NYC

April 16, 2010

This is the fourth time I've been to New York City and, same as with good jazz albums, the more times the better. NY is a place I like living better than visitting, and that's something that has more to do with the way you spend your time there rather than the length of your stay; as some would say, it's an attitude. From the very first moment you land at the JFK, a continuous set of stimulus starts hitting you from different directions and angles at the same time and, whether you want it or not, you get surfing on this stream of activity and rush to live as much as possible before you leave the city, point at which the "river" violently throws you out and you realize how much you've been living over your body's energy constraints. I also see NY as a huge skeleton, the platform that allows for its people to fill it and shape it the way it is. The main cathedral of globalization and physical definition of cosmopolitanism, it's the place and the space where very different cultures, lifestyles and income levels come together and, particularly, clash; like a puzzle made up of pieces of different other puzzles that don't really fit with each other completely but somehow get joint in a strange collage. To me it's like a big metaphor of the american "melting pot", source of all kinds of extremes and contradictions, where nothing is smooth and outliers are the norm. It's not a quiet, nice little place but, to be honest, I know of very few brilliant things that came out of quiet nice little places.