New York Unexpurgated, Part Two: The Guidebook

New York Unexpurgated is a highly inventive, excruciatingly funny guidebook credited to "Petronius." It's hard to imagine anyone using this as an actual guidebook, even when it was released in 1966. It seems to be more a work of wishful, absurdist psycho-geography. For example, if an adventurous traveler wishes to visit the mysterious Key Club of the 7 Rooms, she must first pass muster at a sketchy Chinatown candy store called The Jellybean Path. Once at the alleged club, she will find seven rooms "jam-packed with indescribable nonsense" lit only by a "trained ape of undefined sex" who moves a single light bulb from one nook to another every 15 minutes. How I wish that such a place existed, but I am doubtful of the book's claims of simian efficiency, to say the least.

I brought this guide with me to New York City, curious about its promise to lead me to the "under underground" and soon have me "going down in Gotham." As suspected, it was worse than useless for this. Any legitimate entries, if there are such, would be 44 years out of date and long buried beneath the changing urban palimpsest. But what the travel-guide lacked in practical advice, it more than made up in amusement value. It's almost impossible to turn to a random passage without succumbing to belly-laughs. I had the most fun inviting New York City residents to read aloud from it.

This tome seemed like a useful tool for a dérive ("...a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll" -Guy Debord). The playfulness of such an approach is irresistible to me and ideal for a walking city like New York. Combined with a list of pilgrimage points from the past (here is where CBGBs used to be, here is the former site of Peace Eye Books) and a few songs, the book was less useful than inspiring. It did lead me down the Jelly-Bean Path, though, and I did see a few sites that would have made great entries in an updated edition.

If you buy one spurious guidebook this year, it should be New York Unexpurgated. Its genius sadly under-appreciated, it's a cheap, tawdry read that might once have been valued by Dadaists.