I’m walking through Manhattan at 3:13AM and I stumbles on this… a blow-up sex doll sitting in an empty rickshaw like she’s waiting for a fare that’s never coming?
Now this isn’t art, it’s archaeology. It’s evidence. Somebody else staged this little theater of the absurd and then abandoned it, and I just happened to be there with a camera when the city revealed its actual face. The face it only shows at 3:13AM when the performers have all gone home and the props are just sitting there in the street, naked and unexplained.
I didn’t arrange this,New York did. Some anonymous somebody went to the trouble of inflating that doll, placing her just so, and then walking away. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it was art. Maybe it was despair. Maybe it was all three and none of them matter because the result is the same: a monument to the city’s essential hollowness, just sitting there on the street for anyone awake and damaged enough to see it.
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves… A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
This Miller quote isn’t commentary now, it’s prophecy fulfilled. Miller wrote about the city as performance, as nothingness dressed up as meaning, and here’s the proof: a synthetic woman in a vehicle of exploitation, both empty, both abandoned, both ridiculous and heartbreaking in exactly the way Miller understood cities to be.
The only dishonest thing would’ve been walking past without documenting it. Because this is the real spectacle: not the one I build, but the one that remains when I stop building. The debris. The aftermath. The sex doll nobody came back for, sitting in a rickshaw going nowhere, at 3:13AM in the greatest city in the world.
That’s the ennui. That’s the meaninglessness. That’s the absolute truth of the thing.