The City & the Country no.46 – Nov 3 2014 – I hate Manhattan

(It doesn’t much care for me either.)

Brooklyn I love. But Manhattan, my childhood home (in a different incarnation, and on the border between Germantown and Spanish Harlem) – what a repellent place! Emerging from the subway at 19th and 7th Ave – not everyone’s Manhattan but yesterday for me it coalesced years of suppressed emotion – I attempted to find a snack. Many places were open. It was 3:20 on a Sunday. Behind a long front pretentious in its plainness, an eatery called Cafeteria beckoned. Cafeteria, perfect name for customers who wouldn’t be seen dead in a cafeteria unless slumming it in the half-mocking camp of a chic restaurant. Cafeteria, full of what seemed like slender 30-year-old fifteen-year-olds, similarly chic in a half-mocking camp style, with exactly the cultivated unshavenness to pass Manhattan muster, offered 4 or 5 available tables. The clientele seemed to convey the message that anyone not demonstrably gay (or pretending to be so) would be set upon and expelled, no doubt a just turn-about and payback, yet I wished myself anywhere in the humanly retarded MidWest (whose very idea of Manhattan this was); anywhere but here. I even missed Texas. None of the free tables was available, despite the absence of anyone waiting to be seated, and I was promised 5th place in the inexistent line. I fled gladly across the road to another eatery, this one of no name – the condition to which all Manhattan stores and eateries aspire. As with in-vogue clubs, names are too too vulgar. Here all the snacks were $20 and more, except for a tuna pita for $9 which I ordered only to be told that they had ‘taken it off the menu,’ as they patently had not. Bye-bye, nameless eatery. My next stop was a little salad bar-ish joint. A request for coffee, my needs growing more and more modest, was met with ‘Coffee? We don’t serve coffee.’ Oh for any of the diners we’d eaten in, Joe and I, on our 10,000-mile prowl this summer. I yearned for a mid-western face, a friendly drawl, in towns it pleased Joe to call “Buttfuck, USA.” I was ready to vote for Mitch McConnell. With barely enough time for a coffee I penetrated a Pain Quotidien and obtained a white bean soup, plus bread with a rind that would break the teeth of a Roman ox.

Thence to my destination, the launch of two books by my beloved friend Robert Kelly in Red Bull Studios, an over-designed multimedia mecca distinguished, for the uninitiated, by the fact that nowhere at the entrance does it say Red Bull Studios. Yes, I hate Manhattan. Psychedelia, long gone and rightly unmourned, has declined to the unapologetically garish, defining our age. All it takes is one dose of Manhattan – not only in its Chelsea incarnation, but that’ll do – to make me want to join the Tea Party, take up hog farming, and rush into the arms of the Philistines wherever they may be (Gath, Nebraska? Ashkelon, Idaho?), anywhere so long as I never have to hear the word ‘art’ again. Polite applause. Surfeit of the bien-pensants. Jules Laforgue foresaw it all, over a century ago: Un couchant de cosmogonies / Ah que la vie est quotidienne! (The man even foresaw Pain Quotidien!) Mercifully, to read or listen to Robert takes me to an entirely different planet, that of the heart.