Our challenge is to be town criers. The billionaire mayor is creating a vertical suburb. New York is burning. I'll raise my daughter here. It is a once-great coastal city and the earth is closing over it. That will put the fire out. I see roots hanging down out of low-hanging clouds. Each of us knows that the time to cry out is moments away. The New York Times tries to silence it by reporting it. But the tornadoes and volcanoes and landslides throw our breakfast tables in the air.
Our knowledge is a library of love for this city. The earth is closing over it. New York is burning. That is how the movies portray it, over and over again. Giant waves, back-drafts from hell, aliens in ships the size of a second New York. The advertising for the next Apocalypse assails us from the subway walls as we wait for the F Train. Meanwhile, above us, bankers in amazing glass buildings make their money destroying mountain ranges. Men put mountains on the walls and stick paint-brushes into wounds in their heads and dance dollar signs on the cloudy cliffs.
Our assignment, should we choose to take it, is to interrupt New York's conversion into the New Fake Europe. Middle-brow billionaires who survived bin Laden are forcing fresh arrivals who longed to be artists into a cross-legged position before a five-buck cappuccino, the full lotus torture of tourist leisure, a unique mental island where climate change is forgotten because the blush of status and good-looking youth is so strong, as if a magazine ad fell like the wall of a glass building on a park and the synthetic baby socialites just appeared, enamel-skinned, styled for an unknown year, their purchases already processed by unseen computers high up in the glass, leaving the body to lean over smiling to sip.
Nine million naked citizens know where their gardens should have been. When a neighbor defends a tree we rush out to make a documentary about it. Then NYPD officers, Yankee fans with loaded guns, demand that we produce our film permit while videotaping us from a foot away. All imagery must flow toward the city's logo. The arts have disappeared behind glass. New York is burning. The human project is accelerating in reverse. The glamorous menace of our city's past -- where someone bit your ear in an alley and you knew that you could be a full-blown eccentric and universally loved forever? That is now for sale. It's a fire sale.
We took the wrong subway. Don't you see? The earth's future is a much bigger deal than New York's past. Andy Warhol rises from the dead for 15 minutes and the earth flows into him. Andy's a druid! Andy's a shaman on the edge of town laughing with the rocks! Oh what the earth can do with 15 minutes.