Monday, March 31, 2008

New York missive no 16 - Pee on seats, Madame Butterfly

Just back from a Jazz for Barack event at Cachaca in West Village: organised by an earnest Italian electric guitar player in a blazer and hat, who was accompanied by a beautiful Asian violinist with a mane of orange-tinged hair wearing a red dress, a funky Japanese double bassist, and a concentrating drummer. I kicked myself for having not, in the end, gone to a fundraiser at a lawyer’s penthouse near here last Thursday. A woman at the jazz event had been, and said it was buzzing with about 300 supporters. C’est la vie. It’s great there’s so much activity going on in the penthouses and jazz bars of New York’s West Village – let’s hope there's as much among blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania, where the next key primary is in a couple of weeks’ time.

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Sitting on the table in the sitting room is a book called “Let us now Praise Famous Women”. What a wonderful title. It’s pictures taken by “Women Photographers for the US Government 1935 to 1944” – and from a quick skim it seems the point is that most of the women photographers, and most of the women they photographed, weren’t famous at all. Fodder there for a story at some time. Perhaps I could have worked it into the assignment for my next creative writing class (at the wonderful Writers Studio), though have already got my idea ready for that. The assignment, based on George Saunders’ The 400-Pound CEO, is to use a self-deluded 1st person narrator, in the setting of a ridiculous place of employment yet with all the mundane trappings of a normal working environment. So I’m thinking of something along the lines of a company for the “Award for Sexual Misdemeanours”. The narrator will be a thinly-veiled version of Spitzer.

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A woman who recently moved to NYC from another part of the US wrote in to Time Out a few weeks ago. She said she’s been amazed by the extent women leave pee on the seats of public toilets here (though guess she probably said ‘restrooms’, which I still can’t get used to). It’s so true. Time Out didn’t offer an explanation for the splattering.

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The values that come across strongest in what I’ve read so far of Audacity of Hope are honesty and inclusiveness. By inclusiveness I don’t mean just the awareness that as much unites as divides us, but also that lumping people into clearly delineated groups of “them” and “us” is both unrealistic and dangerous. Each of us is a unique combination of experience and opinion and full of contradictions that mean we don’t fit snugly into the pigeon holes politicians would like to put us in.

Obama also talks a lot about the tension between individual freedom – that sacred American value – and the need to be conscious to the needs of others. That tension’s so apparent here in NYC, where millions of individuals are relentlessly pursuing a dream of their selves. I said to B the other day that sometimes NYC can seem like an adult playground. He disagreed – there's more work than play here he said. That’s quite true, but by playground I meant more that it’s a place where people come to experiment and play out their ambitions. Maybe because I’m a newcomer I’m coming across a disproportionate number of other newcomers, but so many people in this city have come to push their lives either forward, foot on the accelerator, or in a new direction, seeking a richer, or fuller, life. That’s all very well, but the desire for self-fulfilment can become all-consuming and narrowing, giving you a kind of tunnel vision.

The past two weeks I’ve become painfully conscious of that. As I go about working and partying, salsa-dancing and spending, I’m wrapped in a New York that’s only accessible to a small minority. True, NYC is a collision of sex, power and money like Pete of the NYT said, but it’s also a collision of no power, no money (maybe not “no sex”! – which is free, usually, and ignores boundaries ). If our lives are jigsaw puzzles with lots of pieces we need to fill in to feel complete, I’m doing quite well piecing things together here: working on something I believe in; writing more; dancing more; creating more space for friendship and intimacy; learning; exploring etc. etc. But there’s one major piece that I need to fill in to feel that I’m plugged right into the city and playing a more complete role, and that’s working closely with people who've had a rough deal for whatever reason. Whether that’s working with prisoners or ex-prisonners (who was it that said that if you want to know a country look inside it’s prisons – which is probably even more the case here, a country where according to a recent Pew Center report, one in 100 adults is in prison), or with the homeless. Yes no doubt this reeks of noblesse oblige but it’s how I feel.

In a simple symbol of the fragile balance between the individual and the collective, some of the tombstones at the stunning Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx have a small American flag on them. So you have a stone with a person’s name carved on it and the national flag fluttering on top (and not just on soldiers’ graves).

What is it I love about cemeteries? It’s the combination of stone and trees. The quietness. And of course the unthreatening reminder of our mortality, and the memories they resuscitate of people who have died. Hence last weekend’s mission to Woodlawn. I’d left things tight, setting out at 2.30ish and knowing that I needed to get back home to the apartment and then to dinner at S’s at 7. And I managed to get the wrong subway line up, so emerged on the NW side of the Bronx instead of the NE. Some directions from a couple of helpful Irishwomen and three bus rides later I got there though, and it was worth it for the hour I spent walking in the spring sunlight among grand mausoleums, simple headstones and shapely trees. The plots and pathways are all named after trees: walnut plot, primrose plot, pine pathway etc. Many famous people are buried there apparently, including musicians like Duke Ellington, Miles Davies and Celia Cruz, though given my limited time I didn’t try to seek out the big names’ graves which after all look much like everyone else’s. There was hardly anyone else in the cemetery, except for the occasional family purring past in a tinted-windowed SUV.

Then on to S’s for dinner: miraculously 12 of us from the creative writing course were able to make it. We feasted on Lasagne and chocolate brownies and throughout the evening unpredicatable aspects of each others’ lives emerged. Like how S used to run his family’s funeral home and was once asked by a widow to return her husband’s penile implant. And how Su’s mother, who contracted a debilitating disease in her late 70s, decided to move alone to Florida from New York, leaving her husband and daughter behind, and died within a few months of getting there.

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On Weds saw an elegant production of Madama Butterfly at New York City Opera. It’s such a simple story, and with such a small cast compared to most operas, yet is still huge. L raised the good question as to how Puccini, from his base in Italy at the turn of the last century so long before rapid global communications, was able to portray the clash of American and Japanese cultures so well. While M pointed out that Madame Butterfly wouldn’t have survived for more than a week on the Manhattan dating scene, where her heart would no doubt have been repeatedly broken. Have had my own, albeit less dramatic, Madame Butterfly moments this week: not peering across the horizon hoping for a sighting of Pinkerton’s ship, but watching my inbox for the sighting of an email from a lovely architect I met in a cafĂ© last week (he got my contact details, I didn’t get his).

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Have good intentions of making it to the Om Factory (only in New York would you find a Yoga center called that) before work tomorrow, having had another more-nocturnal than planned weekend: a bizarre wine-tasting event at Taj then salsa-dancing at SOB’s on Friday night…an art auction in SoHo where the people were as much the exhibits as the paintings, then a conglomeration of various groups of people at WhiskeyHouse where Iv was celebrating his birthday on Saturday night. Let’s see if I make it: I had good intentions of early-morning yoga several times last week but kept oversleeping, zzzzz.

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