(no subject)
The Cotton Club Blues
The neighborhood is called Manhattanville, I think. I’m not from New York City, so it is just my interpretation of the map. It could be Morningside Heights, or it could be Hamilton Heights. Really one can tell it’s neither because it lies in the Valley underneath these places, it is not high, it is not a part of the ‘the Heights’ at all. So I will call it Manhattanville. It lies between the Westside highway and 125th, and goes up to 135th and probably Amsterdam, maybe as far as St. Nicholas. If you have ever lived above 96th street you will know where I mean. This is the site of an ongoing property rights battle.
The neighborhood is fascinatingly destitute of esthetic pleasure. It is beautifully ugly. At the very northeast corner is the biggest housing project I have ever seen. It holds a middle school and a parking lot underneath it. To the south are one to six story buildings of dubious integrity which are mostly converted into self storage units. Next to the river is the Fairway supermarket, seemingly the only large employer in the area. Though there is a bustling mechanic shop on Broadway. The most notable sign of any private residence is an Eritrean community center. Besides that there is nothing but the train tracks, the highways, and the streets that have been built on massive viaducts to pass over the community without having to sink to its level. It is a startling irony to see the rusting archways of the six story 125th street station next to a paint supply store. One would think someone would take a hint. In another place a crumbling building lies under the Westside Highway, its basement an open pit and its roof collapsed and removed long ago. Between the gaps in the concrete one can see a billboard with a beautiful blonde; her radiant beauty stands 8 stories high and is made starkly absurd against the naked ugliness of decline.
This is war. This place looks like a war zone. I live in the area, and after dark fell, there were parts that felt blatantly dangerous, especially where riverside drive curls around the mega-project six stories above 12th avenue. Besides Fairway, at night the most notable businesses seem closed. This particular area is nothing but concrete, rusting metal, and rotting wood. Fairway lies beneath the west-side highway: well-lit and surrounded by fences and security. A new restaurant is under construction just north of the market, and just one door over the graffiti and degradation begins. The homely diffusion of fluorescent lighting pours through the concrete openings of the project’s parking structure, which one might have thought was underground. Between the ten foot wide pilings that hold up riverside drive, two bums scrabble and fight over trash. If one looks behind you from this point you see Mercedes and Lexus sedans pulling in to pick up gourmet foods. It happens so quickly.
My friend casually mentioned in a tone of contempt, that Columbia was buying up the property and kicking everyone out. They are going to build dorms, a research center and commercial property. They are going to completely remodel the area. She spoke of all the people who would be evicted. Before she could get too far, I started a discussion.
‘It’s not right!’ She would say with a look of shock and indignation; Appalled that I might suggest that Columbia was doing a good thing. She talked about to as if I was Callus and uncaring for thinking that the neighborhood was gutted and worthless. She spoke of people in that liberal way, never really identifying who they were. They were just the ‘proles’, the poor, and the lower class. She believed that they had a right to be there, that you can’t just kick people out because Columbia wants to have a better campus. I didn’t agree that these things were true, but every argument I furnished was received as a hostile act. Being good friends we eventually dropped the issues, but it took the wind out of our time together that day.
My arguments were simple and effective. I argued against the people, saying that if they wanted to keep their property, they should have invested enough in it to keep it too valuable to buy. I appealed to her environmental side and pointed out that the people live in buildings that are approaching three quarters of a century old. The buildings are inefficient, poorly heated, poorly insulated, and expensive to maintain. They probably have asbestos in their walls and lead in their pipes. I did everything I could to point out that Columbia was going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the neighborhood, and she countered that they were only doing it for their own benefit. I asked the question, ‘Would it be better if they did it for their own detriment?’
The causes and effects behind this neighborhood’s decline are many fold. Twenty blocks of federal housing projects lie straddling 125th street. The Colossal buildings have no space in them for commercial interest. Everything around them is blighted by their presence, because for some reason projects breed crime and degradation. As well, Manhattanville is both a historically industrial neighborhood, and too far North to have been converted into private lofts by the cool crowd that was so kind to invest in SOHO. This lack of interest by independent private parties has been going on for a long time, but who knows what kind of power plays have been made, and for how long Columbia has been fighting for this property. Outside investments might have been blocked for the last 25, 50, maybe even 100 years by Columbia’s self interest, while the rest of the city boomed with new money. There is no reason what so ever that Manhattanville, with a nearby subway stop, and easy access to the highway would not be just as prosperous as the Heights surrounding it. It isn’t though, and it seems to be the spillover of neglect from the Harlem plain.
