what new york looks like

[woops]

I feel that I should in fact clarify a few things and add a couple of addendums... addenda? Whatever.

Firstly, this woman, her surname was Aylesbury, exactly the same as the town, and whenever I saw an email from "Aylesbury" I knew it would be either a complaint or a threat or something "you're spoiling the look of the flats by hanging the washing out of the window" or "You're three thousand pounds behind in service charge fees and we're going to approach your mortgage lender and do some complicated legal process involving them to get that money which means you'll be at risk of losing your house" etc etc and I just grew to hate the name Aylesbury so much and when I would go and visit my girlfriend who lived in Oxford the bus would always pass this sign on the motorway saying turn off here to Aylesbury and that would bring me out in cold sweats... in fact, it still does.

But what kind of person takes over the committee of a block of flats that she doesn't even live in? I guess she owned the house that her bullying progeny inhabited which gave her a tenuous financial interest, but why on earth should she give a fuck if there is washing hanging out the window when she is in fucking Surrey or wherever she lives? How does she even know? Who is reporting that to her so that she can complain?

And best of all, when I finally fucking moved out... she sent me a friend request on facebook!!!! What's going on there? Did she still want to maintain some kind of presence in my life?

Also, @woops was it you who slept in the lobby that time? I have a feeling that it was either you or Iwan that she pretended she thought were some random "tramps" who had somehow penetrated the outer defences, when she knew full well they were my friends. Basically this was a recurring theme with them pretending to think that anybody they didn't recognise who was within the outer wall was a potential criminal who ought to be gunned down on sight. Another occasion was when a friend who was staying with me got home like ten minutes in front of me and I had given them the door key but they had forgotten the combination to the gate so they couldn't get into the grounds to use the key - luckily Simon (which was the name of her walking pussball of a son) was there on the drive and they said "Excuse me mate, we're guests of Richard in flat 6, you probably saw us leave with him, an hour or so back and we have his key here but unfortunately we don't know the combination, so, would you be so kind as to let us through the gate?" and with utter predictability he said "Oh I'm so sorry, I just can't do that, it's too much of a security risk, I'm sure you understand".

This bit from the thing above when I needed an excuse for kicking down the door I actually simplified for brevity (yes Edmund I know)



In actual fact, I had a friend staying with me who was this weird compulsive liar. He literally had a problem where he just told weird and unnecessary lies all the time. He had come up to visit that day and we had gone on a stupendous drinking session, which was why I was so wankered that I booted the door in instead of remembering that if the electronic key wasn't working, there was a normal key attached to which you could just stick in the keyhole....

Anyhow, while we were out drinking this guy told me that he had a terminal disease and that he would be dead in five or six years. I didn't for one second think that this was true, but it stuck in my head a bit and so when I was trying to explain what had come over me, rather than just saying "I'm a really stupid hooligan who drank far more than he could manage and acted like an absolute bell-end" I thought it would be better to include the fact that I had just, very sadly, discovered that my friend had a terminal illness and would be dead within five years. And I guess it did help, meaning that all I had to do was pay six hundred fucking quid for the door and apologise to a few people and basically it was all forgotten. But the weird irony is, that Mark did die two years ago - admittedly not from early onset Alzheimers as he had predicted but from liver disease due to his chronic alcoholism.

well i don't think it was me sleeping in the hallway but your neighbours might well have thought you had tramps round just on sight of me doing whatever so i dunno

 

[IdleRich]

well i don't think it was me sleeping in the hallway but your neighbours might well have thought you had tramps round just on sight of me doing whatever so i dunno

That neighbourhood became totally full of cunts as it got posher. I remember my flatmate (Adam not Alex) just standing on the patio outside our french window smoking a cigarette and someone from another block of flats, not even part of our complex started shouting all "excuse me, are you supposed to be there?" - er, yes, I live here.
Also, when I finally did sell the flat (oh thank fucking christ) I was doing like a handover to the woman from this couple who had bought it and I was just giving her the key and showing her a few things... I dunno, where the bins were, that kind of thing. As I told her the combination for the gate, the final piece of the jigsaw I suppose, her new nextdoor neighbour leaned out of her window and started having a go at me "excuse me, why are you telling that woman the combination to the gate?" and I said "She has just bought the flat so she lives here, thank you for making her feel so welcome" and, pressing the keys into the slightly shocked new owner's nerveless hand, Liza and I waltzed off round the corner, checked into a boutique hotel and spent £1,000 on an enormous delivery of drugs.

