Ten observations about New York City...
...after living in it for 19 days. If this seems to be a mash-up of the painfully obvious and the puzzlingly idiosyncratic -- wait, did I just give away my musical secret? -- then I'm sorry.
1. "I'm sorry," offered in a gentle and humble but not too abject tone of voice, is a very effective weapon against many kinds of NYC effrontery. Like the pushy impatient lady at the theater who would rather not seat a last-minute arrival, or the impatient administrator at the P.S., or the pushy impatient postal worker. It's no skin off my teeth saying it, but "I'm sorry" is taken as a startling concession, maybe an almost unfair tactic, in a situation where push is expected to be met with push. It briefly stuns your potential adversary. ("Why, see here old man," Cornwallis indignantly says to George Washington, after the general defeats the British Army using vividly dimensional Norman Rockwell backdrops, in Stan Freberg's Revolutionary War sketch -- "that's not cricket!") Better, it clears the air and gets done what you wanted done to begin with. Obviously we don't want to carry the Gandhi-Jesus thing too far, but for getting a seat at the theater it's just dandy.
2. For consuming purchased goods, New York is hard to equal. The waiters are brighter than you are; whether in a 24-hour diner or the Russian Tea Room, you can talk to them with as much speed and complex diction as you can muster and they will still bring you exactly what you ordered. Music store personnel don't count, because they are universally incompetent. Competition in the private sector seems to work so swimmingly here that I might propose an axiom: anyone whose economic views are harmonious with Milton Friedman's lives where there are twelve Chinese takeout places within as many blocks. I guess that means that all socialists are either from out in the country, or have experienced their city mainly as...
3. Consumers of public services. Here New York has a ways to go to catch up with most other places in America. I won't bore you with examples. I'll just say that an eight-mile trip from where I live in not-too-far-east Brooklyn to the upper west side of Manhattan on a weekend, when the subway service in the boroughs gets spotty, took me almost two hours each way, and the subways are probably the pinnacle of public services here.
4. A single friend who works as a self-employed visual artist reports that the girls in New York -- or "pussy," to use his synecdoche -- are abundant and suggestible. I have nothing to corroborate or refute this, but if true, it may be of wide interest.
5. Living among a dense population creates strange adaptive skills, such as the ability to thread your way through an oncoming crowd without looking directly at its members. A paradoxical effect of big-city life is that others may become either invisible, so that you can curse loudly or discuss intimate details within a few feet of a group of strangers, or object-like, so that you can regard them, when you are actually forced into eye contact, as you would a homely, proliferant weed. The only kind of invasive social gesture that seems unacceptable is an unintended one, like stepping on someone's foot, which brings on immediate and sincerely vocalized regret.
6. There is a kind of human, bony and frizzy-haired and straightbacked and deadpan, dressed during winter in a puffy, dun-colored down coat and wheeling a metal cart, or toting a cloth bag with the word "earth" printed somewhere on it; we will call her "Brooklyn woman."
7. The Russian Tea Room is lit way brighter than previously.
8. Despite the usual conception of Manhattan as having been swallowed up by Sherman McCoy types, and despite the quite ridiculous cost of living here, it's still peopled largely by the struggling. No one has been able to explain to me how it is that someone from the East Indies without a high-school diploma can set up shop in a desirable New York neighborhood but someone from Harvard Law School will have to sweat it out in Ramsey, New Jersey, but there it is, and all very heartening, in its own way.
9. It's still intermittently dangerous, too. One of the actors in my wife's play (which opens tonight!) was hit on the head by an assailant yesterday, near his apartment Williamsburg. No one in the show knows at this point where he is, how he is, or if he's returning....
10. Though everyone may have his own personal New York, partly in accord with his status and social group and so on, and though the city shifts with time, here's a constant: leaving it feels like giving up.
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14 comments
Your leaving Chicago put a divot in my selfish heart.
Tell me why people feel the need to "master" NYC. Is it the "if you can make it there" thing?
