It’s Christmas in New York. It’s Christmas everywhere. All my imagined plans for being among people this day evaporated. I slept until 1pm and, finding that I would likely get no returned phone calls or e-mails, chose the path of no human contact. I wandered all over my favorite parts of my local neighborhood, then spent 3 hours milling around midtown Manhattan. There are people there but I find midtown to be a place where one can mind his own business without conspicuity. I did field a random question from someone who saw me crossing the street and asked “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?” I smiled and said “Nothing,” but wished I had a real answer to that question. He could only have been a con-artist of some sort but I passed him by imagining a celebrated conversation rising from those arbitrary beginnings.
I wandered midtown in search of an open pub but found mostly hotel lobbies and tourist branded places, the few open places crowded beyond comfort. Jimmy’s Corner (my favorite midtown haunt) was as crowded as could be, and the Blue Bar at the Algonquin was the same. I found myself looking at the reflection of my forehead in the windows of any number of places, some open for business but most closed. I need a haircut, but seeing my face in reflections of windows and mirrors makes me ask the obvious: What am I looking for? What do I look like? What sense of anticipation leads me to approach so many places but never open their doors? Is there a metaphor for my life in this oft-repeated ritual ?
I, like most Americans, have my own agenda for the incoming financial apocalypse. I have my own interests. Some people hope rents will fall to realistic levels. Others hope the arts will thrive. Others wait for turnstile-hopping and graffiti to become marginal crimes unworthy of NYPD pursuits.
I want the now-crowded corners of New York to become less generic and accessible to people making less than $300,000 a year. I want the bizarre concentration of wealth into the hands of a miniscule and not necessarily worthy portion of the population to end, and I think that will happen without any distribution of monies to anyone else because that concentration was illusory money that has vaporised.
Like I know what I’m talking about. Hah. I have been interested in the Madoff scheme and its reach. I find that this relatively puny $50billion scam is a model for Wall Street economics of the last 20 years, where profits are rarely real but the entitlements and bonuses are. Greed will find a way, though. I guarantee it.