 

[woops]

That neighbourhood became totally full of cunts as it got posher. I remember my flatmate (Adam not Alex) just standing on the patio outside our french window smoking a cigarette and someone from another block of flats, not even part of our complex started shouting all "excuse me, are you supposed to be there?" - er, yes, I live here.
Also, when I finally did sell the flat (oh thank fucking christ) I was doing like a handover to the woman from this couple who had bought it and I was just giving her the key and showing her a few things... I dunno, where the bins were, that kind of thing. As I told her the combination for the gate, the final piece of the jigsaw I suppose, her new nextdoor neighbour leaned out of her window and started having a go at me "excuse me, why are you telling that woman the combination to the gate?" and I said "She has just bought the flat so she lives here, thank you for making her feel so welcome" and, pressing the keys into the slightly shocked new owner's nerveless hand, Liza and I waltzed off round the corner, checked into a boutique hotel and spent £1,000 on an enormous delivery of drugs.

this is such a sad story

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah it is really. I don't understand why everyone with money has to be so unfriendly. The woman who moaned about the combination I had never seen before, that was my first and last interaction with her... her disembodied head appearing at a window to misguidedly verbally abuse a couple of total strangers.
And why the fuck was everyone so precious about the fucking combination anyway? For one thing there were like fifty different flats and so it was opening and closing every twenty seconds anyway with residents coming in and out, the postman, friends, deliveries etc etc It broke pretty much every other day and that meant either a) it was wedged open and literally ANYBODY could walk near to the flats, you know. like they can with any other normal flat... or b) it was wedged shut and no-one could get their cars (or possibly their bodies) in or out.
I read once that people who live in a gated community don't end up feeling any safer, in fact, they tend to adjust so that, within the gated area, they feel the same level of security they felt previously on the street, but on the actual street once they leave the (pretend) safety of Artisan Court (or whatever) they are often suddenly struck by the staggering reality that anyone at all is allowed to walk down that street. They might be poor or uncouth or they may have even been to prison and there is no-one to vet them and check that you are safe when you are near them... and even if someone did vet them it would do you no good because shouting "excuse me this is private property" would have no effect - even Tricia's authority was not recognised there
When I moved in there the Spurstowe was a local pub, then it shut and reopend with beers double the price and everything more hipster and it priced out most of the locals. A few years later it closed and reopened again and now it had priced out all the people who had started coming after the first price rise.
It had a happy end for me though, it was great fun being a tourist in Dalston for a few days, Staying in cute hotels, eating cakes from Violet and so on... just doing all the stuff that you should be able to do in Hackney but which most of the time most of the people can't afford.

 

[shakahislop]

i mean look at just this one sign. the sticker game is a thing in its own right and this is a noticeably sticker-saturated bit of metal, but there a few distinctive things going on here. that green pole is a uniform thing about nyc, distinct, recognisable. the yellow Kest Gak sticker is probably the most ubiquitous sticker in the whole city, or honestly the most ubiquitous bit of graffiti, it is absolutely everywhere and i wonder to myself: how the fuck do they get up so much? then towards the bottom which is the easiest bit to reach if you have to jump up to slap the sticker on, there's several layers of stickers, some of them must be ancient, actually loads of these stickers must be pretty old coz you don't see them around, the only one that i recognise is the Trades Only Bro one on the right.

beyond paying attention to the stickers themselves, just that there are loads of them on a piece of public property is communicating something moderately abstract about the territory. if you pay attention to each sticker there is a whole world of ambiguous meaning.

