26 October '07

Last week I mentioned, briefly, that a shooting had occurred in the apartment building adjacent to mine. About fifteen minutes after I left the house, shots were heard. Two guys were seen fleeing the area, two more were found inside with wounds to the chest. One of those inside died, the other is in intensive care. When I returned home, at about 3am the next morning, the police had just left. Indeed, the only trace of any ‘disturbance’—what a horrible euphemism—was the discarded ‘Do Not Cross’ tape in the gutter. I only learnt of the incident when I left the house the next day as the police presence had resumed. And what a police presence it was. A great, crime-fighting machine was turned on and went about its work, mechanically: a van was parked on the street with a mounted megaphone, looping a plea for information in a booming Orwellian voice (except that the voice was female, a sign of an NYPD conscious of their public image); posters were stapled to all posts also calling for information, promising a reward and anonymity; a forensics truck spent the day parked outside, white-suited officers coming and going. Curiously, there was a lack of media interest. Not surprising, I suppose, for a country saturated with crime to not be titillated by a mere shooting.

Once the police left, a shrine was erected on the steps of the house opposite the crime scene. Below a photo of Jose Batista, the 15 year-old deceased—another horrible euphemism—lie a row of candles, flanked at the corners by opened bottle of Corona. In the first couple of days following the shooting, people sat by the shrine. Now they do not, though the candles continue to burn.

Now that a week has passed, the shock of the shooting has largely evaporated. For a while it was, actually, quite disarming. I don’t, and never did, feel in any danger—the facts suggest that this wasn’t a random shooting, and thus could have happened anywhere—so the cause of the disarmament must be located elsewhere. As I wrote in the last entry, the feeling of listening to rap music about gang or drug shootings when walking past the site of a shooting is uncanny, almost perverse. The perversity comes, I think, from being that close to violence but not being able to comprehend it, except through parody. In this case the RZA saying ‘Keep it in the hood, niggaz walk with they gun / Keep it in the hood that's where we come from’. And because it is incomprehensible, the violence, the ‘incident’, is ignored and forgotten. So that now the posters calling for information have, like the police tape, fallen into the gutter, and the cardboard protecting the shrine from the wind has been heavied with rain, and has sagged and crumpled.

And so we get to the ‘incident’, the ‘deceased’, the ‘disturbance’. This country has to be the world-capital of the euphemism. New Zealand is, of course, guilty too but the extent of it here is remarkable. You do not go to the toilet here, for example, you go to the bathroom or the water closet. What this euphemising reflects, I’m not sure. I do know that it is linked to the desire for sterility that the advertisers of household cleaners and accessories feed off. A professor once related an anecdote in which he was visiting a winery on a bus with other tourists. Wineries often run sheep also, letting them graze on the grass in between the vines or in adjacent paddocks. In one of the wineries that my professor visited, a sheep lay dead—presumably of natural causes—in a paddock near the driveway. The tourists refused to buy wine from the winery, associating the dead sheep with some imagined contamination in the wine. These tourists, like the alarmingly high percentage of American children who don’t realise that meat in Styrofoam containers in the supermarket come from actual animals, or the patrons who obsessively and compulsively clean every surface of their house with lemon-scented bleach, or, indeed, the perpetrators—like myself— of meaningless euphemisms, are disconnected. Disconnected from nature, from the smell of ferment and sweat, from the feeling of grease and surfaces tacky with accumulated scent, from the sour aftertaste of milk that has just expired, from the sight of death and unconcealed, uncontrived, emotion.

There is, it seems, more and more that classifies as obscene. For Heller writing in the middle of the twentieth-century, the sight of two leg-stumps on a raft in the ocean was what it took to draw people to peek guiltily through the bushes at the edge of the shore. Fifty years later, we are so diligent at sanitisation that asthma cases have increased because we’re no longer so resistant to the detritus the world hurls at us.

This week has been a long one, school has been draining with myriad essays, presentations, books to read, notes to take. Tomorrow I head to Mountain Lakes New Jersey for a night as part of a United Nations conference. I looked up Mountain Lakes and, as it turns out, there are no mountains. And the lakes are man-made. Someone, somewhere, must be laughing at us.

