I’m writing up an interview with Colum McCann and reminded of these great lines on New York, from Let The Great World Spin.

“One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.”

― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

When I walked into the final room of the punk show at the Met last week and saw these words on the wall, up above the Hussein Chalayans and Maison Martin Margielas, I finally knew I was in an especially satirical episode of Absolutely Fabulous. There was Eddy at my elbow, bustling past in 2008 Vivienne Westwood, and saying to Patsy, “punk darling, it’s punk, isn’t it, you know, safety pins and all that darling.”

“Tears, safety pins, rips all over the gaff, third rate tramp thing, that was poverty really, lack of money.”

-Johnny Rotten

And then I exited through the gift shop.

“Neon in daylight is a

great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would

write, as are light bulbs in daylight.”

from “A Step Away From Them”, Frank O’Hara

 

“Only a killjoy would claim neon wasn’t beautiful”

from The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner

I feel a bit embarrassed about getting excited over etymology; I think there’s something kind of cheap about it, or at least a cheapness to the assumption that simply understanding a word’s constituents will really tell you anything – as if understanding a word’s technical meaning necessarily means accessing meaning, in the capital lettered, gravely intoned sense. In fact, I think it might do the opposite: fixating on it seems as wrongheaded and benignly dumb as analysing and explaining a joke, in other words, it perverts what makes it delicious.

But: I’ve been thinking about New York’s unsentimentality – how vigorously and ruthlessly it makes itself new – and for that reason, how appropriate it is that the city should continue to be identified with neon, which, dur, comes from the Greek for “new”. New York’s first neon sign appeared in 1924 –  the material isn’t new but neon somehow endures as symbol of newness. And neon in daylight, like Frank observed in his lunch hours back in 1964, remains a novelty.

I’m reading Rachel Kushner’s very brilliant The Flamethrowers for a second time and noticing how much neon there is (appropriate for a novel concerned with newness – or at least, the future and accelerating into it). The neon flashes come particularly bright in the sections set in downtown 70s New York and noticing that seems a modest little double irony: one, that reading it new, I didn’t notice the neon “newness” and two, that all that neon should somehow conjure up the grubby, dangerous, dirty New York of the that decade, which is as old and gone as, I don’t know, the Chelsea Hotel that Leonard Cohen remembers well.

I took the picture above the summer before last, my first in New York (embarrassing Hipstamatic days). I think I’d just read Just Kids.

In 1965, when “bestselling poet” was an un-ridiculous phrase, and when Leonard Cohen wasn’t yet Leonard Cohen, or rather when he was Leonard Cohen the poet and not yet Leonard Cohen the singer, the National Film Board of Canada made a documentary about him. This is my favourite line.

“When I get up in the morning… my real concern is to discover whether I’m in a state of grace. And if I make that investigation, and I discover that I am not in a state of grace, I try to go back to bed. A state of grace is that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you. It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos — because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order — but having a kind of escape ski down over a hill, just going through the contours of the hill..”

I loved these books:
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
NW, Zadie Smith
The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
Sátántangó, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta
To The Forest, Katie Kitamura
How Should A Person Be, Sheila Heti
Every Story Is A Ghost Story, D.T. Max

And I loved these albums:
Channel Orange, Frank Ocean
R.A.P. Music, Killer Mike and El-P
Jialong, Daphni
Sun, Cat Power
Icon Give Thank, Sun Araw, M and Congos
Swing Lo Magellan, Dirty Projectors
Love This Giant, David Byrne and St. Vincent
AUN, Fennesz
Mungodelics, Mungolian Jetset
Shields, Grizzly Bear
R.I.P, Actress
Luxury Problems, Andy Stott
Instrumental Tourist, Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin
Disintegration Loops, William Basinski
Get Lost Volumes V and VI, Acid Pauli
REWORK_, Philip Glass and various
Lux, Brian Eno

