The sounds of Venice

Today The Leeds Arcades Projects are hopelessly nostalgic for Venice and cannot stop thinking about the sounds of the city. What are the sounds of Venice? The sound of gently lapping water on stone and wood, and the sound of footsteps and voices echoing on brick and stone.

Venice: Pure City

Addingham

Since I have moved to the countryside
where I encounter wood, stone and dead creatures
I feel
somehow better

Taiwan

How to explain the feeling of arriving in Taiwan? How to explain the better me that emerges? How to explain the multitude of luxuries? The overstaffing of department stores, with young, uniformed men hired just to bow as you leave. The cleanliness, efficiency, gentleness, seamless technology, everywhere.
As I begin to bow and smile, as people bow and smile at me, I start to feel more tender, considerate, gentle, compassionate, refined. Better. A person more in tune with the world.

Lonely Planet Taiwan (Country Guide)http://9im6jjs425770o267f7u4gprd0l4tbn2-a-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/ifr?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwms.assoc-amazon.com%2FGoogleGadgets%2Famzn_monetize.xml&container=blogger&view=editor-sidebar&lang=en&country=GB&v=ac6ecfe2e768ddd3&libs=core%3Adynamic-height%3Agoogle.blog%3Agoogle.blog.editor%3Alocked-domain%3Arpc%3Asetprefs%3Asettitle%3Aviews&parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2F&mid=1293552146295#

San Michele

The sick or disadvantaged of Venice were marginalised by isolation on various surrounding islands; so, the leprous were kept on San Lazzaro dei Armani, lunatics sent to San Servolo, Jews isolated on the Giudecca and the dead on San Michele.

It is this last island which fascinates me most, the impenetrable walled cemetery, a fearsome fortress risen from the sea, all walls and cypresses.

There is something about San Michele which seems impregnable, indeed for a long time I thought it was impossible to visit unless you were dead or visiting the dead.

Returning from Murano by watertaxi we made to stop at San Michele, this was the first time I had realised that as a tourist the island could be visited. Amy and I resolved to get off, but it seems that something about the island remains impregnable to me, as the taxi was so crowded and the sea so choppy, that disembarking on the island was almost impossible. We tried to squeeze through but the fierce sea had made the crowded passengers fractious, and as more people squeezed onto the boat, we realized we wouldn't make it through. So our taxi rocked and struggled past the high walls and cypresses of the island of the dead, back to the mainland, with us a little afraid for our own lives, fearing we might be soon returning to San Michele as residents rather than visitors.


Venice Revealed

Venice

The Leeds Arcades Project is clearly obsessed by Venice, but why? What is it about Venice that so captures the imagination? Everything slows down, the gaze becomes somehow sharper, feelings more refined. Walls and windows slip by, churches and well heads come into view, the light as you walk along the shore is somehow brighter than in the normal world.



Venice: Pure City

Evil Pub Quiz - Warning, quite rude

In its spare time The Leeds Arcades Project writes horribly offensive pub quizes. Here's our latest (Beware, some of the language may cause offense):


Evil Quiz

1. What do 9 out of 10 people enjoy – Gang rape

2. Which of the following is not a real Sheila-Na-Gig – 3 pics from churches, 1 from porn

3. 4 Shits, what have we been eating – match the meal to the shit

4. Complete the following literary quote by Nabokov:
“Everytime I saw her face I thought I would….
A) Have a fucking wank
B) Die of tenderness
C) Pull out my cock and ask her what she thinks of that, eh?
D) Think, Damn, I’m old enough to be her grandfather

5. Real blogs dedicated to weird stuff

6. Dangerous chemicals

7. Not-the-Jerry-Springer-show round
a) I cut off my manhood – to deter an unwanted male admirer, “sick to God-darn death of being stalked” cut it off w shears and flushed it.
b) I married a horse – after a bad date shagged his horse “it was so good I almost passed out”. He kisses horse during the show.
c) I’m happy I cut off my legs – also a transexual
d) My brother lets me pimp his wife to pay the rent – lets him live in his trailer, brother even has to pay to have sex w own wife. “If he don’t let me im gonna kung-fu him – and I aint even paying for no doctor bill”

