AN IOWAN IN NEW YORK CITY, WHERE ALL ROADS MEET, FALL APART & COME TOGETHER!

AN IOWAN IN NEW YORK CITY,
WHERE ALL ROADS MEET, FALL APART & COME TOGETHER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 5, 2008

“Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,
And always blind, and often tipsy;
Sometimes for years and years together,
Bestowing honour, pudding, pence,
You can’t imagine why or whence;
Then in a moment – Presto, pass!
Your joys are withered like the grass.”

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802 – 1839), poem titled “The Haunted Tree.”

The fickle finger of fate touches us all, even if we don’t believe in such things as fate. I was reminded of this most recently on my return to our Eternal City, the Big Apple, New York City.

I

Beautiful Betty (BB), my wife, was attending a conference of school executives for the National Association of Independent Schools. She is Business Manager of Hillel, a Jewish Day School, preschool through eighth grade, located in Tampa, Florida.

The theme of BB’s conference was “Schools of the Future: Embracing The Educational Renaissance.”

The conference had some great speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative”; Daniel Pink, author of “A Whole New Mind”; Roland Fryer, author of “Economics of Incentives”; and Faith Popcorn, author of “The Trend Oracle,” among other notable educators and thinkers. I would have loved to hear them speak, but I came in our Friday to stay the weekend as the conference was ending.

II

Friday night we attended the Broadway musical “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theatre, a play, which has received rave reviews and been on Broadway for sometime. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the “Lion King,” which I saw with BB in Toronto earlier in 2003 when I was there to speak at the Conference Board of Canada on the “Fisher Paradigm.”

Not being familiar with television’s “American Idol,” I found it interesting that BB thought the singing in “Wicked” resembled the screaming of contestants on that show. I thought it sounded more like screeching.

“Wicked” is the story of the Good Witch and Bad Witch as prelude to Dorothy and “The Wizard of Oz.” The story line was interesting, but the play was mediocre, in my view, but I’m certainly no expert when it comes to musicals.

III

On Saturday, we took a bus tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, Harlem, Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, Central Park, Greenwich Village and several points between. We could get off the bus wherever we wanted to and visit some site, and get another bus later as tour buses would come on the half hour.

In Manhattan, we got off and took a tour of the Guggenheim Museum. Featured were the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, born in China, resident of Japan, and now a New Yorker since 1995.

The title of his exhibition was “I want to believe.” The exhibition was a little heavy for my tastes, mainly because it was so strategically provocative. I suffer from the same heavy hand.

Cai is creative and an assimilator of ancient mythology, military history, Taoist metaphysics, cosmological science, Maoist revolutionary tactics, and most demonstrative of all, pyrotechnic technology and terrorist violence.

He puts blunt images on canvas of burnt impressions of the world as he sees and has experienced it. This is shocking, disturbing, and not a pretty sight. Cai is telling us, “Welcome to the violent modern world.”

For example, suspended from the ceiling in the center of the museum are two automobiles with rods of light as arrows penetrating the vehicles from every angle, illustrating the combative clash of cultures between the East and West for this lucrative market.

If that is not disturbing enough, there are lions suspended along the passageway to the next level with hundreds of arrows penetrating their bodies. My mind thought of the nature of overkill that is unique to our postmodern society.

Everything is symbolic. Nothing is more symbolic than the work titled, “Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows.” It illustrates China’s dramatic new and dominant role on the world stage. Displayed is an excavated fishing boat with the hull pierced with 3,000 arrows as its support structure, and decorated with a Chinese flag that flutters at the stern from the wind of an electric fan. Imagine, if you will, only the frame of this fishing boat is covered with “Western” arrows to make it viable. This is powerful imagery to say the least.

I am neither an art critic nor a connoisseur of art, but as disturbing as these works the pyrotechnic displays were more disturbing. It reminded me that the East has never forgotten or forgiven the United States for its nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was dropped on those cities in 1945 to bring World War II to an end. Tens of thousands of civilians perished in that mushroom cloud

Cai uses the mushroom cloud to deftly transmute pejorative nuclear tropes into “art” and “culture.”

There are several videos along the way that you can view which comprise gunpowder-exploding events. At first, I could not comprehend the sense of these until I studied the several canvases with imprints of these explosions as montages.

