Because of my unrelenting hostility towards tourists, my disdain of hipsters, my embarrassment over the new-wave vulgarity of the “hip-hopped-ghetto-glorifying-demons” that run amok my black brethren, my contempt for all of things corporate and sterile (except for bathrooms), and my sadness over what has happened to the New York underground or “alternative,” (off-off-Broadway, community operated theaters, hole-in-the-wall bars that were always empty), I am deemed a pathetic burn out who simply cannot come to grips with his bad credit and his past successes. Or, as you will eventually see, I am just considered a paranoid Luddite – at best. I prefer the latter, even though the former is probably closer to the truth.

 

Thinking about it now I don’t see the connection between bemoaning the loss of my old neighborhood as something that a Luddite would necessarily do, but I understand if he would. More appropriately, I see myself as a spiritual ecologist – I am concerned about my social environment, the style and personality of its people. Perhaps that is the dramatist in me, the anthropologist screaming inside – I don’t know – but is there any difference between my concern over native urban centers like my beloved New York City and the ferocity environmentalists hurl at our ignorance while they preach to us the great gospel according to the Horrors of Global Warming? Global Warming is quite serious. So is gentrification. So is, more specifically, “spatial displacement.” So is the loss of a culture. If I saw someone so overly concerned and dismayed at all the rapid and regressive changes that were occuring in his or her environment, I would instantly take note. I would not, and could not, be angry at that person. One must ask why is this person so horrified and traumatized by what has occurred and is occurring? Trauma is the best word for it, for it implies a tremendous impact, some spiritual or internal bleeding that will take time to clot.

This is not a college thesis, although I smell that in the works lurking in the background somewhere. Perhaps I should mustered the courage to do something again with my life: go back to school and get a degree so I can teach, share what I know, impress on the rising generation that ways of life, culture, neighborhoods, traditions, values, beliefs, habits, and “rituals-of-the-block” are still important and carry meaning that people outside of their specific arena will not be able to understand or detect. Isn’t that the charm and spiritual weight of folkways and folk art? Or have I missed the mark? Do writings on your family’s cave wall not matter? Sometimes I feel I am deluding myself, creating meaning where their is none, forging memories that never existed. But then the evidence turns up – as hard and violent as brick or as sad as a beautifully eroding stone. The evidence of what was, what I knew, what had been, and what is – is overwhelming and too powerful to ignore. I have years of memories stored in my chest, painful flickers of a time that I thought would never end, and tormented images of a New York that I once knew intimately when I was the King of my own universe and the servant of a grander one.

It is not the cliches of New York’s checkered past that I miss: the graffiti, the boom boxes, the hookers (although I prefer to see the pros as opposed to the amateurs taking over Wall Street). No, it is the faces and the tiny bars I used to pass through or frequent, the phrases and crazies, the rough and ready feel of an afterhours joint, the neverending conversations at local diners, the rehearsals in the sheep’s meadow, the empty seats on the 7 train, and the empty platforms along the L train…where we were all convinced ghosts lived. I am sure those ghosts still lurk, still haunt. And I can only imagine how difficult even that has become. Have you ever seen the L train at rush hour in the morning? It is one of the single most repulsive images I have ever laid eyes on in my entire life. The gory twisted faces, the bodies packed like prisoners of war on their way to the death camps…No room to breathe, sit, stand, turn, blink…I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. No, I think I would – because I know he wished this on me. What is slightly amusing is the fact that the subway ride to and from home was always the one aspect of your day you could feel comfortable relying on what you would be able to do. You’d actually be happy if it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be. Every now and then it would be packed and full of all sorts of barn animals and riff-raff but you wouldn’t care because at least you felt human. I did some of my best reading on the train. And every now and then I would even have a great thought, an artistic idea I could flex and bounce back and forth without feeling as if I might step on someone’s foot or that I myself might even be crushed to death.

