“High Line,” Google Image search by Rob Walker, November 7, 2011.
From time to time, however, something from Portfolioplis does manifest in the middle (or on the fringes) of more familiar geography, some three-dimensional place where people not unlike you and me live, work, litter, and worry about getting laid off tomorrow. There’s always something uncanny about these structures and spaces. They never look quite like the postcard. The surroundings, the context, are all wrong. And the citizenry suddenly seem so … specific.
I find this perversely reassuring. I’ve visited The High Line, and frankly found it indistinguishable from Portfolioplis to a degree that unnerved me. A visitor moves through such spaces cautiously, half-expecting that it is all mirage — but wondering just the same if might contain, possibly, some kind of portal, some secret passageway to Porfolioplis itself.
Postcards from Portfoliopolis, via Tamar S.
