Reviews: NYC

I lived for 9 1/3 years in New York City. And in that almost-decade I learned, unequivocally, the exact meaning of the phrase “love-hate relationship”.

I refused to admit the “love” part for a long time, so that’s where we’ll start now. The great thing about New York, the thing which, simply, no other city on earth can ever hope to match, is the great accessibility it offers. Where else can you find yourself sharing a cabaret table with some hero from your childhood, or live with a bunch of the greatest paintings in the world practically in your backyard? No place, plain and simple.

When I first moved to Manhattan, I lived in a basement studio in a crumbling brownstone on West 89th St. Horrible apartment (especially considering I’d just left a brand new 2000 square foot, two story, three bedroom, three bathroom house that I loved—and owned! But never mind that….) But it had a great location, on the Upper West Side, half a block from Central Park and just ten minutes’ walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surely one of the great destinations in all the world. The Met is everything a museum should be: huge, confusing, chock-full of interesting surprises, and constantly changing. It has a spectacular Egyptian wing, and a recreated Frank Lloyd Wright room. It has ancient furniture and arms and armor, and more artwork than anyone could ever comprehend. I’d learned to be fascinated by the place from afar as a child, by reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a novel which I heartily endorse for anyone, of any age. And, moving to Manhattan, of course I spent long afternoons at the Museum, and found it to be one of the very few places I’ve ever come to know, after years of imagining, which not only fulfilled my dreams, but surpassed them.

And so, after reading all the plaques on mummies and Greek statuary and Babylonian temples and Medieval monstrances, I eventually wandered into the Impressionist rooms and started staring at van Goghs and Monets. And I defy anyone, anywhere, to spend any time at all staring at original van Goghs and Monets and not be changed, utterly. There’s the obvious passion, and the entirely unique ways of seeing ordinary things, and all the mysteries of creation and light and color and utter insanity. And there’s history and story and love and destruction and beauty. And craftsmanship—you tell me how Monet got so much dimension out of a flat piece of canvas. But the most amazing thing to me about those paintings was that they were there, just across the park, within easy walking distance of my shoddy apartment, practically mine.

And then those heroes. I worked at Starbucks for a couple of those years, at various locations on the Upper West Side, which might just as easily be named Actor Ground Zero. Don’t ask me why. But in my first store, all the Baldwin brothers stopped by at one time or another (Alec: powerful and scary, Billy: sex on a stick, Steven: weird but endlessly charming), and Nathan Lane used to hang out, and a bunch of TV stars on their summer hiatus. And in my second store, just two blocks over on Broadway, both Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper stopped in (although not together, which would have been a better story but just too surreal), and Mandy Patinkin hummed Sondheim under his breath while I made his latte (I swear), and Audra MacDonald bought Chai Lattes and Linda Hamilton from Terminator 2 turned out to be much prettier in person, not least because she laughed at all my jokes, and Joel Schumacher brought a whole bevy of cute boys in, and Ally Sheedy lived upstairs and stopped by at least once or twice a day (she drinks soy milk, and looks harried but always very sweet). I became friends with Patricia Kalember, an actress I’d adored on Thirtysomething and Sisters. And Caroline Rhea, who was hot off Sabrina then, lived around the corner and stopped by for steamed milk and to gossip.

And then one night I went to see a friend in a show at the Duplex, and realized halfway through that the person jostling my chair was Steven Schwartz, composer of Wicked, Pippin, and, among others, Godspell, which marked a high point in my teenage musical career. Now, I’m not a huge fan of most of Schwartz’ work, but good lord—Godspell was huge for me. And there we were, practically sitting on each other’s laps, crowded into about two square feet together watching the same show at the Duplex’ dingy little cabaret room. There’s just no place like New York for accessibility.

But (and here’s where we start getting to the hate part of the equation) would you like to know why there’s such fabulous accessibility in NYC? It’s partly because the damn place is so small—you can walk the entire island of Manhattan without too much trouble, and the lower half, where all the parts you’ve heard about are, is barely big enough for a bus ride—but it’s also because the nature of the city reduces everybody, no matter how fabulous, to the lowest common denominator.

It’s ugly, and mean, and it’s small. Small, people. Tiny. Miniscule. Lots of crowded, tiny spaces all stacked up on top of each other and jockeying for position. Picture the most annoying, high-pressure saleswoman you know. Now picture her closet—so full the door won’t close, and with more shoe boxes than you can count stacked up, stuffed in, and bursting forth from it. Probably overflowing—if you look closely you’ll see more thousand dollar cardboard boxes stacked outside the closet door, and underneath the window, and around all the furniture. That’s New York City, folks. Overcrowded, overly pretentious, overflowing to swamp everything else around it.

New is not known for its architecture, and it’s not revered for its amazing city planning. Central Park does get some kudos—and I have a few gripes about that which I’ll get to later. But for the most part, New York City is famous not for the city itself, but just because of all the stuff that happens to be there. This may seem like splitting hairs, but consider: whereas Chicago is revered for making the most of its waterfront, and for rising up repeatedly in the face of destruction and adversity; and whereas New Orleans is celebrated for its slow, sexy, uniquely bayou pace and indulgence, which infuses the food and the music and the very streets; and whereas even Los Angeles is known for its maddening, spread-all-to-hell-and-gone geography, the only thing intrinsic to New York that people talk about is its “energy”, which I think is really just a euphemism for the dislike most of its social/racial groups seem to feel for each other. People in New York really don’t like each other much, and their antipathy is heightened by the fact that the they’re forced into such close proximity day in and day out. There’s a myth that Manhattan is full of creative energy and productive energy, that the confluence of movers and shakers there fills the streets with such a fertile, abundant atmosphere that anyone with the slightest modicum of ambition can dip into it and thus manifest their own dearest desires. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What fills the streets of NYC, kids, is competition. Ambition brings people there, because the place is the center of so many industries. But ambition doesn’t get you far when everyone you meet on the street has it, too, in equal or greater measure to yours. You have to fight them all, and the ones who win do so not because their vision is purest or most heartfelt, but because they have the greatest talent for ruthlessness. This is an entirely different gift from whatever vision of creativity brought them to the city in the first place. Sometimes it can coexist with those dreams, but sometimes it occludes them. New York City is full of once-creative or visionary people who have become merely good at business. It is, in other words, the world capitol of mediocrity, where everything must surrender to the demands of competition.

But on the other hand, even mediocrity can look pretty damn impressive if there’s enough of it. New York City can’t claim the best of much of anything these days—Broadway is certainly not where the most interesting theater is being produced, and in this age of instant communications designers, artists, writers, innovators in any medium can much more easily exist elsewhere and still get noticed. But NYC is still the most, the world’s center, the place where people and things congregate, where new things will at least be discussed and imported for scrutiny, even if they don’t originate there.

It’s the New York conundrum, to my way of thinking. An ugly place, not nearly as inviting as it should be; a thoroughly annoying city with a populace one wants to slap hard; and yet a place with one particular wonder, which is that everything is there, and everyone can be found, and whatever dreams or heroes you’ve ever cherished, in New York City they have an address and a corner coffeeshop where you can find, meet, and chat with them. Whether this inspires you and enables you to manifest those dreams in your own life exactly as you’ve always wanted, or convinces you that no dreams are real and all human accomplishment is ultimately sad, sordid, and small depends, I suppose, entirely on your personality. For me, both lessons applied.

Oh well.

Next week: Summer Movies!