LA | NY A Special Edition of The East Village







Jeff Derksen


Snap: Live in the City


Is it world domination

this amassing and massive

moving of mostly crappy goods

and personal yearnings

or just the soaring speculation

of deeply fucked dot com?

With hard-won individual

anxieties, rights, freedoms, etc.

on a first-name basis

try imagining that you live

in this century (city). Good. Now

park the Sports Utility Vehicle

and circulate freely

amongst the competing cultural

information and traditions

you have access to.

I'm just sort of ("what ever

happened to") sitting here

imagining a world without walls

or wallpaper, like "reflexive" or

"second" or "free form"

modernism but yet

with better doorknobs

and accredited poetry workshops

for the masses (saskia sassen). Trusting

in art to help me (why wontcha babe)

get over the blank stare of the commodity

(keep me hangin on). If it is

my hatred of classical music

that will save me

in the end

show me

a better (bitter)

century, more social, less

pharmaceutical and sure of the loss

of causality, daddy

these are only ideas, worse (worst)

yet, words

and not people opening

their windows to check

the middle morning weather

(retired postal workers

with heart conditions) in emergent

middle Europe

in the lyrical working district

that circles the city

"girdles the globe"

"the image of an engine"

"the new mobility

of people and money"

"industry outputs" "Thailand,

Japan and, Time

Warner, Toyko, Toronto, Turkey, un-

employment, unions, United Kingdom, United

Nations, Uruguay."



Music. Movies.





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