19 October ‘07

At the bottom of this page, you will notice, are now advertisements placed by Google on behalf of various companies. And Google’s intuition is such that it predicts, based on the content of my writing, what visitors to this site will be inclined to purchase. Thus, in the unlikely event that I spend a paragraph talking about microwave dinners (of which I just enjoyed a particularly lacklustre example―fettuccine with broccoli florets―in which the florets exhibited a plastic chemical tang and the fettuccine was laced with rubber and the whole dish left an aftertaste somewhere between asphalt and pine-bark, but hey, it was three dollars and according to the label had less than 7 grams fat) the advertising below will reflect this and presumably offer visitors to this site an incentive for assessing said dinners or some such ruse.

The advertisements are an optional service provided by Google, the owner of whoever owns this website. Every time a visitor clicks on the advertisement, one ten-thousandth of the advertisement fee―or some equally miniscule amount―is tallied, set against my name, and after an indeterminate amount of time a cheque arrives in my mailbox. As I have no misconceptions about the amount of traffic this site generates, I expect the cheque to be somewhere between one cent and a dollar. It is a relief, I find, to give over to it―whatever it is―and let the tide of commoditisation wash over those possessions of mine that do not bear some birthmark of their origin. The experiment will occupy some time, anyway, and at the very least I will acquire a talisman―in the form of a cheque that’s quite literally worth less than the paper it’s printed on―of the unbridled capitalism this country is the beating, feverish heart of.

And unbridled it is, the metaphor holds true. The system has bolted and is running at a speed and in a direction I doubt even Marx or Nostradamus predicted. Certainly those who herald-in the new age of electronics and transactional relationships (myself included) did not. Witness last Sunday, at the Empire State Building - an apt example, not only of the ruthless commercial assault that capitalism (is that it?) elicits, but of the artery-clogging, gluttonous obesity that it infects systems with. From arriving at the bottom of the Empire State to the ten-minutes on the viewing deck, to the ground again took a friend and I two hours. We entered the building, rode an escalator, and arrived at the back of a queue that zigged and zagged the entire mass of a hall that, once surely reserved for events of class, now served as the pen for the awaiting masses. At every corner, as we advanced towards the x-ray machines and metal-detectors, some lackey tried foisting on us pamphlets detailing the upgraded viewing-deck tour, or the audio guide, or the 3D map, or the countless other trinkets and plastic souvenirs that, once they serve their purpose are crumpled and tossed at the overflowing bins outside the building. Once through the x-ray we enter another queue for the ticket booth. Once through the ticket booth we enter another queue for the lift. At the lift we hand our tickets to one usher who rips the stub off and hands it to another usher who scans it who hands it to another usher who strikes it with a pen who hands it back to us. Once on floor 86 we enter the queue for the lift to floor 96. At this stage we tire of queues and opt for the stairs (recommended as more efficient by various signs on the wall) only to land behind a flight-full of similarly-inclined tourists. As we try to exit the building the same process is followed. The only difference being that the descending stairs are closed. Excessive and lethargic in its conception, the process proved equally so in its execution - the offspring of a sluggish and ineffectual system.

Ah, but the view at the top of the building was remarkable. To all horizons stretched towers, houses, schools, parking-lots, ghettos, sports-fields, motorways, freeways, highways, road-signs, lampposts, potholes, sewer-pipes - interrupted only by rivers and the sky, and all of it teeming with organisms that with the benefit of indoctrination are identified as people. To the unbiased eye they seem like parasites on agar or maggots on a cadaver. And as a mass they possess the same beauty as maggots or parasites – a beauty that comes from complete and total consumption, of purely animal instinct, of action caused by internal forces alone (a beauty that can be compared with the voracity that a pack of piranhas are said to take to a bovine, reducing it to a skeleton in under four minutes. Or similarly, when I was a child, the experiment conducted by my grandmother and I in which a dead mouse was wrapped in a net and set in the garden for a week. On returning, the mouse had been reduced to a perfectly-preserved silhouette of bones, a remnant of some prehistoric era).

As you ascend 96 floors to the viewing platform of the Empire State Building, the observable vestiges of culture, of human-ness, descend, so that from the top all seems uncannily natural. As the ape is at home in the tree, the human is at home in the city. So perfect is our conception of an ideal environment, and so indifferent are we at marking the world, that all adjusted to suit. There is a profound beauty in this perfection. And while this beauty―like that of a supermodel―elicits a kind of jealous repulsion, for those of us who are uncertain of how or why to fight it, the whole conception is endearing enough to lie prone in front of and worship.

