Movie
The residents of Xenia, Ohio, as documented by Harmony Korine in Gummo provide the cinematic expression of moral, social and physical decay. The film begins with a description of the tornado that pushed a precarious economy past the ledge. Now, dead cats are whipped with metal sticks, others are left to attract dead flies. An abused daughter tells her story, a young boy sniffs glue (and later consorts with a mentally challenged prostitute), a couple makes out in an abandoned car (replete with smashed windshield), the glue sniffer scrubs himself clean in dirt brown bath water.
Gummo is less a movie and more a collection of vignettes, populated by marginalized, greasy-haired, heavy metal fans with the T-shirts to prove it. The nothing moments of the essentially plotless Gummo range from sublime to frustrating, with mood conveyed through grainy film stock, distorted voiceovers and blurred out faces.
Music
Urban decay has a soundtrack, courtesy of the instrumental post-rock of Montreal's Godspeed You Black Emperor! The album f#a#oo begins with static and the requisite amount of ominous hum. A disembodied, weary male voice describes an anonymous society in decline. "The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows." A violin begins to play, to underscore the pace and mood of the narration. "The buildings toppled in on themselves. Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble. And pulled out their hair." A lengthy pause. "The skyline was beautiful on fire. All twisted metal stretching upwards. Everything washed in a thin orange haze."
The song, appropriately enough, is called the dead flag blues.
If Godspeed You Black Emperor! has composed the score, then Vancouver's Neko Case is the lyricist of emotional decay. Case sings about "a dusty old jewel in the South Puget Sound" in her song Thrice All American This ode to her hometown of Tacoma features the verse:
Buildings are empty like ghettos or ghost-towns
It gives me a chill to think what was inside
I can't seem to fathom the dark of my history
I invented my own in Tacoma
Despite the gloom, something crackles and pulses between the crashing crescendos of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and the lilt of Case. The liner notes to lift yr. skinny fists like antennas to heaven! calls it "awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope and joy."
Art
Art about decay can involve meticulous documentation, such as the photo series Le Detroit by Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas. As Terence Dick notes in an essay on Le Detroit appearing in the debut issue of the photo journal Prefix, "Office buildings decay, vomit brick and mortar, and stare through shattered windows. Houses collapse, crumble away, gutted."
The book Irresistible Decay features numerous illustrations of plants overtaking the deserted monuments of abandoned civilizations. As Irresistible co-author Michael S. Roth notes, "The decaying buildings seem to be returning to the landscape, becoming once again part of a natural world from which they only appear to have been temporarily separated." The Detroit photos are startling because they so effectively debunk the assumed impenetrability/invincibility of the modern cityscape.
The theme of nature reclaiming its ownership was used to equally dramatic effect in the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. For anti-modernist rabble-rouser Tyler Durden, there can be no redemption until the present is completely eradicated. Progress will only occur when one can "hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle."
Literature
Clint Burnham's short story book Airborne Photo describes dead-end lives and the neighbourhoods that contain them: "The walls in their kitchen were covered in images, ugly, torn from magazines or found on the street. A beetle which had eaten the cockroach chalk around the fridge was dead, its legs visible in the tile." The story, called "Chalk Circle," uses decay as setting; meanwhile the introductory sentence of "Recreational" uses decay as metaphor: "Once I thought of playing hockey, chasing cocaine and pucks like ghosts in a Parkdale television set."
Parkdale is Toronto's skid row, its once great area turned bad; Vancouver's East Hastings minus the heroin. As if to underscore the connection, the recent issue of Matrix (#59) featured an interview with Clint Burnham, his thoughts juxtaposed with photographs from the Woodward's building and the downtown Eastside.
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Tithonus by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Quotes About Decay
"There must be a rate at which one forgets, and as long as a city changes at that rate or a slower one, change registers but it doesn't disorient, for there are sufficient points of orientation and triggers of recollection.... But if the pace of change accelerates, a disjuncture between memory and actuality arises and one moves through a city of phantoms, of the disappeared, a city that is lonely and disorienting..." -- Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City
In a recent issue of baseline magazine (a British publication about typography), Nicola Bailey provides eight pages of photos of aged signs. As she puts it, "Intrigued by the way lettering is often ignored or left to decay, I began to take photographs of buildings which had changed their use but were still labeled with their original function, or photographs of words that were heavily over-painted, were cut in half or had been allowed to fade away." She is equally fascinated by how far words on signage can deteriorate before they become "merely enigmatic or completely illegible."
"In the epic underground storage areas of the Royal Ontario Museum there is a room containing thousands of live dermestid beetles crawling over the skeletons of seals and arts, eating the residual flesh, cleaning the bones for display. They move through the drawers that store catalogued remains of tiny mammals; they inch up the wall and carpet the floor. Watching them in that terrible clinging smell, you'd think they'd be a metaphor for something -- decay, renewal."
-- "ROM Wasn't Built In a Day," by Don Gillmor, Saturday Post
"Wabi-sabi seemed to me a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restored a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living. Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting caught up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surrounds such creative acts. Wabi-sabi -- deep, multi-dimensional, elusive -- appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that I felt was desensitizing American society.
-- Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi
To know the margins of city life is also to know the centre.
-- j. m. merriman, The Margins of City Life, 1991
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
-- Oliver Goldsmith, (1728-1770), Deserted Village
"Covered in hope and Vaseline. Still cannot fix this broken machine. Watching the hole it used to be mine. Just watching it burn in my steady systematic decline." -- Gave Up, Nine Inch Nails
"In a consumerist society, collecting serves a very specific psychological function. While roaming around the countryside, hunting for bargains, the gourmand of garbage gives a clever spin to the act of shopping. He recharacterizes his materialism as an activity of a higher magnitude, not a selfish act of purchasing a product but a custodial one of salvaging the past, the conscientious work of a dedicated folk archeologist who excavates forgotten windfalls that might otherwise have ended up, with potentially disastrous consequences, in careless hands. Collecting is part of a dialogue that the consumer is having with his own conscience, a way of venting remorse for his acquisitiveness by reconfiguring his spending sprees as the freelance scholarship of a disinterested pseudo-scientist who performs a selfless civic duty of curating and conserving the material culture of the past." -- Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic
There are only two types of people that hang out at The Valley Room: really cool old people and goths. The cool old people remember when it was glamorous to shop at Eaton's... The last time I was there I saw a woman that looked like an ancient Bette Davis. She was smoking a cigarette looking very bored with the world. Why do the goths hang out with these old people? They like the ambience -- the sense of faded grandeur." -- Clytemnestra Romanov, Spooky Winnipeg
Internet Resources
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit by Lowell Boileau Lowell, a 300 page site inspired by the transformation of Detroit from industrial to information age city.
Sleeping Cities by Roger Scruton (a Conservative take on decay).
Urban Decay is a cosmetic company whose lipstick shades include Smog, Rust and Acid Rain.
Readymade is a hipster recycling magazine.
Urbanism was launched in mid-1998 in a campaign to save Toronto's CNE Grandstand Stadium from demolition. Urbanism is dedicated to Canadian Modern Architecture & Design, and to the Preservation of Architecture across the Dominion of Canada.
Christopher Leo on barricading our cities, and our minds.
Photographs of Coney Island.
Toronto photographer Jen Wilson.
Photographs of Empty Spaces.
Photographs of urban places.
Great site about the poetics of decay
Eroded Margin | Everything Falls Apart | Everything Addendum | Decay Anthology | Decay Bib
