New York missive no 103 - Individuals & cities, psychogeography, an orange digger

Mural in El Barrio - corner of 104th Street and Lexington.

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A snippet of cellphone conversation overheard along Astoria’s 35th Ave: “So when he had the hat on they booed, and when he took the hat off they cheered? That doesn’t make sense, no?"

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As a child I entered a poetry contest that had a title something like “The Earth.” I submitted what I thought was an epic entry, “Ballooning the Earth”, about a hot air balloon travelling around the globe. I tried to put everything in that poem. The winner of the competition wrote about a single earthworm. That was a good lesson in the value of small details and component parts. The lesson also applies to writing about cities. It’s only through the stories of cities’ individual inhabitants that any sense can begin to be made of the whole.

With that idea churning around in my head, of course now I am encountering it all over the place. For example, I came across the concept of psychogeography, and intrigued, got a short overview of it by Merlin Coverley. (It’s aptly called “Psychogeography”.) Although formally claimed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1950s/60s Paris, it’s an amorphous term and Coverley traces it both backwards and forwards from there: back to Daniel Defoe, Blake, and other London visionaries; forward to people like Ballard, Peter Ackroyd and Ian Sinclair. Recurrent elements are city street wandering (particularly à la dérive, with no particular direction or purpose), using that wandering to sense the effect of urban environments on the individual psyche, a consciousness of the city’s past as it manifests itself in the present, an openness to re-imagining the city, and challenging the status quo. At times I've felt myself wondering if such a broad concept needs a term at all. It seems a bit contrived to put a label on it, as if to try to rarefy and pigeon-hole into a "discipline" an experience that should be so accessible.

When Coverley gets to talk about Michel de Certeau’s "Walking the City" though, de Certeau’s ideas certainly resonated with me. Perhaps in particular because in that book he was writing about New York? De Certeau describes two roles within a city, the voyeur and the walker. In New York that division is accentuated by the height of the buildings, with the voyeur gazing down from the detached top of skyscrapers to the street-walker below. (Presumably he’s talking, as so much “New York” writing does, about Manhattan). The latter group experience the city as a conceptual whole, removed from individual perspective. The distinction between the two, De Certeau says, “emphasizes the democratic importance of the street-level perspective to be gained from walking the city and reconnecting with individual life...In the light of this distinction it is clear how the simple act of walking can take on a subversive hue, abolishing the distancing and voyeuristic perspective of those who view the city from above.” The history of the city is written from the individual perspective at ground level rather than the generalizing perspective up above, he says.

An 1896 “History of Long Island City, New York” (which used to encompass Astoria and by some definitions still does) by JS Kelsey also makes this point. Written soon before the five separate boroughs merged to form New York, it aimed to preserve details about Long Island City for posterity: the full book is online here. Its preface begins: “The history of a city originates in individuals. In its frontier days stands a household or two as lone prophets of better eras. In the lives of men therefore lie the records of society, whether it is developed into a municipality, state, or nation.”

These are just some of the reasons it is important to release stories of the lives of individuals living in cities. I was delighted to discover the “Spitalfields Life” blog featuring interviews with people in that area of East London. It’s on a far bigger scale than my interview blog on 30th Ave in Astoria was, but it seems the author shares similar motivations. Its “Gentle Author” (s/he aims to keep their identity anonymous) said in an interview: "I believe in microcosm, that everything in the world is here.” S/he also said: "I don't understand why everybody isn't doing what I'm doing. I don't understand why this isn't everywhere. It's free to do. It just takes time." Well yes, time is a significant factor. But here’s to many others following suit.

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Recently they knocked down two of the small houses opposite us. (How easy to refer to authorities / developers with a murky “they”). The space where one was is still a gaping hole. In the other, there’s a building site. While if we were a purely adult household that could be seen as a pain because of the noise, with little JNH around it provides endless entertainment. Each morning he asks to see the “orange digger” soon after waking up. Then when we go outside, he wants to “touch orange digger" (depending on whether it's in action or not, C and I try to oblige). He could stand for hours watching the trucks hauling their loads, the men go about their work, the brick walls ascending.