PS – last night, about thirty minutes after I posted this blog, a shooting occurred in the apartment building next door. One man was killed, the other injured. Two Hispanics, so it has been reported, were seen fleeing the building. I was out at the time, en route to a friend’s house, so all I knew of the incident was the yards and yards of discarded Do Not Cross tape lying in the gutter of my street when I came home six hours later. I happened to be listening to some hip-hop as I left the house today, the reports from the news channels (see link below) still resonating. The band was the Wu Tang Clan, and the lyrics were about shootings in Harlem. The experience was unnerving. More on this at some later stage.

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=74768

West, North, East from the Empire State

You Plastic Crab – 12 October ‘07

It began violently raining two hours ago, thick rain, heavy rain, monsoon rain. Two hours ago it started and it hasn’t yet let up. Apparently, if it rains for long enough, the subways flood and all service to the Island shuts down. It is gratifying to know that one of the world’s greatest cities can still be humbled by the weather - that all the architects and city planners and billions of dollars still haven’t found a way to subdue nature. This week has been a blur. The days have rolled into each other―mornings stretch into evenings stretch into mornings―and sleep is but an inadequate punctuation. There was a time when I was working that the ‘rolling’ continued for weeks and weeks until I realized that the details of entire months were obscured and had no form. Routine exacted a kind of muting force - sending a fine mist over hours and days until they were indistinguishable from one another.

Of note, perhaps: on Saturday, like many people back home and a few here, I joined some friends to watch the rugby. Also like many people back home it seems, before the game I just did not consider the possibility that our team might lose. So alien was the idea of a loss that when it happened the words to articulate it were not available. Thus, when the game ended, no one said a word. We just sat and stared and occasional cussed, to break the silence more than anything else. It is not so much that I mind us losing―though the French I had been riling all week with attacks on their inferiority exacted a swift and humiliating revenge―it is more that the result was outside the scope of my comprehension. I simply couldn’t understand it. And while the ramifications of the loss are unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as the reporters back home are making out, it is still disappointing. Rugby is the only thing I can think of that comes close to entering the global arena that New Zealand should win. Not just ‘might’, but should. For once we weren’t the underdogs, for once we weren’t the long-shots. It was ours to take, the conditions were right, but still we did not, or could not do it. And this distinction, between ‘did’ and ‘could’ is, I think, crucial.

Last week I went to a concert of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Last night, The National. Aside from the hordes of hipsters with square-glasses that were dubiously lacking in magnification, the music was divine. Another holy distraction from having to think and really consider (really consider) things. Another way of keeping myself―ourselves―occupied so we don’t have to try and explain the madness and absurdity of it all. Like the feeling that comes from staring at something for long enough so that it becomes bigger and bigger or darker and darker until its true shape is lost in the liquid at the back of the eyeball. Concentrating on something so much that the layers or rationality heaped on top of it are stripped away and what is left is pale and sickly, like a stomach after winter, and is in the same way easily burnt by the sun.

There are those who say that commodities shouldn’t make an individual happy. Or least that the craving and satisfaction that comes from acquiring a commodity is superficial and reflects a shallow individual. Last Saturday the camera I bought on Ebay arrived. It is beautiful – large, heavy, black, shiny – an intricate composition of plastic and wire and solder and motherboard and glass and crystal. And I am happy to admit that it makes me happy. Every time I look at it I grin. I like the camera. It is benign and dumb, like a big slobbering dog with a stupid grin. The camera makes no attacks on my time, does not interfere with my thoughts. There are other devices that are more subversive, malignant - they infiltrate lives on the pretext of improvement. I am not sure, for example, whether the cellphone I possess is mine or whether I belong to it. So good is its grip that I mother it and fondle it. So pervasive is its sound that I cannot think of anything else but the peal it sends forth. So seductive is its potential that I cannot be without it. So comprehensive is its colonisation of all other possibilities that I cannot be rid of it. It is a devious device which, like email, Facebook and occasionally Minesweeper, makes claims on my time that extend far beyond the real usefulness. It is part of the technological fallacy of improvement that I think Ted Hughes is getting at below.

