I had just gotten out of one of those short-term relationships whose essential transitoriness leaves it feeling more like a beautiful dream than life. It still lingered through the drive out of Ho Chi Minh City, on the front of a bike which carried aspiring dissident Asia, in pole position on a beach trip roommate Sara had devised. This trip was my attempt to splash some cold water on myself, and get back to the boring complexities of everyday life.
Distraction culture is a term Asia coined, about the political dimensions of youth culture. In describing it, he talked about the hyperactivity of youth-targeted media in his generation (he’s 17), and the effect it has on an attention span — and indeed, on the steadiness of passion. We were talking about women whose lives are way more wide-open than our own, and sensual and divided in response, but we could have been talking about art blogs just as easily, or this trip, or ourselves.
On the way out, Sara sang to her iPod and weaved all over the road. We burned a straight line and tried to follow her.
We hit the kchink-chank of a metal bridge, spanning a lake, and I pointed out the different tree types shrouding each side.
“There’s a lot of biomes out here,” I said.
“Yeah, hella biomes!” he nodded.
We entered the nicest one we’d seen on our three hour trip, just in time for sunset. It cast a lovely tint on the South China Sea. We pitched a tent on the sand at a cost of $6 per person, drank Vietnamese whiskey and felt the cool ocean breeze. After a while we decided to get naked and swim the choppy night ocean. After another while we put our clothes back on and snuck into the backlit pool.
After Sara went to sleep, Asia and I hung out in a cabana, watching the stars. Like-mindedly, we couldn’t keep our eyes from the illuminated construction site down the beach that will soon host an MGM Grand resort. We looked at it and squinted and wondered, and eventually decided to amble down the beach toward it.
We got barked at by some scary dogs for walking too close to the treeline, and got chased into the ocean. I flashed my camera at the boldest one, and that seemed to put him off.
We sloshed our way through a couple km of tide pools and weird beach debris, made to look ghostly by tricks of light. And eventually we got to a fence, housing what looked like a small city behind it.
In a place like Vietnam where resourcefulness is a national trait, it seemed unlikely that this collection of buildings would be desolate at any hour. We trod carefully, walking the perimeter before attempting anything blatantly trespassy. Closer to the 19-story main skeleton, we found the end of fence and walked in casually.
The light angles were lovely at that time of spotlit night, and the piles of bricks and worker trash and preemptive graffiti scrawls gave us a glimpse of what the concrete palace may look like fifty or eighty years down the road. We stealthed our way up the stairs, peering out on the beach from increasingly lovely angles. Ripped tarps flapped in the wind, and scaffolding framed the moon.
As we hit the rooftop hull, we paused to take a look over our surroundings, and under the two giant cranes that still towered above, and the metal girders that would eventually become rooftop. We looked over the frames of 541 luxury suites, a future fountain, the beginnings of what would become visitors’ entertainment, contained risks and relaxation — a very different type of distraction culture than what we’d been talking about before. Or who knows, maybe something not so different, just evolved, and settled, and less wondrous.
We came down the stairs, exhilarated, just missing a security guard, who slept on a piece of cardboard on the opposite 4th floor landing from the one we’d come up by. His walkie-talkie crackled as we tip-toed back up the stairs to cross over the floor above. And finally, with luck and not a little anxiety, we made it down the stairs and back to no man’s land, where the tide was far out. We walked back slowly by the edge of the sea, letting the tide lick our ankles, just trying to savor the moment in silence, and create a little space for it in our overtaxed heads.
DISTRACTION CULTURE IN THE HELLA BIOME
2007 or was it 8..? — submitted by http://katzenjammer.tumblr.com/
don’t know anything about this but it is our first submission WUT
(click on to see actual photo, i don’t know why the thumbnail is lying)
Moon Landing
Supplement to Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 1969
Found on the floor of
the doctor’s office,
North Philly Formica
warehouse
Prowling 2/23
We scout the front of the fenced-off warehouse, our logic videogame-like, seeing the scaled fence, the stairs to a high door, the flip over rails onto a thin, corroded awning leading to a broken, man-sized window. We contemplate this for a few minutes, our bikes held stationary on the Oregon Ave sidewalk, feeling watched. We decide to follow the fence-exterior-fence down the line, checking for gaps.
We find a hole, a large one, and run through tall weeds to the building. No one cares. It feels invigorating.
And then we’re at this long shitty loading dock, standing up and more on display than we were at any point before, and we talk about this.
C: “I don’t think anyone cares that we’re here.”
We wander along the exterior, trying every door. We wrap around the building, talking loudly, throwing things. Although the far side of the building seems active, with trucks sitting in idle, we’ve lost the fear. We’re where we want to be, full of wonder, looking at the ground for clues, stunned by simple things, like kids.
An old railroad line ends somewhere between two buildings, an old refrigeration warehouse (and it strikes us — how strange a relic, a whole industry that lost purpose) and the tall red brick, with rollers down the edges and Pennsylvania Railroad iconography almost completely faded off. We’re in this valley between the massive decrepit warehouse buildings we’re casing — it’s filled with trash, discarded 40 oz bottles, some legit graffiti.
We crawl on masses of earth and trash and crumbled roofing, looking for ways to conquer this dead end. We test sketchy routes alongside the high walls, simplistically thinking the best way to get the experience this location has to give us is to get on top of it.
After C aborts a deadly-looking climbing challenge, we search for more subtle entry points. Miraculously overlooked to this point, there’s a cleared-out window on shin level, revealing a ladder leaning against the wall beneath it with the little light it allows into the darkened basement.
Crawling in is the only option, over the corroded metal of the former window frame. I put on gloves, careful about the cut I’d gotten the day before, in a lazy autopilot moment on a boring daytime bar shift. I don’t know the logistics of tetanus, but I can sense some sort of Marxist capitalism-indicting obituary occurring in a parallel universe — comprised of a clever correlation between the deadly waste of a greedy civilization and the workers pushed into tragedy by its appetite.
We flip on our flashlights, revealing cold, bare machinery, lots of empty space, extraordinary vaultlike wells of freight elevators. Everything is rust-colored or gray, and the air is cold as it always is in these places, as if years of disuse have sucked out its life-sustaining potential.
We spread our light to the corners carefully, searching workmanlike for the next step. For a moment we pause by a window underlooking the fenced-off situation we’d first observed along the front of the building. We discuss hauling the ladder through it and using it for height, but put it off as impractical.
Then we hit our moment of strange aura, the unexpected thing we knew we’d encounter in this repurposed corner of a living city… the remains of a squatter’s bedroom.
Displeasure
Presumably this page is from a typed diary, real insight into a life hazily sketched in by found letters, women’s club pamphlets, newspaper clippings intended for some scrapbook that might have been judged more valuable upon her death. The immediate, visceral question that comes to mind: Who is this Elizabeth H., who starts her criticisms on page 2?
I found this paper on the floor of an abandoned North Philly warehouse, not far from a wall of Formica samples and a “Babes of Baywatch” poster.
I had to sort through many notes of greater cordialness to get to this, as in conversations with guarded people.
