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New York is not just a city, it’s a Place—a place in the mind as much as it’s a behemoth of steel and concrete and money and dreams. It’s iconic; it’s almost too familiar, because we see it on screen, it’s both hyper-real and surreal, and whatever other strange augment to the real there is, broken through the prism of human desire and memory and imagination. So much had been written, said, sung, painted, even danced about it — what more can I add? And yet, as with every legend, with every such collective place of many minds and hearts, there’s the desire to add one’s own drop to the shifting sea that is New York.
This is a kind of #Citysong .
I’ve been to NYC before, actually. I’ve been once green and bright-eyed, and I’ve been leisurely and savvy (after the first visit, everyone feels so much savvier). I did the touristy things, had my photo taken on the Brooklyn bridge, walked till my feet almost fell off, snapped a million photos, bought an outrageously expensive handbag I ended up gifting my mother... and this time around, I’m not here as a tourist, really. I’ve seen many big cities, and I live in one. New York is still cool, it’s the inimitably cool place, but I’m no longer in awe of it. Instead, I am beginning to see it as a place where people live, work, love, suffer, enjoy, and wait to pass the time—I am beginning to see, maybe just a little, the New York underneath the mirage.
Of course, my images of New York are still derivative. It’s hard to be original; we’ve seen it all so many times. The fire escapes, the steps, the wrought iron fences, the out of scale brick skyscrapers that feel as if they are the homes of giants. The yellow cabs, the subway entrances—sometimes I see mock ups of these entrances in Toronto, too, and they throw me off, because the film crews put them where there’s no subway lines in Toronto, but where it resembles New York.
The people of New York also interest me, but I feel like I cannot see them yet. The Italian pizza guy in his apron, the Chinese restaurent chefs in their white paper hats, the baristas, the local corner prophets—they still feel like extras in a film, a set I accidentally wondered onto. Only a few faces here and there, colleagues and people I’ve come here to meet, they begin to come away from the tableau and stand their ground. Some tell me they love it here; others are unconvinced. Not everyone can find a place in New York, and as I wander about, a little dazed, I wonder if I could live here, if this is at a place one lives in.
And so, we keep wandering in and out of real and imagined places. We have lunch at a diner—it turns out to be the one from Seinfeld, the sign outside, that is; we walk in the park, and keep looking at scenes from movies, playing superimposed onto reality. And yet, real New York is not like the ones on screen. It has a kind of air to it that the films, and tv shows, no matter how loving and how truthful, cannot capture. The real New York is deeper, grittier, more grounded and more human than any single representation of it. It can be boring, it’s empty in places, it’s ordinary much of the time. And at the same time, it’s still New York. It never breaks character.
