Museums and their Inhabitants

Home a week now, and no nearer to catching up. Writing impressions of New York while you're waiting to go to work in Kamloops is a rather different proposition than doing so from a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. Even though the place stays twisted into you like a fish-hook, the immediacy fades and mutes too quickly. Anyhow, onward.

One of the tourist things you can do without feeling a vague embarassment is, of course, to see as many galleries and museums as you can, and there are a lot. Trouble is, everybody else has got the same idea, and not all of them had good mothers who taught them how to behave in public. Funny thing is (actually, it isn't funny at all, and it probably shouldn't even be all that surprising), the more modern and fashionable the gallery, the more ill-mannered are the clods who gather there, mercilessly booming out their opinions for all to enjoy. Pity that you couldn't see what they were banging on about, since they'd parked their gigantic ignorant selves squarely between you and the exhibit you'd been looking at. Considering the clatter they were all making, you'd think they'd realize there were other people around, but obviously not. MoMA was particularly infested with these types.

The crowd at the American Museum of Natural History was no less raucous, but far more gleeful and much less self-regarding. This was the furious din of curiosity - there are lots of joyous sounds in the world, but the sound of kids yelling in wonder with their grubby paws all over the stuff of the earth is one that makes me smile the most. There were exceptions, of course, like the couple with the eye-popping mass and girth, propelling their gelatinous bulk through the crowd with indestructible disregard for all others. Their runts, as small and hard to swat as their parents were vast and impossible to avoid, jumped railings and thumped on display cases like miniscule monkeys on meth. But they were, as I say, the exception.

But then, ah...a place like the Frick appears like a mirage through the humidity. The Frick Collection (not a museum, as you are pointedly informed) is contained in the Upper East Side home of Henry Clay Frick, a steel magnate who made his fortune in the late 19th and early 20th century. He consorted with the likes of J P Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, but walking through the extraordinary collection of art he left to the public, it's hard to imagine him a robber baron.

Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer, Goya, El Greco, all the heavy hitters are represented here. You could sit all day in the monumental West Gallery, on one of the couches provided, and contemplate two huge Van Dyck portraits of people you never heard of, or maybe a couple of Turners or a Velazquez or Gainsborough. The Holbein portraits of Cromwell and Sir Thomas More will stop you dead in your tracks in the Living Hall. In the Enamels Room, you can get your face inches from a Cimabue altarpiece from the late 13th century - no ropes, no plexiglass sneeze-guard, just a stunning 700 year old masterpiece staring right back at you.

Paintings don't do it for you? How about exquisite Houdon sculpture? How about 18th century porcelains and furniture? How about just everyday objets that are so beautiful they'll break your heart? That's the alluring thing about this place - it has the tranquility of a private residence, combined with the almost nauseating beauty of some of the greatest works of art humanity has ever produced. And the crowds know it. There's no hollering here, just the musing, contemplative murmer of people at peace in a lovely place.

I don't care if he was a robber baron. Much can be forgiven for a gift like this.

Walking

Writing this in the departure “lounge” of La Guardia, which is as dingy and suicide-inducing a place as I’ve ever been in. The kind of place that makes non-smokers want to light up. And I’m still trying to catch up.

Walking in New York is a necessary art. (I reckon that in 10 days here, we've walked not less than 600 blocks. Some of them crosstown blocks.) Roy Blount Jr, in a piece from the 80’s, wrote about it, and I don’t think things have changed much. If I’ve unconsciously plagiarized him, sue me. If you have to copy, go with the good stuff.

Walking in Manhattan is not linear, and like everything else here, goes at a furious pace. It appears to be a complete free-for-all, but there are actually rules. You may strut, slide, stride, lope, or barge. You might get away with ankling or ambling, and upon exiting a restaurant or hotel, you can probably skedaddle with impunity. On any day but Sunday, you will be required to sidle. If you stroll or saunter, chances are your credibility will seriously be called into question, but go ahead and try it. But there is one rule that all must obey, local or visitor, old or young, and it is a rod of iron: Don’t Impede the Flow.

New York appears pretty tolerant of tourists (they have no choice), and you can take photographs, drink a coffee, or read a paper as you walk, without giving offense. But you absolutely, positively may not stop in your tracks. You will be run over like a bug. Gawk all you want, but don’t get in the way.

As a pedestrian, your relationship with motor vehicles is simple. You may cross any street at any point and at a time of your own choosing, without regard for signs. You may use a tour bus to block a taxi as you jaywalk. But you must always give the cab a way out, and if it goes bad, be prepared to take the hit without complaining.

And always, without fail, don’t impede the flow. Otherwise you’ll be just another tourist road-kill.

Let's stay with the filth, for now

Yes, let's stay with the issue of rubbish, for this post. The garbage here, like everything else, is extraordinary. I guess that most people in the civilized world have some sort of orderly trash removal system. The system here appears to be "throw all your shit in a steaming heap outside your place of business and hope to Christ it's gone in the morning." It does make stepping out a little less elegant as you step around walls of reeking Glad bags, but then, you did want to see New York.

To be fair, it appears that the garbage fairies do come in the middle of the night, and in fact we observed some of them hurling yards of galvanized steel ducting (still shiny and new) into a standard-issue garbage truck. They stood there, staring with bovine lack of interest, as the truck's compacting machinery tried repeatedly and ineffectively to digest it. We watched a different set of men and machines effect a similar but more expeditious disposal of a perfectly good office desk a few days later.

It would take a broader knowledge of North American cities than I possess to make a confident judgement, but there does seem to be a West Coast (very loosely defined) attitude toward rubbish and recycling, and I suppose I've lived near Vancouver long enough to have become indoctrinated. But for such a constantly re-inventing and go-go-go place, this city's apparently aggressive antipathy towards recycling is in equal parts perplexing and appalling.

I am forced to throw beer cans and wine bottles into the trash, and a handful of atoms evaporates from my soul with every clink and clank. And believe me, that adds up to a lot of eschatons. Not to mention glass and aluminum.

Still, let me say a few words in defense of filth. Friends have come back from NYC visits and exclaimed "It's so clean!" They are all liars. That's all. It's not clean. "Clean" is the very last adjective I'd chose to describe Manhattan. But the strata of dirt, gum, spit, urine, grease, vomit, dust, smoke, snot, and other mercifully unidentifiable detritus are the patina that contribute to that ineffable sense of place.

Just consider the dinosaur galleries in the Museum of Natural History. Not only are their public surfaces grimy beyond compare, but the grime itself has been worn in a normal distribution curve. That's an historical record every bit as revelatory (if more ephemeral) as the stairs of a medieval monastery.

Point is, if everything were sterilized every night, what would you have? A safe, enervated tabula rasa. You certainly wouldn't have New York.

Impressions

Impressions of the city. It's easy to get caught up in the mystique of the place. Street names and buildings are redolent of books, movies, music, you name it. You can't set foot anywhere without kicking up the dust of popular imagination. Not in the same way that you feel the age of, say, the Acropolis or Mycenae when you stand amidst their dirt and stones. This is a dynamic, mutating place like no other on earth.

It's profligate but not frivolous. Look at the lights of the skyline and think about the enormous squandering of electricity. Think of what it takes to keep these millions of residents alive, to say nothing of the tourists! Yet it doesn't seem wasteful, it doesn't seem that there's any to spare, and there's nothing silly about it. There's no time for frivolity. Everything here seems necessary and excessive.

It's a serious place filled with serious people, all just getting on with it. The 9-11 murderers couldn't have picked a worse place to try to intimidate. You can imagine, after the initial reeling shock at the sheer audacity of the act, that New York collectively would say to the hijackers and their gang of hooligans "Yeah? You can all go fuck yourselves. We're busy." And then they'd just get on with it.

Like any conurbation of great wealth and influence, it's a fascinating mix of stupendous and squalid. Like imperial Rome, every loser and dreamer and mental case comes here to make it. Statistically, it's certain that almost all will fail, but lacking the means to move, or more likely still hoping for the big score, will stick around, generating filth. Walking past the temples of commerce downtown, or the holy churches of consumption on 5th Avenue, in one breath you can almost literally smell the money, and in the next you get a blast of fetid god-knows-what from god-knows-where. A street food vendor's cart, maybe, which all smell vile, or a sewer or grate. Doesn't matter; there's nothing resembling fresh air here - it smells used, it tastes like other peoples' breath.

Still, don't get me wrong. I loved the place from the second I stepped onto W 55th Street. Colossal, indifferent, filthy, extravagant, and altogether magnificent, it really is like no other city on the planet.

From Newark to New York

So, having done the comprehensive tour of EWR, we began our demented lurch towards Manhattan. I've been on Turkish buses that were less alarming. The steering wheel and accelerator plainly operated on some quantum principle that forbids a continuum - every turn was a sharp and violent change in direction; every throttle blast that launched the van fifty more feet down the road was immediately countered by an equally unforgiving application of brake. None of these vector changes corresponded visibly to traffic or road conditions.

Matters were not improved by the fact that our driver didn't know Manhattan, and couldn't read a map. This provided more entertainment, as he handed the map book to one of the poor doomed passengers up front, asking if they knew how to use it.

We did eventually make it to our hotel, three hours after landing. Good start.

A Prairie-raised, almost-West-Coast-dwelling Canadian goes to NYC

We've been here for five days, so I have some catching up to do.

This is my first trip to New York, so everything has been strange and interesting, like the first time you eat a lychee nut.

The fun started at the Newark airport, or more precisely, leaving the Newark airport. You wouldn't think that would be so hard, right? First-timers, guess again! We landed at 10:30 PM after a decent enough AC flight from Vancouver. So far, so good. Our luggage all made it intact, another plus. But we weren't sure about the cabs & buses, so the helpful travel desk offering reasonably-priced shuttles into Manhattan seemed a safe bet. Ha ha, suckers!

First, our driver disappeared into the nether regions of the airport, leaving us standing like damn fools in the middle of the luggage-claim area. Okay, so he needs to get a sandwich or take a leak or something, fine.

But then we pile into his van, which already contained two condemned souls (silent ones, who didn't warn us about what was to come), and proceeded to make three, count 'em, three circumnavigations of all of the Newark airport terminals, in search of some other desperate fool waiting for a ride. But the fun hadn't really begun. Oh, not at all...