Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Faraway, So Close (New York after Rona part ii)

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

March 2020, writer Craig Taylor believed he was finally done with his 11 year oral history project featuring the voices of people who live and work in New York City. He wasn’t. His incredible new book New Yorkers provides us with a number of first person accounts of the Covid19 crisis and primes us to think about what’s next for the city. Plus: photographer Renate Aller on the social distancing pictures she took on the street outside her Soho loft during the worst of the crisis.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Far Away, So Close. I love books about New York City. In fact, books about New York are probably the main reason I moved to this city in the first place. But still, today, I remain an easy mark. I still devour and collect books about the city's past, present, and future. One of my latest favorites is a book called New Yorkers. I read it last spring when I was still living on the island in France in COVID exile, which only made me long for the city even more. New Yorkers is an oral history. The author, Craig Taylor, spoke with, recorded, and transcribed the words of hundreds of New Yorkers he met after moving to the city in 2008. But just as he was finishing up, 11 years later, COVID arrived on the scene.

So New Yorkers is much more than just an oral history of a place. It's also real-time oral history of one of the most challenging moments New York City's ever faced. My name's Craig Taylor, and I'm a writer. That's basically it. Craig Taylor's written a number of books about places. Before New Yorkers, he did the same thing in London. He spoke with, recorded, and transcribed the voices of Londoners, talking about the city they lived and worked in.

He's also written a book about a small village in the English countryside, using the same exact methodology. Currently, he's living in his native Canada, and that's where we spoke via Zoom. I'd like to start with one of my favorite New Yorkers from the book, Cook Monster de Illest, the rapper. Like many of the New Yorkers you introduce us to, he's got a really big and bold definition of what New York City's all about. So let's start with that. Maybe you can just read a little bit of that. I'll read this quote, but it's very much my voice and not his. Cook Monsta says, this city is where all the major films, all the major artists, all the major book

writers, all the major songwriters, all the major painters, all the main chefs, all the main maids, servants, butlers, and drivers, escorts, bus drivers, train workers, store owners, all types of business owners. This is where everybody wants to have something at. This is the most productive city in the world. Maybe some cities in other countries make more money than New York City, but the life, the lifestyle that we show you, that we give you. There's a ghetto everywhere. There's a hood everywhere. There's drugs everywhere. We just do it a different way. We make everything look different. We make eating look different. You see how he grabbed that spoon? You see how he grabbed that fork and that knife?

You see how he poured that salt and that pepper while he put ketchup on everything. Hot sauce. Come on, man. We make it look good, baby. Everything. There's nothing like it. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Even with the Canadian accent, it's still an amazingly sounding definition of New York City. But I'm dying to know, did you have to coax this out of him or did he just like belt it out? Yeah, there's an operatic quality to some speech. Sometimes people are just primed. They're ready to deliver maybe a monologue that they've been thinking about, issues that they've been thinking about, the love for their city that spills over. And this was just a great example of someone who

is a performer, who works with words, but was just ready to deliver this kind of monologue. And so I do remember the afternoon. I remember as it was happening, just thinking, you know, this is what New York's about. And as much as people talk about how the language has changed or how it's not an exciting city in the way people speak, I just felt again and again, that's not true. You know, it's there, this way of looking at language, shaping it, changing it, moving it and using it to your own ends was definitely there all over New York in all these different pockets. And that afternoon, you know, in his apartment was just one example.

Yeah, he certainly has a way with language. But what really struck me about Cook Monster de Illest is just how well he understands the city, you know, not just the allure. He also gives you this incredible distillation of the city's dark side do you mind reading that part too yeah this quote's just from the end where cook monster says this city will drain you of your last dollar with no remorse it ain't no i'm sorry it's just bye thank you for this dollar thank you for this money have a good time come. Holler at me when you get your next paycheck or when you get your next dollar. I'll be glad to take it. Yeah, hearing that, it's just so profound. It's such an amazing summation of the economic reality of this city, one that exists independently of the cycles of booms and busts. Absolutely. And I think you can get that if you speak to an economist. But what I was interested in as well was finding people who personified New York,

