-Caveat Lector-
Bill: It has been awhile since I was last on CTRL and I just re-subscribed
yesterday. I read this email and felt it was very nicely done expose on
Manhattan. I did what you did, moved to the city from out west in 1981. By 1984,
however, and one year as a grad student at NYU, I obtained a prestigeous job --
head of a (national) museum education department in the city. No salary -- but
quiet a cudo. I lived in a ranshackled dive in Little Italy the next 7 years. By
mid-1990, I moved into a really nice apt in NJ for the first time in my life.
Also, aligning your experiences, I too lost my father - a year after you did - to
what I consider to be questionnable circumstances. I believe now a cult after his
money staged his death in fact. But, that is not here nor there. My point is
that I know NYC very very well. And it is still the only place I deep down feel
very comfortable. I know every corner and nitch now of the city. I no longer
work there and am glad for that. But, it is still the greatest place to enjoy in
the world and also is even now, handling the fascist govt and other atrosities out
there, better than other cities I visited in Europe this year and better than some
large cities I visited in the midwest this past month. You bettcha. Part of that
is its cocoon-like atmosphere. It really can be very womb-like. Later -- Judith
William Hugh Tunstall wrote:
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> It was in the summer of 1973. With the death of my father, i decided to
> leave California and head back to the East Coast. Perhaps some of you
> know that feeling. You've lived in a place for years, and you reason that
> if you don't break out of the old familiar patterns, you will be driven
> somewhat nuts from the tedium of the ordinary.
>
> Of course, I was single and stupid enough not to know that there are
> certain hard economic facts that are inescapable in America, no matter
> where you go. Changing your place of residence can actually throw you
> into a more difficult situation than the one you're in. But if you're a
> restless spirit, perhaps you can't help yourself. The American novelist
> Theodore Drieser believed that our lives are controlled by subtle
> inexorable forces beyond our control. Each of us is caught up in a
> complex web of tendencies and predilections, energies which we might not
> fully understand. Whether that is true or not, I don't know, but in the
> summer of 1973, I wanted to get as far away as possible from familiar
> scenes; and New York seemed like as good a destination as any to me.
>
> So, I was off. I traveled for five days and nights on a Trailways
> Bus--making a reverse Kerouac-ian "on the road" journey to dread Gotham,
> the megalopolis of every American's imagination. I'll never forget the
> sight of the city's skyline as the bus rolled across the Hudson into the
> Port Authority Terminal. I was immediately plunged into a form of culture
> shock: the noise and the smell of the city... I had five hundred dollars
> on me, so I headed for the YMCA in the Chelsea district. I was
> twenty-five years old, alone, in a city that I had only read about. And a
> form of disssociation set in. It took me at least four days to get
> used to the crowds, the constant twenty-four hour noise of the city
> streets, and to learn how to get around on the subway system.
>
> But first, there was the need to find a job. As the days passed
> by, and my dollars began to disappear, I ended up paying one hundred
> dollars to an employment agency for a job in the garment district. I
> lived for three years in the city, staying in a rundown
> hotel on Forty-Third Street, while I worked at a ribbon exporter's shop on
> Thirty-Eighth Street. The experience was a transformative one. Why?
>
> Because there is something about New York that strips away all of one's
> illusions and self-sustaining myths. In the city, the smiling aspects of
> capitalism are removed; and one comes into full and complete awareness of
> the reigning power of money.
>
> Unlike life in the South and in the West where a number of
> comfortable support systems are maintained (social and religious) in order
> to ameliorate the harsher aspects of capitalism, in the city, the power
> of the dollar reigns supreme. One survives or perishes under the sway of
> the dollar.
>
> Along Eighth Avenue, there were pimps who waited every day for the buses
> to unload their passengers, many of whom were fresh-faced young girls from
> the Midwest looking for the excitement of the city. One could
> find people sprawled on the sidewalk, either intoxicated or trying to
> sleep, while the crowds passed around them obeying the cardinal rule of
> street survival: don't get involved.
>
> But as I got to know New Yorkers, I came to love them. What first
> appeared to me to be indifferent streets were really tiny little
> neighborhoods. And at work, although the workers were from a variety of
> different countries and places, we were all really just brothers and
> sisters, after all; fragile, imperfect human beings trying to keep our
> lives together in an indifferent world that could devour one at anytime.
>
> There was a kindly old Jewish man who had worked for the firm for
> thirty-five years, every day taking the subway into Manhattan from
> Brooklyn to work in the city. And there was George, the foreman, a black
> man from the Bronx who had also worked for the firm for years. I worked
> with people of every nationality and race, and I learned from them.
>
> But the city taught me some cruel lessons about our system that I'll never
> forget. The Times Square Motor Hotel had its share of "jumpers," people
> whose luck had run out. I'll always remember the young girl who I had
> admired in the lobby of the hotel. After checking into the hotel, on the
> following day, she threw herself out of a ninth floor window, only to land
> on an elderly man, killing both herself and him in a horrible scene that I
> had the misfortune to witness. And while living in the city, I would be
> robbed at gunpoint in one of the hotel's corridors. I always had the
> sense that violence might erupt at anytime around any corner.
>
> Living in the city taught me not only how tenuous our hold on life
> truly is, but living in the grip of Malthus's "iron law of wages," in the
> underbelly of the beast, I would emerge shorn of any illusions
> about the true nature of our economic system.
>
> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
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>
> Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
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