And I loved these songs:
“Everything Is Embarrassing” Sky Ferreira
“Get Free” Major Lazer ft. Amber Coffman
“Mercy” Kanye West ft. Big Sean, Pusha-T, 2 Chainz,
“Jasmine” Jai Paul
“Arch n Point” Miguel
“Ill Manors” Plan B
“Grown Up” Danny Brown
“Bad Insect” Ultraista
“New York“ Angel Haze
“Baby” Donnie & Joe Emerson
“Red” Taylor Swift
“That’s Alright” Kindness ft. Troublefunk

And I loved these shows:
Pulp, The SS Coachella, somewhereoffthecoastofFlorida, December 16th
Dawn of Midi, Joe’s Pub, November 24th
Health, Roseland Ballroom, October 3rd
Jonathan Richman, Bowery Ballroom, June 13th
Atoms For Peace, MOMA ps1, September 9th
Terry Riley, Parc Des Ateliers, October 20th
EMA, Music Hall of Williamsburg, March 16th
Lana Del Rey, the Woolly, September 19th
Grizzly Bear, Radio City Music Hall, September 24th
The Weeknd, Terminal 5, September 25th

I have a piece in today’s Independent magazine about Coney Island in the aftermath of Sandy. A too navel-gazing thing to have included is how I’ve never really felt any sort of allegiance to a place until moving to New York; patriotism, or hometown pride, or any sort of sense of belonging derived from geography, has always felt absurd and alien to me.   But New York is an easy place to love, and non-natives are, I think, more preoccupied by that love, it being more self-conscious, more deliberate.

Sandy, specifically the surge of relief efforts, has made me love it harder but they also induced a sort of moral vertigo; this excellent NYT piece on the social divides thrown into relief by the volunteering effort is one of those oh-shit and self-directed-duh reminders that people are always in crisis here. Which, living in one of the most glamourised cities on earth and probably the most fictionalised, is an easy thing to forget: that high rises in Coney Island are as much New York as bijou SoHo streets – the latter just happen to get a lot more screen time.

1. “Werkin’ Girl” Angel Haze
2. “That’s Alright” Kindness feat. Trouble Funk
3. “Ye Ye” Daphni
4. “Happy Song” Sun Araw, M Geddes Gengras, The Congos
5. “Baby” Donnie & Joe Emerson
6. “Foreground” Grizzly Bear
7. “I Only Have Eyes For You” The Flamingoes

I saw The Artist Is Present at Film Forum last week and to understand the breadth of Marina Abramovic’s awesome, I think you really just need to take two images of her from the film. One: her taking a razor blade to her belly to carve a big bleeding pentangle. ART. Two: following the cataclysmic heartache that was the end of her twelve year, intensely passionate, epic love affair with fellow performance artist Ulay, she goes shopping a lot at Givenchy. There’s lovely footage of her swanning about in the Paris store, idly appraising extortionately expensive sequinned fandangles and then hanging off the balcony with Riccardo Tisci.

Nothing but love for a woman so deadly fucking serious about her art who is also able to wave an absurdly, adorably frivolous banner in the face of anguish.  Also, she is somehow able to invest the word “totally” with what I think must be unsurpassable comic and seductive freight.

Here she is looking rully fashion.

Just seven songs I listened to a lot in June. This is going to be more of a selfish mode of hopefully-memory-recalling diary-keeping, rather than any sort of hubristic stab at zeitgeist-cream-skimming. Which, in any case, sounds disgusting.  Spotifiable. And this was May.

The greatest thing I did last week was go see the man dancing in my Twitter background dance, #irl, at the Bowery Ballroom.  There were so-many-but-not-enough moments of him flinging his guitar aside to let loose with all the floppy-limbed charm of a small child, looking very much like he was making it up as he went along (particularly to someone who’d spent a lot of her day watching Justin Timberlake videos). More reasons to love: frequent recourse to cowbells, and the sweetest, most gracious and long-winded response to people shushing other people in the crowd. I wish I’d written it down.

“I’ve been trying to work out who he reminds me of,” said my friend. “And then I realised it’s the five year-old-boy I babysit.” She didn’t believe me when I said that he was 61.

Here’s a video from that night of him singing “I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar”. It starts upside down and has little tuneless snatches of people in the crowd singing along – in other words it’s appropriately, charmingly shambolic.