AUCKLAND: UGLY VOODOO BITCH
SAMUEL TE KANI
In Artificial Islands: Adventures in Dominion (2023), critic Owen Hatherley posits modern architecture’s aesthetic hodgepodge as symptomatic of outer space culturally and politically deprioritized for inner. The inner world—the collective and collectively managed psyche—as new, tantalizingly virgin territory (for plunder). The civic pride with which buildings were once imbued was exchanged over time for a different kind of population uniformity. Subjects that only moved through cityscapes on consumerist
rails. Blind to any meaning in their environment except utility and individual gain (like the whole world was one big airport for shoppers in transit). This is offered by Hatherley as an archeological explanation for Auckland’s garish design. It’s indisputable ugliness. A city bearing visual traces of schizophrenic socioeconomic trends in both global and
local polities. Galvanized, as he points out, by the introduction of mindless deregulation via Roger Douglas. ‘Rogernomics’, as the then Labour minister’s neoliberalizing of New Zealand policy was coined, moved the country more ruthlessly towards corporatism (in Hatherley’s opinion) than even Margaret Thatcher did for Britain. Which is an interesting take. If Auckland is for whatever reason ‘illegible’ as a city—in terms of planning and buildings—Hatherley’s implication is that this mirrors the ideological break with social democracy, something which New Zealand had prior been making leaps and bounds in. The stylistic discombobulation of its architecture, then, isn’t so much the push of a single person or persons as it is the unconscious result of similarly confused futurity. An obsessional insistence on the new. A destructive disdain of the past towards ever changing projections of profit, rather than consistent cultivation of agreed upon principles. Consistent instead with neoliberalism’s ravenous
appetite for novelty over the dialectical maturation of a single set of values. Put simpler, it’s an avaricious impatience with the time it takes for things to grow. A loathing of the garden and its seasonally bonded rewards. The mega-speed of the factory and networked supply chains is favoured, voided of niggling humanitarian concerns and other ‘externalities’ (like climate change). The neoliberal disregard of cultural memory (for its slowness) regulated common goods (for their freeness), and ethics (inefficient) expresses itself like a dark enchantment. A voodoo—fostering amnesia as well as uglifying cities, turning functional beauty into precarious eyesores. Defacing Auckland, and New Zealand, and everywhere else. Poisoning the well.
Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (originally serialized between 2001 and 2002) is famous for its body horror but also speaks to the proliferating insanities of voodoo politics (like neoliberalism). Set in the small Japanese village of Kurouzo-Cho and centering on budding teens Kirie Goshima and Shuichi Saito, the manga novel explores the effects of a mysterious virus. Not a conventional pathogen but, like with much late twentieth century Japanese horror, a mind virus. Or, a distortion of Kurouzo-Cho’s collective spirit
so severe it begins to warp physical reality. The origins of the infection are unclear. What is clear is the contaminant’s unambiguous symptom. The spiral. The people in the town are seeing spirals everywhere. A death knell, as perception is transmission. A germ spread through cognition itself. Kirie and Shuichi are our eyes in the ensuing mayhem, a
perspective of youth and relative innocence witnessing the grueling corruption of their home by the spiral menace. Flesh curls. Plants and buildings succumb to compulsions of curvature. Hair funnels into lethal gorgonian nests. The terminally afflicted transform into snails. Their humanity forfeit. Uzumaki operates on several simultaneous levels. There is visceral horror, of course. Initially ambiguous foreboding—not dissimilar from a demon or a ghost—emerges from shadowy gleanings and dark corners, becoming fact. Fascinating then parasitizing
Kurouzo-Cho’s citizens like a jungle predator (or carnivorous fungus). Then there’s social commentary, the many differing ways in which the townspeople respond to the spiral threat. Some embrace it, allowing themselves to be transformed (to their doom). Others are largely ignorant of the changes both in and around them. This is the spiral’s
cunning. Insinuating itself in the existing rhythms of daily life almost seamlessly, exploiting its weakest links to access (colonize) the whole. Arguably, mirroring the ways in which nationalistic ideologies infiltrate unassuming populations, presenting itself as a benign modality, transparent and nourishing as breathed air. Usually with rhetorics of
