RAGE FOR DISORDER: Loving The (Not So) Mean Streets of Manhattan

      “you don't run from a bear because you're afraid; you're afraid because you run from a bear” The urban experience is an untidy one, full of contradictions. Thrills, dangers, bewilderments and enticements. Brutal confrontation and studied disinterest. Sometimes it hides what it possesses, lazes about boring and blind. Other times it can just explode in your face.

“Like a pig in a burlap sack,” said my North Carolina friend Otis Jernigan, who knew of such matters, on his one and only visit to Manhattan. “You know something's going on inside but you can't quite put your finger on it -- then wham! This town can just rip right through the burlap and tear you up.”

Otis Jernigan was a pretty smart guy and, I suppose, he was going for the ‘gotta have street smarts’ thing. However, nothing bad happened to Otis while he was in New York.

Otis Jernigan went away thinking he now knew something he didn't previously know. I think he just confirmed some predetermined ‘thank God I'm a country boy’ point of view about New York City that he‘d brought along with him.

It goes the other way, too.

Some city people run away from the urban experience -- thinking they're going to find some imaginary Key West where it’s possible to satisfy their blessedly anal ‘rage for order,’ the kind insurance company executive (and poet) Wallace Stevens championed.

I suppose that’s attractive to some. If you can just get all the elements in line and under control, you will have won at the human game. But me, I think there’s a rage for disorder in a lot of us, simmering or rash, that keeps us coming back to the city.

One guy who comes to mind is Peter Orlovsky, who used to preach about vegetarianism on that Cherry Valley farm he and Ginsberg ran upstate. Those in the know will tell you that Orlovsky wasn’t averse to sneaking out on occasion for a midnight hamburger run to NYC.

One way or another, the urban experience can be a two-faced, bi-polar, multifaced animal of major proportions. But it's also “an outrage, a spectacle, an emblem of human ingenuity that seems frankly superhuman,” like Saul Bellows said.

Bellows was also a very smart guy.

So was William James, Henry James' big brother. Returning home in 1907 to his native Manhattan after a lifetime traveling in the highest intellectual circles of America and Europe, he stepped out onto the mean streets of New York City and declared himself gob-smacked with the “courage, the heaven scaling audacity of it all… the great pulses and bounds of progress (which) give a kind of drumming background of life.”

     “In the center of the cyclone, I caught the pulse

     of the machine, took up the rhythm, and vibrated

     with it, and found it simply magnificent.”

William James wasn’t talking smack when he said that. He was a pretty smart guy. He grew up with folks like Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau at the dinner table. He was educated in England, Switzerland, Germany and France. He taught at Harvard for thirty years. He mentored Teddy Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein and WEB DuBois.

Heck, he was the father of American Psychology.

William even told his kid brother Henry -- that's right, the novelist Henry James -- to stop with all the drawing room tedium, and write a book with ‘vigor and decisiveness of plot… and absolute straightness of style.’

Gotta like that kind of talk.

Truth, said old William James, is 'what happens to an idea,' it isn’t ‘an inert static relation.’ Another way of putting that is, truth's the outcome of what you do to things, and what things do to you.

When it comes to love and fear, the truth of any experience -- even New York -- is what happens to you when you’re in the middle of it, not what you predetermine it to be. That’s why you don’t run away from a bear -- or a city -- without a good solid reason for it.

You're not supposed to go in being afraid of it. You don't poke it in the nose, either.

the apocalypse is here and it is the color of spring

They say it's spring but I think the world is just angry.  Tired of the day to day turmoil of being walked upon by meer men.  The apocalypse is here and it is the color of spring.  The green of the leaves is just chlorophyl of the once lived.  We shall dine on the corpses of the living in order to get a little color in those trees.  Blooming flowers are just blood thirsty zombies destroying everything they see with a sense of flowering beauty and the dead.  Oh it is spring and the dead are alive and kicking and ready for the heat of the sun.  That blue widening sky is just a reminder of how empty we all are inside, so have a happy spring.

Yes, Virginia, American Journalism WAS Sensational

Think that today’s news media is biased, subjective, self serving or sensationalist? Does it bother you that scandal-mongerers and character assassins can hide in the blurry margin between news and entertainment? It’s a tradition! A tradition that goes back at least to the free-wheeling, two-fisted penny paper era of journalism in America, situated right here in downtown Manhattan in an area once known as “Newspaper Row.”

Horace Greeley. Joseph Pulitzer. Wm Randolph Hearst. Walt Whitman. Sounds pretty literary and historic and all-American, until you look beyond the whitewash.

In fact, it was a world of hard-boiled, sensationalist scandal-mongering, and shameful and crass vendettas.

Hey, when you’re going for cheap, popular and disposable, what better strategy than dragging standards down to the lowest possible level?

Hardly anyone in the industry was immune to it. However it was The New York Sun -- a paper which had the largest circulation in the United States within a year of its debut in 1833 -- which was probably the grandpappy of American Trash Journalism.

Corruptive? Debasing? Sure. But the sheer energy and enthusiasm of The Sun is the kind of irresistable duality thing we cherish in the train wreck we call Urban Dynamism. Call it the dark side of Walt Whitman's Barbaric Yawp.

For all its crassness, there were some diamond moments for The Sun. The paper was the first to hire boys to hawk papers on street corners. It was first to hire a female reporter, Emily Verdery Bettey. It took a lead role in exposing corruption in the Grant administration. It published a series of articles exposing crime in the world of NYC longshoreman, the basis for Budd Schulberg’s great “On The Waterfront.”

The Sun’s elaborate hoaxes -- The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Edgar Allen Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax a decade later -- set the precedent for deceptions some of us love, today. Orson Welle’s War of the Worlds. Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d.

And at least two of the best journalism one-liners come from The Sun. The first was in 1882, when editor John B Bogart said to a friend “When a Man Bites A Dog, That’s News.”

The second? Sep 21 1897, when Francis P Church wrote the op/ed piece Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.

“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy,” wrote Church. ”Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no child-like faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”

High sentiments, indeed, for a newspaper that established the benchmark for slander, deception, scandal-mongering, sensationalism and punk journalism.