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Johannes Knesl
090217, 031819, 031919
Bombay Beach ( - t h e m o v i e)
Draft.

And so, acclaimed “Bombay Beach“ starts, and ends, with this seminal sentence: “It takes a whole
community to raise a child”; so said the old man who survives his helicoptered stay in the ICA - and so also
said L. Kahn: “It takes a City to find out who you want to BE…”
There is all-around this fascination with apocalyptic images; we have always had it, we always stare at the
victims of catastrophes and it’s always been more than Schadenfreude: It is a death wish in us that consumer
“culture” busily displaces into all our virtual deaths on the screen. The movie-maker zeroes in on all the
politically correct empathic tropes we need to feed on to feel better: Here are the exiles from the
consumption society, making a living in a concentration camp fenced by a desert of sands and a desert of
water - Biblical undertones. And, this (literally) dead Body of water washes up only dead fish on its
infertile shore. And oh yes, Thank God some of them could make it, make it out of there - on the NFL
scholarship… For so helpfully, this adventure wants to be a story of redemption, it focuses in on these
rickety rooms where people try to hide from the merciless sands, winds, suns - just to avoid getting crushed
by the thunderous impact of that space there - and of that time there that are caught dead in circles, always
pushed up against a sea that’s not a sea, that is but a hypertrophic lake of poison left behind by an engineer’s
mistake, and the frames have us crouching always under a lead sky that sits down on us and on everything
and spreads out to choke the horizon in every direction, we are pinned down between the stare of choppy
waves that pitch themselves at us and choppy dunes where detritus lies in waiting from all sides. So happily,
this mini(docu?)drama lets us in on goofy efforts of - select) - personages, gives us the privilege to
empathize with - or actually more “on” - the people we can here redeem - for our sakes, it lets us find
shelter in these makeshift motel rooms that are parked in derelict bungalows and trailers, in the bars, and so
ever again, when dusk softens the wounds that are “the environment” here, the bitter-sweet of redemption in
dance and hugs.

Well then, well, this should occasion us to reflect - on two things:

First, whence this penchant we have developed for the apocalyptic? And apotropaic? Or maybe
apotropaic just on the surface, and underneath a species-deep fascination that feeds our desire to be rid
forever of Our suffering, so to die if that is what it takes, and well, for this whole world to die, and finally be
rid of it - but secretly hang on as “I” that enjoys its extinction. Why that, because we cannot stand for one
more spoonful of what feels wrong, neither the wrongs dealt us, nor the ones we are dealing out, that deep-
down discomfort and unease we are force-fed in our network existence, anywhere and anytime, minute by
minute, and year after year, those harms that we keep at a distance by our empathy, the slights we just pass
along without bothering... Reality-TV “documentaries” betray an apathy-drenched fascination with our own
death, replaced by the apocalypse of the other, they divulge an insane appetite to watch the death of this race
on the earth, taking it All down to hell, all included. Who could in all earnest exclude herself from this
trope? Please tell me of one more do-good thirty- or forty-something and i will scream. We are all caught
up in this collective vortex of guilt - while Trump, feeling it darkly, is squinting at the (real) apocalypse; for
for him - as for us - the images and signs, simulation as the mode of postmodern being “here and now”,
have become first reality. Neither the US nor North Korea can keep going round on their old rounds.

And this for second: Could it have dawned on us that Bombay Beach actually is also, and already,
everywhere here in NYC, and has been since F. Olmsted first cleaned out and up to give “us” Central Park
for social reconciliation. And, thanks to ever rising ground rents and the Real Estate “industry”, Bombay
Beach remains hidden behind upper and lower middle class facades, and is being ever more efficiently
dispersed - no longer to the peripheries since the ever-dwindling holdouts of the real middle class are still
there to paying their taxes. Bombay Beach the Image, that is another storyline for the networks and for the
in-demand streamers. The “real” story is not another one, is what cannot be coined into story: Bombay
Beach - the whole shebang, the death wish secretly shared between the urban middle class and the precariat
of the 21st, our reservoirs of empathy, our never-exhausted self-pity, our lasting despair, our plethora of
gestures intended to redeem ourselves in/as some commonality that we cast in an image of redeemed
“community”, all these are right here, in the URBAN OCEAN of the profit-raking matrix that Is Midtown
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Manhattan. This not a metaphor but open eyes, open heart, direct in touch with the urban bodies that are
rising there.

