The idea to write short stories about New York stemmed from an earlier idea - to write a novel about New York. I had it all planned out. I had a Brooklyn hipster bike messenger, a radical luddite locavore. And I had a chic corporate chick, dressed down in Italian suits and the Upper Eastside doorman studio.
And these characters were relatively interesting. They went around in their own universe, a naive and idealized New York at once grungier (in Williamsburg) and more corporate (in Manhattan) than the real thing. The hipster crawled through sewer ducts to destroy communications infrastructure. The corporate chick took the Six down to the village for underground electro-punk shows. They hooked up and squabbled and dissed on each other.
But I didn't get too far. The thing sort of died on the vine. I could only let these characters live for the extent of five, ten pages. Then it was onto the next archetype, the next image, the next vision. I drew these two from an amalgam of real live New Yorkers I'd spotted over the past year. But I could never grow them, make them more.
Like the narrator says in A Coming Cold - "All I have are seeds."
So a few months later, after taking a break from reading and writing the city in which I live, I came back to the New York theme, if not with diminished ambitions, at least with smaller word counts.
If anything, New York is a postmodern city. It doesn't have any single overarching narrative. It's impossible to pull an authoritative theme from pure observation.
Sure, there's the New York done up in Hollywood glamour, all cabs and steel facades, which for the most part comprises a few blocks in Midtown. Certainly, film has done a lot for this town. It's brought iconic architecture to the masses - infected the cultural consciousness with the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Times Square. And the very noise of the city provides an ambient soundtrack to dozens of films; the blare of cabbie horns or the rumbling scream of the subway are just as iconic as the Statue of Liberty.
But I wanted to do things in the collection that aren't always communicated in film. A lot of the time, the aesthetic of the city more closely resembles Gotham than a gleaming Big Apple. That's what I wanted to explore, in addition to the under-represented New York - Queens, Brooklyn, Union Square and the East Village. I wanted to survey the gentrification of grunge, the mix of aging infrastructure and young blood.
The Healer of Union Square opens the collection, a meditation on the Christ-like act of self-service that's so rare. I will say this character was borrowed wholesale from a man I saw this past summer, in Union Square and Central Park, complete with blonde dreadlocks and a hand painted placard. Whether he met his fate on the L train is unknown. Likewise, Mo Baraka was another "borrowed" New York citizen.
A Halloween party I attended not too long ago inspired Costume Party. The apartment layout, decor, even many of the costumes were similar. No psychotropic punch, though.
Just the Other Day is a short piece I jotted together after returning from work by way of the park. The opening vignettes are non-fiction, and I still wonder if that raccoon was rabid.
I have a subscription to New York magazine, and without its features on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the narrator of IMAGINE probably wouldn't exist. I've been lucky enough not to personally run into any of these hedge-fund tyrants, but their personas loom larger than life here.
New Yorker's infatuation with self-destruction feeds the theme of Writer's Block (paraded loudly this year in the cinema). What kind of self-loathing would underlie a creator of that kind of spectacle?
With Insectomorphile, I was interested in how far we can push extreme body modification. Perhaps this story would fit better in California. Both capitals of the coast have their own breed of narcissism. I tend to think New York's is less vapid, more cultured, tempered with pathos. The Per'Ket of LA would probably just want big tits, not the facial features of a mosquito.
SteinBlog is intended as a humorous take on Mary Shelly's original horror tale, updated for the 21st century. Of course, all the pseudo-science technology is nonsense, but the question persists - what lies in the soul of our creations? What responsibility do we owe our creations?
The idea for Zen Coding Collective was floating around for a while, but I ended up writing it last. I was inspired by visiting the workspace of a college friend at a small Open Source startup. Originally, the cult was more extreme, into heavy drug use and dubious contracts, as opposed to benign meditation and energy shakes.
The titular story was a struggle, if anything the most autobiographical of the collection. A writer always finds pieces of himself in his narrators, and this tale was no exception.
The question is: how much can we truly create on our own? If our circumstances are out of our control, why not our art? What is true originality?
To cultivate this aesthetic of a dark, gritty New York on the precipice of winter, I had to imbibe and inhabit that very aesthetic in myself. It's debatable to what degree this is required, but at the very least, I had to get down to write down.
The final tale, First Snow, diverges a bit from the rest of the collection in that it's not set in the city proper. New York, however, still plays an important role in the story, as the location the protagonist is fleeing, the hub of civilization he must leave behind.
Even as the cold approaches, and finally sweeps through, the city remains a beacon. Granted, it's a nexus, and with that comes all the chaos of magnified human interaction.
But if anything can stand against the coming cold, it's the city.
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