Jesus Sanchez's First Dérive
February 20, 2018, by Jesús
My love for New York is unrequited. When I moved here almost three years ago, the city immediately left an indelible impression on me. Suddenly New York was the gold standard, the epitome of what a city should be. Most cities, like my hometown San Diego, didn’t stand a chance against the behemoth that is New York. I’ve recognized my bias and the unfairness in pitting smaller cities against the giant cultural myth of the Big Apple. Still, it is hard not to feel nostalgic about New York when visiting home again or to be inundated by this feeling of inadequacy—to be tormented by the belief that everything important is occurring in the East. That every other place in the world is just a game. That any other place is just practice for New York City.
I am reminded of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” an essay chronicling the various stages of her fascination with New York. Like Didion, I am a Californian native and a westerner at heart. Even when subsumed by New York, there is the lingering impression of alienation. I am a secret tourist within the midst. I deeply resonated with her observations of the city; a New York where “places [are] ‘abstractions’” and is “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power.” Simply “’living’ there” would “reduce the miraculous to the mundane.” Of course, this sentiment cannot be viewed as unique to Californians. It is a worldwide phenomenon to think of New York as a mythology that perpetuates fervent dreams of Broadway and glamour.
Yet, as the months wore on, what I once found as exotic—the things of legends, movies, and stories—blurred into my background. Gouache on my canvas. The Alamo became simply another impediment to my daily commute. I admit it is much easier to appreciate New York at a distance, facilitated by a rendezvous outside the city’s perimeters. To appreciate one must also stop and take a step back. The city’s mystique does not vanish. Rather, one becomes immune to it by partaking in the repetitions of the daily grind. Phones fight for our attention. Earphones vie to be the ones that curate our soundscapes. The ticking clock carries legs faster over the pavement.
Participating in the derive was a practice in self-control, a time to hone in on my senses, and a lesson in appreciation. I approached New York with mind tabula rasa. Near the intersection of Mulberry and Grand Street, I was tasked with asking someone for their favorite place. I stopped two women that initially seemed very confused with my question but quickly warmed up to me. The first said Canada but then specified, “Prince Edward Island” and her friend decided it was Italy that she loved very much. Mission complete I thought but the chit chatter ensued and one asked me where I was from. When they heard, “San Diego,” they both squealed and exclaimed they were flying there tomorrow. Restaurant recommendations proceeded. It was pleasantly odd to find that my first human interaction with then Dérive app somehow steered me to home, or the idea of home.
On Grand Street, I was told to stop by the nearest tree and observe. It just so happened the nearest trees were potted pines, illuminated with Christmas lights, facing a bakery. I watched some teenagers huddled outside the bakery debating if they should spend money on pastries. I watched while a woman wearing Saint Laurent Opium 110 pumps (the heel is very distinctive, literally spelling out “YSL”) stride past the teenagers next to her husband, or what I assumed to be her husband. The dichotomy of life in New York is everywhere one looks.
I entered full creep mode when my app told me I was to follow someone on a bike until they were out of site. It took me a while to find a bicyclist, which is surprising because I feel they are constantly almost-colliding with me. I followed a middle-aged man with a black Jansport on his back and a faded brown cap on his head up the Bowery for a block. On the corner of Broome, I watched him ride away into the foggy evening, the Empire State’s silhouette guiding him like a northern star. I felt curious about his life.
In fact, the dérive cracked open my curiosity even more. I was a sleuth, a detective piecing together strangers’ lives based on what little audiovisual clues I could gather about them as they passed me on streets. What clues they offered for the public. Initially, I felt most people looked lonely or tired or sad. I saw and heard them make dinner plans wearing Apple earpods while they boarded an Uber. I heard people gossiping about a lover’s refusal to commit. I saw people pose in front of a wall with graffiti and a broken dilapidated ATM machine jutting out of it for the ‘Gram. When I am alone with my thoughts, existentialism threatens to overtake me. Initially, I felt everyone seemed sad or lonely, clinging to sanity by doing the only things humans can do: making plans, living life unsatisfied, etc. I quickly realized I needed to separate my own emotions; I needed to take a step back. I learned that what one learns or gathers from observing people and places changes dramatically based on perspective.
I think of Shannon Mattern’s description of a deep map in Deep Mapping the Media City, a map interwoven with unofficial histories, the history of the personal alongside empirical data or Satellite images (33). I was drawn to the creation of the city through the personal. The areas I traveled around during my dérive had me encountering places I had once been before through very different circumstances. On Kenmare and Mulberry, I looked ahead and saw the restaurant where me and a former lover had our first date. I immediately wanted to run or turn back. I thought it was peculiar how these places, (like a delicious and wonderful restaurant) can start taking on new meanings or associations on a personal level. My bittersweet and secret experience will not stop anyone from dining at that restaurant. People create a New York through their own experiences and memories. It means something entirely different for me than it would for anyone else. This realization made me further understand the importance of a deep map. It is impervious to understand history through the personal, through different unique accounts. We will never have the full picture, but we are able to hop from perspective to perspective (think switching the perspective view on Mario Kart or other video games) to more fully understand the past using the collective and the singular.
At the end of this sojourn the words that came to mind were: interconnectedness, intersections, personal/private, and public. I relate these concepts to Shannon Mattern’s theory of “temporal entanglement,” the realization that knowing our modern city requires tracing “the technologies, architectures, economies, social processes” and so on that has shaped it (14). This means that old and new media work in conjunction to shape modernity. The residual is still at work. Taken literally, I could apply this concept to when the derive asked me to follow an “interesting noise” and document it. I followed a loud crackling sound and it lead me to a storefront. It turns out the sound was a firecracker emulation emerging from a plastic Chines lantern (modeled after real ones) that was glittering with LEDs. The residual (Chinese New Year customs, firecrackers, lanterns) created this modern piece of technology. More abstractly I think of Mattern’s theory of infrastructure as a relationship “or an infinite regress of relationships” (11). I think memories can create infrastructure. They create history. I think that if everyone’s unique experiences and memories could be superimposed we would create a new understanding of New York. The first step in creating a deep map— to see how we all come into each other’s life.
Ultimately, I think of art rock musician St Vincent singing “New York:” “New York isn’t New York without you, love.” The you, for all intents and purposes is interchangeable. Our New York would not be a New York without someone or something from our personal lives.