12. Whitehead

MY SUNSET

Maybe we really do become New Yorkers. In my FINAL post, I covered many of the poignant aspects of Colson Whitehead’s “The Colossus of New York,” at least moments that moved me. He writes so candidly and honestly, it is as if he’s following YOU around and reading YOUR thoughts. Then you realize it is because as New Yorkers we have the same thoughts, experiences, etc. Even though we will not make eye contact with anyone on the subway, everyone around us is thinking, “if (I) had acted differently everything would be better,” and the train would be here already, whereas “on the opposite track, you gotta beat off trains with a stick,” (49). Once on the train, we all move to the same beat together, never acknowledging our synchronicity (57). We are a disjointed community, but in the end, we are a cohesive group with our little big city. We have the same little joys as well as the same great sadness, such as: “Forming an attachment to an umbrella is the shortest route to heartbreak in this town… We learn loss from umbrellas” (62). Sure this line may sound silly to others from elsewhere who have not experienced a wet downpour/windstorm with 300% humidity and a chance of hail. Just another day in old New York.

As Whitehead begins the book, “I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.… Maybe you came here for school… The city has spent a considerable amount of time and money putting the brochure together, what with all the movies, TV shows and songs—the whole If You Can Make It There Business” (3). So yes, I came here for school. I am finishing school today, right now; these blogs are all I have left before graduations tonight and tomorrow. While I’ve been here I have studied the movies and literature of New York, among other things, and helped create my own mythic Manhattan, rooted in reality as well as artistic renderings. I have my own New York, but I am not ready to leave and perhaps New York is the one that has me. I keep quoting Whitehead’s line, “maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us” and maybe I am just trying to hammer into my own head that despite my best efforts to capture New York for myself, I am the one captivated and not wanting to say goodbye (10). No matter why you come, if you stay long enough, you become a part of it. You become just like the rest of the people you don’t say HI to on the train; like the broken, twisted rainbow of umbrellas littering the sidewalk on a damp and gray afternoon. New York is a mighty metropolis and I am hoping to take some of it with me, but even more so wishing that I could leave some of myself behind.

Monday (Spencer Avenue)
His toddler bangs out notes on the child cage. A symphony of flailing fists accompanied by Hebrew reprimands. The anti-theft cages protect each window of each identical apartment building. Also their personal in-house nanny. Jon and Kate Plus Eight on every block, in every building, every home. Three more join in the music lesson playing makeshift instruments. Clack, ring, reverberation. Shouts and screams. Children ride bicycles on the sidewalk but gawk at mine. Enjoy it while you can. After you outgrow your 24" wheels, they will not buy you another set. Toys are not transportation.

Tuesday (Kent Avenue)
Vibrations. DOT's allocation collapsed with Bear Sterns and you've been waiting for the pavement roller for two years. The sound of its exhaust pipe will spout rejoice into your bedroom window one morning. Until then, what's another day? Your headset quivers, groans at the abuse. A uniformed man is the kuma hula and the cars follow his lead. Out of sync, you leap through oncoming traffic, he ponders the impact on his life if your timing had been just a half a second off. Unemployment is only funemployment for trust fund hipsters and recent college graduates.

Wednesday (Ryerson Street)
Forget the flu, I'm suffering from "The Fear." The recipe: a pinch of sleep, a cup of liquor, and a dash of anxiety. Let sit until morning. The pavement stumbles beneath me and my front wheel pitches from side to side. Your favorite bartender bought all the rounds as well as my cab ride home. Sweet syrup of whiskey and ginger ale poured past bar time. Speech travels, choosing its own path uncontrollable, unpredictable. Liquid courage. You danced on the bar and became one of those girls. Later, you fucked the bartender behind the counter. Even later, you deny it. My roommate woke up this morning face down on his floor surrounded by White Castle containers. At least I made it to my bed. Double yellow line provides a straight path. Follow.

