New York Cityyyyyyyyy

The words I can't help shouting out whenever the plane touches down at JFK or La Guardia. I put my arms in the air and shout out this mantra like John Spencer during a frantic encore (embarrassing those around me in the process).

And so, in case you haven't guessed it yet, to launch the fourth edition of Blackjelly we begin with yet another paean to this miraculous place.

What is it about New York that makes people want to proselytize?

Well in my case, it is the overwhelming and constant sense of potential. Something about the scale of the enterprise; but not limited to quantity (for it includes quality also). Most New Yorkers are here for a reason; and are sacrificing their wallets, health, tranquility, and white picket-fences in order to try to realize their projects. (People are far too cynical now to talk in terms of "dreams" . . . but I suppose the net-effect is the same.)

Frankly, it's hard to live here. And the shared understanding of that fact leaves a certain element in common, a form of subliminal solidarity, for a mind-boggling array of people. The spectrum of human types is so much wider and more fascinating than anywhere else I've been. There are subcultures consisting of a single member. And while Japan has the spectacular street-kids, New York has characters I couldn't even begin to describe, but am grateful I have seen/talked to/ran away from.

Quite simply, you never know what you are going to encounter when you walk outside the door. Which is more than I can say about everywhere else I've lived: the kind of places you can write your journal entry for each day in the morning, secure in the knowledge it will be more or less accurate by the evening. But that isn't possible in New York. There are too many elements which will throw off your personal gyro-scope. Too many serendipitous encounters and unexpected scenarios: from the trivial to the fatal to the sublime.

It's a bi-polar city. Some days are inspiring and life-affirming, others are disturbing and depressing. But this kind of schizo-existence is preferable to flat-lining in bland-land. At least for incurable romantics, like me, who crave stimulation over security.

For there is something genuinely "magical" about this city (not necessarily "white" magic, or the kind publicists associate with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). I remember feeling it when I was ten, being pulled through the snowy streets on a sled by my father. And I remember feeling it when I was twenty-six, emerging from the subway with a backpack in the middle of SoHo, stopped in my tracks by a summer ambience I'd never experienced before. And I remember feeling it almost every day this past year whenever I walk out-side my door on Rivington Street.

New York is a phenomenon. It is an ongoing event. A catalogue of catastrophes, only the latest of which include September 11 and last night's Fox News. What this place has taught me is that heaven and hell are separate only in the minds of puritans and purists. In order to have one, you need to have the other. (Which is not to say we shouldn't try to minimize the dystopian elements. Just that we should come to terms with the fact that wherever there are humans, there is pathos and pain . . . and joy and empathy.) Hell, in the case of New York, can be trying to find a public toilet after a large cup of coffee. And heaven can be watching fire-flies at twilight in the Avenue B gardens.

Down below the buildings, there is a human scale to be found. And humans - in excess - is what this place is all about (along with rats, cockroaches and pigeons). Despite the towering skyscrapers, and megalopolis image, I've never been to a friendlier, more "human" place. I sincerely have no idea what people are talking about when they say that New Yorkers are rude. Some can be very direct. They say what's on their mind. But if you think this is malicious, then you are taking things far too personally. For me it has all the advantages of a big city (24/7 lifestyle, vertiginous variety, world-class options for anything you please, etc.), and all the advantages of a village (familiarity, local community, pragmatic solutions, etc.). Of course it also has the disadvantageous of both - but [switch into Jersey union boss accent] "whaddya gonna do?"

And that's ultimately what New York is about. It pops your bubble. Your little narcissistic, big-fish-in-a-small-town bubble. (And yes, I would include both London and Paris here as small towns: as small in outlook and attitude as they are immense in sprawl.) There is no buffer-zone between people in a city as dense as New York. Everybody is living in each other's pockets. What's more, they need help tying their shoe-laces when holding a shopping bag.

