I. Psychogeography
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”
www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
“Construction on I-496 began in 1963, and the expressway would ultimately dead-end 35 streets, create a myriad of one-way streets needed for on and off ramps, and determine future development. In the path of the proposed expressway were more than 800 homes and businesses that needed to be acquired through eminent domain, ceding the property to the state.”
lansinghistory.blogspot.com/p/paving-way-i-496.html
\\
This city was built on a scam. Not that it had any right to be built here in the first place, that’s a whole other series of despicable scams, no, I mean, quite literally, this city as we NOW know it was built on a scam. Two scam artists sold plots of land to gullible pioneers out east, promising a bright future in the flourishing mecca of Lansing (then called Biddle City). When I think about the poor trusting folks, having spent their life savings and arriving after weeks’ journey to find not a city, nothing but a fucking swamp and mosquitoes and harsh, dark winters, and finally coming to the realization that they had been lied to, scammed out the wazoo even, well, I just have to laugh.
\\
Already off to an auspicious start, this insignificant little village of disappointed fools was chosen (in a stroke of typical bureaucratic logic: finding the solution everyone finds equally disagreeable) to be the seat of power in the still-newly established colonial government. Another scam.
One industry rolled in to replace another. The descendents of that first miserable band of rubes went on to get scammed out of their time and health in smoke-belching auto factories, making the tools of their own destruction. Once built, these wretched creations went on to reshape the entire world to meet their needs, devouring pedestrian traffic and further choking the air with the byproducts of their petroleum combustion. Then, after paving over almost everything that came before and poisoning the water and the earth, they decided they were scared of the city and the people in it and needed to leave. The path they carved on their mad flight from the center severed roads, eviscerated communities, maimed, killed. NOW, these vehicles of displacement and violence, prejudice and resentment, fear and cowardice, they all fly up and down the highway to their work at the center, where the malignant state and its little laws are, to this day, festering and making criminals of some and landlords of others.
\\
Do you understand? It’s all nonsense. These things seem so permanent, significant, and inescapable when we’re already situated inside of them. There is an entire world buried under the asphalt. This goofy little world of illusion was haphazardly slapped on top some time in the past, and if you just pull yourself back a little bit, you can really start to see the strings. But that feeling, when you’re somewhere totally new, totally unfamiliar, eyes open wide, taking a real, honest drink of your surroundings, well, you can’t just get that feeling anywhere. Can you?
Look around NOW. They’re orchestrating the next big one right before our eyes. Churning out cardboard box 5-over-1s that won’t last the decade, derelict empty buildings replaced by uglier and somehow emptier buildings to better empty the wallets of empty people. Another round of displacement. They wreck and ruin and then swoop in to buy out from under us whatever’s left. That’s developers, that’s speculators, that’s the local slumlords, using homes as state-sanctioned chess pieces, building ruins, making an absolute killing from this newest scam-within-a-scam. The more they do, the worse it gets. This city starts to look less like Lansing, and a lot more like yours.
\\
Yes, this city carries scars, from all the way back to the betrayal woven in its very conception, to the potholes that never get fixed on dead end streets just south of here. It bears the physical and the psychic scars of the past, and all the future ones that have not yet shown themselves.
Like the elephant that they shot again and again back in the 60’s, it needs to be put out of its fucking misery. God help us all.
\\