who made New York into a character. And here is someone speaking for the city of New York. And dramatically, I always thought that that was just much more interesting. Yeah. So I really am curious if you had your own theory or idea about what New York was all about before you started this project. No, not really. That's the beauty of these projects and probably why they take so long. You're just not meant to go into a book like this trying to prove or disprove a theory or trying to sort of best the city by having some grand theory about a place like New York and then

just going out and finding people to voice their agreement with your own theories. And it just has to be that way because I'm not the expert. Sure, sure. But you have done this before. And I guess what I'm asking is, were there any lessons you learned from doing this in London? Anything you knew you'd want to do differently in New York or maybe do more of? Absolutely. I think the first lesson was just not to speak to professional thinkers. If you want to hear about the streets of New York, speak to the person who cleans it or the engineer, not someone who's sort of written about what makes someone an official expert. But I have to say, so many of the individuals in your book do end up giving you professional thinking.

Maggie Parker, the nanny, for example, not only did she blow my mind with her insights into the 1%, but she's also quite philosophical about what she calls the economy of cool. She talks about so many of the parents that she works for having this fear or dread of normalcy, which translates into them giving their kids weird arty names. But she worries about these kids because the expectation is that they're never going to end up doing something normal like being a doctor or a lawyer. They're going to be doomed to do stupid things, she says, like importing vinaigrette. or rich just how damaging these scenarios are for children whether you're you know a child who only sees people of color in a sort of subservient service role or if you're being pushed towards this this enforced coolness um that she talks about uh where you're you're just not going to

be allowed to live any semblance of a kind of normal life. You're going to have to be, she says, importing vinaigrette or doing something along those lines. Yeah, I want to bring up another non-professional thinker who nonetheless ends up, you know, offering some pretty profound wisdom. This is Steve Rosenthal. He ran a recording studio called The Magic Factory until he lost his lease. And Steve's obviously not the first New Yorker to lose out to rising rents or rising real estate prices, nor is he the first person to think about what this all means for New York. But he is the first person that's gotten me to see that the problem isn't capitalism. Could you read that bit for me?

So this is Steve talking to me. I get capitalism. I understand it. I ran a business, two businesses for a combined 60 years. I get capitalism. But I don't think this is capitalism. I think this real estate disease is something different. It's purely speculative. It doesn't offer any value to the city. There is nothing intrinsically that's valuable at the end of the real estate deal. The only value, incurred value, is that people make more money. Are they asked to do something with that money that helps the city in some way? No. So let's talk about March 2020. If I'm understanding the timeline correctly, this is the moment when you are finishing up the book,

like you're finishing up the final edits for New Yorkers. But are you actually still in the city? Were you there for the shutdown? Yeah, I was there up until the closing of the Canadian border almost. So, yeah, I was taking buses out in Flushing, you know, in mid-March. And I was sort of done in a way. I work with an amazing editor, Matt Weiland, who's at Norton. And we had a, you know, we had a version of the book. And then as March progressed, it just became so evident that this story was going to overtake

the city, that it was going to, you know, change the lives of the people I had already spoken to and change the city, which it has. And so I was able to include it in the book. Thankfully, there was time to get in quite a lengthy COVID section. And, you know, I obviously would not wish this illness on anyone. But in some ways, I was lucky that the person who was going to speak about his own experience catching COVID and going through the New York hospital system and thankfully recovering. The person was a very loquacious character who was already in the book. Yeah, no, it's totally incredible. is the same guy who tells us the story about, you know, surviving Sandy on the Rockaways, you know,

wading through the floodwaters, carrying his daughter and, you know, you know, basically going from building to building as they go up in flames. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, Dan, Dan Bousso is this extraordinary like Forrest Gumpian, zealot figure that just pops up in every, in everything that's happening in the city and uh and so over the spring in the summer you know we i was able to to talk with him about what

