15 Nov> strange to come back to NYC after Atlanta in sted of DC still fields like home knot sure where we belong as good a place as any + to steal a line from Crazy Horse today = a good a day as any to die wich gong fwd we mite use to start each of these here posts + dayz > 1° time back in the big apple sints we moved away 3 months ago staying near Washington square the arch lit up rouge bleu + white comme le French flag > same hotel where Bob Dylan + Joan Baez shacked up for a spell we thinking of asking for that same room (#305) tho that mite come off a bit creepy (specielly in the wake of our Debord-inspired kill yr idols post) > ate @ Lupa 1 of Mario Batali's restraunts w/ Roman theme she-wolf + Remus + Romulus imagery dear to our heart our Raft Manifest heros > back when we lived in this hood on Thompson down the street from Lupa we hadnt yet developed our she-wolf as mudder fixation

washington sq hotel

16 Nov > out the door for a walk thinking how come we always go in strait lines to no destination in particular? always so linear specielly in the wake of our Maphattan project so systematickly ticking off each street x st x st like gridwork why not spirel out? so starting @ the fountain in Washington sq like Dorothy skipping @ the onset following the yellow brick road we circulled a round counterclockwise always turning left but never xing a previous path xpanding out in wider + wider squarish circuls til we got to Spring + Bdwy did sum shopping then threaded the needle back to Washington Square

our CCW spireling post-Maphattan walk for 16 Nov

before google ppl read the writing on the wall

fall in the west village

far from the sistine

ever bombarded (still in the wake of reading Society of the Spectacle)

our sole solice in empty lots

+ residual adhesive

3 Lives bookstore

the new face of Astor place

already tagged in solidarity w/ the Parisians

bring it on punk ass bitches pt 2/ode to Joey

zooming in (on above lower right) we see Huck Finn in everything

> then went to Mercury Lounge saw sum mediocre band Dilly Dally tad bit uv talent + good @ mimicking Courtney Love + the Pixies but cant decide for themselves their own identity derivative of derivative so if say x = (80s punk) the 1° derivative f'(x) = 1 (Nirvana et al) + the 2° derivative f''(x) = 0 wich about sums up their worth > then ate sushi of corse

17 Nov> shifted south down near WTC if those punk ass bitchISIS decide to take it down again weed die fer sure room not reddy so we walked our better-½ uptown (alreddy breaking our vow to not cross 14^th st this trip) as far as Columbus circul came back downtown room still not reddy walked around downtown for another hour or 2 > in the past 2 days weave spent more time outside in the streets in NYC then we halve in the past 2 months in DC what does this say? for dinner ate @ Nobu in Tribeca

along the waterfront

18 Nov > our room looks down over the wtc footprint + all this reconstruxion + w/in the hotel room a loud humm coming from Σum generator feels like the insides of a giant mecaniacal beast 1 way to combat annoying noise = to flood the system w/ randumb white noise + w/ the window open even more of a din w/ the waterfalling of the footprint font the hole city a buzz w/ jackhammers + sirens + traffic ∀ll beecombing 1 w/ the chaos

the footprint + base of WTC 4

the new WTC

@ nite

> had nothing to read after finishing Society of the Spectacle so in ATL we picked up Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (not normally our type of book but the sol thing remotely worthwile we cd find) gess it meets the hype @ 1^st typickle bitching about how it sucks to = black in Amerikkka but slowly an originul angul emurges (still knot dun yet) not to gif nothing away but worth the read so far ± feels sumwhat requisit specially now that we live b-tween Baltimore + DC (where Coates = born + schooled) + Coates also speaks of NYC (where he now lives) as a comparatively leveled playing feeld for misfits ∀ll welcome > but still every thawt laced w/ blackness hard for him to think ± write bout nothing else it sucks yeah (not that weed know) + we trying to put ourselfs in them shoes hoping for the day when every1 (red black gay trans etc) can git to thinking past the 1 defining attribute that makes them Δiffrent ok so he writes like James Baldwin but how about sumthing even fresher + non-derivative taken to the next level (integrate rather than differentiate in mathmatickle terms)? kin we move on past the continued «restatement and retrenchment of the problem» as he himself says + beecomb ∀ll gray Amerikins sum a deeper ± more colorful shade than others but all of us gray ± beige but purhaps we naive ± in denile to think this all gonna just go away + turn gray do we still need to deal w/ such ghosts in the closet?

> 1 line we take away from Between the World and Me (all written as a letter to his son): «... feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway.» > what we rilly want to read = a book his son 1 day mite rite prompted by this > tho it will probly skip a generation

> it aint easy halving white/lite gray skin ether > the mortality rate of white Amerikin middle-class men = fast increasing sints 1999 while it declines in other populations of Amerika + the whorld > specielly suicide + substance abuse > our father came way ahead of the curve checking out in '82 + then our brother (tho not yet «middle-aged») in '97 > perhaps Krugman = on to Σumthing in correlating this trend to the self-destructive policies of republikkkans + the realization that the Amerikkkan dream = ∀ll a sham but we think it has to do w/ the guilt of white privilege (tho this dont explain why it only started increasing sints 1999) not just living w/ the historickle burden of slavery but knowing our country got founded by displacing native Amerikins here to b-gin > we never aksed for this birthrite > it also = akin to coming out born Muslim where not a trivial % of them kind = terrorists ± extremists but we dont see a lot of non-terrorist Muslims trying to make up for the bad apples > @ least a majority of Amerikins voted for a black president we ourselves cast our absentee ballot from Kenya where we fled largely from the disgrace of halving the same color skin as Bush > knot that this = enuf but it beecombs a symbolic start + calamari-wise we willing to take affirmative action if the rite manuscript came our way (for starters s/he needs to write about sumthing other than her own color)

18 Nov > walked around not quiet a spirel but a circut of the downtown parts knot covered in our spireling walk a few days ago > Tribeca to lower Soho (bot a raincoat + running shoes) to east village (ate tacos) + LES + Chinatown + past all the court buildings

Now Showing

speaking of black artists trying to capture the black xperience in contemporary Amerikkka
we stopped to see this «Anxious Men» show of Rashid Johnson

Anxious Men

back out on Wooster st

the hole city ever under deconstruction

19 Nov> + last nite Coates won the Natl Book Award @ an event a stones throw from here on Wall st > Delillo also got sum award he only gave speech after they turned off video good for him > we gitting used to that generator humm fast beecombing the new silencio

20 Nov> left a copy of The Becoming behind in place of the Gideon bible just like we halve @ the other places we occupied temporarily (why not we still halve a suitcase full of books) on this trip + now we @ the Marine Terminul LaGuardia headed «home» to DC if we can call it that

rising up from the ashes