Remember the Rorschach inkblot test, where you were shown inkblot patterns, and invited to interpret them in terms of images, which you thought the blots might represent. Such interpretation was meant to unlock the unconscious mind. Cai is attempting to do this with these canvases. He uses the violence of our times with atomic explosion and suicide bombing to underscore his overall strategy of art as a tool of cultural provocation. He succeeds.

Cai is a student of history and paradigm shifts. He sees violence inextricably linked to creativity with violence a transformation phenomenon. He does this by taking us back to the invention of gunpowder and a new kind of warfare, and then moving swiftly to the development of nuclear weaponry. Now he sees in the confusion and chaos the current shift away from high science to the current rash of suicide bombings. He does with visual art what I attempted to do with words in “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007).

He understands the fragility of human nature and its penchant for oscillating paradigm shifts within the history of civilization. He uses his art to display the dialectical nature of man as a self-creator and self-destroyer in a climate of constant change oblivious to his ultimate race to self-extinction.

I told BB when I left that I did not like the show. It was too disturbing; too much; too clearly provocative of our turbulent times on our way to eternity, wrenching the mind from its complacency to its benign and terrifying nature.

IV

We waited to be picked up by our tour bus and dropped off shortly thereafter at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It had been many years since I had last visited this museum having forgotten how mammoth an undertaking it is to take it all in. We were there for more than three hours and hardly touched the surface.

This was BB’s first visit to New York City and therefore to this museum. No one enjoys art, sculpture, architecture and antique artifacts more than she does. I am less cosmopolitan in my tastes than she is. She loves everything. I am impressed with the artifacts that are thousands of years old, illustrating the genius of man over the centuries. This includes the works of artisans making jewelry out of precious stones, elaborate paintings on the surface of clay pottery, hand formed metallic arms and armor, eating and drinking utensils, but after a while it is too much. BB never tires of studying such craftsmanship. Sometimes I think she approaches the monumental patience of those that once produced them.

Man is storyteller and all art is telling a story. In the Greek and Roman Art gallery, I overheard a mother asking her daughter, no more than ten or eleven, what story a Greek vase was telling. She answered her mother promptly explaining the Greek mythology it depicted and the story it told. I was embarrassed that I didn’t pay more attention to this aspect of my education.

It isn’t only the Greeks and Romans that adored the human form, it is apparent in the Arts of Africa, Egyptian Art, and Modern Art, all different art forms and cultures, and all with an eye rising out of their respective cultures.

Now Medieval Art, which I have seen tons of in museums across Europe, idealizes the human form in almost a beatific way that makes it seem less human. It is art that tires me whereas these other expressions, which are less idyllic and more primitive, do not. I wonder if it is because these other art forms are more honest, or less iconic.

In any case, it is apparent that innovation, creativity and great craftsmanship are a natural expression of the human spirit throughout time.

It happened to me again while I was walking through this museum. I felt timeless. I felt as if I could step into Einstein’s time warp and go back to the future where the future and past collide into a common collage. People like myself produced all this, finding some way to get beyond their petty problems to touch eternity.

In the Guggenheim, you had a headset with a panel of 15 numbered commentaries that accompanied you around the gallery. This was also available at The Metropolitan, as well as guided tours, but we chose to go wandering about on our own.

My favorite gallery was Modern Art, not BB’s favorite, but she tolerates my preference. Unfortunately, it was in our final hour when fatigue was visiting us, and I was becoming increasingly aware of my shingles, which I put out of my mind to take this trip. Antibiotics and painkillers kept the shingles abated, but also sapped my strength.

That said the abstract and impressionism wing of Modern Art once again transfixed me. Each artist tells a different story. Matisse shows his joy of life in nudes dancing in a ring, playing musical instruments, or standing or lying in indolent grace. He captures the same verve with his still lives of a basket of fruit or a view of the sea through a curtain.

The gallery also displays works of O’Keefe and Dali. I sometimes thought the work of O’Keefe’s was that of Dali. O’Keefe’s depiction of skeletal horns titled “From the Faraway Nearby” had the florid flow of Dali. I had the same problem with Matisse and Gauguin. I looked for Munch, Hopper and Peter Max, but if they were there I didn't see them.

Then we were in the middle of abstract art of Picasso, Chagall, Miro, Klee, Klimt, Braque, Modigliani, and Rouault. Most of the cubism on display was created before or early in the twentieth century up to World War II. It was a period of ripeness and decay, many highs and many more lows. That is what I like about this art. It flourishes in the worst of times, moving away from sensible landscapes and impressive nude studies to color patterns on flat surfaces that speak volumes moving on to the crazy quilt of cubism, which has been called “the sum of destructions.” This art is a record of chaos and confusion, which I find calming perhaps because it seems most honest and naked.

