Wryly, but yet, it does—despite everything, including the sentimentality of even thinking so. Because consider how unlikely, how fantastic and multifarious, the lines of cooperation and negotiation that daily make the city possible. New York, like all cities, is a collective experiment in barely averted chaos, a play of vast possibility within the mapped order of the grid. It flows, and that is amazing, because it should not; its congestion, the final gridlock where all the movement suddenly overcomes itself, snapping into the crystalline rigidity forever implied but always avoided, is right there: the culture of congestion, a petri dish of transactions and aspirations and discourses. It allows so much to happen even while not forcing any specific part of itself upon you. It allows you not to attend, and so makes all events optional. Thus does it bestow the “queer prizes” of loneliness and privacy, the great freedom to move or be crushed.
–Mark Kingwell in Concrete Reveries.
This is the third book by Kingwell that I've started, and I think I might end up reading all of his books – all twelve of ‘em – because he writes like angels sing.
I have had a distant love affair with New York City for some time now, inspired mainly by one of my favorite blogs, Pictures From A Taxi. It’s not that I idealize the city – I am just attracted to its seeming liveliness and its immensity and, above all, its metaphor:
New York appears in art and literature as pure metaphor—as the sign or symbol of triumph, of loneliness, of romance. And if one thing is certain, it is that there is no getting to the bottom of New York.
I had semi-serious plans to take up residence there for a month or two this summer. If I am going to experience the city, I’d prefer to do it as a resident and not as a tourist.
There is a space somewhere between tourism and residency when you feel the emotions of a love affair you know must end. This is what the critic Jed Perl has called “the adolescent city,” that shimmering land of half-fantasy, at once true and false—the sense of slightly awed but boldly sanctioned arrival, of Gatsbyesque ambition about to succeed (or not), dreams about to be realized (or dashed). I mean the way we all feel when, well dressed and fresh-faced at least in imagination, we step off the train for the first time at Grand Central or Gare du Nord or King’s Cross.
The plans have since fallen through, but I will be wandering the New York streets for a week next month, when I hope to experience, among other things, the smells of the subway:
The smell of hot air emanating from the entrance, the burp of subterranean gas squeezed out from the innards of the city, the miles of tunnel-intestines and steel-girder bones, is both familiar and comforting. It does not exactly stink, though there are animals and piles of garbage and human effluents down there. It smells homey and warm and alive, like the taste of breath from your lover’s morning kiss, or your mother leaning over you in the evening with Vicks VapoRub ready to apply to your cold-wracked chest. It mingles, the belched-up air, with the other smells of this corner, all corners: the flaming meat and warming rolls of the hot-dog cart; the sickly near-gag rising from sugar-coated pecans; the always-autumn tang, the global odor of cities, from roasting chestnuts.
My favorite New York quote of all comes from Henry Miller. I have read and re-read this many times:
New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.
When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, like breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of aces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless.
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One of the most interesting and well-designed videos I've seen this year is this one showing the interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection: (hat tip: Kottke)