8. Which of the following is a real Elton John album?
a) Thanks wind, you totally raped my hair
b) The horrible, horrible asshole
c) Follow the yellow brick road
d) A load of fucking shit that foreigners seem to really like

9. Recent Anti-Japanese protests in China (Oct 2010).
“Take a Japanese Wife, then string her up and beat her everyday”

10. What percentage of Tea Party supporters believe that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” – 3/4

11. Photo of human skin lampshade, What is this?

12. How many of the current “we’re all in it together” Cabinet are millionaires?
18 out of 23

13. Which of the following is not a real atrocity perpetrated by the Japanese on the Chinese during WW2?
Women naked and tied with legs apart and left by the side of the road for a quick rape
Beheading competitions between two sword wielding generals, with victims lined the length of an entire road
Etc

14. Is it true or false that Mr Davis can make women fall in love with him just by staring at them for 30 seconds.
Answer: Lets find out, Miss, could you come over here

16. Berlusconi has been in trouble for having bunga-bunga parties with 17 year olds, but what exactly is a bunga-bunga party?
a) Brutal an*l gang r*pe
b) An erotic game involving the simultaneous use of a banana and a baseball bat
c) A sexual role-play involving a ‘leader’ and several naked girls
d) A type of orgy invented by Colonel Gaddafi

17. We have conducted an exhaustive survey of porn on the internet to try to ascertain which category of porn is the most popular. Which is it?
a) An*l
b) G*ngbang
c) Mature
d) R*pe
e) Bunga-bunga

18. Prince Charles recently wrote a book of new age philosophy laying out his ideas for a more caring, progressive society, in tune with nature, but is it true or false that the f*cking toe-rag has someone who holds his c*ck for him when he pisses

19. What is the only known cure for hiccups?
a) Water, upside down, all that stuff
b) A finger up the bottom
c)

NCC - 101- 2

So, I went up to the Command Pod to see the Captain for our big meeting. Sure enough, energy vampire that she is, she sucked the enthusiasm and motivation out of me instantly. She really did want to have it all out with me, so there we are in that cramped little pod from which she commands the ship, cramped together. For some reason she's sitting there with her legs spread really wide. Anyway, she's been told by the Cape that the crew are non-too-happy with the course she's plotted and she's really wanting to have it all out. I stall, saying I need to think about my response and change the subject to discuss a few technical problems I've noticed with the navigational software.
So anyway, in the course of our conversation she keeps trying to bring the conversation back round to my doubts about her leadership, informing me that she's been very upset about things. She starts to cry on a number of occasions and i have to comfort her.
Once again she criticises the way I run the bar, I think she's worried about the gang who hang out in there, little realising that a lot of the new staff who came on-board over the summer don't come into the bar because of her drunken behaviour over the summer.
Anyway, I manage to get out of there without too much stress, but feel completely drained and demotivated. How the hell does she do that? She literally sucks the joy out of you.

Marrying Amy. Pt.3

Part 3 of the comedic story of an English guy trying to sort out marrying a Taiwanese girl. A true account of marriage and colliding cultures.

I had fallen in love with a Taiwanese girl (Amy Hsu) and we had decided to get married. Clearly, for her parents, this would be a big deal (they had been initially opposed to the idea of their daughter going out with an older, English, none-Christian). I decided that I should do things properly and ask her father for her hand in marriage. We went over to Taiwan for a few weeks, specifically for this reason.

Having plucked up the courage to ask her father for her hand on a couple of occasions, events had conspired to foul up my plans. And so with the end of the trip approaching I was starting to feel the pressure.

