I'm in a new city and I can smell the difference on the crisper air. But every American city is the same in a way. There is rushing about, standardized branding, dizzying height and a pervasive emptiness. Elegance in the steel. Crisp capitalist construction. Vastness, a Romantic scale, a Neo-Venetian canal cutting through the skeleton. One can’t escape the Moxy hotel chain. Glass can ripple. Goethe would have loved it here.
Every city is trying to appease the prototypical American whom has never really ever existed outside of manufactured myth. In every city, I’m told you can’t walk everywhere like in New York. Plymouth Rock was a kind of entrance into Eden, and in the glass reflecting me to myself, I see the exile. (You can’t walk back into the Garden, ever.)
The work of soaring to reconnect with the ideal. The implicit acknowledgement of loss.
From a psychoanalytic lens, architecture is an art form uniquely appealing to the unconscious. The home is a space we occupy without thinking, where we go to turn off our brain. The office is a prison designed to fool us into forgetting ourselves. The downtown is a space oriented to attract, to excite, to appeal, to advertise not just a product but a people, a lifestyle, a specific way of being in and about the world. A scenic path is best when it can be followed easily by instinct while the mind wanders. The body navigates. When I write about buildings I am really writing about the inner sense of you and I.
Heresies: the streets are too wide, the plazas empty. There is no sense of personal style. The homeless are hidden away, they obscure themselves under awnings and huge umbrellas of patchwork make. And the others walk in the rain without a care for covering. Picasso's sculpture in the heart of an empty plaza was senselessly vandalized during the pandemic. All the originality has long since been ironed out and there isn't even a trace left of what was before.
“Inside me right now it’s very quiet and empty, the same as in the building when everyone’s left and lying all alone, sick, and you can hear this clear, precise, metallic beating of your thoughts.” — Y. Zamyatin, “We”, Record 20
M. lives here like a true artist. No furniture, just a bed, open living space with books lining the walls, a record player on the floor. Everything displayed like a gallery with a waterfront view of Lake Michigan. This is living, I recognize, only because of the proximity to bareness and dying. I meet my own therapist while M. cleans up, humming just a bit too loud to her own songs in her headphones. We complain about the shite flavor hard seltzers she’s had in the fridge for two weeks. We walk against the wind and chain smoke each other's favorite brands. We get drunk on bottomless champagne while playing pool. Every time we go back outside, someone new compliments our style. I call her a sister; she calls me a puppy.
And what of the cat's eye?
Crushed against the water with many layers of indeterminancy like sediment. Who are the wealthy and whom the transplant? What are the original colors? The drives are pleasant and the sun shines differently here. The fireworks are regular. The indigenous are eradicated. A very sterile kind of clean.
A stone and brutal passion! This is the meaning of life! The brilliance, the breathless laughs, the empty streets painted by neon puddles. And emptiness. Just us and the good old days before they're old.
Somehow I have time to meet with a few old friends while wandering around downtown. It’s our first time meeting despite having known each other for at least a decade. It’s wild — how nervous you can be going into this, but how quickly you get comfortable, you refer to old inside jokes, you laugh and crinkle your eyes like you’ve always been together. Because you have. Despite what they told us, some of the most genuine relationships blossom on the Internet. We make our masks here, and for many of us these personas are more genuine than what the rest of the world usually sees. So when you get to know me as C., you might know more of Anderson II than people that I talk with every week.
“I’m glad you’re in my life,” R. told me when we parted, big smiles creasing our cheeks. “Keep writing. We’ll see each other again soon.”
“Hopefully before another 10 years go by!”
Life is waiting higher than the moon. Remove yourself from the ordinary and its staggering what you see: the depths, for instance, of how most people are terrified of disrupting their typical routine. How much vigorous adventure waits around the corner on a Wednesday afternoon. There is no day or night broken apart into chunks — there is only a long stretch of time saturated with opportunity, and we run through it until we exhaust ourselves and lie down for a break. My naps are simply shorter than yours.
Y. arrives and it feels like reuniting with a brother. We’ve known each other for almost 10 years now and we’ve both grown immeasurably. We’re laughing again and coalescing in our respective relationship ruptures. And I’m thinking deeply about what makes a friendship feel strong and secure. What does one do with a close friend?
Here’s what we did: Play Uno until 3AM and argue over the rules of stacking. Text live location updates in the club when one of us heads to the WC. Cook, clean, and enjoy the fruits of each other. Browse and explore the unique stacks of books each of us collect. Swap jewelry. Show off new playlists and watch from the corner of the eye for a reaction. Gingerly bring up unpleasant growth points to internalize. Wash borrowed clothes with extra detergent. Lower the music of the pregame to hear each other better. Take pictures of the group when walking to the next destination. Plan collective trips in the future. Share drafts of upcoming projects and swap feedback. Remember details. Advise on fitness routine optimization. Gift ideas, trinkets, keepsakes, memories. Write stupid messages for each other on dating apps. Listen to secrets and never judge. Pay for small things and ignore requests for repayment. Check in randomly just to make it known that they are in our thoughts.
Love is created, not found.
I'm waiting for you in the huge empty plaza of the Picasso sculpture. I'm looking in every eye for your disaffected ennui and your charm! Your beautiful, melancholy charisma. Our silences are deafening. And we’ve always said so much in the times we haven’t been speaking. Don’t you hear me when I’m quiet? Or are you trying not to?
Who do you think of when you party? When you explore four floors of the “best” place in the new city you visit, who do you think of reporting about it to? Do you have the courage to go out?
None of us know if what we've felt before was love. We know it was strong and for the moment there was nothing else. But now it is gone and there has long since been too much to handle to fall in love. But we haven't forgotten it. Especially not now in the quiet, juvenile hours of the nights.
Returning in the night to the city a few hours before work on the weekend without having slept a wink — just like a New Yorker. Beautiful because functional, but rugged, stained, stimulated from the night that didn't end.
The bastard sun decided to rise despite my pleas to the contrary.
Can't wait for the novel , whenever it is to be. I enjoyed where this essay took me, from a fellow air sign
Like that your initial photo is the horizontal of both buildings -one would need to be familiar with the City in question to notice…