19 October ‘07

At the bottom of this page, you will notice, are now advertisements placed by Google on behalf of various companies. And Google’s intuition is such that it predicts, based on the content of my writing, what visitors to this site will be inclined to purchase. Thus, in the unlikely event that I spend a paragraph talking about microwave dinners (of which I just enjoyed a particularly lacklustre example―fettuccine with broccoli florets―in which the florets exhibited a plastic chemical tang and the fettuccine was laced with rubber and the whole dish left an aftertaste somewhere between asphalt and pine-bark, but hey, it was three dollars and according to the label had less than 7 grams fat) the advertising below will reflect this and presumably offer visitors to this site an incentive for assessing said dinners or some such ruse.

The advertisements are an optional service provided by Google, the owner of whoever owns this website. Every time a visitor clicks on the advertisement, one ten-thousandth of the advertisement fee―or some equally miniscule amount―is tallied, set against my name, and after an indeterminate amount of time a cheque arrives in my mailbox. As I have no misconceptions about the amount of traffic this site generates, I expect the cheque to be somewhere between one cent and a dollar. It is a relief, I find, to give over to it―whatever it is―and let the tide of commoditisation wash over those possessions of mine that do not bear some birthmark of their origin. The experiment will occupy some time, anyway, and at the very least I will acquire a talisman―in the form of a cheque that’s quite literally worth less than the paper it’s printed on―of the unbridled capitalism this country is the beating, feverish heart of.

And unbridled it is, the metaphor holds true. The system has bolted and is running at a speed and in a direction I doubt even Marx or Nostradamus predicted. Certainly those who herald-in the new age of electronics and transactional relationships (myself included) did not. Witness last Sunday, at the Empire State Building - an apt example, not only of the ruthless commercial assault that capitalism (is that it?) elicits, but of the artery-clogging, gluttonous obesity that it infects systems with. From arriving at the bottom of the Empire State to the ten-minutes on the viewing deck, to the ground again took a friend and I two hours. We entered the building, rode an escalator, and arrived at the back of a queue that zigged and zagged the entire mass of a hall that, once surely reserved for events of class, now served as the pen for the awaiting masses. At every corner, as we advanced towards the x-ray machines and metal-detectors, some lackey tried foisting on us pamphlets detailing the upgraded viewing-deck tour, or the audio guide, or the 3D map, or the countless other trinkets and plastic souvenirs that, once they serve their purpose are crumpled and tossed at the overflowing bins outside the building. Once through the x-ray we enter another queue for the ticket booth. Once through the ticket booth we enter another queue for the lift. At the lift we hand our tickets to one usher who rips the stub off and hands it to another usher who scans it who hands it to another usher who strikes it with a pen who hands it back to us. Once on floor 86 we enter the queue for the lift to floor 96. At this stage we tire of queues and opt for the stairs (recommended as more efficient by various signs on the wall) only to land behind a flight-full of similarly-inclined tourists. As we try to exit the building the same process is followed. The only difference being that the descending stairs are closed. Excessive and lethargic in its conception, the process proved equally so in its execution - the offspring of a sluggish and ineffectual system.

Ah, but the view at the top of the building was remarkable. To all horizons stretched towers, houses, schools, parking-lots, ghettos, sports-fields, motorways, freeways, highways, road-signs, lampposts, potholes, sewer-pipes - interrupted only by rivers and the sky, and all of it teeming with organisms that with the benefit of indoctrination are identified as people. To the unbiased eye they seem like parasites on agar or maggots on a cadaver. And as a mass they possess the same beauty as maggots or parasites – a beauty that comes from complete and total consumption, of purely animal instinct, of action caused by internal forces alone (a beauty that can be compared with the voracity that a pack of piranhas are said to take to a bovine, reducing it to a skeleton in under four minutes. Or similarly, when I was a child, the experiment conducted by my grandmother and I in which a dead mouse was wrapped in a net and set in the garden for a week. On returning, the mouse had been reduced to a perfectly-preserved silhouette of bones, a remnant of some prehistoric era).

As you ascend 96 floors to the viewing platform of the Empire State Building, the observable vestiges of culture, of human-ness, descend, so that from the top all seems uncannily natural. As the ape is at home in the tree, the human is at home in the city. So perfect is our conception of an ideal environment, and so indifferent are we at marking the world, that all adjusted to suit. There is a profound beauty in this perfection. And while this beauty―like that of a supermodel―elicits a kind of jealous repulsion, for those of us who are uncertain of how or why to fight it, the whole conception is endearing enough to lie prone in front of and worship.

PS – last night, about thirty minutes after I posted this blog, a shooting occurred in the apartment building next door. One man was killed, the other injured. Two Hispanics, so it has been reported, were seen fleeing the building. I was out at the time, en route to a friend’s house, so all I knew of the incident was the yards and yards of discarded Do Not Cross tape lying in the gutter of my street when I came home six hours later. I happened to be listening to some hip-hop as I left the house today, the reports from the news channels (see link below) still resonating. The band was the Wu Tang Clan, and the lyrics were about shootings in Harlem. The experience was unnerving. More on this at some later stage.

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=74768