Progress and Whatever It Means

There was a billboard that occupied two sides of a five-story, L-shaped building at 42nd and 8th Avenue. Maybe it's still there. A couple of years ago, when I was working in Times Square, I would pass this advertisement regularly and at the time it was filled with a message from Johnnie Walker, the bourbon(?) company. Against a black background, the advertisement showed a linear graph with points along a positive slope that marked generic housing situations: share, rent, lease, own. The progression of the points, and the company motto, suggested that perserverance leads to a steady improvement in material living. And most pointedly, to me, the idea seemed to be that responsibility and maturity were on corresponding x- and y-axes, vaguely associated with a variable amount of liquor that should lead, ultimately, to home ownership, located somewhere near the roof of this scrubby, awkward building that housed Show World at ground level (whose heydey is wonderfully described in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning - now a series on ESPN?).

The reasons http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifwhy I remember this billboard particularly well seem to have much to do with how I felt about progress in my own life at the time, and therefore how this message weighed on my conscience. The fact that a liquor ad was deepening my crisis in confidence only made matters worse, and made me want to drink Johnnie Walker less. It was as though I had an uneasy feeling that my fortunes were threatening to dive all the way down to ground level, which would place me in a porn shop two decades past it's prime.

Another time, I was walking past the Greenwood Cemetery with my girlfriend, and just inside the fence I saw a full bottle of Johnnie Walker (red? blue? black? I don’t know), lying prominently beside a gravestone embedded in the ground. It appears that the bottle was left to accompany the spirit of a former police officer of Italian heritage. In a cemetery known for its eclectic range of famous remains (the founder of Tiffany’s, the man who ran Tammany Hall, Basquiat), who knows the reasons behind the bottle being planted where it was. All I know is that it was perfectly appropriate that Johnnie Walker was there to remind me of the absolute outcome of Progress.


Having recently moved into an apartment here in Fes that is larger than anything I rented in New York, I have been thinking more about the notion of progress. From the fellow who said that capitalism and the end of the Cold War has delivered humanity from conflict (Fukiyama) to the fellow who said that the nation is the ultimate expression of collective thought (Heidegger), the simplistic idea of a single Progress is easily and repeatedly deconstructed in an academic context.

But I have experienced as well the much more personal sensation when time seems not to matter, and a month's beginning middle or end feels one and the same, with no temporality to passing seasons, which in the mind easily slip into years...And being conscious that time is stretching out like an undifferentiable low-lying grey skey, Progress and Its trappings become much more compelling. Give me a walking stick and some bourbon!

I don't have either of those accessories in this apartment in Fes, but I do have a remarkable amount of space to myself, which brings me the solitude I was hoping for, and the lonelinhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifess that accompanies it. I do have a wonderful view over part of the city, where the old medina sinks into a valley below my line of sight, and the white agglomerations of newer neighborhoods climbing the hillside to the north and east reflect sunlight throughout the day. The minarets, blinking pharmacy crescents and ubiquitous satellites remind me of the work of Nicola Lopez, an artist who was briefly a classmate in an Arabic course in the City. Her work is generally described using the term dystopic, and while the view from my balcony is much less so, she captures the aesthetic of the architecture through the lense of an alienating political environment. In truth, I am simply getting acclimated to the new surroundings, fewer acquaintances, and the smell of diesel exhaust in place of the wood smoke in Ifrane. However, the apartment here and the Johnnie Walker ads that I have been seeing, inexplicably, in a couple of Moroccan publications, remind me of the multiple effects resulting from every movement: that with love comes sadness, with solitude, loneliness, but that time remains a rather compelling motivator to retain some measure of progress, whatever that really means.