Skip to main content

NYC

It's hard to sum up my feelings about going to NYC. I mean, that's a real world-class city.

I'm from Vancouver. A city that constantly, if embarassingly self-consciously, proclaims itself to be just that. Last time I checked, though, I don't see people walking around NYC with "I HEART VANCOUVER" shirts on absentmindedly. Yesterday, in Vancouver, I saw two NY shirts (they were kinda well-worn and had all the tourist feel of a Nike jumpsuit). No director is shooting in NYC trying to recreate the picture-perfect Kitsilano scene. I suspect there's a dance club in upper Manhattan that has a higher GDP than all of the Lower Mainland.

There's a enormousness about NYC. Movies and books and the collective memory of much of Western Civilization are put in the backdrop of, are created in, are stamped out in the streets of that city. Midnight Cowboy, An Affair to Remember, The Godfather, Wall Street, The French Connection, Guys and Dolls, Independence Day. It's this fountain of zeitgeist, if I may resurrect a buzz word from '02 that has all the freshness of a Pompeii compost heap.

The bustle rustle, the bumble tub grinding tumble of it all. I never thought one could be intimidated by a city. It's just people isn't it? People, sewer system, a city bureaucracy, the police, the justice system, transit, by-laws, parks, sky scrapers, tenement buildings, concrete, cement, glass. But I am.

I've never really believed in the idea of city loyalty. It's part and parcel of the idea that you can take credit for shit you have had no hand in doing anything about. Like being proud you're tall, or your parents are from a certain part of the world. It's silly.

But I can see how one can feel proud about NYC. Like how one, I suppose, can feel proud about Canada. I'm not entirely sure how this is different from city loyalty. Where people from this city hate people from that city or blahblahblah 'TASTES GREAT!! LESS FILLING!!" merry-go-round of idiocy.

I suppose you can admire it. You can admire what a city stands for, what it's given birth to. What culture and personality it fosters. I suppose there's nothing silly about that.

NYC, to me, a West Coast bumpkin, is so many things and everything. Mostly things that aren't West Coast. When I think of the Hippie Annex (California, Oregon, Washington, BC), I think, laid-back, slow, relaxed, live-and-let live, work just enough to enjoy life, organic, coffee multinationals. Fast-talking, fast-moving, striving, dog-eat-dog, no-time-fore-chit-chat-let-alone-to-breathe, Dangerous Streets, grifting, authentic. Also, you know, Crime. With a capital C. The sort you make grungy, lo-fi tragic documentaries about. It's a burden of a city, I suppose, that is filmed so often and, I'm sure, so often inaccurately.

And here I am plunging headlong into it. A city, which the internet tells me, has almost a third the population of my entire beloved Canada.

What's it gonna be like? How am I gonna even experience through this filter of movies books shows? Will I be able to keep myself from craning my head back, shading my eyes, and muttering, 'That's one tall building'?

I hope I'm ready for world-class.

Comments

I hope you get to see some of NYC in between all the rock band you'll be playing :) There's got to be other people in your group who will want to see NEW YORK! You flew across the country to get there, so get out and enjoy it!

Popular posts from this blog

Insults From A Senile Victorian Gentleman

You SIR, have the hygeine of an overly ripe avocado and the speaking habits of a vaguely deranged chess set. I find your manner to be unctuous and possibly libelous, and whatever standard you set for orthodontal care, it's not one I care for. Your choice in news programs is semi-literate at best and I do believe your favourite news anchor writes erotic literature for university mascots. While I'm not one to point out so obvious a failing, there has been rumour that the brunches you host every other Sunday are made with too much lard and cilantro. If you get my meaning. There is something to be said about your choice of motor-car fuel, but it is not urbane and if I were to repeat it, mothers would cover their children's ears and perhaps not a few longshoremen within earshot would blush. How you maintain that rather obscene crease in your trousers and your socks is beyond me, perhaps its also during this time that you cultivate a skin regime that I'm sure requires the dea...

People You Meet on Transit #5

Thanks to Jay Morrison for the photo. Transit Drivers Bus drivers are an archetype in North American culture. In the imagination they are generous in girth, have staunch opinions about unions and eat 300% the recommended intake of red meat. The odd one adheres to a strict conspiracy theory, which they manage to work into the most innocuous conversations. At least, that's what's been ingrained in our collective subconscious along with "Han shot first" and "Dukakis, 1988". But transit drivers, like everyone else, are individuals. Unique, utterly one of a kind from the 5 billion others who roam this spinning mass of molten iron with the cool, carbon life-form infested shell. Sure, you see the reticent ones, who have a 100 yard stare and coolly watch passengers get mild hypothermia while they take their union-sanctioned 15 minute break inside their cozy bus. But there are other, more colourful characters as well. In my city, there is one that calls out every st...

Cyberpunk 2077

 Like a late 90's webring, replete with link back and hints at an actual relationship with other authors, this is a piece I'd like to say in.. rebuttal is too harsh a term, in reply, to my very long standing internet friend, zompist, where he posts his various gripes with that great sprawling hot mess, Cyberpunk 2077. Now I say hot mess because that's what the internet at large thinks of it, but me, playing on the worringly over-powered computers on GeForce Now, have experienced nearly no problems. Or at least not problems that bother me enough. Keep in mind I'm the Homer Simpson when it comes to critiquing alot of things. I just like, alot of things. Cheap date, as it were.   It might be my hundreds of hours in Bethesda titles and regularly having to look up console commands to debug yet another janked out quest, but it takes a rather large bug to befuddle and begrudge me. Like if a bug repoed my car, maybe, or  told me how much weight I had actually put on during ...