An arousing maze of bodies, noise and urgency, the city speaks through the swiping of credit cards and swishing of martini glasses. Listen closely to the streets and you’ll hear the city’s whispers of simultaneous desperation and pleasure.
Nº1 •
Loudcity
New York City’s sensuality is loud. Often gaudy. Brusque. The gnashing of the train’s wheels and its brakes, grinding metal on metal at the subway stop. The conductor yelling warnings not to obstruct the doors. At notorious subway stops the dirt climbing from dingy tiles onto drugged-out bodies in poses that suggest an exaggerated exhaustion with life – which is its own form of shouting, crying even. As for crying – I’ve seen several times the slow undoing of a woman’s make-up on the train, the undoing of her face. The leaking mascara – stained beauty. A love grown loud, a heart revving with the heat of hurt and surprise and betrayal – a sudden hurtling forward to anywhere, like the train. The city is hard – the turns love takes, as sharp as the angles on the edges of its buildings. (I saw a man walking up Waverly Place, off Broadway, yell into his phone: ‘I hate you and I hope you die a slow painful death!’ Must’ve been love … but it’s over now.) Teenagers with their distressed jeans torn over smooth knees, their beaten-up sneakers pre-empting whatever the city will do to them. The effervescent excitement of girls going out, the saccharine smells of hair products haloing them invisibly, their thick lipsticks, short scintillating dresses, dark stockings, funky shoes. They too are loud in their demure way. There is something everyone wants here. Everyone wants something here. Everyone here wants something – urgently. And there is something that wants everyone. There is a lot of wanting in New York. Aggressive wanting and aggressive satisfaction of those wants. The brazen colours of billboards, the sensual advertisements of food – a grilled cheese sandwich with the warm, rough, almost masculine toast enveloping the supple, hot cheese. The sandwiches spread out obscenely in some dingy corner deli. And always an infinity of lights assuring you of one thing or another, of one want or another that the city could ‘easily’ satisfy. For a price, of course. There is always a price. The whisper of credit cards, the whisper of the transaction, money and product, money and service, the whisper of the cell phone app that seems to exist for everything, for every want, for every insecurity. The whisper of texts. The whisper of the wiped search history, of private browsing. The whisper of the needle, or the pills. Of the glass of whiskey poured late at night when everyone has gone to sleep. For all its noise, for all its brashness, its loud and articulate earnestness, the ‘i’ placed at the end of every sentence in emails or texts, the constant recourse to omg, for all its open advertisement of everything, there is indeed whispering in New York. One may ask, can whispering be loud? If one considers that whispering is not just about the volume of the voice, but about participating in a certain concealment – even by appearing to divulge everything – then one understands how New York whispers. The noise protects, harbours the silence. New York discloses ‘fully’ precisely in order to conceal what it does not disclose. And what it does not disclose – under the cloying advertisement of its ‘surface’ self, under each ad’s desperate attempts at being likeable – is something entirely the opposite. Under all of this apparent obliviousness and superficiality and levity is something way more profound, more alive, and crawling with all manner of paradox.
What desires do New Yorkers slip inside their swiftly sealed packages? These boxes hold not just things, but urgencies and unexpected attractions that go far beyond your typical Amazon delivery.
