The Prada store that got left behind
In the Texas desert near the little town of Marfa, on a stretch of Highway known as the loneliest road in America, sits the Prada store that got left behind. No attendants bustle behind its chic white counters, though it`s fully stocked with veblen bags and shoes. The automatic doors don`t open and no one will validate your parking, but the lights do come on at night, making its glowing glass frontage the only illumination for miles around.
It got left behind by the Prada herd as they were driven over the Texas deserts 5 years ago, the runt of the litter that couldn`t keep up with the others. Ever since then it has remained by the roadside, waiting for its fuel source to die out, watching as its expensive goods slowly slide out of fashion. At night it dreams of crowds of uptown yuppies fawning over its leatherwork, and briefly knows contentment.
Photo by Jonathon Percy.
The aftermath of Oradour’s War
We set up the machine guns in the barn, weighing their tripod legs down with heavy chunks of firewood. When the men were shepherded in they saw the black gun muzzles and began to panic, shouting out warnings to their fellows in back. We answered with soft words, hushed voices, our hands on our pistols. “Only the sympathizers”, we soothed. “You’re free to go if you’re not a sympathizer. Are you a sympathizer?” They shook their heads and filed in.
We took to the guns and shot them all in the legs. The muzzle-flashes lit the glum barn like a lightning storm, the torrential explosion of munitions its own rolling wave of thunder. Afterwards was a moment of silence, then the moaning began. None of us wanted to venture into that tangle of thrashing limbs, so we tossed buckets of gasoline over the bucking creatures nearest to us, followed by a sparking flare. The place flamed to life like Dante’s Inferno. We didn’t even wait for the screaming to stop before heading off to blow up their families.
Oradour-sur-Glane is a village in west-central France. The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site and the original has been maintained as a memorial.
Photo by Ramos Andrade.
Archaeo-exploratory of the fabled Carhenge
The avout Mexicoate writer Caso Andrade (25th century CE) may refer to Carhenge in a passage from his Bibliotheca historica. Citing the 24th-century CE historian Hecataeus of New Europa and “certain others”, Andrade says that in “a land beyond the Dissected Till Prairie” (i.e. the only other remaining landmass in what was once the mid-Western Amish States) there is “an island no smaller than the remnants of Washington” in the circular sea called Lincoln-Mercury, so named because it is thought to be the last resting place of the 56th president. The current inhabitants of this place worship him as an apotheotic All-Father, and there is “both a magnificent sacred precinct of Lincoln-Mercury and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape.” Some writers have suggested that Andrade’s’ “Lincoln-Mercury” may indicate the ancient lands of the free peoples of the United States, and that the spherical temple with its dressed metal sarsens may have been a primitive calendrical observatory and place of ceremonial worship.
Carhenge is a replica of the 4,500 year old Stonehenge ruin in England. It was built by Jim Reinders in Nebraska, USA, using 38 vintage automobiles spray-painted gray and posed after the original sarsens, lintels, and altar stones of Stonehenge. Now the work is surrounded by a ring of ‘portal’ cars, dinosaurs, and giant fish, spray-painted in gaudy colors and forming a wider ‘Car Art Reserve’.
Altar ‘stone’. Photo by Jeremy Burgin.
The sea that vanished overnight
It was a hectic morning for us. We shipped out of Muynak three hours before the dawn, and a sharp Uzbeki wind swept us far over the Aral. First mate Alisher worked the rigging, Nursultan primed the nets, and I set us on a course to drift towards the Pamir flow. Salt water sprayed over the starboard bowsprit and I watched the eastern skies lightening. Somewhere back there was my wife and our children, still asleep. By mid-day I would be home, and scraping the stink of fish from my skin.
I must have fallen asleep. I lift my head from the wheel and it crumbles beneath me. I look at my hands, they are red with rusted metal. Beneath them the decking has rotted through, and I am looking into the sand-filled depths of the hull. I take a panicked step backwards and stagger, barely catching my balance on the rotten bow railing. “Alisher!” I call out. “Nursultan!” There is no answer. I look out, and see that the sea is gone. Now there is only endless sand, spreading all about me, scattered with the hulking wrecks of other ships. I am alone.
The Aral Sea was once one of the four largest lakes in the world, situated between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. In the 1960′s the Soviet Union redirected its tributary rivers into irrigation projects, and as a result by 2007 it had shrunk to 10% of its original size. Once prosperous fishing towns like Muynak were left stranded miles from the retreating waters, their boats high and dry on the salt-encrusted desert sand.
Photo by Urban Explorer.
Dunes envelop the Namibian toytown of Kolmanskop
One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown houses in neat little rows, serviced them with a tinker rail-line, then sat back and sighed in contentment. The next day he walked away and left the toytown to the sands.
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the deserts of Namibia, built by the DeBeers mining company in 1908, abandoned in 1956 after diamond prices crashed. The town is named after a transport driver named Jonny Coleman (Kolman) who took shelter from a sandstorm on a hill (Skop) in the vicinity.
Kolmanskop toytown, drifting into the dunes.
The half-built ruin of the Dreamer’s Gate
Before you stands a gate. It rears 7 meters high and the fence it bifurcates stretches on for as far as the eye can see. Its walls glisten and seem to move with a life of their own. Across their endless expanses giant figures burrow, retreating behind blankets of spiders webs, emerging again down spiral staircases far off in the distance. Through the gate you can see the Dreamtime. You see the pattern of the land, and the Songlines that have sprung up around it. Gaze into it for long enough and you might even catch a glimpse of the Creation.
The Dreamer’s Gate is an abandoned work of art, built by an Australian called Tony Phantastes over a 6-year period leading up to 1999. For the past ten years it has baffled passersby on the road into the small town of Collector, and been the target of community efforts to have it torn down for structural disintegrity. It is as yet unfinished.
Left, completed, section of the gate.
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