SupaStar!
If ever a city personified nervously sniffing your fingers after holding them in your armpits, then lunging into an awkward stance of victory, New York City is it.
Sorry, an NYC post. I know nobody likes that.
money pours down and it drowns the little man
parking lot attendants stuff their pockets with their hands
and the children laugh in your face
-david byrne
It’s just that since both kottke and boingboing have mentioned Joel Kotkin’s article about “Superstar Cities” I can’t help but think about NYC and DC.
My suspicion is that I could live in ten more cities and learn them well, but not find one more stratified, interesting, strange, and surreptitiously menacing as DC. It was odd and overrated, but when you found whatever it was that you didn’t know you were looking for, it was magic. Finding these places in NYC can feel like trying to fact-check rumors.
But that’s part of the ethereal quality, and part of its state of constant promise. I feel like I’m on a massive boat with street meat buffets and circus acts, people way richer than I, and others who saved for a year to get here. It’s sometimes been like Robert Smith’s Snake Pit and Why Can’t I Be You.
As Shelley Jackson described in Half Life, I sleep like a fossil.
Genetically Catholic, I take the guilt upon myself when I can’t find something as simple and life-enhancing as a quality greek deli or restaurant (shut up you face, with your Queens. I shouldn’t have to go to Astoria). I do however find entire worlds where I didn’t know one existed. It doesn’t feel wrong to believe it’s still me who has to change, and learn, to ask and research. How people survived here before the internet, I have no idea. Maybe all the sex shops and graf were just markers. I know I never explored DC to its fullest potential, but I didn’t want to. It wasn’t as inspiring. It’s no one’s city.
It’s hard getting older and wiser.
If only I were getting richer, faster. Doctors have diagnosed my condition as a cash hemorrhage. Every lunch shy of ten bucks feels like a victory, only to be undone a short time later by a cab, a store, a night out, or the pornographic cost of living. In DC I was on the verge of buying a place on my own, here, I avoid the home classified unless I want to remember what despair feels like.
It’s all good, as the kids say. I still have no debt whatsoever, I live well, I save. But I can’t get around the enormous effort and plain facts that say I could have X to the Y more ease, comfort, sanity, if I lived just about anywhere else. It’s just that the effort feels like anything good in life that’s worth doing.
Living on a prayer. And that’s a lot…
I’m in love with this place, I’m glad I don’t know the half of it yet. Our tiny apartments are the space that New York makes for us. We go from there. I can take and leave DC with it’s posturing and boundaries. I rather truly live in a city worth dying in.
2 thousand a month gets you under 300 square feet, 6 flights down 120 year old marble stairs plus 4 blocks with 23 pounds of laundry carried in 3 inch platform heels. Stinky pits and toppling off balance while trying to make a victory stance. Super star!
As a native New Yorker living in DC for the past few years, I have my own observations on the two cities I won’t dump here but I’ll say that life is fractal—wherever you dig there’s countless hidden dimensions waiting to be discovered. Perhaps NYC’s scale and flux makes that discovery happen a lot quicker, with much less effort.
I would absolutely agree with you on that. One of the most critical things is developing a filter for the flux and scale you describe. The advice that proved the most accurate and helpful was any regarding the need to carefully choose where I put my energy, time, money, emotion.
My first month here felt like at least 6, and was a blur. I honestly can’t believe I lived through it, physically & psychologically. It was a rabbit hole. You can’t take pride in blurs like that, because they just happen so easily. Effort has been about everything else. Maintaining friendships, finding quality niches, nourishing and enriching what has had to be carefully sifted and selected.
something like that. on a random note, i was very sad when they closed Visions, on Florida Ave, even though i had moved before then.
Indeed, life in NYC is like drinking from a firehose. There’s a huge
menagerie of choice to filter to find your own happy optimum.Visions was a nice rallying point for the indies and the artsies in DuPont
Circle. It will be missed. However, change is constant, and other places
are blooming for the creatives, like Busboys and Poets near U St and 14th.
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