New York is a (wart) Frozen Shithole

New York was over when I was born.

Given enough time any decade spent living in any of the five boroughs turns into recursive slogans. Make a habit of reading the product origin stories on the back of frozen food boxes and you will find more inspiring descriptions of a thing than you will of New York City in Henry Miller’s Moloch. “Authentic prosciutto. Old family recipe, from my goomad to yours.”

There is nothing more jaded, more boring, or more average than another piece of art about New York City.

Sure we all love that art. Oh how I fondly remember my authentic experience. “From my goomad to yours.” There is a feeling you can bottle like ectoplasm. The pain of finding an alternate side ticket on not your car, one hour of sleep in after squeezing onto an uptown 4,5,6, train. The noise of scratched bleeps and bloops set against 100+ decibel train noise over highly pressurized steam jets. Want to smell human waste and Lysol? You have it, served up with the scent of Tom Ford by Tom Ford by Tom Ford. Showtime is all anyone complained about, but have you seen surrealist puppet shows screamed at you off the platform by a gaunt Reed College graduate that couch surfs 50 year old women’s apartments? He moonlights as a boxing teacher for a communist collective in Bushwick.

NYC is a place where no matter how old you are, or what time period you enter, its relentless hostility will raise your expectations daily. How do people live here? They don’t. They endure it. Don’t listen to shit writers that compare it to an abusive spouse. New Yorkers don’t have spouses.

It’s not a bad city, or a great city. It is nothing. It is a place where the maximum extremes of everything collect in one place. Everyone should try it once, then promptly leave and salt the earth behind them.

An old friend tried to set up two different events with NPCC the last few months. Every single one of them was shut down by venues that absolutely refuse to host them. Venues that host back to back Satanic Temple masses / Surfbrot shows are concerned about reputation. This isn’t an attempt to draw a moral conclusion about Satanic Temple masses or Surfbrot shows. Together with NPCC you will find equal levels of cringe across all three. Any value judgment about what artists are doing in historically retarded venues is not worth the thought. It begs the question, why does anyone care about any of this? You don’t engage bluechecks in the computer, it follows you don’t engage them in the real world. You especially don’t engage them in NYC. You’re better off talking to the pitbull living in the 50 year old woman’s apartment you just woke up in.

There’s never going to be a scene in New York. It’s over. Follow the scrying mirror in the network. Good writing, good music, good art is everywhere. Physical locations have no monopoly. Cling to a place and the only thing you are clinging to is yourself.

Remember 2010?

“The city is Disneyland, wish it was like the 70s”

Enough twenty somethings watched a Fran Lebowizt documentary and bought up all copies of Metropolitan Life from every Longbeak and Sisterhooves booksellers in Brooklyn.

They love to hate Mike Bloomberg

They’re all unique and working on it

It’s not so much that the city is in decay, or that half a million residents left between 2020-2022 but that it was never very much to begin with. The household gods of New York love only speed and youth. A Bloombergian two decades of safe streets and broken windows policing was an exception, an aberration. Nothing is decaying in NYC, it’s merely regressing to the mean. It took a mass schizophrenic episode for some people to realize it. I left when I realized I could just - not pay the fare for any public transit and no one did it anymore. Literally no one cares. Everyone is stealing everything and ripping the blood out of the concrete. Did you know the concrete of Grand Central Station is radioactive?

Remember how many people you know moved to New York City after reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids? They’re romanticizing hepatitis. If you are so lucky to have grown up in New York City, that concept is alien. It’s not a place bound up in projection, hope, illusion. It’s not a crush you only see through your own ideas of them. It’s a collection of islands and rivers. You’ll compare every place you move to for the rest of your life to a city that is an actual John Calhoun behavioral sink. A sink that taught you how to roll woobangers at fifteen years old. Nothing wrong about it, but it’s enough to give you some perspective.

Remember 2022?

“The city is Hotep methadone tent city, it’s just like the 70s”

They love to hate new black guy mayor

They’re all unique and working on it

But it really was a better time, 2010. The same Dimesquare homunculi scattered across the whole of NYC’s third world landscape. More commercial? No, the early 2010s were exactly the same, just as dumb. Little difference from Patti Smith herself. New Yorkers in the 70s sucked lead fumes out of New Jersey refinery pipes. They were romanticizing hepatitis. They reminisced for the gilded age.

I knew a nightclub promoter, let’s call him Franco Pizzaman. You could see the track marks peeking out of his net shirts over what probably were insect bites. Guest of a Guest once put out a hit piece on him for just plainly saying, ‘no fatties’ in his group text invitations. The guy wrote volumes full of sincere Bret Easton Ellis inspired auto-poetry about the tragedy of being too thin and too tall at Avenue NYC. Let’s say the writing project was called the Borough of Lost Faggots (I didn’t come up with that one). It was absolute garbage. It was the best material I read in 2010. He’s dead now. It never gets better. We get the art we deserve.