NYC Mutations, Part 5: a Cybernetic Polytheism of Shifting Observations

Back in Boulder.... I arranged my time in Manhattan to be a discrete, self-contained envelope of experience, with its own notebook (a tiny leatherbound thing my brother bought in Peru), reading list (Rilke, local newsweeklies), and geographic boundary (the edges of the city proper). I was hoping for a certain density of information transfer, filtered through smog and sweat and recorded in the notebook. Various impressions and P.K. Dick-worthy speculations came and went, but none so capture what happens to the Manhattan imagination as the classic "reality-based community" statement made by a Bush aide last fall:

The aide said that guys like me [NYT-writer Ron Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Today I choose to interpret this beguiling bon mot as: there is no one way to experience, interpret, or perceive The City, in fact there isn't even one City at all. What appears to be a North/South-oriented strip of gridded streets and squarish-buildings is but a 3rd-person consensus illusion obscuring the shifting palimpsest-fractal that opens up before you the moment you step out of the subway. These, of course, taken in total, form the self-consciousness of a macro-scopic, nearly-sentient entity that exists above and beyond a physical and conceptual location. To turn the old phrase on its head: there are a million Cities in this naked (shivering, newborn) Story, and this is just one of them.

Ten moments where the MTA subway map lost its descriptive grip on the unfolding hologram I fell through for 6 days:

1) The HEAT. I called it the Sixth Borough, as it was something one needed to navigate through and around, as inconvient as having to bus it in from Upper Manhattan. Unlike the hot dry sun of Boulder, this was something weirdly worse: filtered a thousand times through mixed densities of pollution and vibration, wireless networking, clothing and skin pigmentation, bouncing in off the floorboards, soaking into the sidewalks and releasing itself onto your shoulders as you waited for a subway.

2) Anthropological novelty: besides your friends, co-workers, and local deli guy, if you ever see the same person twice in New York City, you might not be in New York City. That, or what I took as a sure sign of the City's immortality might have been an indiciation of something far creepier: duplicates and clones.

3) Subways as purgatory/bardo: though hellishly hot, I regarded the ubiquitous subway stations, where I literally spent half of my visit, as a weirdly timeless in-between zone which clipped and marked off each incarnational visit to a section of the City's surface. Each time you descend, you die, only to reemerge as a reformatted participant in a shifted time-space maquina. The subways don't even move, they rumble in place as the scenery is swithched above you.

4) The Age of Simultaneity: if one stops to contemplate, its obvious that the whole of human experience is virtually present in every single location. You've got people of every race wearing clothes in every style dancing under neon logos representing every brand/desire/corporation, heaps and books and bleatings of foreign muzaks, a thousand stories of a thousand more stories behind every suffering face. Time is ceasing to be irrelevant as wireless gadgets put everything in the palm of our hand or on the back of our wrist.

5) Darrell Hammond drunk at the Comedy Cellar: I actually felt sad for the ten-year SNL veteran as he stumbled about in his brand-new Yankees hat and sweatpants. I'd always thought of him as a responsible senior member of the cast, a self-denying craftsmen seemingly above the privations of the celebrity machine. But here he was, knuckled down under the weight of his humanity, lost in the intersection between the Sixth Borough and the Village, pining for another booze-run to Mexico as he slurred through his jokes. And Colin Quinn was even worse.

6) Being in the setting for Kids: one the most disturbing movies to come out of the 90s, Kids follows a pack of unhinged teens -- rapists and addicts all of them -- as they wander through downtown on the hottest day of the year. In Washington Square Park, where I beheld a xylophone player, a speed theatre troupe, and a couple sleeping hippies, Telly and Casper went nuts on some dude with their skateboards, a vicious beating. What's most interesting though is the disjuncture between the Park-as-shot and Park-as-seen, proving once again the Infinite Cities theorum.

7) A mojito bar in Brooklyn: Brazilian-themed and lovely, they put real coconuts in the drinks, and the paintings featured psychedelic linework and dead chickens. Too bad it will be a skyscraper soon.

8) The Sphere: now located in Battery Park, this public sculpture once stood at the feet of the Twin Towers. Now it rests, crumpled and mangled, a few blocks away from Wall Street, for whose sins it was killed.

9) Ris Paul Ric at the Knitting Factory: Q and Not U's lead singer made his return to the stage in the Factory's tiny basement venue, doing a lower-key version of the same danceable Q racket some of us love. The opening acts were even better though: two solo guitar-noise performers, one who screamed a lot and played Middle Eastern melodies in between amp-squalls, and a bearded gent who rocked the double delay pedals. Music is eating itself alive and churning out new weird forms in the basements of New York, a tempting sign of future Times Square concerts to come.

10) Coney Island: if you take the subway in, an absolute rupture forms with reference to the rest of The City. Standing on the pier, with a sufficient amount of haze, the rest of NYC dissappears, and Coney appears as though an isolate entity in the middle of the ocean, populated by a Noah-like cross-section fo ethnicities, riding depressing rollercoasters for all eternity as this Island circumnavigates the globe, leaving a trail of mustard, grime, and seagull shit wherever it goes.

Given what rich veins of territory this trip has seemed to open up, I'm toying with dropping this blog once again in pursuit of other things. Unless there's an outcry made by loyal readers in the comments, of course ;)