Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?

Age gracefully by sitting around doing nothing

I went to get pizza at the place on my block a couple nights ago. When I entered, there was an older guy, probably in his 60s, holding court about the Fourth of July to the employees and waiting customers—basically delivering a monologue to a captive audience. After suggesting that the pizza shop celebrate the Fourth by blowing up a big bucket of cooking oil out on the sidewalk, he got to talking about his childhood in Greenpoint, when large areas of the neighborhood were effectively empty and on the Fourth of July he and his friends went over to the waterfront at 10am and poured out a long trail of gasoline before igniting it. Those were the good old days. You couldn’t step out of the house and not have a good time, he tells us. Now he doesn’t want to go outside at all if he can avoid it. Listening to the guy, it’s hard not to read between the lines and think that it’s just more fun to be young than old, however much the city has changed, for better or worse. But he’s still talking, and as they hand my slice across the counter, I realize the guy isn’t waiting for his own food, he’s just there to talk—which I find comforting. If you’re my age or younger you may associate this behavior with video game NPCs more than real people—a character who stays in a fixed position to deliver dialogue that advances the plot, and whose behavior is predictable and hard-coded. It’s OK to be an NPC if you’re the good kind.

The pizza shop guy’s concluding statement—that New York has gone downhill as he’s aged—expressed a basic challenge of cultural commentary, in which value judgments about the world getting better or getting worse are confounded by the observer’s limited perspective. The scene didn’t die, you just got old. It’s impossible to avoid this because every critic ages in the same direction, but I’ve always believed that shouldn’t stop anyone from offering their opinion, even at the risk of sounding like a grouchy old man. No one will ever freeze time long enough to establish a more stable point of view. The way things change and diverge or converge with our own experience is also part of what we’re critiquing. It’s hard not to listen to that guy in the pizza shop and feel like he has a point, but I’m no spring chicken myself. I’m working on my own neighborhood NPC role, anyway. The old people who are still around here seem to have a better understanding of how to live in a city than the rest of us: The deli on my corner recently changed ownership and put out a couple of benches facing the street, and as the weather got warm the benches filled up with old folks who weren’t buying anything from the store but just wanted a place to hang out and watch everything pass by (they’re not looking at their phones either, they’re actually watching). One of the most graceful ways you can age is by becoming a person who sits around outside doing nothing. I’ve started doing it a bit myself.

My daughter is turning two this weekend. Most mornings, we take a lap around the block to get coffee. What she finds most interesting on the walk—aside from anyone who waves at her—is not dogs or cars but something I never paid attention to before: the edge of the sidewalk where the buildings meet the ground (basically eye level for her). By watching her follow this route over and over again, I’m now extremely familiar with the contours of stoops and gates and doorways and stairwells that she touches or steps onto or otherwise stops to inspect. As a student of the built environment, it makes me aware of how much I ignore. It sounds ridiculous to say this street level landscape is interesting, but it’s interesting to her, which makes me feel like she is better than me, in a way—her perception less corrupted by adult nonsense and more attuned to the immediate environment. At home, my own phone is my daughter’s holy grail. It’s fascinating to watch a baby use an iPhone and to see how quickly they figure out the interface. More importantly, in stark contrast to the unresponsive physical world, every swipe or tap of a phone screen has some coherent result. Randomly gesturing, you always end up somewhere on the internet, thanks to search bars and autocomplete and haptic feedback loops and dark patterns, and a less sophisticated user (such as a two-year old) usually ends up knee-deep in the digital slop that adults consciously avoid. It’s not just that iPhones are easy for babies to use—iPhones are actually for babies, and when we use our phones we become more baby-like ourselves, endowed with agency-on-training-wheels. You can see why we lose interest in the edge of the sidewalk.

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• Hospitals as non-places. “For the last eight months, we’ve lost (my grandpa) to a vacuum of medical-speak, pureed chicken, quarantine gowns, exposed penis, two-at-a-time visits, corporate waiting areas, unidentifiable monitor blips, bed-sore-resistant foam boots, piss receptacles that don’t seal properly.”

• Daisy Alioto on filler, for Dirt. “Filler is not the same as trash or garbage, in fact it’s much harder to get rid of…It’s nice to have strong feelings of like or dislike either way, which is hard with filler…An overabundance of cultural filler makes it hard to cultivate any taste at all.”