New York, November '07

30 November '07

In usual circumstances I would be loath to issue forth a photo of a sunset. But this photo—by no means a special by itself—illustrates a feature of this city that has been getting to me like an itch.

A couple of nights ago, as I was waiting for a friend on a busy street, an old man stood up from a huddle of blankets and bags under a makeshift shelter, walked to the corner, and began screaming. Held aloft in his right hand was a bible, held below in his left was a handful of proselytising pamphlets. The man, turning to face whoever approached, bellowed crude theology in a thick accent. “Jesus, Jesus, Jeeeeeesus”, “Lord God, Lord God, Looooord Gaaawd”, on and on and on, over and over again, until the words began running into each other and all that emanated was guttural noise. He stood screaming, a rock in a river, as the lights changed and a crowd streamed past him. When there were no pedestrians, he stood screaming at cars and trucks, even as their engines flattened his voice and rendered him a comic, dancing, mime.

In one part of the world the man would be locked up, in another he would be canonised and made to perform the unction. In this city he was left to babble, so that his voice became as regular as the braking of traffic and his body as common as a shop’s façade. That the man was fanatical is of no great interest (there is, after all, little difference between the rabid fervour of religious extremists and that of environmentalists, for example. And both are plentiful). Rather, it was the atmosphere that the man helped create.

And here we return to the photo. If there is anything redeeming about the photo, it is that it hints at hyper-modernity, a kind of futuristic dystopia, a future akin to that depicted in myriad science-fiction movies and novels, movies and novels that trade in the currency of a dirty, stolid, seething brave new world where nature is replaced by culture and then culture is usurped by sentient machines, where the skies are lit up red by nuclear fumes, where there is either permanent, blistering sun, endless twilight, or stygian darkness, where the only music that suits is that of a thundering male vocalist, the only art that which is minimalist, barren, epic.

This sort of post-apocalyptic vision is what is conjured by the screaming man and the red sky. And it is this vision that is strengthened by the canyon streets, the decrepitude of the alleys, the great City that at every vantage point sweeps from horizon to horizon.

This kind of thinking is not new. Many writers and artists have venerated the City through their craft. Gotham City, for example, was described by the writer of Batman as ‘Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November’. But this is precisely what has been irking me. New York City, as with the rest of the United States, has spawned innumerable parodies, distortions, and caricatures, most of these in the dark and gritty vein described above. So prolific and effective are these parodies, however, that they end up replacing the actual city. Thus, perhaps the man screaming on the corner was only there because every vision of a post-apocalyptic city requires that a man be screaming on the corner. Perhaps the sky was only red because skies tainted by pollution and full of acid-rain must be red.

***

In other news, the mercury hit minus-five a couple of nights ago, or so they say. Gloves and scarves are now left home at your peril. Hands and neck I have mastered, but I have yet to figure out how to protect the face (there is, you see, the rather troubling bind of having a hypochondriac’s sensitivity to frostbite and a not-yet-local resident’s sensitivity to wearing a balaclava in my ‘hood). In combination with the tropical heating of most buildings and my bedroom, the cold weather demands an oft-daily ritual of dressing and undressing, donning and discarding layers. I don’t mind though, I like rituals. They force you to slow down, to stop and think. There has not yet been any significant snow, though stories of flurries on the outskirts of the city come through like war correspondence. There are fronts approaching and all we can do is wrap up and head for the shelter.

Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York '07

23 November '07

On Monday I woke to what looked like rain dropping past my window—I say ‘what looked like’ because the background against which I judged the substance is a brick wall interrupted only by the bathroom windows of people in the apartment building next door (if I wish to see the sky I must press my face to the glass and crane my neck at the gap between the buildings) and thus the substance could just as easily have been air-conditioning fluid, window-cleaners four-floors above, etc—yet there was no sound. I ran downstairs to the street to find that it was snowing. Well, ‘snowing’ is perhaps somewhat generous. There were, indeed, snowflakes but they liquefied six-feet above the ground and gathered in puddles that broke and rolled down the street.

Nonetheless, the snow is here. The season has changed. Winter is coming.

And with it a change in attitude. Gone is the exuberance, the unadulterated flaunting joy with which I first met the city. In its place—and here I speculate as the feeling is still new—is not resignation, is not melancholy but is something akin to the stance of a man who wears a thick jacket and bends forward, hands in pockets and head down, to walk into the rain. A new kind of joy must be sought, a new kind of experience also. This experience will, I hope, be grounded in a deeper appreciation of the city, an appreciation that comes from the changing relationship of stranger to acquaintance to friend to intimate.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that ‘one belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much as five minutes as in five years’. This statement implies that I, along with the eight-million other residents, will continue to plane the surface of this city. Wallowing in the shallows, aware of the depths but not able to reach them. I hope Wolfe is wrong.

This Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that is, in this country, of at least equal importance as Christmas (unlike Christmas though, Thanksgiving exists as a bastion of non-commercialisation in a country where even the advertisements have advertisements. So eager are shopkeepers to attract the patronage of New Yorkers that on the night of Halloween shop displays morphed from Jack-o-Laterns and witches to garish Santa Claus dolls, boxes dressed as presents, plastic trees (one had a Hillary Clinton figurine as the ‘angel’), fake snow and spray-painted pleasantries. And today, the day following Thanksgiving, stores ravenously outbid each other to open early—some at 3am—in the hope of luring the bargain-hunters who camped outside the stores with sleeping-bags, pillows and children to save $150 on a Nintendo). This year’s marketing is expected to be even more aggressive than the last. Americans are, apparently, less willing to spend this year because of the depressed economy. That said, there are advertisements on television that urge people to buy new cars for their lovers or spouses or children. New cars! The thought of it is absurd, almost grotesque.

In Harlem, where I live, Christmas thankfully attracts less cheer (thankfully because the neighbourhood, lurid enough already, would be veritably incandescent if shades of green and white and red and gold and silver were added). Save for the token stocking hanging from the display windows of a minority of shops, the few blocks that are my home remain as they always are. One effect of eschewing the tinsel, however, is that emerging from the ground downtown becomes even more assaulting. So garish were the floats and balloons at yesterday’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, that, emerging from the subway, I had to shield my eyes and wear sunglasses.

As the heavy weather comes down, as the snow falls and covers the pavement, as the sun shines from lower and lower in the sky, the reflection of window displays, the impeccable windows themselves, the carols in the stores, the buskers carolling on the street will all add to an atmosphere that has a sulphuric, caustic edge. A wonderland where the wonder is thinly-disguised as rampant blunt-force commercialism. And so it should be, we have little need for saints when we have idols. ‘Tis the season, after all.

P.S: Some of you have asked about school (my lack of discussion on the subject has left some concerned that I’ve stopped going and instead fill my time with sleep-ins, daytime television, and late-nights in the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen). The truth is that nothing much has changed since I last talked about it. I am still taking five classes, four of which have actual contact time. Of those four classes, two are deeply interesting. The professor of one, for example, is so incisive, so relentlessly interrogative and so rigorous in his analysis that I am often left reeling. His intellect is so well honed—for this particular application, at least—that there is little to be said in the response. Or there is much to be said, but little to add, to contribute. The invocations I would so often bait my classmates with in previous classes—just to elicit a response that I could cut down at the knees—are worthless. As I mentioned last time, such arguments would be refracted with a casual change in angle of the sword. They would glance off the blade, be exposed as fraudulent, and hit the ground without even a whimper.

In contrast, I have another class which is no more challenging that my first year at Victoria. And it’s even worse because there is none of the thrill of a novel way of learning, or the assumption—because of lack of comparison—that this is as good as it gets. Instead, the classes are sluggish, ineffectual, the professor indifferent, many of the classmates, and myself, likewise. Nonetheless, I am scoring fairly well on assignments and should be finished with the MA (sans thesis) in May ’08.

Imagined Skyline, New York '07

New York, 2007

16 November '07

A few weeks ago a great majority of television writers began a strike. Almost immediately, the production of current-affairs shows was halted. In a few weeks most sitcoms will do the same and in a few months the stockpiled scripts of the various dramas, thrillers and comedies will run dry and they, too, will cease production. For a nation infatuated with television, the strike seems, ostensibly, as dangerous for social cohesion and public satisfaction as the rationing of food during the depression and world-wars (television, after all, is almost as potent an elixir for a wandering mind as alcohol) The television networks, however, are well aware of the need to maintain programming and, thus, broadcasting continues: current-affairs shows are currently on repeat, sitcoms and dramas will soon do the same. So seamless was the transition by the networks and so well-versed are we in repeats that it’s difficult to notice any change (there is a similar occurrence in Orwell’s 1984 where Eastasia, the warring enemy for years, overnight becomes an ally and the previous ally, Oceania, becomes the warring enemy. There is also a similar occurrence in the Simpsons when Bart breaks Milhouse’s goldfish-bowl, killing the goldfish. Rather than admitting though, Bart convinces Milhouse that he never, in fact, actually owned goldfish).

