Surely, a person comes the way of New York City to beat sparks from the stones, whether pioneer of psychic outlands, or last member at the fucked-out asshole orgy. . .

This past weekend we went to what might have been a dance party, but once arrived we proved to be the scant few dancing (to the sweeeez sixties soul na-na-na) and we left early, it turned out pretty much a total pud-ass scene.  A friendsome vibe did not exist, it was amateur night on the Lower East Side data page, and upon our departure the “dance floor” was took over like starved bugs to dead food by yappering crawlers of the night, on a different mission than I that evening, though us both humans.

The more the new yorker attaches oneself to the city, the more that new yorker is exposed to riotous disparagement.  In such a way I have unleashed myself unto David’s Bagels, on First Avenue and 14th Street.

I would not be presumptuous of the superlative tendency to claim that David’s Bagels had the best egg & cheese in town (I could not speak equally if asked my favorite bar or favorite skyscraper).  The great bagelry has closed, but word has it another exists on 19 ST & 1 AV, in the Stuy Town perimeter zones…

I did have fun at Fontana’s Subway Soul Club, but I left the neighborhood with a mind to not revisit these streets south of Houston anytime soon (except shop at Ben Freedman Gent’s Furnishing, for shirts, vests and sportjackets).

Routinely, as a person cannot wear eyeglasses other than that person’s own prescription, you cannot go out dancing where no one else has come to dance. Like the werewolf to the full moon, self-possessed, sexually mis-jiggered youths will glamorize a Saturday night.  The girls in fancy-tops, the guys limp and sweaty – in history, New York has never assumed to offer a dearth of such sort. NYC is the most populated city in America but ranked 12 worldwide and after NYC the next most populated US city is LA, at 45, below Wuhan, China. As ever would, unfledged stentoriousness plays on, it’s still the old video game.

This is the old “headhouse” of the first IRT subway that ran from Wall Street to Harlem for a nickel in 1904, designed by Heins & LaFarge, the original architects of The Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue, which is not finished yet.  Across Broadway is the square they used to call Needle Park, when the neighborhood smacked of post-WWII hobos and the rebellious middle-class youth who grew up in the West 60s & 70s, when pro bohemiandos shilled for the grime. It was near this station in 2007 that a woman on the street called Alec Baldwin an “asshole,” in response to the great actor’s widely-publicized, venomous phone message left in the voicebox of his daughter Ireland. Surely, this was an Upper West Side moment.

“Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,” – Hart Crane

Most major cities in the world are on bodies of water: Cairo, Chicago, Louisville, Galway. New York is a port town, founded by Dutch merchants the way space-men first looked for the right place to put the flag in the moon. Today, there are more jet-skis and kayaks in the river than cargo ships, and for the last fifty years the city has been conducting the sometimes lumbering, sometimes swift process of dismantling the architecture of the waterfront. Over the past year, a significant sector of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal was excised.

Never slack as an innovator, NYC since WWII (or publication of The Recognitions by Gaddis) remains a transmitter of goods, and those goods are ideas, let the cargo unload in Jersey. 

Still helmed by the Financial District – which was the first of all neighborhoods born colonially (and where the early dot-coms utilized cheap office space) – New York has become an intense curator of itself. And the room for curatorship is made by both bearing and sacrificing the dicey effort toward full new ideas.

Think tanks are not often built where the piers once jut, but parks and housing.  This is not to say that creativity of individuals does not abound NYC, but that “creativity of individuals” is the very idea in the employ of an economy for which individuals should do as the DJ who is out to impress the clubgoers of his taste in music rather than to get people to dance.

Tho perhaps where one activist views the acquisition of old industrial space in West Harlem by Columbia University as a theft of property, another activist might champion as land use for the intellect…

Clifford Holland, for whom the Tunnel is named, was an innovator in the field of subaqueous construction, and, the story goes, he would join his workers down deep in the new holes dug under the river.  It was in the unfinished tunnel where he suffered a heart attack, and died, but it could not be said that Holland died in New Jersey, nor that he died in New York, because at his stricken moment Holland stood upon the exact border between the two states.

I dated a girl who lived in the low low eastside of Chinatown, and there was a VFW around the corner on Clinton Street. We would sometimes stop by on our way home and have a couple beers. Mostly men hung out there, and drank and played pool, yet there was always at least one local lady present, and usually the lady was of a commanding constitution. Everybody was very inviting and congenial, real bullshooters. And of course, slurred, guffawing jokes were made about how none of them were veterans. A guy named Randy looked after the place, and in back from behind the small bar with stools Randy served the coldest can of Bud I ever drunk. Nothing ever got out of hand, and we could smoke inside.  Most of the people were locals who had grown up in the neighborhood. Randy’s father was the patriarch of the establishment, an old Jewish Loisada stunt-man kind of a guy, and during the day he sat outside with his elder cohorts and made buzzard noises at the passersby. One night we ended up at the VFW after a long night out. There was more activity than usual, everyone was living it up. There were these Argentinian guys, my friends Gary and Eva and brother Fud and Michi, and these guys who worked for the Dept. of Sanitation. One of New York’s Strongest passed out in his chair.  After all, they haul 13,000 tons of garbage every garbage day.

As a Gray Line tour guide, I can only make reference to this building on Express runs up the West Side Highway, as I did last Fall coming back from Brooklyn to Times Square. A fervent, diagrammatic, dockside Iceberg; an homage to the Age which bore the modern archipelago – it has not yet thawed, reinforced in steel and glass. Given all the grandeur, it is unfortunate that among the company’s primary brands is TicketMaster, who take money where money should not be taken, demanding a fee for your enthusiasm to see a live show – it would be opportune if they should be put through the same abject, bone-breaking interrogation as victims of old witch trials, only that TicketMaster is guilty in the most divine and gruesome sense, and the proof is the lame fee right there on the stub which I would gladly use to fan the burning stake. Still. . . the IAC Building regards its whereabouts marvelously.