purity and contamination (even centrist party slogans can be vaguely eugenic). As the spiral blocks all routes in and out of town, Kurouzo-Cho becomes so isolated its people are forced to cannibalize themselves. Like a populist rabble that’s run out of foreign bodies to consume, they devour their own. Uzumaki’s denouement is Lovecraftian—perhaps the only conceivable way Ito could tie up his unruly spiral specter. Once Kurouzo-Cho’s conversion to isolated pocket universe is complete, and its much-changed survivors build a curling labyrinth around Dragonfly Pond—nexus of the phenomenon—Kirie and Shuichi discover the pond is in fact a
threshold. To hell. Or, an abandoned nether-realm of living spiral architecture perhaps millions of years old, sending the lurid intentions of its long-dead builders up to the surface. Like software somebody forgot to delete. Archaeo-futurism, chthonic manipulation, human bodies as satellites for ravenous subterranean (subconscious?) forces. As a maybe-allegory for Japan’s geopolitical history, its oscillating militancy and anxious neuterism, and its ultimate isolationism, Ito’s supernaturally besieged Kurouzo- Cho is persuasively apt. Even more so as a mouthpiece for the cyclical nature of mass psychoses and the inevitability of history repeating. For Kirie and Shuichi soon realize this has happened before, that the spiral curse resurges on a cosmic schedule, and that
Kurouzo-Cho rebuilds each time. Leaving no record for its successors. Who are doomed to ouroboric returning. A ritual immolation in the mouth of madness.
This is not dissimilar from the ways in which humiliated peoples and nations frequently resurge as the aggressor. A schedular phenomenon played out most glaringly in Germany’s humiliation at the end of WWI, before regathering as volk emboldened for world domination only a few decades later. Though Isreal is obviously comprised of more than simply Jewish people, who suffered the worst of Germany’s Id-fueled lust for
power, it’s arguably Abrahamic mythologies driving the state’s practices of apartheid and expansion. A fevered trance, neocolonialism leavened by prophecy and allegedly divine rights. Trying to unbraid the fused influence of exegetical entitlement, ancestral wounds, and corporate puppeteering is perhaps irrelevant when the ambition remains emphatically genocidal (of Palestinians), no matter what the angle. History as an unexamined quantity, content be damned. A voodoo of torrential blood and fire. Would
the spell be broken if the content of the past was properly disentangled from the collective sport of revenge? What exactly is to be done about the political commodity of suffering? The genie is out of the bottle. The spiral is turning.
Comic writer and serious magician Alan Moore has spent years explicating the relationship between voodoo forces (like technology and history) and empire. Never so succinctly (debatably) as in From Hell, considered by many to be an unofficial early opus (despite a horrendous film adaptation which is best avoided). Set in the late nineteenth century the graphic novel tours readers through Victorian London via a case
of royal misdemeanor. Prince Eddy, son of Queen Victoria, secretly sires a royal bastard with shopgirl Annie Crook. After the child’s birth Annie is disappeared into Bedlam and given an experimental procedure (lobotomized), while the child passes into the care of Annie’s parents (as per Moore’s obsessional themes of male degeneracy, the grandfather is a pedophile). But not before being briefly nursed by a kindly but pragmatic
prostitute, Mary Kelly. Afterward Kelly devises a plan with three other Daughters of Joy (the period euphemism for sex workers) to blackmail Mr. Sickert (confidant to the pseudonymous prince) with their knowledge of the child. Who problematizes royal lineage by merely existing. Sickert reluctantly alerts the queen. On whose initiative royal physician William Gull is employed to “take care of it”. Presumably by way of lobotomy
as he did Annie Crook. But William, devout member of the Freemasons, has other plans. Those plans have everything to do with architecture. As a freemason (and natural mystic) Gull is invested in London’s shape as a sigil of imperial objectives. In recruiting hapless chauffeur Netley to aid his silencing of the blackmailers, Gull floridly soliloquizes on his plans. This requires a leisurely tour of London’s proudest sites, its most notable traces of antiquity, lines laid by the Dionysiac cult the masons allege themselves descendent of. Gull explains that steeples are never just steeples, but
obelisks raised in sun worship, charging London and Britain itself with phallic energy. Strengthening its subjugation of the moon and erasure of the ancient Diana cult. Gull’s sermonizing begins on Battle Bridge Road with a lesser-known history of Iceni’s Queen Boadicea, who burned London to the ground for the crime of rape. From which patriarchy sprouted, bent on revenge. Reinvigorating the gendered battle between sun and moon.