It may be easy and “foolproof” to sit back and wax poetically – but I assure you I do not sit back when I write. On the contrary – I hunch over and shake my knee and grit my teeth as if I am getting ready to jump into the boxing ring. Nostalgia is a vital part of any living animals’ consciousness and human beings obviously have a deep connection to what they remember or believe they remember or wish they could have remembered. At the end of the day it does not matter – it is in the acknowledgment of what they are haunted by and miss, what the memories and feelings meant to them are mysterious to outsiders as the reason for a loved one’s suicide. Even if a note was left. Nostalgia is real but my intention is not to pat myself on the back. My intention is to commiserate, get angry that I am currently forced to rent from an out-of-town landlord (literally, she is not from New York) who was even too young to remember 9/11 and if she wasn’t it still wouldn’t matter: she wasn’t even in New York during it! The amount of energy I and my cronies have spent trying to erase the caustic amnesia that took over New Yorkers after 9/11 (remember when police brutality consiglieri Giuliani became a hero overnight?) – would be enough to fuel the automobiles in the entire state for some time to come. There! See? Something positive did come out of all this: I just solved our energy crisis. Now all I have to do is boil down(up?) all that anger and energy and mix it with some french fry oil… I know, for a fact we could get far on that alone.

When a man realizes he has a past, he realizes he also has a responsibility. That is true of any artist, educator, prophet, or warrior out there in the human jungle fighting and paving a way for something purer, clearer, hearier, realer. Speaking of the artist, allow me to reference the lyrics of Living Colour, the black rock group from Queens. I first saw them live when they opened for the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour in 1989 at Shea Stadium. It was the first time I had ever seen a black rock bass player – someone who bore a slight resemblance to me and who was on my own turf, from my local community…Anyway, their song “Open Letter(To a Landlord)”, written by Vernon Reid & T. Morris, had a profound impact on me:

Now you can tear a building down
But you can’t erase a memory
These houses may look all run down
But they have a value you can’t see…

I was thirteen years old when I first heard that song. It had an impression on me then and gives me the chills now because I truly understand it. And many a poet has dwelled on this, has ruminated on the fading sheen of his childhood or what was once known as home. I am sure the conundrum of not even having a home – literally not having something to return to – spins cobwebs of nightmarish peninsulas, deep roaming vertigo that eats up you and swallows you whole. It does for me – because as I write this I still do not have a permanent home. Even worse: I imagine this is what many of the residents of New Orleans feel – as they still try to create a new relationship to their old community. Global Warming. Hurricanes. Gentrification. The wheel doesn’t stop there, it just keeps renewing itself. Like Medussa. I would say like a bear – but from what I gather most bears will be gone from the face of the planet one day. Like the native New Yorker. Like the native ‘American’ before him…

 

 

I don’t know what people think or feel when they arrive in NYC and hear New Yorkers bitch and moan about the loss of Shea Stadium/Willets Point or the increasingly un-stable support of “rent-stabilization” or the fact that they still can’t get over that they can’t smoke in bars. I don’t know what my current landlord would think if I explained how much contempt we had towards Rudolph Giuliani. I don’t know if she would even care. But I do know if I went to her native San Francisco and heard a similar tale, I would forever be changed and would re-asses my involvement and relationship to the people and the communities of that city. San Francisco: well, I see that Gus Vant Sant’s film about Harvey Milk has just been released. I look forward to seeing it, I admire Van Sant (something of an anthropologist in his own right) and Sean Penn very much. But I ask you: could you imagine someone from the East coast infiltrating Castro Street and butchering the legacy of Harvey Milk? (That Yankee would never make it out alive!)

