A sight all to familiar to those with a keen eye for the extraordinary. Deconstruct this image with a healthy dose of imagination and you get all the sound and the fury you might have been looking for in life. Sound to the east of me, fury to the west, standing at the crossroads, waiting from my devil, heading down to New Orleans. To the helpless and unknowing passerbyer, this is all just some spectacle, a joke, a game, an illusion, and he believes it, he falls for it. To the bicycle messenger, it is all the same – a spectacle…and she knows it, she refuses it, even in futility. Beaten back by the harsh reeking wind, she can only concede to the megamachine that is the modern and over-developed metropolis.
What is semiotic to one is real to the other, and that which is real can only fade to the semiotic. These buildings are more than some spectaular facade – they are monuments; monuments to the world wide hostage crisis that is neoliberal capitalism; monuments to thieves; monuments to the triumph of the culture industry; monuments to overkill and repression. But what would it take to bring these monuments down, at least within the symbolic realm? A collective poetics of resistance on a global scale I would say is a good start.
For so long, all I have known is that universal ebb and flow, that killing rhythm that creates these syncopated synthetic laments for love. It is all everyone has known. I look upon these buildings knowing that they are not as tall as they seem. Just as an architect must imagine their creation, it takes a certain amount of “reverse imagineering” to bring about their undoing. To stand on the shoulders of giants and to sing songs like there is no one around – it’s more than just a tiny and stubborn refusal, it’s fighting the good fight. Bike messengers have been doing this for years and will continue on in this fashion, we lonely kings of babylon.
Be free, be merry.
SUBVERSE(S) 