As I was thinking this, BB asked me, “Why do you like abstract art?”

“I think for two reasons. I think in a strange way it speaks to me. That is not to say I necessarily understand it, but it speaks to me in a language beyond words, or what the camera eye sees.

“I think artists see far more than we see. The intensity of their soul gives them a vision into life as it evolves and devolves, which they translate into art.

“Take a Picasso abstract of a woman. It is like looking at a woman from several perspectives simultaneously, all of which collide into a kind of violence and incoherence that can be expressed in no other way.

“I see abstract sculptures in the same sense. There was one of a giant leaf that was designated a bird in flight. I think that was accurate.”

Then I mentioned the architecture of Manhattan buildings. “These look like giant sculptures to me, some like birds ready to rupture from the surface and take to flight, and others like Modigliani flat planes of colored squares and rectangles.”

These artists used their whole system to display what lies beyond the eyes and in the mind. They have given much. I find it interesting and restful. It is eerie but a piece of art can lose its separation from you, if that makes any sense.

V

Aside from the beauty and transcendence of New York City, you cannot escape the more pragmatic fact that it is amazingly expensive.

This is no abstraction as virtually everyone has a hand out waiting for greenbacks to grace their palms. If you come to NYC, bring buckets of cash.

It cost us $100 for the tour bus, and $5 every time we got off as a tip for the tour guide and bus driver. Then you pay to get into the art museums, and then an inflationary price for any postcards or knickknacks you acquire from the museum.

It cost $40 for the cab to the city from the airport. Our hotel was the Grand Hyatt next door to Grand Central Station, and in the heart of Manhattan, for which you pay dearly.

Our tour bus didn’t stop for us outside The Metropolitan Museum because we weren’t standing precisely where we should for being picked up. So, we waited for nearly 30 minutes in sub freezing temperatures, and decided to take a cab, which was only a few blocks away: another $12.

We were a bit cold, so we got a cup of soup, no coffee or milk or tea, just soup: $24. We went out to dinner at a nice Irish Pub where we had a nice dinner and coffee, and since neither of us drink, no booze: $100.

Then the next day, Sunday, we checked out of the hotel, paid our bill, and checked our bags for a few hours: $10. We then walked from the hotel to the United Nations Building, only to find none of the flags were up.

We then stopped in at a small Catholic Church on the way back, the Church of the Holy Family. This church was dedicated to Pope Paul VI. He was pope when I was an executive with Nalco Chemical Company. My driver in Rome, who now drove for my company, had driven for the pope. He used his influence to get my family and me into Vatican City, extremely rare for tourists. It was 1968. Unfortunately, the pope was not in residence but at his summer home.

Back in the hotel, we showed our baggage stub to another bell captain, and he took our bags to the curb: $5. A doorman opened the taxicab door for us while the cab driver put our bags in his taxi: $2. Then we were off to the airport where there was some confusion about what I paid the driver. BB thinks he slipped a $5 aside claiming I didn’t pay him, so that was $45. We ate some junk food in the airport, got on the plane, were met by our towering grandchildren and their mother, my daughter, and went to dinner, and arrived safely home, very happy, and a lot lighter in the wallet. My granddaughter, Rachel, asked if we went shopping. We didn’t. We didn’t even go to a bookstore.

VI

I would love to live in Manhattan, but that will never happen. When I was first here, it was more than forty years ago, and I was with Nalco. I would stop off here on my itineraries to South America, Europe or South Africa. People from Nalco’s regional office would treat me as if a celebrity, picking me up at the airport, making arrangements for my accommodation, and taking me to dinner, and picking up the tab. They would even out do themselves when my family accompanied me. That all changed when I retired in my mid-thirties to become a writer.

I let Nalco know I was coming to New York to promote my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and no one showed up. I called to set a luncheon date with the regional manager, and he never returned my calls. Power is a diminishing construct.

VII

New York City is a very safe city, and you feel secure going about Manhattan at any time during the day or night. Everywhere we went we saw New York’s finest, NYPD.

Manhattan is also a very clean city. Nearly every block you see men and women in attractive orange uniforms picking up trash and keeping the streets and sidewalks sparkling clean.

People are generally polite if not always. We all have good and bad days and so allowances have to be made for that whenever you encounter someone out of sorts.

