New York Monk

I visited the house of a New York monk the other day. Tambourine player, rhythmic devil. Probably introverted, but gets around a lot. And lives in a tiny little hole in the wall in alphabet city just big enough for his drums and a bed. He's studying, working, constantly. Like so many people here. Difference is he's living in a highly gentrified, highly 'hot' Manhattan neighbourhood for a fifth of the market price. He's taken over the lease of some dancer who has lived there since the seventies. The game is up in December, when the lease runs out. Then he leaves town, probably for Africa.

Anyway, the point about this guy is that this is some kind of a message about New York city that's been chewing at me for a while. Every time I walk along Delancey or Allen St. I've got to think about Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed and the days when there were 45 performance artists of serious mettle writing rock operas in downtown Manhattan. I heard Laurie Anderson talking about this once, in a big room out in IMMA, in Dublin.

So she'd walk down Canal st. from her loft in the the Bowery or SOHO or wherever it was back in the seventies, and she'd meet all her friends along the way.. and the conversation would go like this:

"Hey, howya doin?"
"Great. How's the opera goin'?"
"Great. How bout yours?"
"Great".

There was a time when these monks OWNED downtown Manhattan. At least, they were everywhere. They lived in the lower east side and chinatown and it didn't cost them ten thousand dollars a month. And they worked. And they worked. Because that's what's going on here. People are working in New York City. Still. But the monks don't live around Tompkins Square Park anymore.

Not after December, anyway.