Across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.
The rooftops of New York, old buildings with grand roofs.
Jazzmen practicing, knowing the way in, knowing the sound.
Practice space, naah, who cares, this is SoHo this is out there, this is Tribeca.
The artists like the music, said it helps them paint. Be abstract. Be different. Be unique, be themselves.
The whole neighborhoods are cooking with a boho slaint. Poor kids, dreamers, artists.
New York – big, huge, a dream.
A place of wonder. A place where if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.
Cheap lofts. Old tenaments. Lots of space, high ceilings, old, really old.
Chipped paint, rusty walls, rusted metal.
Found objects, cheap paint, make do. Hope to impress someone, hope to sell something. Don’t come here to just wait tables, wash dishes, do the dirty work.
No the is a place to dream, perchance to love. The big apple, the big, rotting, crazy, manic apple.
These were places of horrors, of heat, of low wages, of manipulative bosses. Dirty lower Manhattan. Sure there was Warhol. He was famous. Then shot, then faded away. The factory making crap, had his name wasn’t really his.
There was Jackson Pollack, mad man of the Hamptons. Crazy man, poor man, not beloved until later. Much later, after death. Things which he would have sold for a meal, a month’s rent, now worth thousands, millions.
The dream of being remembered. The dream of being something, anything, not just some farmer’s kid destined to live his life on a tractor, in fields of shit and pesticide.
The was a time of dreams, many broken in drugs, in despair, in lost hope.
It brought cool to the neighborhood, brought money, brought excess, bought out the artists. Bought out the jazz men, bought out the soul.
The little dump of a shack in the Hamptons torn down. Huge mansions come up, ostentatious wealth, hedge fund traders, bragging with their money, but empty.
The artists New York. A dream. A dream still out there. A place that is no more.
Funny how that works.
No comments:
Post a Comment