Category: Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs (page 4 of 8)

City too big to be called a city. City too large to fit on any map. City too huge to have a name. In the city of Mega, it never rains. The colossal pap of remediation hits me. Hey, maybe you only live three times. Sidewinding down to the intermission between tracks one and two. Burning tool hunters. Opera evasions on the side, glassed out emergency macs all over. City of chrome bars and enamel furniture. Primary colours, fruit fusions and blue buttons. Spouts of water dressed as funerals. Arriving at a conclusion that was someone else’s initial departure point. Playing tag with the beacons of drizzle. All of a sudden, the atmosphere becomes turpid. Like sunglasses freeze-fitted to the face. The winking lights of the riverside expressway warm my heart. Applying lip gloss in the dark. Waiting for the subway train that will spirit me to Jeju-do, and the lava tubes. Singing a sad folk song upon your departure. Finding out its name years later. Spin-dried woollen pants. Silkworm rot. Bangs in which the alarms have been triggered. Frozen lakes full of fish. A city in which elections take years to analyse and decipher. City of rotating female leaders. Hits from the blog. Tokens from token amusement park rides. Fightbacks from K1 veterans eager for a news career. Mushy peas, dried pumpkin leaves and persimmon flakes. Shadow-lords, ubermallets. Bingo drums. Carpark solidarity. City of one-way tickets for speed. Sorry for the explosion demands, it was all just hot heirs and taffeta honorifics, babe. I was actually looking forward to the fireworks tonight but the line was engaged and I’d run out of sweat cannisters. Instead, I hurled abuse at a bizarro poster, then emptied myself in the nearest bath. Strawberry soju forever.

A film-strength city situated, obviously, deep in the marshes. Canals full of treacle and drains that drip. Body-parts moving infinitely towards their obsolescence, pulsing nevertheless with the isotope of hopeless life. Hopeless life, staggering towards reproductive symmetry. Symmetry, between our bodies and the city’s design. Blank signs, stretched across a broken boulevarde. Dream spurts, like a monsoon of desire. Speaking of Lubri, a mechanic drew for me his own version of the plastic passions. It looked a little like a bowl of noodles. I danced around a pole, subverting the warrant for my repression. Something sidled up to me and thrilled me in the dark. My hand lay clenched by the remocon, unable to let go of its caffeine fixation. Somehow, we slept. The days could fill a plastic spoon. An endless city of reboots and configurations drawn in red. Beyond the heat-haze, on the river coated with lurid green fronds, we sat and watched as the ferries punted to and fro. The beer bottle between us looked like a limb in a sauna, sweat dripping down its elegant brown skin. Beneath the pulsing drum of my own belly a modest hunger surged, tripping the wire that causes heartbreak and dream squirms. The love of a desert lizard for shade. The footprints you left like a map across the room after showering in the infinite cubicle. The surprise of dawn, hatched from a moon egg. Surviving on water and touch. Drying up in my sleep only to dream of dams and advancing tidelines. Billowing with my arms into a crackling embrace, all the while thinking of the heat of the road beneath my feet. Bathing your feet in a stone bucket left beside the door, then watching it overflow in the candle-enhanced twilight. Swotting mosquitoes with our fingertips. Reading lines from a book of palm prints. recoiling from the hot blast of midday like an electric hammer. The burning sprockets of the stars. The velvet honey holding them together, or apart. The radiant glue of moonbeams. The smoky oil that clings to your lips. The burning resin between us, behind us, in our heads.

