Illiquid Assets

[In the form of the inimitable photo-essays of IT]



Bored with the world and its maldistributions, Jane and TK and I drove out to Benicia to document the circulating capital stranded in parking lots in the shape of automobiles.

All dressed up and nowhere to go, like a bunch of adolescent boys ready to lose their virginity in any way possible (animal vegetable mineral mechanical), they posed, these cars, just shy of sublimity, in front of the derelict navy ships given over to the slow sacrificial fires of rust.


In De Chirico's paintings, the miniaturized trains steaming along in the distance are meant to announce the inexorable impact of modernity and its rectilinear exactions on the a-perspectival angles of a yellowing classicism gone bananas, but in Benicia the junked fleets shoaled upon the ranks and files of stranded cars mean just the opposite, mean the retreat of modernity into senility, financial dementia, suicidal wars.


& a kind of eternal traffic jam.



"The combination of this labour appears just as subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence—having its animating unity elsewhere—as its material unity appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea, and is in fact the coordinator, does not in any way relate to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark, as its living isolated accessory" (Capital, 430).

Never for a moment are you allowed to forget which country you are in.


Not even by self-induced amnesia.


It's a hothouse for political dissidents. . .


. . .whose cryptic messages the authorities will have learned to decipher too late. Amnesty? Immunity? American unity? @?