Where They Make that Good Salsa You Can Actually Pour Out of the Bottle

If you follow my Twitted feed you may have picked up on the fact that
I'm in New York for the week. If you only follow my blog feed than
you've probably only said to yourself, "Hmm... No rants from that Adam
for a bit, maybe he finally got that drink he so desperately needed.".
Or perhaps you follow none of these things, and have been continuing
to discover my "Greek Animals" post through Image Search just as you
have for the past year and a half, and my actual Internet prescence
means nothing to you. If that is the case, enjoy the goat and dog
pictures, strangers caught in the eddies of the tubes!

I've been missing blogging, and I am filled with various ideas for
when I return to the proximity of a real keyboard. Most are possibly
quite-long essays. At least one I hope will make it to the
Brutalitarians' online pages, which means fewer of you will read it in
the long run. I always hesitate a bit to put good stuff there, because
I like when people read my stuff (maybe you do too?) but perhaps we
can steadily build up a readership for The Brutalitarian as well. I
know--it would certainly help if it had an RSS feed. But there doesn't
seem to be a good method of syndicating Google Sites. Because of this
I've been considering experimenting with Word Press (for the Brute
Press side of things) but yet to make the move because of the hassle
of switching DNS and such things. But this is all very uninteresting
to you; just take away the promise of interesting writing to come, in
some format or another, about such fun things as Czech novels and
film, machines and human bodies, narratives and modern dance, and
angry cartoon squids. Also some pictures, perhaps.

NYC is looking good for the most part. Conspicuously more vacant
retail space than 2 years ago, and conspicuously similar amounts of
vacant gazes. A lot of stares at my hair--maybe I was too used to
Portland. Megan and I have been loving the subway and eating too much
expensive food, and generally wandering around between places and
events with no responsibilities in the way NYC will let one do, so
that this drifting phemnomenal consumption feels as if it has
aesthetic purpose rather than the soft, fleshy sensualist absorption
of a floating sea sponge. An interesting thing about the Porifera is
that anything too big to be absorbed through the skin must be eaten
and expelled through the same orifice.

But the food has been delicious. Also some good and not so good
performances, used books, public transportation, and the fun of
dressing nicely without people feeling the need to ask what the
occasion is. All in all--New York City. I totally remember why we
moved to Portland, but also I've been acquainted with a fact; I will
live in this city again. I hope to live in many more cities around the
world (there is an informal list), and I am not a New Yorker by any
sense of definition. But this city catches up with you in a way I
haven't fully understood yet, and I know I'll be living here again in
the future.

There's probably a metaphor related to an idea for a very short story
idea I had while riding the subway some years ago, which would help
explain this pull. But it involves cyborgs and synth-pop, so I'll
leave it alone for right now.

Friday, 7PM, Times Square Subway Station

[Before reading, open this link in a new window/tab so the track will play. Link thanks to Best of... Both Worlds]

Friday, 7PM, Time Square Subway station- As I reach into my back pocket to retrieve my wallet with one hand, I use the other to skip my mp3 player to the next track. I slide my Metro card out of its slot and push it through the turnstile, as the gods of shuffle cue the drum line. I am curious as to what track it is as I press through the rotating chrome, but as I am about to reach the rush-hour floor I patiently decide to let it play and focus on the motion ahead.

Then, the familiar manic motion of John Coltrane rings through my ears, and as his saxophone chaos reaches full speed, I step into the moving human tides of commuters.

Each note is a footfall in the mass of humans, each taking its own melody in its direction, driving the song towards its home. Every note possible is played, except for the ones that shall not be played, and they join every New Yorker in the fast-paced struggle to be heard.

It is the alternate take of the song, and Coltrane's sax is passed through my stereo headphones to my right ear while Art Taylor's statically rampant cymbal line switches to my left. My linear-reasoning left hemisphere reacts with joy at the perversity of the shrieking saxophone, while my right admires the shapely curves of the drum's steady oscillations. They harmonize the rhythm of a mob, and provide the station with its own cacophonic marching-music.

I weave with the flock of persons, each of us altering course but not speed as we step around each other in the tribal-metropolitan dance. Ten-thousand straight lines weave to form a infinite plateau, John's sax the wind filling our sails as his mad jazz genius guides us into destinationless motion. The collective consciousness smiles, turns up the volume, and let's its ears suffer a bit of irreversible damage for the sake of a lyrical moment.

Ira Gitler stands on the platform, directing the performance and clearing the closing doors, while I try to ignore the words that will eventually come with the fading of memory for just one more moment; dodging the firm simulacra of recording like the supporting vertical girders of this metaphorical recounting. Walk in the gaps, see them before they form, otherwise you will stand still and the human race is gridlocked in its progress.

Noise and light approaching, uptown express. We've all taken this Train before, but never on this day, never at this moment. You have to get on to get to your stop. Standing, sitting, or walking from car to car, the train goes to the same place. As the simple melody kicks it and the track fades out, Times Square fades away to the repeating lights of the artery under the city.

To commute is the exchange, a regulation of a motion among humanity. On Friday John Coltrane's record reached through sound and moved the mass, a fulcrum for a lever big enough. A regulation was exchanged for a liberation, and for those 4 minutes 37 seconds, I heard each of us find that common motive, though I wore headphones, and the commonality was mine alone.

Post-Apocalyptic Subway Disco

Last night I was riding a nearly empty 3 train uptown back to Harlem, and listening to Sally Shapiro's "I'll Be by Your Side" on my headphones. As the train goes through the tunnel underneath Central Park passing from 96th Street to Central Park North, it slows down a bit and heads into a stretch with lots of lights in the tunnel in close proximity to the train, because the tunnel is so narrow. Sitting at the end of the car (coincidentally at the end of the train), I saw a peculiar phenomenon. As the lights from the tunnel passed down the train through the windows, their glare reflected in the chrome hand-hold bars in the center of the car. The motion of the reflection spun the lights around the round poles, and combined with the stuttering produced by the windows, bathed the empty car in a strobe-light disco ball effect.

At that point, the ethereal warmness of Sally Shapiro's synths instilled in me a vision of some sort of cyborg vigilante riding on top of an abandoned train across a post-apocalyptic city-scape plain in some alternative future, his existential tears running into sparks as they flow down his face in the poisoned wind. Think Mad Max/Blade Runner/Robocop, but a club remix rather than Vangelis' original Blade Runner soundtrack. I had to listen to the song three times in a row.

Yeah, I like the subway. People talk shit about how everyone in the city has headphones on, but sometimes the mundane can be quite beautiful if it is enhanced with the right soundtrack. And how else would I be inspired with ideas for depressimistic sci-fi short stories? Go ahead, you tell me how. That's what I thought. Cyborgs will always be by my side.