Members of the tour company were stationed at all the critical stops in Manhattan. I asked one young man how long he had to stand out there in the 20 – 30 degree cold, and he said, “Nine hours.” He didn’t say it with sarcasm or resentment, but as fact.

The tour guides on the bus were courteous to a fault with one exception. We failed to put $5 in the coffer in our initial drop off, not knowing the procedure, and this Irishman (I have to admit that, unfortunately) had to say, “Look at those people! They didn’t leave a tip!” So embarrassed, I wanted to crawl under the payment if I could.

The weather in New York City during our stay was in the teens to the low forties. The night we went to the play it was supposed to snow, and we were looking forward to it not having seen snow for years. But instead of snowing it was a cold, sleeting-like rain, which we endured in our mile walk back to the hotel. Tampa was in the low 80s.

Cabs don’t like short fares so it is better to walk the short distance than constantly be turned down by cabbies.

There are black cabs and yellow cabs. We stuck with yellow cabs because they have a meter which shows what you owe as you go. The black cabs may be okay, but we heard stories, and so stuck with what we knew. Yellow cabs also have union licensed drivers.

People that hold the door for you, make up your room, carry your bags, carry you about the city, wait on you in restaurants and so on are my people. I come from their station. I have left money for maids in hotels since I was in my twenties. Every time someone serves me, I pay 20 percent or more for their service.

BB says, “You’re generous, but that’s okay.”

I answer, “No, I’m not. This is how these people make their living. Even if I’m generous, they still don’t make that great a living.” So, we let it go at that.

VIII

We took a night tour of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chinatown and Little Italy. The Brooklyn Bridge and the Washington Bridge were lit up, as were the cafes and restaurants along the shores of the Hudson River. Many of the skyscrapers are lit up at night as well, and appear as if majestic towers of power and purpose. Then there are the nightclubs, the theatre district, the movie theaters, and Time Square, a psychedelic montage of flashing marques of moving images, along with a colorful flow of streaming people.

The crowning jewel is New Yorkers themselves. They move so fast it is hard to believe they are doing this without running. It is why you seldom see an overweight New Yorker. Always on the move, they are like an abstract painting, a changing blur of color.

New York women seem especially beautiful as they crash out of skyscraper doors into the streets in droves as if connected to each other in a single train of movement. It is a wonder how they can move so fast without looking up or at anyone and avoid running into the flow from the opposite direction. They weave in and out with a cell phone, or a contraction strapped to their ears, text messaging without colliding, amazing!

When we went to the play, we dressed to the teeth, only to find most people in jeans, sneakers and anoraks, even older people. Since it cost a ton to see this play, you know it wasn’t because there wasn’t a different wardrobe at home.

What I especially like about New York City is that you can have green hair, black lips, and a purple beard and no one pays you special notice. There is a kind of individualism and independence that pervades New Yorkers’ consciousness. People fly by talking about finance and philosophy, art and politics, in several languages and dialects, leaving a word dangling in the wind like a participle.

The cacophony of sounds, the staccato of workmen drilling through concrete, sirens of police and ambulances, voices from the four corners of the earth, and in the midst of this, the cries of children who cry in a common language to all. You feel you are in the center of the earth where all roads meet, fall apart and come together.

Then there are joggers of all shapes and sizes, all ages, too, running as if their lives depended on it in weather not far above the teens, and you marvel at their dedication. There are cyclists, too, that weave in and out of traffic oblivious to the weather and with the apparent same goal in mind. Some of them, of course, could be working as messengers.

We learned from our tour guides that the Upper West Side has all the millionaires, and the Upper East Side has all the billionaires. The Irish tour guide pointed out the “largest cathedral in the world,” which was about the size of the kitchen at St. Peters Basilica in Rome. So I took these things with a grain of salt.

We also saw John Lennon’s Dakota Building where he lived and was killed by the gate. It was a somber moment for me because he was a favorite of mine.

IX

We never did see Ground Zero or the Statue of Liberty on this trip. In an earlier iteration, when I came out with my second book (Work Without Managers 1990), I was invited by William L. Livingston, also an author, to visit him at the Twin Towers where he was an international consultant designing nuclear power plants for South Korea.

