the hallway the broken plaster

Leave the truth out for everyone to see and no one will find it. The tragic desperation of the Ansonia is what draws the eye toward it, what compels and eventually exhausts it. You do not see the money that piles there, any more than you see the copper wires that run through its walls, the electrical conduits that connect the lights in its suites to its hallways and elevators, to its atrium and its restaurants and its fountain to its cavernous underground arcade and its steam room; you do not see the metal filaments of the electrical grid as they bend themselves to the curve the earth, beginning and ending and returning again from Bisbee and Morenci to New York, to Los Angeles, to Phoenix, to Cleveland and the Van Dorn Iron Works where the US would produce many of the tanks that would be sent to France during the War, to Meuse-Argonne, to secret telegraph machines in Baltimore; to Detroit and the Ford manufactory and the Model T and the headlight and a a new era of mobility in which the consumer had vanquished the night. The junkie the hallway the broken plaster. Capitalism offers abundance, yet its security apparatus plays off our finitude, our frailty, the fact that we are nothing more than primitive, limited beings. It enhances our awareness of that frailty, it forces us to look at the inevitability of our demise. It brings many of us to fetishize it; or, rather, to find comfort in the cave, or solace in the room, the steel, the boxcar, the resolute certainty of the perfectly laid track, the breakfast nook overlooking Broadway at dawn. Let the new year commence.