Mobilohm
is lived once and cannot be repeated—while turning its back on the other, that any given life is infinitely repeated by others, everywhere, in its most excruciating details, before, after, and usually simultaneously. New York takes the most pleasure in considering its own uniqueness, watching itself day by day grow more exceptional, but even in its vigilant self-awareness, the city is miming. In us, such an unfinished vision of life breeds vanity first, and then anxiety, quickly leading to despair and the desire to do away with ourselves. In New York, it has created the Meatpacking District.
Like a hypochondriac or an expectant mother, New York treats each one of its mutations as both unprecedented and critically significant. If a name or phrase has to be invented, it will be done by a journalist who has been told to write 600 to 800 words praising the miracle. Someone takes photos. New York awakes feeling a mixture of mortification and arousal over its latest outgrowth, too preoccupied to notice another, highly similar epiphenomenon just then dipping beneath the horizon of the collective memory in some other city or perhaps just a few blocks away. Of these developments, the most impressive is the anointing of a new neighborhood. To the city, the event is a mitosis, a bud, a sign of life; it is like an expansion of the territory from within. See, the city exclaims, we are legion. As a New Yorker, you feel charmed by the addition to the constellation. You have walked those blocks more than once. You might even have been there two weekends ago. You did not realize that they were imminently to be given a name and a history, and it did not occur to you to notice their remarkable characteristics. It is like discovering you owned a pair of trousers that was avidly collected by some men in Asia. But in the conception of this new neighborhood, all the associations of memory and affection that would constitute a living warp are ruled out. Instead, it is straight-line geometry that defines—what are called neighborhoods are orthogonal areas that can be named, photographed, and assigned arbitrary or semifactual characteristics, simple to understand, to which activities, virtually always shopping and eating in the characteristic vein, can then be affixed. So visitors to New York can eat in a Brazilian way, do some Homosexual shopping, then some more eating, this time in a Formerly Criminal way, and then shop in the way that Students and Artists do, and so on, all in short order, all with confidence, perhaps following a color-coded map. Meantime, the physical and socioeconomic restrictions of the grid plan—the concrete restraint on building girth, the alphanumeric street names, the lack of visible historical difference, the drab democracy of movement and access, the daily free-for-all on the subways, the incredible sameness of the view, all these centripetal forces—incite socially ambitious city residents to compete fractionally, like insects, to divide and subdivide the names divined by journalists into ever more stupid and minute designations: “East Village”; “East Chelsea”; “NoLIta”; “ dumbo South”; “Lower Gowanus”; “Greater Meatpacking.” Or else they come up with solecisms by which to distinguish the insides of their apartments from those of their peers.
The opening of a new foreign restaurant is the other event of greatest impression on New York. Restaurants are more arousing than retail shops because it is still easier to eat something than to own it. One can say, “She has a talent for shopping,” but to enjoy eating requires just about the reverse of talent; a place that awards distinction for something on the order of sneezing or yawning is always likely to cause a huge sensation. Having a meal in a restaurant is also an inherently brief engagement, taking at most twenty-four hours, as opposed to shopping, which stipulates that unsatisfactory items be returned at the point of sale. New Yorkers love restaurants best that claim to be from little-known countries, or else from backwater regions in famous countries. They love the feeling of understanding a complex or primitive culture that is got by chewing on a grilled meat. They overcome and incorporate the incomprehensible in this way, and so much more efficiently than by reading diffi cult novels in translation or going to the trouble of being a tourist—besides, those novels about foreign places are generally better when they are written by someone from New York, the people you meet if you go to those places are mostly from New York, and the food you get can be bland or disgusting.
What travel used to be, restaurants are. Foreign restaurants bring diversity, cosmopolitanism, and compassion to diners in the same way that Google endows writers with erudition. (Magazines and periodicals published in New York are themselves strongly influenced by the notion of foreign restaurants—see a magazine editor describe how he has convinced an “average person” to read “10,000 words on Congo.”) Conversely, it is always an alienating experience to eat in one of the few New York–themed restaurants in New York, to take charge of one of their unmanageable sandwiches or baked pastas, under the neon lights, in sight of the framed and signed photos of Ed Koch or Darryl Strawberry, boxed in by families of tourists speaking in their own languages. Restaurants apparently coming from other countries are New York’s most successful idea; to the degree that people in those other countries are enjoying themselves in foreign-themed canteens and diners, they are approaching New Yorkers. And it does not matter in the end precisely which country or region is being represented in this way. It is more a general feeling of distinction or abstraction that is important, imperial, the sense that on any night of the week you are able to put something not-of-New York into your mouth. But these restaurants are really all that New York is, and the further you go looking for something barbarically foreign, the closer you are to the very heart of it.
