Concerning orientation and proportion

“Chapter one. He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that, “He romanticised it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”

Uh… no. Let me start this over.

Woody Allen, Manhattan

Comrades –

New York is my kind of town. I know, I know, this is in all likelihood not the first time you’ve heard that said. I know, I know, it’s your kind of town too. I know, I know, that it’s safe to say that if you have any kind of town at all, if the oxygen carried through your blood doesn’t feel quite right without a certain sooty residue, if the sound of silence at night less soothes you and more creeps you the fuck out, if the placid grandeur of nature at its most fundamentally natural leaves you feeling even the tiniest bit guilty as you wonder where the hell you’re going to get wi-fi access from, if in fact towns are your thing on any level at all, then it’s probably true that New York is your kind of town. Sure, there are prettier places, there are crazier places, there are busier places and god knows there are friendlier places, but none of those places are New York, and without wanting to get overly tautological about it, only New York has the New Yorkness, the New Yorkitude, the New Yorkacity, that makes it New York. It is, I trust I’ve made clear without in any way labouring the point, New York, and that is my kind of town.

Quite why New York is my kind of town is somewhat harder to fathom. Or it was until I chanced upon the hurlyburly and hullaballoo that comprises the peculiar facade parade charade that will hereafter be referred to as New York Fashion Week (because that is its name). After ambling through the city on my way to MOMA (closed on Mondays, it may save you some shoe leather to be informed) — and ambling being the appropriate word, clad as my size 11′s were in some newfangled footwear that replaces the sole with something that looks like an overturned fruit bowl affording me both increased comfort (style be damned, if I’m walking for 7 hours a day I’d rather not be crippled by it) and a valuable 2 inches to my height (and as you can imagine anything that increases my stature to something approaching that which my Over-Complimentary Internal Monologuist feels I deserve is welcome, although the harbour at Rhodes as yet remains un-Jemmed, so to speak) — I was forced from the paveme- er, sidewalk by a morass of black-clad, sunglasses-shod, heavily accessorized crows jostling and heaving and squawking into cellphones as a tiny man in a nice suit was escorted to a waiting limousine. I have no idea who the tiny man was. It wasn’t Alexander McQueen or Jean-Paul Gaultier or that weird German guy with the pony tail and the little dog, and I think Yves Saint Laurent is dead, so it likely wasn’t him, or if it was, well, it rather becomes him. As you can tell from this incisive insider insight and a quick glance through my wardrobe, I am something of a doyen, and so it was with no small umbrage that I realised that NYFW had started and simply no-one had thought to inform me.

As anyone who has had the terrible misfortune to attempt to have a conversation with me while Kylie Minogue is in the room will attest, I am perhaps-not-quite-as-secretly-as-I-would-like a terribly distracted fame whore. Entirely coincidentally, therefore, I decided that perhaps a nice coffee in the park overlooking the backstage entrance might be just the cup of tea, so to speak. ‘This’, I thought to myself as I kicked a small child from its pram and poured 12 fluid ounces of scalding hot soy latte into the lap of a pensioner in order to occupy what I quickly perceived to be the prime vantage point, ‘is my kind of town.’

And almost immediately, birthed from the distended folds of the backstage tent, blinking dewy-eyed into the sunlight and tottering on emaciated legs like sticky foals, came the models, surrounded by a phalanx of old men (with — to a man — really terribly badly styled and dyed hair) holding cameras inches from their faces. Querulous cadaverous children with blank lost eyes and the quick birdlike movements of the recently unmedicated gingerly made their way through the flashes and shouts and calling of names and over here‘s, faces frozen in an blank internalised expression that I can only imagine otherwise occurs when (for instance) a previously amusing intimate night with a rugby league player becomes something other, something horrifically off-the-menu. Frozen, angular and clearly ill-at-ease despite their learned postures and poses and poise, they played the game, attempting — I’m guessing — to transcend the situation. Striving to become. To become Christy, or Naomi, or Kate or Tyra or whoever, something beyond simply being a tall skinny kid with great cheekbones and a simply fantastic bob. The effort was distastefully apparent. And then another model appeared. And then the photographers moved on with a roar. And then the suddenly solitary model changed. For a few brief moments, freed from their prisons of poise — at least until they made their way through the park (where one can only imagine their captors were waiting to lock them away from sunlight, food and education until Terry Richardson next called for a grope) — they fit. They fit New York. They fit New York perfectly. Why, will — inevitably — take a new paragraph to explain. (footnote¹)

