New York missive no 125: The Bronx is Burning, technology, Stumptown Coffee

I just finished reading Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by journalist Jonathan Mahler. C had recommended it to me, prompted by the death of former NYC mayor Ed Koch who features in the book. He pulled his hardback copy off the shelf and said “I think you’ll like this.” He knows I like reading books about NYC and enjoyed it himself. And it has added significance for him, as it recounts an era in the city’s life – 1977 –when he was a five year-old growing up in Washington Heights, just old enough to have some isolated memories. (It also happens to be the year in which I was born, in London).

When the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Mahler was in the middle of researching the looting and arson that flared during the power-failure in July 1977, when the whole city was plunged into darkness. He acknowledges the events were not on the same scale – an act of terror that killed thousands, and a powercut. But he says, “both were extraordinarily trying moments for the city, and I couldn’t help pondering how different New York felt in their respective wakes.” After 9/11, “there was a sense that our tallest towers had been felled but that our foundation was more secure than ever.” After the 1977 blackout, “New York had felt shaken to its core, and America had been anything but sympathetic.”

1977 was a transformative year for the city, too. Disintegration was accompanied by rehabilitation. The book weaves the seemingly disparate stories of the mayoral race involving Bella Abzug, Abe Beame, Mario Cuomo and the ultimately victorious Ed Koch, the tabloid wars between the New York Daily News and the New York Post (plus Murdoch’s Murdoch-ization of the latter), the search for the serial killer Son of Sam, the blackout, and the infighting within the New York Yankees, who went on to win the World Series at the end of the year. Mahler originally intended the Yankees to be the subject of the book but the city soon took the foreground.

I was amused and not at all surprised to discover that while some neighborhoods were razed by looting during the blackout and Greenwich Village was the scene of candlelit dinners, on Weehawken Street in far-flung West Village a gay orgy took place. (Weehawken Street is where I lived on first moving to NYC). Mahler quotes the recollections of one participant, as told in the magazine Michael’s Thing: “The small one block was a beehive of made insane activity…Nudity was the rule; many guys were pushed against cars and performed upon with the full consent of everyone there.”

Bushwick in Brooklyn was the area worst hit by the looting. Instead of conveying the chaos and moving on, Mahler stops to trace the neighborhood’s trajectory over the preceding twenty years to look for the reasons why. And when it comes to describing the arson fires in Bushwick, which had begun in 1969, he explains why the design of the buildings made them prone to fire and the way the fire teams had to tackle them. The often wooden buildings, with air shafts over their stairwells, were connected by attic spaces that made is easy for the fire to spread from one building to the next. Fire fighters would poke holes in the roof of a burning building to try to lure the flames upwards. Either they climbed through smoke and flames to do that from the inside, or hung from a ladder outside, “right in the line of fire the instant the flames started licking toward the sky.”

Another nugget I’ll share here. It's a description of a typical New Yorker. During the police search for Son of Sam, Rupert Murdoch put one of his strongest reporters, fellow Australian Steve Dunleavy, on the story (he was determined not to be outdone by Jimmy Breslin at the Daily News, who at one point received a personal letter from the killer). The book mentions that Mario Cuomo described Dunleavy later in a profile as a real New Yorker (aside from his right-wing politics): “he’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.” That description fits so many New Yorkers, including Ed Koch.

The Bronx is Burning is such a great read not just because of Mahler’s meticulous reporting combined with pacy storytelling skills, though they are critical, but also because he hit upon such a rich and compelling subject. Disparate narrative subjects are linked effortlessly by a single theme, that of a city at a turning point. For me the book is a reminder that it is only by slowing down to that extent – for example by telling the story of one year in a life of a city in such meticulous detail – that you can ever begin to get to the heart of things.

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A story that should be told in that level of detail but I doubt ever will be is that of brothers Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12. In Feburary they were out collecting firewood with their donkeys in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when they were killed by gunfire from a NATO helicopter. The donkeys were killed too. The new US commander in Afghanistan, General Dunford, said the killings were an accident and apologized. Which of course he should, but I doubt any apology could ever be enough for the parents of those boys.

