Oxford Road Regeneration

The regeneration of the Oxford Road roadside architecture via construction sponsored by Americans is a modern day retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Or is it? Facsimile mall fronts boast a potential future of the BBC car park, the cornerhouse and the over-street covered arcade, a third quarter perspective three dimensional building plans are juxtaposed with photographs of people laughing together. South Oxford road as a mindscape, a lived out dream for the Yuppy flying north for the winter.

“This £300m scheme will bring business into the area. There’s a mile long stretch from the universities to Whitworth park that is an underdeveloped retail zone, offering a –3% drop to the cities potential gold reserves. There’ll be gyms and a nando’s and cat themed bakeries and a Boots. All of it made of glass and steel done in the style of Joseph Paxton. But smart tech enabled. Pedestrians can choose to have their favourite music play as they walk in order to give a televisual sense of scope in their lives, remembering years as a montage accompanied by Florence And The Machine or Kitchen Jumper. Instead of the selfie they’ll be the actualfie, people will actually see other people with a hologram shone under their face, makeup made of light. Driverless cars will potter along the smart road on duvet wheels, it’s occupants talking to artificial intelligences through their glasses about gopro pro-sport statistics.” Said Alphonse Masters, lead designer on the project. He was giving a press conference in front of the cornerhouse, addressing a crowd of ten.
“This is our heritage!” someone shouted, thin body tucked deep into a waterproof jacket. He had that hair.
“The visual concept of Manchester is unimportant. London has Big Ben, New York has the Statue of Liberty, Manchester has The Stone Roses. And rain. Sometimes it might feel like the world is ending, and that’s because it is. Constantly ending and beginning, a reality shaped onion with as many layers as moments in time constantly growing into infinite. There is the potential that we can extend human lifespans far beyond our current frame of mortality. Five or ten times a lifetime today. What would one do after experiencing everything, becoming a master at every subject, to have done everything? Perhaps mutate into a piece of intelligent art positioned in the wilderness, thinking thoughts for eternity. We have several such pieces being commissioned already, conceptual art pieces in which a consciousness could exist in post-biology. The Venus De Milo could have a supercomputer fitted that predicts weather patterns. Every work in the Tate could be animated by holograms and answer questions from the visitors.” said Alphonse.
“What is the point in all this.” Somebody else called out.
“I…It’s the gateway to the knowledge capital.
Improved public community zone realms
Leisure Strategy, including 1000 new jobs.” He said, tanning in adolescent rage. A bolt of lightning zipped through the air and into his eye. On an MRI machine you would see his body turn into light. Around the corner turns a Finglands bus, the last artifact of the 20th century drives away towards Rusholme never to be seen again.

This place of opportunity

and enterprise, of love and

laughter, of culture and

community, of knowledge

and invention.

This place.

This powerful partnership.

This theatre of ambition.

OKStupid: The World Of Online Dating Cracked Open Like An Egg

I approach the bar with some trepidation; it has been years since I have been on a date. Due to a recent string of mysterious events I ended up on a semi-blind date with somebody I had met on the internet. The world of online dating wasn't new to me; I had used it before to help crack the case of the mysterious OKCupid Killer, although this time I wasn't seeing it through the objective lens of a criminal profiler but of the sort of embarrassed, sort of curious, sort of desperate subjective lens of a single male living in the city.

With my legs freshly shaved and the new clothes I was wearing brushing against my body like the wings of a moth, I felt like a new person. Not just new; different. I was a strong, independent man with my own life. As I pushed open the doors of the bar I decided that whatever was to happen on this date, it didn't change that fact. It was just a bit of fun, right? On the other hand I could be walking into destiny; to meet the future mother of my ten or so children who would cradle my dying body in a lethal skiing accident. I saw her waiting at the bar. She was a lot shorter than her profile said she was. As I neared I began to smell the furniture polish that would continue to dominate the olfactory senses for the rest of the night.
"Hello." I said, leaning my head slightly as I appeared into her view. She turned to me and smiled.
"Hi." she said. We introduced ourselves. She offered to buy me a drink, but I declined. We went and sat by a table by the window and began to talk, though within five minutes our conversation was drowned out by nineties RnB. After a strained conversation she suggested we go to another bar down the street, a bit quieter.
"So, what do you do then?" I asked her eventually.
"I'm between jobs at the moment, heh. You?"
"I'm a journalist." I say. She'd started to buy me drinks, the Peach Schnapps cocktails were slightly sickly sweet and not doing my empty stomach any favours.
"Oh right, like Nicholas Parsons?" she said.
"Uh...yeah." I said.

