New York State of Mind

Jack Doyle’s Irish Pub. 240 West 35th Street, Manhattan. New York.

Tuesday. 20th August 2013. 8.30pm.

I sat alone on the bar stool staring at the bank of TV screens fighting for space with the innumerable exotic spirit bottles on offer to entice anyone to drown the events of the day in. Flickering images on the sports monitors were earnest discussions about upcoming football games, tactics, players which most patrons at the bar sat transfixed. However, this was no game of football I knew. Huge men, helmets and shoulder pads so big it reminded me of ladies’ fashion from the 1980’s. There was talk of Quarterbacks and Bootlegs, Hail Mary’s and End Zones, Backward Passes and Shotgun Formations.

All this ‘football’ talk was a foreign language to me. Indecipherable. Impenetrable. However, It was not the first time that day I came across an occurrence with language that made me stop and think that I was out of the reality I grew up with as an Australian.

Earlier that day, I went to the top of the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building has long been my favourite building in all of architecture. My fascination grew for this art deco icon very early when I was about 10 years of age.  I remember being allowed to watch the first Australian televised screening of King Kong (1933) in 1973. Considered benign now, even 40 years after being made it was still considered a horror classic. After watching this film, I remember asking my father how was this done. He explained (with his limited knowledge of the machinations of filmmaking and special effects) that was made by using little model figures and sets. It was the way they filmed the figures that made them look ‘big’. This was my first conscious understanding of the use of models in the making of cinema. The classic titular scene where the giant ape climbs the building had a deep impact on my fertile pre-adolescent mind.

Thrilled to walk out on the 86th floor observation deck, I encountered a throng of people bustling to get the best views, awaiting turns on the ‘pay per view’ binoculars and the obligatory selfies above the vast metropolis below. Not one for crowds, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I took in the atmosphere. Within the cacophony of noise from the crowd, I noticed something unfamiliar, different…the multitude of new languages which I knew existed but never experienced in their native tongue. Spanish, Hebrew, Russian – and so many others no matter how hard I listened, could not fathom the origin of the speaker from whence it came. My immediate thought was the ‘Tower of Babel’ where God in a fit of jealousy struck all within speaking different languages so that no one could understand each other.

I sat in the bar that night pondering what had disturbed me about that auditory experience of different languages, the ‘eeriness’ of it all. The abject unfamiliarity. My thoughts turned to the familiar, Australia, my family, home. Here I sat at the bar in an Irish Pub in the middle of Manhattan and my life as I knew it is on the other side of the world...and the realisation that there is an entire planet between myself and everything I knew and held dear. I was alone and very, very, far from home.

Troubled by my thoughts, I left the hustle-bustle of the bar and decided to go for a walk to clear my head. I wandered down 35th street and turned right onto 7th Avenue. I strolled a block or so down town and stopped in front of the subway station. I looked around at the surrounding buildings. In any other city, this would be no big deal. This was different. I realised I was standing between Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania (Penn) Station. Across the road was Macy’s Department store.

I was now on 34th street. Why was that so familiar? Slowly I turned around and looked up town and looming above me again was the Empire State Building, lit up, a beacon in the night. All these things were so familiar. Of course. Macy’s. 34th Street. The film Miracle on 34th Street. Penn Station and Madison Square Garden also both known heavily in cinema and venues for performing artists of the highest stature to play. And obviously, the Empire State Building featured in cinema via the many versions of King Kong, Sleepless in Seattle, and practically any other film set in New York.

Standing on the corner of 7th Avenue and 34th street became an uncanny experience. My impressions of New York were honed by popular culture and any perception of New York I had before that single moment of time was akin to any other fantasy location based through the lens of fiction…no different than Wonderland, Neverland, or Oz. This was a city also based on myth and legend and for a short instant of time, I experienced that awe…the same awe that held Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy. For that short period of time, I was that stranger in a strange land. “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore”.

King Kong atop the Empire State Building is as clear to me as when I was atop that very same building over a decade ago. I often wonder if my memory of New York is based on details actually experienced, or gathered from the myriad of cultural references seen in TV, film, popular culture, or literature. What was real, experienced, now just a blended memory.

In these later years, are fantasies and delusions becoming more real, more tangible than the life I actually have? 

Am I an artist, or just a mad man with a doll?

One building. Two misunderstood creatures far, far from home.