Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not going back to normal (a conversation with Jeremiah Moss author of Feral City)

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Jeremiah Moss’s Feral City is much much more than a Covid memoir. In many ways it is a continuation of his desire to understand how and why New York city has changed,  and if there is still a place for outsiders or if it now belongs to what he calls “the new people.” We walked around our Neighborhood together to talk about what the city was like during Covid time and what the phrase “go back to normal” really means. Please contribute to the 2022 Radiotopia fundraiser. https://on.prx.org/3NT1g5M

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. One of my favorite New Yorkers is Jeremiah Moss. He used to have a blog called Vanishing New York, and he would chronicle all of the places that he noticed that were not just disappearing, but being replaced. During COVID time, Jeremiah remained in New York City. And in his new book, Feral City, he gives us a first-person account of not just what the city was like during COVID, but he also has new insights into what has happened to the city over the past few decades. And most importantly, he discovered that what he thought had vanished is actually still here. We met up in Tompkins Square Park and walked around our neighborhood together. I got to hear firsthand what it was like when the city went feral.

Well, the streets were completely empty. There were no cars. You know, you could just ride down the middle of the street. I was riding up the wrong way on Broadway, doing figure eights, and there was nothing in the way. It was just beautiful, and there was no fear. There was just a feeling of incredible spaciousness, of being able to breathe, which is ironic in a time when we were so afraid of breathing. But on the bike, you could breathe, you know. And there was a feeling of almost like outrunning death, right?

Both from cars and virus that you could just sort of be free of those worries and really be in my body and just feel very present in my body, feel the strength of my body and the freedom of my body. And it was just really wonderful. It's not a feeling that I have very often. You also sang. I mean, talk about ironic you sang a lot and you would run into people who were also singing yeah everybody was singing it was really it was really wild um i used to walk around and sing you know

in my 20s in new york and other people would too and then I feel like that stopped. And there was a sense of repression that came into the city in the 2000s. And that really lifted. So on my bike, I would just sing. I would just belt out songs. There was nobody to hear me. So I felt very uninhibited. And I think other people did too. What would you sing?

Here we are at the corner of St. Mark's and 2nd Avenue. What would you sing? I would sing I Happen to Like New York, the Judy Garland version. That was the big one I would sing. Would you feel inhibited to do it now? Yes, I would. I like the city air, I like to drink of it. The more I know New York, the more I think of it.

I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it I happen to like I love the sight and the sound and even the stink of it you know New York became a really a dirtier place during lockdown and that stink or that feeling of not not actual odor, but the sense of like just a visceral body of the city just came to the surface again. And so I was singing about that, I think. That was really touching me. And a lot of other people were walking around, you know, people would walk down my street singing, or I'd see them up in Central Park or anywhere I was roaming around. People were just walking around singing. And like, why were they singing in the midst of a pandemic? Like, what's happening there? And I have to assume that they were also feeling the joy. Can you talk about how when we think back to this time, there was a lot of fear,

pain, death, but yet there was a lot of joy. And I think a lot of people don't feel they have the permission even to express that. Yeah. It's really, I think it's exactly right. People don't feel the permission. I had a, you know, I'm a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and my patients often talk about this. And someone said it to me just the other day. They were saying, ooh, it feels like this secret shame to admit that

I miss lockdown, I miss 2020. And a lot of people tell me that because things are not black and white. And there was a tremendous amount of pain and trauma, death and loss in 2020 and throughout the pandemic that is still going on, which is also something we like to forget, right? It's still here. And there was also this joy. And I think the joy for me came from being the outsider from, you know, mainstream society, right? Which is not to say that I don't function within mainstream society, but as a queer trans person, I'm also outside of that. And a lot of the people who were left here,

the ones who stayed behind, a lot of us were outsiders in one way or another. Outside of whiteness, outside of the middle class, outside of straightness, heteronormativity, outside of being housed. So there was a freedom for people who are outside. And a lot of joy came with that. And then for other folks, you know, who may or may not identify as outsiders, I also hear a lot of like, that they felt really free from their internal critical voices, that they felt free from pressures to perform, sort of like capitalistic pressures to always be improving,

to be always in a hurry, to always look busy and important, all of that stuff. That people could just kind of like relax and sink into a kind of comfortable failure, right? You've been thinking about what you call the new people in this book for a long time. You had a blog where you were kind of documenting what was being replaced in New York or what was starting to vanish. And then you had a book where you talked about this. So you've been thinking about this a lot before COVID. What was so fascinating reading Feral City was the new insights the pandemic brought

to you in your own thinking about your own relationship, what irritated you about these new people. And I'd love for you to kind of walk us through that process. Sure. I think I started noticing the new people probably around 2005 and the early 2000s that there was this new population. So what I try to make clear in the book is it's not about newcomers.

