new york text by CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN I have been thinking lately about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In Act III of the play, the eponymous Roman soldier and misanthrope is told that, due to his tyrannical pride in not wooing the public by showing them his battle scars, he is banished from the city. Coriolanus responds with signature impudence: “I banish you!” he rejoins, “… despising for you, the city, thus I turn my back; there is a world elsewhere.” It is not surprising, having moved to New York at the age of 20 back in 1996, that I should find myself having grown old here. Old in Manhattan means middle-aged, and the incidental casualties of being no longer seduced by every corner, no longer the star of my own imaginary music video, no longer, in other words, susceptible to the fiction that merely living in New York can pass for accomplishment….