About the same time as the writers struck, a group of Columbia students began a hunger strike. Sleeping in dome-tents with tables of Gatorade outside, the students hoisted placards expressing their resentment towards a litany of grievances, ranging from the University’s appropriation of various Harlem properties to a perceived culture of ‘hate’ (Columbia is currently expanding its campus by purchasing a swathe of properties. One of these properties, it turns out, is the building I currently occupy. Thus, and here is a rather delightful irony, I may be evicted from my apartment in February by the very university I attend. Touché, Moirae, touché).

While the hunger-strikers are of no great note—indeed, middle-upper class students everywhere have been the most vocal and able protestors for some decades (testament to their ability to do whatever-the-hell they want to without the need to earn a meal) just as workers everywhere have always battled for more money—the reception they have received from their respective institutions is interesting. The television networks, as I mentioned, are merely repeating old shows, and given that M*A*S*H is still being aired on some channels, this repetition could presumably continue for some time. Columbia University is merely ignoring the hunger-strikers as are, it seems, most of the twenty-thousand students who pass by their tents everyday. It is likely that both strikes will result in some small concession by either side. It is likely that the hunger-strikers will pack their tents, trash their signs, and be carried by supportive friends to their apartments, stopping at the hospital on the way for precautionary exams. It is likely that the writers will eventually settle with the networks and return home, feeling only slightly guilty that for the duration of the strike they continued to write for reality television, a genre not covered by their union agreement.

When thousands of people marched on Washington last year to protest the ‘n’th anniversary of the war in Iraq, the photograph that Reuters carried of the march was a person holding a placard that read ‘I couldn’t think of a slogan’. The absurdity of that placard, the nihilistic humour of it, points to one fallacious aspect of traditional protest. Surely an action that is state-sanctioned—no, encouraged—cannot possibly effect any real change? Surely complicity with the perpetrator cannot aid the cause of the victim? It is tempting to think of traditional protest in the same voice as the ‘hatespeak’ sessions in 1984. Hatespeak sessions, as Orwell depicts them, involve a room of usually sedate individuals venting a kind of animalistic rage at the government-vilified enemy on the giant screen in front of them for a pre-determined hour a week. The first part of the Sontag quote below seems to approach this argument (I have included the whole paragraph as it is so on-the-money), whereby traditional protest can, perhaps, be seen as a way to reconcile anarchy with patriotism.

‘America is an odd country. Its citizens have a strong anarchic streak, and they also have an almost superstitious respect for legality. They worship amoral success, and they also love to moralize about right and wrong. They consider government and taxation to be deeply suspect, almost illegitimate activities, but their most heartfelt response to any crisis is to wave their unconditional love of country and their leaders. Above all, they believe that American constitutes an exception in the course of human history and will always be exempt from the usual limitations and calamities that shape the destinies of other countries (Susan Sontag, from ‘A Few Weeks After’)

It seems the stolid and formulaic style of essay-writing has leaked into this transmission. It is difficult, I suppose, to separate-out parts of the self when the left hemisphere of the brain is so well connected to the right. By process of osmosis the thought-patterns housed in the left much leech into the right. But when the thought-patterns of the right, governed by the same principle of nature, flow into the left they are assimilated by logic and reason. Thus, this transmission reads like an essay. Shit, there’s even quotes. I apologise.

This week, like the two before it and the four to come, was dominated by schoolwork. Thankfully it was interrupted by a sterling concert from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! The concert itself was superb, the band a class-act in a disheveled, hipster kind of way—like Sinatra stoned, or Bing Crosby in the morning.

Also superb, and here we edge towards the greatest part of this trip so far, were the people. It is usual for us, as social beings, to collect acquaintances with the same kind of embedded fervor that drives a philatelist to collect stamps (one of the fallacies of Facebook is that acquaintances that would normally be cast-off, or shed as naturally as a locust’s shell, are hoarded so that they become meaningless). In New York there are, indeed, acquaintances, but there are also those who elicit a more passionate response. In New York I have met some fascinating people. People whose take on the world is so strikingly different from your own that the planets fall out of alignment and the whiplash-crack of it can be heard all the way to Irkutsk. These people have the same effect on me as an apocalyptic vision must have on a religious man. For a moment there is nausea as the neurons in the brain fire, burning tracks through the hemispheres. Then the body’s motor-reactions flood the cranium with adrenalin and serotonin, catalyzing a cloud of euphoria that leaves the corpus so light it displaces air and gravity and, like a shuttle launching, levitates a foot above the ground billowing dry-ice and shrapnel. In a billionth of a second you return to the ground but the mark of the flight is on you. The residue and smell of the smoke sticks to the clothes and the tracks in the brain are indelible.

