26th August 2010
Went south from Washington Square, and found myself in a semi-pedestrianised cobblestoned heaven / hell of chi-chi restaurants. (Ah, so this is SoHo…) One was all terrace, with lunch time fashion types sunning themselves; that is, if potential eyes could constitute a sun. But there were almost no rubber-neckers, because all potential witnesses were themselves studiously checking their digital communicative equipment, checking their make up, or talking to a friend who was doing the very same.
The café I’d been looking for, Olive’s, recommended in the NFT for its amazing sandwiches, had a queue going out the door. (How much of their lunch break did people spend queuing for the perfect sandwich? It reminded me of something a young Hispanic architect had told me at 6 a.m. while tailgating at Bryan and Laura’s truck under a raised section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, after their gig at Union Pool in Williamsburg. He said that when you were making good money, when you’d worked so hard to get to where you had, finally, arrived, you thought nothing of queuing for half an hour at the restaurant that served the best ramen, Kobé steak, the latest sushi, “because you deserved it.” Though it sounded a tad like the L’Oréal worldview, I knew what he meant.) Nearby, office girls sat on window ledges with their legs crossed, drinking plastic cups of iced coffee, checking their text messages so as to appear occupied, and not be seen vulnerably eating alone on such strange perches three feet off the ground. Sporty women, slim, forty-ish, went by with baby strollers like designer tanks. The sight of babies in Manhattan had a touch of the alien about it: of a customised humanity, cyborgised – not by technology, but by money: the feeding tubes of sheer liquidity it took to raise children in this environment.
Women passed behind mirrored shades, in black mini-skirts and polished black leather boots; bangles and necklaces jangled on their perfect, barely-moving breasts. They had severe Cleopatra fringes, like designer biker chicks without bikes, as if they’d just come back from shopping for an identity. Guys in check shorts, thick-rimmed prescription glasses, and de rigeur pork pie-esque hats stood around talking, like nerds who’d suddenly discovered they were hip. A blond, tanned, muscular dude in a white vest and jeans walked past the restaurant. He was handsome enough to be a Calvin Klein model (and probably was) but no one noticed him. No one was looking at, or watching, any one else.
I went to look for a café somewhere else. Who knows, maybe in a year’s time I’ll be queuing for the perfect sandwich, but not yet.
New York Peristalsis 