The Grand Circumference

Global Social Lubricant / 2014 / Russell C. Smith

Subway Slim slid down toward the Hudson on a makeshift snowboard made from a tossed out door, past the corner grocery and the bodegas, down into Hell’s Icy Kitchen, wearing sunglasses his head wrapped in a woolen scarf, while shouting, “Are we creating a new Bohemian Paradise here, or what?”. Was a long few years ago, I start to recall. Nothing much was on the radio and the sidewalks were an icy polychrome art project, at least in my neighborhood. Subway Slim was sliding into the big city to be a transformer in the business of change. Word on the street, he was into vitality and efficiency. I saw him as a part of the grand circumference, supplementing time with seeds of discovery, fertilized in the conveyer belt of streetwise wisdom. Quite likely he’d be open to a crime of opportunity, or something in the arts on the far side of legality, is what I’m suggesting. Way back then, it was the habits of mindless conventionality so needed transforming. We knew we had to dig deeper inside ourselves. Rebuild the substrata, substructure, nomenclature. Jettison the misleading cultural structures, and lead ourselves to downtown dives turned into poetry parlors and abandoned storefronts remade into art galleries. These, and a billion other transmissions beamed out from Late Show movies, from a TV station on Jupiter, and from lit-up freeway signs next to the trans-dimensional Interstellar Interstate. Subway Slim was involved with one of the major kissers of the world, East and West included. (Maybe even North and South.) She knew how to look out windows in SoHo, and make entire blocks full of humans feel peaceful and purposeful with her brainwaves. Something she’d learned in India. Another of her specialties, she listened a lot faster than most people. Which came in handy during non-stop conversations over two bands playing types of loft parties. The main thing I remember is how much in awe we were even to be there in such a transformative transitional moment, and how we were all living our lives during that prolonged and wondrous winter.