Entries Tagged 'city' ↓

It feels like ten years have passed but nothing has really happened.

The only progress has been via bubbles whose excitement was redacted by panic.

Maybe the disruption has begun. Maybe we are fooling ourselves with our castles in the air. I wonder if are at some invisible turning point of some huge cycle.

We’ve misguided wars thinking that we were the good guys, but never claiming any victories because we denied we were conquers. So we pay for all the wars. We are selfless good guys by principal but tempted always to be bad.

Are we better off? We are more mistrustful of nature and our frameworks. We trust technology to a fault. We are emotionally stuck in the 16th century. We are dependent upon the unseen. Everyone’s problems are our own problems.

NYC has turned into the Panopticon I always thought it would be. Privacy is a misnomer. Facebook is big brother. Your peers have sent you an invite. The government knows who your friends are.

I’ve lost my health and the faith in my physical body in the last decade. The older people I loved and trusted have passed on. There is no one in a room praying for me on a daily basis. There are only people who hate each other in their narcissism.

I’ve been through a half dozen relationships in ten years. Some of these I still fantasize about. In the end I wrecked them all because I couldn’t understand love or compromise. I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t be happy. I became someone else for people until I became exhausted. I fooled myself as much as I fooled others.

I have been distracted by my purposes and technology. I have struggled with worth. I have realized that too much freedom makes you inert. I have realized that everything is faith and the quality and quantity of faith must be reciprocal to the number of obstacles and their intensity. Faith is a scale of coping and adaptation of the unknown. Its levels are infinite as are the boundaries of success.

I’ve realized that everything is an act of improvisation and sensibility is complete collision. Money is an uncomfortable chair you must sit in for hours. It is better than standing, but makes you lazy and makes you feel like you are always missing something accidental that may be more comfortable and lush.

I attempt to listen to the good progressive voices in my head, but they lead me to isolated places where I question if they are random sounds like all the sounds that inject fears into actions I used to love.

I must focus on mentors and surround myself with people I respect. I must cut out all noise from my life.

- X.F. Pine

This letter was originally mailed to Paul Auster in about 2000 when he was collecting stories on his NPR radio show Other True Tales.

Some of these stories were made into the book True Tales of American Life (First published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project 2001)

The story was originally accepted and then cut at the last minute from the book due to space.

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Paul Auster,

This is a great Experiment. I heard about it on the radio and decided to get this down and send it out.

This is all absolutely true. The pictures included are part of my story.

A while back when I was going through my things and preparing for a move, I came across a drawing that looked as though it had been done when I was four or five years old. The drawing is not dated.

The drawing illustrates a red three story building at an intersection with sidewalks. The building is surrounded by defunct cars, tires, and machine parts. A fence surrounds the lots around the building. There is a traffic light, and a neighboring building across the street where the angle of the intersection is slightly obtuse.

What has intrigued me endlessly about this particular drawing is that it accurately depicts an apartment in Brooklyn in which I would eventually live nearly 16 years later.

The similar real world location is at 14 Bayard Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It is directly across from McCarren Park on the south side, and has not changed a great deal since I lived there a decade ago. The building is a lonely three story building with red asbestos tile. There is a chimney on the right side of the roof exactly like the drawing. The building is surrounded by junked cars, tires and garbage, just as in the drawing. A fence surrounds the lots like the drawing. There is a traffic light out on the corner with sidewalks like the drawing. The angle of the intersection is very similar, and there is another apartment building placed exactly as it is in the drawing. If you take the elements apart they are almost too accurate to be inconsequential.

The only difference I can find is that the door on the building is in the center, while the real 14 Bayard Street, has its doorway on the left side. Interestingly, if you look at the drawing even closer it seems as though I started to draw a structure on the left side, similar to the stoop overhang and which the real building currently has.

It’s so close however, that when I first came across it I recognized the drawing immediately as where I was living. It was also the first apartment I ever had in Brooklyn and was really my first introduction to an “urban” environment.

Now this could have been only a coincidence of course, and a bizarre stretch of the imagination, only it happened a few years later with another place in which I lived.

This time I clearly made the drawing in the late 1980’s while I was actually living on Bayard Street.

The second drawing depicts a suspension bridge stretching away into the distance over a river. The structure of the bridge looks as though it is built in many latticed levels. The aspect ratio of the drawing is easily 2:1, so it almost looks like it is in Cinemascope.

In 1995 I moved  into a unique sublet on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. One dominant feature of the apartment was its marvelous view of the river and the Willaimsburg Bridge. Again, I again came across this drawing after I lived in the space.

