little updates are about to be swiped in like a metrocard. Patience. I'm in the city, still.

One thing about beauty is that it can't be planned. Or at least it shouldn't. What I believe happens, is that beauty comes about despite planning, and more often than not, beauty is in the unplanned accumulation of elements that are not meant to be essentially beautiful as much as they are meant to be useful and used. So is for elegance, and for writing (words about things and not the other way around), and so is for architecture.
Venice is the perfect example, the product of a sort of irrational individualistic development, never planned, where structures like the houses for the Arsenale's workers, the churches of the monastic orders, the street markets, the palaces for the aristocracy all stand next to each other, in a sort of awesome conversation that nobody saw coming or wanted to happen in the first place.
And so obviously is for New York, whose beauty is really in the palimpsest of growing and decaying and renovating and reusing and reinventing that made the colors and the solid forms of this incredible urban island. And I know that every word about the city is trivial and has been said already so many times.

I am into its changing light today, the confused feelings of a guilty morning in my steps getting back to the hostel, thoughts of wrong doing and unrelated worries, the day of the reading closer and closer, not prepared, not deserving, not prepared. I am amazed by all the roofs and the tanks against the moving clouds, and by the faces and bodies of the people walking with me. We drive the trucks and we wash the windows and we sing into the iPods and we bite the bagels and we drag the dogs away and we swear, we are humanity, and we don't have a clue, that's what we are. Beauty isn't there for a reason and into this unasked answer is all I ever wanted anyway.

I wake up before 7 A.M. because of the party of young dutch students that took over the hostel yesterday. Overgrown by cattle hormones, absurdly tall and loud even when they barely move around on the old wooden floor, dutch guys and girls seem to be in every room of the hostel and in every bathroom and under every shower and into every room at this floor and at every floor of this part of the hostel. The hostel extends itself over several street numbers so I don't know if they took over there too. Anyway the turn-over for the bathrooms and showers has started slowly, and noisily, and as I lay in bed in my room I try to identify the moment when the bathroom on my floor will finally be accessible. I curse the dutch people of the world and try to sleep or at least masturbate but without success, 'cause they have now decided to hang just outside my door waiting for their turn, horsing around, calling down from the top of the stairwell, talking and laughing.

It's not before 9 that I can eventually use the bathroom and take a shower. By then the dutch world is gathering its people across the street, and is being noisy down there in the sun. From the window of my room they now look less noisy and less tall and are instead quite good looking, with their blond and red heads glowing under the bright sun light scouring 20th street out of the frozen snow.

I love this Hostel. I have my own double bed room, all run-down and sloppy, luckily no television. There are common bathrooms all right, but it's not a problem for me. Well, as long as the dutch leave something for me.
There is no curfew, it is all very clean, and it's in Chelsea, Manhattan. It is ridiculously pricey, but only compared to similar places outside New York or in Europe. It is actually cheap for the standards here.

From the Hostel I walk down towards the village, have breakfast somewhere (I wish there were alternatives to the fucking starbucks of my boots) and then I probably head towards a cyber cafe' in Bleecker street that seem to be run by a very nice middle-aged chinese lady who doesn't speak english except for two essential words, and who sweeps and mops the floor under your feet while you're there writing.

Afterwards it's the city, it's my being useless into its belly, it's bars I never dared to enter (thanks, Dita) and my feelings come and go, and at moments all the beauty of it, all its lively magic, all the moving accumulation of sorrows in the shaded maze of the subways hits me with a smell and a push, like the banal solitudes, the young couples kissing on the trains at night, the displays of fish and algae in Chinatown, the fabric stores I enter imagining what Libi would think or say of the colors and the materials, where the old jewish store manager tells me, "if you think you can pick the fabrics for your friend you must think you're very good."
And he's right, I mean. I could never pick the right fabrics.

in picture, above: you know what. It has nothing to do with the hostel though.

