Velocity of Money
by Allen Ginsberg (1986)
I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows of Lower East Side
Delighted by skyscrapers rising the old grungy apartments falling on 84th Street
Delighted by inflation that drives me out on the street
After all what good’s the family farm, why eat turkey by thousands every Thanksgiving?
Why not have Star Wars? Why have the same old America?!?
George Washington wasn’t good enough! Tom Paine pain in the neck,
Whitman what a jerk!
I’m delighted by double digit interest rates in the Capitalist world
I always was a communist, now we’ll win
an usury makes the walls thinner, books thicker & dumber
Usury makes my poetry more valuable
my manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold -
Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred
buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes,
Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square -
You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine,
macho men can fite on the Nicaraguan border and get paid with paper!
The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets higher
Everybody running after the rising dollar
Crowds of joggers down broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed
Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books so they’ll have to give a passing ear
to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches
Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy
so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court.
Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931
Hubert Sattler, New York, 1854
A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. (Davy Crockett, 1835)
A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. (Davy Crockett, 1835)
Alfred Stieglitz, Winter - Fifth Avenue, Camera Work XII, 1905
Edward Steichen, Flatiron Building ,1904
Louis Eilshemius, New York Roof Tops, 1908
William Louis Sonntag, The Bowery at Night, c. 1895
John Sloan, Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928
Charles L. Goeller, Third Avenue, 1934
Reginald Marsh, Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930
Philip Evergood, Nude By The El, 1933
New York is a sucked orange. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
New York is a sucked orange. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Leon Kroll, Summer, 1931
Philip Pearlstein, Two Models in a Window with Cast Iron Toys, 1987
Carl Gustaf Nelson, Central Park, 1934
Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went. (Jack Kerouac)
Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went. (Jack Kerouac)
Agnes Tait, Skating in Central Park, 1934
New York Lego
Weegee, The Rich Harassed by the Poor, c. 1940
There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding. (Jules Romains)
George Gilbert, American Faces, New York, c.1940
There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding. (Jules Romains)
Weegee, Vegetable Dealer, 1946
Alfred Stieglitz, Untitled, Camera Work, Nos. 49–50, 1917
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many. (Theodore Dreiser)
John R. Grabach, The Fifth Year, 1934
The thing that impressed me then as now about New York was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many. (Theodore Dreiser)
Raphael Soyer, Bowery Nocturne, 1933
Lisette Model, Sammy’s, New York, 1940
Martin Lewis, Late Traveller, c. 1930
Weegee, Gunman Killed by Off-Duty Cop at 344 Broome Street, 1942
Late on the night of Feb. 2, Izzo and accomplices tried to hold up the Spring Arrow Social & Athletic Club, near Bowery. Shot by an off-duty cop, Izzo staggered toward Elizabeth and fell dead on his face, his gun skittering across the sidewalk.
Dexter Dalwood Room 100, Chelsea Hotel, 1999
Room 100 at New York's Chelsea Hotel is the infamous site of the violent death of Nancy Spungen, allegedly at the hands of her boyfriend Sid Vicious.
Late on the night of Feb. 2, Izzo and accomplices tried to hold up the Spring Arrow Social & Athletic Club, near Bowery. Shot by an off-duty cop, Izzo staggered toward Elizabeth and fell dead on his face, his gun skittering across the sidewalk.
Room 100 at New York's Chelsea Hotel is the infamous site of the violent death of Nancy Spungen, allegedly at the hands of her boyfriend Sid Vicious.
C.R.W. Nevinson, The Soul of the Soulless City (New York - an Abstraction), 1920
When it's three o' clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London - Bette Midler
When it's three o' clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London - Bette Midler
Georgia O'Keeffe, The Radiator Building at Night, 1927
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there ... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. (Ezra Pound)
Earle Horter, The Chrysler Building Under Construction, 1931
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. (Albert Camus)
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. (Albert Camus)
Charles Sheeler, Windows, 1952
Skyscraper national park. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Skyscraper national park. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Harold Weston, Building the United Nations, 1950
Alfred Stieglitz, Looking Northwest from the Shelton, 1932
Crammed on the narrow island the million-windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid... (John Dos Passos)
André Kertész, Lost Cloud, New York, 1937
Berenice Abbott, City Arabesque, 1936
And suddenly as I looked back at the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me quite irresistibly of plied-up packing-cases outside a warehouse. I was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for the sons of men. (H.G. Wells)
And suddenly as I looked back at the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me quite irresistibly of plied-up packing-cases outside a warehouse. I was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for the sons of men. (H.G. Wells)
André Kertesz, World Trade Center, 1972
Hiroshi Sugimoto, World Trade Center, 1997
Thomas Hoepker, View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Manhattan, 11th September 2001
Susan Meiselas, Liberty Plaza, New York, September 11, 2001
Eberhard Havekost, Contact, 1998
Ralston Crawford, Whitestone Bridge, 1930s
Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
C. R. W. Nevinson, Looking through the Brooklyn Bridge, c. 1920
Eugene De Salignac, Brooklyn Bridge Painters, 1914
Arthur Tress, Flying Dream, Queens, NY, 1971
Wouter Deruytter, Billboards, NY: 5th Avenue & 56th Street, 2005
I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable. (Albert Camus)
Richard Estes, 42nd Street Crosstown Bus, 2004
John Sloan, Backyards, Greenwich Village, 1914
Cecil Chichester, Mid-Hudson Bridge, 1934
Harry Shokler, Waterfront, Brooklyn, 1934
George Ault, From Brooklyn Heights, 1925
Louis Guglielmi, Terror in Brooklyn, 1941
Federal Crowd Control, 1918. Machine guns in front, modified phalanx. Soldiers on sides assigned to upstairs windows. Wilson feared antiwar riots, losing mind to small strokes.
Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915
N. Jay Jaffee, Bryant Park, New York, 1953
Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York City, 1949
Charles Harbutt: Boys Smoking in Car, Reform School, New York, 1963
Ted Croner: Taxi, New York Night, 1947/48
Berenice Abbott, 42nd Street, 1938
When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read." (G. K. Chesterton)
Reginald Marsh, Tattoo and Haircut, 1932
Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939
George Bellows , Cliff Dwellers, 1913
Paul Cadmus, Coney Island, 1935
André Kertész, Fire Escape, New York, 1949
Weegee, Simply Add Boiling Water, 1937
Jindrich Styrsky, The Statue of Liberty, 1934
Ellen Auerbach, Statue of Liberty, New York 1939
I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable. (Albert Camus)
When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read." (G. K. Chesterton)
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LOVE this.
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