I think of New York as a great corridor. A walking line like the vast openness of the eighth avenue, a straight line to the beggining and a backing shadow of the long lasting end. I think of it as a collection of those oranged red bricks piled upon each other with old firestairs attached to them, building up buildings of different sizes, some of them damaged or just mellowed up on their run across the avenues to the south, to the great mellowness of the lower east side and chinatown. All these lines and bricks, corridors and avenues, open spaces and infinite, suffocating walls, where you can imagine the action of a dreary night, built upon the quietness of midnight chelsea, with the small symphatetic houses, the darkness of the streets or that lady standing in the front of her housedoor smoking, in the middle of the anguished dark of twentieth avenue. I think about asking the lady for a lighter, saying some useless stuff, synchronizing with that gloomy street feeling and finding some companion in the New York City where I don't know a person (but I do know I identify with many). But I can't fulfill my thought dreams this way. Almost everything I could strive for is long gone. In the end, it's just all these strange-looking negroes, hungry begging percussionists and the poor folks from the Bronx crowding the subway on their returning home from the dreary sides of the 42nd avenue. The Times Square wasn't built for them. Wasn't built for me either, but I can stand there in my good-looking clothes and imagine the past and the future. Being blinded by the lights, feeling like an ordinary tourist that can't believe in the scenery that is shown. This is where the City really stands. Flamboyant as it is, you can still see the beat, the bummy and the restless, hungry from heart, mind and stomach wandering in these neighbourhoods. These are the middle-aged black men standing in the sidwalk looking across the glass walls of the ESPN center to the basketball on the tvs, for they can never pay to get in. You can find the same men in my hometown; black middle-aged long-striving men, driving buses, going to heaven for sure. I eat $5 chinese food in the backstages of time square, trying to feel the 'hip' I came from across the sea looking for. I gather all the neon lights and dark alleys inside my mind and mix them into the real glimpse of the hipster life I am able to get in the troubled times that brought me into being. It is not usual for me to look upon the past, weeping for dead inspiration from some dead heroes. But I do learn from them. And I do catch the legacy which is written in the air, out of the focus of the neon lights hanging in Times Square (and out of the focus of a cheap chinese restaurant hanging upon the dark reachings of broadway.