pleasures of the city

King’s Cross, London

Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur

Saritem, Bandung

SHOCK DOCTRINE =

tend to seek a blank state on which to create their ideal free market economies, which inevitably

requires a usually violent destruction of the existing economic order

SHOCK THERAPHY =

a psychiatric technique where electric shocks were applied to mentally ill patients

Tracing the Love Hotel Journey, Shibuya, Tokyo

Unfolded Section, Shibuya Love Hotels

Cross Section of a Typical Love Hotel

Hidden Pleasures in the City, Shibuya, Tokyo

Exploding the City Components

Hidden Pleasures in the City, King’s Cross, London

Hidden Pleasures in the City, Saritem-Sukamanah-Cibadak, Bandung

NINE NOTES ON BOOK COVERS (Orhan Pamuk, Chapter Thity-One, Other

Colors, 1999)

1. If a novelist can finish a book without dreaming of its cover, he is wise, well-rounded, and a fully formed adult, but he’s also lost the innocence that made him a novelist in the first

place.

2. We cannot recall the books we most love without also recalling their covers.

3. We would all like to see more readers buying books for their covers and more critics despising books written with those same readers in mind.

4. Detailed depictions of heroes on book covers insult not just the author’s imagination but also

his readers’.

5. When designers decide that The Red and The Black deserves a red and black jacket, or when

they decorate books entitled Blue House or Château with illustrations of blue houses or

châteaux, they do not leave us thinking they’ve been faithful to text but wondering if they’ve

even read it.

6. If, years after reading a book, we catch a glimpse of its cover, we are returned at once to

that long-ago day when we curled up in a corner with that book to enter the world hidden inside.

7. Successful book covers serve as conduits, spiriting us away from the ordinary world in which we live, ushering us into the world of

book.

8. A bookshop owes its allure not to its books but to the variety of their covers.

9. Book titles are like people’s names: they help us distinguish a book from the million others it resembles. But book covers are like people’s face: either they remind us of a happiness we

once knew or they promise a blissful world we have yet to explore. That is why we gaze at book

covers as passionately as we do at faces.

Values of spirituality (with churches), power (with offices), money (with banks), goods (with department stores) and words (with the 'agora’ -

cafes and walks). Going downtown means encountering social 'truth', taking part in the

sublime richness of 'reality'.

This city cannot be known except through some sort of ethnographic activity: you need to find

your bearings . . . by walking its streets, by looking around you, through habit and

experience: each discovery is both intense and fragile, it cannot be repeated, and only its trace

can be left in our memory: in this sense, visiting a place for the first time is like starting to write

about it: as the address has not been written down, it has to found its own writing.

The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner in an auditory film which halts at his

ears all the alienations of the mother tongue: the regional and social origins of whoever is

speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize.

Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality. The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me – I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning.

Contemporary city life is punctuated with confetti-like events and random situations. From an old tourist nervously wandering around with local pimps in Saritem looking for hookers, to a

group of gangsters walking through a dark tunnel beating up some guy to street vendors selling

cheap smuggled kretek at Pasar Chow Kit, city spectacles and everyday actions are a

fundamental part of society’s construction.