New York missive no 128 - Dubai interlude

A dhow being loaded with goods in Dubai Creek, bound for Somalia. One of its crew told us it's a good thing the boat looks old and run down - that means it is not tempting to pirates.

Recently my colleague from Beirut and I went on a work visit to United Arab Emirates. We were mainly in Dubai but also spent a day in Abu Dhabi and a morning in Sharjah. On the last evening in Dubai we went for a meal with members of my colleague’s family – some of whom live there – at a restaurant on the Emirates’ “Palm Jumeirah”, a palm-shaped island tagged onto the coast by its trunk (which is also an eight-lane motorway). The island didn’t exist until the early 2000s when it was built by dredging and dumping tons of sand in the form of a palm tree, to extend the city’s beachfront area by 40 miles for the development of luxury apartments and hotels.

As we left the mainland part of the city we became snarled in a traffic jam. They are not uncommon in Dubai because, other than the two-line metro, the only way to get around is by car. No-one walks. Sidewalks are rare, so in many parts of the city it is impossible to. In this case the snarl was caused by a deep construction ditch down the middle of the road. Similar, perhaps to the ditch in which two Indian workers, Ram Kumar and Selvaraj, were buried alive in the nearby city of Al Ain soon after our visit, when the sand on each side of the trench collapsed as they tried to fix a pipe.

Once on Palm Jumeirah the traffic subsided. But it still took around half an hour to reach the restaurant as the car slid through curved bright-lit underpasses along streets lined with pristine buildings around bends back through the same underpasses and over bridges seemingly trapped in a road-loop designed to prevent us from getting to our destination. Reach it we did, eventually. We ate a barbeque meal with a view across to the winking city. The open-air restaurant was flanked on two sides by apartments and on the other by a sleek swimming pool. On an apartment balcony a small girl twirled pirouettes to the restaurant music while her parents, or whoever was taking care of her, set the table beside her.

The structure of a city like Dubai where you are forced to drive creates separation. It's a divide that is echoed everywhere - in the fact that public life takes place largely in air-conditioned malls constructed on desert, for example. The separation is necessary in that it makes the circumstances of the city tolerable through denial: a capitalist dystopia dressed up as utopia where you can get your apartment re-decorated for $50, where you can earn double (or more than, anyway) you would earn on the rice fields at home by working at the teetering steel pinnacle of a tower block in the 100 degree sun.

As Daniel Brook puts it in “A History of Future Cities" though, it is not helpful to view Dubai as all awe or all horror as tends to be the case:

“Apologists for Dubai, like architect Rem Koolhaas, who salivates over the city-state as ‘the ultimate tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed,’ cannot explain away the barbarism of its system: one that assembles all the world’s people but makes no attempt to treat them all like people. Those who condemn Dubai, like urban theorist mike Davis who tars it as an ‘evil paradise’ cannot explain the allure of the city for the hundreds of thousands of low-wage guest workers who have migrated there.”

The unobserved shades of grey are there within individual inhabitants but somehow get lost when you look at the whole. They are there within people like Adil, a taxi driver who we came across outside the Jumeirah Lake Towers. JLT is one of the city’s many free trade zones, this one a conglomeration of over 70 skyscrapers with 6000 businesses, centered around commodities trading. Here the traffic was snarled too, as it is every day. The towers were mostly finished a few years ago but the roads between them were not.

Adil’s experience in UAE is bittersweet. He spent his first few years paying off the fees for getting his job in Dubai, with the state-run taxi firm Dubai Taxi. He works long hours, sometimes to the extent he knows he is driving dangerously from tiredness. He still has to pay a large chunk of what he earns each day back to the company, which still holds his passport, and which only allows him to go back to Bangladesh once a year. He finds that especially difficult because he has a young daughter there. He said he was living for the next time he can go back. And yet, Adil said his situation is far better than that of Jumeirah taxi drivers (the Emirate where he lives), and of his friends who worked on construction sites. He wants to stay some years, perhaps earn enough to buy his own car to run a taxi service on his own terms.