The night before we were to travel back home, Amy’s Dad wanted to take us out to a concert in the Sun Yat-Sen memorial hall. Brilliant, I thought, it’s a lovely building and it’ll be nice to see the concert hall. Hopefully, afterwards I'll get a chance to get Dad on his own and have a man-to-man chat.
The concert was by some American Born Chinese (ABC’s) Christians and was a concert of Christian songs (remember that Amy’s parents are strong Christians). I’m not Christian at all, but hey, I like Hymns and singing, so this is going to be fine. It was really crowded, Wow, I think, this should be good.
Within 2 minutes of it starting I realise I’m in an Evangelical Praise Concert; everyone stood up, with their hands in the air, shouting out Hallelujah, as the band whip the crowd up into a frenzy of Jesus praise.
Not really a joiner-inner, I found various ways of trying to trick myself into enjoying the concert:
I said to myself, “Ah, they all like it, just join in a bit, enjoy it, it doesn’t matter”;
I told myself, “you’re going to ask her father for her hand later, make him happy, look as if you are enjoying yourself”;
I used the obvious one and told myself “I’m a spy, I’m only here to observe. I’m getting the inside skinny on this movement. I’m only joining in so they don’t realise I’m spying on them”.
Anyway, I was getting through it and even making eye contact with Amy’s Dad from time to time as I clapped along to songs about how great a lamb Jesus was.
And then one of the ABC’s started to tell a story about how she had cured a disabled African guy. She told of how Jesus told her to go to Africa to cure the sick and how, whilst there, a man who had been born with a twisted, crippled arm, asked for her help. She laid her hands on him, and Jesus told her to pull. She pulled, but his arm only went half way. He looked at her, afraid and shocked; she looked back at him, also shocked. She said to God “Come on god, don’t joke around with me, if you are going to let me heal this man, let me heal him totally, not half heal him” and she laughed as she told this story,
And the ABCs laughed too,
and the audience laughed too,
and Amy's Mum laughed,
and Amy's Dad laughed.
I did not laugh.
Sure enough she pulled the African man’s arm again and he was fully cured. His arm, which had never worked, was now fully healed. “Africa is a land of Miracles” she told us.
Much as I had wanted to join in, wanted to go with the flow, this story was just too much for me, I didn’t join in anymore, I didn’t smile at Dad anymore, I didn’t clap along to anymore songs, and I didn’t ask for his daughters hand in marriage. I was a fool and let this story cloud my mind; I let my perfect opportunity slide past.
Ah, but the story does not end there, there were still a few hours the next day before we had to go……there was still time...…To be continued……

Marrying Amy. Part 2

Part 2 of the comedic story of an English guy trying to sort out marrying a Taiwanese girl. A true account of marriage and colliding cultures.

I had fallen in love with a Taiwanese girl (Amy Hsu) and we had decided to get married. Clearly, for her parents, this would be a big deal (they had been initially opposed to the idea of their daughter going out with an older, English, none-Christian). I decided that I should do things properly and ask her father for her hand in marriage. We went over to Taiwan for a few weeks, specifically so I could ask for her hand in marriage.

Having plucked up the courage to ask her father for her hand yesterday, events conspired to foul up my plans, but the very next day I woke up with new found resolve.

After a busy day sightseeing we all had dinner together and the two girls went to another room to talk. Seeing my opportunity to get Dad alone and have a man to man chat with him, I went to the toilet for a quick wee (I didn't want to get into a big marriage conversation needing to urinate), and to psyche myself up a bit. I burst out of that toilet as ready to ask for a girls hand in marriage, as any man has ever been.
I marched back into the living room, (where Dad had been looking through his albums when I left), and sat myself down on the sofa. Just as I was about to speak, Amy's Dad, (having found the album he was looking for and put it onto the machine), spoke; "This is the music from my Mother-in- Law's funeral."
"Oh, really, that's nice. Er I want to..."
"She asked for three pieces to be played at her funeral and this one was her favourite."
"Right"
We sit in silence, listening to the music.
I think to myself, "There's no way I can ask for a girls hand whilst listening to her Grandma's funeral music, that's gotta be bad luck in Taiwanese culture, hell, that’s bad luck in Michael Allhouse culture.”
We sit for a little while longer, just listening to the music.
"Very beautiful" I say.
Tomorrow…….tomorrow…….. I'll do it tomorrow……........
To be continued

