Good afternoon, beloved —
Just back now from an emergency-ish few days in NYC. I don't want to get into the reasons for the trip, other than to say that everything went about as well as can be expected, given the circumstances — and boy howdy could that be an epitaph for our aspirations, but here we are.
It was an instructive trip in quite a few ways. It had been a minute since I'd spent any appreciable time on the Lower East Side, and it was startling to absorb all the ways in which my old neighborhood had been transformed by gentrification, the pandemic and simple, implacable generational change. I could probably best summarize these changes in a single image by noting that there are gleaming condos, bank branches, boutique hotels and high-end organic markets where insalubrious dive bars and tenements used to be; that after nearly two years of pandemic-driven neglect, a whole lot of these are in relatively poor repair and covered with graffiti at practically late-‘70s levels; and that nobody's lived in the neighborhood long enough to perceive anything discordant about any of this. The Sunrise Cinema is gone, Yonah S(c)himmel's Knishery hangs on (selling to whomst, though?), and it is still somehow 1995 in The Magician. Sadly, there appear to be plenty of untreated and decompensating schizophrenics around — one per every other block or so. Citibikes have gone electric, Whole Foods has a cargo-bike bay sprawled across a few former Houston Street parking spaces that looks a whole lot like something Ctrl-V’d from the Good Future, and the smell of legal weed is everywhere and at all hours of the day.
Jetlagged, I got up at the hour of the wolf my first morning in town, and walked all the way out Rivington until it hits Samuel Gompers Houses. I'd wanted to pay homage to the tenement Genya Ravan celebrates/curses in her autobiographical 1979 mini-masterpiece “202 Rivington Street,” and I did. On the way I passed where Lee Sportswear (aka "Paul's Boutique") used to be, which is now a shitty, overbranded “gourmet wraps” place, complete with compensatory Beastie Boys mural. And at some point in the walk I realized that in what is now very nearly a decade of living in London, I'd fallen out of synch with this Newer York.
It wasn't simply that things change over time. Of course they do. You expect that. It was something in the specific quality of the changes. There was a mural high up on a Bowery building side, crisply drawn, a downtown-Amazon triptych featuring Jodie Foster as Taxi Driver’s Iris, Zoë Tamerlis in Ms. 45 and Debbie Harry in the holy Vultures t-shirt, and all it made me feel was that culture had folded in on itself — that a New York City no longer capable of generating new culture was here reduced to peddling invocations of its glory days. (Never mind that nobody who’d ever actually seen Taxi Driver would claim Iris as any kind of feminist icon.) I doubt things are quite this bleak when all is said and done, but that this was a place that had by and large toggled over from cultural production to consumption, just like anywhere else on Earth, was definitely the impression I was left with.
And that was the truly alienating bit. My New York, for all its many, many faults, drawbacks, heartbreaks and irritating qualities, was always a place where people turned their struggles with the city into art. Sometimes that meant “202 Rivington Street” or “The Message,” sometimes it meant WW3 Illustrated, sometimes it meant Ms. 45 and sometimes a 16mm film screened for half that number of people at Anthology Film Archives (still there, thank all the gods below). Sometimes it meant a surge of matte-black Krylon that blanketed the whole neighborhood in sinister icons overnight. Or these are my touchstones, anyway — you could literally generate a thousand portfolios of culture produced in the city between the years 1980 and 2010 without turning up so much as a single point of overlap between them, which is part of the point. If that's still happening, it's not outwardly visible.
I'm not going to say much about Hudson Yards, or the midtown supertalls, because what is there to say, really? These are places for oligarchs and minor Gulf royals, not people.
Just at the very moment when I might have been tempted to draw a line under the possibilities of the place, though, we passed a storefront art gallery on Avenue A, and were tempted in by what we could see of the work. It turned out to be the very first day of a show that had opened the night before: wonderful paintings by an Atlanta-based artist named Dianna Settles, documenting the life of the intentional community she belongs to, and other communities in struggle. Not only were the paintings fantastic — imagine a Bank Street Reader for black-bloc tots — but the gallerists seemed genuinely interested in the work, in showing it to us, in our reactions to it. The whole thing was two stops past “refreshing,” in the direction of “outright life-affirming.” Show’s called A Life Worth Living Would Be A Life Worth Living (her titles are the best), you can see it now through October 8th at MARCH Gallery, and you should. Tell ‘em I sent you.
I still feel severed from my root, having evidently left NYC behind or been left behind by it without having secured anything more than “indefinite” (and, as we know, contingent) “leave to remain” in the place we live now. And there's probably something to say about how this — you'll excuse the phrase — rootless cosmopolitanism feels at midlife, especially when compared to the experience of folks who reside in a place they're deeply from. But we'll let that be for now. I have a book to write, and it's going to require every tiniest quantum of life energy I can muster, from here straight down to the end of the year.
§ At the moment I'm reading good ol’ Michael Moorcock’s mastertome Mother London; listening to the suddenly and shockingly late Jaimie Branch; and watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, which straight up made me laff out loud and ugly-sob, though that also could have been the cabin pressure at 37,000 feet speaking. (The fight choreography is very nearly as audaciously preposterous as anything Yuen Woo-ping ever came up with. Ke Huy Quan is wonderful as Waymond — and that name says everything about the character, or almost everything, anyway; I didn't think it was possible for me to love Michelle Yeoh anymore than I already did but, well...you do the math.)
Until next dispatch: please do remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 120 of Wednesday, 31 August 2022, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