NYC is Broken
NYC is Broken It's starts simply. I buy a dozen postcards of New York. I pick ones with sparking lights and pink hazy sunsets. I look at them and think of all the many times my dad took me to places turned off the car and took in the view. He loved it in ways and I can only imagine. He worked for this view, it was given to me. He walked up and down the avenues and all the streets, not having enough money for the train. He memorized the location of gas stations, good pizza and polish stores. He has girlfriends and coffee joints and jobs all over town. There were the Greenbergs on Park with the pink tile he replaced several times until the wife liked it. There was the reservoir and the evenings he would ride around it as if someone was chasing him. I scan the skyline in the postcard like an x-ray, seeing his whole life at the same time. I turn them over so that their white sides turn up. And then with a scissor, methodically as if I know what I am doing, I start to cut. I cut them into triangles and into squares. I try some circles and lines. I take the silhouettes that held the original shapes - the city cut up into scraps. One is the UN. I press it against the Statue of Liberty. Then I take the tip of the Williamsburg Bridge and connect it to a piece of Harlem. NYC is broken and I try to make sense of it. Maybe I can pull out the parts where I remember him and keep only those with me? Maybe I can create new neighborhoods out of these pieces.
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