In the exaltation of its own singularity, its endless discourses on its own repetitive phenomena, New York is congruent with its pubescent boys, its hypochondriacs, and its artists. It is artists, though, who have taken it the furthest, who have ridden uniqueness to the point of bare identity, who have made it possible for anyone who lives in New York today to call
himself, with deep legitimacy, an artist. Since—in no fixed order—a divine aura, a formal education or an artisanal apprenticeship, an objective body of work, any objectively limited activity, a subject-object distinction, an autograph, penury, a deliberately scruffy carriage or toilet, a free-and-easy relation to mass culture, and lately, a sort of fake infantilism, have all been denounced as reactionary limitations, what remains is for the New York artist to define himself as such by nothing more than the particular facts of his own life, the only constant feature of which is the achievement of living in New York. (All of the abject denotations, of course, remain available as grandiose connotations, so the New York artist has the ballast of the canonical names, the monuments of the past, as he sails beyond the promontories.)
Moreover, galleries and museums have made themselves indistinguishable from shops and restaurants. These conditions create an obvious problem for those who have decided to call themselves artists: how to mark your day-to-day activities as artistic? How to differentiate whatever it is you do from what someone does who has not chosen to call herself an artist? How to sniff out other artists? The problem doesn’t exist outside New York, except when encountering other New Yorkers there. The only solution artists in the city have come up with is the continuous demonstration of the word artist. One finds this little reminder all over the place—in notices, on billboards, in galleries and restaurants, conversations at parties, public lavatories, shops. What would happen if it were removed as a descriptor after the two people’s names at the bottom left of the unforgettable picture that has been posted by the MTA in New York subway carriages—that of small cotton chicks dressed in 19th-century costume waiting on a platform for a steam train? Or from
the name provided as the creator’s on the special edition artistic shopping bags from Neiman Marcus? Chaos, incomprehension.
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. The idea of New York as unique or superlative in reality provides cover for myriad ordinary failures. Someone unemployed, aimless, and intentionally unkempt can call himself an artist in New York; a person who knows how to use Google can call himself a writer, or at least a journalist. Almost everyone—apart from the always discreet, invisible, and permanent underclass—is able to go to a foreign restaurant of some kind every week and there enjoy the fruits and the elevation of empire; fully everyone lives in a named neighborhood in the sense of a rectilinearly bounded area with interesting characteristics. Foreign nationals in their hundreds come to New York every month to earn ambiguous degrees or simply to find themselves, entirely content to hand over months or years of their lives to part-time work in restaurants with whose ethnic theme their looks and accents are more or less a match, because they believe they are living in New York. Because to live in New York is to be a part of something bigger, weightier, of greater exchange value. A run-of-the-mill fl op in New York equals a minor hit in Dunfermline, a smash in Pyongyang.
There is a clear sense of New York that settles after just a few weeks spent in the city. It is this: that the meaning of everything you look at is obvious. The furnishing of the shops, the positioning of the restaurants, the names of the neighborhoods, the way the businessmen look at each other and then at the hand gadget, what students and artists have decided to do with their hair: everything signifi cant turns out to have a direct and desperately transparent basis in logic, and as such is instantly, totally comprehended. Where vestigial traditions, lack of rational planning, and overseas transmission errors create aporias in other cities, New York’s urge to distinguish itself and to protect its identity—from the impulses of the provincial suburbs in particular, but also from the influence of its forbears and epigones—creates forces that are opposite but equal in their leveling effect. These forces are arranged in a cycle. The cycle is repetitive and predictable, and the attention span attenuates. A boredom arises. A designer relates to a journalist how she and her spouse converted their apartment to accommodate a live-work arrangement. The boredom becomes anxiety; nine blocks become a neighborhood. Another memoir of growing up in Brooklyn is composed. The sound of thousands of flip-flops slapping against asphalt grows overwhelming. The anxiety turns to despair. The opening of a new restaurant is announced. NYME.