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.