In Which We Do Whatever We Can Get Away With

Escape to New York

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

Just as our first romantic relationships impress types upon us, so, too, do our early urban experiences determine if and how we will live in cities. There are people from whom we do not recover, experiences into which we try to fold all others, places we do not leave.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1933, the photographer Bruce Davidson spent his adolescence on the train, riding the El into Chicago. "I’ve left Chicago," Davidson later told an interviewer, "but Chicago hasn’t left me." The experience was "catalytic," he said; as an adult, he would go on to document New York’s transit system in the series Subway. On the trains he found "an iridescence like what I had seen in photographs of deep-sea fish."

Before Subway, he had submerged himself in South Brooklyn, where he documented the romances and rituals of a young street gang called the Jokers. After covering the Civil Rights Movement, he returned to New York, to its parks and streets, and, for two years the 1960s, its tenements. He set up on the block between Second Avenue and First, working with a large camera on a tripod to capture the street’s sidewalks, bedrooms, and the people who used them.

East 100th Street appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. Nearly twenty years later, my parents and I moved into an apartment a few blocks west, on 100th between Park and Lexington. Both streets belong to the part of Manhattan known as Spanish Harlem, which runs from 96th Street, where well-tended medians on Park Avenue give way to train tracks, up to the northeastern edge of the island and the Harlem River.

The neighborhood is largely Puerto Rican, and home to 24 public housing projects. Last year, the Department of City Planning designated the neighborhood a "food desert," which means its residents have little access to fresh food, specifically produce, and are therefore likely to suffer from diet-related illnesses.

When I was very young, I did not realize people considered my neighborhood unsafe; once I did, I thought they must be mistaken. It was not until after the building next door to mine burned down that I learned it had been a crackhouse. Nobody ever told me anything. If someone was admitted to the hospital, I was informed days or years after they were released.

Now this seems to me fantastical: how do you not talk about things? But my parents and I, we did not talk about things, so for a long time I pretended everything was fine. Then, when evidence to the contrary became impossible to ignore, I decided not to care. This is actually a choice you can make.

The images in East 100th Street do not disclose secrets like a diary, those subjective assessments of material experience. They hold only the brute, dull detritus of daily life: 15-cent pie, a flyer from a camping show, Hart brand bird food. Looking at Davidson's photographs is like visiting someone's apartment for the first time, or reading his blog: I eat a sandwich, I drink a beer, I do not make my bed.

To see the people Davidson photographs is to be reminded that people exist when we do not see them. These are not candids, or stolen shots of animals taken securely from safari caravan, but their subjects accept him without ceremony, as one admits not a stranger but a sibling, someone who has a key and does not care if you have cleaned your apartment.

At the Howard Greenberg Gallery, East 100th Street is accompanied by Davidson’s wide, expansive shots of Central Park. In the foreground of one lies the sweating, bathing-suited body of a woman; beyond her, more bodies, and trees, and beyond them the city, the buildings rising together like a great crenellated castle.

In comparison to his photographs of Central Park, the images in East 100th Street are airless and cramped. The exteriors feel like interiors. Rarely do you see the sky, or the spine of the Triborough Bridge, that big animal, lying across the East River. The city resembles a room, a closed space, a closet. The effect is counterintuitive; in Davidson’s work, narrow alleys and low ceilings serve as reminders of the city’s size, of how much it contains, and conceals.

If you believe people do whatever they can get away with, you might imagine his portraits of people peering out windows or sprawled on beds to be portraits of lust and false-heartedness. Manhattan's geography generates infidelity: ours is a capacious city, a vast island whose size permits isolation and therefore betrayal.

Davidson's photographs remind us that people's personal lives are mostly tedious. Everybody has dirty plates and families. Privacy protects us. Behind closed doors we shine our shoes and our personalities; we rest and then resume playing the roles of interesting people. We hide our worst selves, and our dullest: we would rather have people see us as bad than boring.

What is universal are chores, the failure to do them, and the desire to be looked at. From the way one girl turns her foot you can tell she has taken ballet. She is wearing church clothes; in another picture, a sign on a storefront church proclaims, "All are welcome!" Sunday devotional services meet at 12:30, and something abbreviated "W.P.W.W." gathers on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:30.

A few of the buildings Davidson photographed still stand, but this church is gone. The northwest corner of the block has been cleared for a baseball diamond, and luxury condominiums now run along First Avenue up to 101st Street. In 2006, one of the new apartments on Lexington Avenue sold for $8.5 million dollars.

The protagonists of children's books are usually orphans. The family home is a prison that must be demolished before the book can begin. Only once they are freed from their cells and captors can the characters' adventure begin. Out of the cradle and into the boxcar, or boarding school; the best world is the one without parents.

My parents sold their house this fall. Like Davidson's subjects and storybook orphans, I am one of the lucky ones: I never have to go home again.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer from New York. She last wrote in these pages about Dawn Powell.

"Goodnight Everything" - Liars (mp3)

"I Can Still See An Outside World" - Liars (mp3)

"Proud Evolution" - Liars (mp3)

"Scarecrows on a Killer Slant" - Liars (mp3)

In Which We Are Witness To The Fallacies of The Age

Capitalism and Its Contents

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Walking through Times Square at evening is dangerous proposition. Not because of makeshift hoodlums who lurk to sell you their rap CDs. It took good old-fashioned psychotherapy to teach us that while we like choices, we don't like many choices.

This aphoristic point of view is largely a lie - most of us prefer an infinite number of choices, and modernity is not sufficiently variegated for us not to be able to account for them.