By the way, when I say "New York," I'm actually talking about a small sliver of Manhattan proper. For new visitors to the city, I suggest you never go above 14th street, unless you have a specific destination (for instance, Central Park or the museums . . . or Harlem and the other communities above 100th street). This only leads to the wasteland of mid-town, which has been sandblasted to oblivion by the guilty complicity of commercial and residential space. I rarely go below Canal street, except to go to Century 21 (an amazingly cheap department store), or to gawk at the buildings which embody the city's other name, Gotham. But within these few square miles lies the most astonishing shifts in neighborhood, each with their own feel, tone and flavour. Even there own language.

In the Lower East Side, Spanish is still spoken more on the streets than English. I live above a Latino seniors social and salsa dancing club. Those guys can put me to shame - dancing and drinking till all hours of the night. Unfortunately, the tentacles of gentrification have, in the last few years, extended below Houston street, and are strangling the local economy which has existed here as an autonomous unit, largely immune to the rest of the city, for more than a century now. For the moment, there are still traces of its Jewish past. But the LES (and that sub-section, formerly known as Alphabet City) is mostly Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Afro-American. But even in the few months I've lived here, several new yuppie establishments have popped up like anally-designed, noxious mushrooms, displacing local color such as The Freakatorium, the Gaseteria, and the Dreadlock Shop.

Gentrifuckation, they call it in these parts.

And it is a double-edged sword. Violent crime is relatively low, compared to other US cities, and people like me (i.e., white-folk) can live here without too many incidents. (Although, truth be told, a young woman was fatally shot on my corner a few days after I first wrote this sentence . . . so resentment is definitely building.) I'm a symptom of the problem, and local families are being "bounced across the river." In my building, for instance, the vibe is a scrolling combination of friendliness, resignation and occasional low-level resentment towards us pale new-comers. But we should also remember that New York demographics have always had their ebbs and flows. Irish, Polish, Chinese, Indian, Ukrainian, and so on and so on and so on. We can only hope that crackers like myself don't white-wash New York into a bleached nightmare of Starbucks and Nobus. These hideous life-support systems assembled by the self-consciously dressed vermin which follow the plague vectors of Friends, Seinfeld and Sex in the City.

(By the way, a good book detailing the history of this process is Christopher Mele's Selling the Lower East Side, which discusses the fall-out from the Tompkins Square riots in the 80s, and how all bets are now off in terms of rent-control and compassionate welfare.)

But enough self-reflexive hand-wringing. . . .

Let me just point out that there's "multicultural," and then there's New York. Everyone has an accent, so nobody does. (Unless you are a Haitian taxi-driver trying to get into the Waldorf Astoria . . . but I don't speak for the wealthy. . . . this city's floating aristocracy.) If we discount the snakes and ladders of trying to secure a Greencard, it is much easier to become a "New Yorker" - in terms of day-to-day acceptance - than it is to become a citizen of any European or Asian country.

And while Frank Sinatra famously said that if "you can make it there, you can make it anywhere," I would humbly beg to differ. No-one ever offered me decent work in my home-town, for various reasons, one of which was because there isn't enough to go around. New York, in contrast to most other cities, is a vast engine for generating industry. Especially the "post-industrial" kinds of industry, relating to the media and knowledge economies.

So I remain hopeful that we can "all just get along." After all, that's what New York has managed to prove, over and over again, in tandem with the (at times) palpable under-current of barely repressed violence (cf. the 2003 blackout, which most locals remember with great fondness).

Things were much more hardcore in this respect twenty years ago. This was Taxi Driver times. The subway was truly sketchy, and large parts of the city had been claimed by tribal gangs and random blood-letting. Indeed, if you want to get a sense of what it was like back then, then I suggest a double feature: The Warriors followed by After Hours. Both riffs on one of the oldest stories we have, Homer's Odyssey, but transposed to the mean streets of the Big Rotten Apple.

