Sutphin Boulevard, New York, NY
by Matt Sheret
Twice in the last five days my obliterated eyes have dealt with the sights and sounds of Sutphin Boulevard: Future-hangar trains roar while they prepare to hurtle along the Long Island Railroad; homeless men and women sit with faces swallowed in blankets around their faces to sleep in the neon chaos; loud LED signage proclaims the existence of a regular service to Babylon. My tastes are more pedestrian, so I pitch for the Manhattan bound E-train to Chelsea.
I can’t be sure I acknowledged anyone on either journey. That’s a poison mistake for a stranger, leaving you closed to any number of potential chats and hints. I should have learned better from Quinns. The other day I caught The Girl grinning as she listened in to a couple opposite us chatting on the way to PS.1: A high school senior reading Keats (The Girl would later correct me and tell me it was, in fact, Shelley) on his way to deepest Queens found himself subject to a potted lecture from an elderly former teacher from out of town on the origins of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both of them seemed to enjoy it.
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
- Rudyard Kipling.
Four times I’ve stayed here now and I still can’t get used to the myriad stench of Midtown. Food, flesh, waste and vapour force a sticky taste down your nose and throat, clogging breath and blurring concentration. There’s a pocket between 23rd and SoHo that manages to escape it though, when the sweet odors of restaurants and take-outs manages to cover the subway steam and clouds of gasoline. The Lower East Side almost gets away with it too, unless the wind brings in the smell of the atrophying waterfront, a salt swamp. The combination is scattering, disorientating, New York’s own brew of dementia and non-specific infection to compliment its schizophrenic and insomniac tendencies. It’s not that the city never sleeps, it just can’t.
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”
- D.H Lawrence
When I get online I find a missive from Sarah including good wishes and a couple of choice quotes. ‘Cool, unlying life’ seems to rush in by the bucketload, especially when we watch the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. The rain cracks the crowd and I can feel the water soaking into the soles of my Converse. My photo is taken by Japanese tourists wearing ponchos, an example of the Drowned Rat/Brit Abroad species in the wild. That said, everyone here is woefully under-dressed: it’s the point of the parade. Still I love the broken camp of Coney, a ramshackle tank track trying to fend off reconstruction. There are reams of dockland here that cry out for demolition, decaying housing stretching along Brooklyn avenues, years of unchecked growth pulling down stairwells and rooftops, only stray graphitti and shattered bottles leaving evidence of human interaction.
The rain followed us into Williamsburg too, but Bedford Avenue still offered up a few treats: music on the street, terrible art installations, a flock of checked shirts and a $3 bargains in a thrift store. In one coffee shop we sat uncomfortably close to a couple going through a painful break up. They were both in bands about to go on tour, he in the U.S., she in Europe. She knew it would devastate his family, not least because she owed him a lot of money. Swinging between silent tears and bitter sniping they wouldn’t have noticed us even if we hadn’t tried pretending we weren’t listening. Clearly we’d stumbled into A.C. Newman territory.
I took a plan, I took a train,
(Ah, who cares, you always end up in the city)
Stranded at Bleeker and Broadway,
Looking for something to do.
- “Myriad Harbour”, The New Pornographers
There are fragments of this town I know off by heart now, parts of it here for me to use. I know it always looks its best on the way in, I know its effect on the soles of my feet, I know it’ll bottle up surprises and memories in equal measure and I know I’ll keep coming back here. I know I’m having an amazing time here, again, but I know I’d have trouble living here: it’s the momentum. There’s a pace that, as a visitor, just winds me up like a dynamo and fills me with an urge to hurtle off and conquer things. I know I’ve got a couple more days here and a ticket to Montreal in my back pocket.
It’s easy for someone who lives in NYC to forget the romance of the place sometimes. Good on you for reminding me.
Aw, cheers Jesse! Quintin Smith did a similar thing to me with London a few days before he left for Montreal. I hope I can be a tourist in my own home.
Twice in the last five years my obliterated eyes have dealt with the sight and sounds of New York city. Even within the constraints of those two visits, (cumulatively amounting to less than a month spent in the city) there are fragments of the town that I too, know off by heart. More importantly, there’s so much I don’t know, so much hovering on the horizon, unfulfilled promises.
First – it was my 15th birthday, and I stumbled off a Greyhound bus, hot and bothered after a four-hour journey straight from Washington DC. My ears still echoed the Red Hot Chili Peppers CD I’d had on repeat for the duration.15 seemed like a significant age, my first year post-parental divorce – yet also a blank – just another fucking teenage year in the long road to adulthood. As it turned out, I was two years away from being 17 and properly beginning to get to grips with my self-identity, but that’s a story mostly set in London.
After a day New York said to me: “Hello. We’ve not met before, but you recognise in me a thousand parts of where you’ve come from, where you love, where you thrive. I recognise in you a love of big, fuck-off cities. We’re going to get along like a house on fire. A big old blaze from back in 1666.”
And we did.
Second – 19 years old, carried by train and plane from Florida, best friend in tow. Fresh from a week of heat and sweat and sunshine and almost too much wide open space. The roads were too big in Florida, it felt like there was all this land that they didn’t have enough stuff to fill it with. Everything was oversized and stretched on the outside, too tall and air-conditioned on the inside. But New York, New York was grey, urban, concrete. Significantly less American. Significantly more resonant, drawing upon the roar of traffic and boisterous crowds that underpinned my younger years. Just how I remembered it. Just why I came back. More than anything I was pleased, pleased that it felt the same, that recognition and familiarity, the mapping of my original urban incubator onto another. Alien and unknown yet recognisable, resonant. It offered me that vibe and cityscape that had, five years previous, caused me to nod and decide that this was a place for me.
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Wrote this just now, after reading the entry earlier, and wanting to get something out. This seemed a more appropriate place to stick it than just in some obscure corner of a notebook or on scrap paper.Very enjoyable read, cheers Matt!
Harriett, are you blogging anywhere at the moment?
Not beyond sporadic updates on my age-old livejournal, no. It’s a shame really. So much of my writing energy goes into essays and the odd piece in my university’s music magazine, I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing/blogging regularly or interestingly.
[...] Written straight through just before midnight on June 23rd 2009, as a response to Matthew Sheret’s Sutphin Boulevard, New York, NY. [...]