“Talkin’ ‘bout Monroe and walking on Snow White, New York’s a Go-Go and everything tastes nice …” - David Bowie.
Several visits later, and the Big Apple still feels new and exciting to me: the noise, the lights, the purring of traffic, the plethora of Yellow Cabs sleeping at traffic lights (how many taxi’s does a City need); the torrents of people flowing like lemmings along the broad sidewalks, the hum of conversation - an un interpretable and incoherent blend of disparate languages (the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babble, laid flat and thrumming like a tuneless song along the City’s ample arteries); the howl and wail of fire-engines as they try to squeeze their ungainly bulk through the thick quagmire of traffic; the street-sellers, the destitute street folks - beat-dull and aimless; the pamphlet people, the sharp-smart business people, the crazies - their minds addled with drugs, their motions quixotic enough to make people flow around them, leaving them in their own small islands of insensibility. And the cops; Jeez, if you throw a rock in Manhattan you’ll most likely hit a cop - and be hauled to the local precinct. But you have to stand at an intersection to marvel at how the City marshals it’s denizens: streams of people flowing along the avenues, suddenly jammed together in a consistently thickening coagulum, their seemingly unbound progress halted before a brightly lit ‘Don’t Walk’ red hand which advantages a clutter of cars and disparate vehicles to crawl laboriously by - squawking impatiently at each other - until the Red Hand bleeds to White and the dam of people at the intersection is breached and flows forward/backward/sideways once again: a spectacle in and off itself.
June and I joined them: first stop was the International Centre of Photography in Broome Street on the Lower East Side: they had on an exhibition of Eugene Agets work which I really enjoyed; so much of photography is now digital that, for me, it’s a real pleasure to see original printed works: art is not art until it is made corporeal. We got there via the Metro; I don’t think New York’s underground system is as easily negotiated as London’s Tube, but it is efficient: you’re swallowed down into one throat of the City’s physiognomy and then disgorged out of another.
We were there to see ‘Operation Mincemeat’ in the Majestic Theatre on West 44th Street in the Hells Kitchen area. The play itself was everything a play should be; it had pathos, comedy, tragedy and intrigue. I was blubbering by the finale and rose - as did most of the house - for a standing ovation. I wonder, though, how many people there knew that it was a true story.
We then wound our way back through the underground again (I think we did 8 trips in all) before being ejected back up and onto the streets. A short walk later - accompanied all the way by a high, splinter moon, its silver sheen vying heroically against the garishly bright lights of 6th Avenue - we entered the Dim Sum Palace on West 33rd Street, not far from our hotel, where we enjoyed some delicious Chinese fare before heading back to our room.
