin centre for the processing of subscriptions – business park premises in Droitwich, say – so that the Epic Space Foundation could once again take up its rightful place at the heart of three-dimensionalised British auteurism.
Fat chance. The idea was firmly rejected by the very establishment squares and deadheads who have turned contemporary architecture into nothing more than a styling salon for developers. Curse them. Curse them all.
So I decided the relaunched foundation should ‘do less, but better’. Plan B was a posh tent in Haggerston made from some kind of clever fabric. Just one permanent member of staff but with a huge reach thanks to television’s insatiable appetite for petrified money. Alas, the TV people could not have been less interested if I’d proposed reviving the Monochromatic Architectural Minstrel Show, that infamous Sunday night programme from half a century ago featuring Sir Kenneth Clark waffling on about big churches and country houses in blackface.
Plan C was to ‘do much less but incredibly better’ by setting up a virtual foundation on the internet with podcasts, live-streaming and uploaded images from Britain’s artisans of the transcendental, but bandwidth requirements were too hefty.
Now, the perfect solution. I am officially relaunching the Epic Space Foundation IN THEORY ONLY. Our mission statement: ‘do nothing, be superb’. Here’s to the next half-century!
THURSDAY Off-grid, doing important work for the Epic Space Foundation.
FRIDAY Secret meeting for my latest clandestine project, an association of enthusiasts dedicated to ‘rebalancing’ the London skyline by destroying all buildings taller than the Gherkin.
We’re reporting to Amy Blackwater, the ecomentalist. She’s organising things from prison on behalf of a shadowy billionaire nihilist known only as the Angel of Death. Tonight, we discuss strategies for the Shard. Step One is to evacuate the building obviously, we’re not heartless bastards.