New York missive no 13 - Of snowmen, haircuts and jazz

M had had her hair done for her birthday drinks at Employees Only, a West Village candelit bar where people come to see and be seen and that aims for an air of exclusivity by not marking its name on the door, and hanging thick velvet curtains you have to push through to get in. She looked great (she’d had a makeover as well). This time the haircut had cost $250. Last time she paid $450, and decided that it wasn’t worth it. It made me laugh when she said that you just can’t get your hair done here for under $200, given that just a few days previously I’d had mine done for $25. Admittedly, it wasn’t such a professional job. I’d had “get hair cut” on my (ever-re-charging) mental list of things to do last Saturday and when I walked past “Nick’s salon” on the corner of 8th Avenue and W13th Street decided to get it done right there and then. The salon has been there for 50 years. It has old leather-bound chairs, ornate mirrors and is scattered with hair clips, sprays, brushes, combs and adornments giving it the look of a grandmother’s boudoir. Some of the hairbrushes are still tangled with the hair of previous customers, which is just a bit offputting given how used I’ve got to the swept and sanitised environment of chain salons. The man who cut my hair was old as the décor. His hair was grey and long, down to his shoulders. He wore a waistcoast and courdroy trousers. He proceeded to chop the neglected ends of my hair very slowly, methodically, with drowsy concentration that made me wonder if he’d been at the whiskey most of the morning (a West Village woman in her 50s who was having her hair cut next to me had been served a glass). Yet in 10 minutes he was done. “There you are dear,” he said. “Really? Maybe..should a bit more come off the back?” I asked, but when he held up a hazy hand mirror for me to see, several inches had disappeared. Had I nodded off while he was working? It makes you wonder what other hairdressers are up to when they spend an hour pulling and tweeking and trimming. Anyway, it’s shorter, and feels good, and for the first time in ages I’m wearing it down (partly Ra’s doing), and people are even commenting on it (little do they know – it’s my haircut secret).

Next step…products. Then maybe next time I’ll spend a bit more, as part of this slow but sure New Yorkerisation of me: which I promise to myself I won’t take too seriously, but is doing me good. I’m watching it with amusement, like yesterday when I turned up an hour late by mistake to a salsa-class induction so missed it, and found myself buying not one, but two, dresses in a shop across the road instead. Eek, it’s a slippery slope…texted Va to tell him I’d missed the salsa (we’d been talking about it beforehand) and had spoilt myself instead, and he replied “Well done!”: not sure if he meant it ironically re missing the salsa or seriously re the dress-buying. Anyway, will just promise myself I won’t get to the point of the woman in the gym changing rooms this morning who was acting like the world had ended because she couldn’t find her sunglasses.

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A snow-artist has travelled over the city at night, daubing white liberally over the buildings, trees and sidewalks. For a couple of days it was thick on the ground. Now it’s surviving in clumps in cold corners. Though somehow Central Park, free from the rising heat of the Subways I guess, is still smothered, luring little tobogganists, couples throwing love-filled snowballs and creative snowman-sculptors (the nearby art museums’ influence clearly seeps through the park: no-where else have I seen Miro, Gaudi, Giacometti-inspired snowmen).

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I liked a Chicago Public Library poster from the “Helvetica” exhibition at MOMA (Helvetica as in the font that used to be omnipresent on signage, that Massive Attack used on their Blue Lines albumn cover, and that apparently means “Switzerland” in Latin). It says: “A is the first letter of the alphabet. There are twenty-five more. The Chicago public library has all of them in some very interesting combinations.”