Thursday (N Elliott Place)
"We used to launch ships, now we launch businesses." Rumor: The borough president promised a developer. The juxtaposition of industrial relics and over priced water views would have been a bourgeois dream. Fact: Decrepit row houses leak glass and asbestos just the same. Their ghosts fade into the jungled greenery as the vines inch closer to the sun. Admirals abandoned long ago. Bricks slide off the barrier wall forming sidewalk jetties. Climb over. Don't get caught, the skeletons beckon. Gliding, pedaling, spinning, she wishes for the details. Murderous filigrees suspended from caved in ceilings--she saw it in a photo once.

Friday (Gold Street)
Shit. I missed my bridge exit. Flushing turns into Nassau and Navy plays hide and seek.

Photo by Budi Akbarsjah on flickr

Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is hard to pin down as something in particular—fact or fiction, poetry or prose, novel or ethnography, celebratory or scathing—we can certainly say it is about at least a few things: New York City, and people that live there. We can imagine the book as a single consciousness, coursing through the city's denizens at random, seeing through one's eyes for a moment, a thought, a sentence or two, and then moving on, jumping too quick to get caught up in who they are individually, so as not to distract from the city. We can only begin to come to grips with New York City (or any city, or any place) on the human scale of experience. Humans intuitively understand by imagining entities to be human in some way, having motives, and a consciousness. The city takes on radically different qualities from each of these perspectives, often personified, uncooperative, even antagonistic. They see the city as monstrous and hungering, and at times unexpectedly friendly and even caring—but they don't let their guard down, who knows what it's playing at. Its motives are inscrutable, it is too vast, too complex to be understood. Its power is beyond our comprehension, this Colossus.

Living in New York City ourselves, we pass these people, or people like them, sometimes too close, bumping up against each other on the subway or in the street. We resent them or don't notice them or wonder or worry about them or feel attracted to them, but we don't know them, and we don't know what they feel and think, we don't know about their personal relationships with the Colossus. Whitehead draws us into the minds of those people we never connect to, and we find that they are in many ways like us, and in fact we are all connected: each person is a part of NYC, and each person has NYC within themselves. In this way the book is also about empathy, our creative ability to put ourselves in each others' positions, to suspend judgement and attempt to understand their perspectives, ultimately discovering that in so doing we have transformed our own.

Cathy GrierThough I found the tone of the book gloomy and some what depressive, I enjoyed his notion of a city made up of millions of individual cities overlapping one another, breathing up and down to its own rhythmic beat. His section on the subway was intriguing, and frightenly accurate at times. But that would mean I felt I was ‘suffering like a true New Yorker’. I am not quite sure if I want to admit that yet.

The passage discussing the rhythm and choreography of the subway cars reminded me of the Music Under New York collective sponsored by MTA. Initiated in 1987 as part of the ‘Arts for Tranist’ program, MUNY sponsors more than 100 musicians who perform at 25 designated locations throughout NYC. In order to become a member of the collective, each musician must attend an audition at Grand Central and be judged by industry professionals. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLy8jgWzLGk)

The collection of musicians is vastly diverse, ranging form harpists to saw players. Each brings their own unique rhythm to the station. Many have initiated online blogs to record their experiences underground. For instance, Saw Lady provides windows for a weekly blog, merchandise including books and cds, and external links. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r-zLKzLD38)

"Hit the town. It hits back.": Illustration by Jacob Thomas for TimeOut NY.Contemporary literature perpetuates cultural understandings of Lower Manhattan as an entertainment zone rather than a residential neighborhood. In his essay “Downtown,” Colson Whitehead structures the essay around the experience of nightlife. The essay begins at a bar at the beginning of the night, and ends at sunrise. Throughout, Whitehead points to specific signifiers of subcultures at work:

“Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind” (Whitehead 128).

The restaurant industry is also identified as a part of an exclusive experience of downtown: “What do you feel like doing. Dunno. Everybody else knows where the hot new restaurants are” (Whitehead 126). That creative writers are perpetuating cultural stereotypes of urban life is not surprising, but their role in the culture machine has a significant affect on the cultural understanding of place and therefore, through the political and economic processes of the growth and community machines, the physical landscape of Lower Manhattan.

