On New York

and the american industrial complex

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from “Earth Room” by Rachel Mannheimer

If you were reading this newsletter last summer you might remember that I was unceremoniously thrown out by no less than 30 mice (yeah, imagine cleaning up that p00p for 2 months) from my otherwise pristine and dreamy Brooklyn apartment. I fled from New York like one did in the olden days, or, you know… what I imagine one did if they had to flee a small town or village… I fled like a social pariah, and for months I felt dirty and unworthy of a good life. In the depths of birthing a book, I spent most of my time dying. It was scary to face a housing crisis and economic scarcity, alone, and yet the most bewildering gift is that friends showed up for me. Two of my closest let me stay in their Los Angeles home for two months, for free while I scrambled together enough money for an apartment with zero credit as a non-American. I had started hearing the horror stories post (first stage) pandemic… vicious landlords, shitty decrepit homes, an obvious failing economy. I really started to see the difficulties of class, of having no standing in a country that doesn’t want you. I’m on the O1 visa — alien of extraordinary ability. The only reason I’m allowed here is because I had to prove myself worthy. I guess I think about that a lot.

What does it mean to be extraordinary? What does it mean to succeed as an artist… or rather, a person? In a world that demands some to prove their worthiness, while granting others full, unbridled access to a life of comfort, ease… How do we determine what is fair? Over the years, it’s been hard to consider economic hardship and not feel frustrated that life is just so shitty for some. Especially when most of us know it doesn’t have to be this way. Remember when you’re a child and you think about injustice and poverty… the solution seems so simple… yet, adulthood hardens you, it makes you think that unfairness is the norm. You become nihilistic. You accept your own shortcomings. You begin to believe the world is bad. So you don’t question. You accept the status quo. You become too tired to fight.

This last New York apartment, the one I lost to mice, was the first apartment I truly had for myself. It was the first time I could afford to actually live alone (touch and go) and after being in a relationship that I thought would lead to forever… I had to re-examine what it meant to live for myself after we broke up. For the few years we were together, I felt, for the first time in my life, that I would finally find the stability I had been denied since birth. When the relationship came to an inevitable end so much shattered for me, but at least… at least… I finally was able to find my own home in New York. It was my dream, it was the thing I wanted the most for so long. All those years I went back and forth from Montreal to NYC, on that long Amtrak train ride by the Hudson, hoping I’d be able to prove my worthiness and grab an O1. When I got it, I felt released from the sisyphean task of gaining residency in America, of having to prove oneself even to gain entrance. When I finally gained the visa that would grant me some peace for a little while (at least in terms of immigration) I felt I had made it.

There were many days in that apartment I felt cocooned, finally safe, grateful I had a place I could call my own. Nobody could take it from me and I would do whatever I could do protect it. Then the pandemic happened and despite the darkness of the times, in all of the ways, I found a way to pay rent. It was hard, I didn’t want to, and knew others who were shouting their fuck yous to landlords. I didn’t want to jeopardize the two others in my building so I decided against that particular protest, but 2020 was a deeply dark and harrowing economic year for me. Maybe because I didn’t expect to be back at zero. I realized how scarce my life was and realized that I had little to no safety units… but at least, at the very least, I had my apartment. I considered living there forever, the trees enveloping me. I loved those trees, those trees were my friends. Nobody could take away my home, I wouldn’t let them. But then the mice came I was driven out. God gave me a Biblical sized answer. So I moved to a new coast, I found a new home. I settled. But New York, I knew, would beckon me again. It was too big a love, and too grand a heartbreak, for me to stay away for too long.

