The center of the world

While browsing the Time site, I came across an interesting autobiographical essay by Edward Albee. He writes:

I went straight to Greenwich Village to stay with a friend. In a very short time, I arranged a sublet for about eight of us at 60 West 10th Street, the first of many Village apartments over the next decade. I got odd jobs... (and) immersed myself in the incredible artistic renaissance that was the Village in the 1950s -- the Abstract Expressionist painters, the Beat Generation, the avant-garde playwrights. At the Cedar Tavern we'd meet up with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. At the Carnegie Tavern we'd sit around with Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter and talk music. Seeing my first Beckett play, my first Genet play - they were revelatory. They showed me that theater didn't have to be what I had known thus far. They opened things up for me and were probably responsible for my becoming a playwright....

Wow. Talk about being in the center of the world. People these days generally think American society started changing in the 1960s, but the groundwork for the upheaval of that decade was laid in the 1950s by people like Albee and those he mentions.

Meanwhile, fifty years after Pollock: To my list of bloggers whose postings permit me to live the life of a New Yorker vicariously, add this gay 30-something named Michael, whose blog "Me, New York, and a Fifth Floor Walkup" is in turns vapid and poetic and just self-conscious enough about living in New York to give a flavor of it to an out-of-towner like me:

Somedays I love being in New York so much that it hurts. The faces passing me all look beautiful. The way the sun bounces off the millions of windows and how it glows on the sides of the buildings is magical. The noise and the crowds are exciting. But it is a man-made world and I don't always love being here. Sometimes, it seems like its only purpose is to crush out anything natural, environmental or organic. This can be unnerving since I cleary recognize that I am an organic being. The streets are walled to the sky. The sky becomes a distant blue ceiling, nothing more. There is no horizon to mention. The sidewalks don't give when you step...they defy you and remain ridged. There is very little in the city that is soft and comforting. It is a world that
constantly pushes down on you and reminds you that your are just a small part of it, not the other way around.

That's the kind of thing I want to do in my other blog -- the one I never update. I just don't have time.