RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

I love this city. I love that I can walk through the largest underground catacomb, the meeting point of the subway, the el, half a dozen underground trolleys and 9 regional rail routes. I love that I can walk through that nexus of transportation on a Saturday afternoon and find myself completely alone. It’s like being the last sinner on earth, scratching his way through a post-rapture apocalypse.

There’s a feeling of emptiness, but there’s also the sense of something enormously powerful. The final witness carries the incredible gift of being the final witness. It’s a privilege greater than being called en masse towards some beckoning light.

Being alone within the enormity of the city colors all that is observed with a thick brush of the surreal. When an events’ only witnesses are a single pair of eyes and the omnipresence of the empty space in which that event happens, you begin to call into question your own perception, or at least your own capacity to truly understand it.

Your only hope at remaining true to the greater witness of the space is to lose your own skewed ego and let yourself become a part of the space itself. I know this sounds troublingly western-filtered-eastern but there’s a difference. The space here is more terrifyingly surreal than any imagined Tibetan mountaintop. This is a city where buildings wander out of the mist like ships from a dream, and pigeons find a place to mate on the backs of sleeping homeless couples. This is why and what I photograph. I need the confirmation of a truly objective eye.

But why am I writing this testimonial? I heard something today that struck me as so arrogant and so incomprehensibly stupid, that I felt I had to share it with the anonymous public.

Like it or not, the steady march of gentrification is carried out in easily predictable stages. Like the early waves of fur trappers and bearded French traders who wandered into the North American woods, the first stage of territorial imperialism in our cities of today comes in the form of artists and self proclaimed outcasts. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this. Actually, there’s a lot that’s right with it.

My problem comes when an artist complains about his or her neighborhood gentrifying, as if his or her presence in that neighborhood was an isolated event and not indicative of the early stages of that very force. But what really disturbs me, is when that person pines openly for the days when human bodies littered the streets, drug addicts roamed like living ghosts through trash strewn vacant lots and cars were set ablaze nightly in acts of petty destruction and terroristic retribution. Today, I heard a person wishing exactly that for his neighborhood.

As annoying as one might find the conversion of a crack house into a corner café, a vacant lot into a community garden and a hulking mass of a decaying factory into $750,000 lofts (actually I’m not being quite as sarcastic about this last example) I can’t imagine any resident wishing to return to the days of living in a legitimate war zone. The arrogance of that impulse verges on the psychotic.

For a person who is himself a gentrifying force, claiming innocence of the fact and on top of that, wishing for the violent deaths of his pre-gentrification neighbors, is completely insane. The paradoxical loops of reasoning necessary to form such a mindset, perform miracles of self-delusion so powerful, they’d make an Escher print blush.

What makes this city surreal is not, under any circumstances, in any way, shape or form, being threatened. The strangeness of this place runs far deeper than any economic veneer can cover. This is a city where the busiest transportation hub in the most densely populated, wealthiest part of the town sits eerily vacant on Saturday afternoon. The nicely manicured Washington Square Park doubles as a mass grave for thousands of unidentified bodies. If you can’t find inspiration without fresh bodies lying in the streets, then it might be time to find another town.

This city is already full of ghosts. When the streets are empty and you stand alone in the dark; when the wind whipping between buildings makes you feel like you’re standing on some bald mountaintop and not in the middle of a 325-year-old city of a million and a half people; sometimes then you can feel their presence, watching, listening, and whispering their secrets.

All right Philadelphia, listen.

Enough with this ‘sixth borough’ crap. Just shut up. The city is acting like that kid with no self-esteem who constantly reminds everyone just how much they hate that hot popular boy. If things keep going this way, Philly’s gonna end up getting knocked up behind Newark after it gets too drunk on the 4 th of July. By next winter we’ll have some bell shaped Lady Liberty with a nasty crack staring awkwardly at us from the middle of the Delaware River.

So get over it and shut up already. I’m sorry Philly, but there’s something I have to tell you. New York doesn’t care. They can’t even hear you pretending to be outraged. No one in New York even knows who Jessica Pressler is. People up there don’t have any idea this whole thing is going on down here. And if you don’t shut up now, you’re only going to look that much more desperate when they actually do catch wind of it. I see it now.

(It’s the Fourth of July. Characters are at a catered barbecue with full bar. At an appropriate distance, fireworks flicker, brightening the night sky with a dazzling array of color)

Philly: Yeah, we’ve been pretty angry about that whole Sixth Borough article.

New York: The what…?

Philly: The sixth borough… some Philly writer wrote this article for the NEW YORK TIMES, and said that Philadelphia was the sixth borough… Jessica, O’ it doesn’t matter. (nervous laughter) Isn’t that silly? (smiles sheepishly. While leaning closer to New York spills her Continental Martini on New York’s Armani jacket)

New York: (brushing off stray liquid and speaking with disinterest) Oh, that’s funny.

Philly: The whole thing was months ago now.