The situation in UAE is kept on a relatively even keel by the synthesis of economic dreams and absolute social control by the government. At times, frustration when the former are not realized threatens the latter. In May thousands of workers at the Emirati construction firm Arabtec went on strike, demanding better wages. Reuters just reported that the strike happened and, a few days later, that Arabetc said it had resolved the dispute, without saying if the workers’ demands had been met. Many of those involved in the strike were deported.

Not surprisingly, voices from the workers themselves were missing. But a reporter for Al Jazeera (which is headquartered in neighboring Qatar), stood by the Arabetc workers’ camp gates – they weren’t allowed inside – to gathere a few testimonies. One, for example said, “I have not gotten a raise in the last nine years. The strike ended because of pressure from higher management and police. People are scared. It is possible this will happen again because conditions are so bad.”

This week I was immensely privileged to listen to a conversation between Henry Belafonte and Dolores Huerta, looking back at the civil rights movement in the US to inform its future. Playwright Bryonn Bain chaired the discussion. He kicked it off by quoting Martí’s “radical no es más que eso: el que va a las raíces,” - “to be radical is simply to go to the roots." The roots are in all of us. We need to put our ear to the ground more often and listen to what is going on down there.

New York missve no 127 - Attention

A wish from a wish tree in Socrates Sculpture Park

I’ve recently stumbled across points people have made about attention, and how it is a neglected value. It was the focus of a commencement address by author Jonathan Safran Foer. He describes how he saw a teenage girl crying into her phone saying “I know, I know, I know…Mama, I know,” and how burying himself in his own smartphone made the option of not intervening a lot easier. He goes on to quote Simone Weil - “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” – and says, “By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.”

Then I read the obituary of a priest who had pretty much spent his life giving attention to people who needed it. He had said his work was “heaven on the way to heaven.” (I'm not considering becoming a priest to find out).

And then an extract from the commencement address by Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. He talks about how he had always passed a group of kids in the lobby of his building and sometimes hung out with them. One of them stood out as being like his father, for his “quick wit, that great swagger.” Later as he campaigned for mayor and during his first months in office he had less time to spend with them. After coming home from a murder scene at which, as mayor, he had talked about the need to rally to fight crime, he read through the day’s incident reports on his blackberry and only then realized that the victim had been that boy on the stairwell who reminded him of his Dad. “As you put your sights on your goals…” he said, “don’t forget what is right in front of you today.”

I just realized that all of those three pieces were from the New York Times. That’s shocking. Time to diversify reading material. Though recently I’ve been trying to read more fiction than news.

Speaking of attention, being in the presence of young children forces it to some extent. One of my most memorable times last weekend was with JNH, closely following a small bee as it moved from clover flower to clover flower in Astoria Park.

Two more wishes from that tree in Socrates Sculpture Park:

New York missive no 126 - Home

The day in November 2009 when we came apartment-hunting in Astoria was gray. We saw two places, the second of which is where we live now, about which more below. Then I decided I wanted to check out the nearest park. We took the least scenic route. We walked up 31st Street under the elevated subway track – an oxymoron, but so it is – then went left along Astoria Boulevard with its roaring traffic and gloomy new apartment buildings that offer luxury but convey nothing of the sort.

We reached the Southern edge of Astoria Park, and then the running track at the foot of the towering Triborough Bridge. As far as I remember there was no-one running. Luckily the grayness wasn’t enough to deter us from moving here. It was such a different scene to the one recently, three and a bit years later, albeit in just the same spot by the running track. The sun was shining and the track, by now so familiar, was busy, though no-one was taking the running too seriously as this was mid-morning on a Sunday. JNH, who will turn three in May, asked C to run with him and off they went jogging around the track while I watched, holding 10-month-old CMH.

I was struck by the randomness with which a place becomes known so intimately. What if we hadn’t come to Astoria that day in November? (C had emailed me in the morning saying “what about Astoria, check out these links on Craigslist.”) Would it still have become home? Would the stretch of shops between Crescent and 30th Ave subway station, for example, be unknown to me, rather than sunk into my memory – however long we end up staying here – as the place we walked every day when my children were young?

The apartment we chose is in a semi-detached three story-house, so our building has six units. In many ways its dynamics are typical of Astoria. There is a mix of newcomers and old timers. (Click pic to read it):

About a year ago, the two houses in front of us were knocked down. The space became a building site. JNH was thrilled because that meant trucks and diggers. The foundations seemed to take ages but now finally the apartment building is going up: the first floor is there. Buildings like it are springing up all over Astoria, and their apartments are far more expensive than the old ones in the neighborhood. They have names like “The Elizabeth”, “The ‘L’ @ 30th Drive”, “The Luxe” and “Crescent View.” I wonder what this one will be called. J’s uncle was watching the construction work recently, and I asked him if he knew whether the plane tree just in front of it was going to stay. He said yes. I thought he probably would be disappointed by the building, another concrete block going up, albeit smaller than the huge one that towers behind our back yard. Instead he said, “it’s good. We’ll get lots of new neighbors.”

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Earlier this week a big bunch of pink helium balloons was perched outside a house two doors along from JNH’s Montessori. “It’s a girl,” one proclaimed. Another was in the shape of a stork. A man was coming up to the front door with his dog and his neighbor called across her congratulations. The man said thanks, then yelled at his dog to get in the house “NOW!”, his anger seeming most out sync with the occasion.

New York missive no 125: The Bronx is Burning, technology, Stumptown Coffee

I just finished reading Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by journalist Jonathan Mahler. C had recommended it to me, prompted by the death of former NYC mayor Ed Koch who features in the book. He pulled his hardback copy off the shelf and said “I think you’ll like this.” He knows I like reading books about NYC and enjoyed it himself. And it has added significance for him, as it recounts an era in the city’s life – 1977 –when he was a five year-old growing up in Washington Heights, just old enough to have some isolated memories. (It also happens to be the year in which I was born, in London).

When the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Mahler was in the middle of researching the looting and arson that flared during the power-failure in July 1977, when the whole city was plunged into darkness. He acknowledges the events were not on the same scale – an act of terror that killed thousands, and a powercut. But he says, “both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes.” After 9/11, “there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever.” After the 1977 blackout, “New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.”

1977 was a transformative year for the city, too. Disintegration was accompanied by rehabilitation. The book weaves the seemingly disparate stories of the mayoral race involving Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Mario Cuomo and the ultimately victorious Ed Koch, the tabloid wars between the New York Daily News and the New York Post (plus Murdoch’s Murdoch-ization of the latter), the search for the serial killer Son of Sam, the blackout, and the infighting within the New York Yankees, who went on to win the World Series at the end of the year. Mahler originally intended the Yankees to be the subject of the book but the city soon took the foreground.

I was amused and not at all surprised to discover that while some neighborhoods were razed by looting during the blackout and Greenwich Village was the scene of candlelit dinners, on Weehawken Street in far-flung West Village a gay orgy took place. (Weehawken Street is where I lived on first moving to NYC). Mahler quotes the recollections of one participant, as told in the magazine Michael’s Thing: “The small one block was a beehive of made insane activity…Nudity was the rule; many guys were pushed against cars and performed upon with the full consent of everyone there.”

Bushwick in Brooklyn was the area worst hit by the looting. Instead of conveying the chaos and moving on, Mahler stops to trace the neighborhood’s trajectory over the preceding twenty years to look for the reasons why. And when it comes to describing the arson fires in Bushwick, which had begun in 1969, he explains why the design of the buildings made them prone to fire and the way the fire teams had to tackle them. The often wooden buildings, with air shafts over their stairwells, were connected by attic spaces that made is easy for the fire to spread from one building to the next. Fire fighters would poke holes in the roof of a burning building to try to lure the flames upwards. Either they climbed through smoke and flames to do that from the inside, or hung from a ladder outside, “right in the line of fire the instant the flames started licking toward the sky.”

Another nugget I’ll share here. It's a description of a typical New Yorker. During the police search for Son of Sam, Rupert Murdoch put one of his strongest reporters, fellow Australian Steve Dunleavy, on the story (he was determined not to be outdone by Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, who at one point received a personal letter from the killer). The book mentions that Mario Cuomo described Dunleavy later in a profile as a real New Yorker (aside from his right-wing politics): “he’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.” That description fits so many New Yorkers, including Ed Koch.

The Bronx is Burning is such a great read not just because of Mahler’s meticulous reporting combined with pacy storytelling skills, though they are critical, but also because he hit upon such a rich and compelling subject. Disparate narrative subjects are linked effortlessly by a single theme, that of a city at a turning point. For me the book is a reminder that it is only by slowing down to that extent – for example by telling the story of one year in a life of a city in such meticulous detail – that you can ever begin to get to the heart of things.

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A story that should be told in that level of detail but I doubt ever will be is that of brothers Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12. In Feburary they were out collecting firewood with their donkeys in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when they were killed by gunfire from a NATO helicopter. The donkeys were killed too. The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dunford, said the killings were an accident and apologized. Which of course he should, but I doubt any apology could ever be enough for the parents of those boys.

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There’s something disconcerting about the endless flick between twitter accounts, hit of send and receive buttons or scrolls down Facebook pages. It is a search for affirmation. As if that flick or hit or scroll will turn up something wonderful, something that recognizes that you, yes you, are the best being on the planet but no, of course that ever happens, so we just set ourselves up for a series of disappointments by searching cyberspace that way, it’s all a bit ridiculous, but still we do it.

Fast-forward fifty years and most of us will have stopped looking at the physical world and at each other.

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Talking of things that we still do anyway, about once a week I get a coffee on my way to work from Stumptown Coffee in the Ace Hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Broadway. This article gives a great portrait of the two economies at work in the neighborhood. One is that of cheap wholesale goods. “Rhinestones and ribbons” one storefront reads, and another, “Tiger Accessories”, which when I passed the other morning triggered an entertaining procession of accessorized tigers through my mind. The other is the world of hip, rich, international technoscenti, drawn by the Ace Hotel that opened in 2009. Stumptown Coffee epitomizes the latter. The coffee is roasted in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The servers are clad in hipster-meets-nineteen-forties attire. They wear chic shades of brown, accompanied by thick rimmed glasses and wide brimmed hats. In the mornings there is always a queue out the door and into the hotel lobby. The coffee is great but also pricey, like $4.50 for a latte. And yet still I go.

New York missive no 124: On fallible online maps and the purchase of a globe

A friend recently described how she is in awe of Google maps for i-Phone. She had emerged from a subway stop in Manhattan, and unable to get her bearings flipped out the phone and checked her location on the map app. It promptly let her know she was walking in the wrong direction. I myself had been using Google Maps a lot recently – the online version – for a house hunt in Astoria (now temporarily put on hold). I would zoom in on a house for sale to get a feeling for the extent to which its real surroundings differed from those described by real estate agents.

Online maps can give a sense that they miss nothing. As Simon Garfield, author of the forthcoming book "On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks," said: “The uncertainty that was once an unavoidable part or our relationship with maps has been replaced by a false sense of Wi-Fi-enabled omnipotence.” His word “false” is key. Today’s maps may not be as prone to mistakes and omissions as the earliest ones, but they are no means free from them.

In November, a group of scientists set out on a boat to “Sandy Island”, about 1200 km off the coast of Australia. It appeared on several maps, including Google’s. When they arrived at the spot where it should have been, the island was not there. At first I wondered if that could be because of rising sea levels caused by climate change. It turns out that the island’s non-existence was likely the result of a different kind of human error.

A librarian at Aukland Museum (hooray for librarians!) found an early sea chart that implied the island was “discovered” by the whaling ship Velocity in 1876. The ship’s master had recorded “heavy breakers” and “sandy islets” in the area. The librarian, Shaun Higgins, believes that over time mapmakers may have started to consider those as a landmass. The sea chart had included a sensible disclaimer: “Caution is necessary while navigating among the low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. The general details have been collated from the voyages of various navigators extending over a long series of years. The relative position of many dangers may therefore not be exactly given.” (That wonderful last sentence could apply to so many things beyond a map.)

I recently encountered the fallibility of online maps much closer to home. I wanted to get the name of the store at 34-03 30th Avenue in Astoria. Given my 30th Avenue blog, Alfred Holzman, who grew up along the Avenue in the 1940s and 50s invited me to a reunion lunch he had organized with 23 of his primary and junior school classmates, all now in their seventies. His Slovakia-born parents had run a paint and decorating store at 34-03, and the family lived above it.

When it came to writing up the story I wanted to include that detail, as well as what the store is now. I remembered it is a printing store but had not checked the name the last time I walked past. I lazily used Google Maps’ street view feature to get the name. “Prime Design & Printing |Prime Brokerage”, the image of the store sign on my screen read, and that is what I wrote. The next day I walked past and saw that it is now called simply, “Prime Design & Printing”. A minor change, but I corrected the story.

The two places – Sandy Island and Prime Design & Printing – are reminders that online maps, with all the sophistication of features like satellite imagery, give the illusion of presenting current reality while in fact they do not. Nothing is a substitute for being physically present in a place. Hopefully nothing ever will be.

That said, I did still buy an outdated globe the other day. My fascination with maps is still in tact. After all, it is their limitations and flaws that make them interesting, a bit like people. I was walking back from the 30th Avenue subway station to pick up six month-old CMH from his daycare. As always I was rushing to make sure I was there by six o’clock. I passed the store “Old Village Thrift, Gift and Antiques”, whose owner Sami Mobarak had been one of my 30th Avenue interviewees. Perched at the back of the cluttered table outside the store I glimpsed the globe. I asked Sami’s wife how much it cost and she told me $15. I said I would probably be back to fetch it the next day - I was in a hurry and carrying a lot of stuff. A few paces further along I found myself turning back to buy it. I was excited about giving it to JNH (now two and a half), and worried that someone might snap it up before me.

It reminded me of when my paternal grandfather turned up at our house one Christmas with a big box. I was about eight or nine. He told my sister and me that it had a monkey inside. I remember distinctly the feeling of disbelief combined with a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, he meant it, and there really was a monkey inside. My heart beat a bit faster as we opened the box. And it sunk with disappointment when we pulled out a globe, even though it was the kind that lit up when you plugged it in.

Over time the globe grew on me, as the excitement about the monkey-that-wasn’t waned. My childhood friend E and I spun it around to choose a place to “travel” to in our games, taking colored candies along as our malaria tablets. When I was old enough, my real globe-trotting tendencies kicked in. I wanted to feel the places on maps in the flesh, albeit becoming increasingly aware that passing through somewhere does not provide a taste of living there. There is a certain sameness to experiencing different places as an outsider.

JNH is delighted with his globe. He calls it his “gloobe", for some reason. He is learning to point out where he lives – New York – and where his grandparents and aunts live, scattered as they are between the UK, Switzerland, Florida and Dominican Republic. There may come a day when he asks what that big green country labeled “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” is. Or why South Sudan does not feature. That will present a good excuse for a history lesson: on how the way things are portrayed is not what they are. And on how the way things are one day, they may not be the next.

New York missive no 123: Re-creation of Christmas memories, and two offline times

The week before Christmas. People were buying more than usual: not only more things, but bigger quantities. That was evident in 30th Avenue’s Trade Fair supermarket the other day, when the guy in front of me bought 20 bunches of cilantro (total $15). Up the road in International Meat Market, where despite there being plenty of other butchers along the street everyone goes and endures the consequent long queues, a woman called April who seemed to know everybody bought eight huge marrow bones to turn into stock.

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Christmas, it seems, is about trying to re-create the best elements from your childhood experience of it, finding they turn out differently, and then realizing that’s the whole point.

Our Christmas so far has included a mix of things from my childhood and from C’s. On Christmas eve, we ate pernil – Dominican-style roasted pork – that C had marinated for a day and half beforehand in garlic and spices: the result, juicy and delicious, served up with rice, beans and plantains.

Then this morning, after JNH and CMH (with the former’s help) had dug Santa-delivered presents out of the the army socks that my grandfather had worn in World War II and that my sister and I had always used as our Christmas stockings, we had a britishy brunch of scrambled egg and smoked salmon on brown bread (washed down with a glass of champagne), albeit to the accompaniment of Merengue.

Right now, while JNH and CMH are very rarely both asleep at the same time and C is out at a basketball game, I've turned on BBC World service. (I should be catching up on sleep myself, but there's always that trade-off between using those quiet moments for valuable "me"-time or loosing them to much-needed sleep).

We’re spending the afternoon at L and A’s place near Central Park, with a bunch of others. There, no doubt, will be traces of their Armenian and French upbringings mixed into the proceedings.

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Recently we’ve had two five-day periods without internet and cable TV access. Not because of hurricane Sandy, but because trucks from the construction site opposite had sliced through the cables that run from our home to the other side. Here in Astoria pretty much all the communications and power cables are above ground, with the resulting tangled messes, and tied-together pairs of shoes caught up in them, flung by party goers on their ways home.

Being offline had the combined effect of freedom and isolation. Without emails to check, websites to surf, online videos for JNH, TV to watch, we had to speak to each other! And found plenty of ways to entertain ourselves, as well as ways around the supposed information-deficit. I bought a newspaper. When we couldn’t access our online music lockbox, we played CDs. I even proposed to C that we have a self-imposed offline day each week from now on, which didn’t go down well. And of course as soon as we got hooked up again, on went the gadgets and consumed our attention, as if we were glugging a relieved drink after passing through a media desert. (Which anyway had not been the case, as we’d both been online at work during the days).

The fact the cut off was the result of a fallen cable is a reminder of the physicality of cyberspace. With features like “cloud computing” it’s easy to think that the internet is intangible and consequently has a light environmental footprint. Of course that couldn’t be further from the case, as this NYT article “Power, Pollution and the Internet” makes clear.

New York missive no 122 - post-Sandy haircuts and more

Both C and JNH had post-hurricane Sandy haircuts. And our neighbors gave the shrubs in the front and back garden their fall pruning, wrapping the chopped parts up in black plastic sacks. As if to say after the storm, let’s straighten things out, restore some order. (Albeit to unruly hair or gardens).

Of course, that doesn’t stop everything from feeling out of sync and fragile. Western Queens got off very lightly compared to other parts of the city. Some lost power (our block was lucky and had power throughout) and trees came down here and there but there was nothing like the major flooding and widespread power outages of elsewhere. Nor, of course, the horrendous fire that ripped through 100 homes in Breezy Point. Nonetheless there are plenty of signs of lingering disruption.

When we called our local cab firm to book a cab to take my parents to the airport (they’d got stuck for a couple of extra days), the man at the end of the line laughed. He said their firm had no cabs available and he didn’t know of any that did. The disrupted subway system and limits on private cars driving into the city has flooded the taxi companies with demand. (In the end I nabbed a limo driver from under the subway tracks at 30th Avenue, who jumped up the price because of the lack of gas).

Yesterday when C and I went into my branch of Alma Bank we were seen by a woman who had relocated temporarily from the Ditmars branch, given it was out of power and therefore closed. The queues at the supermarket are long, because people are stocking back up on provisions and because the credit card machines are running sluggishly so each plastic transaction takes a long time. In the butcher's shop, I felt surprised relief to find our Friday night pepper-and-blue-cheese burgers were in stock. "I appreciate it more than usual," I said to the guy who works there, "when places have things I’d expect them to have." "Tell me about it," he replied.

It seems that finally some politicians and media outlets are acknowledging that our recent crazy weather patterns are caused by climate change and there may be more to come. Governor Cuomo said after the storm: “[P]art of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable.” Bloomberg Businessweeks’ cover story headlined, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid."

It’s ironic that as a result of storms like Sandy people are compelled to take the kind of actions that environmentalists have been saying for ages we should take to prevent them. Like sharing cars, taking public transport (such as is available), turning off the lights, minimising flying. As with environmental damage in all parts of the world, it's people with the least resources and who have contributed least to the cause who tend to get hit hardest. And who are likely to be overlooked by measures to mitigate impacts.

It’s a shame it has to take such a major shake-up of one of the world’s richest cities to wake the world’s richest country up to climate change but let’s hope this has been a wakeup call – and not one immediately followed by another hit of the snooze button.