raufrichtig's blog

Despite his often condescending tone, I find great truth in what Kunstler writes about in The Geography of Nowhere. In the final chapter of the book, he writes: “…We have lost our knowledge of how physically to connect things in our everyday world, except by car and telephone. You might say the overall consequence is that we have lost our sense of consequence. Living in places where nothing is properly connected, we have forgotten that connections are important” (246). These words spoke most directly to the way I feel about my hometown. Though I have driven across America and spent some time living abroad, I feel the weight of this lack of connection most acutely when I am spending time in the house I grew up in and the area surrounding it.
            When I came home from my sophomore year at college, I decided that I did not want to partake in the tradition of taking a car to get everywhere. This lasted a mere week. I quickly re-discovered why nobody ever chose to walk anywhere in my hometown: there are no sidewalks. On top of that, the nearest business to the house I grew up in is five miles away! The one time that I did walk to the nearest coffeehouse (which took over two hours), I felt as though I was seeing the area around my house for the first time. I am almost embarrassed to share this, but it was the first time in my then twenty years of life that I had ever seen most of the stretches of road while not zooming by them in a car.
            I suppose every person who has ever gone on a road-trip has had an experience similar to this – the kind you have when you step out of your car at a rest-stop and look back and see the highway not as a black mass passing beneath your wheels, but instead as an object measured against the scale of a human body. The absurdity of what you see takes your breath away. Walking along the winding suburban streets two summers ago, beauty of the trees and forests that lined the sides of the road and the peacefulness in the space between them became visible to me for the first time. When a car would speed on by, I would suddenly be hit by a want to scream: “Stop it! Why are you moving so fast!” But it only took looking back on any other time I’d ever made that journey to remember.
            What Kunstler so clearly articulates in his book, and specifically in the quote I have included above, is that the majority of people in America are no longer aware of the unconscious unease they feel in the lives that they are living. Having grown up in what Kunstler refers to as “America’s Man-Made Landscape”, many people have never experienced life in a community where natural connections can be made and in which human beings are able to share and exist with one another in a, for lack of a better word, human way. As I plan on heading out on a road-trip around America again over the course of the next year, I suppose it is a place like this that I am looking for. 

[photo taken by me - my mother hula hooping at a rest step along I-70 in june 2009]

            As my time at New York University is coming to a close, I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about where I would like to go after I graduate and finally excavate the piles of things that have been sitting in my room at home (mostly untouched) since I graduated from high school four years ago. Over the course of this semester, I have been thinking a great deal about the way in which I have experienced my life in New York over the past four years. While I spent a lot of time thinking about New York before I took this class, the readings that we’ve done over the course of the semester have given me a larger vocabulary to be able to express the thoughts that I’ve been having.
            Ever since I spent the summer in Nebraska in 2009, I’ve been coming to grips with the fact that I don’t enjoy living in the Northeast. Though so many aspects of my life and personality have been shaped from growing up here, and the people I have met throughout my time living in New York City (if the time spent attending New York University can actually be called that) have inspired and helped form the person I am today, I find the basic experience of living in this city (and in this area of the country in general) to be stressful in a way that other places I have lived are not.  While I enjoyed reading Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and agree with a great deal of the material it touched on (or rather, complained about), I also found that the book served as an example of a strange response that many people I know (and that I as well) have had to living in New York: making fun of it relentlessly, but also somehow taking pride in being able to weather the insanity of making a life here. At the root of this humor, it always seem to me that people (myself included) are actually just miserable as a result of their day to day life here. While I’ve taken a great deal of joy in weathering this enigma of a city for four years, my time in New York this semester has cemented that this is not the city for me – at least for now.
            My current plan for this summer is a road-trip across the country spent visiting cities I am thinking of moving to but have never been to. Now, if only I can get Kunstler’s ideas about the suburban sprawl I am bound to see out of my head…

[photo taken by me, driving from colorado to nebraska, june 2009]

In the 8th chapter of A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan offers a description of finishing work that really spoke to the way I feel about the end of an artistic process. He writes: “No one big thing, finish work consists of a great variety of discrete tasks, many niggling, some inspiring, but none you would call heroic. And yet, day by day, each task checked off moves you another notch down the punch list, that much closer to move-in day, when the time of building ends and the time of habitation begins” (268).