I'm the king of New York: And so is he, and so is she and so are they.

Early in his novel, Whitehead brings up the phenomenon of millions of New Yorks, each one belonging to the individuals who live in and experience the city or have at some time in their life. Being that I work in a restaurant where I socialize and work with people who have nothing to do with NYU, I often hear about New York experiences completely different from my (and all of my NYU friends') NYU, West Village, Manhattan-based life. For most of the people I work with, I can only imagine what they do after and before work, somewhere in Brooklyn, painting, auditioning for plays, building furniture, doing drugs. My life barely resembles the lives of the people I work with, except for the job we have in common, yet we are all experiencing the same city on a daily basis. I've decided that for this post I will contrast the details I know about the "New Yorks" some of the people I work with, and my own.

I live in Alphabet City with my sister, also a student. We have a very cute "authentic" village two bedroom apartment and our neighborhood is made up of small longstanding communities as well as newer businesses such as restaurants and bars. We usually do basic grocery shopping at Key Foods, a supermarket chain largely concentrated in Brooklyn, with only 4 stores still in Manhattan. The buildings are mostly old red brick, four or five stories high, maybe a little graffiti on the front door. My super's name is Pedro Gomez, but everyone calls him Pete. Pete is probably from the Dominican Republic and when he mumbles monosyllabically about fixing the lock on our front door or installing the carbon-monoxide detector, he has an accent. He says the F word a lot, especially when he's on the phone. I have class at the NYU "campus" four days a week in various buildings on Broadway, Washington Place, Waverly etc. I work two or three days a week in the West Village about 10 minutes from "campus". My boyfriend lives in a dorm near Union Square and I almost never go there. On weekends and other nights when I'm feeling up for it, I go out with my friends. We used to go to clubs in the Meatpacking district a lot, but I think we all got a bit tired of it and bogged down with work, and now I find myself at bars in my neighborhood more often. I'm a downtown girl. I know the East Village and West Village pretty well. I've walked around both of them many times. I feel alienated when I go uptown, as if I don't quite belong there and I'm only on a field trip. I don't even like going to Central Park that much - the hoards of people crowding the green spaces as soon as spring arrives rob the park of its natural element, in my opinion. School, work, home, friends. Downtown.

John lives in Astoria Queens with his girlfriend and his cat Zoe. They have been together for 7 years (John and his girlfriend, not John and the cat). John grew up in Georgia. Five or six days of the week John takes the subway into Manhattan and down to the West Village where he is the sous-chef at an upscale restaurant. He's been working at the restaurant for almost 4 years, ever since he graduated from the CIA in upstate NY and came to the city to cook. John hates the restaurant he works at, because it has become his entire life. His friends are the other cooks and some of the front of house staff. He spends more time at the restaurant than he does at home. He has a few favorite spots to drink after work, all in the West Village. He likes Daddy'Os (they have good tacos and tater tots), Blind Tiger and sometimes if he's tired enough he'll just go sit at Ditch Plains. On some of his days off John goes out to dine with his girlfriend. He has enjoyed meals at many of Manhattan's finest restaurants and usually gets styled out when they know he's the sous-chef at another upscale restaurant. He says he didn't love Daniel (cork in his wine and bones in his fish for $600?) but he loved Sotto and Bar Blanc and Chanterelle. John also cooks sometimes when he's at home and he gets his produce from the greek and asian grocery stores in Astoria. When he's at work he often has to go to the Union Square greenmarket to buy ingredients. He likes local and seasonal produce, but everything's cheaper in Queens. John plays the guitar and often talks about going to an open mike night in Queens to play some of his songs. He smokes a lot of pot when he's not working, and plays a lot of video games in his apartment. He loves going to K-town for Korean barbecue. Work, work work, smoke, guitar, girlfriend. Queens, West Village.