My friend Gabrielle, or Gabby, and I didn’t agree. We both argued passionately for our side, but still the disagreement wasn’t comfortable. As friends we were under illusion that perhaps we rooted for the same football team. It’s like some uncomfortable fact became included in our relationship. She was reacting to her anger at all the corporate high cost housing, which is making it increasingly hard to find a decent apartment in the city. She was reacting to a feeling that one’s home is always impermanent, that we are forced to move, that the world is changing into something, and though we don’t know what it is, we can all tell that it is bad. I was reacting to the constant and unending education of how messed things up are in the world. I had just studied all kinds of social problems, and I have gotten fed up hearing the same tired arguments.
She kept talking, but the subtext of her words had a different meeting. So did mine. We were both tired of something, but I had been tired of one thing and was now tired of talking about how tiring that thing was. My argument was so different from what she expected that it caught her off guard. She didn’t expect to be stopped that soon. She thought that she would be able to state the problem, and then I told her I didn’t think it was a problem. It was like a slap in the face.
This is the political climate we all live in. Our cities fall apart, so we start trying to figure out why. Really that is too general of a statement. So much of Manhattan is brand new, but the steel and glass looks wrong when its background is the gouged brick of the last century. Brand new Nissan Murano’s look decadent next to the oxidized wood and steel we call a subway system. It is hard to feel like the world is an equitable place when you see fresh-faced spoiled NYU freshmen walking past crippled men begging for change. I am twenty three and struggling to support myself through community college. Then I see twinkling gold on the watch of some 19 year old member of Columbia’s republican club. I realize that their outfit costs as much as my rent, and my rent costs more than my cousin’s who has a three bedroom house, and that one semester of their education is as much money as I go into debt spending in a year. Gabby supports herself too. Between her scholarships and working fulltime as a waitress, she makes ends meet but barely. Her life has no time to spare, and consequently she gets bad grades though she is smart enough to do better. She has no family, no place to fall back to except one uncle and aunt in Massachusetts; whom she will soon visit for a week so she can be deliberately driven insane, take pictures of it, and get a good grade in her large format photography class.
How do these kinds of lives relate to the world? Most of the time when I’m told I’m in conflict, or that my class, or my generation is in conflict with someone or something it is very believable. I have not seen anybody actually attack my rights, but I know there are no good jobs for me if I were to quit school. I have been informed by the general education of the media and literature, that the world is slowly getting worse, and it is probably right on the verge of falling apart. I look around at the news and all I see is scandal and lies. I look at my own life and see pain and struggle. Then I watch TV and see characters deal with their problems in a couple of hours. I see how they all have money, huge houses, and clean clothes. I get the impression that everybody’s life is supposed to be that way. As I grow up I am confronting with increasing severity, the lie that is the public expectations of private life.
Gabby has that same problem. She has led a life of almost absurd insanity. Her entire existence is forged by chaotic influences. Her childhood is a mess, and her adolescence sickeningly tragic. She is a person who can make the most faithful person pause when trying to convince someone that god loves them. I had that conversation with her once, and she held that pain so tight that when the trap was finally sprung it was hard to keep talking and not feel trite. I know more people like this. People who are emotionally degraded to the point where it seems outright physical molestation might have been better than the short end of the thorny stick they got.
