22 February '08

On arriving in New York City, one of the few discrepancies between my expectations and the city as it lies (as I have maintained on other occasions, there is an uncanny similarity between the two) was the lack of graffiti.

In due course I learnt that during his 1990s tenure, his righteousness Mayor Giuliani, campaigned to render wholesome the mean streets of New York. During his campaign those troublesome squeegee bandits were excised, dark and steaming alleys were flooded with light and disinfected with fire-hoses, the nomad homeless and the ubiquitous crack dealers were pushed to the boroughs, Times Square’s adult stores were razed and replaced with neon Disney-o-rama, Williamsburg became the old East Village, Harlem became the old Upper West Side, the Bronx became the old Harlem. In short, the city was stripped bare and freshly painted, sanitized and sterilized, made family-friendly and welcoming, less Gotham more Smallville, less melee more milieu. And with sterilisation comes sterility. So it goes.

Those who have been here a while disagree on whether the sanitisation was positive. Many rue the loss of character, more rue the rise in rent and consequent need to move to the odious suburbs where bus-stops and discount stores reign. Others celebrate the drop in crime and the reduction in scattered piles of trash. Whatever the case, certainly the New York of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs et al is a world away from today’s. Theirs was as raw as a scar, a frontier-land wet with the creative and the new, a foul mix of drugs and sex and bad jazz, but a mix that yielded poetry, art and beatific energy. Although that I haven’t yet been mugged is at least in part due to the white-wash and fire-hose, I cannot help but feel nostalgic for a place I have never even known, the New York of old. While this city is still one of great frontiers of the world, art it seems has moved off the island and into the dark interior. And the vacuum the artists left behind was filled with fanny-pack-toting tourists and skinny hipsters, all drunk on their own particular version of the City (the tourists sigh, speak in whispers, and click their cameras at the cavernous rent left behind by the twin towers, the hipsters sit on the pavements and smoke cigarettes and congratulate themselves on setting the precedent for cool). But then perhaps I am no different. One day I will take a photo of the house where Kerouac spent weeks at a hot-keyed typewriter chattering out one-hundred feet of palimpsest. One day I will walk down a street in blue-jeans, hands in pockets, head bowed against the cold, a smiling girl clasping my arm, a la Dylan’s Freewheelin’. I have already portrayed the city as a furnace for the apocalypse—that image is now so well entrenched in my psyche I have dreams of the four riders galloping down Broadway—and will do so again. I have also repeatedly used the metaphor of the frontier, a metaphor I believe in. Not for geography, of course—there is, after all, little left to discover in the world (that said, there is a group of determined trackers in New Zealand who believe that moose exist in Fiordland and spend much of their time tracking the brutes. So far their search has yielded little other than grainy footage and a tuft of hair. Similarly, when a helicopter crashed en route from one major North Island town to another, searchers weren’t able to find it for weeks, so superficial is the human colonisation of the land. The point being that even in a country as small as New Zealand there are tracts of land so dense that if there ever were footprints on the soil they were made a hundred years ago by some lost hiker)—but for economics and politics, both of which are largely decided here. The beauty of a frontier, I guess, is that is depends on change. The permanence of the flux endues the frontier with its particular energy and charisma. The only downside is that there’s no place or sympathy for nostalgia. What’s done is done. So it goes.

Back to the graffiti then. A treat it was to catch a train to Queens and come across a building, loosely called a museum, dripping with the stuff. Every surface—ledge, wall, fence, floor, whether plane or in relief—of the building, which occupies an entire block, is covered in the most exquisite art. Some of it stylised, bold, two-dimensional, striking. Some of it as intricate and elaborate as a master’s oil painting (indeed, there was a Mona Lisa on the building that rivalled Da Vinci’s for finery). See photo below of one of the walls.

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This transmission is a rather auspicious one, the twenty-fifth so far. I’ve been in New York for over six months, now. And it is increasingly likely that I will be here for another twenty-four. If it wasn’t for the injection of horizon and heavy sky on, for instance, the Canada road-trip, the prospect of two further years would be a daunting one. After all, one can only live in a canyon for so long before one craves the light.

I woke up this morning to four inches of snow on the ledge outside my window. In the last two hours that four inches has turned into five. The city has a pillow pressed to its face: a sky that is nondescript, uniform, blanket. In a few hours it is predicted that the snowfall will turn into rainfall and thus the snow will turn into sludge. Little here is permanent. So it goes.