What a wonderful town

Lately I've been thinking about New York. For me, the romanticism of the big apple comes from jazz quartets and musicals. It comes from the reverb in Carnegie Hall and Gershwin's keystrokes. It comes from Miles Davis and Harlem night clubs when it was fashionable to wander uptown and mingle at the bars. It comes from The Catcher In The Rye and Woody Allen films. It comes from the lens of Berenice Abbott and the personality of Keith Haring.

In my ideal moments, I am wandering through central park in autumn and spending long nights over my Royal DeLuxe writing up another short story about Brooklyn. I sit on an old fire escape on the West Side's hottest summer day and I look over the old tenements. This is not to say that I am bored or unamused with Montreal. Quite the contrary. I am more in love with my city than I have ever been, and as summer approaches, the city blooms in its full concert of optimism and liveliness.


Markus Hartel

It's just that my longing for New York is very profound, and almost juvenile. It is the sort of longing that one had for the old west when watching Clint Eastwood fire his Colt, and the urge to become a cowboy at the age of seven. For me, the city has been galvanized in a sort of romantic alterity, much like a still photograph that is perfectly motionless and presents only a fixed impression of its subject.

When Alex (my roommate) and I went to New York City last year, in April, it was my first time. It was a spontaneous trip which we started at one o'clock in the morning as I was about to go to bed. We decided, there, chatting in our dormitory, that we should go to New York. No maps. No bags. We literally followed the road signs to the big apple. We drove through the Bronx at nine in the morning and we were parked in Midtown by ten. We walked around on what was an unusually warm day. It rained a bit, but we didn't care. We rode the subway, where we saw an acapella group perform for change. There were hoodlums of the sort you'd see in eighties crime movies, with leather jackets, bandanas and leather boots, playfully boxing each other on the R train.

Elliott Erwitt

It was all a big giant cliche and we basked in it with the bashfulness of young tourists. We flipped off cab drivers and Alex wrestled the downtown rush hour like a true New Yorker in his small Daewoo. It was a great, balmy New York day. When we crossed the border back into Canada, the temperature had dropped below freezing and there was a snow storm. The melancholy was mute, but it was felt. We had spent a great day in a lively and tomorrow we would have to go back to class.

Nonetheless, we had a great trip and we are currently planning our return in early June.