This morning, our neighbor E. was outside his front door. He’s at the opposite end of life to JNH. Now in his nineties, until a few days ago he was sprightly as if he could go on and on. Apparently he only retired about four years ago. Then he had a fall, and suddenly he seems vulnerable. He gave JHN a little green toy train when we past, then as we walked up the street he was still standing by his front door gazing up at the building work across the street.

New York missive no 101 - Thank you for your memoirs Bernado Vega

(pic from Good Reads)

The subtitle of the “Memoirs of Bernardo Vega” is “A Contribution to the History of The Puerto Rican Community in New York.” What a contribution. Vega, a ‘tabaquero’ (cigar maker) from the Puerto Rican town of Cayey, came to came to New York City in 1916 and lived there until the 1950s. The subtitle wording is typical of the modesty with which he approached the memoirs. In fact he originally wrote them in the third person as a lightly fictionalized account. His editor César Andrew Iglesias, who published the memoirs 10 years after Vega’s death, was the one who convinced him that it made much more sense as a direct memoir of his own life.

Vega describes his experiences in the city’s cigar factories, and grim stints in other professions when that work was hard to come by: in a munitions factory, in an underwater cellar making antiseptics, as an assistant then accountant to an abusive rag trader, for example. He talks about his involvement in socialist and union movements, the city’s Spanish-speaking newspapers and his ownership and editorship of the paper Gráfico. At times the narrative is choppy, probably because of the switch from third to first person and his motivation to tell a much broader story than this own. In a 1955 preface he had said “an honest recollection was needed, a memoir telling of how Puerto Ricans have lived and what they have accomplished in New York.”

So while his work and politics play an important role, his personal life barely features. A couple of wives and two children by the first just get fleeting references and are not named. With reference to the first wife he says, “Here I must insert a very personal note: I married a Puerto Rican girl. This, of course, has nothing to do with anything…” Meanwhile people involved in political struggles are sometimes listed in dense paragraphs of names as if to be sure that everyone he respected had at least a mention in the book. A portion early in the book switches to the perspective of Vega’s uncle Antonio, in order to tell the story of Cuba and Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence from Spain and the role played from New York.

The last chapter breaks off after just a page as Vega is about to get involved with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party (he worked as national director of the party’s Hispanic section while Wallace ran for the presidency). The chapter’s title is “An unfinished chapter with an unwritten moral: it is always more interesting to live than to write.” Thank God he did write. Through the choppiness of the narrative comes a deep portrait of a particular community at a particular moment in time. A portrait that as I read, I was acutely aware would not have been recorded, at least in nothing like the same detail, had Bernado Vega not decided to set it down on paper.

Here are some excerpts just to give a glimpse. On “readers” in the cigar factories:

“A few days later I found work at another cigar factory. ‘El Morito’ (‘The Little moor’), on 86th Street off Third Avenue, a few steps from where I was living. At that wonderful place I struck up friendships with a lot of Cubans, Spaniards, and some fellow countrymen, all of whom awakened in me an eagerness to study…

“At that time the official ‘reader' was Fernando García. He would read to us for one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. He dedicated the morning session to current news and events of the day…The afternoon sessions were devoted to more substantial readings of a political and literary nature…It used to be that a factory reader would choose the texts himself, and they were mostly light reading…But as they developed politically, the workers had more and more to say in the selection. Their preference for works of social theory won out. From then on the readings were most often from books by Gustave LeBon, Ludwig Buchner, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Bakunin…And let me tell you, I never knew a single tabaquero who fell asleep.

“The institution of factory readings made the tabaqueros into the most enlightened sector of the working class. The practice began in the factories of Viñas & Co., in Bejucal, Cuba, around 1864. Of course there were readings before then, but they weren’t daily. Emigrants to Key West and Tampa introduced the practice into the United States around 1869- at least, I was told that in that year the shop owned by Martínez Ibor in Key West had an official reader.” (pg. 22-3)

On snow in the winter of 1932:

“By that time 15 million workers were unemployed. New York was one of the cities most seriously affected. The winter of 1932 was particularly harsh, and in the middle of February the whole city was blanketed in snow. Around twelve thousand men were hired by City Hall to clean up the streets. Many Puerto Ricans jumped at the opportunity to make some money, and what a sight it was to see them all wrapped up in rags, their necks covered with old newspapers, swinging their shovels and shivering to the bone.” (pg. 170)

During WW2 Vega worked in the postal censorship office, first reading soldiers’ letters home to their families then in the “international department”, where among other things he kept a file on Nazi agents in Latin America. Of the Puerto Ricans working there he says:

“There were over a thousand Puerto Ricans working in postal censorship in New York. For the duration of the war not one was promoted to an executive position of any standing…[O]ver 80 percent of the Puerto Ricans who applied for employment at the censor’s office and took the Federal Civil Service examination demonstrated a command of at least two languages, as well as other qualifications. No other nationality had such a high average. On to top of that, I can attest to the magnificent work performed by our countrymen. And yet we Puerto Ricans are still regarded as in incompetent people who never reached maturity…The truth is that those of us who get anywhere in this country must be superior to our equals.” (pg. 208).

New York missive no 45 - Uptown moments, David Foster Wallace

Am digesting lots of sushi and a blowfish saki. JB and I just went for a meal at a Japanese restaurant in mid-town following a consultation at the UN. Very Japanese, in that at first we were led to the upper floor even though there wasn’t a single person eating there, and then to the far right-hand corner of the upper floor, presumably because we didn’t blend in with the clientele downstairs. We manoeuvred our way back down though.

So before they’re layered over with more downtown images I’ll record some of my uptown moments (not that I won’t be still be going up there sometimes!). There was the first McCain-Obama debate in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Its walls were draped in history in the form of photographs of jazz musicians who had played there, and the auditorium thrilled with the flush of history in the making.

There was a night of music, when Ch, Sa, L and I had planned to go to Smoke jazz bar but found it full for the first session. Instead we went (through a friend of L’s Mum), to a free Brahms concert performed by Russian musicians in an old hall somewhere in the W 70s. The violinist and pianist both had paunches and ill-fitting suits. They gave their brows dramatic mops with handkerchiefs between each movement. The pianist’s pile of hair flopped about as he swayed on his piano stool. The page-turner was a teenage boy with a prominent red polo logo on his shirt. There were quite a few fur coats, big hair-dos and smartly turned-out Russian children in the audience. Yet these visual details were just a merry accompaniment to the music itself, deep and dreamy and oh such a relaxing way to spend the first part of a Saturday night. That was followed by wine at the French Roast on the corner near there (I had thought the one on 6th Ave and 11th was the only one, so was disappointed to discover it’s not unique). Sa then headed home to his Thai lover and Ch headed home to sleep as she was running a half-marathon next day, and L and I went back to Smoke to catch the last set. It was a celebration of the drummer Jimmy Cobb’s 80th birthday. He played, and played good - after all he was the drummer on most of the Miles Davis albums - but this was clearly the third and final set. At midnight on the dot he and the band laid down their drumsticks and trumpets and made a beeline for the bar.

Other uptown things...English conversation classes with mother tongue Spanish-speakers from Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico in Washington Heights (an excuse for me to practice Spanish as much as help their English)…a fascinating talk at New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series…and a stunning walk one morning down from 145th, after turning up at the swimming pool in Riverbank State Park to find it closed (oh where oh where are the good big open and affordable Manhattan swimming pools?!). The sun was just rising as I walked through Harlem, gently kissing quiet streets awake.

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I've come across several examples of privatization-of-public functions gone crazy recently. Which is a little ironic in the midst of a financial crisis in which companies are being bailed out and bought out by governments all over the place, though both are symptoms of blind faith in the market. For example in Dan Baum’s new book about New Orleans he apparently describes how “the Superdome turns into a Dantean circle of hell. The coroner can’t figure out why no one is bringing in bodies. Soldiers aren’t allowed to pick them up; neither are state police. Eventually an outside contractor arrives, and the coroner says bitterly: “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.” Or there’s the court case underway at the moment in Pennsylvania. Two judges have pleaded guilty to taking over $2.6 million in kickbacks from two private youth detention centers in return for sending teenagers there - some of them for minor, first-time offenses. Apparently one of the judges sentenced over 5,000 juveniles since the kickback scheme started in 2003. Everyday I’m immersed in cases of business behaving badly. It’s easy to become a bit numbed by them, to let my sense of outrage get worn down at the edges, until a case like that electroshocks it back to life again.

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A strange, intense appreciation has come over me, naff as that may sound. An overwhelming sense of privilege and being awed by the tiniest things.

Is it because Spring’s coming? (Albeit in fits and starts via the occasional disruptive snowstorm, like last weekend's which is now melting in heavy splashes from scaffolding and windowsills).

Is it because of the crisis-recession-downturn-or-whatever-we-like-or-dare-to-call-it? Out for dinner with PK the other night we got into talking about how "it" is making us reassess priorities and value the things we have. Which of course was easy for us to say, who still have jobs, and who had just emerged from hearing Jesseye Norman speaking at Carnegie Hall (she’s as charismatic a talker as she is singer, her conversation sparkling with vivid anecdotes). I doubt most people who have lost their jobs, houses, healthcare, pensions, or all of those are savouring a reassessment of priorities, they’re in a dark place living day to day.

The downturn has also birthed a new breed of guilt-quickly-transformed-to justification for spending. Several times recently I’ve heard myself and others rationalizing carrying on as usual, deciding to eat out, have an extra glass of wine rather than spending more cautiously and saving, either on the basis that “we may as well enjoy it while it lasts”, or on the basis that doing so will support the economy, keeping small businesses and shops alive.

But back to the intense appreciation feeling. It was echoed in a speech I read this morning over coffee (back at Mojo’s again, yay!) – David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address. I’m no longer surprised in this city when I find echoes and reflections between things I see, hear and read: the frequency of interactions means it’s inevitable there’ll be connections between some of them. And alertness to connections is a kind of survival strategy too, weaving patterns and logic through what could seem disconnected sequences of events.

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience,” Wallace says. And, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness…if you really learn how to pay attention…It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation [he had just described a stressful trip to the supermarket in cinematic detail] as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital T-True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” (His "try" there a tiny but such a loaded word). The speech throws open window upon window upon window of possibilities. I guess you could sum his message up as, "it's all in the attitude." But in the most profound and liberating, and challenging, of ways.

New York missive no 37 - New Year, reflections on light, 40 before 40

Loosely connected reflections on light.

It’s midday, well just after, on New Year’s day 2009. It’s a bitingly cold but bright blue-skyed day with people stuffing their hands deep down into their jacket pockets and with burst balloons tangled up in tree branches. I’m in the Hungarian café, before heading to a Montclair gathering at JB’s.

I’ve just emerged from the Cathedral of St John the Divine across the street. It’s fully exposed and open again, free from the scaffolding and temporary walls that had blocked sections off for repairs from a fire in 2001. Now it feels whole, totally different. Going inside is like walking into a living creature. A whale’s belly? Yet instead of chaos and clutter there’s ordered beauty, enhanced today by shafts of winter sun shining through the stained glass windows and scattering rainbows across stone columns. Further enhanced no doubt by my slightly fragile champagne-hungover state.

(An East Asian woman next to me is taking photographs of the cakes she’s ordered. Two big ones - too difficult to choose between them I guess).

On the North side of the Cathedral there’s a place for cremated priests, in stacks of square marble-fronted cremation boxes. There, an African American priest asked if I could help him find his friend, Thomas Andrew Moneymaker. The priest was partially sighted so couldn’t find Thomas in the book that indicates who is where. “He was cremated,” he said. “I’d never be cremated.” He said the reason his friend wanted to be cremated was that his body had disintegrated. I turned the pages to the M's. There were three Moneymakers.

(The woman eating the cakes has gone already, leaving two halves of them uneaten, and grinning and saying “happy new year” before setting off in her bright yellow jacket).

The first Moneymaker was a woman. “No that’s his mother,” the priest said with a trace of impatience. Then another man. And then Thomas Andrew, died 1998, box 80c. We found the box - the priest called out, put his hands up to it and stayed still in front of it for a while.

