I Love New York

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I will try to share with you thru differents writers my unconditional love for New York and i would like to start today by Jérôme Neutres.

New York before taking its English name in 1664, was called at first New Angoulême, in its discovery in 1524 by a caravel of François 1st, then New Amsterdam, when settled down there in 1626 the first Dutch pioneers.
The revival is in the root of its toponymy, and New York has respite throughout its history appears as the laboratory of the modern society, the place of experiment of a new shape of human organization, and another town planning than that of the European cities inherited from the classic age.


So even before seeing her, without living there, we dream about New York. Work by definition in perpetual movement and in permanent development, having seen her, we imagine her agreeing in our desires or in our fears, we anticipate the incredible growth and inevitable fall: Chateaubriand calls in his " Memoires " more than hundred years before the first skyscraper to what that a monument " pyramidât over the mass of walls and roofs " of New York, and Sidney Lumet blow out the city of the map by an atomic explosion in his movie Fail safe.


Fantasy of the city par excellence, and city of all the fantasies, New York, as Rome and Paris before her, became a plentiful source of myths, the contemporary El Dorado in the city of all the dangers; greatness and decline of modern Babylon, inexhaustible raw material for uncountable novels, movies, poems, shows, which often hesitate between both extrèmes of a vision once infernal once ideal …
It is there that the modernity places the center of the world, its future and even its end. New York or " the heiress at the same time of: Athens, Alexandria, Persepolis ", summarizes Jean Baudrillard. All the eyes and all the unconscious are held up on New York, which involves the rest of the world, as the step of the world explains the fabulous fate of the city.
One hundred and sixty one nationalities coexist on the 57 km2 of Manhattan, the real name of Babel today, sit besides of the United Nations Organisation, the general assembly of which, every September, gathers in a building the quasi-totality of the leaders of about two hundred States of the globe.
Feeling of irreality that increases the plethoric visual representation of New York, owed as much to its fantastical power as in her fantastic photogenius. New York, the most filmed, most photographed city, the vertical and horizontal lines of which allow all the movements and editings - nowhere else Hitchcock could have shoot the amazing sequence shot of North by Northwest, and it is already of this futuristic frame that Fritz Lang pulls the set of its Metropolis.
Conceived " for the angels and the airmen ", according to the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, New York was drawn to generate fates of super-hero, Superman and Spiderman who fly in the airs as on the planet Mars. King Kong fights the fighters at the summit of the Empire State Building, as Gene Kelly dances from a roof to the other one in On the Town .



We do not count the allegories which transpose the decoration of New York into a supernatural world, from the Planet of the Apes to the Gotham City of Batman - Gotham, the mythological nickname of New York, invented in 1807 by the writer Washington Irvin and developed by Alan Moore, imaginary metropolis founded by mercenaries and populated with madmen and gangsters. The dream, is the possibility of the impossible, that could serve also as definition in the ambition of New York.
Sleepless city (we can make our shopping at the supermarket in the middle of the night, subway and business remain opened 24 hours a day) which widely pulls its dynamism of " l'énérgie of the dream " as says Edgar Morin, New York is a surrealistic city.
To measure New York, is walking in an awake dream, just like the dreamlike wanderings of Little Nemo in Slumberland of Winsor McCay, published in New ork Herald in 1910. Because the city without sleep, towers which remain enlightened thru the night, even without real activity, has " the boiling and excessive power of dreams " …


To live in New York, it is to live in this fiction, the epic of the contemporary era.Who wins here, will win everywhere: " If i can make it there, I' ll make it anywhere, of it up to you, New York, New York ", to start again after Frank Sinatra and Liza Minelli, words which resound as the hymn of the city.
But to live in New York, it also to confront the dream with the reality. Does the myth leave a place to the being? The New York slices of life often contrast with the musing on the city … Where we discover another experience, the magic of the crowd not preventing a strange solitude, the premises of prommesse sometimes turning in lost illusions. New York such as in herself: beyond the fiction?
In this city " where everything seemed possible ", Claude Lévi-Strauss remembers " skip there to achieve as Alice on the other side of the mirror, the so charming worlds as they seemed unreal there ". Social monster, last utopia, urban fancy, New York demands to be thought. Which other city so much made philosophers, writers, sociologists think?
The symbolic city of the XXth century is the object of so many images and literature, as only before and with her Paris and Rome, as a rigorous anthology of texts would take fast the dimension of a library. Everywhere, New York was already seen and said by the others, " everything is alluvium, and everything is allusions ", as says Julien Gracq of Rome.
In the chronological order of Cities light, it is Paris which New York dethroned; no fate if the writers of France spoke more that about it all other foreigners.


Jérôme Neutres

« Le goût de New York » édition Mercure de France





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