At the end of every artistic process, there comes a time when the work is no longer foundational. In the case of writing a play  (which I recently had the experience of doing) there comes a point in the process where the story has become clear. Instead of making the plans, you now have to build the play scene by scene. Analogous to the building of a house, there are often moments where it becomes apparent that plans need to change – for example: when a character transforms, seemingly by the force of its own will, in a way you could never have expected. In my experience the writing of a play often begins in an impulsive way – with the writing of the first draft fleshing out the basic story. After that, the true work begins: Who are these characters? What are they doing to each other? What is the story that I’m reallytelling? And when the play seems to be nearing completion – it mirrors Pollan’s experience almost exactly. As actors slowly learn their lines and the play develops under a director’s vision, minor changes begin to appear necessary. It could be an inconsistency in a character, or a confusion as to what is happening in a scene.

As a play, like a building, slowly comes to life and becomes a thing that people inhabit, all the finishing touches get put into place. I find it interesting that in both cases, this “finishing” process in no way signals the end of the work. A play, like a house, upon its completion has now become an entryway into an experience, a place for people to exist for a time.

It is a liberating thought to remember that the end of a creative process merely serves as the beginning for another collaborator. With this understanding, the work never stops. I could certainly stand to acquire a bit more patience in the “finishing” processes in my life. 

There is perhaps no place in New York City that I have spent more time thinking about than the Hudson River Park – specifically Pier 45, the one that extends beyond Christopher Street. I first discovered it in the fall of my freshman year. Strung out in the middle of October, I started wandering into the West Village. I had been to the Christopher Park area once before, to sketch the George Segal statues that stand in the park for a design class. At times, it can be easy to forget that Manhattan is an island. As I wandered farther west on that day, it never crossed my mind that I would somehow reach the end of a body of land. That is, until my eyes were met by the glint of sunlight on water. Crossing Greenwich Street, I saw the Hudson River in the distance.

It warrants sharing that I grew up an hour north of the city in a town also situated on the Hudson River. A mix between a suburban town and what I would now refer to as “the country”, there was very little to do in the area for teenagers and almost nothing that didn’t require driving from one place to another. When I, along with the majority of my friends, got my driver’s license at the end of my junior year, I began frequenting the numerous local parks that stood on the water’s edge. Almost every day after school I would drive there with one friend or another and go for an hour long walk. Though I could not have articulated it at the time, it was the only place in my town where one could engage in what I now call “functional walking”. What I mean by this is that I could walk to get from one place to another. The nearest business to the house I grew up in was roughly five miles.

But it was not just the “functional walking” that brought me there nearly every day – those hour-long walks began my first real interest in and attachment to nature. The beautiful, tall trees that stood and lined the dirt paths served as an antidote to the relentless barrage of suburban construction. This is not to say that nature did not surround the majority of the places that I spent time in while I was growing up. But, for some reason these local parks were the only place where I could focus on it. As I would walk silently on the various dirt paths, I would gaze up at the trees or see the wild flowers growing in the grass and somehow feel centered in a way I never had before. While walking in these parks there is an overwhelming sense of stillness, of peace. Removed from the commercial and industrial worlds, one begins to feel human.

When I saw the Hudson River in the distance on that early fall day in 2007, I had not been on a walk in one of my hometown’s parks in almost two months. Reflecting back on it now, that two-month period had, up to that point, been the longest I’d ever gone without seeing the river. In that moment, I suddenly felt at home. But, while the river that flowed along before me was very much the same body of water that I had known in my hometown, the experience of walking along Christopher Street and the stores and varieties of people that I was exposed to there could not have been any more different than what I was used to. In 2007, Christopher Street was predominantly filled with sex shops advertising dildos and a variety of other sexual paraphernalia, adult video stores with large posters of naked men on their front windows, gay bars, bookstores and spy shops.

Over the course of my four years walking to the Hudson River Park, I have grown attached to this street and observed its transformation into a more gentrified area. The majority of the sex shops are gone now, as are the adult video stores. The Oscar Wilde Book Shop, which had been the oldest LGBT bookstore in the United States, has closed its doors as well. It is now a designer clothing store, as are the majority of the other shops that closed. The Chair and the Maiden, an art gallery that I once played a concert at, has since closed and moved to another part of the city. Its old storefront remains empty, and in its window a decal still remains that says: “fund art now”. A barrage of expensive restaurants have also opened their doors in the past few years. Only one of the many shady delis that I recall from my freshman year still remains open . Even that deli has changed ownership, and now refers to itself as “gourmet”. Both of the spy shops have since closed their doors.
Perhaps it has more to do with the shift in my own perspective of the world, less naïve now than four years ago, but it seems to me that as the storefronts have become more developed on the stretch of Christopher Street that leads to the Hudson River park, the area itself has actually become shadier. All of the activities that once happened behind closed doors have been pushed out into the street. Even though the stretch of Christopher Street has been full of homosexual men and women from more urban, and less accepting, areas of New York City since I started walking there, there seem to be a larger presence now than ever before. In recent months, no trip to Pier 45 has passed without one or two men, often in their mid-40s attempting to pick me up. One notable recent occurrence was a man stopping me in the middle of the crosswalk that extends through the West Side Highway to ask, “Hey, do you know where I could go to get my dick sucked?” When I responded that I did not, he asked: “Hey, you’re not like a cop or anything, right? I mean…this iswhere you go to get your dick sucked, right?”