These people, by their very presence, humour, and charisma spark such a reaction. These people are holy relics, mundane saints. These people make the city, they make the experience. These people cannot be collected, for their gait is so light they leave nothing tangible to collect. And it is partly for this reason that these people are so enthralling: they must be pursued, for they bend everything around them into a verb. They only exist in the present.

Anyway, it is getting late so perhaps I will just leave it to Kerouac:

'the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “AWWW!”'

New York, November '07

9 November '07

Fox News—which, as with most dogs, I cannot tell whether they are genuinely stupid or are so intelligent that they can pretend to be stupid to avoid games of ‘fetch’, or in this case serious reportage—has a weather segment in which a gushing man told us that snow may be on its way this weekend. Indeed, the week has demanded gloves and scarves, jackets and jerseys, socks pulled all the way up. The white noise of the air-conditioner in my window has been replaced by a somewhat unnerving sound of metal-on-metal coming from the pipe in the corner of my room that provides heat (New York apartments are almost uniformly heated by steam that is pumped from underground pipes into a machine in the basement of each building. That machine, in turn, pumps the steam through pipes and radiators to warm individual units. Residents—in my building at least—have no control over when and to what degree the steam is pumped, so that the temperature of rooms can reach that of the tropics (as I was writing this transmission earlier, my computer rolled its eyes, went blank and attempted suicide. On inspection, the steel connectors at the back were hot enough to glow in the dark). Indeed, the only way to regulate the heat is to open a window. The steam that feeds the machine that pumps the heat that makes Ben warm is, however, free and unlike New Zealand’s chest-freezer houses it is deep Autumn and I am in a tee-shirt). The sounds emanating from that pipe, which is presumably connected by some intricate lattice of similar pipes to the basement, could, given the sound-conductive quality of steel, have its origin anywhere along said lattice. Thus I am powerless to stop the tinks and dings and therefore, as with other background noise—neighbours, computer fan, and the countless humming electronic fields—it shall be evicted from consciousness.

More than usual last seven days have been a haze of sleep, coffee, irregular meals, subway stops, the Columbia library, late-night treks home, red wine, whiskey and so it continues, except now it is sessions in front of the computer that punctuate. Sessions writing essays and forever trying to restrict myself to language that is orderly, direct and unequivocal. There is a skill to it, yes, but the skill is nuanced and uninteresting. I am bolted to my chair. I read, then type, then read, then edit. Thus, like the machine in the basement that receives steam and pumps heat, more often than not, writing essays breeds a kind of resigned stupor, an automatic response to a mechanical call.

On that note, I shall return to the essay, less I get away from myself. To substitute for the second-half of this transmission I have attached a photo of the Statue of Liberty and a Helicopter. Make of it what you will—I have my own ideas.

Halloween

My night photography, it seems, needs work
(click to enlarge)

2 November '07

This week I left the Island—Manhattan, that is—for the first time. I crossed the border of New York and New Jersey via a tunnel struck deep beneath the Hudson River. It was almost a relief to be on the mainland. The Island, like the city itself, lacks permanence. When the polar icecaps melt, it will be among the first tracts of land that is reclaimed by the ocean. And even before then, I would not be surprised if the earth gives way to the immense weight of steel, concrete, brick, stone, blood, tissue and bone that sits atop the Island and envelops it all in some cavernous rent.

In any case, along with thirty-odd other students I boarded a bus en route to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Traveling above ground was, in itself, a revelation. The subway system is by far the most economical and efficient means to travel the city. Thus, all my crisscrossing of the Island has been subterranean. And being subterranean there is very little to look at. It is considered rude, I gather, to meet anyone’s eye. Consequently one must either glaze-over on some indeterminate vision or flit one’s eyes from one strategically-placed advertisement to the next. Further, because the whole experience occurs in artificial light and without significant markers, it is difficult to conjure any sense of spatiality. The distance between origin and destination is only as real as the ten-inches that separate the two on the subway map. The only marker of distance when underground is the ‘dud dud, dud dud, dud dud’ of the tracks, which after a while become meaningless. As such, the only possible measure of a journey is temporal: the time it takes the rider to arrive at their destination. On the bus this all changed. Focus shifted outwards to the passing cars, the passing people, the mile after mile of factories, bulk retailers, used-car yards, and anomalies like the Jam Shop, the viability of which must surely be precarious at best.

