Paradox City: Go West, Young Man (Just Avoid Rush Hour)Joanna Colangelo

I should have known what to expect from European art promoters, with all of the eccentricities that they evoked through the flood of exaggerated emails that had landed in my inbox the week before.

"We must make a meeting with you!" the emails read. "For the sake of creativity! For the sake of artistic liberty, madam, we must make this meeting with you!"

You would have thought that the fate of the free world rested on this appointment — the emotions were that high. I had been working for the most prestigious of prestigious Cultural Affairs Commissioners at the time, and as only the hollow prestige of the shamefully esoteric urban art world can allow, meetings with Europeans were never to be declined. Europeans did not meet with City bureaucrats; they met with the Mayor — maybe, but they certainly did not meet with his underlings. It was a day to celebrate when the two perfectly erudite women ushered into our extravagant marble offices across the street from City Hall, in full art regalia: the required orange hair (grown out just enough that they could call their accidental gray roots a "blending of primary colors"), chunky jewelry flung around their wrists, layers of scarves strewn across their shoulders and, of course, the belts that slung below their waists, elongating the younger woman's slim torso and cutting somewhat unflatteringly into the older one's fashionable middle-aged pudge.

Somewhere throughout our email exchange, I had come to understand that they were in New York City to propose a month-long arts festival to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's, Futurist Manifesto. It seemed peculiar, if nothing else, to be looking so far backwards to celebrate a movement that had so rejected the past, but I had yet to speak with them. In time, they would prove their point, and they would do so, with that same urgent emotionalism that emanated so dramatically from their initial emails.

"We will show the world what the future is, not by ignoring the past," the older woman began. "But, by using it to launch into the future!" Her accent was thick and I could hardly place it — so let's just say she was French. The other woman, the younger one, nodded enthusiastically and with every nod, her necklace made a noise not dissimilar to an off tempo tambourine without a supporting band.

"Why here?" I had asked them. "Why not in Italy — in Florence or Rome — where Marinetti would be more recognized?"

The older woman took a patient, slow, deep breath and flung her chin up, in the most declaratory manner, proclaiming, "Because New York is the city of the future. It has always been the city of the future!"

She continued on for about three more minutes, barely inhaling as she plowed through the accomplishments of New York City, trying to convince — trying to sell — the idea of New York City to a native New Yorker. I nodded, anticipating the next declaration of characteristic impressions.

"It is always changing," she continued excitedly. "So expansive, so full of opportunity, so full of movement!"

The younger woman spoke up now, as though taking her cue to categorize New York for the youth, for Generation Hip — the international artists, writers and whatever other Nouveau Pauvre were inspired by the creativity of Whole Foods and iPods.

"The great European cities are just as rich, really, but they have too much history." She spoke with the sophistication and pensiveness of Jeanne Moreau in some François Truffaut film that has long been since forgotten. "They cannot look to the future like New York does. They are simply not open to the changes."

It seemed like a reasonable assertion: change certainly existed as the ever-present ring of renewal in New York City, but New York as a city of actual Futurism? A city of space and expansionism? A city of fluidity? A city of movement? The promoters clung onto the majestic myth of New York City; they hung onto the intangible promise of opportunity, and recognized the city as one built by great leaps of faith from the zealots of ambition, who otherwise go by the name of "New Yorkers." What the art promoters contended made perfect sense, and it certainly would not be the first or last time that Europeans would look towards New York City as a young, vibrant urban organism of vitality and change. The whole concept seemed to fit as an integral piece in a national puzzle of indefinable American identities — those traits which, while providing a fundamental understanding of the complexities that distinguish the characteristics of Americanism, prompt some of the more obvious paradoxes in our construction of the elusive American Character.

As a city built upon its own set of cultural mythologies and defined as much by its perceptions as it is by its actuality, New York City presents one of the more striking cultural and societal paradoxes in American identities: a city, so full of change, so full of movement, so full of opportunity, in fact, exists as an overpopulated beast of urbanity, offering no actual "space" for movement, exploration or renewal. The very nature of New York life operates in a constant state of conflict with its mythic identity. However, the art promoters may very well have been correct as they declared New York the city of the ephemeral future — a city rarely hindered by its past. After all, New Yorkers are so often characterized as much by their inability to be characterized as they are by any single underlying identity. Surely, the Futurists who renounced history for its fatal stagnancy, would look towards such a place for its perpetual renewal — for its "movement," as the older woman declared so deliberately. Though, it was the European categorization — the outsider's classification — of New York as the realization of Futurism, and not necessarily the New Yorkers' self-definition as such, which suggested the complexity of this urban paradox.

The younger woman tore deeper into her argument, contending eventually that New York City was Futurism; that it was, as she put it, "A city of transformation!" It was the city, she went so far to say, "that Marinetti would have built!"

I leaned back in my maroon velvet chair, one of four set out at a round mahogany table in front of the hardly futuristic turn of the century fireplace in the Cultural Affairs offices, where the past invariably spoke through the daily monotony of government affairs. Government, I had learned quickly, could hardly be considered government at all if it were to ever function without the inefficiency of tradition. I watched as the promoters gesticulated; I was engaged as their voices grew louder and how the older woman's orange hair had half-fallen out of its clip and was hanging across her face, posing minimal distraction to her epic sale. I wanted to be convinced, and to again see the City as I once did, as a romantic Woody Allen wonderland, but as with most myths, when the reality exposes itself, it is nearly impossible to ignore its manifested presence in everyday life.

My apprehension was only slightly rooted in the art promoters' contention of New York as a Futurist city; it was more the New York City myth vs. reality that had ignited the curiosity to explore how this cultural paradox was vested so deeply in the City's perception and identity. How had it come to be understood that a city known for its assaulting urban chaos, which practically suffocates its inhabitants by its ubiquitous presence, could simultaneously be understood as a land of space and expansionism — a land of change and movement? How was it that this land from which its inhabitants cannot leave without crossing congested bridges and crammed tunnels be celebrated for its modern functionality? How had this City of crawling sardine subways become the 21st Century version of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's illustrious vision of speed and modernization? If this were the City that "Marinetti would have built," I could venture to guess that he would have never tried to get across town in rush hour.

This type of regional and often times, national characterizing is, of course, not at all unique to this moment or to this story. Americans, perhaps because of an impossible historical and cultural collectivity, inexorably turn towards our sweeping cultural mythologies as a raison d'etre. Though, it is no surprise that these myths are lined with flawed generalizations, attempting to amalgamate a population that could not otherwise be amalgamated. The result is that American identities often operate in intricate contradictions, contradictions so prevalent that John Steinbeck commented in 1962, "Americans seem to live and breathe and function by paradox; but in nothing are we so paradoxical as in our passionate belief in our own myths."

Cultural historians have long criticized American culture for its "dominant cultural mythologies," as they have coined them, though the examination of these myths should not necessarily be disposed of in the name of passé cultural hegemony. For years, "progressive" American Studies scholars had criticized their predecessors — Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, in particular — for studying American myths and symbols and for therefore, reinforcing a false "collective American mind" in American culture. Yet, more than fifty years after Smith and Marx began to first dissect these myths (and twenty-five years after academics shifted away from studying them) we are still faced with the power of the myths in defining — or at the very least — in influencing a perception of American identities. This time around, however, it is not the Americans defining themselves by the myth, but the Europeans looking towards America for the realization of an exported mythic identity. The perception of New York City as a Futurist success employs the most fundamental of American myths — the American Dream — and brings with it the necessary sub-myths of opportunity, individualism and westward expansion.

We all know what the American Dream is and perhaps the attribute most indicative of its continued relevance in American culture is that most of us would be hard pressed to find someone in this country who did not have an opinion on this theoretical brass ring — in one way or another. It never existed; it existed one hundred years ago, but it has since been destroyed; it is more powerful today than ever; it discriminates on every level; it is the one truly pure opportunity that ever existed and continues to exist in the country. The arguments are endless, complicated and personal, but the elements — not the prevalence — of the myth are rarely debated. The myth is quite simple when you break it down to it most primitive form: if you are not content with where you are, leave. Start over. Build a new life. Move, and then move again. "Go west," as Horace Greeley immortally recited in the 1850s. The freedom is detachment. The freedom is, in many ways, Futurism; it is the liberation from being tied to any pre-determined time and space. The American Dream, it appears, has forever been the mythic dream of renewal, but it is a shell of promises without the opportunity of movement.

Huck Finn would have remained a delinquent child without the currents of the Mississippi; the Joad's would have rotted in the desolate Dust Bowl without their barreling Hudson truck; On the Couch would have had a much different appeal than On the Road. In the twilight of John Steinbeck's life, he could have remained in Sag Harbor, content to go gentle into that suburban goodnight, but he packed his bags to rediscover the America about which he had spent his life writing in Travels with Charley. The journey — the movement — in these tales is less about the characters' actual relocation, or even about the inability to stop moving, but is more about the abstract physical, spiritual or moral renewal that the characters experience during their travels. This begs the question, what becomes of a culture, what becomes of its citizens, when movement exists in a state of confinement, when its energy fails to cease, yet it has no place to go? The eternal paradox of New York City is the very nature of its structure. Give New Yorkers the figurative plains of opportunity, a city in which to write their own Horatio Alger autobiographies; give them a City of tomorrow, but give them a City from which it is nearly impossible to escape. Of course the European promoters could declare New York the City of Futurism! After all, they had the unique opportunity of leaving it without the formidable urban roots that hold New Yorkers to the concrete floor, accepting the boisterous jungle surrounding them to be a physical and emotional home.

The argument can be made that on the most superficial level, New York City is a town of architectural Futurism. In the fashion of true Futurism — perhaps even more so than Rome under Mussolini's watchful eye — New York could grow northward, reaching high into the sky, claiming pieces of intangible property hundreds of stories above the Earth's surface. As overpopulated and congested as the City is, it certainly tries to be functional, and the great architectural beauties of the City — the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, for example — are admired as much for their aesthetics as they are for their practicality. But this was not what the European promoters aimed to celebrate in the City; they wanted to honor New Yorkers as "visionaries," artistically speaking and otherwise. However, if we are a culture of contradictions, as most cultures are, then perhaps New York City's most cherished contradiction is its ability to exist at all — the ability of New Yorkers to exist at all. The opposing mythic counterpart to New Yorkers as "Futurist visionaries" is New Yorkers as cynics and as hardened souls who have lost themselves in the bustle of the everyday grind, who have little time for anything outside of their own busy lives and all-consuming daily rituals of biting sarcasm and work. Yet, if this is to be believed, then the perhaps the greatest paradox of New York is that a city of such cynics can ultimately be a city of wondrous dreamers, where the beaten down and jaded New Yorkers can still surrender to their City's promise of opportunity, individualism and hope for a future not hindered by the limitations of its past.

Joanna Colangelo is a frequent contributor to CJAS.