Don't You Look Pretty in Your Cool New Jeans

Here comes the boom of the end of the civilization and don't you look pretty in your cool new jeans.
Here comes what we get for a hundred years of privilege squandered and nothing done to educate our children or save our planet.
Here comes the cabriolet edition of capitalism and the end of an empire you were too conceited to even protect.
Here comes the rising tide. Here comes the Middle East. Here comes the weather. Here comes everybody.

-Robert Montgomery

I have an entire collection of emergency websites to visit when I run out of ways to procrastinate--my daily website rounds include iwastesomuchtime.com, dearblankpleaseblank.com, time.com--the usual. But sometimes they all fail me and I run out of ways to procrastinate. That's when I used to start getting desperate. But then one day, I discovered StumbleUpon, which is basically a procrastinator's heaven. 

StumbleUpon is a website that provides users with a new website based on the interests they indicated every time they click on the stumble button, and it helps users discover new websites. I've stumbled on a lot of cool things, but by far the favorite thing I have discovered is WORDS IN THE CITY AT NIGHT. It is a project in the United States and Europe by artist Robert Montgomery, who "hijacks" public advertising space to post his messages. He posts messages that are usually strongly worded denunciations of modern culture that mock its values and ideals. His work is, in his own words “an attempt to describe in public space what it feels like to live now.”

The words that he uses are so beautiful and powerful, and they have the sort of truth in them that makes me ache when I realize it. Much of his work points out the loneliness of the lives that people lead today. One of the most enduring phrases that has stayed with me is "and in all pictures now, even the famous people have begun to look lost and lonely."

Some of his work is available online at his website.

"Echoes of voices in the high towers, all wounds explained here, all knives bandaged, all empires arrested, all castles unbuilt, all hearts unbroken."