Of course, I'm speaking from the privileged position of not living in Red Hook or the Bronx. So this is all relative, and to be taken with several pinches of salt. Nevertheless, it's worth repeating a point a friend made recently, which accounts for the "we're-all-in-this-together-so-we-might-as-well-get-along" unspoken policy of the place. For his theory is that New York is a city with no middle-class. The rents are so ludicrously expensive that you are left with little or no disposable income, even if you are making seventy-five grand a year! So there's Donald Trump and Jay-Z and Paris Hilton orbiting around somewhere in the blingsphere, and then there's the rest of us, trying to hustle up a buck for tomorrow.

Anyway, where was I? . . . . oh yes, taking you on a tour of downtown Manhattan.

In walking distance from the Lower East Side (that's the other great thing about here - you can walk most places) we have the East Village, Chinatown, Nolita, SoHo, the West Village and the Meat-Packing district (and all the overlapping "what would you call this part?" zones in between). Within these few miles is more STUFF than you could possibly process. It can fuse the mind just trying to imagine actually experiencing all these chic cafés, cheap restaurants, Christian churches, voodoo churches, thrift stores, pickle vendors, matzos makers, left-wing squats, covered markets, old world tailors, impromptu installations, upholstered tree-stumps, pretentious boutiques, unpretentious boutiques, dive bars, tattoo parlours, massage parlours, architectural offices, biodynamic bakeries, fish mongers, bookstores, record stores, bubble-tea joints, media studios, pork bun stalls, ramen stands, specialty supermarkets, S&M nightclubs, acupuncture clinics, pop-up exhibitions, lo-tech galleries, etc., etc., etc.

After the disastrous 2004 election, the Village Voice ran a cover with Manhattan drifting alone in the ocean. It conveyed the sense that this geographical quirk is symbolic of how New York is not only detached from America, but the rest of the world. How it serves as a space-station for those that manage to make it here - physically, financially or both.

Which is why I don't understand the exodus to Williamsburg. I suppose it made sense when things were cheaper there, but those days are behind us. Now it is a lifestyle decision to live in the closer neighbourhoods of Brooklyn: something I plan never to consider. I always feel deflated when I come out of the subway into the burroughs. It's too quiet. There is too much space between lonely clumps of people. It feels unsafe (for this very reason).

No. Moving to New York and living in Brooklyn is like marrying the most beautiful, sexy and exotic person in the world, and then sleeping in separate rooms.

Plus there is the question of the dreaded "hipsters," parading up and down Bedford Avenue; back and forth so much that they are cutting an urban sheep-trail in the pavement. As some wag recently put it: "Williamsburg is now the Epcott Center for mid-Westerners in post-post-rock-bands and designer haircuts."

True, I'm a newbie, still in the poetic throes of a honeymoon. Things will change. I'll start taking this miracle for granted. Not even seeing it as a miracle. The inconveniences and frustrations will emerge in starker detail from the rewards and pleasant surprises.

But I'm convinced that this just gives way to a deeper, more unconscious appreciation. The spirit of the city gets further under your skin, along with the lead-paint particles and whatever the hell was in that cloud made by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The knowledge that New York has everything you could possibly wish for, except for Nature (which is a train trip away), and peace-of-mind (which is an illusion to begin with).

The fact that it is effortlessly awesome. (A state we should all aim for, while understanding the unlikelihood of it ever happening.)

But I'm being too precious. Interesting people and places are scattered all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. This fetish for New York is my fetish, but one shared by millions.

And so, in honor of being here, we have assembled Issue 4 of Blackjelly: the NYC Edition. This is the latest installment, supplementing Issue 1 (Melbourne), Issue 2 (Geneva), and Issue 3 (Amsterdam). If things go well, then the next issue will be a joint theme, coming to you from New York again, Rome, and the International Space Station. If things don't go quite as well, then issue 5 will be from Melbourne again. God forbid.

Anyway, we will be adding things on a scrolling basis as we find them, so be sure to check back every now and again to see what's new. (And don't hesitate to submit materials to bjeditors@yahoo.com . . . we don't use our own domain for spam-related reasons.)

Feel free to explore this virtual Gotham..

All the clichés are true.

There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.

Editors

  

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