Monday, July 12, 2010

Flavor in Space: Ch 51

At the New Post Station the city of daylight lies to the west. A temple to men, huge metallic phallic buildings scrape the sky. Men and women, dressed in black slacks and white creased button down shirts stream through long corridors towards their planned work hours. At lunch, vast courtyards of grey stone and brick are populated by men and women sitting on mathematically spaced benches, apart, unspeaking. A few fellows puff cigarettes at the corners of long ashen granite staircases. In a far corner lies a marble statue in a house of brick: buxom and round, sexual, yet cleaved below thigh and above belly.

At the center of the district is a the Oykot Prefectural Metropolitan Government Office. It's dual pylons rise taller and grander than any other building around, a feat of engineering, a wonder of power made solid. And below it just to the east, beyond a wide, clean boulevard, lies the broad, oval, Prefectural People's Square and the low Prefectural Meeting Hall of Deliberation. The oval People's Square is lined by eight bronze statues, all of women, six of whom are naked. The ladies flaunt their metal flesh in powerful poses, facing, obstinately, without fear, the massive towers across the way. Aunties, mothers, and grandmothers squat and transplant primped rows of bright red flowers in the most black soil of beds prepared below the statues.

Beyond the stone monument of male accomplishment, just to the west, is the vast New Post Station Central Park. Hidden among the dense groves of oak and zelkova are the hundreds of blue tarp houses in the homeless' towns. Men sit about on benches, staring forward. The soft din of highway traffic is perforated by the constant sound of the crushing of cans, elderly men recycling the trash of public parks and town squares. Laundry- rags, old towels, old office clothes- dries under black umbrellas beside blue domed houses the size of large copy machines. These are the towns of the floating men without companies, without work, without status.

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