# housing market simulation garme a recent horrible experience welcome to the stressful humorless and nondescript parallel fiscal universe of housing estate agents and the property market garme (scam); that is the concept of accommodation as a get-even-richer-quicker scheme for the already disgustingly wealthy (ie. holy land owners and the golgafrinchian pet piss-weasels which do ir dirty bidding) // video here imagine you and your girlfriend recently went to see a flat in town. your current rented accommodation-cube of several years is cramped cold shoddily built and generally makes you feel miserable / thoroughly disappointed - with it and yourself walking to the flats in town in the light january rain you were immediately struck by how brown and generic looking they were - as though they were a recently abandoned conceptual art exhibit now inhabited by random miserable strangers. you remember there was ample space for parking and the outside build quality was of a high industrial standard; you imagined the confident clang of the gates leading to the oversized grass green recycling bins. wow a well / neatly dressed no nonsense woman from the estate agents soon met you outside the flat in a nice car. right off the bat you sensed you were now privy to some of the highest forms of modern performance art available. ir handshake was particularly limp despite the half smile on ir face; the way they leaned too far forward from ir waist as if to hand you ir handshake on a platter suggested they immediately did not like or trust either of you - that you were not 'suitable' for this innately desirable property / 'concept' they beeps you though the high security plastiglass door with its video surveillance console and the door automatically shuts behind you with a reassuring solidity / finality the first thing you're stuck by is the smell of the paint on the corridor walls and stairwells - the 'new smell' rising off the freshly installed carpets (apparently a by product produced by combining styrene and butadiene monomers) - which instantly induced terrifyingly mundane visions of **+** hyperreal postmodern cube-based office mega-complexes **+** leisure / 'wellbeing' centres **+** still as-yet unstarted double maths homework (and that twisted-stomach feeling) **+** doctor's appointments waiting in over-warm waiting rooms **+** inherently alienating educational institutions generally the showroom at the end of the hall doubles as ir temporary office. it contains a bizarre set of 'real life'-like furniture and fittings - a deliberate cultural serving suggestion. you remember the carpet beneath the tasteful glass table was particular warm and luxurious bizarrely some of the pretend homeowner-art on the wall were the same poorly rendered cgi 'ideal buildings' based on the real world model complete with too-tiny consumers / home owners looking chuffed with themselves; you noticed how the two anorexic woman crossing the carpark in front of ir virtual castle were carrying shopping bags. isn't everything grand when your a home owner like any good researcher the first thing you did was seek out the/any ballardian 'invisible literature' in this case a slick professionally printed hyper-corporate brochure - complete with cool postmodern looking typefaces and exacting colour coordination. flicking through it you noticed the distinct layouts of each apartment; such blueprints and 3d outlines inevitably remind you somehow of (inherently unsafe) anti-zombie protection stratagems andor robocop like crime analysis headup displays - ala "yeah infra-red shows two undead perps in the main bedroom second floor fourth quadrant. roger" passing from each cube-like flat complex to another you were stuck by maze-like structure of the building as a (hyper-fragmented) whole; you suffered mild disorientation even within each apartment so odd were ir partitioning proportioning and spatial layout. looking at the front doors of each apartment set in ir warm white and amazingly well carpeted corridors you imagine casually reading a headline of some local rag a couple of months after you move in > local unmarried man found partially self-cannibalized in front of wide screen hi-def television from terminal boredom in local flat. nearby residents - none of which ever actually met ir - nonetheless imagine remembering ir as 'probably a very quiet nice man' > ~ the local rag first off; these flats seem incredibly well made - at least in comparison to the often freezing pokey hole you currently live in. (thankfully the landlord is a really nice man.) and yet they feel cramped claustrophobic soulless blank efficient. psychologically optimized for optimal pseudo-living. one can imagine oneself feeling particularly anxious listless lonely and mildly violently-apathetic in such a hyper-generic disembodying non-site / non-place / dis-place. this despite the exciting new electric hob and energy efficient boiler you often look at the other houses in your home town and as you walk past them on your way to the supermarket in the rain you not so secretly wonder and marvel at ir design and construction - and probably incredibly high price even for this area with its pinkywhite-skinned upper middle class couples driving oversized suv tanks and sipping pricey frothy lattes in the local cafes - a couple just like the dim pair of droids seen in the hypercorporate housing brochure in your hand who appear to have all the rich inner life of a stuffed albino wallaby // video here there is one particular house in town that embodies your occasional dreams of 'a decent place to live'. it looks like it was designed by the home owner himself a well respected artist and a writer you imagine. (you obviously.) every time you pass by it you see the tall windows and unusual design the wonderful sense of aesthetic cohesion and you imagine living there happy for once - a cosy multilevelled place full of neat little alchoves and resting places each stacked with really interesting books to read. a place imaginary friends would actually want to visit and stay at. (..) these two in the picture are beaming so much they seem on the nicely carpeted verge of consumer orgasm. they're so keen so young so fresh faced so ultra-consumerist so profoundly pleased with ir spanking new purchase it makes you want to puke slightly in your mouth. the whole mere notion of "home ownership" interests you about as much as "professional golfing anecdotes" or "academic discussions of economic theory in the harold wilson era" one classic experienced while undergoing psychosocial evaluation for this prime property experience - the estate agent - an insidious term in many ways - opened a pathetically small storage cupboard (actually the 'second bedroom') and upon noticing our underwhelmed reaction said "they always look smaller when ir empty" like that even makes a remote lick of sense. but of course it does make perfect sense - within this darkly surreal sickeningly hollow cringe-inducing double maths homework-like system called "the housing market" you were only there in "the complex" (called something laughably ugly generic like "green trees estate" "the freedoms" or "tranquality base") for half an hour but you left feeling particular drained by the cloying vampric presentation skills of the estate agent. seriously ir corporate presentation felt like some insanely well practised art installation sthick. the way they opened the doors ir constant uninterrupted smiling the near-infinite number of details and instructions they layed upon your head - who to call if you're interested what things to sign the various kafkaesque stages of financing and suitability tests and cultural acceptance you'll willingly need to drag yourself through in order to put a down payment on this miserable little double glazed mind cage in the middle of suburban nowhere - it was all down with such consummate clean edged professionalism; gently feeding you feet first through the financial wringer all so you can - at some blandly happy nodal point in the near future - settle down on your professional white collar sofa and watch reruns of frasier while idly scratching your genitals and thinking about nothing. (this appears the kind of lonely professional woman who's on half a bottle of stoli and a handful of mood equalizers before lunchtime - who secretly hides in the show room's seamless prison-like toilet while checking ir myfakeface profile sobbing uncontrollably and furiously rubbing one out methodical and joyless - much like the properties they represents) while on paper it would be really nice to wake up "in a house of / to call one's own" it's not a solid material house of brick and mortar and decent cavity wall insulation" you want or need but a sense of.. belonging? roots? real relationships with real people - not just strangers labelled 'neighbours'. thing is 'living' here in this standard-substandard.. nondescription - not even really a place - is getting you down and you both long for what is termed 'a better life'. apparently buying a home of one's own is a major step toward that.. whatever it is. (merely shutting yourself away from it all?) watch as sisyphus uselessly continues trying to get on "the property ladder" only to find what ir's treading murky property market water like a poor homeless gerbil you have little to complain about; as you read this you feel warm(ish) and dry with a full round stomach. yet it is always you who must 'accommodate' yourself to this distinctly fiscal line of thinking - about property ownership existence in a hermetically sealed forever blankly smiling middle class 'lifestyle' hellhole // republic of bob