Stuart Staniford: Feeling my Inner Kunstler

I’m currently in Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast of Australia in order to give a talk for work.  If you are in a bad mood when you frame the photo, the place looks like the above.  Or like this if you try to make it look good (say be capturing the sunrise from your hotel):

I absolutely detest this kind of place – there’s nothing that destroys the spirit of a once beautiful place quite as effectively as a bunch of 20-100 story concrete and glass hotel towers.  I went for a walk early this morning, and by the time I came back, I was seething.

I was trying to figure out why places like this make me so mad.  I don’t mind major cities nearly as much as this kind of beach+concrete-jungle resort.  I don’t like to live in cities – being that far removed from nature feels oppressive to my soul.  But on a visit I can appreciate their liveliness and intensity and grand scale.  I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that big cities have been there a long time and the original spirit of that place has been completely replaced with the ambience of the city itself.  Whereas, at a resort, there is still a little bit left of whatever natural beauty it was that made people come here in the first place, and that makes it so much worse.  The crassness and insensitivity of the people that developed all these towers is made achingly painful by the fact that there is still clean sand and soft breezes and strange tropical sounding birds whistling in the trees between all the unspeakable ugliness that the humans have brought to the landscape.

And maybe it also has to do with the fact that it’s clear that thousands on thousands of people must choose to come here and stay in all these concrete towers with their own money – to a place I experience as a kind of spiritual torture and never would come to if I wasn’t being well paid to do it – and then I feel very isolated from my own kind.

How does anyone expect to feel a sense of the universe’s mystery in a building that looks like that?