"One day, while hiking around a dried-out wash to get at a particularly inaccessible stretch of fence, I also came across a den of foxes. Startled, one of them had shot out from the dark trellis of sagebrush to retreat across the flood bed, its paws scattering the rain-gathered stones. At some distance, it stopped and turned to look back at the threat from which it had fled. It met my eyes with its own, two dark pools as slick as oil, glinting with that wild light you can only catch for an instant, flashing across feral bodies like some force inside them writhing to get out, to spill into the world uncontained and that struggle itself driving the body forward, a glimpse of wilds untamed though plundered. In those eyes was a reminder that despite the mundane world-breaking driven by price and profit, worlds could still be born, linked together, made to bloom—that even when the economy seemed to have reached an unprecedented expanse, it was driven by a crisis that forced its very core constantly to decay, interstices opening within the cycles of accumulation and devastation."

-- Phil A. Neel in Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

Part politics, and perhaps part vanity, this site is dedicated to exploring our wonderful Hell, full of billboards and brimstone. Somedays this may involve an outward glimpse from a car window, seeing "wilds untamed though plundered," and others this may involve inspecting a popular movie making its rounds through our individual screens.

Now, traversing the various circles of our Hell would be quite dull save for a healthy dose of belligerence. Truly, how can you not develop some sense of anger at this point. Everyone really does know, and I suppose they have for a while. Rather than pointing out the obvious and demanding indignance in the face of oncoming catastrophe, we propose the view that the catastrophe has come and gone. Or perhaps that instead of being a single, KABOOM! of an event, it is much more anticlimactic and enduring. So get situated, take in the burnt view, smell the chemical breeze, and start taking names. The only way out is to recognize that we are here in the first place.

For any comments and questions, please email crackedwire@hellandbillboards.com