For the most part she talked throughout the night, of her love of football and previous relationships she had, now and then making what I imagine were meant to be flirtatious comments though she came across as a bit creepy. Nevertheless, she kept buying me drinks and before long I was feeling quite drunk and after returning from the bathroom and waiting for her to put her phone down, I couldn't help but begin to flirt back. When we left that bar her hand 'accidentally' brushed across my rock hard chest, although neither of us acknowledged it.
"I think I'll go home now." I said, looking around for a taxi.
"Yeah, it's getting late huh?" she said. I nodded and watched as she flagged down a black cab. We rode in silence, although even through the drunken haze I began to panic slightly. She hadn't given the driver her address. I should have gotten dropped off outside a shop or something. But before I could find a way out we were outside my flat. She paid the driver and looked around.
"So, it was nice meeting you." I said, smiling at her.
"Do you mind if I come in for coffee?" she said. I paused. Did she just mean coffee? Or more? She had been buying me drinks all night, surely I could make her a brew, thank her and let her leave.

She entered my flat and looked around. She seemed out of place. An intruder.
"What's that? That's mad that." she said, pointing at a framed print on the wall.
"Judith beheading Holofernes. It's by Caravaggio." I said.
"Who?"
"He's an artist. Did you say you wanted coffee?" I said, going to the kitchen. She followed me and had her hands on my hips.
"I don't need a coffee." she said, voice low. I turned around, her face was inches away from mine. The smell of furniture polish was overpowering.
"Oh." I said. She leant in for a kiss, I couldn't help but reciprocate. She was eager, at one point our teeth rubbed together like the twisting of a pearl necklace. She took a few steps back and lifted up her dress, revealing herself and looking at me expectantly. I shook my head slowly and climbed onto the kitchen counter.

She left soon after, leaving me to sit alone in my flat with a herbal infusion and Radio 6 playing in the background. There was a chime from my phone, another e-mail from the dating site. I looked out of my window and sighed. Why did I live in this dumb robot future instead of the golden days of house phones and dance halls? I rolled up a trouser leg and began to tattoo a daisy chain around my calf.

Manchester Central Library Review

The grand opening of Manchester Central Library took place on the 22nd of March after its closure for four years. The £98m revamp restored much of the Library’s original interiors as well as funding entirely new spaces designed by boffins at Manchester University along with international style guru Jacobi Mendelson.

Hundreds of thousands of books were retrieved from a salt mine, kept in a sodium stasis state until being arranged in alphabetical order on the shelves once again. Such rare books include works by William Shakesbeare, an 8th century book on astronomy, an unpublished Simon Beckett play titled ‘The Bone Sharks’ and a complete Florentine Codex. Visitors can happily pluck them off the shelves and leaf through them hungrily, but all of the books have also been scanned by lasers and converted into a pdf file specially designed for Manchester Central Library. In fact a large portion of the library is digital; the entire recorded history of mankind exists in large underground databanks that can be accessed over wi-fi and printed out at a new publishing house found in a distant wing of the library.

Upon entering the Great Hall you cannot helped but be brought to a standstill by its magnitude. Pillar after pillar of green marble line the room, stretching upward to support a domed ceiling that emanates a gentle light over all. Marble statues of deities connected with knowledge are interspersed between the enormous pillars, each of them have the quality of highly polished pearl. The glass floor is made up of a series of interconnecting black triangles, each give the impression of standing above infinity.

Thick wooden doors open into the grand Reading Room, an enormous circular room with tables and chairs arranged in a pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence. It is entirely silent. Walking through people occasionally look up from their book and watch you walk past, there is an air of paranoia around. I am acutely aware of the sounds inside my body. The gurgles of stomach acids, the sighs of the kidneys, the unsticking of eyelids during a blink. I make my way through another door and along a sweeping staircase running around the exterior of the library. There are replicas of author’s desks now and then, in which visitors can access all the books they wrote as well as the books the author had read. Oak doors lead into a room lined with shelves, holding roughly two million books. If one was to sit and read every book in this room it would take roughly one million years.