Marrying Amy. Part 1

Marrying Amy
Episode 1: My first attempt to ask
her father for his daughter’s hand in
marriage...
I had fallen in love with a Taiwanese girl
(Amy Hsu) and we had decided to get
married. Clearly, for her parents, this
would be a big deal (they had been initially
opposed to the idea of their daughter
going out with an older, English, non-
Christian). I decided that I should do things
properly and ask her father for her hand
in marriage. We went over to Taiwan for
a few weeks, specifically so I could ask for
her hand in marriage.
Things all went very well, with me
managing to charm them/pull the wool
over their eyes, depending on your point
of view. Things had gone so well in fact that
they let it be known that they approved of
me as a boyfriend. By the second week I
resolved that as soon as I got Amy’s father
alone I would ask him for his daughters
hand in marriage.
Opportunities were not forthcoming and
with only 3 days of the holiday left I had
still not found the right occasion. And then
we all climbed a nearby mountain together.
The four of us got up early and went up the
mountain before the sun had a chance to
The comedic story of an English guy trying to sort out marrying a Taiwanese girl. A
true account of marriage and colliding cultures.
get too hot. Now, I sweat rather easily
and even though it was only 9am,
already the temperature was starting
to get quite high.
We got half-way up the mountain and
the girls wanted to turn back as we
were all starting to sweat profusely, but
I could see the top from where we were
and couldn’t resist but try to climb all
the way. Amy’s father agreed to go with
me (I think he was worried I’d get lost)
so us two boys set off together, in what
was becoming intense heat.
As we were climbing up, it occurred to
me that this was finally an opportunity
to get him on his own and have a proper
man-to-man chat. I thought, I’ll wait till
we get to the top, it’ll be great. It will
be a great view and a really significant
and romantic place to make such a big
gesture. As we climbed it was getting
really hot and we were both sweating
a lot.
Finally, we reached the top and wiped
the sweat from our brows. We both
took a moment to look around and
enjoy the remarkable view. I thought
to myself, this is it, this is the perfect
moment: “Mr Hsu, can I ask you
something?” he turned to look at me
and as he was looking at me, his eyes
moved down to my crotch area. I
also looked down to see what he was
looking at; I had sweated so much that
my beige shorts were drenched with
sweat in a big p**s stain pattern. I was
soaking wet between the legs and the
beige had changed to a dark brown
in what really looked like pant p**s.
Amy’s father looked up at my face and
said, “It is very hot I think”.
“Err, yeah”.
“You wanted to say something?”
I think to myself, can I ask him for his
daughters hand in marriage when I’m
standing here having virtually p****d
my pants?
“Err, nothing, I just wanted to say
thanks for bringing me here, the view
is amazing”.
Tomorrow, I think; I’ll do it
tomorrow…………to be continued

Benjamin Fashionwear

Fabulous new Walter Benjamin fashionwear
The sweatshirt reads "Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" - Benjamin.

Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard, famous for philosophy
thought that to be truly free
one had to be consumed with worry.
I think I might agree.

NCC-101

Today the Captain came down to see me after her shore leave. Jesus, I forgot what an energy vampire she is; 2 minutes in her company and you feel totally demoralised. She was trying to get me on my own again so she can have it all out with me. Since there's always so many customers in here she cant get started on me. So, first she tries to get me to come to the command pod straight away; I make up an excure, then its later this cycle; another excuse. Tomorrow? No, but she pins me down to next week.
I hear from Webb, who was called in today that there was shouting, anger, tears, the whole thing. Webb ran out of there. Campbell changed all the E5 developments Webb had been working on. Its difficult to know how much of it is vindictiveness and how much incompetance.
I decided to go over and see the Chief to express my fears; I even doubt whether this new course she plotted isnt heading for disaster. Anyway the Chief listens and promises to call up Canaveral; make sure they're aware of whats going on.
Sometimes I think Burt is right and there really is a secret mission we all know nothing about, it just seems to be a secret mission which is leading us all to our doom.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

