Afterburn

Kowloon Walled City, City of Darkness, Dice City, Vice City. Intermediate space, the space between zones. When I first got into interior design I found some images of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, a warren housing 35,000 residents, completely demolished by 1994. A place built entirely without architects or interior designers. A no-zone. Impudent and free. A rumor. In a few shots I was confirmed in my suspicion that architecture and interiors do not have to be planned to be beautiful. In fact, most interiors are unplanned. We don’t have to listen to designers who implore us to use their services, their products, or to the bureaucracies and administrators who command us to use their electricity, their infrastructure, their zombie shit. We don’t need the USGBC who subjugates human needs in favor of commodifying the idea of “the environment.” We don’t need the NCIDQ passing paper designers into the field. John Pawson doesn’t need the blessing of the Architects Registration Board to call himself an architect. Tadao Ando doesn’t need school.

The greatest threat to architecture and interior design today is the international building code. Designers are hamstrung, unable to work because it’s flat-out illegal. It’s always been true that black markets are the only free markets. Likewise, illegal architecture is the only free architecture. Even in a discipline as benign as interior design you need a chainsaw to cut through all the red tape. The city of Hong Kong was economist Milton Friedman’s example of pure unadulterated capitalism. Kowloon Walled City is the premier example of free architecture.

In William Gibson’s Virtual Light (1993) the author synthesizes the environment of Kowloon Walled City, transferring it to The Bridge in San Francisco where its denizens live outside the normal economy. In the dystopian Cyberpunk future The Bridge is a symbol of wild living physically and psychically suspended between zones. In the 1988 film Bloodsport, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kowloon Walled City is the place you go into and may never come out of. In real life, the city harbored prostitution, gambling, and drugs and for a long time was primarily controlled by The Triads. But it also housed entrepreneurs, miniature factories, barbers, typical families, and the like.

Kowloon Walled City is a physical, structural, example of a type of abstract phenomena that can be applied across a multitude of disciplines from aesthetic philosophy to commerce. In finance, one way of making money is to get between transactions. The distribution of poetics may follow a similar, circuitous path. For poets, the idea of intermediate space is related chiefly through the means of distribution. Getting between the traps. Energy dies when publishers create layers of red tape, and turn the marketing mix into a sanitized “event” remixed by panels of self-appointed experts. To achieve friction-free circulation publishers, writers, and content strategists have to circumvent the monolithic architecture of the distribution system. Poetry needs to be illegal to survive. Poetry wants to flow through the intermediate spaces, the shadows, to tack around the channels of the last idea. Poetry wants to be free.

There’s a sort of moral imperative to re-directing one’s work. Private editions explode the dominant code. The private writer creates a cult-like energy available only to those who truly pay attention (the only payment we can count on). Traditional channels delight in their democratic, perennially available effluence. The private edition succeeds precisely at the point of no return, promoting a poetics of distribution that resides outside the boundaries. Unreachable, unavailable, unconditioned. Out of print. Private editions are the purview of the arbiters, not the washed out text of editors. The logistics of this kind of system is classic, perhaps best represented by the chapbook, but the chapbook in its present state is obsolete, assimilated and institutionalized, and has been for some time. It is bulky, too material, too precious. We need a package that dematerializes before our very eyes. This doesn’t mean digital, already an old-fashioned term, but vaporous.

Having once mastered a content delivery system that traffics in the intermediate zone the work, the text, its world evaporates, like coming into contact with the ultimate. As we approach disintermediation we get only after taste. When it’s done we know that we have done it. We have experienced the text and it is sweeter with the knowledge that we cannot materially possess it. Poetry must become unavailable in order to become affective. Published poems die on the page. They are not the thing. The work must become aerosolized, spreading, and viral. A mist that washes over the reader infecting her with its drone. We need the thing that gets us to the thing. In a publishing climate where creative work is simply “content” or “text” writers may find a more poignant means of free expression through cutting edge modes of distribution.