Karen Solie: "Life is a Carnival"

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit

of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert

through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier,

or grossly

contemporized, denuded of childhood's native flora,

stuccoed or in some other way hostile

to the historical reenactments we expect of our former

settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal

basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart

sprouting in the demographic, in Street View's perpetual noon.

With pale

and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise

to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete.

We sense

a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence

of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see

them

change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage

from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest

of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold,

though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old

house. Look what they've done to it. Who thought this would

be fun?

A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before

YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store,

cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful

they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher

registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity?

Encore, applause, encore; it's almost like being there.

Mitch Bogen's Art & Argument