Well, there are thousands of Harvey Milk’s here in NYC that get abused, spat on, and destroyed every day. Local people that work hard and strive for rights and their community. Perhaps these are not literal heroes like Milk was, but they are New Yorker’s who had pride in who they were, what they were, how they lived, and what they did in order to survive. And what kills me is that I constantly have this feeling that they – we – are never respected. It is a peculiar feeling and it gives the city an ominous tone, an even more divisive feel than it was previously known to have boasted. Some people, like Amadou Diallo, come to New York to work and create a better way of life. Diallo, unlike the new wave of immigrants raping New York, came here to contribute and work for himself. He was an African street merchant and had plans of starting his own business, he was even known to help out other immigrants and the homeless by lending or giving them money. The Diallo family became intertwined with not only African-Americans in New York, but New Yorkers who were fed up with police brutality, in general. After Amadou had been shot at 41 times by four white NYPD officers and murdered to death for no reason at all, the Diallo family had to become involved and be concerned with local and national politics – unlike the busloads of smug Europeans I have noticed who just want to spread their claws over Williamsburg/Greenpoint and now, in droves, Uptown Manhattan and Harlem. I wonder how many of these people are genuinely concerned about New York. I could not imagine going to France and living in Paris and not pay attention to the riots occurring, as they did in 2005. But the new gentrified and corporatized and comfortable New York does not concern itself over such matters. Why should it, when it has a billionaire for a mayor? In fact, it is Bloomberg himself, that corrupted Big Business Czar, who not only doesn’t given a damn what the voting New Yorkers think (as if our votes even mattered), but would bend over backwards to continue building upwards and onwards, into the skies and out into the Hudson…It is Bloomberg himself who is the American Gentrifiers’ best friend in New York City and it is he who plays dead dog when the couple who can’t afford their place find their belongings on the curb, beside some raggedy-ass car service who will pick them up and take them nowhere, while the young twenty-something upstart moves in, lets his tiny dog off his lease, chatters away on his cellphone, dances atop his new I-Mac, and laughs away the world as he now makes plans for his friends in Boston to join him in Brooklyn. And all the couple can think as they try to make sense of it all is “But we were such good tenants, we got married here, we went to school down the block, we were only late with rent a couple of times…” It will be hard for them to admit what has happened, to allow questions and issues of class or race (or both) to infiltrate their mind because it is happening on their home turf, not in someone’s downtown chic restaurant, not in someone’s suburban mall. They will vaguely associate Bloomberg with the gentrifiers who vaguely associate themselves with the hispters who vaguely associate themselves with corporate America who vaguely associate themselves with native New Yorkers who pay rent (because in case you have not noticed it really is not “cool” to discuss how much you struggle to pay rent when you are at your office job, no it is better to boast how much you put down on your new Lower East Side or Sugar Hill apartment. Cause renting is “too last century,” and there’s property to buy buy buy! ‘What depression? You mean the recession? Yeah, well that doesn’t affect us, I mean we’re in New York – we’re not farmers or factory workers…’ These will be – and are – the words of people who abandoned Ohio and Detroit in favor of New York and have the temerity to speak about their “own” people as if they were nothing. The flipside is the proud Mid-westerner who is making a killing in New York City and espouses how much he hates the city! Those freaks are my favorites because they offend every sensibility and impulse I have ever had; they get me right in my center. These are the same freaks who do not use the subway, however, and look upon you with pity when you tell them how difficult your subway ride in this morning was…)

My contempt gives way to a deep sadness when I think of New York and the end of the twentieth century. It was as if anybody who is now in their thirties were part of that last minor wave or splash – that spilled over and up into our faces and let us have just a taste of what “New York” was really like.

New York in the 1990’s was the last crumb left over from a smorgasboard that may have started in the 1920’s and reserved itself as a meal in the 1970’s…and slowly once the clean-up crew started to move in and close up the kitchen doors, we’ve been chewing and sucking on the remnants of those foods until there was nothing left to eat.

Nothing left to serve.

There is nothing cooking.

That is New York today, the only NYC I know.

In the late 1990’s, Martin Scorsese constantly complained about the changing facade of New York City, in fact when he made “Bringing out the Dead” – he had to spend money to make the city what he had remembered to have been years earlier. Personally, I think the money could have been spent on better things, but his heart was certainly in the right place. Our consumate New York directors, I’m sure would agree with Scorsese on this aesthetic problem and cultural shift in NYC. Spike Lee, even Woody Allen – all now seem more interested in expressing their New York attitudes in overseas palettes and foreign countries and more power to them. But it leaves you wondering what the current crop of newly established “New York” directors will teach us and reveal and make us feel about this city. My word of advice to those who are still trying to make NYPD movies and cop dramas: Leave it alone, you will never be able to top Sidney Lumet! (He’s the only filmmaker to me – whose films seem to feature not only the landscape and architecture of New York, but the actual soul and energy of the city itself…as if Lumet’s films feature the star, the supporting actors, and New York City – as a character itself)