Though I cannot verify the legitimacy of the man’s claims, while talking about the pier with a professor of mine during my freshman year, he spoke of the pier’s longstanding history of these kinds of sexual favors. The current section of the Hudson River Park that extends from Clarkson to Horatio Street has only existed in its current form since 2003. Before then, the majority of the piers – including Pier 45 – consisted of abandoned warehouses and shipping ports. The warehouse that stood on Pier 45 had apparently been the most frequented warehouse for gay men. In view of that specific history, perhaps the population of people that had formerly occupied the space of land are merely attempting to reclaim what is now a public space.

Though there are no plaques indicating it, the stretch of land between Christopher and Tenth Street from which Pier 45 now extends has a storied history. It was on that plot of ground that Alexander Hamilton was brought after being fatally wounded in his duel with Aaron Burr across the river in Weehawken in 1804. Seven year earlier, the first State Prison was built there. In 1907, Robert Fulton launched the first successful steamboat from that location. At that time, the stretch of land along Manhattan’s west side had been one of the most popular points of shipping in the world.

The fact that all of these histories have now faded from the most of the city’s collective memory and that an understanding of them is not integral to one’s appreciation of the park is representative of the way I feel New Yorkers have a sense of place in the city they live. New York is, often frustratingly so, a place where things exists for a specific function. Perhaps spawning from the overwhelmingly rational grid that most of it is made up of, it is very hard to do anything in this city that does not serve a specific function. Unlike in the area I grew up in, it almost impossible to walk anywhere in this city not for a functional purpose. Within my busy life as a student here in New York, I have found very little time to do anything that does not seem immediately functional towards achieving something specific. It is perhaps for this reason, even more so than the experience it affords to reconnect with nature, that I so often find myself walking to the Hudson River Park. Though its beautiful views of the Hudson River and its frequently breathtaking sunsets draw me there, the most affecting aspect of going to the park is the trip itself. Totally opposite from the “functional walking” that my trips to parks in my hometown afford and that most of my days are filled up with here in Manhattan, the walk to the Hudson River Park affords me an opportunity to walk for no other reason than the pleasure I derive from it.
 
[photo taken by me on my first trip to the hudson river park in 2007]
 

When I was leaving Berlin at the end of the fall semester, with only a few days left to experience the city I realized I had not purchased anything tangible I could bring back with me. Keeping hard fast to the rule I’d set for myself to spend money on experiences first and foremost – my new material possessions consisted entirely of used books from an English language store and a few rolls of film that I’d shot in my time there. In one of my classes called Exploring Berlin, we took a trip out to Spandau, a neighborhood about an hour outside of the heart of the city. At a Christmas market there, I found a stand that sold tiny glass lanterns. A red one caught my eye – and my first piece of memorabilia was purchased.
 
It was only after I arrived back in the United States that I was able to actually use the lantern for its intended purpose. Sitting on the couch in my living room, I delicately placed a tea candle I’d just lit into the lantern. The result was breathtaking. The pretty little glass lantern from Spandau transformed into something else entirely. Its beautiful, rich, red tones amazed me. At last, I thought, I have seen this little object in its literal and metaphorical best light. I had never thought about it in this way before, but I suddenly began to wonder if every object – if every person, place or thing had a light or situation in which they best and most truly shined through.
 
In the first chapter of Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own, I encountered the first expression of the idea since that moment of discovery. He writes: “Bachelard says this is a propert of houses in general, that they only come into their own in bad weather , when the poetry of shelter receives its fullest expression” (13). Lately, when meeting a new person or walking into a room – “for what purpose is this place best used?” and “when does this person really shine?” I think this hope for the hope that the things that one encounters to express something is a helpful one towards making one’s way through the universe.

