The New York Image

"i was in love with a place in my mind" - sufjan stevens

I’m moving from Illinois to New York City. Many people have done that move, from a smaller less-known place to New York, so I won’t try to say anything fresh about it. New York City is constantly mythologized in American art, and lately I’ve been struck by that. It’s so different to be in a place that has launched so much art, especially because I’m not that familiar with the city so art is often my guide.

The feeling may wear off, and I’m not sure New York deserves its uniquely thorough mythologization, but I want to write about the images of New York in art that I remember now as I get ready to move. This isn’t all art about New York, it’s only art that I like, but this is a blog for media criticism and diary entries at the same time. This is art that I’ve liked from my entire life, but not listed in sequential order. I recognize that this is a very 26-year-old NYU freshman piece of writing, but I can only be myself. 

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• The New York City of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Taylor Swift opens her first true pop album with “Welcome to New York”. It’s a bright and optimistic song about new beginnings in the big city. 

• The New York City of Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Hamilton is the only piece of aspirational wealth media that fits into the Obama canon, a story of an immigrant who goes to New York seeking glory and finds it, but at what cost? Lin Manuel Miranda namedrops early America’s New York City to evoke the city it would become over the next two hundred years as America grew. He names specific places like Harlem and Wall Street that hardly could have had the same context then, imbuing the history with the context of now. It comes with an inherent self-affirmation in that the play was written to be performed on Broadway, so he's talking about the place where the audience is sitting. 

  

• The New York of “New York City” by They Might Be Giants. As a kid, I loved They Might Be Giant’s album Flood, but was bored by Factory Showroom, with the lone exception of “New York City”, which I would skip to on my parents CD-player and listen to exclusively. It’s a song of exuberant love for New York. For one verse he just lists locations. 

• The New York City of Stephen King’s The Stand, a novel about a plague that sweeps over America. One protagonist escapes plague-ridden New York City through Lincoln Tunnel on a motorcycle, and the tunnel is full of stopped traffic attempting to escape the city, with corpses killed by the plague in their cars. When I went to New York at age 13 I had just read The Stand and I thought it was so cool to see in real life a place I had read about in a book when we drove through Lincoln Tunnel on our taxi ride into the city from Newark Airport.

• The New York City of Joker (2019). Those big stairs in the Bronx. The way the subways are dark and yellow.  

• The New York City of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, where the Greek gods wait at the top of the Empire State Building. 

• The New York City of the opening line to Death Cab for Cutie’s song “Marching Bands of Manhattan”. It makes me feel how watery Manhattan is.

• The New York City of TikTok user WorldOfTshirts. I have a lot more to say about WorldOfTshirts, he’s my personal Chris Chan, but I think the way he’s showed New York to the world is great art about love for a place. I started watching him in January 2021, stuck inside my parent’s house, when he was a 19 year old kid who took the train in from Long Island to walk miles through New York with no discernible purpose, compulsively shooting video of basic New York landmarks like Times Square and Central Park because he loved them that much. Since then, his life has gone in sad directions at times, but his continued love for places like McSorley’s and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station has that same core of admirable love for the specific in a strange way, where he’s not part of that specific world but still loves walking through it.

• The New York City of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. This is New York at the turn of the 20th century, halfway between Hamilton and now, at its peak as global immigration destination. It’s a sprawling narrative that drifts between characters to capture New York’s entire social strata over a period of decades. There’s a part where a character nightwalks on the Brooklyn Bridge and sees the Milky Way galaxy in the sky which I think is cool because the streetlights and office lights in New York are too bright for that to happen now. 

• The New York City of Don Delillo. There's Underworld, which is sprawling and human like Manhattan Transfer, for a later time in New York’s history, based on Delillo’s own childhood in New York. And there's Americana and Cosmopolis, a city with upper floors of skyscrapers filled with very human capitalists aspiring towards wealth and still feeling empty when they achieve it, but loving the feeling of power they get along the way. 

• The New York City of Red Scare and Cum Town and Chapo Trap House, of sitting in apartments talking about interesting things because there are interesting and important people around you. 

• The New York City of “Anthems” by Charli XCX, a song about being bored in the house during the pandemic. New York is only referenced in this song as a throwaway phrase in the chorus, but it changes the whole thing for me. 