Nº2 •
City of Packages
New York City is a city of packages and distinctions. With non-human things, the city works swimmingly, exhibits an efficiency that is increasingly free of touch and contact between human beings. An efficiency so smooth it is a kind of whispering. Packages are tracked, are delivered on time, their every inch accounted for. Nothing seems out of place. Items are paid for by merely hovering a credit card over a reader like a kind of virgin birth of commerce. Each item could be scanned and its exact identity – the ‘category’ in which it exists – is revealed. This knack for categorisation in the city makes its way into the relations of human beings, and on the surface it works. And in the city anything that works becomes a kind of silence, something we no longer pay attention to, something we are not apt to re-examine or disturb. On the surface it feels like the city respects you. One’s pronouns are respected, one’s relationship status, one’s sexual orientation, one’s race. The entire machinery of the city’s institutions participates actively in retaining all of these categories. The human being becomes a package, so to speak, with every dimension seemingly accounted for. But unlike the Amazon package that lands faithfully on your doorstep at the exact time it was projected to arrive, there is a vibrant, dynamic and inescapable erotics at play in human relations at all levels. There is the elemental and protean nature of desire, which is exacerbated by such packaging (even when it is the person who has packaged themselves). And by the rules of this erotics, opposites attract. The more difference is stressed between human beings, increasingly two possibilities emerge for interactions between such ‘different’ beings: to fuck or to fuck up. Making love is something else, something a little more subtle, something that happens in a kind of relationship where the packaging’s importance is not stressed as much, the difference secondary to the possibilities opened up by the relationship. Difference, when stressed, however, has a naïve but potent magic to it. The ‘different’ thing is fetishised. And not just the ‘different’ thing but the thing that – among all this packaging – is increasingly, in one way or another, othered, presented as rare, strange, dubious. Stereotypes feed these depictions and heighten the new, strange, urgent, if also unanticipated, attraction.
The glistening bodies lying out in the city’s luscious parks could easily be a modern-day scene from Bosch’s fantastical Garden of Earthly Delights.
Figures inch closer together in its sun-soaked grasses, craving connection, surrendering to love and shedding stress.
Nº3 •
The Untrue Truth of Fantastic Stereotype
The Black man becomes one whose sexual ability emerges from some vital underworld of desire, materialised in his huge member. The Black woman, a test of one’s manhood, with a sexuality that can undo the weak, the not-virile-enough – with unbearable, vigorous pleasure. The white woman becomes a perfectly white cloth whose impossibly frail ‘purity’ one has a strong desire to soil. She emerges like a rare delicacy that one has never tried, like something from the depths of the sea that has suddenly surfaced in close proximity, and could either kill through some strange bodily reaction, or could be as pleasurable and smooth and intimate as eating oysters. All of these are stereotypes, but all of these are legitimate parts of our level of consciousness. We create them for our consumption. And in our creation of them is a profound sweetness, an irresistibility like a cross-hair hovering over its target. The greater the ‘hate,’ or the ‘othering’ or the ‘never have I ever’ between any two people or groups of people, the greater and stronger the desire for a certain dark and irresistible interaction between them.
Yet, truer than our ‘packaging,’ is the primordial desire for uninhibited human contact in a host of ways. It is at once a manifestation of the beauty and the ugliness of the forces underlying our humanity. For uninhibited human touch suggests a great mulch of bodies and sweat, the impossibility of any form of social organisation. Human life becomes a real version of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (which – frankly – is what any park in NYC looks like in summertime when everybody’s tanning). Even more than Bosch’s painting, the ‘earthly delights’ of uninhibited touch become even more extreme, even more boundless, almost demoniacally intimate. Nothing whatsoever is off limits – everyone can sleep with everyone, everyone can undo everyone, everyone is everyone. It is like a carnal version of an afterlife in which everything is everything. We cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Suffice it to say, we do need some labels, some packaging. On the other hand, as the labels increase, so too do the relations between these inherently related beings become increasingly sterile. The fire of desire dies as soot, ash, dust. This excess of labels that prevents a more balanced version of this original ‘uninhibited’ touch initially creates a kind of engineered famine that catches people unaware, for it is a famine concerning something invisible but absolutely essential. It is the lack of not a particular thing, but that special something in between that brings it all together. What emerges due to this restriction is a perversion of both tendencies:
(1) There is a sense within us of an immense desire, like one person having to bear the desire of the totality. Therefore, he/she needs not merely to have sex, or to make love, but to unload, unburden him/herself of this immense sexual energy.