Bombay Beach is also Manhattan Beach, it is also Manhattan, NYC: Between, under, over, and
deep inside these stalacmites and stalactites, there is a sea that is just as alien, untouchable, hostile, and
poisoned as Bombay’s Salton Sea. This polluting/polluted sea is that of ALL, that of Capital’s “goods” that
employ human carriers to communicate amongst themselves, to yield profitable progeny for their numbers
that live virtually treasured away in the banks’ server farms but live really in how they are conducting the
minds of our bodies. Inside expensively dressed-up spaces, throughout those ground-rent multiplier
structures, there is only the barest of re-engineered materiel just enough to simulate a life, outside there are
the encrustations left by this sea of objects that Capital churns out and keeps running – “people” included.
Massively glass, these walls’ transparency actually installs an undetectable and incurable blindness, these
building bodies are ruining, and are ruined, they become impenetrable screens that float the sealed cubicles
that keep the bees in - and anyway all real walls have long been exploded to make way for the glassy
surfaces of our screens that set up our world all across the scales of it, from the smart phone in pocket to the
monitor to the view of the neighborhood to this region in the world… - these are our walls, here everything is
coated by its images, and these images no longer depict nor do they describe let alone discuss or argue: They
simulate and dissimulate – themselves and us. The screenshots, no longer scenes, that line this our labyrinth
of surficial surrounds without flesh, they are about as real, as bodily, as the images that flit across the blogs
on our phones. What is left of real life that is - just as it is on Bombay Beach: Warriors beating the retreat,
seeking refuge in at the lowest level of “community” - and are we, the ones of NYC, or Berlin, or.., are we
really better off than the flocks at Bombay Beach, if we were to go without the help extended by on-demand
TV, help in getting ourselves adjusted for living in/as simulations?

What of an architecture that understands itself as urban spatiality? The skyscrapers stand, studded
and shrouded, production of luxury - could G. Semper have had any inkling about how his intuition og
comparing our bio-social bodies to the bodies architectural would turn out, so innocently originating as the
first weaving worn on the body? These Gestalten in their towering/towered gesturality are grandiosely
hollow but nevertheless impenetrable, they have their hold on us, they nudge us to join in their trip, the last
hurrah of an ever calculating global Capitalism, now going non-stop cradle-to-cradle - never lose the faith.
And, dear Architects and clients, be sure that the “higher” the design, the more it shows: The smell these
ever more cleverly refashioned tropes that promise the happiness of more power to those who succeed, this
smell never ever will leave our nostrils - even if success comes down to bare and barely still comfortable
survival y the skin of the teeth. This entire City feels like a sound stage for a panoply of reality TV, and also
the last corner lunch place at the corner, featured in the series, will soon be replaced by a chain with its
designed “feel” - and that feel will make also it a set for the next new reality TV , for “me” and “you”, the
me and you series. We have lost touch, literally, it’s gotten away from us, and so now we act like children:
We can’t have it, we can’t take it, so push it down and throw it out, knock it down, that uncanny :”real”, keep
it at a distance, see it rotting in the urban gutter on the screen. Admit that there is pleasure in killing what
you can’t endure inside yourself. Anything out there, it will do for us to be able to project onto all that’s
underneath and glacially builds up to an ocean inside, project our death wish. Wish it of course, especially
on the poorest, those that cannot hit back because they are invisibly out of work or almost equally invisible
as just barely still at work. And also for us privileged there surfaces this nagging feeling we cannot allow to
take hold: Are we truly usefully working - whatever - or even living? Is there something about the City,
this City, that might help us discern ? When all the City is of
One design, of one Midas throw, there is only generality in how we can engage with the world; there must be
untold instances in the City of direct and intensive involvement between real bodies - ours, and all other
kinds of body - so that we may regain a sense of self as making a life with(in) others, yes, literally In others,
all others, and as other making their lives (with)in us. This gleaming streamlining of all the spaces in NYC
that is accomplished in image in/as which the things and bodies simulate themselves and one another - so as
the better to offer themselves to capital as the tracks that will further accelerate its flows to return with
growth profits, this leaves no hooks for real initiative, for taking real risk: You fit in to get the next job, you
feel badly inside, but you just love America or just get out of here and go back to wherever you crawled out
from under. Manhattan is Bombay Beach and Bombay Beach is Manhattan, this is the global City’s inner
landscape, and that's why we fall for viewing premiated dramas that simulate the authenticity that
documentaries claim to possess, eroded sign posts that point nowhere but keep us moored in an imaginary
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that passes for documentary because it allows our personal desert finally to recognize itself in the desert that
is the buildings of the postmodern cyber-city.