New York: (sensing desperation) You know, I really like Philadel…

Philly: Yeah, it’s like we’re not our own… like New Yor… like you… (trails off, awkwardly presses its breast against New York while leaning over bar to order another drink. New York looks around with a sly smile, checks watch and gives Philly a lecherous once over.)

In the background, New Jersey is being removed from the scene by two bouncers. Breaking free, Jersey says he can walk out on his own. Exits.

But anyway… I’ve run a couple of experiments in the last week. I asked a young New Yorker whether he’s heard of this whole Philadelphia as the Sixth Borough thing. He said no. Thinking that maybe I’d just stumbled across some alarmingly out of touch individual, I tested google’s cultural barometer with a search for “sixth borough.” How many hits I wondered, would be from actual New Yorkers discussing the Philadelphia phenomenon? Maybe I’d find a few message boards with helpful tips for emigrating Brooklynites… blog after New York blog devoted to Philadelphia… features in all the major papers, lockstep behind the Times … Here’s what I found:

First hit: The last sentence of the last post of a dying blog. The 6 month old message boasts 0 comments. A harbinger of things to come? Yes.

Second hit: Songs from the Sixth Borough, the Philly band compilation, (who’s highpoint btw melds Ween with the Action News theme).

Third hit: A link to a Times article about New York’s actual, though entirely fictional sixth borough. It begins, ahem…

Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won’t read about it in any of the history books, because there’s nothing - save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park - to prove that it was there at all…

The Sixth Borough was an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water, whose narrowest crossing happened to equal the world’s long jump record, such that exactly one person on earth could go from Manhattan to the Sixth Borough without getting wet. A huge party was made of the yearly leap. Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. The children of New York captured fireflies in glass jars, which they floated between the boroughs…

In case you may be confused… they’re not talking about Philly.

Fourth hit: Wait, you’ll love this one. The next link is a page titled: Jersey City, the sixth borough. Looks like we’ve got some stiff competition.

Fifth hit: Well, there’s another link to the other Sixth Borough Times article.

Sixth hit: Long Island… the sixth borough.

Seventh hit: DJ Big Bobby Blast and his album, the Sixth Borough, Volume 8.

Eighth hit: and hold it, holy shit! There it is! A New Yorker. (or probably some 22 year old jackass from Connecticut who moved to Washington Heights 3 months ago) But anyway, whoever he was, he lived in New York City and he took the time to very briefly mention, dismissively, the infamous article. Recut and paste in it’s entirety:

Jessica Pressler, who wrote the strange Philadelphia-is- the-sixth-borough piece in the Times last weekend, talks to the blog Philebirty today and, between admitting that the whole thing was just a PR gimmick for the city and dropping a few too many f-bombs, basically ensures she’ll never write for the Times again. Also, she manages to insult all Times -reading New Yorkers:

The sixth borough concept was a good way to introduce New Yorkers to what’s been happening in Philly. It’s kind of like when you give a dog a pill–you wrap it in something you know they like, such as cheese.

Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario? We are? We’re the dog?

Well, if so: Grrrr.

Then, apparently, New York lost interest. After that, there were 8 or so consecutive Philly media/blog hits. The article, “Miami Beach the sixth borough”, briefly broke into the mix, but Philly hits returned in force thereafter.

And there you have it. Now shut up Philly. You look stupid.

Photos courtest of Philadelphia’s South Street, from 12th to 27th.

Well, I guess I should get the old holiday message off the top of the page here and get on with the New Year. I’ve got a lot to say; but unfortunately, or fortunately, or whatever or however you want to take it, most of it’s personal. So bear with me, as I get all uncomfortably familiar with you.

I’ve been away for a week. (staying with my girlfriend’s family in Northern California over Christmas) Aside from being sick for the last couple of days, I had a great and relaxing time. California is a beautiful place.

Just before I left, I did a photo shoot for Philly’s “2006 breakout band” Bumrunner. One of the shots and a small article headlines this week’s Philadelphia Weekly live music section. This is my first legitimate photo to make it onto actual newsprint. It’s not much and they didn’t bother to give me credit, but I still think it’s pretty neat. Photos from that set will probably be flying all over the place in the next few months. I’ll add that the photo at the top of the page, is not the published photo.

In other news, it feels like somebody crammed a cottonball into my right ear. Ever since I got off the airplane a couple days ago, it’s been all clogged up. I don’t recommend flying with a cold.

Since most of my search hits revolve around it, here’s a quick Toynbee tile update: In the world of the tiles, a whole new avenue has opened up. Actually it’s not an avenue, it’s a 16-lane highway, or maybe a jet plane, or maybe more precisely, a superadvanced, interdimensional vehicle of subtle energies and alien vibrational states… But more on that later.

Actually, now that I’ve started writing, I realized that I don’t have all that much to say, or maybe I’d just rather be doing something else. I’m still sick and I got a big old head of cauliflower. Maybe I’ll make some soup.