Holden Caulfield’s beloved skating rink is under a giant funfair for the summer, but I watch red, green and yellow striped turtles stretch orange patterned feet as they bask on rocks in the sun in the park’s manmade lake, and try to persuade a man that my fascination stems from seeing in the wild a creature I’ve only seen in garden ponds and zoos before. I daydream about writing for The Onion or the Village Voice and tell the time by a musical revolving alarm clock in the children’s zoo of Central Park as parents and nannies stop to photograph it. One publishes the dimensions of all its girls - 48HH - 27 catches my eye - and advertises a ‘Brazilian gang bang’.
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I read the free newspapers, full of sex advice and adverts for women, that come from boxes on the street. I nap in parks such as the East Village outdoor sculpture garden to jazz buskers.
I walk down Charlie Parker street in the Lower East Side, stroll down the Bowery and wander through Chinatown. The streets, too, are living, breathing cultural stages. Jeff Koons goes a step further and places the creations of convenience America, like vacuum cleaners fresh from their mass produced packaging, in a an air-conditioned gallery setting. It’s super size before it even became a global term that ate itself into the consciousness of any outsider’s impressions of America. You can see the seams of the vinyl, the grain of the shiny, wipe clean fabric. His pop art vinyl recreations of fast food, like ‘French Fries and Ketchup’, or his giant BLT, complete with a wooden toothpick stabbed through the slices of tomato, is trash promoted to gallery status at the Museum of Modern Art and recreated in the cartoonish fabric of children’s indoor play areas. It’s even in the work of artists like Claes Oldenburg. It’s in those who take it on themselves to stand up on a soapbox and become the orators of the street, assuming to speak for the rest of us and our salvation. It’s in simple things like hot-dog stands on fire. It’s in the brash neon signs of Times Square where consumerism and branding is enlarged into something impossible to escape from. Larger than life is part of the everyday American experience.
He clicks his fingers whilst moving from side to side and smiling, gesturing towards a woman sitting on the floor that she is the object of his serenade. From the subway window, fragile Ferris wheels tower above the water, their future hanging in the balance and the basis of ‘Save Coney Island’ appeals and burlesque roller-skating benefits.Ī man warns us that we’re decadent and damned, espousing his religion into a microphone as he paces back and forth against the backdrop of a beach hut, an improvised altar against the shimmering cut glass of sea and sky.Īnother mimes the words in Spanish to a cheesy Latin song, as his friend in lifeguard colours sings along to a ghetto blaster. Listen: New York Coun terp oint - Steve ReichĬoney Island is at end of the line, literally. It’s been another long day in the city that never sleeps.
On display in a double fronted window, crotchety canines fight on one side and snooze in a heap in the other. I can feel my feet frying in my black plimsolls as I walk past a dog shop in the shady side streets of Greenwich Village that is offering $200 dollars off puppies. It’s true - the heat is wafting up from the streets and the front page headlines of discarded newspapers, and Manhattanites are riding the subway even for just a few blocks when usually they’d walk, confirming that the heat wave is making our bodies feel like we’re sweltering in the hundred degree rang e of the Fahrenheit scale. Attaching himself to me as an impromptu tour guide, he tells me his office is round the block and tries to reassure me that the weather is unseasonably warm for a time of year when the temperature should be in the seventies.
‘It’s so hot’, says a suited man, in the effusive, expressive manner of those for whom English is a second language. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going either, but Americans seem drawn to anyone with a map and the slightest trace of a lost facial expression as if by magnetism.