(2) Certain labels harden into ‘fact’ in order to provide an object for all of this sexual energy, and must continue to find new ways of devising ‘interesting’ objects, so that this sexual energy can be aroused and ‘redistributed.’ And so we have it: sex in all possible forms. We want the pleasure of it. We want it even at the level where it at once brings pleasure and disgust. We want to feel like we are at a great height, or defiantly to know how low we can go, how sweet life could be, and how bad we can potentially be. Each of these is a unique experience, and we are hungry for all of it.
Yet so much of this, as immense as it is, must be whispered. And it is New York City’s gift for efficiency and delivery that helps to distribute it across the city’s millions of bodies and libidos, like contraband. It turns from a loud yearning to an efficient whispering about where the raunchy party is happening, where one can go to get what type of drug and what kind of sex, the whisper of liaisons efficiently managed by Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grinder and all the others.
The polished streets above and the coarse passages below tango in a tantalising dance. An intoxicating exchange, the city’s dual sides playfully blur the lines between pleasure and power.
Nº4 •
New York Above, New York Below
The speed of people on the sidewalk, the headiness of the stock market, the rising and falling of fates, lives, money, status, and the subway ‘whispering’ – in its New York City way – beneath it, to organise it, to keep it all going. The basement storerooms of supermarkets, cafés, where stock is piled, waiting to be repackaged to meet the energy of New Yorkers. In all of this, what matters is the imperceptible whispering, the exchange, the ‘deal’ always ongoing between New York above ground, and a tenebrous and secret New York below.
Every morning, as a ritual, the New Yorker goes to the bagel shop and orders his bagel with a void at the centre, a void painted over with pure white cream cheese. With it, he orders a cup of coffee, an Americano, a latté – something on a continuum of dark and light. The two are brought together in his mouth that opens and closes – light and dark, light-and-dark, lightanddark. The food, a mulch of dark and light, a vigorous relationship in his mouth between the softness of the food and the hardness of his teeth, the flesh of the bagel and the bitter water of the coffee. The loud squelching sound of his chewing is drowned out in his throat and silently makes its way to his stomach. He gets up, wipes his mouth with a clean white napkin, throws it into the trash and leaves the bagel shop to go out into the city.
Outside, New York City boasts loudly of its efficient management of ‘race,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ etc. – its efficient management of lives. Above ground, the charade: Blacks remain Blacks, whites remain whites, men remain men, women remain women. Those who are gay remain gay, those who are straight remain straight and so on. They are asked to indicate by ticking a box on a myriad of forms, each time confirming to themselves – and to some institution or other – their identities. So it goes or so it seems. The way New York Above presents itself, so transparent, so naked, so well formed, arouses something in New York Below. Not the prettiest, precisely because New York Above has claimed so much for itself, New York Below nevertheless has an uncontainable libido, and feels a heat rising inside of it. At first, New York Below whispers. But New York Above is as oblivious as the stereotype of the beautiful but mindless blonde in Hollywood films. Like a lover, New York Below whispers again, of a warm – no hot – void it suddenly feels within that needs to be filled, a void it cannot bear. New York Above, ashamed of New York Below, pretends not to hear. To truly give New York Below what s/he wants is to at once soil the purity of New York Above and to face a frightening vitality, a pleasure that one may not recover from, that will leave one entirely out of breath. Le petit mort. In either of them exists a void. New York Above, however, must pretend that this isn’t so, that life, as it looks above ground, is beautiful. New York Below whispers: ‘There is only one life.’ New York Above pretends New York Below does not exist. New York Below says again: ‘There is only one life.’
The boroughs have their two sides, but there is only one life, where high ideals blend with fleshy desires. Much like the allure of the city’s 1960s cults, the parties, sex, low rent and affordable therapy make up the paradox that draws wanderers into its chaotic embrace.