In one of his terrible books (I think it was You Know What? Mad People are Funny and Also Sad and For Some Reason They Never Sign Confidentiality Waivers) Oliver Sacks talked about a client who couldn’t go shopping on 5th Avenue (or similar) because she had a fear of heights. Not that she was shopping on the top floor of Macy’s, but the sheer vertiginous verticality of the place, the forward momentum of the people and the traffic burrowing along the concrete trench carving its beeline towards Greenwich Village led to a terrible all-consuming fear of falling. I find it hard to accept that she was in any way mad. The walls of the canyon bounce bristling static from all directions, it’s so busy, we’re too small, it’s too narrow, there’s no sky, there’s no purchase and if we stop for a moment goddammit we will leave the earth and drift rootlessly. And there are no handholds, no footholds. There is no vista. Or rather, there IS a vista, but it’s not a widescreen landscape one, it’s a portrait one. Everything flows upwards, and when you’re at the bottom it feels like a long way to fall before you hit the tiny patch of blue above. Which is why the models, suddenly freed and relaxed, made perfect sense. Only they could negotiate this beggar’s canyon and make it through amongst the womprats (apologies for the Obvious and Stilted Popular Culture Reference, it’s really late). Maybe you do have to be six foot six and willowy of frame to just make it down the street safely. Maybe, further from the ground, it feels safer. It certainly looks safer. It looks correctly proportioned and oriented with these stretched and angular beings sashaying through it. This was my theory and I was going to put to the test with my new bouncy shoe contraptions. Noise and excitement and people and The World Is All Right Here aside, it occurred to me that it’s this perpendicularly skewed vista that makes New York my kind of town.

I mean, look what I do for a living, sort-of embarrassingly: it’s all portrait format. Look at any photo I’ve taken with your camera at a party: Portrait. Virtually every photo from my current trip: Portrait. Magazine and book design: Portrait. Every painting I have ever painted ever ever ever: Portrait. Even my still-not-even-finished-the-script difficult art film: Portrait format. This is how I see the world. And, although it’s kind of hard to accurately gauge in any way, my optometrist suggested recently that it actually might be the way I see the world. Or at least, I might not see the same kind of widescreen vistas that you do. No-one’s really sure what happens with an astigmatism that comes and goes to a medium strength, as mine is, but with extreme fixed astigmatisms, the brain simply ignores the ‘lazy’ eye and processes the 2D image from the healthy eye, so it’s likely that something similar is happening to me, particularly as I get tired. And I have been so tired. As you may be able to attest if you’ve found yourself in a sweaty nightclub with me at 5.30 in the morning, it can be distressingly obvious to all that my brain has given up controlling my left eye and has sent it to bed for the night. So it’s not unlikely that I am generally only seeing 70% of the width of the world that you are (and probably only infrequently in 3D), resulting in a visual range that, while it might not be portrait, certainly isn’t going to be able to appreciate the widescreen desolation of the Yorkshire Moors or the rooftops of Florence on quite a fundamental visual-processing level.

You may not be entirely surprised to hear that #1 on my 101 Things list (see last week’s bout of unintelligibility) is

1) get your eyes fucking sorted out

so I will be getting that ‘fucking’ sorted out when I get back, despite my being emboldened and empowered (and not tripping up over nothing quite so often) by my current jaunt through a city that feels like it was built especially for me, and for all the other cripples like me.

So, to sum up, finally: unless you have a similar disability, then frankly you can take a fast flick at a flying fuck if you think New York is your kind of town. Me and New York, we see things the same way, and you can tell that to the judge. We’ve got the same outlook, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, buster. We have the same perspective on things, buddy, so stick that up your big fat ass. New York actually is my kind of town.

JEM OUT

* * *

Footnote ¹ Purely to be uncharacteristically clear at this point:Just in case this sounds in any way like I’m being catty, I have nothing but sympathy, admiration and a whole bucketful of you-go-girl for these symmetrical young things who I couldn’t help but suddenly feel immense fear for, along with — I’d be remiss not to mention it — a vague and honestly rather unhealthy-feeling attraction. Given a hypothetical and entirely unlikely buffet-style line-up I would generally plump (an entirely inappropriate choice of phrase) for the skinny tall cigarette-shaped girls every time. Don’t blame me, I’m a caucasian male conditioned from a tender age by advertising and something paradigm something ‘beauty myth’. (footnote ²). I think Lucy Mclure put it most confrontationally when she recently asked during a rather precise discussion about nipples, “If, what you’re looking for, Jezzle*, are the hips of a young boy, and the nipples of a young boy, then there might be an obvious alternative [to women my own age] that you have overlooked.” And then she laughed cruelly and I kind of felt a bit exposed, and quite rightly too. Anyway, let’s move on.

Footnote ² Hey, footnotes within footnotes. Either this is a pretty coarse David Foster Wallace pastiche or I’m kind of wriggling around a bit under my self-administered microscope. Just to acknowledge that, for those of you flicking through your mental rolodex of my previous partners and kind of failing to come up with anyone who matches the description just proffered, well, there’s a whole lot of stuff I could mention about appeal vs. instinct vs. a-finely-honed-personality but I can’t be arsed and you don’t care.

* Don’t even think about it.