His/Hers/Sub/Burbs

Posted by S A-M on September 5, 2010 · 4 Comments 

Does anyone else feel like they are losing years off their life glazed-over in the isles of Lulu Hypermarket?

I do.

And I think it’s killing me slowly and painfully…with a spanner… in the majlis.

Today I read this and took courage from the saint of suburbia hisself J.G.

“In a crackpot way… I like to be where the battle is joined most fiercely…and a suburb is the real psychic battleground — it’s on the wavefront of the future…

A city like London doesn’t really offer me anything – I’m not interested in it. It’s much too old. Whereas the suburbs are, compartively speaking, new.

In a way they’re more dangerous places – you’re not going to get mugged walking down the street, but somebody might steal your soul.

I mean that literally – your will to live.

Your imagination might be tken from you by some passing merchandising corporation or what have you.”

– Excerpt from 1982 J.G. Ballard interview conducted by A. Juno & Vale

What is Doha but exactly this? Too New, Suburb of the World, Battleground in so many ways, psychic and otherwise.

Ballard should have moved here and he should have lived with me. Together we would have sat on my balcony foiling palm tree fronds one-by-one and breathing in the cement dust over a cold jug of karkadeh.

Filed under Uncategorized