I come from struggling to tell someone that life is more than just some pointlessly brutal absurdity, and I’m supposed to find some kind of entertainment or contentment when I turn on the Ally McBeal? Have Ryan and Melissa finally professed their love? Oh no, Tim Allen’s kids are stealing from the cookie store, lets see if he and Jill can agree on how to punish them. Thank goodness Wilson’s there to quote a little Homer and save the day. I’m not so anti-culture that I never watch these things, or that I think they never provide release or enjoyment. I have spent time watching Sex and the City just loving the interplay of the characters. Much of it is just brilliant writing. I don’t mind watching the drama; it is seeing the kids running around trying to mimic it that eats at me. It seems everyone today doesn’t think their cool unless their sipping screwdrivers at the Essex market with there girlfriends while listening to the latest trance remix of the latest top 40 song, and spending 50 dollars on brunch. Or they are twenty six and somehow think they can afford to buy 1600 dollar rims for their car, and roll around telling everyone how gangster they are. My sense of the rational reels at the price people will pay to look like the actors and actresses on TV.
Now gabby and I both identify with this shitty neighborhood. She thinks of the neighborhood as herself, and wants to hold onto her identity, and never surrender to mainstream culture, which somehow seems to be both smothering and promising. I think of the neighborhood as my future. I don’t want to work as hard as I’m working right now just to find myself rotting, burnt out and neglected. I want somebody to recognize my potential and take the risk, and for me to accept it and be better for it. We both took that feminist battle cry to heart: the personal is political.
This is politics now. This is where we are. I read Marx and feel what he’s saying. Aren’t people telling me to be someone I’m not? Do I have a meaningful history or culture? Isn’t my family wrecked and destroyed? I see everything he’s talking about, and like him I can taste that the revolution is about to happen. Something has to change! It just has to, because the world cannot go on being at war with itself. Most youths of any value feel this way. We go to our schools, and we start hearing about all the pain that our society inflicts on other societies in pursuit of its ambitions. We read how the West has effectively subjugated Africa into a slavery of political instability. We pick up Machiavelli and read the words of a brilliant politician laying out a plan for grasping power. We can see how such tactics have been used and used again, for maintaining a hegemony, whose principal weapon is competition. Then the capitalists tell us competition is good.
I read Ayn Rand, and I want to vomit at the startling scope of her writing. How the pusillanimous masses pull down the greatest people, and that it is really our own weakness that causes us to fail. My mind spins off on tangent after tangent trying to figure out my path and how I can stop this when the whole world is pitted against me. The whole world is against me.
At this point I feel something with in me crack like a wall of granite. I feel like what has happened is irreparable. Book after book, conversation after conversation, we are always having the same argument. Whose fault is it? The problem is! How do we fix it? This is our political discussion. Fight about the problem and negotiate a solution. I have spent years doing this, and only now did I finally realize that maybe nothing is wrong. Our world is as it should be, and our struggles will result in more of the same, no matter what we do.
Marx and Rand are who I contrasted most recently, but every four years it is red versus blue. We put so much importance on these changes in power. My father has said over and over that really, ‘It’s the same shit, different day.’ But I had trouble really believing him. There is so much fear. I keep thinking that if we make a mistake, my whole way of life is going to be sacrificed; either to famine, sickness, and war, or else the destruction of my mind by some Orwellian super state. Every time we talk about some issue of policy, and we start thinking in these terms. We know what might happen, we are told about it so often and so fervently by such effective writers and entertainers, that we come to believe it can happen. That our world will simply snap onto rails and obey the predictions of one brilliant man.
Gabby thinks that if this one neighborhood is bought up it will start a chain reaction, or that the chain reaction already started, and soon all the neighborhoods will lose the New York City, family, and freedom vibe; and become one big corporate park, like Tribeca and the north chunk of the village that NYU is gobbling up. The east village is no-longer needle park, heroin, and art. It has become teenage-trashy, pop-punk, glam gone poor, and the hipster sensation of tights, bad hair, and daddy’s stipend. Worse yet is next time Gabby’s lease is up, she won’t be able to find an apartment on the island, and will be forced to move out to the lower paced, stress free, soul destroying boredom of the suburbs. Halfway between death and life is Queens or the Bronx. Then you come into Manhattan on weekends, and know that somehow you don’t belong anymore.
