IF THEY WOULD HAVE BUT LOOKED

164. IF THEY WOULD HAVE BUT LOOKED (nyc 1967):

Somewhere in the back of my mind at these times was the idea and the realization that when people spoke of 'New York City' and all its magic and excitement what they were really talking about was a place and a time that was gone and for all practical purposes but a fading memory - for the city itself was at this time already foundering and breaking apart and what was left was a saddened reality which had somehow lost most of its more true vitality and instead become enmeshed in another world entirely of modernism and lightness and because of that so many of the places and scenes of the old days started just disappearing and the city was getting made over again into something new and different - glass and steel replacing mortar and brick and concrete - and people changed too and because of that everything began to be different and seem almost foreign or unreal and circus-like and I wondered (or began wondering) 'where are the serious conversations?' and 'where are the things of import which matter?' and I knew they were mostly gone or dwindling and it was apparent everywhere : a funny memory I always had was of a time when you'd see cars - station wagons mostly - with rear widows covered over sometimes with twenty or thirty of these odd travel-decals people used to put in their windows - things they'd picked up from their various destinations ('Weeki-Watchee Florida Yuma Arizona Knott's Berry Farm Georgia New York City Cape Canaveral Pike's Peak Niagara Falls) and they covered the entire country because apparently most every destination had them - these colorful water-transfer decals - and slowly they all began diminishing and I'd see less and less of them as apparently fewer people still 'understood' the naivete necessary for these things to be in place and as that went so too did much else and a more strange sort of abrupt self-awareness began taking its place and with it the self-consciousness necessary for irony and humor and parody and all of that to take place and set in and essentially what resulted from that was the cultural cross-referencing which made many other things suddenly intolerable (like the things which took innocence or naivete to be tolerated) and once they were gone there was no bringing them back and that then was the end of the old scene even to the extent that I noticed the old dour darkness and solid serious of old New York had simply vanished and much of it by the late 1960's was being replaced with plastic and light colors and better lighting and modern fixtures and more colorful decor and wild designs and fabrics and shapes and while that night not seem like much it really IS much and makes a great difference to oh-so-many things and New York City was in the forefront of all that as it grew into its own self-awareness and 'Fun-City' crap and all that (from Robert Wagner to John Lindsay to Michael Quill to Abe Beame in one fell swoop) and while 'DISASTER' is its own best friend it does - at the same time - arrive with plenty of announcement and fanfare and all of that was very apparent and obvious for all to see IF THEY WOULD HAVE BUT LOOKED : but they didn't.