[the photograph is by me - it is of my professor at the market]

The parts of Sorkin’s book that I found most interesting were when he recounted his personal history with specific locations. While he frequently, and with great skill I should add, recounts the history of a location and how areas of the city have transformed over time, the most affecting stories dealt with his personal experiences of how the city’s changes have affected the day to day reality of his life. While the passages of journalistic history were interesting, the personal passages were more meaningful. Unlike the historical passages, they have stuck with me.
 
One example of this comes in the “Alternative Routes” chapter. As he discusses the gentrification of the area of the West Village in the area where Christopher Street breaks off of 6th Avenue, he touches on his experience of getting to know and have a relationship with a man named Henry who owned a dry cleaners near his apartment. Over the years they developed a rapport, and Sorkin even came to know the details of Henry’s daughter’s life – how she was doing in school as a child all the way up to her deciding which college to attend (she was the first in her family to attend college). As the area where the dry cleaners was located became more and more expensive, Henry was forced to move his business out of that location and to a place much further away. Due to the change in distance, it became no longer functional for Sorkin to bring his dry cleaning to Henry’s store. As Sorkin recounts with sadness, this relationship has since mostly dissipated.
 
These stories of Sorkin’s personal relationships with the city resonated with me, I think, because they touched upon what is ultimately great about cities. When it comes down to it, cities are places where people live. Unlike in small towns where it is easy, and often stifling, to get to know everyone, the connections made in a city are hard to come by. Whereas it is commonplace for a clerk to get to know you in other parts of the world, this is not the case in most cities – especially New York. As the city grows ever more and more commercial, expensive and impersonal – it is even more important than ever before to appreciate and hold on to the places where those kinds of relationships can be made and sustained. 

[photo taken by me]

In the first chapter of his book, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin touches on the low stature that walking has attained in our sprawl culture. Its sole purpose, he explains, for most Americans is that of leisure. Elevators, cars, trains and planes have become assumed necessities in our lives. It has become a rare thing for a person to be able to take a twenty minute walk in the morning to make their way to work. New York has become one of the only places in American where this kind of walking happens. It is something that I have come to call "functional walking".

Having grown up in a suburb with no sidewalks where the nearest place of business was three miles away, functional walking was not something I experienced all that much before I moved to New York for my freshman year. Despite all of the issues I have with this city, this ability to walk not just for leisure but for the specific purpose of going from one place to another is something I always miss when I spend time at home. When I'm at home, I walk so much less than I do when I'm in the city. This is not because I don't want to, but because it is not functional. Often, it is actually dangerous. I once walked the five miles to get to the nearest coffeehouse in my town - and due to the lack of sidewalks and narrow curvy roads I was almost run over by a car several times.

When I go on a walk at home, it often happens in a local park. Walking for an hour and  half on a trail somehow always feels so much different than walking on city blocks. Even though I know I surely walk at least that much everyday, it doesn't carry the same weight as those nature walks do.

I have found that what I really require is a mix of both. While the functional walking is a necessity for my health, the time for meditative walking is just as important. While Sorkin primarily fills his twenty minutes of walking in Manhattan with the histories of culture and architecture and all the historical events that occurred there - The city blocks have always somehow felt more potent to me when they are charged with memories of my own experiences there. Everything that Sorkin encounters along his way seems to serves as mere entryways into discussing his vast knowledge of a tradition or history.

One of my favorite memories of my time attending NYU was something that happened during my sophomore year. I was standing in front of what is not the New York Film Academy Café when a group of four or five wide-eyed teenagers wearing tie-dyed shirts and oversized backpacks stopped me with a question: “Excuse me Sir, but do you know where we can find the Village?”
Having lived in a the area commonly referred to as Greenwich Village for almost four years now, it seems to me that the kind of place those teenagers were looking for, and that I suppose I was looking for when I decided to come to this school has been irrevocably lost. From time to time, I come upon something that reminds me of what this neighborhood once was – and what I imagined it might be. At the start of Wrestling with Moses, Anthony Flint writes:
            “She saw storefronts with awnings shading cluttered sidewalks, kids chasing one another in front of a grocery, delivery trucks stopping and starting their way up the street….She gazed at shopwindows full of leather handbags and watches and jewelry, strolled past barbershops and cares, and ran her fingers over the daily newspapers stacked high in front of shelves inside filled with candy and cigars. Everywhere she looked she saw people – people talking to one another, it seemed, every few feet among them longshoremen headed to taverns at the end of their shifts, casually dressed women window-shopping, old men with hands clasped on canes sitting on the benches in a triangular park. Mothers sat on stoops watching over it all. Everyone looked, she thought, the way she felt: unpretentious, genuine, living their lives. This was home” (Flint 4).
 
