Diamond dust memories

Walking home two days ago I saw Van Gogh’s peasant boots abandoned on the sidewalk, their soles melting from a layer of fresh asphalt. Bedford is being refinished, in the middle of July, so probably the boots crapped out from the heat and a worker discarded them. I looked at the boots and realized I was an asshole for crossing the street in a pair of mocassins. But their presence was more than a warning. I wanted to stop and show them to someone. I wanted someone else to see these boots and think, holyshit! Jameson’s Van Gogh boots!, and then I wanted to be able to talk about what they prove or don’t prove about vestigial traces of the modern within the postmodern. I see the boots, and they resonate, but I’m by myself and I don’t even know how I could call someone and not sound insane: "I just saw Jameson’s boots! I just saw those diamond dust Van Gogh boots we always read about!" A few feet away from the boots a little girl is sitting in a box in front of a health food store. Her legs are folded over the top of the box and her tennis shoes almost reach the sidewalk. She’s content, almost bored, and staring into the street. Workers and shoppers are everywhere. I’m on my way home from reading Levinas on ‘escape’ at a coffee shop.

Not an image of an object, just an object. Not a representation designed to mark a moment of rural toil, but an inarguable marker of the city. Neither painting nor photograph, but still an experience of mediation: these boots are New York. Of course every experience is experienced through a lens--language, history, the structure of culture. i get that. But i've been living in New York for two months now and i am just beginning to understand why everything i have so far tried to say about my experience here feels like a kind of permanent travel writing. When i first got here the notes i was taking kept coming back to this question: when do i cross the line from travel writer to local observer? i got off the train at a new place each day, thinking that by walking through the neighborhoods on the map i would gain some sort of grounding. But this city refuses that transition from alien to familar. The process, which seems closer to some sort of reverse reification than alienation (and its probably impossible binary), involves walking through places i have seen over and over on film. The walks transform me from a viewer to an immediate participant. As a visitor/tourist, i was prepared to match the place to its picture. This is how you know you have found the thing from the guidebook you were looking for. But as someone who lives here, this becomes a seamless process--ie, now that i am not "going home" in a few days, the flood of matching locality to image is endless.