I was a newcomer. A lot of people are newcomers. It's got nothing to do with that. That's often misunderstood or maybe willfully. Well, it does have the word new in it. It does. That's often misunderstood or maybe willfully. Well, it does have the word new in it. It does. That's my fault. But they are new in the way that they're a new kind of person. And I think that they are very much products of neoliberal capitalism,

that there's this kind of like new form of a personality that comes out of neoliberalism. And these people are it. They are what's called ideal neoliberal subjects, which is like a real mouthful. But basically, they're hypernormal. They're very fiercely attached to normativity. So it's not just about being an ordinary person it's about you know holding on to normativity as a kind of policing function so they are policing themselves and they're policing others with the way they present themselves in the world. They're fiercely conformist and they are aggressive and I would say

violent towards people who are not conforming to what they're conforming to. So, you know, I found myself prior to COVID certainly irritated, upset. I'm obsessed with them. I'm obsessed with, you know, what, what is it about them? What are they doing? What are they about? And why am I so irritated by them? I mean, you know, I'm a psychoanalyst. I was in psychoanalysis for 10 years, three times a week on the couch. And I would talk about this and like, couldn't get to the bottom of it. Um, and irritation in your book and we should say that this irritation actually led to physical maladies for yourself. Yeah, I had terrible IBS, you know, body pains, really like somatizing what I believe is anger, but also fear. I'm afraid of them.

They're frightening. And I believe they're frightening because of the kind of violence that they radiate. And I know violence is a very strong word. Let's unpack that, because you describe the way they laugh as not being full of joy but dominant laughter and I feel that really explains what you're trying to get at least it did for me yeah they are they're dominated they dominate space you know a lot of people

talk about them in terms of settler, colonialist kind of mindset, which is about not just about invading and taking space, but about replacing the existing people, the existing culture. So it's very much about there's an annihilation that I think that they, and I'm not saying that they're doing this consciously, although some of it I think is conscious. But there's a sense of annihilation. Like one of the things that happens that happened prior to lockdown, stopped during lockdown, and then started up again after is people hitting me on the street.

So I get assaulted physically almost every day by these people. And I use the word assault on purpose because it's not they're not accidentally hitting me I firmly believe that and I don't fully have it I'm still working on like what's going on in that moment of collision right I will see them so I'll be walking on the right side of the sidewalk and they'll be on the other side and I? I will see them. So I'll be walking on the right side of the sidewalk and they'll be on the other side and I will see them look at me and then veer towards me and hit me hard enough that my body will torque and I'm in pain afterwards. So what's happening there, right? And if you say like, fuck you or something they'll they'll scream back at you uh well go fuck yourself watch where you know don't don't talk to like they get

very um indignant about it so that's fascinating this behavior completely stopped during uh lockdown didn't happen once in 2020 early 21 21, didn't happen at all. And then as these people started to come back, I started to be assaulted again. So during 2020, there were not a lot of, obviously the streets were empty and there weren't a lot of bikes in the bike lanes. It was mostly delivery people and a few other cyclists. So a lot of us would ride the wrong way, this thing examining, right. Going, going upstream. And this is something that rightly pisses a lot of cyclists off. Um, but there was nobody to really piss off at the time. So we were all kind of like, yeah, we're going to just go the wrong way and we'll make space for each other

when we do that. Right. Like you'll go to the right and I'll go to the right and it was fine and nobody had a problem with this. And it was one of the benefits of not having a lot of traffic, right? Is there's space to sort of see each other and make space for each other. And there were periods during lockdown when there would be these little reopenings, right? There would be these attempts to reopen New York. And there would be an announcement, New York is reopened.