I fear too. I could afford a room in some cockroach infested asbestos laden, lead piped, coal heated, hell hole, but not battery park’s, double-paned, dry-walled, spot-lit, ergonomically, feng shui, corporate tower. I need that stinking filth that comes with not having a business for a whole block, so the garbage trucks don’t bother to stop for a month. That’s where I can survive because I’m the one thing Columbia isn’t going to think about when they snap up this valley. I am poor. There will be Starbucks and Cosi, probably a Best Buy and a DSW, there might be a Costco, a couple of really good fusion restaurants, and one good all purpose diner. There’s already a McDonalds, so they will just remodel. There won’t be some atrocious hole-in-the-wall pizza place, that gives you a small lunch for a buck seventy-five. I won’t be able to afford to live there. All the daddy’s girls and Richie riches moving in will drive the rent up so high that it will chase me out of where I live now too. It sucks. I can only hope that by the time it does happen for real, I will have one of those windows of financial solubility that lets me move to another cheap place in another momentarily unpopular neighborhood.
Marx tells me I should organize and resist. I should go door to door and form a neighborhood union. I should enlist the help of the federal government and move people out to stand in front of bulldozes and construction workers. If that doesn’t happen the neighborhood should riot, and steal the wealth from all the surrounding people. Write my city councilmen, my newspaper, my congressman, and spend every spare moment of my time fighting for Marx’s utopia. But I realize that it is just change. The farmers who first lived there probably felt the same way as the city dwellers do now, and I won’t even discuss the American Indians. Long ago those small community neighborhoods were one and two story houses, and they were then driven out by an organized city board who talked about the future of everyone and city planning. It might have just been the American Revolution, or the gang riots in the 1800’s, when the valley was turned into a fort. The point is these things happen.
Ayn Rand would say, don’t even consider those poor people, stop thinking about them. Selfish capitalism leads to production, which leads to jobs, which leads to wealth for all. This whole neighborhood is a waste of space, and it would be better for everyone involved if the city gave the planning over to the capitalists.
They both have their merits, their little hooks that tie you into their point of view one way or another. They both also preach about the possibility of a utopia. There are people everywhere that write down in grand books some generalized view of the world that allows one to see a way through all this mess to a place of perfect peace and stability. Some people think that eventually we will reach a state where society lives in harmony, one way or another. At least in George Orwell’s Ingsoc, nobody would be kicked out of the slums. Somehow or another we get sold on the idea that pain can end, or that any specific pain is permanent. This generalization of the specifics makes politics even harder to deal with.
I know a girl who told me one of the worst parts of moving to America, is that once she was here she was black. Before she was Ethiopian, she came from a line of people that went back to Shiva, and had been part of a culture that maintained its independence through all the European wars of expansion and contraction. Here we check every form, black, white, or Hispanic. My grandparents were German and French, and they all became American when they got here. We became white. Luckily enough we were generalized into the oppressor portion of society. She came from one of the proudest countries of Africa, and became just another black girl with an accent.
Political philosophy, especially Marxist and socialist, seems to think generalizing people into groups and classes can make for accurate social assessment. They do this for the purpose of being able to collect data, or in the case of Marx, just to make any argument what so ever. We cannot calculate the details, and for the sake of feeding data to our bureaucracies, just to get any kind of action, we need to fit people into some kind of punch card. Marx says it’s the bourgeoisie that oppress the proletariat, but often it can be the other way around. It can be the incessant demands of the mob that oppress those whose only crime is seeking to be free. We forget about the witch hunts, and McCarthyism. We forget that feeling of loosing you’re dignity as you beg a bureaucrat for food.
So I’m taking those first steps now that I’m sure many have taken before me. I’m declaring that life isn’t perfect, and I’m ok with that. I accept that my children and my children’s children will not witness a perfect world. There is no system of dividing limited resources to billions of people spread over millions of miles, which will ever stop putting more power in one person’s hand than another. We don’t need to fight for our political beliefs; we just need to talk about them. Class lines are illusions philosophers use to make talking about life simpler. Sometimes that’s fun, but perfection is something salesmen use to get you to do what they want. I think it is wrong to buy into the corporate consumer culture of overspending and having a passion for feeling more passionate. I also think it is wrong to buy into that other culture, of always fighting, of oppressing the oppressors, and calling it revolution.