One curious aspect of the bridge drawing is that it seems to depict a huge fire, or plume of smoke, emanating out of Brooklyn. I haven’t been able to identify this smoke with any real occurrence. There was a train crash on the bridge one summer close to the spot in the drawing, and once one of the towers caught on fire, but nothing that large and on the distant horizon. The frame of the window is similarly rectangular, although not 2:1, and the element of the latticework of the bridge, makes it resemble the Williamsburg closely. I’ve often thought that this smoke in the picture might illustrate a calamity to come, but fortunately for everyone, I will be moving from this location in less than a month.

I find it very curious that I seem to consistently be making a record of the places I have lived before I have lived in them.

If anything else it encourages me to keep drawing.

Regards,

X. F. Pine

P.S. On a side note (you should hold onto your hat if you are wearing one), one of the very first exterior shots in the movie Smoke shows the Willamsburg Bridge from the Brooklyn side. If you look closely in the back, beyond the bridge, I believe you can see the apartment window where I am currently writing this letter. The building is definitely visible.

So there!

Best,

- XFP

You are passing through a field of junk with tall dead grass, and you cannot see the vermin underneath it all.

A huge barrel shaped goon with a tiny head hoists a large safe on the arch of his back. The combination has been lost. He puts it down as he tries to organize the derelict lot. You walk past pretending not to notice an old bass violin with no strings leaning against a wall. You are positive there is a rat under the grass at your feet.

You hear another man speaking to the goon while he picks up more junk, “We should have gotten into this business, we’d be rich by now.”

You walk out of the lot.

The express train doors close and the thieves are in the corner of the car. The two drunk men stand in large unkempt suits laughing hysterically. They stumble with the unsteady train as it starts up, and the sound that comes through the broken door is as loud as hell.

The taller one with the mustache violently pulls out a large roll of money. He tries to count it and divide it up. The other small drunker thief in sunglasses waves a dozen thick gold chains in his stubby hand. The lights dim and flash out for a moment as the train hurtles past stations. The thief in the glasses begins laughing again as if he is splitting. The tall thin one loses his grin, as he is mesmerized by the bills.

After a moment of counting, he looks at his friend with alarm. He shoots a paranoid expression over the rest of the train. He becomes serious and begins shouting only it is too loud to hear. It all sounds like nonsense.

You remember a story about a young kid who comes to the big city to be a singer. He sacrifices it all in a number of years and never gets a return. His nights wash into alcoholic angst. His act becomes loud, annoying and disgraceful. He falls into a group of similar people who feed off of fake compliments. They are a party crowd and they keep each other alive until one of them gets in an unmitigated accident, causing the whole group to be offset. The particular young man whose descent we have so wickedly had the honor of tracing finally returns to a trailer home in Florida where he grew up. His only keepsake is a bright red scarf which was worn by one of the ladies of the group.

A young man hands out leaflets about his jewelry business at the foot of an escalator in a busy train station. The fliers have line drawings of the perfect diamonds which he spent days rendering. Everyone thinks collectively of diamonds on their long commute home.

X. F. Pine

A festival takes place today in honor of a giant pool. Old men sit on benches uninvolved. There is a memory room with pictures. A parade goes by the window. Ghosts set foot down somewhere. All memories are crafted by chances ghosts make. Ghosts make us remember moments.

BD and I walked around the park earlier with a fake rubber spider on a hemp rope. The “spider trick” as it is known, proved to be most effective to the people in the park. The small slighted children believed it was real “P-P-P-P-P-P Arana es grande – Arana es in me CASA!!” The spider trick gets them every time.

I spoke to an old Orthodox priest before it rained. He was dressed in a purple uniform which rose wildly in the air. He had been extradited from the old church by the park in the 1960s. I told him the bells would wrestle me from sleep in the morning. He asked me if I ever attended a service there. I asked him when the services were. He said when the bells rang. He also said that the church was one of the last ever built partly by the czar Nicholas of Russia before the Russian Revolution. He was was kicked out of the church for letting the Spanish in (The priest, not the czar).

The festival was rained out just before the mighty Shorty Jackson Band were to take the platform. Shorty is a Jazz piano player from Harlem who was also an undertaker. I believe he is almost ninety years old. The band drives around in an old Dodge. It is amazing to watch Shorty play the piano. He’s been playing so long his skill is automatic. I’ve seen him at Teddy’s very late at night, having complete conversations while playing old ragtime.

There was a dead cat on Bayard St. the same night the locks didn’t work.

X.F. Pine