Cheap Novelties

"Ben Katchor has an incredible eye for minute details. You see in this book a profoundly New York sensibility, which is very different from these other authors. It is not a mandarin sensibility, but it is piercingly intelligent and observant. If you read this book, or any of his books, you are going to get a view of New York that is not available anywhere else. Katchor might be galaxies away from Howard Moss or Jimmy McCourt or Dawn Powell or Dorothy Parker but there were and there are numerous authentic versions of New York. Each one of these books gives you an authentic version of New York, even if the thing that is authentically New York is just the author’s sensibility. This book was published in the early 90s. You see what New York used to look like. He ended up recording something that has disappeared. When he did these drawings, some of what he depicted was already gone and some was still there. His consciousness is a kind of a collage, and of course there is nothing more contemporary than that. The first time I met Katchor – and I don’t really know how old he is but I would say around my age, which is 500 – we were talking about some old place and he said, “You know, that delicatessen culture is gone.” That’s not all his book is about. It’s about how everything in New York is always changing. This is one of the things I find heartening. The present day New York will also disappear should Bloomberg ever relinquish his ill-gotten throne. There is a subtitle to this book… New York has always, always, always – from the Dutch until this day – been about real estate. But it was a billion real estate people – it was not centrally planned, which it now is. In that way, Bloomberg is like Mao. One of the things that Bloomberg did was make a plan for knocking down New York and building up Marina del Rey, or whatever he thinks this is. That was never done before. It changed New York immensely, the way that it changed the country immensely. To me the primary way it changed this country was that Americans could not wait to give up their civil liberties. They practically stampeded to give away their civil liberties. And safety became a countrywide preoccupation. In fact, I would say it took hold even more outside the city. That’s all you would hear: “Safety, safety, safety”. I think there is nothing more dangerous than constantly thinking about safety. I’m not saying it’s good to get blown up – it’s horrible. I’m not saying it was not scary. I lived here – it was very scary. It’s scary to be attacked, but Europe has been attacked numerous times and they did not race to give up the things that they valued. I really hope it will change back, in the sense that I really hope that people will stop being so afraid. What the reaction to 9/11 showed me is that not many Americans valued their civil liberties. But I did and I do. So, to me, that’s a very bad legacy of 9/11. New York prospers. This morning [in 2009], on the New York news, I saw Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the state assembly, talking about how great the new “Freedom Tower” was doing, how it’s all leased out. As if what happened was merely a real estate disaster. That neighbourhood, which was once called the Financial District and is now known as Ground Zero, is apparently very commercially buoyant. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but to me that wasn’t the main thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Present-day New York has been made to attract people who didn’t like New York. That’s how we get a zillion tourists here, especially American tourists, who never liked New York. Now they like New York. What does that mean? Does that mean they’ve suddenly become much more sophisticated? No. It means that New York has become more like the places they come from. That won’t last. What is immutable about New York is that it’s always changing and it’s relatively hard to live here – relative to the places where people drive from mall to country club. It’s expensive, it’s not necessarily clean and you have to walk. So I think, in the end, the people who will be in New York are the people who deserve to be here – people like me."