![]() In Morningside Heights I studied anthropology, getting deeply involved with student politics and doing my best to revive the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the organization from which the Weather Underground emerged in 1969. ![]() I was used to living in a city that felt like a 3D lenticular print, but I was unprepared for the level of screaming cultural saturation I felt.” “I microdosed American culture: its music, its cinema and TV shows, its books. Later, when I would spend large chunks of the year away from the city, meeting acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while who had no idea I ever left, I had a whole other life in another geography which conjured up the same uneasy interstitial feeling. Have you ever seen those mille-feuille-like photos of tourist monuments, compiled from thousands of tourist photos taken from the same vantage point with small differences of height or weather? Walking around a city where I recognized street corners I’d never been on from images or movies, where a street name could call up a song whose lyrics I didn’t know I had memorized, had the unsettling effect of inhabiting one of those images, suspended between several time periods and histories. I was used to living in a city that felt like a 3D lenticular print, but I was unprepared for the level of screaming cultural saturation I felt, like everything around me had been hit with Photoshop’s Find Edges filter. I’d grown up in Dubai and, like so many others in so many places, microdosed American culture: its music, its cinema and TV shows, its books. Midterms approached, and I regretfully decided to miss a Flipper show after seeing they would be playing at a church in a few months it turned out to be a showing of the 1996 dolphin movie. ![]() When I first got to the university dining hall, I was confused to see the iconic 2000s Choking Victim posters which illustrate the Heimlich maneuver, thinking that they referred to the ska-punk-“Crack Rock Steady,” in their own words-outfit that my own ska band used to cover sometimes. In my mind, they had been frozen since the 1980s and ’90s I was somehow surprised to see them as they were today-middle-aged, slightly deflated dad figures. I’d moved to the city from Dubai to attend Columbia University, but spent as much time as I could seeing my punk and hardcore heroes temporarily reform one last time. Fall 2006: CBGB was closing, and I got there just in time for its last, dying wheezes. New York isn’t dead, but it was killing me. For Document’s tenth anniversary, Rahel Aima reflects on what New York gave to her, and why she left it
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