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There’s something disconcerting about the endless flick between twitter accounts, hit of send and receive buttons or scrolls down Facebook pages. It is a search for affirmation. As if that flick or hit or scroll will turn up something wonderful, something that recognizes that you, yes you, are the best being on the planet but no, of course that ever happens, so we just set ourselves up for a series of disappointments by searching cyberspace that way, it’s all a bit ridiculous, but still we do it.

Fast-forward fifty years and most of us will have stopped looking at the physical world and at each other.

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Talking of things that we still do anyway, about once a week I get a coffee on my way to work from Stumptown Coffee in the Ace Hotel on the corner of 29th Street and Broadway. This article gives a great portrait of the two economies at work in the neighborhood. One is that of cheap wholesale goods. “Rhinestones and ribbons” one storefront reads, and another, “Tiger Accessories”, which when I passed the other morning triggered an entertaining procession of accessorized tigers through my mind. The other is the world of hip, rich, international technoscenti, drawn by the Ace Hotel that opened in 2009. Stumptown Coffee epitomizes the latter. The coffee is roasted in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The servers are clad in hipster-meets-nineteen-forties attire. They wear chic shades of brown, accompanied by thick rimmed glasses and wide brimmed hats. In the mornings there is always a queue out the door and into the hotel lobby. The coffee is great but also pricey, like $4.50 for a latte. And yet still I go.

New York missive no 30 - Carnival of the animals

At a bookshop in Newark airport yesterday I picked up a fat paperback compendium of Arthur Schlesinger’s memoirs. Then looking at the subjects he covered – Bay of Pigs, missile crisis, Vietnam, Watergate, first gulf war – I couldn’t help but think that while no doubt it was full of the perceptive insights of a wise advisor nestled close to power in times of crisis (“today, over breakfast with Kissinger…”) those insights applied to a world so different from today’s. So I decided not to buy it.

(Instead I went for “The Best American Short Stories 2008", edited this year by Salman Rushdie and prefaced by both him and the series editor deliberating over what constitutes “Best”, “American”, and “Short”).

Once on the plane and as it taxied up to the runway for a couple of hours (Newark on a Friday night clearly no better than JFK) I engrossed myself in this week’s New Yorker, leaning over the empty seat to my left and holding the magazine’s small print up close to my eyes, as my overhead light wasn’t working. (That and several other details on the Continental Airlines flight reinforced my belief that Virgin rocks, and I’m not usually one for brand loyalty). The magazine, a bumper “politics issue” included an article by Nicholas Lemann, “Worlds Apart – Obama, McCain, and the future of foreign policy”. It describes the candidates’ starkly different “new” and “old” foreign policy approaches.

Lemann says Obama’s is echoed in and influenced by a report published last year by the Phoenix Initiative: “'This report,’ [Susan E] Rice writes in her preface, 'breaks away from such traditional concepts as containment, engagement, and enlargement and rejects standard dichotomies of realist power politics versus liberal idealism.’…The reports lists five top ‘strategic priorities’ for the United States. The first three are issues that governments, or even international organizations, can’t handle on their own: counterterrorism, nuclear proliferation, and, taken together, climate change and oil dependence. The other two are regional: the Middle East and East Asia. The report barely mentions great-power diplomacy, the traditional core concept of statecraft. It is not just post-Cold War but post-war on terror and, arguably, post-American hegemony.”

McCain’s world view is certainly not post-American hegemony. As Lemann says, “McCain is far more oriented to countries than to transnational forces, and far more apt to stress that America must remain the world’s most powerful nation than to lay out a cooperative, collaborative plan for the world’s future. 'I am committed to working with other nations that share our values,' McCain said [in an interview with Lemman in Grand Rapids, Michigan], 'but somebody has to lead. Somebody must lead. America has to lead. Look at the challenges we have faced after September 11th. American led, in coordination with our allied in one case – Afghanistan – and in one case without: Iraq. Somalia was a failure because we did not lead [ah, so does that logic make Iraq a success then?]. We have to lead.' McCain was in his animated mode now. His eyes were open wide, his face upturned, his arms raised. 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I do. And I can prove it by reviewing our history. I want the twenty-first century to be the American century.'"