Continue:
There is a sea we are no longer able to sail on, even the global rich of this world, we all have become
capsuled submarines whose life support systems are failing and we had better develop gills: That sea is the
virtuality of global capital that no longer just coats but now pervades all that once we thought solid, that now
turns everything, everything that is body, into the sign/image of itself. Capital is the lust – oscillating with
the angst of not being any-thing substantial, any-thing at all - that is its drive, in us, to liquidate all that still
is body and bodies, and so to let the flows of signifying value become life itself; the god that had promised
to overripe Rome of the east: “In hoc signo vinces”, that god is here to stay, worse, that erstwhile
commander now is not simply in but is “us” - us truly. Also this restaurant will be gone tomorrow, morphed
into the place of business of another globalizing chain. In this unwholesome Urban Sea we have only
storefronts left - also the interiors are but layered screens that puff out a halo of space, there are no more
facades since each and all instances of hypertrophic gesturality are nano-thin, and even, and especially, the
skyscrapers will go down, amortized, is it 25 years now? Our fellowship as urban bodies we no longer even
feel because it is their tacit auto-cyberneticism that keeps going, avoiding to bump into one another, stoically
building defensive mini-privacy while stacked in the subway car that is filled with the talk of phone screens.

NYC once had a certain feel, the feel of a rough and ready community forged from the sense of sitting in the
same boat - more or less anyway. We are in the same boat all right but in a very different sense: Even if
and we are performing well enough as consumers in the department stores and boutiques of the world, we are
nevertheless thrown back our own solitudes, left to prove that “we” are still here by working to obtain the
right threads, to cloak our lost-along-the -way emptiness with all the layered items that will project “us” as
the “right” walking storefront. The urban spatiality here is this sea without any shore, no this side and no
other side, the sea as land that does not offer anything to come to rest on, anything to endure with, anything
to draw faith from - or, therefore, to give to. This sea runs through any place, any -thing, it is not just “in”, it
is the architectural bodies of Manhattan who have become virtual (dis)simulators of a “way of life”, the sea
is not just in-between these buildings, but it is the “all” of these urban bodies that are alive in how their
outlines intersect, in streets, lobbies, cubicles, trains, as each one desperately is fighting to become a “space”
for itself in how it interacts within the sea of all the other Four-D outlines that no longer can establish “real”
sites for a concrete life. The desk, no longer individually assigned, turns into the bare adumbration of what
had been a small architectural body, and so it loses itself, goes on and away, into the corridor, the elevator,
the street, floats across what had been district, and ends, or rather doesn’t, “regioning” (– pace, dear M.
Heidegger.) It can no longer become a part body of all the other bodies, since both it and the others are mere
schemata, ghosts formed in the sea, how could it gather in all the histories that still are alive there - taking it
all in - in giving itself away to all the other urban bodies – who each used to breathe half-way between their
own way and the other’s. The breathing is the sea’s, only the sea’s. No surprise that also the manager’s
corner office des no better, another make-shift shelter, no fortified protection against the rabid exploitation of
all the bodies, of everything as resource for getting productive flow, and of detritus tomorrow that will go
cradle-to-cradle, hurray. And, making it feel more cozy by “soft” urban design, and sidewalk cafes, and
vest-pocket parks, and “guerrilla” urban design, and dressing up the old industrial river fronts as the new
amenities, that is a little like wearing sunglasses and straw hats at Bombay Beach, Salton Sea. One thing that
ever uglier populistic outbreaks – now becoming more evenly distributed - remind us of is that the current
global capital regime is not only disastrous: It is literally murderous, And the high-design neighborhoods of
Midtown where everything shines as a token of and for, a self-anointed higher and benign power, where
nothing can be really touched or held, or just happened upon as an “itself”, all that is our Bombay Beach.
Neither here nor in the Central Valley, there can be escape: The dystopia that is rich Midtown, that is the sea
that needs to be navigated by an architectural bodies that give, and demand, real respect and build an in-
between all bodies there where they can raise their own claims to live - with(in) us - as freely as we all can
together-and-separately.