I found myself in a MOMA-meander way in the Helvetica exhibition after seeing New Perspectives in Latin American Art, and then the Lucian Freud etchings exhibition (which included paintings too) – plenty of art for one evening. Freud's work isn't beautiful, at least in an aesthetic sense, but it's powerful, and your emotions get a battering when you see so many of his paintings and etchings at once: his humanised whippets; wide-eyed faces behind spiky plants; women’s flabby nude bodies that leave nothing to the imagination except, crucially, the women’s thoughts. There are paintings of nude men as well. As the text next to one of them said: “Freuds’s portraits of men are in many ways even more disquieting than those he has made of women, perhaps because we are less accustomed to seeing men exposed and examined so unabashedly”. Something to do with a fear that what’s underneath and inside doesn’t quite match up to the externally projected idea of a man? That’s not exactly uncommon among women either, just that men have got away for longer without being exposed.

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B and I watched Cool Hand Luke a couple of weeks ago (which I was quite happy with, as it involves a cast of half-clothed muscley men and many a close-up of the young Paul Newman – as well, of course, as wonderful acting, and a vivid portrayal of the power dynamics of punishment and the insanity of chain gangs and flawed punitive systems more generally).

One of the classic lines from it is when the Captain of Road Prison 36 says to Luke, “What we got here...is failure to communicate.” Communication failures (albeit in a a different context, so much so it seems a bit weird to make the connection) – starkly contrasted with parallel communication successes – have been a theme of the past few weeks, picked up again on Friday evening when L and I went to see The Duchess of Langeais which is essentially about the tragedy of a failure of communication between a couple due to barriers constructed by society and by themselves. Have come to conclude that however magic the chemistry between two people, if they’re incapable of conjuring a natural flow of communication the chemistry’s bound to combust.

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Got home from a lively discussion at Bard college on Thursday on venture philanthropy and social investment to find the Weekhawken Street gang, most of them, sitting on the sofas and watching the latest Clinton-Obama debate. It was in Austin, Texas, where primaries are going to be held on March 4. Hillary had her moments, but throughout most of it she seemed uptight and prickly while Barack carried the conversation with apparent effortlessness and calm. There was a fantastic moment when he said that Hillary’s campaign has implied at times, though its criticisms of his rhetoric of change, that everyone who has voted for him is “somehow delusional"...that "somehow, they're being duped, and eventually they're going to see the reality of things. Well, I think they perceive the reality of what's going on in Washington very clearly". That squashed her. It was accompanied at our end by “Ooooos," "that hurts," air-punching and bouncings on the sofa. But whenever the conversation veered towards point-scoring and personal attacks he steered it back towards policy and substance. He warned off the “silly season” represented by recent accusations that he’d plagiarised lines by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in one of his speeches: "The notion that I had plagiarized from somebody who was one of my national co-chairs, who gave me the line and suggested that I use it, I think, is silly." So far he’s managing to keep the momentum of a movement for change (far more powerful and deeper than a personality cult – which some have said his campaign is becoming), and rise above the increasingly desperate attempts to stop him by those who won’t believe it will happen.

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Am feeling better for a lower alcohol-intake and some longer sleeps (hooray!) this weekend than the previous one, where one night of antics seemed to move seamlessly on to the next. On the Sunday evening, after Saturday’s long night of Belgian party-Café Mogador– 205 club–4am coffee shop, met up with P’s friend Ru for what was meant to be a quiet chat over a beer. But we were in the Blind Tiger on Bleeker Street, which has a chock-a-block blackboard of special beers and ales with names like Dogfish Head, Rockies Cold Hop and Sly Fox Black Raspberry Reserve…and we just had to try three each. Cozily tipsy we moved on to 55 for some live jazz, where Ra joined us. Just as the time before when I was there with M, we managed to annoy people by talking over the music, albeit in hushed tones. I’ve learnt that talking is just not the done thing there. The music deserves respect. On this occasion it turned out that the wife of the trumpeter was sitting on a stool next to Ru. She’d written half the music so perhaps not surprising that she didn’t appreciate our whittering over the top of it. We de-camped to Arthur’s Tavern where a fantastic blind guitarist was in full, funky flow and the punters were allowed to talk. The bar’s low ceiling was heavy with balloons and other party decorations and it felt like being in an Aladdin’s cave.