Every time I come here I see a different city.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

❧

Late lunch followed by a walk in the park. Not just any park. An elevated park. We’re up amongst the buildings–not above them, not looking up at them from the street, but weaving through them, like we’re hovering, like it’s magic. The sun sets behind us as we walk (through? over?) the meatpacking district. We can see into art galleries and meeting spaces, meet the eyes of billboard models. A strange yellow light descends upon the city, then melts away, into the night. We stand watching the long straight lines of the streets, the headlights, the glitter of windows. When we come down, our feet feel heavy. We’ve been floating.

❧

And the parade of the poorly dressed.  One man has seen fit to slit his trousers from waistband to hem, so that from behind we catch the sight of his naked bottom, the crack between cheeks.  At night the girls flock to nightclubs and wear getups that even Fellini could not have imagined.  And always in pairs.  One girl in a zebra-print skintight dress that doesn’t quite cover the twin bulbs of her rear, the other wearing rubber tights and something resembling a top.  Disappearing into the pulsating intestines of a place called Raw or Moles.  Hens in chefs hats meet stags in kilts on street corners, lose themselves in a cloud of smoke, emerge with outfits askew and cigarettes burned to the filter.  The air is heavy with shouting.  I think it’s happy shouting; but how to tell, when the calls of the drunk before he (or she, in ripped denim skirt, sequin blouse) slips finally into the realm of not-remembering are so close to calls of anguish?  Perhaps it’s the sound of the self letting go, leaving the conscience behind, two aspects parted by a sip too many.  Will the zebra girl wake with ears still numbed by techno, breath still seeped in rum and the empty taste of a late-night kebab-shop feast, and have a regret?  Even a single one, a small one: those shoes, she might think, they’re too high, my knees are sore from dancing now.  The naked-bottomed man might sit, later, upon a cold park-bench, might feel the metallic chill in new places, places he didn’t know could feel things.  Perhaps in this way the senses seem suddenly to expand.

But you see them together and you think that some sort of game is being played, surely.  That the girls fumbling with purses on the street corners are deliberately emulating the hookers of bigger cities; that the blokes, staggering in zig-zag patterns, letting their English voices loose upon the town, are deliberately ignoring every siren call until the last, choosing not to look up a zebra-patterned skirt or at the way a pair of rubber legs is crossed.  Each human his (or her) own, complete, exhibit.  And each exhibiting for an invisible audience.  Not for the disdainful eyes of you or me, or of the girl in jeans holding her boyfriend’s hand.  No, not for us do they strut and pose.

❧

I like watching people watching each other.  The two girls on the bus, their eyes following the roller-skating ginger-bearded man on the pavement.  The girls in front of me turning their heads at a trio of boys carrying champagne.  “He was fit,” they say, drawing out the “i” in fit. Earlier, where they are sitting, was a man with a magnificent yellow Mohawk, having ice cream with his friend.  They seemed to be having a sensitive discussion about relationships, life journeys, one of them was talking very seriously about skate parks, saying he just felt he needed to be in a city where they were prevalent.  Every so often their heads, too, would incline towards the glass, they would let slip a smile or a snigger.

People watching is almost invariably more pleasurable when the weather is good.  This is not just because there are, inevitably, more people out, and dressed a little more brightly, but also because of the way the sunlight affects them, and makes them look, and the way that a woman standing with a dog next to a spring green tree sprouting small leaves is suddenly poetic in a way she wouldn’t be if there was a drizzle over the city or a monochrome grey in the sky.  Shadows do more interesting things like this.

❧

“The great man is he who in the midst of the crowds keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last night, on something like a whim, we went with some friends to an opening at Modern Art Oxford. I like art, but I have to be honest: the real art, at events like this, is the crowd (the free wine doesn’t hurt either). And Oxford’s artsy hordes didn’t disappoint. Girls in striped dresses and red heels, or outlandish outfits straight from a very colourful fever dream, men in suits and bad floral ties snapping photos, an appearance by the Lord Mayoress of Oxford (wearing of course the strange medal around her neck which only a society whose lawyers still wear white wigs could condone).

