Borderlines

In New York - the westernmost point of a line that draws its semicircle to Graz in Austria - borderline behavior is one more mythologized attraction for tourists and transplants alike. The quasi-madness, the ersatz lunacy magnetizing dreamers to XX Century Gotham - is legendary, the fantasy of filmmakers in LA and Bombay, Helsinki and Sydney. The infinite line of the Empire State Building is said to herald capital's primitive longing for the sun, for holy transcendence. But its penultimate spire bears useless dirigible moorings, a direct trajectory to the moon, a lunatic fringe of skyhooks that support Adolph Loos's thesis of "ornament as crime".2 Borderlines are for crossing, like rules are made for breaking. Caught crossing the borderlines, one is crucified: jailed, expulsed, exiled. Rules comprise the markings of measurement removed from the body: infused in a meterstick, invested in law, never give an inch.