            Even though the layout of the city blocks has remained much the same, and many of the buildings still stand just as they were – finding something unpretentious in Greenwich Village is something I find incredibly hard. At what point, I find myself wondering, did New York transform into the city I live in now? When did it leave behind the magical atmosphere that Flint writes of?  In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, he spends a great deal ruminating on the way that cities change. There is one passage that I find myself continuously returning to – 
 
            He writes:
 
            “There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules. Ancient observers, whom there is no reason not to presume truthful, attributed to Aglaura its enduring assortment of qualities, surely comparing them to those of the other cities of their times. Perhaps neither the Aglaura that is reported nor the Aglaura that is visible has greatly changed since then, but what was bizarre has become usual, what seemed normal is now an oddity, and virtues and faults have lost merit or dishonor in a code of virtues and faults differently distributed. In this sense, nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city, whereas the haphazard opinions which might be inferred from living there have less substance. This is the result: the city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.
            So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, sticking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colorless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true, either: at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.
            Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Agluara and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.”

I. 
Hendrick Hudson High School is located on the top of a hill in Montrose, New York. The steep hill is always empty in the warm months. But, when the snow falls, little children come out in droves to sled their way down its slope. Despite the thrill, choosing to sled on this hill requires a great deal of skill. If you cannot keep control of your sledding vehicle, you can easily sled your way right into the street. What looks like a normal two-lane country road is in reality a section of route 9A, a continuation of the West Side Highway.
 
II. 
Before the school’s campus was closed, I would cross this street nearly every afternoon to each lunch with friends at a Mexican restaurant across the street from our high school. Though this restaurant changed hands and names numerous times over the course of my freshman year, it was always referred to as “Little Mex”.
 
III.
I cross the West Side Highway almost every afternoon on my daily walk to the Hudson River Park.
 
IV. 
When the campus was closed, we ate in the cafeteria. The selection was always the same. The cafeteria was a multi-use space – used not just for eating, but for assemblies, tutoring sessions, and anything else that required large groups of people to work together. Once a year, the student government held a Senior Citizen prom. I once played a Battle of the Bands in the cafeteria. I came in last place.
 
V.
Hendrick Hudson High School is located less than a mile from Indian Point Power plant. Twice a year, the school would hold evacuation drills. After waiting for an hour in our classrooms, we would all file slowly into school buses that would drive us to the next town over and then turn around. It was never made clear what would actually happen next.
 
VI. 
Montrose is a hamlet, not a town. Its students come from the various bedroom communities that span the woods between the larger town of Croton and Peekskill.
 
VII. 
My favorite spot in all of Westchester is in a local park in Croton. All of the parks in my two surrogate towns are on the Hudson River. When I stand at my favorite spot, a mass of land that juts out into the river looking North – which historically has been called Croton Point – I can see all the way down to and past the Tappan Zee Bridge. When I close my eyes, there is the sound of the river and rarely anything else.
 
VIII. 
One of the more distinctive features of Croton Point Park is a large hill near its entrance. When standing at its peak you can see far into the distance to both the north and south. I only discovered recently that this is a man made mountain. Only 20 years ago, this mountain was literally a mountain of garbage. Now, there are a few inches of dirt covering it and a variety of plants. Large straw-like poles allow the gas from the garbage to escape the ground.
 
IX. 
There is very little to do in Peekskill or Croton besides visiting their parks. Both of the towns have a coffeehouse. When I received my driver’s license, I spent much of my time driving to or between these coffeehouses. Before these coffeehouses opened in 1995 and 2003 respectively, there were only the parks. Perhaps this is why my high school used to carry the nickname Heroin High.
 
