Here’s an unedited vehicle of thoughts for some photos I took in New York Last month. On (variously) office furniture at the beach, the subway, la monte young’s dream house &c.
On my 37th birthday I took myself to ‘Brighton Beach.’ The inverted commas are only because the original BB in East Sussex will always mean university, pebble burn, cold chips and half a pill when they were a three quid a go. This one was a strange field of out-of-season uncanny, flat damp seagulls and passing snippets of Russian on the short walk from the subway stop to the sand.
It was raining with a soft insistence and deserted except for me, a teen and a lone black leather office chair facing the tide. Bedraggled and uncanny, neither quite flotsam or jetsam, this lightly furnished moment felt perfect for my first time on a New York beach.
I smirked inwardly at the silly humour of its gently outrageous presence. The Teen and I didn’t speak but were both silently enjoying The Chair being there in our respective ways. I’d passed up the opportunity to photograph it, resplendent in black leather, and now The Teen had fully occupied it. I let go and walked on. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him pose for many selfies first with, then on, The Chair. I instinctively empathised with this challenge. To take a photo of himself sitting on The Chair would not capture the humour of the moment. To take a photo of The Chair itself would not capture the essence of it either (plus, I assumed, crudely, that The Teen was potentially not the genre of teen who would see a landscape with incongruous furniture as postable content.) First I did a loop along the curved shoreline loosely hunting for shells, and saw out of the corner of my eye that he’d begun unsuccessfully propping his phone on the log for a new angle. I considered for exactly half a second approaching him to ask if he would like me to take a photo of The Teen on The Chair. I recoiled at how deeply embarrassed I would be if the only other person on a beach asked me the same question. Then the unthinkable happened. My guy PICKED UP The Chair and moved it to get a better angle. I was shocked. This felt not only like somehow bad form but an affront to god. Or at least the very specific form of urban divinity I always feel like I’m vibing with whenever curious objects and words enter my path on the various Little Walks I take myself on to create my life. I was disappointed with him.
I realised in that moment that I was a massive hypocrite, who had not only a film camera slung under one arm but was in that very moment recording the sound of the rain in a voice memo to myself like some kind of loon. I had no more right to the emotional resonance of this strange big beach and its ugly-perfectness on my stupid birthday etc. I chastened myself with the reminder that I was constructing no more or less meaning from this encounter with the chair than him, for all my insistence on constant commentary and notes to self. In the end, the film had expired.
I found it very funny that the surreptitious phone photos I took he cuts such a forlorn figure. I can’t quite remember what it reminded me of and think, with some concern, that it might be a meme. I tut at my projection of The Teen and I, how the internet has completely robbed our ability to just laugh an office chair on the beach. Then I wonder whether I have achieved any kind of higher thought mode than The Teen or am infact more internet-poisoned precisely because I can’t just happily enjoy making content from The Chair like him, without the woolly guilty metanalysis about mediated instinct, that I still retain a vague grisly investment in some apparent lost art of authentic relating to the world that left my life the day a dial up modem entered. I tell myself to shut up then wish myself a happy birthday and accept my fate.
I look up the meme on the subway (I searched ‘sad beach man alone’) and laugh out loud. It’s called ‘Dramatic Dimitry.’
II
I spent the rest of my twelve days hurtling about in beautiful cuboid silver bullets that make up the new york city subway system, happily getting lost here and there, adding hours to my journeys, unbothered. Their tunnels, varicose vein-like, are so close to the surface you can’t ignore them as they bulge out steam, every artery forcing you towards the hyperbaric chamber of 14th-Union St. MTA, for all its scars, feels New York in the same way the antiseptically bright public-private blight of TfL’s ‘Overground’ feels very London, acting as the diseased gall bladder of A Very British gentrification where ‘good transport links’ come first and everybody knows it. BVG does similarly for Berlin: a jaunty beast whose lack of ticket barriers suggest a laissez faire society but in reality just make every trip a hotbox of airborne anxiety as everyone wonders silently which one of the assembled passengers is actually a ticket controller about to try and beat the shit out of you.
In New York the guts show. My favourite neighbourhoods have bulky metal ribcages overhead that ration daylight, trading sky for endless movement movement movement, heavy until sunset when the lines criss cross like a frame rising out of syrup. Thiccc silvered railings are buffed soft by one billion gloved hands. Everybody hurtles. Is Heroin a Problem for You? I relish the feeling of hoiking my cold thighs between the right angle gap of the strange plastic chairs that face right into someone. We sway to the symphony of managed decline, mutant rats-like-cats and bright plastics of machines no-one uses. Eric Adams is a Pig. I’m amused to see that they only just added contactless payment, how the tapping displays affixed to turnstiles that feel deeply out of step with the beautiful mouldings of other technologies, the foray giving off the air of your mum pushing her reading glasses down to peer into iPhone. Try Muzz App: It’s Short Muslim King Summer.
