An Open Call to Barney Dunn

Having moved to the city after Giuliani sold Times Square to Disney, I have the feeling that I will never be able to call myself a true New Yorker.  I am one of those people who moved in with the racks of clothes stitched by Taiwanese children.  The brushed aluminum facade that morphed into computer fed high rise plans.  In certain pockets of the city, the streets have the bizarre utopian plainness of architectural drawings.  The trees grow straight, planted in their grid.  The dogs are walked by women wearing Juicy Couture.  And the men in their Hugo Boss suits stride blithely toward the next $million.

Whenever I watch movies shot in New York in the 70's and 80's I marvel at the grit.  Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, The Pope of Greenwich Village.  As far as I can tell the grit provided character.  Take the world's worst ventriloquist, Barney Dunn--- the poor schlemiel who Broadway Danny Rose gives up to gangsters in Woody Allen's movie from 1984.  Now Barney Dunn may have been a  paradox back in '84-- how does such a horrible ventriloquist pay the rent in Manhattan-- today he would be a total figment.  He would live in the Catskills like Rip Van Winkle and walk down arm in arm with the school teachers, artists and mimes.  

Barney Dunn has disappeared from day-to-day life in Manhattan.  Maybe he found some snug rent controlled den on the Lower East Side and became a shut-in, maybe he's moved to the outer rings of Queens or is playing pinochle in the lobby of a senior living facility in Yonkers, but no one has shown up to take his place.  New York has lost its bad ventriloquists (granted: if they ever existed beyond film) and its mimes (is that a loss?).       

Next Tuesday... Antici...pation

When I walked into the voting booth last November and pulled the mighty lever of ol' Democracy I walked out electrified.  At that point it didn't matter if Obama won-- I was excited just to have voted for the man.  In the interceding months that electric charge seems to have arced through a good portion of the population.  Obama won and then the machine began to change.  

Dr. Frankenfurter flipped the switch on his Medusa Machine.  All barometers dropped and everyone seemed to stop in their tracks-- not Obama, not the transition team, but the population froze.  Wait and see.  The scandals surrounding Madoff and Blagojevich underlined the approach of the inauguration. Were they falling or was the country standing up? The ideals roused by the campaign paced back and forth.  Are people proud or nervous or both or neither? The last gulp of air is being sucked out of the Bush presidency.  We're standing in the vacuum of the last eight years, gathering strength.  None of the instruments seem to agree.  Dials are spinning, needles are dangling and a flashing sign reads "Adjust Your Expectations." This is how hurricanes are formed.

The fear of depression in the city is palpable.  MTA cutbacks, the loss of jobs and retirement savings, the green skinned lady in black riding her broom in the eye of the storm.  This just after the most energetic and optimistic phase of political history I have encountered. In the odd, ironic correction to the mid-nineties pop-radical mentality, political impotence (i.e. the official stance of Grunge) is gone for now.   Corporate impotence has taken its place and the long slack arms of credit are tied in a knot.  Did we get what we asked for in the way of change?

Regardless, this is the prelude.  If the country can realign itself this quickly in this short of a period to renewed expectations, then next Tuesday has a good shot of being the official beginning of a new epoch.    

Leased by Aggression

The sidewalk belongs to babies.  Babies and dogs and tourists.  The sidewalk does not belong to strings of friends or to clustered nuggets of slow-moving family. Walking side-by-side-by-side so the poor schlep in the on-coming pedestrian lane has to step down off the curb and be splattered by freezing rain is not authorized by New York City's Department of transportation. Neither is slowly meandering in a loose daisy chain of matching DNA so the poor schlep who's late for work  has to wait for a brief gap in the amorphous and idle family formation to dart ahead. These people actually do not exist as legal entities and should be treated as such. 

 

Nannies with double-wide HumVee style strollers are NYC's sidewalks' priority.  The careering mother who was implanted with extra eggs and so birthed her own portion of the city's boom in twins or triplets retains the right to 5/12 of every foot of sidewalk in New York (as negotiated with Bloomburg-- they also own Harlem now, apparently).  

The city's infants are followed closely by its dogs (soon to overtake human babies as the primary recipient of adult affection).  Whether they are walked in gigantic barking sniffing canine clouds by the neighborhood dog walker or by the half asleep owner who reluctantly threw on a pair of nitty sweatpants and an open mouth to allow He-Bear the microscopic full breed to stretch a leash across the street and cloths-line the unaware, dogs and their keepers own the next 4/12 of that foot of sidewalk.      

Tourists move for the most part in efficient packs that feel the need to stop from time to time to take pictures of artifacts stolen from their homelands.  True they slow foot traffic and frequently wear matching wind breakers and drive the price of real estate up by buying whatever ridiculous scam developers can cook up in the form of luxury city living and will most likely erode all of the city's infrastructure (if the chain stores don't do it first) but they are unaware by definition and must be forgiven for taking those last three inches of sidewalk.  

Everyone else in New York walks on the edge of their feet. They flood into the gaps the tourists leave when they move on to their next sight.  They tip-toe along the utter lip of the curb.  Some blast down the center of the sidewalk, unaware that they have tipped over two strollers and upset the world's greatest picture of a Central Park squirrel looking as if he's about to hail a taxi.  When caught these people are shucked of their citizenship and forced to stand on the corner and hand out flyers for strip clubs, weight loss programs, discount suits and Jews for Jesus.           

