The city slows me down
In my recent travels to different cities, there’s a moment where the city snaps into view. There’s no use willing this moment into reality: each trip is different, the city revealing itself without warning. In my inveterate pursuit of connection with all the places I’m lucky enough to experience, it’s this moment of sudden blinding clarity that becomes realer than reality itself, a shimmering vision of my surroundings, slowing time down to nothing.
I made my way to Los Angeles for the second time in my life about three weeks ago, there to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Academy Museum’s John Waters retrospective, which I’d written about for The Baffler a few months prior. My first trip came in 2017, at a moment where I was functionally unemployed, adrift in my own life, not particularly sure what I was seeking. Alienated by the city’s overwhelming reliance on the automobile, always my nemesis as a biker and public transit user, I could not find much purchase on that visit, and the city’s charms remained a mystery to me.
That changed this year. After nearly getting stuck in pouring rain on my first day, phones malfunctioning, feeling like I was recreating the nightmare of my first trip, my friend Carter scooped me from the onrushing traffic, taking me to see the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense, coincidentally shot just a few miles down the road. The next day, just after a newfound sense of purpose illuminated the writing work I’m engaged in, I found myself ascending an infinite escalator to the top level of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where time stilled to nothing. There, as I relistened to the band play “Heaven” and “Once In A Lifetime” and “This Must Be The Place (Native Melody)” and Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” that feeling overcame me: nobody could describe it better than David Byrne, the words “Oh heaven, heaven is a place/a place where nothing/nothing ever happens” ringing in my ears, my presence wholly subsumed by the radiant vista before me.
I returned from New Orleans on Saturday, where I also just took my second trip, there for a week to convene with folks from around the country involved in Right to the City Alliance, a trans-local body of radical organizers working to change their cities, there to swap lessons and foster solidarity in our struggles. Unlike LA, I’d had a better time in New Orleans on my first visit: there to celebrate my 25th birthday and year anniversary on hormones in 2019, I’d been in a body more able to appreciate its surroundings, grazing the kinetic spark that the city encouraged. I knew I’d find my way back eventually, and having the chance to visit and build relationships with countless others fighting similar battles for justice across the country was exactly the excuse I needed to return.
On this trip, the city came into view on Tuesday night. After a lively day of workshops and panel discussions at the conference, I carved a niche of solitude into my evening, first biking to a bar named Siberia for dinner, before drifting on foot towards my colleague Antonio to see a show at Preservation Hall. Though my boot-black feet stepped methodically onwards down Frenchman Street and towards the Hall, my body’s motion seemed beyond conscious control, the city tugging me about wherever it pleased. I found myself peering into a window display where traditional New Orleans jazz instruments had been recast as glowing lamps, there for no other reason but to enchant curious passersby.
I chatted with people like Banjo Nate and King David, evanescent companions in the nocturnal city, the first but not the last strangers to intersect flowing pathway through the night, sharing space in an instant and then moving along. Wherever “I” might have been in that moment became irrelevant: far more compelling was the city that suffused my conscious awareness, my senses swallowed into rapturous attention at every passing detail, everything and everyone a vivid splendor.
On my first trip to Louisiana, I’d been in blissful solitude on a bikeshare when an older Black man saw me cruise by, singing Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” in joyous recognition of the chapeau on my head. It’s a moment that’s stayed with me ever since, a three-second interaction passed between strangers, unscripted and unforgettable. Once more, I’d donned my red beret, an object that’s always possessed an unnamable magic to me; once more, someone I’d never met before sang Prince’s sweet tune, collapsing time and space into itself for an instant. In these encounters, and in the raucous 45-minute set that the Preservation Hall All Stars played a little while later, my body vibrated with impossible resonance, a tuning fork in endless harmony with its surroundings.
Los Angeles and New Orleans are both extremely vibey. It feels impossibly goofy putting it so bluntly, but anyone who has spent time in either place knows the feeling. Whether it’s a product of perpetual temperate conditions, forcing the body’s energy to graze the city with minimal friction, or perhaps some indefinable cultural force stamped upon the city’s residents, you’re always liable to fall into unplanned encounters, a stray compliment or even a simple nodding head enough to say: I see you. So it comes as no surprise to me that I find myself this ever-flowing conversation, a comfortable blanketing sensation of openness making real connection possible around every blind corner.
Attending this conference, forming emergent ties with organizers from scores of cities with facing challenges not unlike Chicago’s, I had plenty of time to ponder what a right to the city means in my life. The framework was first developed by French geographer Henri Lefebvre in the late 60s, emerging from the spontaneous, determined resistance of Parisian students and workers against the stifling norms of an affluent society, the people longing for a connection to their homes that the market could never deliver. With global warming promising the imminent destruction of places like New Orleans, sea levels overwhelming these low-lying places, a substantial right to the city has never been more pressing, and more perilous. How long can we even lay claim to the places we call home, or find ourselves as visitors, knowing all the chaos that looms just out of view?
These are impossible, stomach-dropping questions. I try not to imagine the wholesale destruction of a place like New Orleans, though we’ve seen this already play out once before, the ruling class using Hurricane Katrina as a purging mechanism, sweeping as many of its downtrodden out to sea, or at least elsewhere. To not repeat this violence will require a fundamental transformation of our values, and our relationship to place. The city, not as tourist trap, Airbnb ghost town, or moneymaking machine. Instead, the city as connector, facilitator of fleeting joy, refuge for the down-and-out, still in need of shelter and hope for a better tomorrow.
There’s no use forecasting how soon the next big disaster may come, though we know it can happen anytime, anyplace, the lives within an entire city left hanging in the balance, their fate on the other side to be determined. This uncertainty can become paralyzing, the likelihood of imminent destruction enough to steal away one’s breath, leaving behind only a gloomy fatalism. I find myself in that place often, nightmares dancing before my eyes, so little on the big scale there to deter this anxious fretting.
But the city slows me down, grabs my hand, pulls me within its protective spell. We delight in not knowing what comes next, who may be awaiting us on the next corner, what chance encounters with likeminded souls might make a better future more attainable. I believe this city is everywhere, always within the spirits of anyone wanting to make space for branching sidewalks and leafy parks inside themselves. I saw the vast unimaginable depths of these places in each person I met on this trip, our mutual curiosity enough to draw us deeper into the grid, never quite sure what we might find on our journey together.