 [image taken be me - it shows the view from croton point]

The town of Red Cloud, Nebraska can be found roughly ten miles from the state's South-eastern border. Situated only eighteen miles from the center of continental USA, it is laid out amidst a sea of land. The one thing distinguishing this town from the seemingly infinite number of small towns littered along two-lane highways all across the Great Plains is the fact that author Will Cather moved there at the age of six from a town in Virginia. The town had such a profound effect on the way she viewed the world that she spent nearly all of the rest of her life writing novels inspired by her experiences there. "The great fact was the land itself," she wrote in O Pioneers!, "which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes."
            When I spent two months living in this town of 800 people during the summer of 2009, I found this largely to be true. Though very little of the town has stayed the same since Cather moved there in 1883, the vastness of the surrounding land is still impressive. Despite roughly a hundred and fifty years of American attempting to make a mark on the land, the large, flat fields are still far more prominent presences than the human landmarks. Houses on the town roads stick out like sore thumbs.
            When I drove into the town for the first time, it seemed surreal to me to imagine that people could actually live in a place like this. I had just driven from Boulder, Colorado through the single most terrifying lightning storm of my life, and the town's streets were full of fog. The air was wet and thick. The sound of crickets surrounded everything. They seemed to be coming from everywhere - from fields far off in the distance and from the grass on the lawns. Stepping out of my car, I couldn't help but feel that I was experiencing something akin to what Willa Cather must have felt climbing out of a train and sensing all the land that surrounded her on all sides.
            But even more impressive than the land was the sky. Looking up for the first time as I stepped out of my car, I had never seen a more massive and expansive collection of stars. With the sky feeling farther away than it ever had before, the houses that I saw around me seemed somehow separate from the cosmos. It was like they had banded together in a unit of defiance against the awe inspiring sky that eternally rested above them.
            I lived for two months in one of those houses that summer as a part of a theater company that had gotten a residence at the Willa Cather Opera House. Over the course of those two months, we put up over twenty-five staged works. During my time there, I wrote over thirty songs inspired by paintings that I had postcard reproductions of. A large part of why that short period of time was so productive for me had to do with the house that I lived in with the twelve other company members. In the house, there was only one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, three bedrooms, a living room and a basement. Three of the company members slept in the living room - the largest room in the house. There was also an enclosed front porch, on which I wrote the majority of the songs during our stay. The house had previously been occupied by a family with two daughters. It was unclear as to why the family had left the house, but the fact that they seemed to have left in a rush left a certain spookiness hovering over the place. On the walls of one of the bedrooms were painted characters from Sesame Street. Shocking to us as New Yorkers, none of the doors in the house had locks - including the front door.
            The room that I slept in was just large enough to fit three mattresses on the ground with roughly a two by four floor space in the center. The walls of the room were painted with technicolor polka dots. On the wall of our room that faced the house's enclosed front porch was a large window. There was a window shade that could be closed, though as I recall it never was. There was a small ceiling fan in the room that was decorated with stickers of Disney princess characters. 
            Though one of the guys I shared my room with was a friend I had known for a number of years, the other I had met on the day he arrived in Nebraska. Sleeping in such close proximity to each other - it was laid out in such a way so that all of our heads were in kicking distance from one another's feet - led to a particular kind of comradeship unlike any I have ever known. When one of us set an alarm in the morning - all of us were, sometimes begrudgingly, woken up. If one of us was staggering home from a late night walk - on one of mine, I was stalked by a mountain lion - it was nearly impossible not to wake whoever had been sleeping. I distinctly recall one evening, debating with Alton, who I had only known for two weeks at that point, whether or not we should wait for the couple making out in our one bathroom to leave or just to pee outside. We eventually decided to pee in the bushes outside our front door. And, as we did, we gazed up to the sky above and both saw the first shooting star of our lives.
            Almost two years later, the memories that sit with me most from my time in Nebraska all incorporate an element of the gigantic sky, and the way it made me feel. Beneath its vastness, the lives of the people I observed and the actions in my own life appeared both miniscule and somehow felt more vital than they ever had before. In literally the middle of nowhere, with no distractions beyond the ones I could provide for myself, my life was stripped to its bare essentials. In the vast metropolis that is New York City, that sense of what was truly important has never left me. 

[photograph taken by me in red cloud, nebraska - summer of 2009]
            

[video contains song inspired by polka-dot wallpaper in my bedroom and numerous other photographs from red cloud, nebraska]

In the third chapter of The Geography of Nowhere, “Life on the Gridiron”, Kunstler expounds upon the fundamental differences between European and American cities. He write: “The great cities of Europe, long abuilding, were at once centers of political, commercial, ecclesiastical, and military power, and they showed it not just in their finely grained urban fabrics – their plazas, forecourts, esplanades, and galleries – but in the overarching civic consciousness with which buildings and spaces were tied together as an organic whole, reflecting the idea of civilization as a spiritual enterprise. American cities flourished almost solely as centers of business, and they showed it” (33).

