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Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle by Justin Nobel
Ever spend 14 hours straight on the New York City subway? All morning people watching in a Manhattan elevator? All night on a city beach trying to document the mating ritual of ancient crabs? Justin Nobel has a simple the best way to know a city is to stand in one spot and observe it, for a VERY long time. In "Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle", Justin "stands" in some of New York's most famous spots--Central Park, the subway, a Park Slope coffee shop--but also grittier places no tourist would ever go; a street corner in a rough part of the Bronx, a forgotten cemetery, the ER waiting room. Peeling away the surface of the city, he finds a murky nether-metropolis populated by evil genies, Revolutionary War ghosts and his child doppelganger. If you've ever been fascinated with watching the meaningless minutiae that occurs everyday, and might not be so meaningless at all, this beautiful little book from an award-winning magazine journalist will surely pique your interest. And who knows, perhaps you're in it.
Mass Market Paperback
First published October 18, 2012
16 people want to read
About the author
Justin Nobel
4 books9 followers Justin Nobel writes on science and environment for US magazines, investigative sites, and literary journals. He has been published in Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best American Travel Writing. A book he co-wrote with a death row exoneree, The Story of Dan Bright, was published in 2016 by University of New Orleans Press. His 2020 Rolling Stone magazine story, "America's Radioactive Secret," won an award from the National Association of Science Writers and inspired this book. Justin's writing has helped lead to lawsuits, public dialogue, academic research and been taught at Harvard's School of Public Health.
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October 28, 2012
Shockingly original and deeply unsettling, Justin Nobel's "Standing Still in a Concrete Jungle" is a fever dream of New York--vivid, shadowy, and perched at the knife's edge of apocalypse. Nobel's premise seems innocent enough, even calling to mind a bit of "Heckuva Town" boosterism: The author camps out for hours on end at the Staten Island Mall, the Bellevue ER, a Queens cemetery, the 1 train, and so on, carefully observing the characters who pass in and out of his frame. But the New York Nobel finds is terrifyingly otherworldly. It's like a Damon Runyan story collection rewritten by H.P. Lovecraft.
In Nobel's first dispatch, a night on the 1 train, he sees a rangy kid with a "face like gypsum" scrawling surreptitiously on a seat. When the kid gets off Nobel looks at what he's left behind. It's a message in sharpie pen: the names "JFK, 2 Pac, Biggie, John Lennon, Gandhi, Malcolm X." It finishes with a seventh name: "YOU." In a Brooklyn coffee shop where Nobel spends an afternoon, he sees a towheaded kid who looks "eerily similar to how I did at his age." Nobel exits the cafe later in the day, and sees the kid again, as if the doppelgängers were following one another across time. Zooming up and down in a Chelsea elevator full of fashionistas, Nobel looks at the image of a Mexico City museum and suddenly he imagines that he's "up, up, forever up, zooming up, to a vast honeycombed orb, the mother ship, where await the alien surgeons." In the wee hours on the Sheepshead Bay beach, Nobel spots a shiny-headed man walking with a Doberman. The man disappears into the mist before Nobel can reach him. Later, in the rain, on Wall Street, a shiny-headed man reappears. He has "no umbrella though [is] somehow dry" and looks out on the world through two glass eyes. Nobel discovers a message in a Coca-Cola bottle buried in the dunes. The message is so hideous and depraved that I will mention it no further.
The genius of this book is that it works simultaneously as a master class in reportage and a fantastical prose poem. A writer should not be able to do both at once, but Nobel has. His ear for dialogue is so true, his reporting so courageous and charismatic (he appears on a drug corner and is immediately taken in like a brother by the dealers) that by the time his observations morph into arias of the uncanny, we've already come to trust him absolutely. I don't know another book that attempts anything like this. I know of very few authors who could even conceive anything this audacious.
In Nobel's first dispatch, a night on the 1 train, he sees a rangy kid with a "face like gypsum" scrawling surreptitiously on a seat. When the kid gets off Nobel looks at what he's left behind. It's a message in sharpie pen: the names "JFK, 2 Pac, Biggie, John Lennon, Gandhi, Malcolm X." It finishes with a seventh name: "YOU." In a Brooklyn coffee shop where Nobel spends an afternoon, he sees a towheaded kid who looks "eerily similar to how I did at his age." Nobel exits the cafe later in the day, and sees the kid again, as if the doppelgängers were following one another across time. Zooming up and down in a Chelsea elevator full of fashionistas, Nobel looks at the image of a Mexico City museum and suddenly he imagines that he's "up, up, forever up, zooming up, to a vast honeycombed orb, the mother ship, where await the alien surgeons." In the wee hours on the Sheepshead Bay beach, Nobel spots a shiny-headed man walking with a Doberman. The man disappears into the mist before Nobel can reach him. Later, in the rain, on Wall Street, a shiny-headed man reappears. He has "no umbrella though [is] somehow dry" and looks out on the world through two glass eyes. Nobel discovers a message in a Coca-Cola bottle buried in the dunes. The message is so hideous and depraved that I will mention it no further.
The genius of this book is that it works simultaneously as a master class in reportage and a fantastical prose poem. A writer should not be able to do both at once, but Nobel has. His ear for dialogue is so true, his reporting so courageous and charismatic (he appears on a drug corner and is immediately taken in like a brother by the dealers) that by the time his observations morph into arias of the uncanny, we've already come to trust him absolutely. I don't know another book that attempts anything like this. I know of very few authors who could even conceive anything this audacious.
Displaying 1 of 1 review