I've arrived in New York in the middle of an unfeasibly sticky, debilitating heatwave. Managed to get my fix of tourism from the Staten Island ferry trip; pondered the morbidly magnetic World Trade Center site; soaked up the hipster ambience of Williamsburg in Brooklyn (graffiti pictured is from there); and the thick, intoxicating vibrancy of the East Village. It's an amazing process, gradually accumulating first-hand experiences of a cityscape so abundantly expressed in mass media, smelling and tasting the rich, often shitty loam out of which the over-familiar shoots and buds of Images and Icons have sprung. And of course, gradually seeing how a complex form of feedback is working, life on the street consuming and reflecting media representations, the withering flowers of pop culture falling to the soil and composting into fuel for ever more complex flora.
OK, I'll wind up. I'm well aware I've just been reading Baudrillard and drinking coffee in one of the mostly hectically mediated places on the planet, so I'll stop before things get messy.
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