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Not so surprisingly, the most astonishing part about being back in NY, when I was there just last week, was the reality that we’ve all bought into this idea of New York, much like we’ve bought into the idea of the American Dream. So all that I felt this time in the city was the bewildering and astonishing gaps of class, the leaps and lurches of how the city spits at you in such disgust. How neighborhoods are lined with bags of trash, a hellscape of smells and heat bouncing off the pavement, but dares you to scream, it conditions you to like it. An emblem of America is its dissonance from itself — what it purports to be versus what it is. I had not noticed it as much before, not like this, maybe because of the patina of the city, the excessive shine—the romance we have from the infamous Washington Square arch to motherfucking Zabars — we’ve been sold the mythology of New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of, we’ve been sold America.

So we pretend to not see the immense gaps of wealth, we pretend that things aren’t so bad. We are taught to look away, to make excuses, to defend the status quo. The pandemic radicalized me differently, it’s made me look at things that we’ve been told are the norm and not just ask why, but challenge it. I realized so many of us are conditioned to accept the privileges of what being upper class benefits you and because of upward mobility, the solution for many of us is “work harder! try harder!” then YOU TOO (uncle Sam finger) can have a life of comfort.” But that’s not the solution, it’s not even the truth… so why have we all bought into it?

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Being in New York, and traveling in general, made me realize I have to take my chronic illness seriously. I’m now at the point that when I’m traveling I can’t eat, most things make me sick, and when I am eating I have to be immensely intentional otherwise I could trigger my IBS. It’s a struggle to come to terms sometimes, how much my life is out of my control. Being in New York exacerbated how things are just easier when you are economically privileged and able-bodied… when you can navigate the city in comfort, with a relative amount of freedom and mobilty then New York is a dream, a cinenematic ceremony… the city is built for the wealthy, for those who can enjoy its riches. But for everyone else? Well you’ll just suffer in pain.

I was embarrassed by my own desire for comfort, and I found myself angry that I didn’t have more money to afford a certain existence, then ashamed that I even wanted that. As my therapist has been working with me on this for a while… I’m actively learning to disavow myself to a life of poverty, an ancestral baggage I inherited due to the generations of family members that dedicated their lives to the Socialist/Marxist/Leninist cause. But, as I tell my therapist in response to when she says it’s OK for me to want money—I always, always exlaim “But what’s the balance?????” We don’t have good representation of people in the public actually moving in an anti-capitalist way… maybe like Noam Chomsky and Aruundhati Roy, but still, they’re few and far between. I want to be apart of that representation, I want to always talk about class. I am invested in collapsing these systems, in collapsing capitalism. And I’m OK being uncomfortable with the in-between… I just think it’s important we don’t keep looking away from our tiny hypocricies, expecting others to do the work for us.

Through conversations with my DegrowthNYC comrade, Jamie, I’ve realized that utopic envisioning means believing in a future where we all have access to comfort and luxury, that it’s for all not just for the few who can afford it. People think socialism is having nothing, not investing in beauty — but as the world get ravaged by industrialization and the obsession of capital, I actually think it’s immensely important for the planet to invest in beauty, true beauty. I’ve always struggled with my own desire for nice things so much so I’ve kept myself so small, controlling myself to no end, only to be in a cycle of depression. But I’m trying to understand what is balance, what is fairness, in a life within the confines of the capitalist structure?

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New York reminded me it’s not a city for all, and it doesn’t want to be — and that is a part of the greater mythology of America. That it doesn’t have to play by the rules, that it’s OK to be a bully — those are quintessential American values, and they’re also what governs the incredulous charm of New Yorkers. They’re brash, and we somehow find that impressive. Is that what makes a nation-state powerful? Its own projection of power through force?

Kendrick sings I grieve different, in the song “United in Grief.” It was a different grief being in New York this time. A lamentation for an old self, a self that thought she could do it. But I can’t, I can’t live in the dissonance of the city anymore. A city that was built against the poor, redlined and urbanized, we know the evil of Robert Moses, a city that forces you into capitalism… that’s New York. I still love it for all the things it gives all of us, but it also takes so much to keep the engine of its romance churning. Empires collapse. New York is the giant ruby, ripe like blood, pulsing on the crown of the American empire.