EAST VILLAGE, POST RAIN

Baffled after eating burritos, we couldn’t figure out where to get coffee before the !!! show at Webster Hall, so we headed towards 1st Avenue and stumbled upon the Mudspot on East 9th Street and 2nd Avenue. While Cara went to use the bathroom before we left, Nic Offer, !!!’s lead singer walks past our table while exiting the rear. Found it odd the last time I’d seen him was about 3oo feet away from a stage in Switzerland.

The show was packed, some drunk Latin Lover behind us was yelling at his girlfriend and neither of us could get that into the spirit of things, so we left after about six songs.

METHODS OF MIGRATION

Every day it moves outward, filling up the space between shores, moving into spaces once determined to be unfit or impossible. It is blunt and brutish and cares little for aesthetics or longevity. It lacks quality and seeks neither to inspire nor encourages contemplation. It has successfully negated eons of culture in the name of expediency and commerce.

It is the new architecture we shop, live and work inside: the packaging that contains our food and almost all that we purchase; it is the vapid music, fashion, art, design and writing that reflects our most popular and best-selling ideas; it is the visual presentation of information from books to television graphics; it is the worst of our behavior we now view as entertainment, and the materials, synthetic, organic or human that we use to construct all these things. All that is cheap and soulless and asks no loyalty since none of it is created to have any real lasting value—physical, spiritual or otherwise. After decades of experimentation, marketing and research it fully expects to be merely consumed and discarded as quickly as possible and that the process continue in the production of more. It pillages all other movements and ideas, callously appropriating and cheapening their original importance, and fashions them into one large conglomerate that has no particular defining characteristic other than it has eclipsed its frequently ignored and forgotten inspiration from which its ersatz reproduction came from.

If Las Vegas was an experiment in the acceptance of artificial environment through consistent distraction, then what has occurred in the sprawling, crowded construction and its compacted citizenry is endemic to almost the entire world and it’s blooming incessant population. Guided by a corrupted, misguided philosophy of societal planning (urban, rural or otherwise) and every single element that comprises it—no matter how small—those in charge manipulate the system, completely ignoring the questionable yet wiser scruples passed on before them. This capitulation to wealth in the name of perceived societal prosperity is nothing new; its been going on for centuries, the main difference being an actual understanding and appreciation of aesthetic standards. Where Rome still stands magnificent, as its Papal leaders and Caesars’ built a lasting, triumphant legacy to themselves, the Trump’s of this world’s gleaming spires are as vacant as the era that encouraged them. The world’s greediest individuals only concern is the bottom line, and have stopped at nothing to ignore any kind of greater potential to leave something of importance to history, choosing only personal gain and profit.

Few if any protest any of this and have come to simple accept without question this is the way things are, an age of accumulated waste, pollution, filth and decay. As we accept the ugliness of so much in our culture and at best adapt (frequently escaping the overwhelming psychological burden through addiction of all sorts) it is strange that the idolatry of physical beauty hasn’t found itself in any less a place of reverence. Perhaps for most it is all we have left, that and some scrubbed images from television and magazines of places most will never see in person are no substitute for the physical form which seen in person. It speaks to our over self-importance as organisms that we think so much of ourselves yet defecate on the environment in which we must live.

If we as an organism reflect through our actions those diseases that similarly affect the body, then this could be easily described as a form of terminal cancer: where something healthy, vital, beautiful and robust over time is transformed into ultimately malignant tissue.

We respond to an appeal to consume and discard and to do so without reflection. We ignore its consequence of clamoring filth that will almost certainly never be cleaned up. Our beaches are filled with trash, plastic bags linger in the branches of trees, and newspapers blow down streets, foiled wrappers float down rivers and fill out gutters. We have come not so much to hate the Earth as to be entirely indifferent to it, as we have become indifferent to ourselves. If we valued introspection or looked closer, we would but outraged by what we see and everyone responsible. We would feel cheated from our sense of humanity and appreciation for beauty that has slowly been peeled away, moving us back to our animalistic natures cleverly disguised in things we’ve become programmed to seek out through entertainments and messages from our authorities we seldom question, who have all but mislead us and our impressionable minds.

Because most are barely able to survive, toiling incessantly just to eat or have dug themselves into holes of debt or marriage or both (or simply would rather do nothing else), there can be nothing but the ongoing determination to simply exist without the seemingly luxurious idea of reflection. Many are raised or encouraged through religion or authority to simply stop questioning things and do as they’re told. There are many more who move this forward into even more precarious states than those who don’t, and no real reason to expect any of it to reverse through consensus or appeal. There is nothing anywhere that states things should be any different or will ever be so. It brings to mind the Biblical predictions to the end of the Earth which probably had less to do with supernatural predication that a simple observation about mankind and it’s self-destructiveness—obvious even then.

THE RESERVOIR

Around 8pm, shortly before the thunderstorms.

NIGHT GALLERY I

NIGHT: SANDY HOOK BEACH

Indian Summer drove us out of Manhattan and over to New Jersey for the weekend. We wandered down to the beach on Saturday night after attempting to eat probably the worst burger in my life at the abominable Clam Hut.