Times Square is more like a square than ever, with tourists sitting on a beach of madness, and Radio City Music Hall hiding in its shadow. It's never been pretty to look at it, but at least it's daytime forever somewhere besides Alaska. For many out-of-towners, Times Square is Nuevo York, but for me it's just a place I pass on the way home, walking. And believe me, not bragging.

We are finding out in California what driving the away the rich really does. With an exorbitant demand on a minority of Californians, the system was bound to end up losing out to states with fairer laws about these things, e.g. no income tax: Texas, Florida. The government's entitlement to an out of proportion income tax is a sin akin to murder -- because it is the economy that dies. New York is the corraborating witness.

In Times Square, nobody seem to be making very much money, and sitting around and staring is preferable to other activites.  On a normal day, the marks can't get enough of the show, although Broadway is unable (or unwilling) to capitalize on the available market and do theater for less than the cost of a bagel. In addition, New York has the highest income tax rate in America. Why should that be?

Ironically, the most useful aspect about this capitalist orgy from the tourist's point of view is that it doesn't really cost anything. Like Madison Avenue (moments away!), the glitzy storefronts are merely for show, whether it reads Ernst & Young, News Corporation, or ESPN Zone. The companies themselves are taking a bath - they just have to keep up appearances.

Closer to 8th Avenue, things begin to get a little seedier. Nudie booths, virtuals, Starbucks. It's not really comforting to know that commerce goes on in these places. Frankly, New York used to be much better at doing what a city does - conducting business. Now its prohibitive prices push real people away, tourists simply gawk or purchase cheap souvenirs of a fake city, and net, it's a loss.

Long-term it wasn't just our banking system that was phony to its core. The advertisements that blaze on screens are a declining proposition, and network ratings dropped right along with the stock market. The new culture is good at casting the attention of the masses on the relatively inconsequential - and even the extremely consequential - but it can't manage to get the public's attention regularly, or even profitably. Capitalism becomes harder, not easier, in a depression.

There's too much else to distract people - that's why the internet is fearsome to old media types and goofy new Luddites who write bad novels alike. The essence of what American capitalism is changing, and whether the end result will be better or worse is a complicated question. Right now, it's not terribly better for the consumer, as corporations that can afford to lose money crowd small businesses out of the marketplace, and bailouts only help the already strong. But the lesson is that all things that don't earn will die - no company is strong enough to eat losses forever, even if Obama would have saved them if he could.

The end result is what matters, not how you got there. The consumer will be the final decider, and even if his choices are becoming progressively more complicated, he's better at making them then bureaucrats and thieves that stalk the corridors of Washington, propping up companies that haven't made a decent car since the Model T.

My folks returned from their first European vacation recently, and all they met from that part of the world asked them why they'd leave America to come there. There is still some free, admirable quality to this country, a redeemable element that we don't fully grasp since we've grown spoiled by it. The neon lights and billboards used to frighten me with their excess, but now they seem like the storm before a calm, pushing air out of a toothpaste tube before the blue comes out to clean.

That's why capitalism is the greatest - when it's dysfunctional, it repairs itself. It doesn't matter how many silly altruists wish to rescue companies that can't make it on its own. Even here, in this place, it is comforting to trace your finger in the air, in the shape of a dollar.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Stroke Their Brains" - Spoon (mp3)

"Tweakers" - Spoon (mp3) highly recommended

"Tweakers (remix)" - Spoon (mp3)

In Which Our Heart Is In Our Pocket It Is Poems By Pierre Reverdy

"Poets Dressed & Undressed" Elwyn Chamberlain

Nudities Unknown To Ancestors' Imaginations

by WILL HUBBARD

I am currently in debt 19,782 dollars and 19 cents compounded annually at a rate of 6.8 percent for a graduate education in the writing of poetry but learned drastically exponentially more about its practice from listening several thousand times to a recording of the poet reading the poem that follows.

It is a poem that properly sweats where others jackknife into the pool sending droplets of distasteful water into the secret fruity liquor cocktails of underage teenagers adjusting bathing suits fringed with new pubic hair. It in other words it does not mind getting wet in secret, uncomfortable all to itself.

Were you aware that we have taken to digitizing the enduring poems for your eternal convenience? We call it A POEM FOR YOU, and if you look down the far right column this minute you'll find another tasty morsel by Mr. O'Hara and forgive yourself all those unspeakable harshnesses.

We sympathize with the difficulty you encounter reading the verse on a lighted, fictional screen. The answer is not, here as ever, to take away the light. Whether it's coming from behind the poem or in front, light will always be at odds with the printed word because it is more powerful and lives easily in beauty.

Human beings may spend one-third of their lives asleep, but the majority of it happens in their mid-twenties. It was said that Frank O’Hara never wanted to sleep. After he was run over by a dune buggy in 1966 while dancing down to the shoreline with his gin gimlet, Willem de Kooning heard the surgeon say "No one should be dying of these injuries." It is a story that could be stitched into a pillow. Instead I tell everyone I know, hoping they’ll take it easy.

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick

Ode To Joy

We shall have everything we want and there'll be no more dying
      on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we'll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
      over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
      will swell from the walls and books alive in streaming rooms
      to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
      that's sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
      near the grave of love
                                                                    No more dying

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
      near the elm that spells the lovers' names in roots
and there'll be no more music but the ears in lips and more wit
      but tongues in ears and more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors' imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
      under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
      like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city's abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
      who's self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulchre at last
      that love may live

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
      and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
      to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
      as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
      pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes though the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
      which wants us to remain for for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
      lets us live with it
                                                                         No more dying

—Frank O'Hara (mp3)

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. Please attend this.

"Disarm" - Smashing Pumpkins (mp3)

"Good Times" - Sam Cooke (mp3)

"Boat Drinks" - Jimmy Buffett (mp3)