sexpigeon:

caro:

From an e-mail I sent earlier:

It’s an odd city: lovely and calm but sometimes just doesn’t feel like there’s a lot going on.  Neighborhoods are much more segmented and people tend to stick to their own haunts rather than going out around the city.  I like to tell people that what it’s missing is this band of energy that seems to always be floating over Manhattan like the jet stream on a weather map; sometimes it’s positive, sometimes it’s negative, but it’s always there.  San Francisco just lacks that.

Oh, I get so tired of this debate. Everyone ought to be tired of this debate.

That said, this assessment is 75% accurate. Manhattan has the switchblade energy of cocaine, pointed and jittery and fantastic and ragged. A ski-pole, a rail, that island. The 25% that’s missing from McCarthy’s notice is: energy does settle over this city, but it does so in weird Pacific clouds that settle like the fog and skedaddle as fast as they came. When the Tenderloin is suddenly and randomly exploding, when you fumble onto the rooftop of a crashed party in the Mission, when Dolores Park is so heavy with cool kids and sunshine and stupid ideas that, that—that whatever, I don’t know.

And just like that, the cloud is gone.

6:01 pm  •  11 November 2009  •  17 notes