Amanda Manitach, a finalist for the 2012 Genius in Visual Arts, has a poetic essay in City Arts, Psychogeographique, that's connected with the City Arts Fest, the tickets of which are available here, and concerns the city, the funnanimal city, the flesh and layers of the city, the remains of the city. Her city is, of course, Seattle, and she presently lives in a doomed place...

I live on Capitol Hill’s Bauhaus block. My apartment is in one of the buildings scheduled to be torn down next June to make way for a mixed-use building. Two months after I moved in, property management left a printed letter wedged in my door explaining the situation. Along with everyone in the neighborhood, I was shocked that even this historic cluster of auto row buildings and beloved boutique shops like Wall of Sound and Le Frock could be demolished and replaced by condos.

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity.