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…”