i imagine our dream catcher would be filled with fingers intertwined like the braids in our hair and that one feeling when your toes turn to liquid. i imagine, if we wanted to, we could take apart the fabric of our most favorite and most secret dreams and hide them in our floorboards for those nights when the moon just doesn’t shine bright enough, when the harmony is just a note or two off.

weegee please

“People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film.“
-Weegee

Weegee was the pseudonym of photojournalist and photographer Arthur Feelig. Born in Usher Felli, Weegee and his family moved to New York in the early 1900s to avoid antisemitism. Feelig’s nickname was derived from the word Ouija due to his frequenting crime scenes and fires directly after the police arrived at the scene. He was best known as a candid news photographer documenting the streets of New York City with his black and white photography.

In 1938, Weegee was the only New York photographer allowed to carry around a police-band radio which allowed him to arrive at the scene of the crime almost immediately. With his innovative dark room staged in the trunk of his car, Fellig was able to get his photographs out the newspapers first. Although you would never know it from his imaginative and beautiful photographs, Weegee was a self-taught photographer and often claimed to know nothing of the New York City art photography scene.

His reputation spread quickly and Fellig became of the most notable photographers of his time, and is best known for his collection of photographs titled The Naked City.

maybe its not all as bad as i thought

good morning new orleans. this is where my grandma used to live, and my sister’s house used to be. and the levee where it all began. here is the parade route, the trees are covered in beads and the street is covered in beer bottled graffiti. here is my high school that was once an Italian orphanage. across the street is the graveyard where i had my first kiss. here is the gumbo shoppe, mother’s poboys, angelis, nacho mamas. food better than you can even imagine. this is where teenagers go to get fucked up. this is where tourists go to get fucked up. everyone in new orleans thinks its so great to be fucked up, but maybe new orleans is just so fucked up. welcome to the chocolate city. this is the superdome. this is where my elementary school used to be, notice it’s now best buy. welcome to the big easy. heres bourbon street and st. claude avenue and peoples street and you can’t ever really get out of here street. welcome home.

lights

Throughout time thousands of influential authors and poets have brought their journeys to rest in New York City, every one of them viewed the city from their own eyes and saw it as something individual and remarkable or something to one-day walk away from. For E.B. White, as demonstrated in his essay “Here is New York”, there were three New Yorks. There was the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who too often takes it for granted yet accepts it for what it is. Then there is the New York of the commuter, who spends the majority of his time traveling to and from the city that it becomes something about time and escape and not about the little things that make the city unique. And finally there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and moved to New York to become a part of something. To White, this is the most remarkable of the three because this New York is a goal and escape and something of first love in a sense. For Alfred Kazin’s in “From the Subway to the Synagogue”, New York was something he was a part of but not necessarily in. Having grown up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York seemed a million miles away. “ ‘New York’ was what we put last on our address, but first in thinking of the others around us”. Kazin had Brownsville and New York, but they were two different worlds because Brownsville represented his family and the families surrounding him journey to America and the quest to make something out of nothing. It was filled with all races and religion encompassed and one and the New York brilliant lights were so far away.

Joan Didion’s New York was the one that I feel I most relate to. She saw New York as a city for “only the very young”. She came to New York thinking she would leave within in a few months but ended up staying for eight years. It was a place that she fell in love with, but not in colloquial way. It was the gold and parties and never staying in one place permanently because she was figuring it out on her own and warmly embracing the new faces, to prove to herself that she could do it on her own. For Didion, the New York she knew eventually died down and did prove to be the city for the very young. The new faces and adventures diminished, and she finally “understood the lesion in the story, which was that it is distinctly possible too stay too long at the fair.” Edward Abbey’s New York was not actually New York but Hoboken, New Jersey. In “Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night”, New York was across the lengths of water or train and bus journeys for day escape from the gray lights and sulfur dioxide. Although he loved New York he believes it was “doomed”, the human hatred was spread amongst the boroughs but still something of prophesy and liberty in America. The last of New York’s is one of vermin and adventure. In “People and Their Streets, Places” Sarah Schulman reminisces on her friendship with Killer and her desire to shoot the rats of the tumultuous city, “picking them off the way hillbillies shoot squirrels”. It is about her memories of a time when money wasn’t following but friendships and witnessing time was all that really mattered. New York was something different just as it is for everyone ultimately.

 

First glance at New York City and a million different eyes are open to a million different new beginnings or endings for dreams. Some fall in love, most don’t understand, and for some it’s just a stopping point for something bigger. For me it was where everything finally came alive. I was no longer stuck in my adolescent dreams in the swamp land of Louisiana; I was apart of something bigger. New York was entirely romantic for me. It was my escape. It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of any mystery delusion allusion or magic, but the first time I ever stepped foot on those icy streets I gave birth to something. I was drunk on everything and nothing. Just like Joan Didion said in her personal essay, “Goodbye to All That”, that New York was “instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself…” When I leave New Orleans to come back to my home on Willoughby and Myrtle I get that little pinch in my ribs, like a little salty sentiment. And though I may not currently be living the life that I thought I would do when I came here, I am still apart of the magic.

 

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