New York, February '08

(last photo of the ol' girl, I promise)

29 February '08

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people… Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is a blasphemy. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant look which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal illusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

I am in possession of a rather curious trait. This trait determines that I am deeply impressed by most of what my senses pick up. That is, most books, movies, sights, et cetera leave a mark that while delible, is not easily erased. Thus, after seeing Fight Club I become violent. After seeing the Last Samurai I investigate the martial arts. After reading Blake I source the opiates and delve into mysticism. After reading Raymond Carver I mistrust women and relationships and drink whiskey like water.

Perhaps this is not curious at all, perhaps most people are subject to it (it is surely the psychological trait of our species that allows advertisers to profit). Whatever the case, Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book I have been leaning on for a week-or-so, has leeched its way, by process of osmosis I suppose, through my skin, tissue and blood and has settled like plaque on the bone. I should preface what follows here with the assertion that I really am fond of this country; more particularly, this city. I am a vocal proponent of New York and the United States (indeed, I have often been in the peculiar position of defending America to Americans—many citizens I’ve met here a deeply apologetic about their country, their leaders, their domestic and foreign policy, et cetera—by asserting, as I do believe, that no country in the same position as the United States could claim to have done anything differently. Humans are, after all, the same the world over).

Back to the book, then. After reading the opening pages I saw a movie with some friends. As we sat down, a great guffaw erupted from the seats behind. I looked back to see a saggy man fisting big handfuls of popcorn. Staring at him was like staring at an old sock on a clothesline. His eyes were fat black slugs sunk in pink holes, the skin on his neck dripped to his chest. He was vulgar. In a children’s book snakes would be crawling out his armpits. If the Grimms had seen him he would have been immortalised sitting atop a throne atop a mountain eating children like drumsticks. If Shakespeare had written of him, the man would skulk around on stage executing his wives and eventually dying of syphilis. The man laughed when there weren’t jokes, talked when there were silences, belched at the climax and farted at the dénouement.

It is possible, of course, that I imagined the man. Or that he was not, in fact, as depraved as I have described. Whatever the case, it matters little (if he didn’t exist then, he does now, so it goes). The book, for the moment, has infected me, thickened my blood, turned my skin wan, a pallor more fitting of an apparition. The man is a symptom of this blood-thickening, of this infection. Events that last week I would have laughed at, or at least dismissed as curiosities, this week seem to confirm the myth of this country as, so says Miller, ‘a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed’.

It is possible that the plaque will crumble away—I started taking vitamins today and bought mouthwash to spur the process—and that the bad taste which lingers currently will be replaced. Until it does, however, experiences give way to a sickly, synthetic aftertaste, like that left behind after eating cheap chocolate or drinking diet soda. A cleansing ritual needs to be performed, a sacrifice of the highest order, something nascent and forged in fire that emerges spitting and steaming, drawing bitter effluvia from the body with the force generated by the spinning earth. Either that or I shall date a cheerleader and watch a romantic comedy. The end point, in all likelihood, will be much the same.

***

In other news, school continues to run its course. In a little over two months I will have finished the coursework component of my Master’s. In a little over two weeks I will know whether I am to remain in New York until May ’08 or May ’10. In the meantime, little changes. The City exacts its tidal drag, the atmosphere is frigid, the water from the tap, sharp. Little changes when change itself is the standard.

* The rest of the Miller quote is as follows:

Returning to the boat we passed bridges, railroad tracks, warehouses, factories, wharves and what not. It was like following in the wake of a demented giant who had sown the earth with crazy dreams… It was a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed

** Today is the twenty-ninth day of February, a day that has occurred five-hundred-and-two times since the birth of Christ. At the time Christ was born, the Romans had no numeral for (and therefore, based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis no comprehension of) ‘zero’.

New York, February '08 (click to enlarge)

(additional photos here)

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.

***

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.

New York, February '08 (click to enlarge)

New York, February '08

15 February '08

It was Valentine’s Day in America yesterday. I say ‘in America’ because there is no other country I have visited that adopts such absurd holidays with the same kind of breathless fervour that the United States does. This country lurches from one celebration to the next. A few days after Christmas, tweaks were made to shop foyers and facades to transform them into citadels of New Year-o-rama. A few days into the New Year, the foyers and facades were tweaked again in expectation of Valentine’s Day. In a few days, I expect there will be further tweaking so that Saint Patrick’s Day, or Easter, or Founder’s Day, or Independence Day can be celebrated in the correct manner. That is, with hordes of inflated balloons, festive hats, emblazoned tee-shirts, novelty glasses, or any combination thereof.

My output, of late, has been low. I feel bad about it, mainly because writing of this nature requires discipline and regularity lest it fall away altogether. The low output has its genesis in a few events. The first—quite concrete—is that a number of friends have made their way through my apartment over the last month. The other, more abstract, is that I’ve sunk into a rather powerful creative and emotional torpor. The origins of this torpor are many and varied and too complex to get into here. And I wouldn’t mention it except as an excuse for a fusty transmission. It is just that in this state the mind is sluggish, the body lethargic, nascent ideas are stillborn and the intellect lists in and out of consciousness and is mostly replaced by a dumb laugh at the foolishness of inane characters on television sitcoms.

