New York missive no 18 - Pistachio

After a Lower East Side brunch with Ch and a girlfriend of hers yesterday (welcome back to what’ll hopefully be temporary singledom) I went to two very different museums. First was the Ukrainian Museum, which has grown over the past 30 years or so from small beginnings to a three-storey renovated building at 222 East 6th Street, boosted by accumulating donations from the American Ukrainian community. The building has what’s perhaps the perfect elevator: an enormous one made of steel and a beech-type wood that moves smoothly and quietly and in which for once the “this elevator was donated by x…” sign doesn’t look ridiculous. Yesterday the ground floor was closed in preparation for an exhibition of maps of Ukraine. The first floor had an exhibition of traditional clothes and folk art that had originally been shipped over from Ukraine in 1933 for the Chicago World Fair. The Ukrainian National Women's League of America had decided that for their contribution to the fair they would display a cross section of traditional folk art, which they bought from experts in L'viv for $2,225. The embroidery on the clothes is detailed and immaculate: intricate geometrical patterns in black, red and white sown onto thick white linen. The fact that the costumes are still on display a century since they were made pays homage to the time and care that must have gone into making each one.

In stark contrast, the current exhibitions in the New Museum, which opened its new building in the Bowery on New Year's Day, seemed to me to epitomise the disjointed temporariness of Facebook-land, where interactions are stretched thin over wide distances and people pick and choose the experiences they want to have without really living any of them. They had names like "Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries", and "The 7 Lights" (with "Lights" crossed out).

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Spring has hit New York now and with it a wave of women in colourful dresses, joggers pounding the streets and the clatter of sidewalk chairs, glasses and cutlery. It has confirmed what many people have said – that if I loved this city in Winter I’ll love it even more in Spring. Black coat’s been packed away and has been replaced for now by the bright pistachio green one I got for £6 at a charity shop on Kingsland Road.

Speaking of pistachio, in a Flatiron Irish bar on Ru’s last night in New York, a middle-aged woman with a non-descript man hovering behind her came up to me and said “Are you Pistachio?” (though I didn’t have my coat with me that night). And then, “Are you here for twitters?”. I told her I was neither, and was too flummoxed to probe further and find out what pistachio and the twitters are, leading to much speculation among our group about swingers’ parties and codewords for dubious antics that could have been taking place in the pub basement, further fuelled when a man came up to Ru and asked “Are you Laura?”. By the end of the evening an eclectic gathering of people of different ages had formed at the back of the room – none of whom looked much like the type to be into sexual experimentation but you never know….Pistachio, the twitters and Laura will remain a mystery.

[a mystery no more]

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Spent $20 that I didn’t have to spare on “Writing New York” yesterday – a fat chronological anthology. It starts with an extract from “A History of New York From the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty”, written by Washington Irving at the age of 26 (grrr says the envious wannabe writer in me), and narrated by, as the introductory blurb describes him, “an aged, bitter, codger of Dutch extraction, Diedrich Knickerbocker – in short, one of histories ‘loosers’”. And it ends about 100 writers later with an extract from Don DeLillo’s 2007 “Falling man,” among the first novels to deal directly with the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Not that I’ve read anywhere beyond half-way through the first extract yet: I fell asleep with the book on my tummy late last night after drinks at R’s. In the introduction, its editor Phillip Lopate says that “No matter how independent a writer might be, New York has always had a way of seeming stronger, of bending the individual will to its designs and obsessions.” And he goes on to give a rather disconcertingly familiar list of themes that recur throughout the extracts:

• "the city’s contradictory faces of glamour and squalor;
• its man-made quality; the gigantic built environment and the relative unimportance of nature;
• its Mammon-like preoccupation with business and money-making, from the days of the Dutch settlement to the present;
• its concentration of media and information, leading to the manufacture of celebrity for the few;
• its offer of anonymity to the many;
• its uneasy relationship with the rest of America
• its large, dense population, providing space if not always the warmest of welcomes for the immigrant and the nonconformist;
• its affable, loquacious working-class populace speaking a streetwise vernacular;
• its fabled loneliess and alienation;
• its symbolic importance as the modernist city par excellence;
• its addictive, temptress quality, which ensnares newcomers and convinces them – no matter how much they may suffer at its hands that no place else will do."

I certainly felt that temptress quality when I returned here from Washington DC on Tuesday, after four days in DC spent running around to fundraising and other meetings with C. I was surprised to feel myself – someone who’s just as happy surrounded by wilderness as in a city – relieved to be back in New York’s pounding urban chaos. DC's so much more spacious, elegant and green than I remembered it, and we’d hit it before the end of cherry blossom season so it was still daubed with pink. Yet there's something staid about the centre, and the areas I was in were strikingly homogenous. Still, it was about time I ventured out of the Manhattan bubble and was wonderful to catch up with H, who I stayed with while I was there.

On Sun afternoon C and I combined our brainstorming for a meeting the following day with a walk down the Mall. We started at the Lincoln memorial where we read the two timeless speeches carved onto the walls around his statue; the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address. In the latter, he says that slavery was the root cause of the civil war. Two days later I attended a Senate hearing on the slave-like conditions that some of Florida’s tomato pickers work in. While slavery's long been banned internationally there's no doubt that almost everyone, other than people who know the origins of all the food they eat and all the things they buy, at some point consumes products made by people forced to work, or working in deplorable conditions.