We are in the Dales on a coach trip. We pass many beautiful waterfalls, I am stunned.
One particular waterfall on a steep hill is awe inspiring. Our coach breaks down on this hill and we all have to get out. It is soon repaired and we leave two girls behind, who just didnt make it back to the coach in time.
Ah, we are in an Eastern European country, approaching the capital. The ancient gates to this city are stunning. They are huge and covered in gold and delicate carvings. The detail is incredible. Loads of leaves and tiny doorways. Beautiful.

More Stuff

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.-John Ruskin

The Complete Works Of John Ruskin - John Ruskin

Berlin Childhood

“We can never entirely recover what has been forgotten. And this is perhaps a good thing. The shock of repossession would be so devastating that we would immediately cease to understand our longing. But we do understand it; and the more deeply what has been forgotten lies buried within us, the better we understand this longing. Just as the lost word that was on the tip of our tongue would have triggered flights of eloquence worthy of Demosthenes, so what is forgotten seems to us laden with all the lived life it promises us. It may be that what makes the forgotten so weighty and so pregnant is nothing but the trace of misplaced habits in which we could no longer find ourselves. Perhaps the mingling of the forgotten with the dust of our vanished dwellings is the secret of its survival.

“However that may be, everyone has encountered certain things which occasioned more lasting habits that other things. Through them, each person developed those capabilities which helped to determine the course of his life. And because- so far as my own life is concerned- it was reading and writing that were decisive, none of the things that surrounded me in my early years arouses greater longing than the reading box.

“It contained, on little tablets, the various letters of the alphabet inscribed in cursive, which made them seem younger and more virginal than they would have been in roman style. Those slender figures reposed on their slanting bed, each one perfect, and were unified in their succession through the rule of their order- the word- to which they were wedded like nuns. I marveled at the sight of so much modesty allied to so much splendor. It was a state of grace. Yet my right hand, which sought obediently to reproduce this word, could never find the way. It had to remain on the outside, like a gatekeeper whose job was to admit only the elect. Hence, its commerce with the letters was full of renunciation. The longing which the reading box arouses in me proves how thoroughly bound up it was with my childhood. Indeed, what I seek in it is just that: my entire childhood, as concentrated in the movement (Griff) by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words. My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to talk. But that doesn’t help. I now know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk.”

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900.
Berlin Childhood around 1900Berlin Childhood around 1900Berlin Childhood around 1900

Kafka

There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure
Walter Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka” from Illuminations

From the Benjamin archive

Article on Benjamin

A very interesting article on Benjamin

Gathering Storm

Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist—Walter Benjamin remains difficult to classify, but his mystique only continues to grow

By David Kaufmann




In the last five years, more than 300 books and articles on Walter Benjamin have appeared in English alone. Not bad for a man who was virtually forgotten when he committed suicide in 1941.

It’s always been hard to pin Benjamin down. Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist, deconstructive spirit—he has been many things to many people. It is equally hard to describe what he did, in part because Americans don’t really make intellectuals like him. Benjamin, whose most important work was written in Berlin during the ’20s and then in Paris during the ’30s, wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one. To use a quaint expression, he was a man of letters. Even that does not do him justice.

Uwe Steiner’s new book on Benjamin—which attempts to put Benjamin in his historical place—doesn’t really do him justice either. Steiner traces Benjamin’s mature work to the thinker’s early days as a radical student before the First World War, when Nietzsche was all the rage. Fair enough. Steiner also has a larger goal: He wants us to stop trying to bend Benjamin to our intellectual will—be it Marxist, deconstructive, or religious. A laudable goal but also slightly perverse, because Benjamin had no trouble trying on others’ thoughts to see if they fit. Even worse, Steiner’s approach scants Benjamin’s intellectual and emotional allure.