Of course there has been much happening. As I have stated and restated and will do so again, New York has no sympathy for idleness. So much of this city is built on the idea of movement and flux—millions of students, travellers, workers drift on and off the island every day—that there is the simple expectation that those of use who are left behind will, like the tides against the moon, be pulled into activity by the immense force generated by so much movement.

For example, last week I visited the Museum of Natural History, where to access the South Pacific Peoples exhibit you must first pass the primates, then the Native Americans, all frozen in ludicrously-natural-and-therefore-all-the-more-unnatural poses. And all testament the evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth and parts of the twentieth century and, even today, pervade scholarship and popular opinion with an age-old potency. There was, of course, no exhibit of colonizing white men or even of picket-fence suburbia. The natives, it seems, are still fascinating as static exoticisations.

But more on that some other time. Now there is work to be done to redeem myself from this funk, gain a level, and take aim at something great.

Washington, December '07

25 January '08

I am going to abandon the regular tone of these transmissions, for the moment, in favour of that more vitriolic. This week, after the miles and miles of Canadian highway where the horizon stretches in a great circumference from pole to pole, I returned to Columbia for the first week of the spring semester, the final semester of coursework required for my degree.

As I mentioned in an earlier transmission, I had very high expectations of Columbia as some sort of bastion for the intellect, a university at the vanguard of research, at the coal-face of all that is new and changing and exciting about this usually dry academic world. I had further expectations that because of the absurd, almost grotesque amount of money that myself and my family needed to scrape together to pay for a year’s tuition,¹ I would be treated by the university the same way a patron with Bennys dripping from his back-pocket is treated by the staff of a hotel. I do not mind that the first expectation was not met. After all, it would be naïve to think that the intellectual rigour of one institution is markedly different from that of another. Great minds exist universally, institutions exist merely to contain and direct them. And I do not mind that I am not treated as a celebrity. That expectation, too, would be naïve given that in a lifetime I am unlikely to earn what the university is bequeathed most days.

What irks me, and what has been compounded this week, is the complete antipathy, the arrogant indifference, the institutionalised marginalisation that Master’s students are met with at Columbia. Example: one component of the MA degree is a thesis. A thesis requires a supervisor. Last semester, after much wrangling, I managed to meet with a professor whose interests aligned with mine. That professor, after some deliberation, decided he did not ‘have the time’ to supervise me. ‘Fair enough’, says me, ‘I’ll try someone else’. That I did, only to receive the same answer. Beginning to lose hope, I tried again, with the same result. One of the great fallacies of the academy—and I’m sure this is not restricted to Columbia—is that once faculty are conferred tenure, there is very little impetus for them to do, well, anything. Teaching becomes an obligation, supervising a distasteful affair with no real reward, research a token exercise to keep up appearances. Thus, the lowly MA student enters his second semester unsupervised, seeking—with the same desperation that a dog at the pound seeks an owner—the acceptance of a professor. Example two: this semester I enrolled early for an anthropology class that seemed particularly interesting. During the first iteration of this class it was clear that there were more people who wanted to take it than there were spaces. Even though there were non-anthropology students in the class, it was the anthropology MA students who were excised, cut from the class like some festering ganglia, the scalpel a token email professing the professor’s ‘profound apologies’. When I emailed the professor asking for his rationale in cutting students, he did not answer.

These examples may seem petty to an outsider, I do not know. While they are, of course, subjective generalisations, they are examples shared by many of the other MA students at this university, and others. Given that Columbia is unlikely to offer some prostrate overture by itself, I will have to bring the situation to its attention.

***

As I mentioned, this week marked the return to school after a month of break. The last few days of that break were spent as the last week was, driving. Driving relentlessly in that spaceship minivan that, like Bucephalus, brought me home to victory, in the end. Now it is a new semester and a new year. There is much to be done. Many trees to rattle and many strides to take, many ideas to fructuate. There’s revolution in the air.²

***

¹ The cost for two semesters at Columbia as an MA student is over $36,000 US dollars. Most doctoral students, in comparison, pay nothing, have their housing taken care of and are provided a monthly stipend.

² Well, the revolution was stymied by technology. My laptop, for reasons I prefer not to expand on, toppled from my window ledge and fell ten metres to its ignominious final position as a scattered mess on the concrete, its parts distributed in a sick constellation of plastic, wire and steel, its insides revealed with the same disinterest as a stripper reveals her body. Whatever the cause (okay, the explanation: my laptop overheats, my room is often tropical, I was talking to my sister on Skype when the computer overheated and shutdown, I perched it on the window ledge so I could continue talking, the last thing my sister heard was “oh shit” then the ominous sound of the phone being disconnected (‘ominous’ because I’m in Harlem), the laptop, my main vehicle for communicating with the world, spent the first part of the week being further dismembered in an attempt to save my data and the second part of the week first in a garbage can, then a garbage truck, and now, presumably, lies in state beneath a pile of rotting pizza and plastic bags. The computer has now been replaced, most of the data saved, and with the onset of school work all, including the regularity of these transmissions, returns to normal.