  

• The New York City of LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down” and “All My Friends”. This is the one that scares me the most. Where are your friends tonight?

• The New York City of All the Vermeers In New York (1990). A New York City that writes back to the Paris of Rohmer by casting a Rohmer girl as the lead, but its soul is more LCD Soundsystem. The main character dies of a brain hemorrhage from stressing himself out at his finance job when he has one brief moment of true human connection falling in love with a girl at a museum. A movie where New York museums are places to be hot in. 

• The New York City of The Goldfinch. I’ve only seen the movie, haven't read the book, sorry to all the Donna Tartt fans but I feel like I got enough out of the movie. In the story, a boy’s mother dies in New York during a terrorist attack on the Met, and he’s sent to live in Vegas, only to return to New York later. Las Vegas is cookiecutter suburbs, poorly built and empty. New York is dense and time-tested and wood-varnished, with museums and antique stores. 

• The New York City of Vampire Weekend’s debut album. This New York is dignified in its own youthful quirky way, but more importantly it gives access to dignity later in life outside of the city. 

• The New York City of Michael Crumplar’s autofictional? (definitely auto, sometimes fictional) Substack, of infiltrating fascist parties and namedropping lists of people from the internet that even I can’t always keep up with despite my life-crippling Twitter addiction. A New York with essential cultural importance to be reported on, but also one where he the writer and you the reader have agency in shaping its future. 

• The New York City of Logo Daedalus’s Selfie, Suicide. Like “All The Vermeers in New York” this is a New York of museums, but these museums have nothing left to say, as real art has died a painful death between shallow critical theory analysis from academic institutions and shallow marvelslop served up for the general public. This is a New York that Logo wanted to get out of when he was writing the book, and that very much comes across.

• The New York City of Ling Ma’s Severance. Like The Stand, this is a story of plague-ravaged New York, instead of bodies rotting in the city, people empty out to flee to the countryside before being taken over by the plague and becoming mindless zombies. Protagonist Candace stays in New York City because she has nowhere else to go, an aimless woman in her twenties with no other desires other than the structure of labor. She goes into her abandoned skyscraper office building for no reason as society collapses around her and her job becomes meaningless. The narrative jumps around between pre-plague New York and post-plague New York, and sometimes pre-plague New York feels just as empty. 

• The New York City of The Great Gatsby. A place where Midwesterners go to try to become coastal elite. (Back at the time of writing they just called it the West because we hadn’t made the second coast yet.)

• The New York City of Ladybird. Ladybird is a movie about Sacramento, but New York is present as a constant desire in the daughter’s mind during her oedipal coming-of-age battle against her mother, the place that she believes is more cultured than Sacramento. She describes Sacramento as “the Midwest of California”. Narratively the city is a small coda location from which she calls mom. 

• The New York City of the “September 11th Attacks” Wikipedia page.  

• The New York City of Crying’s albums Beyond the Fleeting Gales and Get Olde/Second Wind. I listened to Crying a lot in 2016/2017, and I think my Gen-Z readers would like them. They're a softer version of hyperpop, sort of like 8485, but they did it before hyperpop existed. I don’t know if I can explain what their vision of New York is, or if they try to have one, but I’ve been listening to Crying again and remembering that I really like them.

• The New York City of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s War & War. Protagonist Korin becomes entranced with a mysterious outsider art manuscript that he finds in his home country of Hungary, so he flees across the globe to New York City to transcribe it and upload it to the internet so it’s enshrined in its immortal archives. He chooses New York because he sees it as the center of world culture. Because the internet is everywhere he has no real reason to be in New York, besides the feeling that being in the big American city gives him. He spends most of his time alone in a cheap apartment with sketchy landlords that end up being involved in crime. Before he set out from Hungary he planned to kill himself in New York after publication of his manuscript, because he could see no purpose for life beyond this piece of art. 

• The New York City of the lines in The 1975’s song “When We Are Together” when Matty Healy says “and we were searching New York for a fancy new apartment, she said Central Park is SeaWorld for trees.” New York does have trees, but I’m going to miss the way the trees are here.