SIDE BY SIDE...A DIFFERENT WAY TO LIVE...

If you are heading off to New York City for a visit..…it might be relevant to know that perhaps the most transcendent and one of the most important characteristics about New York City is the fact that New York makes it very difficult to have distance, physical and visual, from other people….it is very unlike Malibu in that way…you can live in Malibu and almost never interact at all with anyone outside of your personal “contacts”, unless you want to buy something. You might see someone who is on the corner looking for work or even someone who is soliciting for money…but you will see them from inside your car…...you will be protected by the glass in your windows and the steel of your Range Rover……it likely won’t be human to human…it will be human to auto--certainly you will not be required to literally rub shoulders with someone who is not a potential facebook friend.

In New York…you are forced to be a part of the street life…..you are married to city life….subways, cab rides, bustle, people, sounds….it’s a full time job in New York City to keep yourself isolated…it’s much easier to be empathetic in New York City….much easier to feel a connection to those unlike yourself.

“Because of it’s shape, the narrowness, the way the neighborhoods are all pushed together, you are constantly being forced to, whether you want to or not…watch other people with wildly radical styles…that’s what a new Yorker in some way commits to” - Margo Jefferson

By contrast, Malibu is insular; for that matter, all of Los Angeles, with it’s commitment to the automobile, and freeways, and it’s vastly spread out landscape….allows us to avoid those who are not in our “circle”. It allows us to glance at the “untouchables” while traveling at 65 miles per hour. New York city requires that you engage with others…….you will be pressed up against others in the New York subway, whether standing or sitting…you might be sandwiched between, on one side, a lady wearing an old coat and mismatching shoes, who is barely above the poverty line…and on the other side…you could be squeezed against an older black man who was born in Nigeria, but now lives in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Standing in front of you holding the safety handle might be a very out of breath, successful Wall Street trader in an Armani suit who has been leaving hints of Dolce Gabbana in the wake of his mad dash to catch the train. There is no ”first class” in New York subways. A few feet away you might hear a conversation between two Latin American young girls in Spanish…you can hear it..smell it, feel it---it’s downright intimate. For long stretches your eyeballs are close to ”their” eyeballs.....you can almost feel their heartbeats....you are connected...And, all the while you are subterranean…dozens of feet below where the sun shines., surrounded by dirty concrete and tile.

It is, among many things, what makes New York City such a sublime, and human place….it’s ability to house (in tight quarters) so many people with totally disparate intentions…different socioeconomic circumstances….different ethnicities…..

Malibu has a few different conditions…just a few…it wouldn’t satisfy an archeologist….you won’t get a cross section of America in Malibu…..not even close….you get an outer crust….living at a safe distance….

just my opinions

Food for Thought...