The cold came suddenly. It was last Tuesday 11 November. I got up early as always, on 6.45 am, and I saw tiny snowflakes falling behind the window. I've been waiting with fear for weeks.. A friend warned us that it would snow the previous weekend.. He didn't do it. It snowed then, just in those first weeks where the night falls on you as if the elevator suddenly collapsed. Late summer is over, the one that clings to October and allows you to walk around with the clothes from the slim closet until the first sneezes. That period in New York begins where the wind hits your face and cracks your lips. the cold has arrived, and the city recognizes itself. New York is cold, by character.
This is a strange period, the one that goes from Halloween to Thanksgiving, just before christmas on celluloid, where the city mutates and shows its essence. It's fun to walk the streets and find so many people who, even at zero degrees, continue to wear their shorts and long socks. As if the cold were not enough to intimidate them and, with that New York cockiness, Its inhabitants will show that the seasons are marked by them with their helpless legs.. you see them pass, along with those who already wear their scarves up to their eyebrows, with their red and boiled cheeks.
The famous Standard hotel on the High Line has been denounced several times because the best views are from those outside their rooms
New York prepares for the onslaught of winter by celebrating. Halloween has something of a pornographic carnival in a city addicted to exhibitionism. The New Yorker doesn't give a damn if people look at him. Many apartments lack curtains. My wife, years, She stayed with two friends in a hotel in New York where there were no cloths on the windows. They thought the glass was opaque. Looking from the street at night, when one of them was inside, they understood that not. The famous Standard hotel on the High Line has been denounced several times because the best views are from those outside their rooms. Al Public Hotel, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the same thing happened to him. To several of my neighbors, also.
Central Park is the heart of Manhattan. Or maybe it's the heart of my Manhattan, to point out, that we all have the concrete organs in different places. I went on Sunday 16 November to visit. I hadn't gone for weeks. I missed the foliage, when the trees turn ocher and red, and I found myself in an already dying autumn, with its ice rink full, and its trees losing hair. I hate the bare forests of that harsh winter that is bearing down on me without knowing how to avoid it.. The streets end and indoor New York begins, to the shelter.
The subway has mutated. Now it began to be a refuge. The troop of beggars that inhabit the city struck out. Enjoying the cold is a luxury of the rich, the cold skins the poor's hands. And New York is full of poor people who now enter the bowels fleeing from the hosts that hit the ice. Yesterday at the 14th station there was a guy lying on the ground. I had a plastic container with food. His pants were torn, like your eyes, and he ate some Chinese noodles on a “tablecloth.”. He had placed a piece of cardboard under the tray. I ate with my hands. I looked at him and he looked at me with anger. and I left, and I left him there alone dying the winters that his body resists. Winter bothers me because I like to drink spritzes on the balcony, to him because it is difficult for him to put the noodles in his mouth with his cold fingers.
The cold also announces a paradigm shift. I have to discover, not out of vice, but out of necessity, the inner New York. Yesterday I went to a very special theater that I had been wanting to enter for a long time.: the Cherry Lane Theatre. I happened to be there by chance in April and I liked its bohemian and small feel.. It turned out that it was going to reopen, after several years of reform, and we bought two tickets to see the play “Weer”. It is the city's oldest continuously operating theater off-Broadway.. It is an old building 1817, that 1924 It became a home for actors and playwrights, where artists such as Scott Fitzgerald have visited., John Two Steps, T S. Eliot, Barbara Streisand, Sam Shepard, Bob Dylan, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, John Malkovich…
Weer is shameless, hilarious, thug, irreverent, satirical, biting…
It was very cold outside, and it was very hot inside while we enjoyed a hilarious play performed solo by actress Natalie Palamides about a couple. Weer is shameless, hilarious, thug, irreverent, satirical, biting… When they opened the doors to the room, The northern air shook our faces and we ran to a place, Bar V, to feel the house of the taverns. The voice is loud, the light held, They have a coat rack and a radiator.
Next to me, two New Yorkers were chatting about politics at the bar.. The new mayor, Zohran Mamdani became the hope of a dead left, no story, from which Trump's conservative populism stole social classes and left him with the battle of pronouns and geraniums. Democrats are happy to have regained their voice, although many do not recognize the message. They were both talking about it, without reaching an agreement, and I thought that this is a rebellious city in which they watch winter arrive without having to wait for summer.. For pimps. It's not a pose.
And then I remembered an anecdote told by the New York writer, Franz Lebovitz, to Martin Scorsese in his documentary “Suppose New York is a city”. The author, famous for being famous, Warhol legacy, tells the filmmaker: “A New Yorker is a person who opposes everything that those who run New York promote.. In the years 80 they wanted to tear down Lever House and I was in a restaurant sitting with Jerry Robbins when a guy came to ask me Let's sign a petition so that it is not demolished. I did it, He too and when the man left, Jerry told me: 'Know? I'm pretty sure I signed a petition years ago to stop them from building Lever House‘. For me that is the story of New York.”.
on saturday 15 November I passed through Washington Square. A guy ranted against Trump. Another wrote poems to passersby on a typewriter.. A homeless man screamed and cried, between forced laughter, thrown on the floor. A group of people all dressed in outlandish outfits had gathered on some benches and were chatting heatedly.. And a pianist played music while an older couple danced in front of him. And I had the conviction that that scene could be repeated even if it were snowing.
The beginning of the cold has arrived in New York, but winter hasn't come yet.