When trying to think of an American city and beyond that, a specific place in an American city that represents this ideal as a center of business, of commercial activity, the first thought that comes to mind is Times Square. My sensory experience of Times Square is one of total bombardment. Bright flashing lights, a sea of people, the smell of trash on the sidewalk, billboards, marquees. The blocks surrounding Times Square are also full of this same kind of crass commercialism. Men on street corners are coercing every passerby to attend a comedy club, teenagers from the entire New York City area stop to have their portraits drawn by old men with displays of their portraits of movie stars.

While I could not say that I find my infrequent sojourns through the Times Square area to be deeply nourishing on a fundamentally human level, there is something to be said (and perhaps even respected) in the transparency of what that area stands for. While the commercial nature of most of the rest of New York City is often deliberately veiled, Times Square is a place that revels in what it is. While I cannot confirm the truth of this statement, I once heard that every institution in Times Square, whether it be a restaurant, a toy store or a Broadway theater, was legally required to have a lit marquee at night.

Regardless of how a place makes you feel, whether or not you find its mission deplorable, there is something to be learned from a place that is able to completely embody an abstract idea like commercialism. On the flip side, as Kunstler is vocal in sharing with his readers, any play that removes itself from a human scale will end up leaving those who inhabit it feeling disenfranchised from their daily lives. Whether Times Square is more appropriately interpreted as the most profound expression of the American ethos, or whether it is merely a crass, soulless collection of city blocks – I cannot say.

I can say that every time I walk through that section of the city, the experience stays with me for a number of days. 

[photograph taken by me while walking through times square in the summer of 2010]

In the summer of 2009 I drove from my family’s house in upstate New York all the way to Boulder, Colorado. On my trip toward the summer writing program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, I experienced much of the span of America between the East and West Coast for the first time. Stopping in cities, I began to notice a series of similarities. Each city had a downtown area, a college area, a financial district and either one or two sports arenas. Having grown up in the New York City area, my first response to these cities was to think of them not as cities, but rather as very large towns.

The sense of vast open space that I felt while driving on I-70 was mirrored by the often empty streets that greeted me as I would walk through the cities in the morning. One particular morning, walking through Cleveland with my mother (she had come along for the ride), stands out in my mind. Searching for a place to eat breakfast, we walked for literally twenty minutes in what appeared to be the financial district – or rather formerfinancial district. In those twenty minutes, not a single person walked past us. Every single storefront was empty. We headed back to our hotel and drove to the college town where, as in every city we visited, we found an excellent café filled with at least one young woman reading a book by Vladimir Nabokov.

Though the similarities between the places I saw that summer have been floating through my mind ever since, it was not until I encountered John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s book, Discover the Vernacular Landscape, that I felt myself begin to try to understand those American cities I saw on the basis of something more than a theoretical model. His suggestion of how to appreciate the American landscape is a freeing one. He writes:
 
“The study and understanding of landscape metamorphosis can nowhere better be undertaken than in the contemporary United States, but it has to be undertaken in the proper frame of mind; and this is largely a matter of recognizing and accepting our national landscape for what it is: something very different from the European” (70).
 
What Jackson suggests is that before one can begin to make any claims as to what something is or how something is changing, they must first deeply accept the intrinsic patterns a place reveals. I find this suggestion helpful for more than just the study of manmade landscape. 

[picture taken by me - outside the rock and roll hall of fame in cleveland, ohio - summer 2009]

In the 11th Chapter of Space and Place, Tuan deals with the ways in which human beings become attached to their homelands. Making his way through human history, he writes first of religions that bound ancient groups of people to the lands that their ancestors inhabited. He writes: “In religions that bind people firmly to place the gods appear to have the following characteristic in common. They have no power beyond the vicinity of their particular abodes; they reward and protect their own people but are harmful to strangers; they belong to a hierarchy of beings that extends from the living members of a family, with their graded authority, to ancestors and the spirits of dead heroes. Religions of this local type encourage in their devotees a strong sense of the past, of lineage and continuity in place” (152-3).
 
Such religions seem to have come out of the deeply human need to feel as though one is part of something larger than oneself, as well as the need to feel the security of having roots that connect you in some way to the infinite past that came before you. It seems to me that the place these religions once served are now held by a sense of nationality and national culture. As he alludes to further on in this chapter, this sense of rootedness and connectedness with the past is something that most Americans have a hard time connecting to. 
 
In the time I spent in Berlin this past semester, I would frequently think back on America and my life that I’d left behind there. Perhaps inspired by Deutschland and its notion of Heimat, America began to attain a different meaning in my mind than it ever had before. After about two months on foreign soil, I had visions of America as the homeland I’d left behind. I dreamed of my return voyage home when at last I could be reunited with a nation of people with whom I could see eye to eye.
 