On light and religion still, in October I watched the pattern of Diwali in Madurai, a town spun like a web around the massive Meenakshi temple in its midst, in Western Tamil Nadu. Sunday 26 October was preparation. Divali being a festival of wealth as well as light, the streets were in a consumer-frenzy, shoulder-to-shoulder elbow-to-elbow with people buying and selling clothes, sweets, toys, washing machines. On quieter street corners women sat stitching together chains of white jasmine flowers to hang in women’s hair the next day. Early morning on Monday 27 I went into the cavernous temple where the scene was totally different, quietly respectful, a time for religion. Families wearing the festive clothes bought the day before circulated and greeted each other. For a while I sat watching and listening by the “Golden Lotus tank” – which as it sounds is a swimming-pool-like tank (rimmed by red and white garish painted checks), with a big gold lotus plant in the middle. There were layers of sound, from furthest to nearest: the clatter of fire-crackers echoing round the streets outside; a repetitive chant like this _ __ _ / _ __ _ / _ __ _, short note-long note-short note on and on drowsing the air; caws from crows hanging about in the towering gopurams (towers) whose intricate multicoloured sculptures were sadly wrapped up in wooden scaffolding interwoven with straw while I was there, making them look like enormous haystacks ; the chatter of families and groups of friends circling the tank; the jangle of toe bells; and the brushing of bare feet on dusty stone. The quiet, harmless side of religion that is so often drowned out by violence.

In that day’s Hindu newspaper was a column on the “practice of meditation”. It described meditation as “stopping the wheel of thoughts in the mind by coming out of the habit of brooding on trifles. When the mind keeps flitting from one thought to another, the whole strength is lost.” Something to keep in mind this year, for which my main resolution is calmness. (Calmness, along with curiosity, openness and honesty were four principles that I decided a while ago are the ones I live my life by, or at least try to). Anyway, the thinking is that with the calmness, all the other plans and projects and the things on my list of “40 before 40”, drawn up in a South London pub with Gita the night before I turned 30, will either be easier to make happen, or will be less troublesome if I don’t.

So in that spirit of openness, here are the 40 things. Many are intentionally unquantifiable to make them easier (“more of this”, “more of that”)...

Stop smoking
Write children’s stories
Write novel
Get the above published (not the smoking bit)
Find Latin lover / sensible man to settle down with [If I was allowed to update this, which would be cheating, I'd change that rather narrow and prescriptive entry to "love"]
Speak Spanish more
Climb some mountains
Have 1 or 2 children
Get thinner and fitter
Live in cities by the sea e.g. Bombay, Lima, Caracas (close enough), Istanbul
Play flute well enough to be in a band
Dance salsa really well (and generally dance a lot)
Work in prisons / with prisoners / ex-offenders
Write poems that make a difference
Wherever I live know the place inside out
Keep childish
Expose injustices (through words, work, etc)
Be kinder to the environment
Build an eco-house
Swim in the sea
Document life in diaries and pictures
Drink less coffee (but not give up)
Be more vegetarian
More music
Cook delicious things
Meet and talk with hundreds of people, of different ages, from different places
Do things well, “with love” as Das [owner of Rasa restaurants in London] would say
Lean about cemeteries
Learn about and make maps
Make something that lasts
Sail lots
Learn and speak Portuguese
Work for human rights
Write letters
Ask questions, be open, listen
Keep reading all kinds of things
Don’t fret re things I wish I was doing; either do them or stop worrying
Spend time in open spaces
Make people laugh and smile.

Well, embarrassingly childish and/or highfalutin a lot of them but there they are.

When I extracted myself from the quiet spot beside the Golden Lotus Tank I meandered through the temple’s labyrinthine intestines lined with Gods and sparkle and encountered the temple elephant. Tourist touts outside the previous day had been urging me in to see the elephant doing its rounds and I’d resisted, so was happy to stumble across him like that. His forehead was decorated with white paint and people were queuing to have him tap their heads gently with his trunk, a diwali blessing.