My second time in the Twin Towers was in the late 1990s, when I was invited by Solomon Brothers of Wall Street to be considered as director of organizational development (OD) for the firm. I didn’t get the job, but I did conduct a seminar for about thirty stockbrokers, all of whom I was told later made at least $1 million in bonuses that year. Incidentally, had I gotten the job, I would have most likely been in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

X

Another time when I was in New York in the 1970s I was hired to conduct a company search for Jacque Leviant, a New York Board Member of the Stock Exchange, and an entrepreneur. I gave a seminar for his staff of stockbrokers as well on his Lexington Avenue offices, which took up two floors.

I had retired from Nalco, but he heard of me and asked if I would survey about 15 – 20 specialty chemical companies for him for possible purchase by Leviant’s firm.

My advance airfare for that jaunt was $12,000, which gives you some idea of my traveling plans. It was as if I was running for public office. One of the memorable places I visited was Green Bay, Wisconsin, home of the Green Bay Packers. It was in the middle of winter and I had to take a small play from Chicago to Green Bay because there was no easy access.

When I completed my survey, Leviant went into negotiation to purchase one company with stock, alone, and asked me if I wanted to run the start up operation. I said, “No, Mr. Leviant, I want to be a writer.” That may seem strange to those who know me realizing thirty-five years later, after publishing nine books and hundreds of articles I have failed to establish myself as a writer. I could have made enough in that one year working for Mr. Leviant that is several multiples over which I have earned as a writer.

Instead, I went back to school, and became a contract consultant with the Professional Institute of the American Management Association. That work became fodder for my Master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot, 1976). I spent nine-months in Fairfax, Virginia, the richest county in the US, where a white police officer shot and killed a young African American in a 7-11 Convenient Store in Herndon over an altercation concerning an expired driver’s license. The police officer nearly pushed the man through a cooler. In self-defense, he grabbed the police officer’s nightstick and attempted to club him over the head, but hit only his shoulder, at which the police officer unloaded his service revolver on him killing him. A riot followed, and I was called in to sort out what happened and why. I wrote my thesis on this work.

My doctorate dissertation (The Paradoxical Dilemma Between the Police and the Policed 1978) was based on work from John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York City, to an OD intervention in Fairfax, Virginia, to an OD intervention in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a police force of 350 sworn officers went on mutiny to work conducted in Richmond, Virginia to Dade County and Miami through the auspices of Biscayne University.

Joseph Wambaugh, former police officer of Los Angeles Police Department, and novelist, once said, “A community gets the police force it deserves.” I found that corroborated in this research. For example, Fairfax County Police Department had less than 5 percent of its officers living in the county, as it was too expensive. Consequently, they were policing a county in which they had little sense of ownership.

XI

The Free Press Publishing Company of New York City considered publishing my master’s thesis as a book, but one of its readers said it read too much like fiction and should be better placed in the New Yorker magazine or the New York supplement to the New York Times Sunday edition. It never happened.

One of the members of dissertation committee was a former Harvard professor currently at the University of Southern Illinois. He thought I had written the best dissertation he had ever read, and made that same comment about the flow having the consistency of fiction. It, too, has never been published.

Still, Prentice-Hall of Long Island did publish my first book (Confident Selling 1970), and gave me the courage to continue writing. In rambling on about New York City and what it has meant to this aging Iowan, it has had a permanent impermanence that is consistent with the fickle finger of fate that I have shown here has often touched me. I have been moved to write this because New Yorkers are resilient, as they have been since the dawn of our history. I find it catching.

XII

At the darkest hour things can change and New Yorkers know such times – remember the New York City “black out” in the last century – but they have always risen from the ashes to create a better tomorrow. We see this resilience in their faces since 9-11. So, revisiting the city is like a booster shot of courage.

New Yorkers can be falling apart, in foreclosure; in bankruptcy; their kids out of control or in trouble with the law; their marriages falling apart; having difficulty making ends meet; having lost their job or made redundant; having trouble living for another day; thinking why not give up the ghost and end it all; but staying the course; muddling through with a cocky strut looking at what they have built and what they are; and what they have endured to come together; and take control. They go to a play, a ballgame, a film, a neighborhood bar, or simply walk the streets and take energy from the passersby.

You see it in their faces where they show their determination but not their hand. There are millionaires and billionaires but they can never rise above being simply New Yorkers whomever or whatever they are. There is power in this. It is truly “The Haunted Tree,” and Praed’s magic poem captures this, “Dame Fortune is a fickle gipsy,” indeed.

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Check out Dr. Fisher’s website: www.fisherofideas.com, where you will find more than 300 essays such as this free for your enjoyment.