the dark-vowelled birds

there was a scene in the first ghost in the shell movie — reconaissance, the music simmers and mounts, and the leviathan cityscape of hong kong flows into the foreground.

walking through shanghai in the rain it was the same acrid & vivid sight– half-lit catacomic tenaments above the old neon covered alleys; unceasingly dense & moving; a highway above and the river of people below. galleries of shadow & light. no impulse. no sense of purpose or production besides the countless exchanges of things. in the languid rain-eaten air the city is dreaming of itself. its dreams are overlaid in mired lettering.