This is phase one reopening. And you'd get this little flood of the new people would come back. And there was one week, it was the phase one reopening. I think it was in June of 20. I was riding up uh broadway the wrong way and a guy on a city bike started to come towards me now you wouldn't see any city bikes in 2020 nobody was on those fucking bikes everybody had their own bike and the city bikers now were suddenly back and they were guys with the white baseball hats and the polo shirts and no helmet and you know whatever

um this sort of sense of like here comes an amateur right on a city bike and he and the first one was coming towards me and i went you know i i went out of the lane out into those white lines so i'm not in his way and he turned his bike toward me aimed at me sped up as if to hit me, slammed on his brake, you know, to like threaten me and shouted wrong way, asshole. And I thought, okay, that's weird. That hasn't happened in months. I don't know what's going on. This seems like something has shifted in the ether, right? But it's one. So, you know, I'm not going to make too much of it. The next day it happens again, white guy, young guy on a city bike the same kind of look this

hyper normative guy are you sure it wasn't the same guy it was not the same guy it was not the same guy they're burned in my retinas um and same behavior and the same words wrong way asshole and i thought okay these people have come back they don't like the disorder you know it's not just about bikes going the wrong way it's's about the graffiti and the uprising and the garbage on the sidewalks and the rats and all of it. And they're going to come in and they are the police. They are the police. I absolutely believe that. And the COVID lockdown taught me that, that they are the police and they are policing this city every day. I confess a little bit that some of these characterizations of the new people,

especially maybe in the earlier, the book before and the blog and even in Feral City, felt almost like caricatures. I was like, come on, how could this guy not be the same person? And I was also kind of maybe resisting because I felt like you were ascribing too much joy to this type of the new people. Whereas I would, you know, thinking back to the John Waters famous line, you know, it's like the real crazies are the ones pretending to be normal. Like, I just don't see there's any joy in the hyper normativity. At least that's from my experience and thinking.

But I realize now that I had it wrong. You're characterizing entitlement. Yes, it's definitely entitlement. It's definitely entitlement. I would also say that they are caricatures, but that they make themselves into caricatures. That a caricature is a human being who has been reduced to a type, right? And, you know, this is a painful existence.

The violence comes, I believe, I mean, they're doing that violence to themselves and the desubjectification, but the violence that comes out of them, I believe, is the way in which they then try to de-subjectify everyone and everything around them. And so the whole world has to be reduced to a caricature so that this neighborhood is becoming a caricature. These buildings are caricature. And you feel the sanitization, the emptiness, the hollow feeling, the alienation.

I think alienation is something I talk a lot about in the book, that we are meant to be alienated from each other in neoliberal capitalism. And this is what these people are carrying, what they're carrying like a virus, what they're spreading, what they're infecting people with, what they're infecting the city with. And it's heartbreaking. It's just absolutely harrowing to be around it. And that policing, you know, that get out of the way and the running me down and the hitting me on the sidewalk is that, I believe it's that. So we're coming up on Washington Square Park, which is a big part of your book.

It's a place you really went a lot during COVID time. And I will say, as someone who was not here during the pandemic, reading online, this is the thing I remember that I'm like, really? There? What? There's a party there? How? And I'd love for you, as we enter in, to explain what was going on. You call it, it even had a new name. Yeah, I got the name Wash. The weekend has arrived, and once again, hundreds taking over Washington Square Park.

The dancing, drinking, and smoking started late Friday night into Saturday morning. You know, what happened was it really became the heart of the uprising after the murder of George Floyd in Manhattan. This is where protesters would meet before marches. And so there were Black Lives Matter rallies here. There were socialist rallies here. There were, you know, just it was like just everybody was gathering here. And there was this

kind of, you know, there was certainly a lot of policing, a lot of violent policing around the protest movement. But there was also this kind of relaxation of policing, which is still hard to get my head around. But part of it, and I do think that this is a really big part of it, is that when the hypernormal people went away and the tourists went away, there was like no reason to police the city as much and when I say police I mean the NYPD but I also mean all of the mowing of grass and the trimming of trees and the taking out of garbage and all of that that is about controlling the the feeling as well as the aesthetic of the city. So there was this kind of like, you know, it's this shrug like, so what? Let it just let it be, let it be, you know. And so there's this incredible freedom came into this park. It became a much more racially diverse space, a much more diverse space in terms of class. There were more unhoused folks in the park.

