Will I ever make it to New York? I feel if I ever did make it to New York I would never want to leave again. What do I know about New York? Nothing. Except what I’ve read and heard and seen. We all know New York more than we know anywhere else. It subsumes our own weaker places by its virtual omnipresence. It’s the hyper real city for our worldwide culture, I sense is ebbing away, before I got my chance to see it for myself, firsthand. I’m not at home in a small town in a small country. I should have been born in New York. I love visiting London. It’s my foothold in the real, a reference for comparison. I imagine New York as a bigger and better version of London; a place where it would be actually impossible to ever get bored.
All the songs, the movies, the TV shows set in New York. I soak it up. I was listening to Paul Simon this morning and it got me to thinking about it. Searching google earth, once again for Greenwich Village, Manhattan, Brooklyn, all of it. I saw a news clip yesterday of people fighting over wearing masks in a supermarket on Staten Island. Paul Simon’s Bleecker Street, the reunion concert in Central Park. The diner in Seinfeld. The skylines in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Annie Hall. The New York Public Library. The disaster movies, all the disaster movies set in New York.
In lockdown I decided I’d finally get round to reading Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, the autocrat who shaped modern New York. Caro himself is a New Yorker. First I read his shorter book, Working, which describes his life as a researcher and writer. He walks each day from his home in, 62nd Street, is it, to his office on 72nd Street? Anyway it’s all adjacent to Central Park. Amazing. What a life. What a place.
Caro talks about New York Public library, how he earlier settled in there to write, and the other great authors he met along the way. It’s the same place I’ve seen depicted in all those disaster movies. On those iconic steps. So many disaster movies in New York. The citiy captures all of modern life, its bureaucratic complexities, its cultural dreams, extreme greed, alienation, anomie, all our modern fears and nightmares. If I ever get to New York, will it still be there? Even the Watchtower offices, now vacated. Will I go there and look at the familiar shape of the buildings, with all the signage swept away in time. A lonely pilgrimage to a location and a belief that’s no longer present, no longer inhabited.
Watching Andrew Cuomo with his updates on the current disaster, flashbacks to the day the towers fell, the ice and the fire of fiction, folding reality into unreality, and hyper reality of the ever present wonder of the greatest place on earth. I want to go to New York before it disappears. New York, because it’s the place of promise, and at the same time the fear for a civilisation that might yet be washed away by some man made or natural disaster, a role it’s played out on the screens so often in fiction and in reality. The final scene of Planet of the Apes; the Statue of Liberty sticking a hand out of the sand. I don’t think I’ll ever get to New York. I don’t know New York. It will be gone before I get there.
Beautiful lyrics from the best song writer of our time, the self described only living boy in New York. How lucky to be alive when New York existed.