In this short story, William Gibson describes… well, the title says it all. Does anyone know more about this story? Did Gibson ever visit the cardboard city in person? Were any of the artworks or persons described in the story real?
https://web.archive.org/web/20211023112537/http://cardboard-house-painting.jp/mt/archives/cat2/index.php?page=all
WARNING!
DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK!
It takes you to a rather strange site.
I am concerned about malware.
The Internet Archive is a strange site now?
I did not notice anything strange about the artist’s Movable Type blog itself, but I automatically filter out all Javascript so I cannot vouch for it, though nothing in the source code seems to be remarkable at a quick glance.
The site is fine. A lot of the text is Japanese, but foreign languages/sites aren’t scary and dangerous.
But I’m not sure what that link was. Was that supposed to be Gibson’s story as he wrote it? Was it really mixed English and Japanese?
The link has pictures of real artwork from and views of the real cardboard city, from before it was destroyed. I doubt it comprehensively photographically documents the entire city, though (and, as the blog notes, there was a “NO JOURNALISTS OR VOLUNTEERS” sign at the entrance, so they may not have allowed people to just go in and start snapping pictures of everything). Gibson describes his thirteen views [I need to go back and carefully re-read]—I suppose I am asking if any of them were real things that he saw, or is it known to be made up? And, if they were real, do any images of them survive (not necessarily on that site)?
E.g., off the top of my head, one of the things Gibson mentions are phone booths repurposed as storage space. Another was somebody in front of his living space with a cat, a guitar, and a bunch of other stuff in it.