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New York/anti-New York
Monday, October 1 2001
I've said this many times, but it's more or less true: I've been living out of my backpack for the last three years. I have relatively few clothes, and few of them are anything short of embarrassing for formal or semi-formal occasions. This point was driven home the other night at Uguale, when the only shirt I had to wear was sort of, well, Hawaiian in design. Dressing flamboyantly has never been my style, but it almost worked in Los Angeles and I got used to being that variety of weird there. However, it just doesn't make any sense in New York, especially not in this confluence of cold autumnal weather and existential tragedy. So, in an effort to do something about the situation, I had a very New York sort of morning.
Gretchen and I caught the Q train into Manhattan and we got off at Union Square. Coming out of the ground, we walked into a nearby Banana Republic and went shopping. Mind you, I can only take so much shopping of any kind, even for fun stuff like computer hardware. Shopping for clothes is, for me, almost torture. The process of trying them on, fussing around with sizes, wondering what to do when the legs are too long, to me it seems anathema to the important things of life. But I'd been putting this off for too long and it was time for me to bite the bullet and refresh my wardrobe with a massive infusion of black, grey, blue, and sensible olive drab. Between the two of us, Gretchen and I managed to blow nearly a thousand dollars on my fresh new threads. However, because we applied for a Banana Republic credit card, we got 10% off.
When one of the 7th Avenue & Flatbush bums saw me coming out of the subway with three big bags of new clothes, he asked "Having an early Christmas?" and shook my hand. Back in the house, I told Sally the Dog and Noah the Cat that I'd been influenced by their black and grey wardrobes when I'd been making my clothing decisions.
I was just watching the Ken Burns documentary on New York City on Channel 13, the New York City PBS television station. (Its antenna was recently re-erected in New Jersey after having been destroyed in the September 11th attack.) For some reason I'd never been aware of the original Penn Station that was torn down in 1963 (at just about the time the World Trade Center was entering the final planning stage). Seeing how beautiful and irreplaceable the original station had been (its statuary and gargoyles unceremoniously dumped in a New Jersey bog), and knowing how sorry its replacement is, the superstitious parts of my conscious start to wonder if its loss may have cursed all the ugly architecture that has filled New York in its wake. This includes the World Trade Center, a cold impersonal embodiment of the most anti-New York phase of New York's history. In order to restore the karmic balance, something truly beautiful needs to be built in its place. Not that anyone knows how to build beautiful buildings anymore.
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