 

[shakahislop]

talking to a couple of friends about marseille (where one of them is stuck with a new corona infection) and napoli, about how divisive they are for visitors. and how much of whether or not people get off on them is about how dirt, struggle and poorness are coded and interpreted for them. marseille is a straight up affront to the sense of taste of a decent chunk of french people i think, which is partly that they don't like north african immigration, but which is partly an aesthetic judgement as well, about what is good and what is bad.

nyc is exactly like that as well. i was walking down 14th st today and noticed a mexican place that i'd been wondering where it was for ages. i went and got a burrito there in my first month in the city. at that point i thought so much of the city was a total shithole and i totally didn't get it. something like downtown manhattan which is full of cars, roads, 1950s tall buildings, a million people on narrow pavements, scaffolding, everything covered in graffiti (not murals, mostly tag after tag), people in expensive clothes with haircuts, these bare bones resturants like this mexican one with metal chairs that they hardly heat so you end up eating wearing a hat: all of that from a euro sensibility is coded as bad, ugly, shithole etc.

notice it a lot with visitors from the uk, especially those who live in nice southern cities, bristol and brighton, that kind of thing, that they are a bit affronted by nyc and do not get it. it takes time to do that rewiring, where you re-interpret things that you think are bad as being good. whereas i think it's already done through the media for americans.

 

[IdleRich]

notice it a lot with visitors from the uk, especially those who live in nice southern cities, bristol and brighton, that kind of thing, that they are a bit affronted by nyc and do not get it. it takes time to do that rewiring, where you re-interpret things that you think are bad as being good. whereas i think it's already done through the media for americans.

I have to say that this was not at all my experience of NY - although that was a long time ago and, the one thing I would be confident of saying about the place is that, as a living big city ought, it changes. My own - extremely trivial - experience of this comes from two visits about ten years apart.

In 2001 I went with a girlfriend, I remember that one thing I ate a lot of, for a number of reasons - it was on virtually every breakfast menu I saw, I had never had it before which made me want to try it, and when I did I really liked it - was grits. When I returned to UK that "fish out of water" film with Joe Pesci when he leaves New York and goes to... not New York (My Cousin Vinny I think) happened to be on telly and I watched it. A big part of the plot turns on the fact that Pesci, being from New York, has never eaten or even heard of grits but he learns how to cook them and with that knowledge he is able to get his client off a murder charge or something. So watching that I was going "What do you mean he aint heard of grits? That's practically the only thing they eat in the whole city; morning, noon and night".

Fast forward ten years and I am going back to New York with a friend*. We are on the plane and I tell him how much I am looking forward to eating grits. What's that he asks? No need to tell you my friend I replied, confident in the knowledge that we would be basically showered in them from the moment we disembarked from the plane. Except what do you know? You can't get grits anywhere for love or money. I guess that the previous time I went there was for the week when they were fashionable. And that's cool, I like it when things are changing like that... but I do kinda wish that when there is a good idea it could get a bit of a toe-hold and not be utterly obliterated by the next trend that comes along.

So yeah, when I was in NY I didn't find it at all as you describe but maybe I would now. Although come to think of it, when we stayed the first time it was in this hostel in the Bowery which literally had homeless people sleeping in the foyer, I can see that that would put some people off. I remember the guy on the desk said we should see the room before we checked in cos a lot of people took one look at it and decided to stay somewhere else. That was completely out of the question as we were far too drunk to even think about attempting to negotiate our way to a new place. They had free drinks on the plane and, exercising typical restraint, Mel drank herself unconscious and I was only slightly behind her, when we landed they refused to let us through customs until we had sobered up so by the time we got to the hotel it was about midnight. The rooms were like toilet stalls in that the walls didn't reach the floor or ceiling, but we were young, we had no valuables and we couldn't afford anywhere else.




*A holiday that came close to being cancelled as, shortly before we went, I went camping with this guy and apparently he seriously questioned his ability to share a room for nine days with someone who snored like that.

 

[shakahislop]

There's one graffiti tag here, which always makes me laugh when I see it, which is simply the word 'fart'.