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."