Folks shovel the snow away from the parts of the sidewalks in front of their building or stores. At the corners of the streets the snow accumulates creating valleys of brownish waters between white mountains. People jump around to avoid them. Leashed dogs skid and never lose balance. In Chelsea, Avenue 6 there's almost nobody around, the small Starbucks almost empty and silent. Later a little more to the south east, there are the banners, and I guess I'm wearing my green sweater for st. Patrick today, although the only Irish I'm familiar with is James Joyce and it's not like he wanted to be considered Irish anyway.

I am so not prepared for this kind of weather. My shoes are not water proof, instead they are soak wet, my burgundy jacket not even seriously protective. When the wind blows I lose contact with my ears.
But I love the steam coming out of my mouth, the cold in my hair still wet from the shower. I know all the basic sensations, walking on the hard snow, the too warm insides, the smell of the subway, the long coffees, the endless coffees sipped in the soft music of the Starbucks, with all those silly misused italian words.

Last time I was in the city it was easy to be under the illusion of being a part of it, of being just another citizen, in spite of not having anything to do there. It's odd, or maybe not, how this time it's not so easy.
My obvious not belonging here. My not being one of them. My not having the financial and emotional means to be one of them. See, there, I wish I was one of those folks shoveling the snow from the sidewalks, scattering grains of salt on the frozen parts, just to know how it feels. I'd be singing some song and someone would smile at me as they walk by.

So I bring with me my not having a purpose. Hands in pockets, a silly smile on my face, always there, telling what I am, a spectator of the most trivial things, and all the other things, unreal only because I am unreal.

Once again I think of that phrase from the Nicolas Born's novel I am reading, The Deception . Well, I forgot it in Milan, together with the stupid cable to download the pictures from my camera (shit), so I quote from memory: Ends and Goals are never so important as Means.
Whether you're waging a war, or helping someone, or just going on with your life. What really count are the ways you're adopting. The real truth is that the machiavellan logic should always be reversed. So it doesn't count why you are at war or at peace or at love, it counts how you behave to get there. And if your ways are sick, or rotten or phony, then even your best aims aren't any good, and what you're doing isn't any good.
I don't think this forgives me for feeling so aimless, still aimless, after all these years. Does it? Even ashamed of having come all this way to feel like this, on my first day, and also, not really caring: and still feeling good and not caring. I wonder what's wrong with me.

-- In picture, above: saturday morning, "except sun"

I didn't follow the movie really, but I looked at the faces and took the pictures, not only because I was just left there, while the many dogs were running in and out of the house, and my mother was industriously preparing their meals. It was also to capture another connected moment, so to speak.

The first night I ever checked in a US motel, it was upstate New York on the interstate through the Adirondacks. I had left NY with this rented car and was driving up there just to avoid freeways and traffic, as I would have always done for the following two months driving across the states.
I drove trought the night until I finally picked this motel because it was old-looking, and it was named as the NY hotel in the novel by Peter Handke I was reading then.

All the doors of the motel were green except a red one, and the old man gave me the red one, which was sort of scary and kind of cool, say. There were the so called Adirondack decorations on the walls and a lot of other crap inside, and this very old TV set, with no remote control but the rotating button to switch channels.
As I turned it on, Streetcar named desire, the first TV I was happening to see in a long time, and it really hypnotized and fascinated me. First time in the States ever, old Motel with old creepy man, in the middle of the forests with lake, Marlon Brando. It was enough. I didn't have a camera with me, just a notebook. I wrote "young Brando on Tv says, don't worry about it, everybody is alone as you are. He also says you should work out a little".

So as Brando and Magnani's faces appeared on my mother's TV, in that different ramblin' of mine two years later, different TV channel and TV set, different director, and language too, I just sunk in the coincidence, for meaningless as it was. Plus Brando was a little softer now and I felt better.
I said to my mother there was Brando. She stepped out of the kitchen and said, again? The guy's on TV all the time.