(no subject)
NEW YORK CITY IS AWESOME.
I fell in love with a place once before, in Marrakesh in 1997, and this weekend in NYC I felt the same kind of feelings creeping up on me. I have never felt so at home and so inspired by a new place before -- maybe because it all seems so familiar. Look, over there, isn't that where they crossed the streams at the end of Ghostbusters? And isn't that the place that got blown up in Independence Day?! The iconic nature of the quotidian here is incredible. A taxi stopping at lights, someone drinking coffee on the sidewalk, steam rising from the streets as though (in Tom Waits's words) "the whole goddamn town's about to blow" -- all of it looks beautiful and fills me with a sad kind of delight. Other cities have extraordinary attractions, but New York is unique in that the whole town is the attraction. Sure, there are the sights -- the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building -- but the real magic just seems to reside in those endless intersections of avenues and streets, the very normal interactions which make it easy for a visitor to feel like they've had an amazing experience with little effort or expenditure.
And people this side of the Atlantic, of course, are amazingly friendly and welcoming. At first when people kept asking me how I was, I thought they were a little mental....then I realised they actually mean it here. It's so nice! I am furious with people like Thom Yorke who are always complaining about being told to have a nice day in America --- it's awesome! I have spent the last week at least on a constant high of goodwill...."How's it going?" people keep asking me. "I hope you're having a great time here?"
"Yes!" I find myself gabbling incoherently, "yes! I pledge allegience to the United Stateside of apple pie!"
The food is so delicious and so ridiculously unhealthy. If I lived here I'd be the size of a house. I'm having four or five meals a day just to try and fit it all in. On Sunday I had breakfast in the Village with the wonderful
herself_nyc , and ate challah French toast with bacon and maple syrup....when the hell was this invented, and why has no one told me?!
I haven't spent too much money -- just bought a few books and a couple of T-shirts. Hannah and her sister took me on a mammoth trek down Fifth Avenue, which was surprisingly fun given how much I hate shopping for clothes. We actually queued to get into Abercrombie & Fitch, a ridiculous place which sells the same stuff as every other high street store but which thinks it is the cornerstone of a remarkable countercultural revolution. There is a branch in Covent Garden but I don't remember it being that busy. Here it's like some kind of club, filled with topless male models and aggressively cute shop assistants swinging their hips irritably at you in time to the euphoric trance mix. I tried not to express too much annoyance though, since the staff outnumbered the actual customers by about three to two, so if it came to it they could probably take us down.
But I guess I was prepared for the great food, the busyness, the awesome shopping. What I hadn't expected was how affected I would be by the buildings. I have a crick in my neck from walking around with my head back, staring in awe at the skyline. Nothing is old here of course, by Euro standards, but there is something about that 1930s borderland between art deco and gothic which moves me deeply and which New York has in spades. The Empire State Building, obviously, and the Rockefeller centre -- the Hyatt, the old Paramount building, and my favourite, the Chrysler Building -- all of them have this extraordinarily solid, brooding, almost Stalinist intensity which I just love. It looks like Batman should be standing, cape flapping, on every rooftop. This weekend, with the peaks of the skyscrapers reaching into a high mist made sepia from the light pollution, the whole town had me speechles, totally speechless, with appreciation.
I have been away from a computer for so long, this is just a frenzied splash of thoughts on the place now I've got five minutes with a friend's laptop. I flew out midnight last night. Man, I can't wait to go back.