had happened and involved some of the tangential people in his struggle against covid and it ended up being a very important very emotional part of the book, Dan and some of the others who experienced COVID firsthand definitely have some powerful first-person accounts of what it was like during that spring of 2020. But I was even more so struck, I think, by how your work almost primes us to think about life after COVID. And I think this is mostly due to the time and care you devote to the events of 9-11. You introduced us to a number of New Yorkers who were on the scene, characters who are

still grappling with the after effects. You know, some of them are still suffering, in fact, physically, emotionally, and mentally. There's something that one says in particular that really got me. This is Gladys, the 9-11 operator who was working on September 11th. She says, I want people to know that everything that people are going through with COVID, that's going to last them for a lifetime. Gladys was one of the last additions to the book, and she's an extraordinary person who I met by fluke through a Facebook group for 911 operators working and retired. And so we were able to talk about COVID as well as what she had been through on September the 11th, 2001. And I think I needed someone in the book who could talk about the lasting effect of these moments in New York's history, in New York's living history. This is very much a book of social history, but it's not just about the events themselves, but the way that these events live in the city for so long after.

We move past events, but they're not erased. And New York has such an interesting way of dealing with memory. And even though it changes, even though buildings come down, even though it's known for this kind of rapidity of change it does harbor a lot of memory as well so I really wanted to show that these events happen but they but they linger with the city with its populace for so long and I think Gladys was making the point that COVID too will linger for a very long time. My name is Renate Alla, and we are in my studio, which is also our home, and we are in Soho. As you can see, I've got a lot of space here. Back in March 2020, when COVID shut New York City down, not everyone who had the means to leave left. I love working. Renata Ahler is a photographer, mostly known for her gorgeous

large format images of nature. When COVID struck, she just returned home to her beautiful loft in Soho from Death Valley. This was probably the best thing that could ever happen to me. For me, it was like artist residence at home in my studio. Renata was determined to make the most of the shutdown, printing and sequencing the images she shot in Death Valley for her next book. I just made sure that I had enough inks and paper because I always need to print out things to you because I like the physicality of the pieces. So everyone else was shopping for toilet paper and you were looking for printer ink.

Yes, that's right. I did at some point think that this is a different situation and I have to somehow record this. My children always used to say, if mommy doesn't take a picture, it didn't happen. And so I thought maybe I should photograph the empty streets. That was my surrounding and it didn't feel eerie. I mean people kind of mistook that sometimes. You saw articles. It wasn't eerie. It was actually peaceful

and the other thing is you knew that whoever was here was not a tourist. They lived here and even if you didn't know them by name you would sort of acknowledge each other with a little nod. At that time we didn't wear masks, I know that from my photos. Eventually, Renata Ahler started taking pictures with people in them. Photos of her friends and neighbors socially distancing on the empty streets, most just outside her loft in Soho. These are the photos I've come to talk to her about. It's a project she calls Sidewalk. Well, most people think I just photograph nature, but if you look on my website, there's actually more work with people and on people

because my work's all about people and their environment, and sometimes the people aren't actually in it, but they were presented. Sidewalk began when Renata invited a friend who she was missing over for lunch. And I said, well, why don't we sit in the street? She brought some chairs down to the sidewalk. Of course I was wiping the chairs and I was touching her chair only with paper.

She decided to photograph the encounter. I mean, it was meant to be a memory, because everybody, the whole world was sharing this memory. Renata ended up photographing 32 encounters with her friends and neighbors, most of them on the sidewalk in front of her Soho loft. Next spring, the New York Historical Society will exhibit these photos.

