The City
The City is my first true love. I love the city for it's anonymity. The thrill of alienation. I also love it for it's people. I love my corner-stores. I love being face to face with inequality and having to reckon with the complexities of modern life. Like anyone, I dream about having a backyard and a tool-shed, but I couldn't give up having a place to buy Takis at 2am.
I met the city in Chinatown (it's better these days to find a Chinatown in Queens or Brooklyn, Manhattan is a museum). I spent hours nosing through bins filled with dried roots and powders-- strange cured fish and sea creatures hung in windows. Living in the city for 20 years, you become a voyeur and a traveler. Exotic is a complicated word in the 21st century. It really means "external to one self, foreign or strange". Living in the city for many years is a process of re-orientation in which gradually things do not feel foreign or strange. If you live here long enough, you find yourself listening to Indian Ragas, Salsa, Saharan techno... it's only a matter of time, and you will appear exotic and threatening to people in the place you came from.