City

I had a dream about a city that looked like a beehive made out of wood. Instead of bees, there were helicopters, flying people back and forth from the various cells that were like apartment blocks, or maybe neighborhoods. It was in the middle of this huge, pristine field of grass, with no roads leading to it or away from it. Instead of a faint hum, it gave off the sound of murmurs and groans.

On my visit to the city last week, I noticed that I felt a strange fear. The sight of buildings joined together in huge clumps, people living underground, advertising on top of advertising, and everything owned by somebody else. It's a huge growth of living sterility, sort of like a cancer, but in some ways more like AIDS. I saw graffiti (good!) and ugly subways (bad!) and Portuguese soccer tabloids (no opinion).
Worst of all were the towering concrete blocks down at the loading docks. Tens of stories high, these featureless poles of manmade stone stood like idols of the economy, grain elevators protruding from strange angles. As I look at these through the car window, I shudder, and thank god I'm a country boy. Yee-haw.

A city is the place that I own everything. I own the streets and the trash, the tree and a stray dog. I own it.

It was warmer in the city. Perhaphs it was all the buildings. I saw all these people walking around and I asked myself, »Don't all these people have jobs?«

when I first moved to this city all of the fruit trees suprised me. I liked thinking about all of the free food and hoping that noone was hungry...but then I saw the oranges piled on the sidewalk rotting.

All the majesty of a city landscape/
All the soaring days of our lives/
All the concrete dreams in my mind's eye/
All the joy I see thru these architect's eyes.

--David Bowie, »Thru' These Architect's Eyes«

the place where multitudes gather and a collective whole becomes more than it's sum parts.
it's a harsh mistress where a man's mettle is strained to it's fracture point. its ugly its beautiful and I love it