Delights for the Ingenious

Last night I decided it was time I got away from the Upper West Side for a change, so I went downtown to see Cat Power playing at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. It was a free concert, which meant that some people had (free) tickets which they'd got their hands on at some point in the previous weeks, and everyone else, like me, had to stand outside and wait to see if there was room. Luckily there was.
( ...sorry )

I tend to have certain expectations of everywhere I go. For one thing, having moved around a fair bit in my time, I, quite naturally, treat each arrival as a new departure in my life, the beginning of a new episode. I always liked to imagine that when I arrived at my next destination I would be able to re-invent myself to a certain degree, and I would construct fantastic scenarios of what my future in that new place would have in store for me. With age these possible futures of mine have grown less and less fanciful and unlikely, largely, I assume, because I have grown increasingly satisfied, or at the very least conscious, of 'who I am', and so I no longer feel such a strong urge to recast myself as someone else in this new play which is about to unfold.
There are other factors which play a part as well, though. Ten years ago, when I was moving to Denmark, I had very little concept of the place I was going or what life would be like there, or indeed how it would be different. Consequently, I was able to construct an entirely personalised vision of how this new stage in my life would be. As my knowledge and indeed awareness of the outside world has grown, the scope of my fantasies has, as I say, diminished, but it has by no means vanished completely.
However, I sense a palpable difference between the way I envisioned this latest move of mine, and my feelings about moving from Denmark to Switzerland some fifteen months ago. I suppose the principal difference between moving to somewhere like Lausanne and moving to someplace like New York is the degree of preconception involved. Lausanne was pretty much a clean slate in that regard, and although I can't claim to remember having constructed baroque mental schemata prior to taking up residence there, my experience of living there was quite immediate precisely because of the lack of specific expectations.
With New York on the other hand, although I'd never physically set foot here until last Sunday, it is such a prominent and ubiquitous presence in Western culture that you can't help but have a whole host of notions and prepossessions about New York that you've absorbed through the years. And I can't help feeling that as a result my own first impressions of the city, which I was hoping to make the subject of my first journal entry from over here, have been crowded out by all these vicarious impressions of a city I barely know. The closest I've come to an 'epiphanic' (if that's the right word) moment was when the SuperShuttle from the airport crested a hill and the Manhattan skyline loomed up ahead, and that sudden apparition provoked a surge of—what?—recognition, I suppose, coupled with a delayed realisation of where I actually was. Apart from that, I recognise the street names, and it's interesting to be able to locate them within my personal experience as well as the mythical pseudo-experience everyone has had of Madison, Park, 5^th, etc. Avenues, but so far there has been no profound moments; Times Sq. did nothing for me except make me want to get away from all those tourists, and Broadway looks pretty much like any big city street.
I suspect that it is in part the legendary status of this city which makes me feel as though I should be having large-scale emotive reactions to actually being here, together with the old wide-eyed dreamer in me, but I also suspect that because of 'what' this place is, it will take me a good deal longer than a week to push all those preconceived ideas out of the way and make room for some sentiments and impressions of my own. So until such a time as I am able to provide some sort of cohesive, overarching 'view' of New York City life, my tales of the city shall remain primarily anecdotal.

But then I think that's how I prefer them.
And I can only hope that you do too.