(Goodbye to) Manhattan

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"Chapter One. He adored New York City," begins Woody Allen's 1979 Manhattan. "To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out . . ." Allen's line may be an allusion to suicide, but one less radical departure for New York creatives has been, traditionally, to move away. With seemingly exponential increase over the past decade, asylum seekers have turned not to Brooklyn but to Berlin, inaugurating in their wake a love-hate fantasy wherein the German capital is cast as a utopian center of artistic production, and New York as a place to sell, not to make––a sexy but commercial hell. The success of Ken Okiishi's film work (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, is its dismantling of that bipolar fantasy, of which its protagonists are ostensibly a part.