Oh Ooh Oh, Oh Your City Lies In Dust

“Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.” That’s the Times’ Timothy Egan reporting from the town of Lathrop, where median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000.

The ruins of past civilizations come to mind, like Pompeii or something from the Amazon. You wonder whether in fifty years, places like this will be reclaimed by nature, vines hanging through skylights into McMansion grand rooms. (Probably not, Egan argues, as America’s human population continues to boom. Did you know that since 1970, the country has added more people than live in France? Crazy.)

Similar thoughts seem to be on the minds of artists and architects these days, as evidenced by a slide show at Fast Company that collects images of the “dream interventions” proposed by some of the folks the Guggenheim Museum asked to design installations for its central atrium in celebration of its 50th anniversary. Three of the eight pictures depict Frank Lloyd Wright’s pristine white masterpiece crumbling and/or overgrown with vegetation. Here’s the entry from Denmark collective N55:

It also puts me in mind of a passage from John Cheever’s 1961 Some People, Places And Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel that has really being giving me comfort lately as I consider the question of whether, or maybe just how fast, American society is collapsing. (Leave it Cheever-so famous for seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses-to cheer you up, right?)

3. All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tea rooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we-you and I-shall build.

And here’s the video for Siouxsie and the Banshees’ 1985 single, “Cities In Dust.”