Neon beauty

This city is most beautiful at night, when the straight lines of its architecture make shadows that cover the peeling of the stucco.

This city is most beautiful in the early morning when the light is almost blue and the sounds of coming awake are distant.

This city is most beautiful from a boat a few hundred metres off the coast, with the sun in the west and the whiteness and greenness and even the grayness shimmering in the changing light of dusk.

This city is most beautiful from the air, the rooftops full of hidden gardens, the boulevards swathes of green in the dustiness of the air.

This city is most beautiful mornings, on it most crowded sidewalk, when the high fashions and the low fashions and the hip fashions and the old fashioned fashions parade.

This city is most beautiful is most beautiful in the late morning, the rain making every car look bright and new, the streets swept by wind and water into a shiny gray containing both blacks and whites.

This city is most beautiful at night when the nightlights of neon and fluorescent and emergency vehicles make ordinary buildings into light shows. This city is most beautiful in the brisk cold of winter's brightness.

This city is most beautiful in the deep heat of its sensual summers.

This city is most beautiful from the north, looking southwards from a hilltop; this city is most beautiful from the south, looking up the coastline.

This city is most beautiful in its peeling round kiosk posters revealing layers of performances, exhibits, rallies, and hopeful apartment renters, baby sitters and private tutorials.

This city is most beautiful in its brightly lit, ultramodern high-tech, espresso and croissant joints and it's most beautiful in its old, dusty, crumbly-walled dark and shadow-ridden street corner cafes.

This city is most beautiful in the madness of its lonely bag ladies and its new parks where clowns perform without any one asking them to but everyone enjoying the silence of the maneuvers.

This city is most beautiful in the smelliness of the sidewalk surrounding the whiralmagig sculpture that breathes fire and sprays water and blasts crazy music to equally crazy crowds of hypnotized strangers and regular benchsitters who are the habitues of the place.

This city is most beautiful in the lover's loneliness of the empty beach, and just as beautiful in the crush of families crowded around the umbrella and the picnics on the beach.

This city is most beautiful in the rallies for whatever cause in the plaza of the kings outside city hall.

This city is most beautiful in the quiet dispersal of those rallies.

This city is most beautiful in the darkened side-streets after midnight, at that time of year when there are a few leaves to kick and a few small puddles to splash when nobody is looking.

This city is most beautiful in the bright noon light when every blemish, every flaw, every scar in the soul of its structures can be seen, perceived with the tenderness of empathy for those who believed it was more important to build than to plan the building.

This city is most beautiful in side streets and main streets where someone has seen the beauty behind the crumbly facade and reached into his own pockets to repair it all, restore it all, or fix-it-up, knowing that an old building need not be a bad building, and that a new building need not be a good building.

This city is most beautiful when it's seen through the eyes of someone who is not afraid of strange smells, fragrances, odors, aromas, and various other forms of human attack on the nostrils.

This city is most beautiful when it's walked or pedalled and it's most beautiful that way because it can be walked or pedalled more easily than driven. It's not the most beautiful city in the world, of course.

But it has become beautiful without intending to be so, without even realizing that it was becoming so, without even believing that it is possible for it to be beautiful.

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