In these Manhattans, these Bombay Beaches, as well as in the ex-urban metropolis, we are see something
like S. Serlio on steroids: He once set the course for classical – and modern -architecture by making the
Roman theater the paradigm for all future architecture to speak to us, around us and inside of us. In our post-
modern 21st, all things, all bodies, are reduced to less than Serlio’s message-bearing surfaces, they are
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shadows that (dis)simulate the flesh and density of bodies. Any spatial body now Is but te outline of a
module that is fitted to chime in on a global multilevel stage set that is no longer even designed to leave the
stage machinery in the dark but which makes it inaccessible precisely in letting it be ubiquitous, around
everywhere and any-time. (We, the audience, are glad to oblige and to collude, who wants to look all the way
to the bottom of the sea?) Even what we are supposed to take a stand on, what old Serlio presumed would
hold as common ground of meaning in-between the signs and images that appear on the palace facade and
the faces of a more or less public audience, this ground is gelatinous flow and all the floors of Manhattan are
just outlines traced on shifting sand streams that will hold up what’s left of our bodies only insofar as these
bodies go along with the new common, a dream that has turned hallucination, half “wet”, half nightmarish
drop.

At the turning point into the post-human there are no more referentials to be found behind the surfaces
because all surfaces have become screens. This precisely is the real uncanny that we yearn to obscure and
bury in the ubiquitous chatter - of the sea, touch-up is happening everywhere to make up for touching/being
touched, and to substitute for “reality” we have the quasi-presence – faking and faked - of us ourselves as
the outlines of our bodies who person, and are personed, as the agents that dwell in the hell - worthy of
Dante - of having to keep shopping for the “right” life style. In this post-theatrical game there is no opposing
other side, this hallucinatory world-scape simply bypasses any uncomfortably close thrust of something like
reality. These games are the glue that melds all surfaces into a hyper-delirious whole that makes its own
hyper-reality by setting itself apart from the concrete real, from what is all-that-is-unacceptably-other, there
is no outside-other, there is totality - outside, inside, all the same. It is this unholy game that pulls in all of
us, to work in great obsession, as masking/masked figures that caulk the leakages that would let seep in the
real world. No different in our work spaces, just that there the "mission" fuels an augmented-reality that sets
up the “right” way of life - we are pluralist ecologists, aren’t we. The architectural bodies in the “office”,
seemingly away from the scenarios for and of consumption, have finally, become the “medium that is the
message” and so still point the way to consuming “well.” This message itself must not, cannot say anything,
for it has nothing concrete to point to, to “utter”, to get out, r to take in, meaning is a viscous circular flow,
the message transports a self-imposed thought-police, and even more importantly, feeling-police. Ah, the
Baroque to which all this goes back: It could only afford distributed samples of such meaning-emitting and
-absorbing environmental surfaces that were designed to hold in, to possess, the ideally “good” (and
powerful) by keeping out of the picture the undesirable rest of the real. And there, in the Baroque, the
forcing-house of such intensive feelings held in will erupt in those excessively torsional and explosive extra-
jections of bodily tensions that beomce the dispersive sculpture of a world. But those were the surfaces of
bodies, footed in concreteness; we however, have managed to turn the bodies into flows and have disersed
this pall into the City across the globe, and so we, caught-up - dying/living - in all that is all (dis)simulative
semblances, for us it feels OK to - almost really - feel good, or does it?

running in place on the water

desert has no mercy
kids throwing things, rocks,
in defence against the desertification, a small village intimacy
Slab City
harmonica playing
a gentle sway together in embrace under cloudy sky ducking all over
drinking in the bar
prostrate after fight, youths looking after him
wind blowing over shrubby dunes, no protection , wind everywhere
a school better than LA
people melting inside home garbage, kids neglect, explosives
boy wants to be a girl in pink hair
Slab City misfits of the world
telegraph lines
urban dancing the ruins
fireworks
taking medicines, tons of them for the little kid
coming out at dusk - when the surroundings are softly veiled
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the nearly dead are airlifted by helicopter
three dogs on rooftops
rejected by military
it takes THE whole community to raise a child