Filmmakers are an impenetrable lot, they are adept at recording “living-death” and they seek to capture life as it is and preserve it in order to tell us stories, make us feel in new ways, and invite us to think about all the thoughts drowning their brain. They record, they capture. Like documentarists and ancient tribal painters. I think it is every artist’s secret goal to express and capture something authentic and unique about their times, but also about a plane of thought, a memory from our human consciousness. Some people do all they can to forget their past, where they are from. And rightly so, because not everyone has pleasant or positive or even benign moments growing up or from their “hometown.” But that was why such cities like New York had such a pull – it attracted brilliance and diligence and freakdom and pathetics from all walks of life, from all four corners of this universe. And those people could be who they wanted to be on their own terms. Even if they didn’t have the money or the connections to back it up. All it asked was that you were savvy, talented, desperate, and hungry. At least one of the four. And that you added, that you gave of yourself while you soaked up your surroundings. The New Yorkers who were from other states and countries often found ways of bartering, they give a little and took a little. This was before New York had become obedient and subservient to the swaggering cowboys and the West Coast flip-floppers. Believe it or not, there was a time when people came to New York and had to gain experience and be humbled and taught and schooled in the “ways of the world.” It was the old adage, “When in Rome do as the Romans.” How fitting that these are now the people who have decided to watch Rome burn as Nero did. Maybe that is what we all secretly want – after all, remember how  corrupt Rome was? I say to hell with New York – if the bastards want to destroy it, let them. Let them have it all, take the subways, the brownstones, Bushwick, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, Astoria, Red Hook, the Lower East Side – but leave me out of it. In fact, how’s this: you come here, take what you want – just leave me your car keys. And then I realize when I see an old subway token, hear an old cab driver reflect, dream about an old girlfriend’s apartment, or see a face from my ruined ’20’s: I’m back, I’m going back, finding a way back to…my future…

I miss New York and I miss the New Yorkers I grew up with. The ones I worked with, created with, fought with. Even some of the ones I disliked in High School. Looking back, I can see how sophisticated we were even as dumb fifteen-year-olds. Kids then could still give adults from the sticks a run for their money and they could still lead their own self-governed lives. I often wonder what the relationship could be between the increased vulgarity and self hatred of many teenagers in NYC, the violence at large, and the massive quantities of Midwestern and Southern transplants taking over…I wonder if there is a connection at all, outside of the influential thrust of pop culture and trash movies/media. That is something to investigate at another time when my hunch is a bit more legitimate and becomes more apparent. Hell, I can see it already: “Today, the NY Board of Education has assigned more than fifty thousand teachers in New York – all of whom have recently moved to New York from South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Ohio.”

Well, hicks and Southern Belles may replace the Jewish teachers and the Caribbean nurses – but one thing they’ll never be able to replace: that New York soul. The belligerence, arrogance, wisdom, and humor of losers adrift in some terrible storm, lost at sea, but trying to be cool as they make their way back…

Everyone has a place in their hearts that represents a moment in time when their inner compass could be trusted and they knew that even if they had to die – those old steps they had crossed and pounced a million times over would be there until the very end like a trusted lover’s sigh or beauty mark you somehow learned to be proud of.

Respect yourselves, your community, your origins. And remember if you ever reside or work in a city or land you are not a native of, don’t be so callous and arrogant to think that you have a “right” to do as you please and how you please – because that wall you are removing could be the corner of someone’s last refuge. And then, the next morning – it could very well be the door to someone’s end.

 

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places had their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I’ve loved them all.

- John Lennon & Paul McCartney “In My Life”

(from the Beatles 1965 album Rubber Soul)

 

 

(c) 2008 by Dennis Leroy Kangalee. This piece became the inspiration for The NY Horror series.  In the interim, please read the short story What Happened to the Brother on the Block? (released as a spoken word recording under the title NY Horror Vol. 1)  -- a surrealist attempt to express the horror of corporate-friendly gentrification.