hw_campbell_jnr

This is my favorite song about depression, in that it's the most accurate so far.

"Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide — extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old or playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production."

— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

I'm reading this for my thesis, and have equal responses of "this is profoundly useful to the discourse theorist attempting to wed discussions of bio-power in the physical to discussions of the operations of power through language (and et cetera) and "somehow, in some fashion, I feel this is relevant to American Captain."

Somehow. I was in NYC in '08, and while obviously the WTC is no longer there, and the landscape has changed in that particular sense, the first thing I said when I walked out into Times Square was "oh my god, it's post-modernism's brain!" and it is, in the late capitalist sense especially, and in the sense that in dystopian movies, New York is always the symbol of the apex of this culture, the last creation, the city at the end of the world. (For interested readers, the very next thing I said was "HEY I'M WALKIN' HEAH" in the manner of Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, because you have to, don't you? Also, in my defense, I was walking there).