Benjamin’s remarkable endurance derives as much from his style as from his ideas. Or rather, his brilliant, damnably esoteric critique of capitalist culture is one with the pathos and indirectness of his prose. His sentences suggest. They imply. At their best, they radiate. Hence the remarkable bursts of scholarship his work has seen over the last few decades. He reminds people of what they might think.

His most famous set piece comes from his last work, a series of aphorisms called “On the Concept of History.” Written in the short period before he killed himself while trying to flee from the Nazis, this paragraph gains some of its considerable melancholy from retrospect, from the fact that it has been taken as his last will and testament:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

A beautiful piece of writing that gets an extra kick from its pessimistic counter-intuitive punch line. Progress doesn’t progress in the slightest. It is a steady march through disaster. And there is nothing, it seems, we can do about it.

Bleak stuff. But Benjamin’s ability to arrest you with the solidity of an abstraction can tempt you away from the thin thread of his argument. On its own, this paragraph presents us with a picture of fallen and unredeemable history. In the context of the other paragraphs of the essay in which it appears, we can see that the Angel of History does not have the last word. History, Benjamin maintains, is permanently, if elusively, susceptible to revolutionary change.

Benjamin claimed that his work was saturated with theology, even—or rather especially—when it appears to be at its most secular. In the piece that contains the Angel, the revolution fulfills a theological mandate by making “whole what has been smashed.” Benjamin imagines that it will enact tikkun olam in a very literal sense. Benjamin’s colleague, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, once accused him of believing all too squarely in the Last Judgment. Though Benjamin tried to recast his thought into more acceptably materialist terms, Horkheimer had a point. Benjamin might have talked about redemption as the historical fulfillment of squandered hopes, but at heart he was always listening for the final trump. He was waiting for the glorious resurrection of the dead.

Benjamin’s thought was essentially religious. It clung to the twin promises of redemption and transcendence. The man worked from the clearly Jewish intuition that justice cannot be derived from the world as it is. Justice is precisely that small break from nature instituted by the Law. Our problem is not that nature is sinful. Our problem lies with the fact that on its own, nature just isn’t enough. It needs to be transcended, if only just a bit. As his friend T. W. Adorno was fond of reminding us, the Talmud says that the redeemed world will be like this one, but a little different. And that tiny shift means everything.

But what happens when we, as the children of modernity, have lost the Law? That is where Benjamin’s messianic politics slip in. Gershom Scholem, the magisterial historian of Kabbalah, always maintained that Benjamin was a Jewish thinker and not really a Marxist. For his part, Benjamin argued that he pursued a single goal—the radical transformation of the world, a utopian strike against suffering. His was not the tikkun olam of good deeds and incremental improvements, but of bold risks and decisive moves.

Sure, sure, there is a great deal of Romanticism in all this (as Steiner would be the first to point out) and a sentimentalizing anarchism that speaks of another era. Even so, Benjamin proposes a heresy we might want to consider: redemption without faith. He refuses to give up the rigors and promises of theology for a more amenable, even amiable ethical Judaism. He therefore cuts a different path for the post-religious. Just as Scholem, however unwittingly, presents us with a Kabbalah without halakhah, so Benjamin quite wittingly addresses a theology without God. An intractable contradiction? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it is a historical conundrum that we have yet to overcome.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

I am on a Northern England beach, in a seaside town, Amy and a long-haired man I do not know appear before me. They want something from me which I know they will use to kill another, innocent man. They have the ability to teleport. I run but I cannot escape them.

Young kids, urban types are talking about sex. They are all saying that it doesn’t matter if you have a baby. It seems that they all have one. One girl admits that she has no children and everyone seems to be amazed. Everyone laughs at one guy who admits he still lives at home. I am the host.

In the ULC they are executing students who cannot answer three test questions correctly. They are only doing it as an example to encourage the others to try harder. I stand and watch the testing and the executions. I seem to be unmoved by it all. It is taking place in Room 101 and is being filmed. I think to myself “this is really not going to help Room 101’s usage figures”.