There was a guy, you know, Jesus of Washington Square took over the fountain. The fountain, there was no water on because of the pandemic. They didn't want people in the water. So it was dry. And this guy who called himself Jesus just took over the fountain and moved in with furniture and camped, he had set up a camp in there and there were people staying with him and he would sometimes preach and dance and sometimes take off his clothes and it was, it was great. Yeah, let's talk about how it ended because this was a place you returned to time and time again

during the pandemic because of this joy and camaraderie and I mean to put it bluntly place of feeling seen what happened well uh the city reopened and um with that came um a mandate to clear the streets of unhoused people of people who are playing music and so this this park became fiercely policed by again by the cops by the NYPD station you know we had it's kind of less now but they're still here but dozens of cops stationed all over the park um and people who were known to be protesters you know i saw friends of mine comrades who would just be sitting talking and the cops would come over and just grab them and drag them out um for doing nothing but but known to quote unquote troublemakers right uh black people people were particularly being targeted in this park.

You know, you would see like if a white person had an open container drinking a white claw, the cops would leave them alone. But if a black person had an open container, they would be hassled or arrested and removed. So that was happening a lot in the summer of 21 and up to now um i want to talk about what that fight was about because you are here during these protests during these altercations with the cops um kind of participating observing fighting running but there's a girl you talk with and she says to you quote i think i'm getting this right she says us young people are going to try and keep the 2020 energy going and i think when i read that sentence of my i just like my jaw went open because i'm like you know horrified by 2020 and i feel a lot of people who weren't

here definitely were horrified by 2020 and i'm and i and I feel like for someone to say that, they're viewing 2020 in a way I am not. And I think that view is something you really want to convey in this book. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly as you said it, if you weren't here, and I think if you weren't in a rebel city, your experience of 2020 was only the horrifying parts. The horrifying parts were here. I mean, New York City was the epicenter of sickness and death. It was awful in the spring of 2020. But there was also that other part that didn't happen in most places, right? And that other part was, I think, a very urban experience and happened in these urban centers like Times Square, Washington Square,

that are, you know, public squares where people come together. I mean, people were desperate to connect, right? We were all social distancing. But in the park outside, you could could connect you could be with each other and people were so hungry for that human connection and that hunger and that freedom just created this I mean I cry when I think about just how beautiful I met a lost for I mean I wrote a whole book but i'm at a loss for words about it because it was so almost otherworldly and and i do think that a part of it is the presence of ambient death that that in that collective trauma that we were all in you know it heightens the

intensity of connection that's also a piece of it for sure uh but you really had to to be here because it sounds like such a it sounds like a crazy thing to say right keep the 2020 energy going um and what she meant of course was you know this uh resistant rebel wide awake connected loving it was a loving loving time um you know we're sitting in this park now there's There's music going on in the background, but it doesn't sound like the music you talked about in your book. This feels like, you know, the kind of, you know, the park feels exactly like it was when I left it on March 13th, 2020. Yeah, it's heartbreaking. This music is the sanctioned music. It's the soft jazz.

The soft jazz is okay. The drums are not okay. This just kind of like lulls us into a state of everything's nice and we're not going to worry about white supremacy or climate change or anything like that. We're not going to topple capitalism.

We're just going to have a nice time and maybe we'll have a little fun and we'll all behave ourselves and um the world will burn and we're all dying i mean like it's horrible this is a horrible moment in history and we had a chance and i hope that you know i talk a lot about um this this idea of uh that arundhati Roy, the author, talked about the pandemic as a portal. And through that portal, that opening, there was this rift that opened up. And there were these new possibilities, this chance to, and I know this sounds cliche, but to save the world. To really get people together and get them activated and and and have

them make change I want to I want to talk about that but I want to I want to go somewhere where the ambient soft jazz is not there because I think they work against each other the ambient soft jazz works against conceptualizing saving the world okay okay Saving the world. Okay, okay. The place that I have hope, which I talk about at the end of the book, is that that oppositional energy is right under the surface. It is pushing up all the time.

And if you lift that repression barrier just a little bit, it can break through. And that's really exciting. And that's something that the pandemic showed us that I certainly didn't know before. I thought it was just gone. I thought like, you know, it's dead. Everybody's asleep, but that's the end of it. But that's not it.

Like you just give, give you know it's like the tiniest crack and and people will open that up and that portal will reopen so i do see that potential um and people also got a taste of something like once you give people a taste it's hard to make them forget i mean they're trying and you know um people are getting sleepy and that soft jazz is always playing in the background. But it's hard to make people forget something that tasted so good. And, you know, even the people who weren't in the cities

got that taste of like, you know, this is what it's like to be unstructured, not controlled, not policed. And that, I hope, will have reverberations that we can't yet see. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Jeremiah Moss, author of the book Feral City. I can't recommend this one enough. Go right now and get yourself a copy. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX,

home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.