The peaceful rhythms of the morning were broken in the afternoon when the syncopated tirade of firecrackers sped to a raucous frenzy. Groups of kids spiraled laughing from doorways. By early evening the narrow streets were piled high with the crackers’ paper remnants and festivity rubbish, with the occasional cow perched on rummaging on top.

That night as the train I took from Madurai to Cochin wound through the dark countryside small splashes of coloured fireworks sprung up from hidden villages. As magnificent, if not more so, than the $50,000 display that Ra and I had chanced upon at Fisherman’s Cove hotel outside Chennai, financed by a group of corporate executives clearly not yet affected by the financial crisis.

Manhattan's 109th Street has its own coloured lights dynamic going on. In the build up to Christmas people strung fairy lights between the trees, until one day they all disappeared and we had notes delivered, telling residents not to do that (no reason given). But that hasn’t stopped creative light-decoration, in fact it seems to have provoked it: strands of coloured bulbs wrap around porch columns and twist about the fire-escapes, looking like weird sea creatures floating in the air as you walk down the street. Twinkling lopsided stars lurk behind the bars of basement windows.

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I found perhaps my favourite sculpture the other day, at the end of a walk on a cold Sunday morning across West 109th Street, through Central Park and out the other side to Spanish Harlem and the East River. The statue’s in Thomas Jefferson Park, at 112th Street on the East edge of Manhattan. It’s called El Arbol de Esperanza and was designed by Brower Hatcher, though is way better (says me) than any of the sculptures that are photographed on his website. It’s a tree, with a dalek-like trunk, and then a round clump of woven metal branches like a birdsnest on top, filled with coloured ceramic sea animals, birds and toys made by local children.

New York missive no 28 - Rooftop films

In the New York summer, movies appear on rooftops, by rivers, in parks and in emptied swimming pools. A couple of Fridays ago Ch and I saw La Fronterra Infinita on the roof of El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem. It’s a documentary about the determined journey made by migrants through Central America to the US, or to as close to the US as they can get. Sometimes that might be a border town in Mexico, sometimes a detention centre, sometimes a rehabilitation facility for those who loose limbs in their attempt to jump onto moving trains. One man, in his late teens or early twenties, had lost an arm and a leg. He sat on a chair looking straight into the camera with bright optimism – I’m going to try again, of course. I’m going to get there, or as close as I can, find some work. Find some work.

Watching that desperate voyage while sitting on a roof in the very city the migrants were trying to reach - with planes coming and going overhead - was intense. The filming was un-intrusive. It didn’t attempt to narrate or analyse. The camera accompanied people on their journey letting their actions and conversations report for themselves. The simple explanation that many of them gave, “I’m looking for a better life,” made complete sense. “Porque le interesa los inmigrantes?” asks one of the women in the film of the camera, which doesn’t respond of course. Then she adds, “Todos somos inmigrantes”. Yes everyone is a migrant but some have an easier journey than others.

Back home I told X about the film. She said a woman on her LLM at Notre Dame had won a prize for her photography of women who were raped on their journey from Central America to the US. Their story hadn’t made it into La Fronterra Infinita – but it was there behind the scenes through shots of vulnerable-looking girls. “Me siento sóla,” one of them had said.

A week later, a series of short non-fiction films about New York City. It should have been on the roof of New Design High school on Grand Street in the Lower East Side but given rain it was held inside, in an old-school old school hall with greek figures painted in alcoves labelled “art”, “science”, “knowledge” etc. The films about people’s stories worked better than those that panned the city vaguely in search of arty images. Like Bird Strikes about a man who trains Peregrine falcons to clear the runways at JFK of migratory bird flocks and P Star's Redemption about an eleven year old rap star fulfilling the dreams her Dad originally had for himself, but putting her tough confidence to the test in the process. One of the more abstract ones that did work beautifully was Native New Yorker, that tracks in black and white cine-film a native American’s journey from the northern to southern tips of Manhattan. He clambers over rocks in Inwood, descends from the elevated to the tunnel-wrapped tracks of the 1 train in Harlem, stares at the “Imagine” memorial to Lennon in Strawberry Fields, sees the twin towers fall in a cloud of smoke (9/11 happened while the film was being made) and watches contortionists entertain crowds of tourists near the ferry piers.

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."