never lost on the incroyables and merveilleuses
meaningless outside of some limited revolutionary context
which has subsequently absolved us of any need to be literate in its politics
who emerged at the end
of the reign of terror to infuse Paris
with the rare air of empire parties
fanning themselves with peacock feathers
gripping staffs wrapped in gold lamé
awash in a river
of luxury like a Bank of America exec in 2009
the pistons of the new world are pumping much faster, reader,
out of culture-bound mysteries
that rest here in the sun
while you, stand there still as always
antiflâneur or — flâneuse in memory of Cher
not singer-songwriter but the blonde
whose dusty complexion
mocks the world she faces to save
everything everywhere submerged in the moral philosophy
of “Niggas in Paris”
where the individual balls hard
in the exclusive right to be fair
self-determined in Paris getting fucked up
or getting married, as Kanye says, in the mall
no longer an important reference to the focal point of commerce at the end
of the nineteenth century but to every undergraduate
whose thesis quotes The Arcades Project extensively
in the morality of “Niggas in Paris”
like “To the Reader” it ultimately becomes itself
a teacup ethics to be thrown against the flower
wallpaper of the sitting room
reader, disengage
from the utopia of “my zone”
in a plume of desire
destroyed but alive, like you like me like blood
There is an infinite highway that builds toward Cher’s Jeep. Everything is the pop gradient of Tumblr, even the desert in which the highway begins from our point of view. From our point of view the highway begins everywhere. Sunglasses and Advil, everything is mad real. For others, it begins with the faces of the dead, Ronald Reagan, Jacques Derrida, Gertrude Stein, mixed with the dust from which the road starts. Horizons mean nothing. Horizons mean the albatross has been captured and is dying, slung across the deck of the ship toward the teary-eyed sailors burdened by its bad luck. The procedure that envelops us culminates in a disavowal of the system we benefit from more substantially than we know. There is no other choice, art markets shift, make room for more art, then disappear. What is the light that springboards off the surface of a pool in the Hills? The white Jeep, pure symbol of wartime ingenuity married to lives of leisure, sits in the driveway and commands us to bow down. I was in awe as a child. I was in awe as an adult, too. Perfect suspension and a lightweight exterior both affordable and transmutable, the luminous soul of the entire project dwells there. A word that means so little and yet suggests the undoing of its own simplicity: Jeep. Two e’s like in spleen, which Cher meant when she cursed her driving instructor for not giving her a pass. As if. Take away a car and you still have a passenger. I take walks everywhere I go, even in the supersprawl. Los Angeles, the antithetical capital to preservation, accelerates the speed at which we consume in order to perfect a place in the future as the site of the future. LA translates today into tomorrow by noon. But tonight, we can relax in the waterfalls of the Hilton as they flood with bubbles and champagne.
LANDSCAPES WITHOUT END
Clouds can archive. My fantasy is a landscape. Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real. Where are the palm trees swaying toward tonight? Standing at the beach nothing fails to come to mind, but out of blue prevalence thinking comes in waves. Am I my own vision? I am stretched beyond it, but beyond that, other oceans we hadn’t known, lost continents restored in code. Where should we enter? The point where the digital camera clicks to record dusty boys playing by the side of the road? Weather in Google is fixed.
The night of Hurricane Sandy, I smoked a lot of pot, then looked at photos on Twitter of the flooding in the East Village, lower Manhattan, Queens, and Red Hook until the power went out, my phone died, and I passed out in my friend’s West Village apartment. (News of Staten Island and New Jersey hadn’t reached us yet.) The last thing I recall was another friend texting me to say that the city was evacuating the East Village in boats. Was that in my dream, I thought, the point where the present surpasses the expectations of history to bring about a future we were told we had propelled away? Windows blasted open. My favorite trees fell. The streetlights did not work when I was driven to Brooklyn two days later. This is what happens when you aren’t paying attention and, over the hill, a car arrives with bad news, news that seemed impossible but in retrospect was the only news you could have received. I fell on a pillow. In my dreams I woke and found that everything west of 6th Avenue had sunk into the Hudson, which was now the ocean. I rushed with the others to the shore to take a picture. I stood on the beach where the last part of 7th Avenue remained, staring at the dark waters of the new world splashing up against the old one. I remember taking the Staten Island Ferry one night, the height of the following summer, and in a rage throwing my glasses overboard. I remember reading that anecdote in Joe Brainard’s I Remember and thinking it was my life he’d remembered.
The prime directive of fantasy is aftermath. In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the world is covered in ice, above which an alien species excavates the image of our future together. Our life in remains, trinkets, Coney Island, all of it submerged in water memory. There is no future that isn’t also an excavation of some present. In A.I., aliens float past the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the future, are they restored? If only Stanley Kubrick had lived to make his movie. He might have known that climactic precarity is an economics of gloom, predicated upon a system of consumption that, in our lives, became a hostility normalized in time. In my vision of the future, the resurrected Stanley Kubrick reshoots A.I. as a second parable of the contemporary moment. Since every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it, the new movie ends with the robot boy discovering that his only job was to promote the male family member, hobbled by impotency, to his symbolic function as Father — and not to love and be loved in return. The boy is abstract wealth synthesized into a Haley Joel Osment-identified body, the cork in the void of loss. The aliens, who have come to earth to find us permanently lodged in the landscapes we made for ourselves, do not return him to the dream of family life in which the mother’s love is the focal point of his experience; rather they return him to the dream of labor. His mother greets him, then goes into her bedroom and locks the door. Landscapes are an economics. Toil over the earth as we always have and eventually it will toil over you. Will we meet in our mutual fantasy? Will I finally be your employer?