Last night Jose told me about the CIA Torture Report, that the contents of the report were worse than he had expected, far worse. I couldn't believe it--that it could be worse (we're both informed and have read widely on the subject since the revelations broke some years ago). I thought certainly the use of waterboarding was likely to be far more widespread than anyone could believe, but was, like Jose, expecting the report to be watered down, to identify rogue actors within the enhanced interrogation program, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the report features items such as "rectal feeding," detainees kept in "coffin-like boxes" for "266 hours," the threatening of detainees with sexual assault of their children or mothers, detainees on life support after only days or hours in captivity (which indicates the report doesn't fully outline the degree of the savagery), and detainees who died during torture. The sadism described is medieval.
I was so upset I had to take a long walk, and additionally thought maybe I would find myself a chocolate chip cookie or croissant. How could people, people like you or I, torture other people, like that? With such brutality! And with such sadism.
The thing about New York: you're never too far from human misery, and every day you're confronted with a new tragedy, whether it's desperate looking women scavenging for cans in the bitter cold, vacant-eyed men roaming the streets yearning for compassion or death, homeless children and teens, abandoned house pets nuzzling disinterested legs. It's tough. Some days I come back to the apartment and weep for all the misery in the world, all the suffering, all the sadness. Well, not weep, but tear up and stare at the ceiling, despondent.
The city isn't just proximity to human misery--if it were, no one would want to live here! What redeems New York is human possibility, and the beauty of the warmth and compassion of the majority of the people who live here, when it comes to helping strangers. You've probably read a story about the homeless man who needed a new backpack, his old backpack disintegrating, when, in the nick of time, a stranger hands him a new backpack. This kind of thing happens all the time, and though a backpack isn't really what the homeless man needs (how about an apartment and a job), there are cities where he wouldn't even get a backpack (Chicago and Los Angeles immediately come to mind).
Possibility and beauty are the other major redeemers of New York. At my depressive nadir last night, I sat in the Pacific Street station, waiting for the train, reading The Moonstone, while a young woman played the guitar and sung nearby. She was a distraction, though, mostly because she good, very good. She covered a song which by now we've all heard, Pumped Up Kicks (just in case), for which she won amateur night, apparently. Here's the version she's uploaded. Neither are very good, and there is some odd fuzz at the end of the version on her youtube channel, but I know why she won amateur night--she has a fantastic voice, a mature, self-aware style, and someone should sign her, develop her, and cut the album. She calls herself Opal Ell, and we need new names like hers as a culture, new voices, and especially young voices who sing in the subway and on the streets, people who take whatever platform they can because they have something to express and the talent to express it beautifully.
Opal turned my night around, and I visited Strawberry Fields because it's been thirty-four years since John Lennon was gunned down as of a couple days ago. I went on to my lucky fountain, said a few words, and left two pennies on the edge of the basin, now drained of water for the winter.
It was a nice enough night, so I cut across the Park and strolled slowly down Madison, which I've come to consider one of the most sepulchral places on the entire island. It's so dodo, all of it, such a hyper-expensive morass of hopeless loneliness and dissatisfaction. The fact that Donna Karan, from her perch on Madison Ave and her house in East Hampton, is considered to be a representative of the downtown scene and downtown at this late moment when the downtown scene has had its last gasp--there is an aspect of New York and America in general that has lost its soul. New York is a microcosm of the world in many ways, and also a microcosm of the United States, so the corporitization, suburbanization, and mass, homogenous commodity culture that has taken over the city is representative of what has occurred and is occurring in the rest of the country and in the world. It will pass, like everything else. But we shouldn't let it pass without acknowledging its existence, critiquing it, analyzing it, and understanding it (this condition), because if we neglect to do so what follows may be far worse than whatever it is we anticipate, like the CIA Torture Report.
Fashion needs new designers, young designers with ideas. This kind of culture, along with most forms of artistic expression, is born in the streets. It is a low to high process--one needs only to examine the French restaurants of New York to understand this: the classic, rarified menus of the fifties and sixties, themselves part of a much older tradition that evolved out of the countryside, are all but extinct. The last in the grand dame tradition that remains is La Grenouille, though it is, coincidentally, New York's best restaurant and certainly one of the best restaurants in the entire United States. Many bistros and brasseries have opened in New York, but these serve a kind of French cuisine I would consider to be pedestrian, middle class, or working class. I write this not to disparage these restaurants, as I frequent many of them, I solely intend to describe a change that has occurred, an elevation of something once considered inedible in French cuisine--or if not inedible certainly not fine.
Fashion needs an enlivening, badly, and a kind of emergent designer that doesn't aspire to design clothes for the wealthiest few, but to revolutionize what everyday women wear on a day to day basis. If this person knew his or her history, he or she would only need to look to the story of Chanel for an example.
Otherwise, Madison Ave is New York's glamorous dodo--a beautiful piece of taxidermy.
No comments:
Post a Comment