New York Cares.

Note: i'm not really very happy with this entry, but i'm posting it anyway.



Paul Banks is a liar. The subway is not a porno, it's an orgasm - sometimes jubilant and euphoric, sometimes languid and tortuous, but the important thing is that it, and this city by which Banks is "not impressed" remain, despite the gentrification, the militarization, histories of racialized police brutalization and enclosure, irreducible to the extended-stay tourist/williamsburg hipster's callow dismissal i read in the Interpol Song "NYC." Because when I think about New York i think about elevated riverside drive in the sunset and sledding children, i think about 500,000 people in the streets and banners hanging from the plaza hotel, i think about when we left school a 1PM that thursday in 11th grade to join the Diallo march in Brooklyn or October 22 1998. I think about watching Max Roach and Cecil Taylor destroy the corporate jazz festival on the steps of columbia university, i think about the time i walked sixteen miles around manhattan or all the times i walked up into the bronx and i think about watching 15,000 home health care aides shout down dennis rivera as Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and Howard Dean, arbiters of failed liberal reason, watched in confusion. I think about rooftop iliads and all the lonely odysseys and don't even get me started on the aeneid. And if anyone mentions "Troy" i will go postal i swear.



My point (sorry) is that Banks' detatched scorn - whether intended as morriseyesque irony or emo testimony, rings empty for me. I've been fed up with new york plenty of times. But unimpressed? Nope. But maybe that's because i have nowhere else to go.



Oh. By the way. Any way you want it, that's the way you need it. Any way you want it.