The City is a Neural Network, Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño follows the lives of several poets, writers and artists associated with the short-lived Visceral Realist group in Mexico City.  A chronicle comprised of dozens of interviews, each complete with its own distinctive voice.  Whether Bolaño's work is a roman á clef for his own Infrarealist movement is beside the point.  Bolaño captures the burgeoning life of global wandering from the late 60's through the mid 90's with the same speed and acuity of Jack Kerouac.    

Each segment provides a different perspective on the Visceral Realist movement and likewise its progenitors, Arturo Belano and the aptly named Ulises Lima. At the same time it shows the interconnectivity of the various people involved in Mexico City arts-- their place in relation to the major movements of the day and their down-and-out lives. 

In utilizing an interview style, Bolaño writes a fictionalized verbal history with all of the unlikelihood, lapses and distinctiveness of the real thing.  He synthesizes the Homeric, rabbinic and monastic traditions in building the legend of the Visceral Realists.  He draws a map of influence, friendship, hatred, lust and insanity that follows the two founding characters.  Bolaño only uses linguistic polish as an extension of the character's voice.  He keeps the details raw, strung out in the cold, dangerous world.  

The novel continually returns to Mexico City: its slums and suburbs.  The world is endlessly compelling because of its truth and its equal nearness to mortality, obscurity, survival and immortality. Questions of fiction and meta-fiction are secondary.  Bolaño succeeds in showing the world, exactly as it exists-- within the minds of the people we know, the voices we hear, and within the relative striving to know and capture it in its purest essence. 

  

The Door

Holding the door in New York City can turn into a full-time occupation.  The job of the doorman developed when the few brave souls who were willing to unabashedly hold the door for a loved one then the string of people who followed realized they were being taken advantage of and so decided to organize.  

For the rest of us who hold the occasional door without tip or guarantee of monetary retribution, the feeling that you can wind up holding the door for every living person in New York arises every now and then.  The door is held and here comes the never-ending line of people-- some of whom acknowledge the gesture and others of whom ignore it completely. Generally I find it my duty to let go of the door if no acknowledgment comes-- whether or not it swings right into the person's face. 

For a while I felt rude doing this, but once I realized that these people are most likely skating by on doors held open for them all over the city and thus living the life of ridiculous privilege. If I don't let go of the door I may as well get a crimson suit with gold braiding and an impressive hat. 

Butte, Montana

This town dwelled in its own past, which was literally embodied by a series of large holes dug in the hillside above. The mines had never been rich with copper, but they'd made up for it in volume. The result now was a bunch of glorified wounds in the earth. Some also contained uranium, and she read me something in the guidebook about pilgrims who stood on the edges to soak up supposed healing properties. And sure enough, a highway sign plugged "health mines," this exit.

I wondered about the people here. The same two teenagers seemed everywhere, on all the streets. Funny how kids walk and walk when they have nowhere to go. I wondered what they might say to me, who so obviously regarded them from from behind a credit card and a map, and would probably swirl them in the martini glass of subsequent conversations.

Calculating violence, I factored in the boarded-up saloons, town halls, and company headquarters; the old Peregrine Hotel, the Copper Kid lounge, glint street, flint street, boom street, bust street, dust street, meth street, and meth recovery program street; along with the old impossible alleyway that failed prospectors snuck down to feel the last vented warmth from the past, and to awake foaming at the mouth and soiled; before finally considering the impervious sheen of newer corporate entities that had landed on the wreckage like amiably double-dealing extraterrestrials. I concluded, in classic tourist fashion, those kids were trouble.

Still, I would walk with her two or three blocks along the history vacated downtown, that had once been lit solely by the gleam of precious and semi-precious metals.

Passing Time with Strangers

I have long since resolved to always have a book on hand whenever I take mass transit.  The trouble I have with my eyes on the sidewalk triples when I'm placed in a cramped car with a work wearied legion.  So my eyes stay glued to the page, except for the occasional busker, hammer fight, or drunk-girl late-night throwdown.  

This really just gives my peripheral vision a great work out.  I'm able to read and process what's on the page while still taking in small glimpses of my surroundings.   I get to wonder for a minute why a girl in head-to-toe make-up wouldn't paint her fingernails.  Or like the time I was reading Franny and Zooey on the A train back from SOHO-- in the olden days when I lived in the tippy-top of Manhattan-- and attempt to keep my eye on the page even though a crew of high latino gay twenty-somethings decide to populate the seats around me and just stare at me. This one was bizarre enough to make me wonder 1) am I also high? 2) do gay latino twenty-somethings usually travel in packs? 3)why is Mrs. Glass in the bathroom with Zooey?  

There were also the kids with the camcorder on their way to the beach who took the time to turn the camera on each of the other passengers and narrated their assessment: Here we found her, fresh from the milk carton-- about the skinny midwestern girl with Manic Panic hair passed out with her head against the window; Powder-- about the pale bald man sitting next to me; Clark Kent-- about me; Chef Boyardee-- about the fat man over-flowing the seat perpendicular to mine, my knee was inescapably nestled into his warm soft thigh... and on and on.  And no one said a thing back to them. 

The pack of gay latino guys stayed on the train for about eight stops-- no short amount of time to be stared at.  The girl with the unpainted nails stayed on for one stop.  I got off of the train before the beach kids.  The people disappear, along with the imagined scenario that explains them.