Nº5 •
There Is Only One Life
A perfect example:
A New York Times article entitled ‘The Upper West Side Cult That Hid in Plain Sight.’ Its lead: In the sixties and seventies, the Sullivanian Institute had a winning sales pitch for young New Yorkers: parties, sex, low rent and affordable therapy. That opening alone contains all the complexity and paradox of New York City. ‘Parties’ and ‘sex’ on the one hand, and ‘low rent’ and ‘therapy’ on the other. Except this was all smashed together in one sentence, like a neat little McDonald’s hamburger. A group of therapists – some trained, others not at all – offer an alternative life, a commune where they will live, abiding by new norms. It actively encourages uninhibited sex among multiple partners, and intense friendships among persons of the same sex, all things typically hampered by marriage. But, chief of all, it offers therapy, and everyone in New York has a therapist. But then the therapy turns into sexual relations, and, well, the sex was also its own form of therapy anyway. A veritable example of that mush of bodies and lives that The Garden of Earthly Delights reminds me of, except it is apartments on the Upper West Side, kept a secret for several years. New York City always knew how to whisper. New York Above / New York Below.
Another whispering: the swingers club interestingly called Plato’s Retreat, mixing high ideal and the desires of the flesh. An article in the New York Times entitled ‘New York Observed; Fantasy Island’ about Plato’s Retreat captures in one brief paragraph the tendency of New York Above to package lives, and the uninhibited life of New York Below into which these lives descend:
Packaging: ‘Captain John and his girlfriend, a [1] brunet [2] chemistry major at [3] Rutgers, descended the steep, mirrored stairwell.’
Then the unboxing: ‘a space in which partly clad couples were grinding against one another … people fondled one another or had sex in plain sight. The orgy room was a sea of flesh … a sea of mattresses on which naked couples formed an undulating tangle.’
It is always highs and lows in New York, ascending and descending, the high ideal and buried desire threatening to erupt. New York Above / New York Below. Yet, there is only one life.
The Big Apple whispers through a whirlwind of rushing taxis and glowing fluorescent signs. On steamy fire escapes, subway cars and stoops, lovers echo the city’s electric rhythm in pursuit of sensuous connection, just as in this photo by Leon Levinstein.
Nº6 •
We Are What We Whisper to Ourselves
The whispered life of New York laughs silently, in its slit-eyed way, with a dark mascara, amid all the city’s noise. It laughs and indulges in the strange, comic pleasure it facilitates. Things we fuss over and make into considerable hurdles and divisions aren’t hurdles at all in this underworld. The role of any underworld is to put everything into relation with everything else, by any means necessary. The underworld is about relation, touch, feeling, about knowing the other. In particular, it puts you into relation with your own thoughts, your own outlook on the world, your own repressed fantasy, your own self. It makes it all come true. Whatever you want. Like New York, no matter how much we advertise whatever it is we want others to believe about us, our morality, our correctness – as an extension of that need to be liked or accepted – we do not escape what we secretly say to ourselves. The louder we advertise something untrue to how we feel, the more intense our unconscious whispering to ourselves. Ultimately, the beauty of the city, which is also its ugliness, is that it puts us into our own hands in a situation where everything is available to us. And, from that everything, we are to make decisions about what we want, which will slowly reveal to us who we are and what we are made of. And what we find, invariably, is that we are made of what the city is made of – New York Above / New York Below. We are ‘party,’ ‘sex,’ as well as the high aspirations of building a commune dedicated to psychological wellness and the possibility of imagining a New World. Despite all the packaging and division that appears before us, it is all one – ‘there is only one life.’ What we despise in others we most definitely possess in ourselves – for we are everything. It is only those who are aware of that, who do not lie to themselves by advertising gaudily some version of themselves, wearing their opinions like the nutritional facts on a bag of New York City bread (which has a million ingredients by the way) – it is those who truly, spiritually, survive. Those who know the truth – as New York City deep down knows the truth about itself – are conscious and cautious enough to manage the busy-ass city within us. For those who aren’t – beware of what you whisper to it while you’re busy spouting grand opinions, busy packaging yourself. Be aware (or beware!) of what you really want deep down, for in New York City, with efficiency as smooth as the softest ambient jazz music on a rainy New York City night, you will have it.