Seven Red

So there’s an extended conversation going on through Facebook email about that favorite topic of all New Yawkahs over 28: What happened to authentic New York? The predictable positions, of course, all come out. Yuppie interlopers ruined New York, the junkies on Delancy, the fancy cheese shop on Smith Street, we like one, not the other, etc. I’ve never known quite what to make of these arguments, but I like Andreas Huyssen’s take in a concise little essay called “Fear of Mice: The Times Square Redevelopment,” which appears in his Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. I saw Huyssen – a kind of Frankfurt School cultural critic – speak now many years ago on Maus as a memory text, and I guess it’s interesting how many of the successful graphic novels perform similar public memory functions (Persepolis being the obvious example, but isn’t Ghost World also a sort of memory text?).

In “Fear of Mice,” Huyssen addresses the Disneyfication of Times Square, the most manifest marker of the New New York, and an obvious locus for the debate. Whether you stand with the heroin addicts and peep shops or with the fucking Olive Garden (there’s a fucking Olive Garden in Manhattan, and people actually fucking go to it!!!) says a lot about where you might stand. Of course, it’s more complicated than that: whether you want junkies and stick-up kids and corrupt cops and crack rocks on Smith Street or the Brooklyn version of Mario Batali’s Po with its grilled guinea hen, pumpkin and scallion fregula is probably more where the argument is these days. In any case, Huyssen argues that both the clean-up mongers and the peep show nostalgists are running the same program: the desperate fear of social change. I especially like that the Sleaze Lovers get labeled the “romantics of marginality” – I am, of course, guilty of quite a bit of this myself, the whole “exit” business from Bey to Negri is vulnerable to just this charge.

No real conclusion here. Maybe it’s a question for others. I think I may be a little too close to the heat of this one to come up with anything interesting to say about it. But it did put me in the mind of one of NYC’s great pre-Great-Clean-Up verses, so here’s a little Gang Starr for your Friday morning. And really, how could you hate on a guy who came up with one of the most bizarre lyrics in the history of American music:

Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
I get more props and stunts than Bruce Willis

The huh? This was our New York, right on the cusp, Spring 1994, right before Giuliani’s broken windows policing really started kicking in that summer. It was summer 1994: The Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and Giuliani killed working class culture in New York City. Maybe for the better. Like I said, too close to it. But I dare you to listen to “Mass Appeal” without nodding to the sick beat and sample.

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