New York missive no 10 - Pigeon-feeding, super Tuesday, superbowl

“PIGEONS. DO NOT FEED THEM”. A sign by a patch of grass by fifth avenue around 56th street sums up one of the differences between here and London. In London that same message would have said something like, “Please do not feed the pigeons because of x, y and z. Thank you for your consideration." I leave it to you to decide which you prefer.

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Last Sunday I went in search of greenery to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A little like Hyde Park, it’s snaked by wide walkways that channel flows of weekend joggers, lycra-clad cyclists and horseriders (the latter not in lycra). There are little corners of wilderness too, rustling with busy squirrels. I was tossing up between continuing to an exploration of Greenwood Cemetery, or pacing through the park to Brooklyn Public Library at the northeast corner to hear a lecture by Patricia Williams on whether Obama will get the black vote in the Democratic primaries. I figured that the cemetery will always be there, and that it’s only once in a while that you have a moment of potential in American politics like this one. It was worth it, even just for seeing the impressive façade of the library: a towering stone doorway with gold embossed figures up either side. The lecture hall was only half full but there were still probably 200 people there – old, young, black, white, Asian. Patricia Williams is a Columbia academic and also a contributor to the Nation, and that academic-journalist combination came through in the way she was able to convey a thoughtfully constructed argument with conviction, humour and the creative use of words. If only all academics could communicate like that. I often think that the ideas of uncommunicative academics have an unfair start in life; they’re unlikely to progress far beyond university walls so have limited impact on changing things, even if they deserve to. Williams said she’s “almost 100%” behind Obama and planned to vote for him on “Super Tuesday” (two days later), but that at the same time she has enormous respect for Hillary. She’s infuriated by the way in which the media is trying to turn the contest into a battle between race and gender, and the way that Democrats themselves are in many ways seeing it as a battle, without listening to either side. She described her subway journey to the lecture, when a group of young Obama supporters had come through the carriage waving flags, wearing Obama hats, and calling out “Vote for Obama”. An elderly lady sitting the carriage had lifted her walking stick, "almost menacingly", and shouted “Vote for Hillary”.

A hip-hop fan sitting behind me asked if Obama has somehow skipped up and over a whole range of black issues, from the discrimination exposed by hurricane Katrina to the nascent exploitation revealed by the sub-prime mortgages debacle – and that his success so far as a black nominee can disguise the fact that the civil rights movement still has a long way to go. He’s not ignoring those issues, Williams said, but if he did confront them straight on at this point his rise would have been curbed well before now (which in itself says a lot), and that if he ever does make it to President he won’t be shy of addressing them. It’s true of course, that he’s a lot more than the “black” candidate. There was a strange moment when a woman said that her fear he will be assassinated is almost so strong that it would make her not vote for him. (What's politics all about then?!). The audience began to enter gingerly into a subject that’s partly taboo but partly unavoidable, feeling that by talking about the “if” they could be increasing its chances of becoming a “when”, but knowing that it has to be addressed. Would it provoke shock on the scale of 9/11 if it happened? What would it say about America to itself and the rest of the world? How would America move forward from there?

What I’m increasingly realising though, is that it’s dangerous to talk about America as a whole, as it feeds into its external power in a skewed way. It’s as a whole that America, the idea of America, seduces and will continue to seduce, yet it’s also as a whole that it threatens its own and others’ destruction. As always, reality and the way we try to understand it needs to be brought back down to the experience of individuals in its multiple forms, even when that doesn’t present the clear-cut answers we look for.

Well, “Super Tuesday”’s been and gone, and Hillary and Obama are still neck-and-neck. Watched the start of the results coming through at C’s apartment with a couple of others, eating chilli and chatting above the prattle of the pundits in the background as they tried to make news out of numbers before there was any news. Huckabee kept popping up being interviewed on all the channels as if he had nothing better to do.

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Well it’s Super everything here at the moment. The evening of my Brooklyn day was the Superbowl: the New York Giants (underdogs) against the New England Patriots (who had won something record-breaking, like every game in the season). I watched with Ra in West Village pub, and having never seen a game before in my life went from being a complete novice to a screaming fan. The score stayed really low and close, though with a slight lead for the Giants, till 10 minutes before the end when the Patriots scored a touchdown – AGGHHH – and then, less than 2 minutes before the end, the Giants scored – HOOORAY! New York erupted in unanimous cheering, horn-honking and hugging. A novel first date, and a fun one. Which has confused me a bit, but I need to relax into the fact that it’s ok you can juggle encounters here to an extent. After all am making up for lost time.

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The previous Friday had been to a party with Ch in a gorgeous apartment that had the effect of filling all the guests with envy and making them depressed about the deficiencies of their own abodes. The woman holding the party is an Australian who’s house-sitting the apartment for friends, which meant it’s full of all their furniture, paintings, books and the kind of global artefacts that say “well-travelled and cultured”. Given that, it was brave of her to throw a party, but then if I was living somewhere like that I’d want to show it off to everyone too. It’s on the fifth floor of an East Village walk-up. From the outside the building doesn’t look like much, but when you come into the flat you immediately feel welcome and at home. It’s one really long thin room, with a sloping roof, wooden floors and an exposed old brick wall. But the wow factor was the fireplace at the foot of the wrought-iron bed, which had a crackling log fire in it that captivated people with its light in the primitive way that real fires do (so rarely do we see them). The party was like two parties: we turned up at 10ish and the ratio of women to men was about 10:1. Ch and I then got into a long, catching-up conversation, then when we decided to go and get another drink, suddenly the ratio had flipped the other way round. Much more like it. I’m not that comfortable surrounded by hundreds of other single and semi-single women, who invariably are also not comfortable around hundreds of other single and semi-single women.

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There’s a bit of a fun-serious swing going on with this blog. Last week went to a lecture by an Indian economist based at Columbia, A P. Columbia’s so omnimpresent in this city, or at least in the corners of this city that I’ve been hanging out in – there’s a lot more still to be explored that doesn't touch the university and that the university doesn’t touch. A. P. had a rather infuriating fixation with numbers (though understandable, given his profession). He viewed India’s growth in purely economic terms, arguing that along with that growth, the social divides and difficulties will gradually resolve themselves. Yet despite me not liking much of what he said, I couldn’t help liking him, as he conveyed his calculations with charm and a twinkle in his eye. I liked an analogy he made between India’s stagnant growth prior to the opening up of the economy in 1991, and cricket (what else?!). Just as you will never have the best cricket players if they only compete locally and nationally rather than internationally, you will never produce the best products unless you compete in the global marketplace. The problem with that argument though, is that marketplace competition is often for “cheapest” rather than “best”.