I am on the train to Skipton with Matthew and Siti; we are going to visit the castle. It is snowing heavily. There are announcements of delays and cancellations. We assume the snow is causing the problems but as people around us receive mobile phone calls it becomes apparent that this is something more. Crossed? Outbreak? Zombies?

In an altered Bradford the market is outdoors. I am buying pakora and discuss with the shop owner how we could take over the house next door to mine and open a curry house. The police arrive. I am parked illegally so have to run off to my car to move it.

It is the future and I am in a simusleep machine. I wake up from a lifetimes dream; this life, my normal life; it has all been a dream. The world I wake up in is similar to this world except the women are all dressed in sexy pvc-like futuristic clothes. I am sent on a mission by the authorities and given a female handler.

Amy and I are watching TV, flicking around the channels; we seem to have seen everything. We come across a film where a group of people are trapped in a ruined castle and are pursued by two killers. We start to watch it, and somehow get drawn into the movie so that we are the characters in the film. We run around the castle desperately trying to find our way out. We head to a corner, where a door should be, but yes, I have seen this film before, there is no door here, it’s a trap. I start to remember more about the plot of the film; some of are going to die before we get out of here.

I am a rugby player in the future. The game has changed and now you have to get the ball halfway across the city whilst the opposite team try to do the opposite. The man running with the ball is tackled and as he goes down, he passes the ball to me. You are allowed to use the crowd for cover and even hide if you want to but there is a time limit. I shake off my pursuers by ducking into a large crowd. I hide out in a tower block which can be sealed from the inside. I seal it and they begin to surround the building. Shit, they know I’m in here.

Some old document I own turns out to be something a number of criminal gangs want. I am to hand it over at a certain time in return for the release of a friend they are holding hostage. The meeting place is my home. The friend is in on it with the criminal gang, somehow I know this so I don’t turn up at the rendezvous, I just run and keep running until I have left my old life behind.

I am working in a hospital during the Christmas holidays. I am walking down a corridor with some colleagues when I run into Anne who asks me to card-swipe a door for me as she has lost her card (again). She asks in such an abrasive way that it seems like a command and all my colleagues seem alarmed, some even ask me if I am ok afterwards.

I am in some abandoned future city, on a high plateau, like somewhere the Incas would live. The buildings are huge and crystalline; made up of huge crystals joined together, except they are all smashed and fallen. I come across one which is unspoilt. The narrator informs us that this is where XX lives, who is the head of security. XX saw that the state was crumbling and realised that humans could not properly enforce the law so he replaced the police with robots. I think: “this is starting to sound a little familiar”. The robots enforced the law, XX’s law, and pretty soon most people were either dead or had fled to the woods nearby. We see some robot police patrol past where I lay (they look like robot stormtroopers from Star Wars).

I am on a barge with a load of posh people (am I in Downton Abbey?). They are all dressed in Edwardian clothing and are discussing a forthcoming marriage. The conversation turns to someone who is not with us and the scandal of their wedding. Suddenly someone points to the sky where we see a German bomber swooping down on us. It drops a bouncing bomb on us, which bounces just before us, and just after. As it flies over me it is so close I can see every mark on its metal casing. A powerful woman takes control of the situation, grabbing the barge controls and starting to steer us in the opposite direction. I ask her “will it be back?”. “Oh yes”, and she points to the sky where I see the plane turning round for another salvo.

In the woods near my parents’ house (between the tennis club and the park) there are wild people living. They are white haired and naked. They look quite terrifying, and I’m told are cannibals. I jog too near them one day and am grabbed and pulled into the woods. They are actually very friendly, and it’s all a big misunderstanding. I arrange for them to be interviewed on TV. They play the whole thing for laughs and become a new media sensation.

In zombie infected Venice I end up at a crossroads, with Zombies coming at me from all sides. I manage to climb up the side of a high building and climb inn through a window. Inside I find Martin, who offers me dinner. He takes me to his lair which seems to be underground. He has a very nice set up.

Antique shops

Collectors are people with tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of book!
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”