The sun was shining, the sky was a lustrous blue, it was mild. The rain that had been threatened all weekend didn’t materialize. People were happy to welcome the spring weather, walking around in loose t-shirts and perhaps-too-soon rubber sandals. I got off work and decided I’d make a trip back to Strand Books. Poetry was calling, along with a general desire to walk around Manhattan on a gorgeous Monday afternoon and observe, reflect, walk, and breathe. The rhythm of street life -of peddlers, poets, con artists, lovers, dreamers, stragglers, strugglers, tired parents, scared tourists, oblivious locals, obnoxious students – all co-mingle here with a natural harmony that is both breathtaking and choking. Get out of the way!, I wanted to shout every few steps, if you want to yap with your boyfriend, don’t try to walk at the same time! Surely it’s a sign of becoming a local, though I still get shocked looks whenever I say “thank you” in a store. Habits from home die hard.
I entered Strand Books and immediately knew what I wanted. I’d seen
Patti Smith: Complete when it was first released in 2006, but I couldn’t afford it. Now, five years later, in a place where Patti figuratively welcomed me to the city my first night, I couldn’t afford not to. Did they have a used copy? Yes, just one -but where? I looked, high and low. Nothing. Was the computer lying? I checked again, and there it was, snugly tucked in on a high shelf; even standing spider-like on the edge of a cart, it was just out of my grasp.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that short people hate asking for help from a tall person. But… I swallowed my vertical-challenge pride. I didn’t look at it until I got it home, to my bedside, my bathtub, reading in barefoot with a glass of wine and a sharpie.
Poetry, music, prose, drawing -these things are keeping me sane, even as they drive me to more and more questions. Art isn’t and should never be a baggy
La-Z-Boy of comfy, feet-up vanity and smug self-congratulations. I keep wondering in what order I should place all the things I’ve seen and heard these last two weeks: the faces, the floors, the pieces of gum on the sidewalks, the squeaky rails of the subway, the boomboomboom of a hip-hop boy’s earbuds -and if I’ll ever do all of them justice. My iPod has been a vital tool in attempting to make sense of these moments, giving them themes, names, direction, and momentum. Recent playlists have reflected this tornado of anxious confusion, with a selection of tunes, both new and old, urban and urbane, soft and abrasive, uber-cool and super-gauche.
Bizarrely, this tune has become a mainstay on my iPod since -and even as -I moved. What I love about the above performance (
from Brazil this past Sunday night) is that you can’t actually see the band; you can only hear them. Maybe it was the rain. Or maybe it was on-purpose. either way, there was a forced listening at work, an experience of the quiet-but-awesome marriage between sound, ideas, and art in a way many bands of that caliber wouldn’t attempt in such a
mondo-stadium context. The slick glammy sheen of the original has been stripped away for a world-weariness and a nose-to-the-grindstone grittiness, even with those gorgeously swooping, theatrical guitars. The audience is clearly confused:
where are they? what is this? I don’t get it! But… who cares? Should mass art always be digestible? Should life always be full of answers and no questions? Should we be spoon-fed everything our entire lives -even (or especially) the meaningful stuff?
To quote
a favorite poet whose posthumous work I recently picked up in Strand Books, “
poetry is what happens when nothing else can.” That “nothing else” can be so many things -for me, it’s the striving to understand everything, all the time, it’s the “what ifs” that don’t get (and won’t be) answered, ever. And so the possibilities -of the streets, the subway, the stains, the sleepless nights and somnambulant days -is louder, softer, harder and more real than any slick glamorous picture people have of the Big Apple, and more beautiful to anyone with two eyes and a beating heart. It is those questions, singing loud, a little more weary but every bit wiser, confusing the masses, and maybe, just maybe, inspiring a few of us along the way, that is the real poetry. Viva love, viva life, viva… New York.
It was beautiful in New York today.
Beauty Hairem
Ah, I love this post and I love your writing. You explain things in such a vivid way. I can imagine being a fly on the wall and seeing what you describe. I like that the band wasnt visible, it does put a lot of attention on actually listening to everything going on.
Love your blog, your posts, music and photos are very visually stimulating
Lew
Bravo. What an excellent commentary on NY street life and why it is so nourishing. What you caught is the engine that makes this place run so fast, nonstop.