Soon into the journey the buildings next to the interstate were replaced with trees. And not just isolated, ordered plantations but real, wild forests. The Island has trees, sure. Central Park is a sprawling, swaying mass of them. But even in Central Park there is the knowledge that if you walk too far in any direction you will, within a few minutes, find your feet on concrete, then tar seal, then carpet. For this reason the experience is little more satisfying than the illusion created by romantic comedies. A forest in a city is as mythical as a chance encounter with a long-lost lover in some forgotten corner of the earth. But Mountain Lakes has real forests. Forests with beavers, deer. Forests without hobos piles of cigarette butts. And Mountain Lakes has lakes (granted, these lakes are the work of a reckless developer who dammed rivers, which then swamped pristine wildlife). Mountain Lakes doesn’t, for the record, have mountains (but then Manhattan is, I assume, no longer a good place to collect bow-wood, as the Native Americans originally named it).

Mountain Lakes also has a warm and generous family who housed me for the night, fed me, and wisely kept me away from the weekend’s formalities (which were, by all accounts, rather dull). We picked pumpkins, then carved them. We make pumpkin pie, then ate it. We dressed up and went to a Halloween party at a mansion, its owners so inebriated with the holiday spirit that the decorations extended from the scale cemetery in front yard to the jack-o-lantern toilet paper in the bathroom. We walked down to the lake and kayaked. We drove to the forest and walked. It was, in short, a rejuvenating experience. The American host family was extremely generous and welcoming. There was no hint of arrogance or self-importance, traits that in my part of the world at least, are characteristics of the American stereotype. Traits that have proved themselves to be fallacies considering the Americans I have met so far. Indeed, the host family—like many other people on this continent—are constantly try and atone for whatever imagined or real faults they see in their country, most often in its foreign policy. So prolific are the apologies that I often find myself defending the place: ‘It’s not that bad’, ‘all countries have violent histories’, et cetera. Somewhat of a role-reversal, the tourist as the patriot.

In some of my earlier transmissions I talked at length of the uncanny experience of having the surreal rendered real. That is, I talked of the many experiences in New York that are familiar to me, despite never being here before, the many symbols that I have previously encountered that appear as strangely familiar apparitions. The Mountain Lakes weekend was very similar. I cannot understand whether Americans parody themselves, or whether the parody comes as a result of action. The latter is most likely but I continue to think that the parody is a key driving force in the continuation of tradition. Let me explain: there is something absurd, almost ludicrous in the fact that Americans actually do, for example, pick pumpkins, carve them, and convert them into pumpkin pie. Something reeking of hilarity in that Americans, and many others in the world, dress themselves, dress their children, dress their houses in garish plastic costumes and prance around the streets. Simply, Hollywood parodies the United States. Then the United States assumes the parody. Witness New York on Halloween day. With some friends I dressed and traveled underground to the Lower East Side. Emerging from the subway station was like emerging into a Christian nightmare. Pagan costumes and pageantry abound. Three miles taken up with dancing, shuffling, rolling people and floats. If you are suitably attired you can join the parade. This we did and witnessed the spectacle from the inside, as it were. Thousands of people, mostly sober, dancing and singing in costume.

A friend and I were once talking about the compulsion we both felt when, for example, walking over a bridge suspended hundreds-of-metres above the sea, to jump. Not that we were suicidal, but there seemed, to us anyway, to be a human compulsion to at least flirt with the idea of death. My friend then told me a story—the details of which are now long-lost so I shall falsify—in which during World War II, say, a Greek island was invaded by Turkey. On this Greek island was a village situated on the edge of a cliff, a cliff that plummeted to black-rocks and waves below. When the Turkish soldiers approached, rather than surrendering, the inhabitants of the village—men, women, children, all—jumped from the cliff, to their death. Some who have speculated about the motivation for the villages to jump have argued that, like the pedestrian on the bridge, they had always flirted with the idea of jumping. Living so close to death, it was never far from their minds. The compulsion to act was only suppressed by reason. The invasion of the Turkish soldiers, then, was merely an excuse, a justification for action.

Returning to the Halloween parade, a similar speculation can be leveled. That so many New Yorkers were so quick to abandon their suits, their stockings, their glasses and don the clown suits, the bras, the bizarre and whacky outfits is testament, I think, to how thinly sanity and convention are in control of this city. So quickly and so blithely did so many people march, dance and sing in the parade that ‘holiday spirit’ or some such platitude just cannot explain it. The Halloween parade was a release, a vent for otherwise un-channeled animalism. The phenomenon is similar to that of night clubs, rock-concerts, riots, but none of those events are on this scale. This was a whole city, or at least half a city, gone mad.