CONCRETE/BRICK AND NEON BY ROBERT PIRSIG

A Isla Estrella la arruinaron los arquitectos/ingenieros...que a su vez culpan a los planificadores que nunca hubo, planificaron nada, por eso existe un tren tres veces mas grande de lo necesario, perdiendo 150 millones anuales.  

En fin, este articulo en un libro que tengo hace 4 decadas me recoldo a Puelto Rico...En realidad trata de USA, pero es imagen de la construccion en cualquier pais del mundo...con una plasta de concreto/asfalto como ciudad. 

Lo de Ruben Blades es otra foto/imagen musical de la mierda que es este entorno encantado paraiso.

https://youtu.be/EX_M7MOKaO8





THE CITY closes in on him now, and in this strange perspective it becomes the anthithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails,  dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies.

Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman:  seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off other straight streets forever..

If is was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive.  It is the little, pathetic  attempts at Quality that kill.  The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist.  Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it.  A few square feet of grass, after Montana.  It they just left out the hedge and grass it would be all right. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost.

Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid by the vendors of substance.  He thinks of them ant night alone with their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, starring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists here, crying to heaven God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement and brick.