City of garrets and all-night nature rants. City of the invisible line between smoking and non-smoking areas, waves of smoke billowing freely across this demilitarized zone while observers from both sides wo-man their monitors. City of freak scenes and bad acne, too much foundation and red blood dripping from the lip. City of faux-soundtracks to eighties jazz bio-pics shot in sepia-green. City of corn investigations, acid-rash and delta dreams. Waking up non-plussed by the miaowing of a miniature fridge, set to icicle. City of blather. Move along, please. Haunted by the disco-pup cruising at three o’clock, dumplings like miniature brains at an autopsy. Cleaning up after the big tsunami. Coin-drop can dispensers, grape soda rushes. Waiting to hit number one, for the counter to trip zero. Surprise me, phantom pants. Wriggle out of a stone. Borrowing a line from an anonymous abstract, bleatings from the online cyclo-pediatrics. Your cyworld homepage gives me the impression that you harbour tentative feminist fantasies. Suddenly the counter whirrs. Catching the emoticon disease. Hearkening back to the last time you ate shrimp. Shredding itineraries and placing them in the hulls of ashtrays. Add water. In this way the glowing coals can rest in death. Depth charge from an infinity whack of the timeless pressures of inner-city life. Bivouac by the poisoned stream where Bono bled for Africa. Hacks uploaded in binary code will not execute on this server. Mocking my own spasmodic lingo. Hours without speaking, days without listening. City without parks or gardens. Wandering women hawking doughy refreshments to the new warriors out on patrol. Listless seargeants wave them away. Bodily functions are expressed as mathematical end-games. Energies are short. Strapping explosives to the whining mule, then off up the pass. Planning a seven day journey from which you will be back in five days’ time. Ponder the deleted histories of the last half hour. Spider diaries. Whip-cracks. Lonesome peaks, jagged.

City of radiation and pliers. To find meaning in the ad breaks between sutras. City of radio free emoticons. Television is a sheet of glass between eternity and magnetism. Decomposition comes naturally. We are of the worm. This electronic charge re-situates my poles. I crave great density. Listen to the crystals dictating terms for an armistice that will never come, discovering some correlation between diplomatic functions and these bare-faced streets of Ioni. Packed with pseudopotential, the trains revolve on time. Chaos – or is it entropy? – is achieved in such a way that no one ever notices the difference. At the community police station, some charge is bound to be read out, slowly. I document the eruption of a different species. It is no longer appropriate to quote scientific abstracts in the fce of minor court officials. Beneath the piping of sub-latrines, a new manure-nation can unambiguously be defiled. By means of decomposition, the general and his band of assassins attempt microscopic reform, supposedly for Ioni’s benefit. Truth and reconciliation can only be established once minight’s hour has swung around to face its attackers. This army, being constructed from the valency of zero, charges invisibly, and the longitude thus undergoes strict change, otherwise known as annihilation. The latter can also be expressed by experimental soundscapes, as in the aura bars of the steely capital’s sun districts. Drugs flow through veins here in well defined quantities, i.e. the obverse of the pupil’s dilation, by the wax and wane of which our loony calendar is set. Transverse, on the other hand, becomes a new form of poetic dialogue between effective traitors and the opposite charges. Our macroscopic viewpoint produces a dielectric constant. Propose explicit values for all classes, large and peasant. Histories of crystals are a given. They can be compared with the other cities, existing (as we do) on warped and tortured scales.

City of vapour trails and suns that set like eggs in a sky of brandy. City of drivers on auto-pilot and air pregnant with the rumour of the first snow. Snow so fine it falls in shards and can only be seen in the light of the eerie streetlamps. Wan glow so eerie it makes you feel like snow. Tomorrow morning you will walk out your door, see the damp bitumen and think: last night it snowed. Only here and now, in the alleyways of Inter, snow is just a jotting on a “to-do” list, like missing your appointment with thanksgiving and going out drinking instead. Compiling a list of body-parts you would like to photograph. Check the hourly news bulletin for a ping from some long-lost friend or your new-found love. Burying your new-found lust under a tree, then walking three circles around it. Crying at the sight of children holding onto handrails and not looking down as they inch towards the tempting sweet. Air so cold it makes your eyes wet, coming out of the subway with no gloves and nothing around your neck. The foolishness of your desire to run naked through these lanes. The flecks of rain that were once snow. The imaginary cities your friends are creating, right at this moment, in a sunnier climate. The earth spins yarn. An exploding neon monument, retracted. Connections missed and promises broken. Plans for a new year, a new visa, a new city. The place of the heart in the act of thinking. What do you feel? As autumn breaks under the pressure of its interconnection with the snow, you decide upon something. The egg of your frozen head dictates a punk shadow but you walk alone anyway. Women hear you coming and cross the street. Dogs hear you walking past and lift their earflaps quizzically. The cats are all frozen in place. Their eyes are slivers of snow. The cars stop at green lights. Outside the grocery, a glass steamer for memory buns gathers condensation. How to tell the difference between raw and boiled eggs. Red date stamps on your palm. Inquiries as to the validity of your educational qualifications. Moments on a passport waiting to expire. Photographs of a human face in sunlight. Blocked pipes and tepid water. These are the times when you would like to run.