And Karin Verlag, her publisher, just released a book. Sidewalk is a super compelling documentary project about New York during COVID. That moment when New Yorkers had to figure out if it was possible to come together in quarantine. So the first photo, I called it Guardian of People's Hopes, is the one where we're standing and we have our hands on our chest. And the other thing is her guitar. This is obviously my reading afterwards, because at that point, you know, we didn't have the murder of george floyd yet and you know all these things hadn't happened yet um i mean they happened but we weren't aware of them and uh i think the guitar looked like this sort of machine gun that the white supremacists are

kind of sporting it's just that it is a guitar and sort of we doing it with music or it was just to me it looks like that i did not see anything close to that sure renata and her friend are both standing tall majestic and proud but they're also wearing bandanas. Remember, back in spring 2020, actual protective masks were impossible to come by. And so, in my reading, Renata's friend's bright pink bandana is almost a glorification of this can-do, ad-hoc, DIY attitude. A testament to the New Yorkers who figured out how to make their own masks, bake their own sourdough bread, build their own homeschool pods,

and construct their own mutual aid societies. But, well, I'm still furious about all that stuff. I can't see what there is to celebrate about a government failing its citizens. Perhaps it's PTSD, or perhaps I just spent too much time in France. But there's something else I can't see. Something I want to see. Togetherness. That's the reason I've come to talk with Renata about her photos. I am desperate to see this coming togetherness. When you blink with your eyes, you sort of see the shapes.

And that's what I really created when I looked through the camera. We're coming together in shapes, really. Each image, when you blink, you can sort of see a body language between us, which is beyond words. And it's like a reaching out nearly, but you can't touch. For Sidewalk, Renata stands or sits six feet away from each one of her subjects.

The bandanas, masks, and shower curtains attached to floppy hats make it extremely difficult to see facial expressions. Some of her friends clutch books, poems, and musical instruments. But these props only seem to call attention to the distance that separates Renata from her subjects. In the image she chose for the cover of her book, she stands with her head bowed like a tree about to be toppled, six feet away from a young man who sits in a chair playing a guitar. This image actually is probably the most emotional one for me as a memory because Dan Baby Boy, that's his actually real name, he's just called Dan Freeba.

I mean, his real name is Baby Boy in the birth certificate. He just brought out his chair and he sat down and he had composed a song for me. And he was touching me with his music. I mean, there's a physicality to sound, you know, in some ways. Sound creates really physical space. And I couldn't touch him back. And I was crying and I was hiding my face behind my hair,

which is this image. And I will never forget how he looked over his guitar. And, you know, we're big huggers. I mean, you know, we hug our friends. So we couldn't touch each other. I mean, you know, I couldn't even touch his chair then. Well, I could have probably, but I didn't. So I had to tell him.

I had to tell him. Do you know what that means? If somebody, I had to make sure that I say, can you move your chair a bit more towards, you know, whatever, which direction, because I couldn't just grab it and do that that would have been not acceptable right i love that that phrase totally not acceptable this feels like you've basically been forced to do everything that you don't like to do or don't normally do like you have to put masks on you have to keep people apart like you can't have interaction you had the most constraints placed upon you to do what you normally do yeah but six feet is not

that far apart i mean at a dinner party you talk to somebody across the table it's just the masks were an additional problem and that we couldn't hug. But to be together in a space, and if you occupy a space, sometimes you just maybe even sit in silence for a few minutes and you just really, really soak in each other's company. It's possible to be together even when you're apart. In the final photo Renata took for Sidewalk, she stands six feet apart from a tall, slender black man whose black mask is adorned with big, puffy red lips,

making him look almost like a racist drawing from a comic strip from the early 1900s. James, he works in the neighborhood, but he's also been a personal friend. He was very, very sad. He told me also afterwards that he was very, very sad that day. Renata and James are standing in front of her doorway, the same doorway from the other photos. But Renata had to point this out to me, because in this photo, her doorway is boarded up. This is just after the police murder of George Floyd, just before protests tore through lower

Manhattan. Someone's written on the plywood, don't just be good, be good. He said it was very meaningful for him that we created a memory of this time because if you take a picture of somebody in a situation, it's also honoring the person at the moment. As we ate bread and cheese and drank wine in her beautiful Soho loft, I didn't have the heart to tell Renata that I couldn't see togetherness in any of her photos, not even in the large format version she showed me. But I wish I did tell her how good she is at capturing distance. The gulf between New Yorkers that's widened and expanded over the last year and a half. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called Far Away, So Close. and it featured Craig Taylor and Renata Aller. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.