Coming back to New York
Monday, July 20, 2009
My kid’s coming to visit this weekend, and of course, we’re going to NYC.
She can’t get it out of her blood – since she was born there – and neither can I even though NYC has stopped being the NYC I loved as a kid.
You have to be Indiana Jones to find the remains of the old place.
Even the East Village is going the way of the dodo. I take pictures of the places I know will vanish soon.
When I found out the center piece of “Desperately Seeking Susan” was to close its doors, I hurried over only to find the windows dark already.
The St. Mark’s Books of today isn’t the same funky place it was, and caters to the ever encroaching population of the two local universities. The MFA writers from New School have even taken over KBG bar – and though I’ve sat through a couple of their readings, I soon found out what snobs they are. The curator of the event is the rudest person I’ve ever met, a regular star fucker whose only interest is in hobnobbing with high profile guests. Since we’re from an older generation, he can’t impress us so he insists on bullying us, a typical reaction of the new generation of artist that requires a degree and a masters before he or she can create.
Love’s Saves the Day was an over priced junk store filled with nostalgia for the once “beautiful” passed. But since THIS present doesn’t love THAT past, it had to fade away, just as the Fillmore East had to and the other icons of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
My daughter loves the Village because from a distance it still remotely resembles what it stood for in the past, a center of rebellion against the establishment. Yet close up, the establishment has clearly taken over – as that jerk from New School suggests – and the center of rebellion has become a mockery of itself.
The real rebellion isn’t in NYU or New School, but in the next generation of green people, who seem to have managed what we could not, transforming mainstream society into a more responsible engine for social good.
Just as our generation didn’t quite fit in with the Old Left of the 1930s, this generation doesn’t quite line up with the values we learned in the 1960s, yet seem to be on the same page, using their influence to turn the place into a healthier and more positive place.
Ten years ago, I was near despair, fully believing that the Ronald Reagans had taken over the planet in much the same way as the pod people did from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Everything was greed rather than green – and perhaps I’m still a little skeptical, I’m also slowly coming around to believe we might be seeing a new dawn.
Such revolutions have no need for sellout places like the East Village, and thus when the bulldozers finally roll over the last vestiges of the 1960s, the revolution will go on without it, stirred up inside the heads of a generation that has so fully internalized the message they have no need to wear tied-dye t-shirts or flash peace signs.
Still, I need to make my pilgrimages back to the old place, and perhaps I’ll drag my daughter to the door of the apartment we lived in when she was born. I may take her around the corner to my best friend’s house, an tenement so full of roaches and junkies then, they strung out behind him like a chain each time he strolled over to visit us.
I will walk to the Cube on Astor Place, tell her about how I used to take the subway to work everyday, and how much we hoped for the future and how somehow the future let us all down with the exception of her.
We also have plans to take the Circle Line around Manhattan so that she can see it all for the first time and I can see it again after so many years – the first time when I was four years old, the last time when I turned 40.
This ever changing island as magical as Avalon, even after the dream has ended, and what we once knew fades into the mists.