The philanthropist laughs with his throat,
his social bounds unleashed by his kindness.
The young man leaves his wallet on the open bar,
turns away. two men nod at him after he turns
to retrieve it. the economy for the faithful failing.
The lack of electricity dissipates the power from house to house, business to business, dissolves the structures of contact between people. Every interaction requires reinterpretation. Where the standard motions of waiting and payment once took place, FEMA ration lines now stand around POD centers. The officiating sounds of transactions no longer take place with the punctuation of a register ring or declarative totals, but the soft hiss of soldering. The loose wires are live and active, albeit disconnected.
In no shortage or irony, international banks threatened to halt interbank loans this weekend, a direct threat to the movement of the international economy. The collapse of the superstructure from Houston towards the world, seems imminent. In this imminency, the entitled seem ludicrous, the lack of self-humilating consent to their demands or the lack of some structure that enables their entitlement enrages them. These scenes of distemper take place in a scene of address where electricity is available. The avaibility to reference the disconnected system aggrevates the lost power of the superiors in the capitalist structure of social accountability. The aggrevation to them is that they no longer are accountable to a 5pm conference call or mortgage company, but to everyone.
Every action acts as measure, every interaction a genuflection to their character. How this power structure (economy/credit/electricity) provides space for this scene of address and how the lack of this structure reveals an alternate and co-existent human possibility further illuminates the power of myth in our contemporary society. The myth of stability, the myth of money, the myth of work, the myth of economy. The emergence of possibility, of not a replica of myth, but a new criterion, true to contemporary experience, not an archaic power structure.
The streets, like my vague memories of Alicia, are lined with fallen limbs and debris. My neighborhood, in blackout possibly until Thursday, lights up with dimly liminal candels flickering behind walls, through windows, across the pages of my books. Against the sillouetted trees, at times the skyline peeks through, the stark contrast sometimes strange as the light contrast creates a parallax of greater distance. Most doors are open for the little wind that does move after dusk. I know my neighbors better now. There are shut doors where the overtness…the abrasive generators pummel silence with their carborators, their combustion. I have spoken with my neighbors once since they aquired a generator. The T.V. flickr through the windows, on the walls. The reconnection.
man with gun pointed downwards while waiting in line for gas. surreal sound of the ice rink music. old woman sitting at bunk bed installation. how mass use of galleria utility turned from problem to seeming philanthropy, “charging station”.
