Identity, proximity and the grinding halt of our cities.
Like one cockroach in the silverware drawer, it was a sign of a bigger problem.
- from ‘Aspiration’ in Sleeveless: Fashion, Media, New York 2011-2019 by Natasha Stagg
A few weeks ago my friend came over for dinner. I made pasta and we talked about Joe Biden’s re-animated corpse somehow gaining traction in the US Democratic primaries. Hesitating at the front door he clumsily referenced ‘social distancing’ before tightly hugging me goodbye like he has done every time we’ve parted ways in the decade since we first met. That interaction now belongs to a different time.
In the space of a couple of weeks my job and consequently the way I see myself has changed entirely. As a bookseller I am non-essential. As a writer I am obsolete. But the day job that takes up the largest chunk of my time and the role I affix the least of my identity to has been deemed a ‘frontline service’ by the UK government. This past week I have consolidated huge sacks of rice, flour and oats into smaller ones. I have filled hundreds of supplementary fruit bags with tiny red apples and I have heard every single COVID-19 conspiracy come from the masked mouths of frightened customers: from 5G interference to fascist state control.
In the scant time I’ve had to self-isolate I’ve been reading Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019, a collection of essays and stories by Natasha Stagg. Stagg’s voice throughout is clear and cool with an underbelly of cynicism that when read in the midst of a global health pandemic playing out among the ruins of late stage capitalism, feels eerily prophetic. Sleeveless encapsulates a slim yet pivotal time in New York’s rich history. A post-financial crash, pre-coronavirus era during which all of culture appeared to have migrated online. A peak in the cult of individualism dictated by the blue-lit devices fused with our collective fingertips.
In an essay dated November 2017, Stagg writes: ‘I was wearing a sexy costume and felt like a different person, like I was in New York before it sucked, which is how I always felt at big parties full of drag queens and drugs’. This equivocal nostalgia and self awareness that taints our personal experiences as inauthentic seems to me a direct result of the vapid gentrification that has plagued our major cities. A couple of years ago I tried to move to Berlin, where instead of becoming the well dressed sex-clubber and writer I thought I might be, I became a low-paid nanny living in a basement flat underneath my friend’s management offices. Interns wandered in to pick merchandise out of the spare room and I was too skint to go out. The only time I felt I was having anything like an authentic experience was smoking hundreds of cigarettes in bars that stayed open until dawn. I stank and I was miserable, embarrassed at my failure to fuse the identity of the city with my own. If this sounds narcissistic that’s because it is. Are we not all in some small way curating ourselves for an audience that doesn’t even know that we exist?
In an essay originally written as part of a series for Spike Art magazine, Stagg details a relationship she had with a city sanitation worker from Staten Island. The tenderness of Stagg’s relationship with the ‘garbage man’ encapsulates the blurred perception of a city that exists in a constant flux of overlapping mythologies. Straddling the moneyed fashion and literary worlds as a person who was by no means born into them, Stagg is cripplingly aware of the potential fallacy of the New York she exists in when seen through the eyes of a garbage man from Staten Island. She writes: ‘Most Staten Islanders can’t imagine moving to Manhattan because of this thing that happens when you’re so close but so far away, this proximity that feels like a wall instead of water.’ I’m married to a New Yorker from a working class Italian-American neighborhood outside of the Bronx who claims it was easier to move to a small village in Greece than into the city itself. ‘It’s easier to get to Manhattan from Arizona’ Stagg continues, ‘because you’re oblivious to certain things about it’.
Until fairly recently I’ve been reluctant to share my day job, not because I think that being a greengrocer is inherently embarrassing but because as I try to develop myself as a bookseller and writer, still having to rely on full time low waged work feels like failure. Though I’m grateful for them both they are difficult worlds to manage simultaneously, and trying to maintain one identity that makes the other seem fraudulent means I’m often left looking punishingly inward. The demise of Stagg’s relationship with the ‘garbage man’ underlines the demented inner politics of authenticity and identity whose only trajectory is further alienation. ‘It was this game I kept playing, letting him know that he should be impressed by me and then letting him know that I considered my own success negligible, which probably made him feel like nothing’. Even writing this newsletter causes a swell of inadequacy. What right do I as a full-time greengrocer have to comment publically on a published author? The whole thing is a stark reminder of how we’ve drank the capitalist Kool-Aid that tells us to base our entire worth on our jobs and income. Only now are we beginning to choke on it.
There is something menacing in the way Stagg writes about New York, like it’s a city that can never reciprocate your love. When writing about her sister’s wedding, she notes a wry comment made by a Midwestern cousin: ‘You can tell the New York people from the Michigan or Arizona or Connecticut people because the New York people’s clothes are either too big or too small, and everyone else is just wearing something that fits’. If the city can become a parody, then its residents who think so fondly of themselves as ‘New Yorkers’ become parody too. My own love of New York is often ridiculed by my partner who from his own experience knows it as just another city complicit in the gruesomeness of America as a whole.
I loved reading Sleeveless from the unlikely vantage point of our current collective dystopia. I liked imagining the parties, the close bodies, car rides and gossip. But armed with the knowledge of the scale of collapse we’re hurtling headlong into, most of all I liked the novel idea that we might look longingly to the past, and not from some misguided conservatism, for a life that is more authentic or more free.