Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Thirty years ago (on Dec. 12) my adventures as a resident of New York City began.

Please note the choice of words: Not New Yorker but resident of New York City.

In fact, I find the idea of considering myself a New Yorker to be a fraud, one that even on this significant 30-year anniversary, I’m unwilling to accept. (Although I did write this note only two days ago [Dec. 10], while traveling in a subway over the East River from Brooklyn to Gotham. “Bluest sky over Manhattan;  a wicked slash of home, that this place is home.”)

Still, such identification of home as it relates to the label “New Yorker” requires more than a fleeting feeling. The “fraud” a loaded phrase like “New Yorker,” the latter being manifest in a slew of tiny cuts of assumptions  -- how a New Yorker dresses, how a New Yorker views the subway, what cocktails does a New Yorker have after a long day of work.

I’m not alone in my un-New Yorker-ness. In fact, the hardened silos of self all around me obviously don’t contain those who think of themselves as identifying within a group that doesn’t meet their ever-narrowing definition of self.

Call it exile for want of a more precise term.

Perhaps I cringe from the straitjacket of a New Yorker sensibility, as is reduced to the clubby magazine of the same name. Imagine, if you will, the strained community of purebred prancing poodles, heads erect, never deigning to root about in street trash, the fetid stain, relish the abnormal, the fresh, the raw exotic that’s not breed-worthy.

Suffice to say, I don’t wear that collar. And if the poodle masters have their way, I never will.

Which, on the face of it, sounds like sour grapes. But what’s required is to check your premises. If the world does not share your ideals, then when you express them and they are not reflected in the outcomes, well, doesn’t the blame fall on you for the feelings of disappointment? Aren’t you, always, setting yourself up for disappointment?

And taken further, the health factor  … It is so important to keep your expectations real, to control what you can control. Is it a matter that you “stick to your guns,” or adjust your thinking, beliefs to obtain the desired result?

It seems to me the objective is to keep it real: to wit, use a “straight talk” analysis when moved. Be who and what you are, others are counting on you; it is how to best answer that sticky question: What did you do during your time on earth to make a difference?

Next: Running for Your Life: Going Postable

Jamaica, Up Close

Blue-black prophet points in a jagged angry way, the endless mountain road; he is surrounded by a gaggle of goats in shade under a mystic-looking tree ...

“Grilled” gate in what seems the middle of nowhere on this fantasy island, rum punch and jerk meat, all you can drink and eat, heavenly days, nasty broken green glass, countless mind-numbing, self-medicated drunks unshameable, embedded in concrete, what Russell Banks writes in “The Book of Jamaica,” how much worse it is to lift up the poor with promise of real hope, real change, and then see the declared others thrive as before, in charge, as always it is better for them, ideals meaningless, what is the accident of birth, eye contact at the risk of a dull, dirty knife stabbed into ….

The signs says:

TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT

SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

It won’t be up much longer, Concrete Utopia. Jan. 13 it comes down.

A part of the world, a moment in time. Currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Could you find Sarajevo on a map?

Where is Ljubljana?

What borders Serbia to the north?

Split, Croatia? Dubrovnik?

Then there is the library in Pristina, Kosovo … and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia, “a hopeful, future-oriented process in a perpetual state of emergence.”

Back in the day (I hesitate to use my father’s phrase, “Back in my day …” but) we’re talking the Third Way, a living socialism, however imperfect, with bilingual signs (English being one) across the so-called Balkan states of Yugoslavia.

In 1984, the year of the Sarajevo Olympics (I have the pin), I was twenty-eight and impressionable, odd the Orwell string, one I’ve not plucked until now.

Age of the concrete – shown in now vintage photos – limns the limits of theory when it comes to the manifold possibilities of disruption through social – not capital – gain.

I look about me here, at the people attending Concrete Utopia, and think:

The immaculate truth of an idea, so last century.

And what, do tell, feeds the dreams of today’s twenty-eight year olds?

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix II

Reading “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner is like coin-mining an ancient plain, ever so periodically, while stirring pools upon pools of patience that in the early pages seems beyond human capacity because so much of what is put down seems, at first, aimless, even inert, you come upon a gold doubloon, an object of such perfection that your heart skips a bit, to wit:

“Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate.  He seemed to see . . . a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both – the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

Running for Your Life: Prospect Park Shoot

On alternate days I run, typically for about 45 minutes – five miles more or less – and like to take a route to the skating rinks in Prospect Park.

For years, from the mid-90s to the late ’00s, M and I would go for morning skates, back when there was an outdoor facility, called Kate Wollman Rink.

Now, it’s a swishy two-rink affair, one under a skylight cover, the other in the open air.

The second ice surface will, from time to time, be commandeered for product photo and video shoots.

I’ve seen Martha Stewart signs, but typically there is nothing outward that would identify the client.

On this day (Dec. 6), I noticed the shoot but kept running along the path near the ice, a route I like because as an avid skater I admire the skate cuts in the surface of the ice, and perchance, be drawn back into memories of mornings past.

Just as I get to the middle of the outdoor rink wall, a woman starts cursing like a sailor, slashing my reverie to ribbons. F-words, S-words, a cascade of muck, pierces the morning cold, the “talent” in the shooting pen is a girl in expensive-looking winter wear, eight years old max, looking wanly on.

When I return on the same path, two members of the shoot crew block my way as I attempt to return along the public route I take every other day for months of the year. Like a good doobie, I retreat and look for a second best way to run home.

Turned away – yet another example of how in our profit-obsessed culture, “your options have changed.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia