NY missive no 191 - Layers of time in lower Manhattan

It took me a while to settle on what to read this Summer, when I realized I really wanted to read in French, and landed on La plus secrète mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. So that is what I was reading when I was on the N train with JNH last week to take him to his Summer camp (about which more later). At 14 (blimey!) he’s old enough now to take the trains himself - that’s what he’ll be doing when he starts high school in the fall - but when we can we’re accompanying him on the back-and-forths to Canal Street because why not, it’s company. 

I described a little segment of the book to JNH - a dark snippet from the book-within-the-book "Le Labyrinthe de l’Inhumain", which the main book's narrator Diégane is on a quest to find out more about. The guy sitting opposite us asked whether the book was in French, which led to a brief conversation-in-passing before he got out at the next stop, Queensboro Plaza. He’s Algerian, has spent time living in Paris (where the first part of La plus secrète…is set), and is now studying medicine here in NYC. I shared that I was reading the book to reignite the French that I’d learned at university. 

From Queensboro Plaza, the N goes down underground and under the East River into Manhattan. A few stops on, we passed through the 49th Street station which I can always sense we’re entering without looking up because of the bright red bricks of its walls, which emanate their red into the train. That’s the stop where I would get out when taking the kids swimming as babies at the pool on the top floor of the Skyline hotel. Like C, many parts of the city produce multi-layered memories for me, though still not as much as for him, who rode its trains and walked its streets as a child. Then we passed 28th Street, with its wonderful mosaics of hats, set at the height of their wearers and with a tile beneath saying who the wearers were. 

Our destination was Canal Street, where we got out and walked a couple of blocks to DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center), in a converted fire station round the corner on Lafayette. JNH is doing the so-far amazing DCTV Summer Media Intensive, in which NYC high schoolers create short documentary and narrative films. DCTV itself, set up in 1972 by husband and wife team Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, produces many documentaries. 

Among the DCTV documentaries is the 50 minute “Canal Street - First Stop in America” by Tsuno and Peter Kwong which immerses viewers in the street and its people in the 1990s: street vendors, sellers of contraband fashion and fireworks, a couple of men sleeping rough, garment factory workers and the interactions between the informal law of the street and formal law enforcement. Another is Cuba and the Cameraman, featuring Alpert’s visits to Cuba speaking with the same three families over a period of 45 years. By coincidence we had all watched it last year, before JNH knew about DCTV and its programs.

The DCTV firehouse building stands at the the intersection of Chinatown, Tribeca, and the city’s downtown courts. The Bowery Mission serving homeless New Yorkers is across the street, and next door is a fancy gallery with its sculptures on display in tall windows. It was revenue from its documentaries that enabled DCTV to buy the firehouse building, having initially rented just the second floor - with real estate being as it is in NYC that’s a major factor in the non-profits longevity. 

I decided to take a long route home, walking down through Manhattan to get the ferry back up the East River to Astoria. Just below the courts I passed the African Burial Ground, which is one of NYC’s national monuments, together with the Statue of Liberty, Governors Island, and Castle Clinton. It is the earliest and largest African burial ground in the US, where free and enslaved Africans were buried between the 1630s and 1795. During excavation for a city building project in 1991 the remains of 419 men, women, and children were excavated, nearly of of whom were children under the age of 12, and who were only a fraction of the thousands thought to be buried there. 

Christopher Moore, a descendant of Goot Manuel who was one of the first 11 enslaved Africans in NYC, wrote a short essay on the historical context of the burial ground: from when the first known person of African descent arrived in Manhattan in 1613 from Santo Domingo - the free black sailor Jan (Juan) Rodrigues who traded with the Lenape - to the arrival of enslaved Africans as laborers for the Dutch West India Company, and into English rule when a mostly enslaved African labor force worked as “carpenters, blacksmiths, printers, sailors, dock loaders, tailors, seamstresses, bakers, and servants.” In 2003, the excavated ancestral remains were buried in the still-accessible part of the burial ground, together with nearly 8000 personal handwritten messages from the living.

I continued South, past City Hall (memories of leading a rally for electric school buses, and attending many others), and through City Hall Park (memories of C and I pausing on the benches there before heading down to the Seaman’s Church Institute - at that time on Water Street, now relocated to Broadway and replaced by an expensive daycare - to plan our wedding celebration). I paused for a while on a bench this time too. 

At the Southern entrance to the park, lying low in a circle of long grass, is a sculpture of a bison skeleton, called "Attrition" by Cannupa Hanska Luger.

I had intended to keep walking down Broadway but gravitated right, towards the 9/11 memorial site, and the accompanying shopping mall whose structure has echoes of the bison skeleton, converted into a church of consumerism. 

Tourists posed for photographs by the deep memorial pits with falling water that mark the bases of the two towers, with empty sky above. Overlooking the site, there is the newly renovated St Nicolas Greek orthodox church (I had bumped into the 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley in an Astoria cafe as he was reporting on that story), and a structured park dotted with introduced plants and homes for bees. The park connects with a walkway across the West Side Highway to an air conditioned Brookfield office tower where workers in fluorescent vests were cutting and installing bright green foam at the base of a new installation of plants.

A block West I emerged by the Hudson river and continued down to the Battery. I had pictured being in the park there, overlooking the harbor, but as often happens on city walks construction steered me off track: the Northern edge of the park is closed off by a long construction hoarding as restoration work goes on behind, so it being hot, my hopeless right knee playing up and time ticking on I curved off through lower Manhattan to get on the ferry home. The ferry departs from Pier 11 near the end of Wall Street, where a plaque in Manahatta Park recalls the sites use as a slave market from 1711 to 1762.

NY missive no 162 - Year of the pig

Recently I caught up with JQ. She said that returning to New York after a year in Berlin and Budapest reminded her how deeply she loves this city. It struck her particularly on a visit to Chinatown. I too had had a similar reminder in Chinatown, when I took the boys there for the Luna new year celebrations. As my schedule’s more flexible for now (oh yeah!) I can make the most of days like that, when they are off school. We got the train down to Sara D Roosevelt Park where the firecracker ceremony was happening.

The park was packed, but we found a slightly less crowded area on the South Side by a playground and some grass. A nearby store brimmed and spilled out on to the street with lanterns, small boxes of firecrackers, and foam string spray cans for a dollar. The boys loved squirting the foam all over the park where it hung in fluorescent threads from the trees and climbing frames. The air popped with the sound of the fire crackers as little feet leaped on them.

Then we found a little girl who had lost her mother. Tears ran down her face. Everyone was just continuing on their way around her, oblivious to the fact she was on her own. We tried talking with her, but she only understood Chinese. I lifted her up high to see if she could see her mother in the crowd, but no sign. A woman who did speak Chinese came and helped us. We began to head towards the stage to ask for an announcement to be made, when the mother came running up to us, hugged the girl with tears and relief, and all was well.

It’s the year of the pig. The boys talked me in to buying a pig each: bright red, round, squishy ones decorated with Chinese flowers. In that unpredictable way that toys do, they have turned out to be hits. Both sleep with them each night (with a group of other carefully selected animals), and JNH’s joins us when we’re watching TV.

Homewards through Little Italy. Though I’d given up hope of seeing dragons in action, suddenly there they were on a side-street, leaping and glaring to the accompaniment of cymbals and falling streamers in the evening sun: I was taken right back to my 10th birthday party in London’s chinatown, where the dragons frightened little sister P.

Thank you Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 6 - Chinatown and the Lower East Side: People

This is part six of my seven-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." Introduction and part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five.

“He has so much of you in his face,” says the elderly woman opposite us in the Q train carriage. “And he seems very calm.” Conrad is perched on my knee observing the occupants of the train. The lady has been looking at us. I appreciate her two comments. Jack’s facial expressions are so much Carlos’s that now I am beginning to know how he feels, seeing his traits echoed in his child.

Family resemblances fade in and out over generations. When I was about ten I went to a birthday party dressed as Dame Edna Everage. God knows why I decided to be her. Looking at a photograph of me in that costume, feather bower, long gloves and all, my parents immediately said, “there’s your great aunt Eileen.” She was one of my paternal grandmother’s five sisters, many of whose stories have disappeared with their passing. (When the sixth was about to be born, their father apparently said that if the baby was another girl he would leave the family. He did).

I appreciate the comment that Conrad is calm too. The lady is right. From day one he has had a peaceful way of watching the world.

We get out of the train at Canal Street and go straight to Columbus Park. The park flickers with morning rituals. Chinese men sit on benches reading newspapers or at tables playing mah-jongg. The chips clink beneath the trees which are not yet turning autumnal but soon will be. Women and men do their exercises (separately – the genders don’t mix here), gentle thai-chi on an asphalted surface, or slow pull-ups using the park fences and playground equipment.

That asphalted surface has been a space of contention. In 2003, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city would use a large chunk of a bequest by Polish immigrant Joe Temeczko to resurface the sports field in Columbus Park with artificial grass. The mayor had made a campaign promise to replace asphalt play areas throughout the city with artificial turf, on the basis it was safer and easier to maintain. But a group of park users campaigned against the change. They were worried the new surface might be unstable for elderly exercisers, and would not last a long time. In the end the area was split in two. Half turf, half asphalt.

The park is next to the site of the former slums “Five Points” and “The Bend,” where newly-arrived immigrants made their lives in over-crowded tenements. Dickens described the area as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” while Walt Whitman pointed out that the inhabitants were “not paupers and criminals, but the Republic's most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men who will work."

We sit on a bench in front of some bamboo that keeps Conrad entertained as he waits to poop (it can be a long process). When the park was re-developed, botanists advised on plants that are common in East Asian parks. They got it mostly right, except for planting a few bushes with white flowers. Some Chinese believe that white symbolizes death.

As it happens, Mulberry Street, which runs down the East flank of the park, is lined with funeral homes. A funeral procession is gathering outside one of them while we are there. A band wearing olive green uniforms plays on pipes, accordions and cymbals as the mourners and limousines gather. One of the cars has a photograph of the deceased on its roof, with his name: Yi Xing Chen. Relatives huddle as his coffin is slid into the car, some of them circulating with video cameras.

A man wearing a bright yellow t-shirt comes to sit on the bench adjacent to ours. “75 Years – Goya” it says on the front. On the back: “If it’s Goya it has to be good.” I am tempted to tell him that I agree. Carlos uses a lot of Goya products in his Dominican cooking, like their black bean soup (which we have with rice and pork chops), small red beans (in salads), and adobo spice-mix (on pretty much everything).

Conrad and I get on our way, working East. Opposite the Transfiguration Church on Mott Street we find ourselves passing through the funeral cars as they drive around the block from the park. Their tinted windows have labels in English and Chinese according to who is inside: “friend,” “relative,” “daughter.” The street is lined with shops whose owners are setting produce out on the sidewalk for the day. Among them are pharmacies – in one a pair of businessmen skims the shark cartilage shelf. I take a photograph of the two street signs at the intersection of Henry and Catherine Streets. I will send it to my friends Henry and Katharine. The three of us lived for a few years in a house in Camberwell, London soon after we had left college, and despite the different spelling of her name the signs prompt me to get in touch with them.

At a point between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, with the FDR Expressway roaring above our heads we reach the river. I do not intend for most of these walks to feature the East River but they do, as if it has me on an extendable leash. This river and its sister the Hudson on the West side of Manhattan are the margins down the side of the city’s page. They are taken for granted but without them the city would make no sense. They are a continuum as the city and people between them change. As we stand there an occasional solitary person stops to admire the view of glinting water beneath the bridges, or jogger pounds the sidewalk. I close my eyes and imagine the crowd that used to fill this place, when it was a tangle of docks and markets and counting houses.

Our next stop is back inland. We rest by Little Flower Playground. The playground is perched on the edge of the LaGuardia Houses project, built in the 1950s – “Little Flower” was mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s nickname. Alongside it is a concrete space with picnic tables and we sit at one of them. This park does not have the varied botany of Columbus Park, just some dusty plane trees. But it too has its rhythm and clearly is an important fixture in the neighborhood. Doctors and nurses from the adjacent hospital come here to grab their lunch, let off steam or to give elderly patients a walk.

I read as Conrad nurses. I am reading Teju Cole’s Open City. Its narrator, a Nigerian psychiatrist called Julius, goes on walks in New York City that become a prominent part of the book. I read a section in which he is headed for a party on the posh Western edge of Washington Heights. He is a bit early so walks up there from his apartment near Columbia University. I can trace the path he takes in my mind and have flashes of recognition with the landmarks: I explored Washington Heights a couple of times when I first arrived in New York, then it became more familiar after meeting Carlos who was brought up there. Julius mentions El Mundo Department Store, the perennially busy restaurant El Malecón, the United Palace Theatre, and the narrow steps reminiscent of a funicular railway (that is how they look, I think as I write this later, then realize that is the word Cole used as well), with their steep slope and railings that connect 181st Street with the sedate environment of Pinehurst Avenue. Here I am in that comforting world where writer, reader and place meet.

From Little Flower Playground we walk up Clinton Street into the Lower East Side. Gentrification has been sliding Southwards, with realtors dressing sub-neighborhoods up in new acronyms like BELDEL for “Below Delancey.” Evidence of the creep is in two establishments tucked at the corner of Clinton Street and East Broadway, a craft beer and cheese place called “Malt and Mould,” and Pushcart Coffee with its little benches outside for people to sip their lattes, and t-shirts on sale saying “Pushcart Coffee – est. 2011.” As we walk North those kinds of places are everywhere of course. The streets are filled with memories of my first two years in New York, so nocturnal compared with the predominantly diurnal habits of my life now with children, a procession of nights of music and dancing in places like Nublu, Drom, Nuyorican Poets Café, National Underground, 555 and Macondo, where Carlos and I first met. These are interspersed with memories of coffee and laughter with a girlfriend, Mia, before she died of ocular melanoma at the age of 33. She loved this part of the city.

We pass Cooper Union. It is the site of many moments of social change, including a speech by Abraham Lincoln soon before he stood for the presidency. In it he unraveled a statement by Senator Douglas, which suggested the founding fathers would have considered the federal government forbidden from controlling the use of slavery in the federal territories. He meticulously built his evidence to show the opposite. He focused on setting out facts but pulled back a little at times to make points that seem equally relevant today. If any man sincerely shared Douglas’ belief, Lincoln said, “he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’ were of the same opinion – thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.”

Just above Cooper Union we reach Astor Place. Huge billboards wrap around a building site and announce the pending arrival of “51 Astor Place,” a thrusting glass office development. Commercial Observer, a real estate magazine, celebrates its arrival on the scene with the declaration that “Noho is finally turning into a swan.” It quotes a leasing agent for the building: “Whatever tenant moves into this building can brand the Astor Place area, like Google branded its neighborhood and AOL branded Columbus Circle. It goes way beyond just having a name on a building.”

Part 7: "DUMBO to Red Hook: Destination"

New York missive no 72 - Three birth stories

For some reason I took Ariel Dorfman’s autobiography “Rumbo al Sur, Deseando El Norte" to the hospital with me when I went into labour. There it sat by my hospital bed. As if I would be putting my feet up and reading in-between contractions. I knew though, that some labours can take a long time to get underway so thought I’d have it with me just in case. Anyway, no reading was done in hospital. But by coincidence when I did finally open the book up again when we got home it happened to be at the start of chapter two when Dorfman’s mother gives birth to him, in Buenos Aires. She had been given a pain relief gas so was drugged up when he was born. In her delirious state she had the sensation that he was falling. “Doctor, se cae el nene, se cae el nene,” (the baby’s falling), were the first words he heard her say, though of course he couldn’t understand them. Dorfman sees that as a metaphor for what happens to all newborns. “Yo caía hacia la soledad y la nada, de cabeza hacia la muerte,” I was falling towards loneliness and nothing, headfirst towards death.

Another birth story popped up when M, who was here helping for two weeks after JNH’s arrival, read me a passage from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography that she had brought with her, Infidel. It describes the birth of Hirsi Ali’s mother in Somalia. “My mother, Asha, was born sometime in the early 1940’s, along with her identical twin sister, Halimo. My grandmother gave birth to them alone, under a tree. They were her third and fourth children; she was about eighteen, leading her goats and sheep to pasture when she felt the pains. She lay down and bore forth; then she cut the umbilical cords with her knife. A few hours later, she gathered together the goats and the sheep and managed to bring the herd home safely before dark, carrying her newborn twins. Nobody was impressed by the exploit; she was bringing home two more girls.”

Each birth story is different. JNH’s wasn’t as dramatic as either of those but was momentous in the way that any mother experiences the birth of her first child as momentous. My water broke, or half-broke, before I had any contractions, at home following a bowl of pasta and an afternoon snooze. C and I gathered up our bags and went to the 30th Ave subway station where a bunch of black cabs hang out under the tracks. The first driver had no idea where New York Downtown Hospital was. I said it was by Brooklyn Bridge, and he replied, “Ah yes, in Brooklyn…”(it’s on the Manhattan side, near Chinatown). Much consulting of maps and gesticulating later, all the while me concerned the rest of my water would break and contractions would kick in, and envisaging one of those New York births-in-a-taxi that only happen in films, another driver finally showed up who knew the way. More water falling just as we were about to get out of the cab and soon after, on a hospital bed and plugged into various monitors, labouring got underway. I used the monitors to vent my anger as the contractions intensified, “get me off these f***ing things”, as if roaming around the room would necessarily make the pain - which was all in my back - less intense.

I could easily have been in a dazed state like Dorfman’s mum when JNH was born. I’d wanted to give birth as naturally and drug-free as possible. But just as I was about to give in after 8 hours or so of contractions and have some IVF pain medication, I felt something change. “I think he’s coming,” I said. The doctor, who’d been elsewhere tending to more complicated patients than me checked where things were at and said yes, are you up to pushing? I pushed (accompanied by plenty of operatics – all those classes re calm breathing right out of the window), and an hour later there he was.

A tiny creature splayed on my chest like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a life-raft.

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Current mission is getting JNH to sleep properly. He loves the subway, just as C did as a child, when his mother took him for rides on the graffiti-covered A train from Washington Heights for fun, C gazing out of its windows at the dark tunnel walls. So we’ve considered putting JNH on board the N at 30th Ave in his car seat, headed to Coney Island, with a note saying “Please leave me on this train till it’s back in Astoria where my parents will collect me.”

New York missive no 29 - Bohemians, theatre, street festivals, a soup kitchen

Oh to have been a Greenwich Village bohemian in the early 20th Century. I’ve been reading "Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village – the American bohemia 1910 – 1960” (with an emphasis on the 10s and 20s), by the Village Voice journalist Ross Wetzsteon. He died in 1998, two years before the book was published. He reveals the intimate and extrovert existences of a place that became a cauldron of interaction between artists, playwrights, rebels, social activists, feminists and the occasional philanthropist. They were fuelled by a potent mix of narrow self-promotion and broad dreams of social change (some of which were realised). There was Edna St Vincent Millay, the red-headed poet who everyone fell in love with, Mabel Dodge the salon-host, Jig Cook who determindly kept the Provincetown Players running till eventually he ran out of steam and retreated to Greece, Max Eastman the editor of the Masses, Jack Reed the dashing young journalist, the whispy playwright Eugene O'Neill...Between them they formed and dissolved movements, established magazines and watched them combust, and slept with one another. The lesson that it's easy to practice free love onself but hard to accept it in one's partners was repeatedly learnt and unlearnt.

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Monday and Tuesday nights last week, two events on wooden stages with different subjects but posing the same resounding question: what is a government for? The first, a reading at Joe’s Public Theatre of JS’s play (written jointly with two others) about Hurricane Katrina, The Breach. The play switches to and fro between three stories. Of a family stuck on their rooftop as the waters rise around them. Of a bar tender wheel-chair-bound by multiple sclerosis who just survives the storm to learn shortly after that his son has been killed in action in Iraq. And of a young, earnest white New York journalist pursuing the “truth” of black New Orleans. At first the journalist attempts to dissect fact from rumours (primarily rumours about the levees having been purposely exploded to direct the force of the damage towards the poor and predominantly black ninth ward), then realising that a chunk of truth lies in the origins of rumour, whether or not they can be substantiated.

The second, a PEN event “Reading Burma” at Cooper Union involving writers and exiled monks who were involved in the Saffron revolution a year ago. At one point Kiran Desai and Orhan Pamuk were on stage. She read testimonies from victims of Cyclone Nargis, including a woman who went into labour as it struck. In-between the testimonies, Pamuk read excerpts from the government’s mouthpiece “New Light of Myanmar” trying not to wretch as he released its words. The excerpts poured scorn on international relief efforts. Surely, the paper said, the people living near the Irawaddy were resilient enough to find wild frogs to eat.

Whatever the sins of the Bush administration I’m not going to start comparing it to the Burmese regime. But both Katrina and Nargis exposed government neglect for all the world to see. Has that changed anything?

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On X’s last Sunday in New York we went to China Town for the Mid-Autumn festival. It turned out there were various other festivals going on around China Town at the same time. A pickle festival on Orchard Street (lots of tents with lots of pickles and lots of crowds sweltering in oppressive heat). A farmers’ market. And the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy, involving ice cream-stands, temporary restaurant terrazzas and fairground rides with booming music manned by grumpy women in tight t-shirts. We met Mi and co for iced tea to cool down in a nearby café, ambled on to a dumpling bar for a $11 Chinese feast, bought mooncakes to take home then wandered over to West Village via the concrete Picasso statue of a woman’s face that I’d never noticed before in the midst of the NYU student housing off Bleeker Street.

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“What motivates you?” is what the now 96-year-old Louise Bourgeois asks of young artists who attend the weekly salons at her townhouse in Chelsea. Her scrutiny, no doubt, can be transformational or devastating. She’s someone who speaks her mind, and her mind is forceful, permanently unpredictable and renewed. She’s also someone whose life and art are one and the same. When P was in New York we watched the documentary about her, “The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine”. Then a few weeks later Sa, Lu and I, energized by a huge brunch at Kitchenette and walk through Central Park, went to her exhibition at the Guggenheim. There we saw one of her enormous metal spiders (representing her mother’s spindly resilience and calm), several variations of “cumuli” – clusters of mound-shapes in marble or wood apparently evoking either penises or breasts though they looked much more like the former to me – and her “cells”, rooms that you can glimpse into through cracks and gaps in the walls to see organised-disorganised objects like spools of red and blue ribbon, a child’s train running over a red bed, a pillow embroidered with “je t’aime”, a mirror propped up against a wall, and dresses hanging on bone coat-hangers, as if you’d been given permission to watch someone’s subconscious and experience laid out together on a vivisection table. The spiral of the Guggenheim worked perfectly for her art which is full of spirals itself, inspired partially by the twisting of cloth at her parents’ tapestry restoration business in France when she was a child.

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The stretch of Broadway between the express 2 and 3 subway stop at 96th Street and 109th Street where I live is a Manhattan microcosm. On the sidewalk, the rich from Riverside Drive penthouses rub shoulders with the poor from the projects on Amsterdam, and at any given time there will be haitians, jews, southerners, dominican republicans, native New Yorkers, old, young, students and shopkeepers. When I walk home at night there are always people on the street corners asking for money. Yet last week on the night after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt suddenly it seemed like they’d doubled – at least three on every corner. That must have been a coincidence, but the atmosphere everywhere is one of economic fragility and current or pending struggle. In the elevator the next morning a man and woman were talking about a mutual friend who’d found a job. When the woman said the job was in the postroom the man sounded disappointed. “Well at least it’s a job,” she replied.

Every other morning a queue of people, most without jobs or homes, forms outside St Bartholomew’s Church on Park Ave and E 50th. Inside, breakfast is served with military efficiency. Enter, hand over voucher, pick up tray with cereal, hot stew, sandwich and banana, find a space at one of the trestle tables, eat, call out for whatever you want more off “Juice! Cereal! Stew!”, eat, tip the rubbish in the bin and exit as another enters, hands over voucher, picks up tray...At 10am the room has to be emptied of the last breakfasters. “Time to go home,” called one of the volunteer organizers on a Sunday morning when I was there. Her colleague laughed and corrected her, “Well, time to go…”

New York missive no 14 - Serendipitous encounters and slug-bearers

Am ensconced in ‘Snice with a Cuban Panini having been to the gym to sweat out the effects of last night’s beer (at the “Asia Roma” Karaoke restaurant in ChinaTown) and preparing for some long over-due EWINY updating. So where to begin? Perhaps with a bit of peacefulness. Last Sunday afternoon, feeling sleepy and a little fragile from overdoing it (I have a tendency to over-absorb when I’m in a new place, leading to self-inflicted moments of saturation), I climbed onto the 11 Weekhawken Street roof about half an hour before the sun went down. The city’s wavering on the brink of Spring. It still gets whipped about by a cold wind, drenched by driving rain at times (like this weekend) and scarves are still essential. But there are days when the warm nuzzles through, birds flit about etc. That Sunday afternoon on the roof was one of them. I lay on my back. I realised that despite first appearances an “empty” sky can be endlessly entertaining. Helicopters, seagulls – flying solo or in tattered flocks – and aeroplanes criss-crossed the blue canvas as I watched. Perhaps there was some disguised maths in the pattern they created, or a continuously written and unwritten score composed of their flight directions, the angles they crossed at, and the differences in their height from the ground. SW–NE, N-S, NNE–SSW, 30 degrees, 190 degrees, 20,000 feet, 10,000 feet, 500 feet...

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Thinking of Spring and rejuvenation's reminded me of Lygia Pape’s “El Ovo”, one of the exhibits at an inspiring exhibition called Arte ≠ Vida at the Museo del Barrio. Or at least, not an exhibit in terms of a work of art in its own right, but a photograph of one: a dancer clambering out of a white box, through a hole that she’s broken in one of its thin plastic sides. The exhibition is about Latin American “acciones”, or performance art, throughout the last century. So rather than seeing the works themselves, the exhibition’s an archive of photographs, film footage and written descriptions about them: which could be tedious, but given the power of the work represented it was riveting. Many of them were created during the dictatorships of the 60s and 70s, and the exhibition prickles with the discomfort of art struggling to, having to, represent life alongside the un-representable pain of real experience. There’s a film of Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés – coloured outfits of capes, hoods and wings that he gave to people to wear and asked them to respond to. The art is the person and the costume and their movement altogether. One man is imprisoned in what looks like a cellophane bin over his head. He’s in an underground parking lot. He squirms and hops beneath it but never escapes, dancing with his captor. In another clip, coloured netting slides over the anxious faces of its wearers. And in another a woman’s liberated by a bright yellow cloth to the sound of samba. In Alfredo Jaar’s “Chile, 1981, Before Departure”, a thousand small Chilean flags stuck in the ground march in a line from the mountains down to the sea, through the desert. There are many others I could describe...but I will just write out this poem that the group CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) in Chile wrote in Hoy magazine in 1981. They had wanted to have just a blank page in the magazine, but the editor insisted they provide some text: Imaginar esta página completamente blanca Imaginar esta página blanca Acediendo a todos los rincones de Chile Como la leche diaria a consumir Imaginar cada rincón de Chile privado Del consumo diario de leche Como páginas blancas por llenar.

 

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Two encounters: New York’s full of serendipitous collisions of strangers. Last Friday I had two very different collisions, that may, or may not, lead to anything more. I was getting a bit of work done early in Mojo coffee before heading into the office. I was sitting in the corner seat by the window. A guy came in and jokingly said, referring to me, “this young lady will look after my car”, a snazzy one he’d parked just outside. We got talking and in a couple of minutes he knew about my work, and I knew that he owns some smart women’s shoe shops, one of which is on Hudson Street in West Village. I asked if he has any clientele who might be interested in supporting our work, and he said you never know, the shop and its clients do already support Human Rights Watch etc. So possible outcomes could be fundraiser in his shop (picture here inspiring presentations projected onto the shop walls by me and big cheques written out by the likes of Sara Jessica Parker); or a date (a google search revealed he’s single, enjoys cooking, likes eating pizza and cupcakes, is a member of Young Presidents Org, MOMA etc.,); or no more than that random encounter. 

 Then at lunchtime I’d been at a Foundation Center training session on using your board for fundraising, and on the way out met Deborah Koenigsberger, one of the thousands of inspiring people buzzing round this city who had an idea and made it happen. She owns a fashion store in the garment district. About 14 years ago she started getting depressed by the huddles of homeless people she’d pass on her way to work, and one day heard a Stevie Wonder song (I didn’t find out which it was) that inspired her to set up an organization to help. She now runs, as well as her fashion store, Hearts of Gold, that raises funds for women’s homeless shelters across the city, and provides support for women who have just moved off the streets. I asked if Stevie Wonder knew her story. She said, yes, he does, and is now a Hearts of Gold supporter. Possible outcomes: we stay in touch and share experiences on fundraising and growing our boards; I get in touch with her re volunteering opportunities with homelessness organisations in NYC; I feature her in an article I’d like to write (I have a rapidly-expanding list of like-to-write articles, soon will have to start writing them) about the ways in which NYC’s garment industry is still alive today; or no more than that one random encounter.