One wet afternoon I pick up L from work and we wander around looking for shoes that may not exist, waggling our divining rod at stores that won’t wink back, women be shopping / perfecting our delicate science of applied swagganometry. If you know &c. There’s some time to wait before the next train so go back up from the platform to listen to the jazz. My feet burn so I hoist my butt between two buffed silver poles and exhale into them. This is heritage transit, a last holdout. Like they built this once and they’ve been half meaning to repair it ever since. Yet all about me people betray a gentle grumpy love for this one system, forever a bit broken. It’s in the consternation melting into quiet acceptance like when you finally get a seat just before your stop, it’s in that weary satisfaction of sharing best routes. It’s the look that’s an eye roll gliding into a half smile shared between bickering beaus, a flicker thats betraying the steady love that thunders along beneath every row. You get there eventually.
III
I don’t remember when I first met Z but I categorise him within the precious spoils of more regular early 2010s jaunts made to the US, an only semi-knowable gem I picked up and put in my pocket to return to as fate allowed. A sturdy raconteur with a preternatural ability to paint a picture with his mouth, Z is a tall leather liker who knows how to be in this world or at least possesses the same hunger for knowing it (in the biblical sense) that I do.
It’s raining slightly harder than you’d generally elect to take a long walk in but I barely notice. We’re debating the finer points of where gentrification and food discovery do and don’t overlap and his quest to try something called a French Taco on a recent visit to Paris. He is taking me to The Dream House, the installation by La Monte Young, but I do not know this yet. I find a triskele on the ground and barely take it in since spirals began appearing everywhere I looked in 2020 and now I can only expect and welcome them.
The rain’s almost gone when I ask a rote question about the music making we both used to do a lot more of in the Before Times. On this trip with a hundred reunions, I’d been asked this question ten times that week and found it rough and unwieldly, a untameable trojan horse for everything that’s different now, a way to talk about aging and shifted priorities and certain feelings that you can’t get back. I listen to him talking carefully about what changes when you lose someone like he did. I realise I’m a self-serving idiot agog at the grace.
My knowledge of grief is abstracted and limited to the kind always relativised by ‘a good innings.’ I do not know the grief that pulses. But I can feel the tremor of it in my friends low tenor and each one sways me, still. As it takes shape in my head, I realise the strong urge surge I’m feeling is that I want to somehow untie the huge boulder from across his back, lay it down and smash it methodically into a hundred pieces, then fashion perhaps a candle holder, a limited run of Wilma Flintstone-style necklaces or even a small shelter out of the bits. For him to rest in. Before the thought is finished I realise that it is not my right to remodel anyone else’s burden, nor would I deign to know the kinds of planning permission needed for such a place. Many small stones weigh the same.
Walking with a person who is a professional underplayer of their contributions to the world (as most good people are) a point that feels both revelatory and obvious arises in front of my mouth. I swill on it first. I’d felt struck by the choices we made today, each one technicolour against the grey. Every day we live is maybe also art. Easily moreso than songs. If the only thing he or I does cr e a t i v e l y from now is to make the these most elaborate chaotic Gesamtkunstwerks out of afternoons in the rain with friends, ours would be lives fufilled. I pledge to put the same gravity, wonder and intent into all my days. And what a palette the world contains to work from, fucked and nasty as it is still. The tones whether chosen or not, the sky and the dinner, sweet and sour, the train after dark, the rain smells as it dries on our jackets, the warm leg ache of a big walk, finding and absorbing the many strange textures of a city. The bold punctuation of hot drinks, cold drinks, an unknown destination, tripping over a curb and laughing at your body, respective journeys, so many flavours! That is to say, life. New flavours and special sauces and stooping to a NY burrito and a grapefruit drink called Squirt. Feeling the deep rattling thunder of the L train and how animates the bridge under our boots, how perspective up here makes the shipping containers below us look like lego, brings us eye to eye with public housing bedrooms on the twentieth floor. I decide that maybe this is all art, or god, or just more beauty than can be fully experienced in one go, but in the end just stump up with a disjointed “Don’t you, uh, think that living is like, also a creative act, though?” He murmurs something kind but I’m annoyed that out loud I’d sounded like a needlessly abstract attempt at reassurance. I decide if I get round to it maybe I’ll try and write down what I meant, but the ingredients of the thought feel wrong again. Before I can untangle them we reach the door and I realise where he’s brought me.
At some point later on I will fall asleep on the Dream House carpet, plaited loosely in the pink sine waves. We are the only people here. When I wake up Z is in extended childs’ pose on a pillow with his hair covering his face. I note that his shelter is not made of stones. Later he will tell me the first time he came was only two weeks after. I am drunk on the warm wonder of this place, the marvel that it existed in 1969 and still exists today, and what that makes possible or could means in spite of e v e r y t h i n g. The drone frequencies shift as I move mucus around my skull with my palate. I’m painting. Stretching feels like heaven. I doze off again. We leave with that exact engorged airy lightness you get after a sauna and go for tea and cake on the bowery. My friend has a robot sneak up on me. It brings tea and sings a midi version of happy birthday that the other tea drinkers join in with. I cry with laughter and joyful embarassment until one of my contact lenses falls out.
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