“That symbol [the moon] also signifies female power within humanity, enfettered by its ring of stars that are but distant suns and therefore masculine. Symbols have power . . . to deliver half this planet’spopulation into slavery. With symbols did male warlocks conquer women...With symbols man castswoman down, and then with symbols keeps her there”
Queen Victoria’s charge is not so much royal espionage as it is an opportunity for Gull to symbolically continue this work. Finally they enter Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which Gull explains was once a temple dedicated to Diana, before its usurpation by modern sun-god Christ. Here Gull illustrates his design on a map, drawing five points (Cleopatra’s Needle, Battle Bridge, Herne Hill, Hercules Road, Spital Fields) into a pentacle. At these sites Gull will slay and displa the offending whores in alignment with druidic ritualism (“Druids believed locations were empowered by suffering, soaked up despair and terror which reverberated in the soils and stones forevermore”) and antiquity (masonic forebear Hawksmoor’s creed of “Terror and Magnificence”). When Gull later realizes his vision (for the most part), it succeeds him in history like he’d hoped. Misidentifying him
thereafter as Jack the Ripper.
Returning to Hatherley, his charge of Auckland’s urban ugliness (its “illegibility”) is premised on berserker breaks from the past via neoliberalism. That said, Moore’s insight about the architectural stylings of Empire at different epochs shares with Hatherley the view that aesthetic integrity is lost with the changing of the guard. Where Gull bemoans
the dilution of masonic design (with which Auckland is still peppered), Hatherley lambasts the more secular illogic of progress at any cost, undermining the symbolic cohesion cities are tasked with. Where history’s indomitable march diminishes London’s mystical tenets by proxy, its replicas in the colonies are already vulnerable to misinterpretation by factors of distance. An infernal imprint corrupted by scale. For example, Hatherley points out the garish simulation of Pa Homestead, a janky
reproduction of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Osborne House in the Isle of Wight. This he further argues seeds Featurism. A nominal plundering of architectural accents attributed to buildings on which they do not belong (which anyone with eyes could tell you). Like putting gargoyles anywhere but a gothic cathedral. Or (devil’s advocate) lavishing a skyscraper with koru pattern and calling it a whare. Under neoliberalism the scalability of products and services (and ideas) to larger and larger markets is an absolute credo. But here its distorting effect is plain. Plant as many obelisks as you like. But never mind the hope of perfect transmission. They will mean different things in different places. Interesting, then, that CANZUK rears as a right-wing fantasy for conservative Brits. The idea is a post-Brexit revival of the colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand), to replace the inexplicably relinquished economic stabilities of the EU. The frankly untenable proposition would revive those remote fixtures of imperial heritage in the colonies as reclaimed satellites. Beacons of British occupation. A rekindled masonic design. Though unlikely to be given the go ahead, popular interest alone points to colonial voodoo resurging.
Though paranoid, Moore’s masonic conspiracy does point to history as impenitent. A stark layer of (bloody) fact undergirding neoliberalism’s quicksilver movements, and which it frequently harnesses in its ruthless profiteering. A mindless program accidentally tapping into insidious foundations. Secular designs encountering and assimilating masonic strategy. And becoming something worse. This is perhaps the cycle of the sun at war with the moon. Or, like Kurouzo-Cho, the subterranean spiral
emerging from ancient slumber, sating itself on newly secular populations, before retracting into its cave for another thousand years. Like Kurouzo-Cho, the voodoo of inner and outer space converging (manifest spirals) is a cataclysm. One born of fascistic totality. A dream of planetary order and enslavement. We are arguably experiencing such voodoo times now, with neoliberalism like a metaphysical temple erupting all place, all times. emanding tariffs of oil and blood. Reviving old-century ire under new
symbols (though the swastika still slaps, apparently). We’d do well to dismantle that temple before it can have its solstice.