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Following the abortive salsa effort when I turned up an hour late for a class, I’ve now had the class and a couple of private lessons. I’m going to have a few more private lessons before joining “salsa 2”: was most chuffed to be advised to skip over "salsa 1". My teacher isn’t, unfortunately, a dashing Latino who whisks me off my feet, but the diminutive Jenny, a blonde woman who’s half my size, in all dimensions. She’s a great teacher though, and giving me skills that I can put in practice when I do come across dashing Latinos to dance with. Got some way there when Mi, Ru, Al and I found ourselves in Gonzalez y Gonzalez in East Village last Saturday night, where I was whisked off my feet by a Peruvian guy – a good dancer, though not much taller than Jenny. Before that we’d been at Habibi, a gay club night with a Middle Eastern theme at Vandam in TriBeCa, where a friend of Mi’s (a guy) was doing a belly-dancing show. Despite feeling a bit bizarre when we first arrived to find we were four girls in a roomful of 400 men we soon settled into lots of crazy dancing, carefree in the knowledge that no-one was paying us the slightest attention, other than Ru who got occasional compliments on her pink top.

The previous evening Ch and I had seen a wacky beautiful play, called The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island at the Vineyard theatre. The slugs of the title are the little lead weights in cheap electronic products that give the illusory sensation of “heft” and “worth”. The story revolves around the discovery by the 25 year-old student GinGin that the people of Kayrol Island work in deplorable conditions to create those slugs for export. She lives in Manhattan with her father, the eccentric Dr Rushower who befriends random people he passes in the street and brings them together once a year to solve the world's most pressing problems. After one of these meetings, he dispatches GinGin and a wide-eyed young man called Immanuel Lubang to Kayrol Island, to establish an institute for the appreciation of the poetry of electronic device manuals (Immanuel’s speciality). On the island, GinGin’s preconceptions about the islanders are turned upsidedown. The actors weave in and out of a stage set of moving cartoon projections – scenes of Manhattan, of rows of Kayrol islanders traipsing down to the port with lead slugs on their shoulders, of GinGin’s English literature classes etc, - a technique that perfects the play’s playful exposure of our flawed perceptions of reality. “I read it in the paper,” a character says to Immanuel on his return to Manhattan, refering to a story about their trip to Kayrol Island. By which point we take that statement to confer no more legitimacy than “I saw it written in the sand beside an incoming tide”. A similar feeling of fragility, and of presented and misrepresented reality, pervades the Democratic party nomination process at the moment. It's got nastier since Clinton won the Ohio and Texas primaries last week and emerged determined to keep on fighting.

 

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Last Monday I heard Jeffrey Sachs speaking at a Columbia Club event called “Crossing Borders, Crossing Disciplines – reflections on working in International Development”. He was excellent on the scale of the problems facing the planet, of which he said the most urgent are the environment, population and poverty. Yet somehow his ideas for solutions were swamped by the problems he’d described. Despite his call for joined-up thinking and collaboration, his proposed solutions, which revolved around the escalation of new technologies to tackle climate change, disease, etc. seemed a bit piecemeal, addressing symptoms rather than causes. So, for example, he made the depressing point that the amount the Pentagon spends each day on defense would be enough to provide mosquito nets for all those who need them in Africa for five years, preventing millions of malaria deaths. “So we need to tell the Pentagon to have a day off,” he said. Which, other than flagging up how difficult it would be to tell the Pentagon to have a day off, didn't tackle the heart of the matter: the problems with the economic and nation-state system that are the stumbling-blocks to the commonality and co-operation he calls for. How do we break out of the cycle that leads the Pentagon to be spending extortionate amounts a day on defense in the first place? He did hint at the direction we need to take to find solutions when he read extracts from Kennedy’s 1968 “peace speech”. And in doing so he made, it seemed, implicit connections between Kennedy’s vision of peace as dependent on co-operation and understanding between nations and Obama’s message of the need for a new, more open form of politics. 

In the speech Kennedy says: “I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war - and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task. First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many of us think it is unreal. But that is dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable - that mankind is doomed - that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade - therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable - and we believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the values of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace - based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace - no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems."