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| Wikipedia |
New York is over. Billionaire mayor Bloomberg, executing the peevish dreams of dispirited yuppies, has declared war on the
messy fringe culture of the city. Ruthlessly suppressing the vaguely illegal improvisatory club scene, banishing smokers from
bars, he has made the city a tidy place for responsible stockbrokers, who don't want to see irresponsible people having fun
in grubby dives, way past every decent person's bedtime. Once the capital of the 20th century, New York is now the capital
of Connecticut.
A miracle has been dismantled in the process -- the miracle of a true world capital, where political and financial power
encountered the anarchic chaos of possibility, in the persons of young, passionate outsiders who flocked here to compete in
the marketplace of ideas, by means mostly of art.
The young and passionate have long been driven from Manhattan, because of rents inflated by competition from the immediate
beneficiaries of the 90's stock market boom. They have set up vital new outposts, in Brooklyn for the most part -- but these
will never be more than outposts, because they are isolated from the heart of the city, from the physical proximity to vested
interests that made the New York dynamic what it was.
Williamsburg is an exciting, energetic community, but it has the feel and the scope of an exciting, energetic college
town in the provinces. It will never incubate the literature and the music of the West Village, it will never have the cosmopolitan
glamor and edge of even the East Village in its heyday. It is a refuge from Manhattan rents, not one of the cultural motors
of a great metropolis.
New York has always been a hard town to break into, especially for the young and the poor. Tiny amounts of living space
rent for large amounts of money, earned by crummy entry-level jobs, waystations in a career. But the young and poor have always
come -- because just outside that tiny living space is one's real living room . . . a place filled with surprisingly congenial
strangers, many of whom are pursuing impossible dreams not unlike one's own.
The streets belong to everyone, the bars and clubs were once parlors where the unexpected could be encountered in an atmosphere
that was oddly comfortable, oddly welcoming. But all that has changed. Daddy Bloomberg and his reluctant stormtroopers in
blue now stand guard in all of them -- making the kids behave. We don't leave home for this -- this is what we leave home
to get away from.
A great city needs to be a dangerous place, with dangerous temptations -- where one can make mistakes, and learn from
them, or not. It's the place we come to grow up -- on our own terms. Now the state is taking charge of the process -- and
the hardships of New York become hardships without meaning, without recompense.
Smoking is bad, drinking to excess is bad, staying out all night when you have work to do in the morning is bad -- but
from the matrix of that badness a million dreams have been born, a million schemes have been hatched, a million implausible
alliances formed. It's a badness we need, that a culture needs, to foment resistance to the complacency of official notions
of propriety.
Imagine Bob Dylan writing "Blowin' In the Wind" while standing on the sidewalk outside a coffee house on a cold
rainy night having a cigarette break -- expelled from the warmth and community within by the whims of the Puritan masters
of New York. He would have written "Blowin' In the Wind" just the same, no doubt -- just not in New York City.
American conformity and Puritanism -- "The creeping fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy," as Mencken
put it -- are parts of our national character, not to be lightly dismissed. But we have always needed safety valves -- for
the more rebellious among us, the more eccentric, the more reckless and courageous. Once circus trains brought that kind of
release from propriety and provincialism to small town America -- with their exotic animals and exotic people, their nihilistic
clowns and dirty girly sideshows.
Now we can find images of that alternate reality on television or the Internet -- but that's not enough. We need an actual
place, the big top, New York City, where the alternate reality can be lived. The circus trains don't run much anymore -- so
we travel to the circus. Specifically, we travel to Las Vegas, the number one tourist destination, and the fastest growing
city, in America. And it isn't just obsessive gamblers and degenerates who travel there -- it's Aunt Peg and Uncle Walter.
They don't want to live there -- they just want a peek into other possibilities.
That desire is a necessity for the young, the creative, the pioneers of art, of alternative thinking.
Las Vegas is where criminal syndicates learned to get legit, where legitimate corporations learned the profitable possibilities
of criminality. It is the spiritual capital of corporate-controlled America. It's rich, and getting richer, for the same reason
that New York once got rich -- people were willing to pay any price to breath the air of its dangerous, instructive, fertile
freedom.
Ironies abound in all this. Yuppie stockbrokers luxuriate in, feel privileged by the cultural excitement created by the
messy fringe culture of New York, even when they don't fully understand where it comes from, how it happens -- and when it's
gone, has moved on to someplace wilder and more tolerant of its excesses, the hassles of New York life won't be as easy to
tolerate, even for the well-off. The city will become just one more desiccated urban jungle. And Las Vegas, with its vulgar
Mid-American fever-dreamscape, may become the place where the real cultural dialogue of the future takes place -- because
it's where the vested interests of big money collide most spectacularly with the anarchic possibilities of license.
Indeed, now that New York is over, perhaps the time has come for America's dreamers to look West, to the strange city
in the desert -- my candidate for the capital of the 21st Century.
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