www.NewYorkCult.com

www.AestheticRealism.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic_Realism

Me a zombie, me eat out your brain
Shoot heroin and smoke cocaine
Suck pussy on the R Train
Make it rain blood, me ah gon’ rain

Once you’ve stepped through the turnstile… keep walking… for at least a few steps. Don’t stand there, blocking the turnstile, fumbling with your wallet and/or purse, as you put your MetroCard back in its receptacle.

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran.

Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair.

By a city we don’t mean, or just mean, a place where many people live; we mean a place where many kinds of people live, all more or less on top of each other.  Though Mrs. Astor knew nothing of the Lower East Side, and the Lower East Side could only dream of Mrs. Astor, they were still nodes on one grid.  In the course of any even semiconscious wandering through the city—much less the kind of conscious wondering that marks the city’s poetry and literature from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin and beyond—each group bumped visually and tangibly into the other.  Only twenty-five years ago, a walk from Tribeca to SoHo and the Lower East Side would show as many kinds and classes—rich, aspiring, immigrant—as it had a century before; now that walk is likely to show only the same six stores and the same two banks and the same one shopper.

Read the full article here.

It is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular.  The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face.  This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens.  For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier.  Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence.  These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Read the full piece here.