Dillon was born in Colorado and moved to New York after college. Her older brother lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son, and Dillon lives in the same building. Her father has a loft in Tribeca that Dillon often house-sits. Her father lives a bachelor's life with the family dog, Hubert. Dillon is an actress by training and goes on auditions all over Manhattan. However, Dillon loves Williamsburg. Her apartment, her brother, her gym, her favorite yoga instructor, are all in and around Williamsburg. Once a Hassidic Jewish man living in her building asked her on a date. She was reminded of her absolute apathy toward religion. Dillon often spends time at her father's loft in Tribeca, which has views of Gwenyth Paltrow's apartment and the Hudson River. It is a wonderful place to relax, and throw a party. Dillon also dog-sits two spoiled Portuguese Water dogs (yes, like Bo Obama) from time to time. She gets paid $100 a day to sleep in the lavish Tribeca apartment that belongs to the dogs' owner and to cook the dogs gourmet meals. Dillon thrives in New York City, for the most part. At times she feels as if the city is folding in on her and she feels anxious and depressed. She sees her therapist at his Union Square office once a week. Her therapist suggested she try taking Prozac to treat her anxiety. She filled the prescription but never took the pills. Work, yoga, dog/house-sitting, auditions. Williamsburg, Tribeca.

Crowded day at Central ParkLast weekend, my friend and I decided to take an adventure up to Central Park, the annual trek up on the 6 train us downtowners take at the very first sign of spring. As we approached the park, I could feel the anticipation and anxiety growing, every block closer the sidewalks seemed to get a little more crowded, until the greenery emerged in our view and what we already knew became obvious—it was on. Our pace quickened as we entered the park around 68th street, and we danced and skirted through the crowds, half running through the family’s with strollers while frantically searching the hills for the perfect spot. Up and around, over and under, trial and error, we finally saw it emerge, that perfect tuff of grass at the highest spot on a hill, perfectly space so as not to be too close to anyone else, especially out of range of those kids throwing the Frisbee. Ironically, after we spread our blankets and nestled in, I opened Whitehead’s book Colossus of New York. In his short chapter on Central Park describes the chaos of our quest for a peaceful afternoon almost exactly. “Where to sit, where to sit. Our whole future depends on it” (38), he chants. Whitehead’s take on the unique experience of sitting in a park in New York rang very true to me. He lyrically describes the hunt for the best spot, the bombarding sights and sounds our brain must process as we seek the solace of the trees, and even the overly apparent scarcity of this green, with over half the parks green hills sectioned off with fences—no trespassing. We are so starved for peaceful greenery and nature in New York that even going to the park is a stressful and competitive experience. And a great deal of it we aren’t even allowed to make us of. This became even more evident to me after my trip to San Francisco this weekend, where we stumbled through the green lawns of public parks every ten minutes to get to the street on the other side. Yet there, there was no fenced off space or overly manicured areas, it was just simple lawns like our back yard, where people sat barbequing, playing games, singing and playing music, even dancing or simply sun bathing, with at least a twenty foot radius of open space around them if they wanted! For us New Yorkers, this is unheard of. Yet for some reason, I couldn’t wait to get home and find that perfect spot again in the park…

Coney Island is a unique and vital part of how we think of New York City.
Business or Pleasure?
Colson Whitehead acknowledges this by attributing a section to it in The Colossus of New York, a collection of vignettes about the city.
Other than his personal musings on the collective experience of going to the beach and amusement park, I found the most valuable and provocative sections of Whitehead's writing to be his use of metaphor and abstraction. At the end of the Coney Island chapter, Whitehead writes:

"Citizens of this new vertiginous city. Up and down. Reel this way and the ocean is upon you in a wave, in beckoning gloom, reel the other way and slam into highrises, into broad brickfaces. A rollercoaster is your mind trying to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Earth and space, cement and air, city and sea. Life and death. Choose quickly. The city and the sea don't get along, never have. Two trash-talking combatants, two old bitter foes."

This passage sheds light on the relationship between Coney Island and Manhattan, and the mental state of New Yorkers who are torn between the two opposing forces. In his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas writes about Coney Island, "a resort implies the presence, not too far away, of a reservoir of people existing under conditions that require them to escape occasionally to recover their equilibrium."