Do not Pick up the Telephone

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores
The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone
Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

O phone get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in your breathing
World's emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses
Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone
A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone
A dead body will fall out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone

5 October ‘07

And so what is around me has changed. Gone are the uneven floors with their many burrowing-places for persistent cockroaches, indignant at the threat of my raised shoe. Gone too are the light fittings that never managed to truly light, only stave darkness away and remain that way, pressing constantly, the darkness always encroaching. That is, I have moved house. I have a new bed (a new bed - the first one I have ever had, I think). Its memory is young and its surface hard, but at least springs and cushion have replaced lumpy foam atop the steel bars of the fold-out couch that has been my resting place since I have been in New York. I have walls to fill with photos and soon will have shelves to fill with knick-knacks. I have new roommates, new spaces to acclimatise to, new areas to explore.

Moving was an ordeal. In little over seven weeks I have―by a crude calculation―gathered twice the volume of what I have arrived with. And since I am stubborn, and my new house is only six blocks from the old, I insisted (to myself, I suppose) on carrying everything. Six round-trips later I regretted the decision and spent the eight dollars I had saved on a cab on ice cream and a sandwich.

The new place is much smaller, but I have no problem with that, especially coming into winter. Less air to heat and fewer spaces for the warmed air to escape. My roommates are friendlier, though still reticent as those who meet by chance often are. One is an actor – see www.jackfitz.com – a lively fellow who signs off sentences like letters: ‘stay cool, man’ or ‘carpe diem, man’. The other, a share broker. Nice guys who subsist, it seems, on microwave dinners consumed in their rooms. There is an equipped kitchen also (my last place had four can-openers and no knife). This is important as I have grown fat and lethargic from eating out twice every day (though I have mastered the art – there are six places within a 2-kilometre radius that have meals for less than five dollars. Thus, all I need to do is rotate between these places and nuance my selection to avoid the vapidity that would result from a monotonous meal routine – beef and broccoli on Monday night, beef and string-bean on Thursday).

In Spanish Harlem, more so than in other neighbourhoods I have visited, streets are an important marker of identity. My old street, 141, for example, had its local domino-players, crack-sellers, housewives. The new street, 134, the same. And the street that connects 134 with 141 repeats the same stores over and over: deli (read dairy) is next to a hairdresser is next to a Chinese-food joint is next to a dollar-store is next to a deli and so on. And each of these stores, like the streets has its locals, the folk who carry deck chairs and spent balmy evenings on the pavement half-heartedly watching the baseball on the television through the window of the store. It took a long time, perhaps a month, for the locals of my street and my shops to advance through staring at me during the first week, ignoring me the second and third, and giving me a tacit nod as my place in the neighbourhood was tentatively confirmed in the fourth and following. Now I must repeat the induction, be initiated through simple acts like holding the door open for residents in my building or kicking a ball back to some kids.

Scientists once conducted an experiment based on one of Einstein’s lesser-known theories, from memory, whereby lasers were mounted in aircraft and receptors mounted on the ground. By some secret of science which is beyond me, these scientists proved as incontrovertibly as scientists can that time actually does slow down as you speed up. The effects are miniscule – a commercial pilot, for example, would be a second younger over a lifetime than a land-dweller – but the effect measurable nonetheless (Einstein hypothesised, if I remember correctly (there are so many of these ‘facts’ which I dream, steal or simply make up) that a merry-go-round travelling clockwise faster than the speed of light would advance through time, a merry-go-round travelling anti-clockwise would navigate the past).

The reason I mention all this―and perhaps it is a trite observation, I have not investigated whether anyone else has already said it, though the ‘New York minute’ cliché is well-known―is that I am quite sure that Einstein was wrong – the faster you move, the faster time speeds up. People who have lived on Manhattan for 10 years, as an example, age 15. I have been here for two months, it could easily have been three or six. A friend noted that many people in the city are transients – the population of eight-million swells to twelve-million during the working day. And that’s ignoring the Manhattan residents who are students, temporary workers, et cetera. The sheer volume of that movement, of that amount of transience, perhaps contributes to the speed of the place. Perhaps the kinetic energy of four-million people moving in and out of the city has the a pull on those who remain akin to that of the moon on the ocean. Twice a day, as people come and go, we are tugged in all directions, our blood collects closer to our skins, our lungs press against our ribcages like the tide, our organs rumble. You feel yourself getting old in the this city but rather than seeking rest, rather than allowing yourself to feel weary, you move faster, you push against the tide, you seek the thrill, you scorn lethargy, and forever you try and escape the scythe at your back.