Does leaving NYC for the NYC suburbs fall into the "giving up" category?
R-I hope Donna has a long run! ORD-LGA has and will be my gig for the last 3 months. I find the LGA paxs this side of polite compared with other East Coast (BOS) havens.
Don't overlook a Yorkie if you're still in the market. Our first we had for 17 years and the current one for 3. Our 8 year nephew loves him! Yorkies are a lot of dog in a small package. Ours is 8lbs.
Is Chicago still considered home?
Hi - "leaving New York" is what some old friends here can't do, even though it seems as though they'd be happier & life would be easier elsewhere. I think a city like this throws you a challenge that is hard to resist. Hi Susan, and thanks for the tip. We should settle on a dog soon after getting HOME - to Chicago - whenever that is.
Heh.
Maybe some part of Robbie still belongs to US (us in Chicago, not us on the board). I won't nourish that glimmer of hope, tho, lest it be extinguished by the juice of the big apple. I am guardedly optimistic that he will return to us someday.
Hey, Robbie / Moriarity: If you are going to post this often, how 'bout adding a subscription option so I get this in my e-mail? They are ridiculously easy to add and I hate to miss one pearl of down-home-wisdom-from-the-Big-Apple.
Matt,
There is an RSS feed available. Most browsers have that built in now, but for reference it's http://robbiefulks.com/blog/posts/feed.atom
We have toyed with the idea of notifying the mailing list when new posts are made. But I want to be careful not to SPAM people. But I'll put some kind of email notification on the to-do list and figure something out.
Cheers,
John
Robbie, your observations of NYC are brilliant. :) I was recently there, and as an 8 year resident of SF bay area, I was astounded at the city in its beauty and its oddities, including the tourists like me.
I think leaving anywhere can feel like giving up. I recently moved from Silicon Valley back to rural Oklahoma, and I still ask myself if I chose to leave because I was unhappy or if I was driven out by my $2000 a month rent and a crappy dead-end job in real estate at a internet search giant.
I'm sure there's a country song there somewhere...
Leaving NYC did in fact feel like giving up. It was sweet surrender, though, and while I miss it terribly sometimes and mildly at other times (and sometimes not at all), I don't regret leaving for a second.
As someone who left Chicago for Brooklyn and then left Brooklyn for Chicago, I think you will enjoy coming back here.
That said, I'm thinking of leaving Chicago for Brooklyn again. The rest of the band is there and flying in for shows is just too darn pricey and annoying these days.
okay, here's a thought, since you're here for now, how about playing a gig or three for those of us who refuse to give up?
Hi, I just came by to see about tour dates and scrolling through the Blog, I see the words "not far from our sublet in Bushwick!" (or is it Windsor Terrace)
As a lifelong Brooklynite who grew up in the "Saturday Night Fever" part of town and now live smack in the hipster ghetto, may I say, Welcome to Kings County!
Feel free to email if you ever want to know about the Best Turkish Food in Coney Island or where to get the best Lebanese Food in Bay Ridge.
***I also posted this comment on the most recent post.
Interesting commentary! My story: left England for Nashville, from Nashville moved to Atlanta, left Atlanta for Dallas, left Dallas to return to Europe, left Europe back to Dallas, left Dallas for Sydney (AUS), departed Sydney back to Dallas, then for the love of an actor left Dallas for Chicago, two years later left Chicago back to Dallas, and now I'm ready for New York! (Oh God will I ever find myself?) New York is where I want to be.
Tell me it is doable? I need reinforcement after reading these posts. Know that I cannot live without theatre, art, literature and music. I would so appreciate candid dialogue.
-Feather-
<" Music store personnel don't count, because they are universally incompetent.">
I object sir... I worked in a great record shop dedicated to Roots Music of all kinds (that is the name of the shop, in fact) and, let me tell you, I was shit hot at my job, very proud to do it and gave my whole life for 7 years helping sell records of, well, people like you.
We also, for a while, distributed Bloodshot in the UK.