Clustered around the large halls are secondary rooms. An Italian restaurant is somewhat surprising, though a logical extension of the Renaissance themes seen around the Library. Frescos are painted on the wall lit softly by candles. The next room is the archives, roughly six gigabits of information contained on special cards that can be entered into a computer and read at a leisurely pace. The latest computer gaming systems are also here, the Sega Megadrive and Dreamcast consoles linked up to HD monitors. A tree grows, tendered to daily by a robotic gardener that adjusts artificial lighting and hydroponic systems. Overall one gets a sense that a library doesn’t have to just be a place poor people go when they don’t have a telly. It can be a place of inspired learning. There is a recurring phrase carved into every single piece of skirting board in the building. ‘Dulce Et Ego, Cor Domorum Veni’.

As one climbs the staircase more rooms can be accessed. An art gallery, an operatic theatre, a three dimensional mirror maze, even a vivarium all can be found in the Manchester Central Library. Once one reaches the top floor they are treated to a 360 degree view from the roof of the library. Most of Manchester is obscured by multistorey budget hotels and empty office space, but the roof is nevertheless impressive due to the bubble formed that keeps visitors dry. The bubble is constantly collapsing and reforming as a wave of atomic energy is projected from the rooftop generators through water molecules in the air.

Overall Manchester Central Library is a 21st century take on what a library is, with reference to multiple zones of time, cultures and architecture. Sections of the library are unbuilt, leaving gaping voids between walls in which one can glimpse the libraries previous incarnations. Other sections are overly built; huge chunks of rock can sometimes be found obscuring a corridor or clustered overhead like a nest of wasps. It is a pastiche of the human brain, the new god in the new millenium. I am eagerly awaiting its closure in fifteen years for an entirely new refurbishment, perhaps a simple holograph attached to the side of a drinking fountain, or a first person shooter in which one can get the 20th century American literature DLC at $14.99. Nevertheless, irregardless, at the end of the day, ad nauseam.

All The Waters Of Earth

In which all of the animals came together for a glorious feast.

Mamucium

Rainy Manchester. Rainy, god forsaken Manchester, with its glass towers and multiple football teams. With it's musical history that it clings onto like someone who used to be cool. With mile after mile of terrace and suburb surrounding a concrete nucleus in which nothing gets done. With its university fostering some of the most influential minds in recent history whilst also harboring a significant portion of average minds. Manchester sits snug in the borough of Greater Manchester, an egg inside an egg. Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, Tameside, Stockport, Trafford and Salford all circle the city like the moons of Jupiter, yet with less fantastical names. It has its own airport, street lights, public transport system and a rich sense of community through advertising. It is Manchester in which I first cut my teeth as a rookie reporter, writing up stories on traffic disasters and unnecessary surgeries, reviewing bands in dingy basements who didn't even know I was there. And like many others I had returned to the north of England, head empty and spine perforated. This was England post-recession, post 9-11, post-Diana, post-Thatcher, post-Industry. It was time to scry the zeitgeist from wi-fi hotspots, Bitstrips, competitive cooking shows and so on. Manchester was as good a place as any. London was expensive, Liverpool was cold, there never seemed to be enough light in Bristol, Birmingham was stuck in a perpetual state of 1979 due to factors known only to myself, Newcastle had poor drainage, I had been banned from Chelmsford, Durham and Sunderland, Bradford had disagreeable architecture, Belfast had it's own thing going on, and I couldn't seem to find a decent curry anywhere else save for Glasgow, but why would a high-tech media sociopathologist running a brain limb across the meme sphere want to move to Glasgow? So Manchester it was. Acid rain on an acid house.

And so I stride along the streets, twisting my neck to and fro, rummaging in bins for clues. A wizard, a psycho-geographer, a bum. I am none of these things. I am a metanoid thirsty for information, mouth glued to a hose connected to a car with a bomb in it. The year 2014 is nearly here, isn't it. The year in which the Queen dies. The year in which the internet is turned off in what is known as Intergate. The year in which China begins to populate the moon with annoying robots. Yet before all that must come January the first, New Years Day, a champagne and mephedrone binge. Probably. If not, why not? And why wait? This is winter and it is hot.