I thought of this rumination on the flâneur, by Baudelaire: “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” I thought that the real joy of a museum is not necessarily what it holds but who it draws.

Put another way, in Graeme Gilloch’s Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City: “The flâneur is that character who retains his individuality while all around are losing theirs. The flâneur derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards the crowd with contempt, as nothing other than a brutal, ignoble mass.”

Eventually, when I was done regarding the crowd with writerly contempt whilst simultaneously basking in the glow of it, I wandered around the actual exhibits: Raphael Zarka’s “Encounters” and Regina José Galindo’s “The Body of Others”. Zarka’s highly geometric series of photographs and sculpture (see the photograph above, courtesy of The Man) were easy on the eyes and pleasant to behold (I only mention this because it is, as you shall presently see, so deeply in contrast to Galindo’s videos). The photographs, images of huge isolated structures (mainly concrete), were not in themselves extraordinary, though they were nicely rendered; it was the knowledge that these structures, which were man-made but utilitarian in nature, had only become art through Zarka’s transposition of them, which made the exhibit thrilling.

But then maybe it’s hardly surprising that I liked Zarka: “True to Zarka’s interest in the essay form,” writes Acting Director of Modern Art Oxford and the exhibition’s curator Suzanne Cotter, “Geometry Improved consists of a literal as well as speculative narrative of formal enquiry…he describes himself as a collector, rather than a maker of objects…the artist sees his work more akin to the cabinet of curiosities, an activity of subjective classification, in which objects are freed from the weight of history and combined in such a way as to suggest new interpretations.”

This is only intertextuality redrawn, where intertextuality refers to the relations-between-texts (texts in this case not necessarily referring to words on a page, of course); and a refreshing view on the act of creation. But on a personal level I like it because there’s an extent to which it describes the genre of writing that I engage in (and with)–and therefore the genre of my book. Freeing objects (places, texts) from “the weight of history”, combining them, suggesting new interpretations. It sounds lofty but just about doable, doesn’t it? If you don’t believe me, read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel.

The second exhibit I visited was Regina José Galindo’s The Body of Others. If I hadn’t been on my third glass of free wine, I doubt I would have lingered for more than a few cursory seconds, but my senses had been dulled by Oddbins’ Own white and I found myself as if hypnotized, drawn to the horrific images of Galindo, naked, being hosed down, forced to her knees, and Galindo, naked, pregnant, tied to a bed, and Galindo, naked (are you seeing a theme here?), being drawn on by a Venezuelan plastic surgeon, and Galindo (clothed this time!) swinging (as if hung) from a bridge, reading poetry, and Galindo, clothed, carrying a bowl of human blood, leaving red footprints. The worst of all was Galindo, clothed, with her head forced into a barrel of water, like a perverse aping of the torture scene in a spy film. We see enough of this kind of violence already, don’t we?

But to give the artist her credit, there was, downstairs, a tiny video installation, a 23 minute long film entitled “Rompiendo el Hielo” (Breaking the Ice), which I found very good indeed. The subheading read: “I sit naked in an extremely cold, empty room, waiting for the public to dress me,” and this struck me as almost uncomfortably poetic, as if it was a line from a text, now stripped bare of context and as naked and cold as Galindo herself. The Man and I stood for some time, watching the artist seated on a bench, watching the people watching her. What I liked about the video is twofold. She ends up clothed, first of all, which is (at least in comparison to, for instance, the video of her cowering by a wall with a heavy spray of water pushing her down) almost an admittance of hopefulness (the public will, if you give them long enough, at least metaphorically dress you).

But also (and I can only hope this was deliberate), the idea of the video mirrored the thoughts I’d had earlier about the flâneur; about our place in the crowd, about our being both within and outside of it. “The flâneur derives pleasure from his location within the crowd, but simultaneously regards the crowd with contempt, as nothing other than a brutal, ignoble mass” again. For a moment, anyway (or 23 minutes of cold) Galindo was a true flâneur, and we, by extension, got to taste the flânerie firsthand.

❧