This connection alludes to the interdependence between Coney Island and Manhattan. In a sense, neither would exist as efficiently without the other. Hardworking middle class Manhattanites, at least in the early days, required Coney Island as a destination for recreational escapism for the masses. In return, Coney Island's existence as a leisure center depends on the existence of a large New York City working force in need of recreation. Coney Island is a symbolic projection of Manhattan's dreams, wishes, and shortcomings. New Yorkers exist in the tension between the dichotomy of city and sea; Manhattan's Progress and Coney Island's Pleasure.

I was born in Coney Island Hospital, which was originally founded as a first aid center for beach goers in the late 1800s. The earliest, most innocent years of my life were spent living a mere 15 minutes from Astroland, the Cyclone, and Brighton Beach. As a child I would visit carnivals and the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. I have vivid memories of feeding seagulls on the boardwalk and riding waves in the Atlantic. Moving to Manhattan at age 8 was a physical split from Coney Island, but also a symbolic progression. What laid ahead was growth and concrete, what was left behind were memories and carefreeness.

NYC Subway

“Etiquette is very important when so many people are crammed into such small spaces. First of all, when preparing to board the subway, let people off of the train before shoving your way inside. Take only one seat when it’s crowded -- don’t put your feet up, put your bag on a seat, or sprawl all over the car. Be gallant and give up your seat if you see a pregnant, elderly, or handicapped person standing. Most importantly, keep your hands (and the rest of your body parts) to yourself.” (About.com)

Are these etiquette rules followed in the NYC subway?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzHHuh7J8Bs

Whiteheads fantastic writings on the NYC subway scene inspired me to reflect on my own subway experiences:

SUBWAY ARCHETYPES

The Pervert…….stared at me without blinking for 10 minutes straight and said, “I like the way you adjusted your pants.”

The Asshole…..is 1 of 40 sardines in this can of a subway and yet is the only one yelling and cursing (at the woman who happened to accidentally bump into him): “Don’t fucking touch me!”

The Performer….made my day when he and his buddy formed a gigantic human ball and rolled down the train aisle. My sister’s first nyc subway ride experience couldn’t have been more perfect.

The Beggar….will unfortunately have to continue to beg from one train car to another.

The Old Lady…is very rarely offered a seat …..unless I’m in the train car (cuz my mother raised me right).

The Student….is me, reading a book, and listening to my ipod in hopes of escaping my claustrophobic hell.

Central Park While I can appreciate Whitehead's need to turn New York in to a series of vignettes, each profiling another aspect of New York, I find his choices a little tired and almost self conscious in selection. I tend to think that my problem with this book is related to the fact that I have lived here since childhood and am therefore, less interested in hearing someone else's understanding of New York. What frustrated me is that the depth of his prose belies the fact that he is rarely saying very much. He distracts you from the content with his form. I too could go to Central Park and go shot for shot explaining, "this is where my friend lost his virginity, this is where they drank 40's of malt liquor, and this is where I got high for the first time." If I dressed it up in interesting language and with the occasional snarky comment I too could have this deep revelation about Central Park, but I don't think its deep. I think this book is more about the author than the city. Very few of the details in his explanation of Central Park gave me new perspective of the Park. Surely, some of his details ring true, but his delivery of these details shows me someone more concerned with his personal experience than some sort of objective understanding of New York. UNfortunately, it feels like he is passing his own opinions and emotions about a place as the actual feel of a place. While Frazier's vignettes seemed to be a little more universal, I find Whitehead's to be too personal under the guise of universal. There is a condescension and irritation to the narrative. I understand both those emotions in relation to New York, but find myself annoyed by it when I know this book is written for those who want a window in to the city. I find that the tone paints the city in a strange way. Maybe I'm just nervous about "my" city being misunderstood at the hands of another New Yorker. Maybe its a pretty typical New Yorker response to say, "well no shit Whitehead. You're not special for noticing that." And maybe he isn't. But maybe he is. Maybe verbalizing all those little moments is what New York needs to be understood. I'm not convinced but I could be wrong.