Are they kitsch, retro?
A nostalgia for halcyon days,
or is everything old new again?
Maybe it’s a romantic response to the disposable iterations of modern communicative technology – smartphones, tablets, laptops?
Clearly resorting to a cumbrous and antiquated piece of machinery makes a statement. It is after all an anachronism capable of only slowing down productivity and stands in contrast to our demands for ease and speed of everything.
Honestly? They are just cool. The look and feel and often enough the smell of an old typewriter, like an old book, are soothing. It is also rare today to handle a device, short of a power tool, and feel any heft. Smaller and lighter is better is what we’re sold, except that in most cases smaller and lighter equal cheap and flimsy. Old typewriters were anything but. They were built to last and when they eventually broke, from wear and tear and not cheap manufacture, they could be repaired. No upgrade necessary.
This is easier to explain. I’m a native. Like many, I wasn’t born in Manhattan, but close enough to know it first-hand in all its blighted and gritty glory. It was littered asphalt underfoot and graffitied walls before it was a scene from a movie. It was where my parents lived and worked when they first immigrated to America. It is also where I would later spend most of my adolescence.
The city also wasn’t a dive or a place to slum for me. Growing up on the border of Elmhurst and Jackson Heights was seedy enough with rampant prostitution, drug trafficking, and a nightlife that frequently erupted in shootings and stabbings from within football bars and nightclubs. The only notable difference being the drug of choice; in my neighborhood it was cocaine; in the Lower East Side, heroin. And, of course, New York City had punk rock.
City life – living stacked on top of and crammed alongside one another, eating with one eye on your meal and the other on the clock and always rushing to catch the next train or bus. The aural bombardment of varying dialects and different languages, foreign and seemingly incongruous customs juxtaposed, assaults on the olfactory by ethnic foods when a meal is the furthest thing from your mind, and always the tinge of refuse in the air from a neighborhood nearby neglected by sanitation.
Many would expect this level of enervation to result in a breakdown, the kind that leaves you either catatonic or gibbering responses to conversations that will never happen. And it can, if you are not careful. But it can also coalesce into a perspective that finds focus, if not peace, at the center of the storm, and learns to move with it, appreciating the functional order within the chaos, the music within the dissonance, and harnessing its frenzy as fuel to thrive and create.
Ideally this website allows me to focus this persepective on my city, to explore – evocatively, intellectually, and as the tagline says, “lustfully” – whatever can be rendered in words and photos. The criterion for what is considered content is simple, if arbitrary; it need only be referent to New York City as an historical, iconographical, or literary phenomenon. Practically speaking, however, it is just a place to post my written work, photographs, and quotidian musings, as well as being something of a repository for imagery that I find enjoyable; think of walking into your favorite bar or bookstore and the feelings it stirs. If anyone else should find this amusing, it is purely coincidental.