Almost as soon as I landed in New Jersey, I realized how wrong I’d been. I spent most of my first weeks at home snowed in and reading, doing all I could to not interact with the masses of people with whom I felt nothing in common with at all. Finally making my way through Tropic of Cancer, which a friend had lent to me two years earlier, I stumbled upon a passage that perfectly articulated the feeling I had had while I was abroad. Henry Miller writes: “It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a bit patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…” (208). 

[photo taken by me in the summer of 2009, 18 miles from the center of continental usa]

In Chapter 5 of Space and Place, “Spaciousness and Crowding”, Yi-Fu Tuan touches upon the subject of travel – specifically dealing with modern modes of transportation. He writes: “The speed that gives freedom to man causes him to lost a sense of spaciousness. Think of the jetliner. It crosses the continent in a few hours, yet its passengers’ experience of speed and space is probably less vivid than that of a motorcyclist roaring down a freeway. Passengers have no control over the machine and cannot feel it as an extension of their organic powers. Passengers are luxury crates – safely belted in their seats – being transported passively from point to point” (54).
 
This passage called to mind an experience I recently had while flying back to New York from Berlin at the end of the fall semester. Flying somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, 30,000 feet about the water and moving at a speed just as preposterous– I became suddenly struck by the feeling of occupying no place at all. My “organic powers” of perception, which Tuan lays out as the primary element of experience in the second chapter of his book (8), stripped away from me, I could only understand my experience objectively. While I could easily tell myself where I was, how fast I was moving and where I was headed towards – I somehow could not believe it. I felt lost, like my ability to be a real present human being had (I hoped temporarily) left me.  
 
While on this flight, a monologue form Sarah Ruhl’s play Dead Man’s Cell Phone came to mind. At the very start of the second act, the titular character says, speaking directly to the audience: “I get onto the subway. A tomb for people’s eyes. I believe that when people are in transit their souls are not in their bodies. It takes a couple minutes to catch up. Walking – horseback – that is the speed at which the soul can stay in the body during travel. So airports and subways are very similar to hell” (58).
 
Though Ruhl’s choice of words are extreme and she chooses to have them spoken through the mouth of a man pondering the nature of his own death (which occurs at the start of the play), those words have stuck with me ever since I saw the play performed at the end of my freshman year. Walking and, to some extent, driving have always provided me the ability to experience the spaces and places I move through. When I can, I have found that I prefer driving long distances rather than flying. Though still sometimes dauntingly fast, driving has never left me with that strange disembodied feeling. 

[photo taken by me, summer 2010]

It’s hard to say precisely what draws me to this place, what keeps bringing me back. Situated on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 111th St directly across from the Cathedral Church of St. John of the Divine in Morningside Heights, this café first entered my world as a symbol of student life in Manhattan when I was sixteen.
 
If I recall correctly, I first visited the café on a trip to the city visiting my friend Rebecca, then a freshman at Barnard, to play a concert on her 4AM radio show on WBAR. Sitting there bleary-eyed, trying to load up on enough caffeine to keep me up and alert long enough to perform for the probably dozen or so listeners of the program, something about the place made a profound impression on me. As I recall it now, almost six years later, this profound impression had something to do with the elements of its mise-en-scène.
 
Unlike other cafes that I’d been to, they never play music. Unlike other absurdly brightly-lit coffeehouses in lower Manhattan, the Hungarian Pastry shop is lit by a scattered series of bulbs in flower-shaped fixtures attached along the wall that give out a warm, amber light. Along the walls stand a series of watercolor paintings. The tables are square, brown and wooden – the chairs the same. These elements still make the Hungarian Pastry shop stand out in my mind six years later. 

I often head to the Hungarian Pastry shop on a Saturday or Sunday morning to read a book or do some homework. If you order a pastry (I recommend the tiramisu) or a coffee, they let you stay as long as you like. There are unlimited free refills on both coffee and water. While there, I cannot escape the fundamentally human feeling that rises up within me. In a way I never do in the loud, cramped and bright cafes so closely found near where I sleep and attend class, I find that I am able to engage directly in the time I spend there. Whether I am reading a book, talking to a friend, or thinking about my day – the only distraction I have ever found is that of other human voices. And, that is not really a distraction in a good place. 


[photo taken by my friend Nicole in the Hungarian Pastry Shop near the end of my sophomore year]