NYC 07

You should love New York. Every souvenir shop pushes one particular message: I (heart) NY, and when they say "I" they mean "you".

Therefore, you love New York.

They say it so much it must be true. In fact, everywhere you go in the city you get the reinforced message that this is The Greatest City In The World. The stores have the greatest deals, the restaurants have the greatest food, so on.

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"?

I have to confess that I haven't had too many awe-inspiring moments over the past few days in New York. There are impressive things here, to be sure. There is a little rush of excitement the first time you see the Empire State Building towering above 5th Avenue, likewise the Brooklyn Bridge and Liberty Island in the distance. Times Square is remarkable in its neon tackiness. But these uniquely impressive spots are undermined by the ordinariness of the spaces between.

The overall effect is similar to looking at a Seurat painting - the closer you get, the less cohesive the whole appears. You start to see the disparate individual elements that make up the whole, and sat next to each other in close proximity they don't seem that impressive. Like Seurat's La Grande Jatte you marvel at the beauty of it from afar and at the achievement of creating that beauty from up close. The real New York is not just the New York of popular culture. It is both less than and more than that.