Sudoscience

I recently returned to NYC for a brief visit. I lived in the city, as one of its "transplants", from 2018-2020 and again for a few months in 2022. Faced with unemployment, penury, and the generally crushing sense of ennui that largely evaporated upon my departure, I chose to move away for good. I left behind many things and a few people I cared about. Most of those people and all of those things assumed a typical relationship to the city. You are expected to love NYC if you want to live there, and I had learned that I did not love it.

Perhaps I thought an extended absence would change my opinion. Fast forward several years, add in a much broader and healthier outlook on the world, and tangible prospects for a life in a major American city; I found myself still perplexed, and often downright infuriated, by NYC. I have this vague notion that every year life in the USA gets measurably worse, more chaotic, and more unreasonable. That's not to say there aren't bright spots, and even some which occur in NYC.

It also must be said that NYC is currently the site of one of the more promising, in my estimation, political events in the country, the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, one of the pitifully few politicians at any level of the US government who can be said to have ideas which match his passions. Still and all, it struck me rather harshly how everything seemed so hostile there: people doing drugs in the bathroom of a public library, dramatic and loud public mental breakdowns witnessed and ignored by hundreds, etc.¹

What I was hopeful for, upon my return, was that many of the things I used to like I would still like, and that some of the parts of life there that began to take their toll on me would no longer faze me at all. An analysis of that situation would require a much lengthier post than I wish to write here. It will suffice to examine the things which I didn't like then, and still don't like now.

New York City is really whatever you want it to be: a tale of eight million cities, rather than just two. This is part of the excitement for the people who like living here, and for those who don't. Even if you are a casualty, like me, of NYC burnout, there is something to be said for the essential novelty of the place. But there are certain things that, in the Main Character Syndrome capital of the world, you just can't avoid. One of those things are buskers, and specifically that most contempible variety, the "hostage situation." This is my own term for the unpleasant occurrence that besets riders of the express trains that go up the west side of Manhattan. On the A train, you go from 59th St, at Columbus Circle, to 125 St, in Harlem. Ditto the D train, along Sixth Avenue. The 2 train follows the same route up Seventh Avenue. These are some of the longest stretches of track in the system with no stops.

But as with so many things that distort our perception of time, the few minutes one spends in the darkness of these tunnels feel interminably longer when one is importuned by the presence of a performer who knows just what they're doing, and how long they can place a demand on your sanity, if not exactly your attention. We are all of us restless and bored by the prospects of going without entertainment.

Bad taste has its rights just as much as good taste, we are told, but that doesn't make being forcibly subjected to the dregs of popular culture, in a way that is uniquely demanding, any less unpalatable. The counterargument is so dreadfully mundane I am loath to even mention it:—wear headphones, they say, listen to music or a podcast; just tune them out. Yet this is exactly the problem!

It is just the feeling of disdain for layering distraction upon distraction that I am cultivating. And we should not encourage the bad manners of others by inviting them to notice that we have the ability to ignore them, and choose to do so. It is evident that this only incites them to further displays of ridiculous self-aggrandizement, masquerading as the most humble self-sacrifice.

At the very least, if they know that the better part of their audience is paying them no mind whatsoever—insofar as such people could even be called an "audience"—they could accordingly be more selective in their repertory. Unfortunately, it seems like each time I board a train and am broadsided by one of these performances, the quality of the chosen song declines even further.

The latest offense took the form of Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours", a song so blithely saccharine it calls to mind the painful verse output of one's youth. That this represents something like a notable plot point in the history of popular 21st century music is a topic that must be put by, for now; in this context it is enough to observe that, no matter how much a performer excuses themselves by claiming they are "actually pretty good," they do themselves and their listeners a disservice by wasting their time and talent on poor-quality material.