When I first met Ron Kolm and began listening to him read
his Duke & Jill stories at various venues around NYC, it struck me how
these dynamic street-urchins and drug-popping trouble magnets could almost be
comical and cartoonish in today’s hyperactive, click-bait, irony-infused
culture, if mishandled by the wrong author. Because tales of old-school New
York and its widespread filth, crime, and bumming
around are as much a fantasy to today’s city dwellers as anything Disney could
create. However, getting to know Ron really helped drive home the fact
that these stories are authentic New York slices of life, offered without any sort of wink-and-nod exploitative subtext...and yet perhaps they are also fantasy tales of a their own sort, stories of what once was and will never be
again, at least not on the scale that artists like Ron remember it.
For the most part, today’s millennial and trust-funder
denizens see the city as an entertainment and party mecca, with chain stores
galore and old New York quickly
phased out or made safe (or safer than it was). We all read about how this dive bar or that bookshop closed for yet
another Citi Bank or frozen yogurt shop, gym, or condo
skyrise, so none of this modern New York description is a revelation to anyone.
But these stories of Ron’s show the bedrock this new glimmering city is built upon,
a city many New York long-timers knew
as a dirty yet endearing cultural melting pot where artists, criminals,
entrepreneurs, the homeless, the talented, and the lost all jostled elbow to
elbow on every city block. And yeah, scenes of NYC in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s
sometimes look like something out of a dystopian film about garbage men
fighting giant rats and sewer 'gators, but at least there was an authenticity to
it that we’re reminded of in these stories by Ron.
These stories ARE funny
without being cartoonish. They’re shocking and raw without pandering or going
over the top. They’re revealing in how much one had to struggle to get by in New
York when one COULD struggle AND
get by in New York . And I don’t
mean struggle as in the train took forever getting to work and the Starbucks line was too long
and one homeless guy last week asked you for change. I mean selling your few
possessions on a blanket on a street corner and going home to a bombed-out
shell of a building to find someone stole what little else you had and on your
way home from buying a new door lock you get mugged of that too. That’s a
goddamn struggle, but people like Duke and Jill got by, and had crazy tales to
tell, and drank too much, and were gritty and real and funny and tragic.
And yes, this all might sound like a glorification of a
place that wasn’t all that fun to live in and was pretty scary sometimes, but
there was a truth to that. You knew what NYC was then. You knew what you were
getting into. There was no pretense. Now? It sometimes feel like it’s all just slapdash
makeup, pop singers and TV moguls, a siren song that lures you in to an island
city that isn’t quite what it was and isn’t quite what it purports to be. The
city can still be a great place to live and work but it will never be nearly as
genuine as what you’ll find in Ron’s stories. If for that reason alone, a book
like Duke & Jill is important to read and share with fellow artists and
writers struggling to get by. I highly recommend it.
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