Schlesinger apparently says the following about McCain in a 1998 entry in his memoirs: "McCain is a loose cannon . . . capable of bizarre behavior...This plus his reputedly wayward sex life will sure destroy his evident presidential aspirations."

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Last weekend, a New York weekend if ever there was one, with bits of culture, work, exercise, partying and unpredictable moments mixed in. Friday night L, D and I saw the film “Four nights with Anna” by the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski at the Ziegfeld on W 54th street, as part of the New York film festival. It’s the first film he’s made in seventeen years. Skolimowski, with bright white hair, dark glasses, and a thick-set frame clad in a dark suit, spoke before and after the film. The moderator beforehand asked him why the long break. “My last film was mediocre,” he said. “I don’t like doing mediocre.” The film is about a crematorium worker in a small town in Poland ("Why did you set this film in your home country?" “You think I could have made a film like this in Hollywood?”), who witness a rape, is charged with the rape, and then on his release from prison finds himself living opposite the victim, Anna. He becomes obsessed with her, first watching her through binoculars from his window and then eventually climbing into her room as she’s asleep to be close to her…he potters about, sewing back on a button that’s coming of her shirt, cleaning up the aftermath of her 30th birthday celebrations while she’s passed out drunk, and never touching her, though coming close when once he gently tops up the red nail polish on her toes. The camera revels in the spying and creeping about. It’s a dark, slow and bizarre film and I can’t say I enjoyed watching it. But when I went out half-way through to go the bathroom, walking up the aisle of the operatic cinema with its high ceilings, red velvet chairs and gold decoration, passed the shadowy bodies and flurouescent flickering faces of the audience, through a corridor and a lobby where ushers were chatting quietly and into the over-opulent bathroom, I was acutely aware I’d been immersed in a brilliant work of film-making. I watched the water pouring out of the brass tap as I washed my hands and it seemed to move in slow motion. Everything I could see was enhanced.

After the film D confirmed she’d had a similar experience when she too went out to the bathroom, so it wasn’t that I’d had a drink spiked beforehand.

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On Saturday had many hours of much-needed sleep; then sat in a café having late breakfast and planning Ukraine and India meetings; worked out at the gym to a mixed accompaniment of CNN bulletins and a Mexican concert involving ballading mariachis with sequined shirts only half-buttoned to reveal hairy chests, curvaceous songstresses in long tight dresses, and screaming fans; and bought two pairs of boots, having realised that all my winter shoes have holes in, from a shop run by two Malians who introduced me to the music of Salif Keita. Then met with M for a long, fun West Village evening. First stop, the Other Room on Perry Street. We drank wine sitting on tall chairs by the open window – a cluster of people outside the bar in front of us fed themselves and their dog tidbits of takeaway pizza, while behind us the room got progressively fuller and darker as lights were switched off to be replaced by little candles on the wooden tables. Wine-fuelled we headed for Malatesta Trattoria on Washington and Christopher. Being so close to old territory though, I couldn’t help take a detour via Weehawken Street. Realising I still had my keys we surprised my room replacement D who was watching TV when I bounced in to give M a guided tour of the apartment and the rooftop. Then Pear salad, pasta, and more wine at Malatesta (can't believe I hadn't been there before, it's scrummy), followed by a ten-piece set crammed into Small’s jazz bar, among them an old yet animated xylophone player and a youthfull alto saxophonist. Actually there were only nine, I guess the clarinettist got waylaid.

The following morning we checked out the sculptures built by children outside the vast, gothic St John the Divine cathedral round the corner from the apartment. There, we encountered a peacock, preening itself on a stone wall outside the church. And then another, a white one. And then a woman by a stand promoting the rights of pigeons. Somehow we found ourselves buying badges with their logo (pigeon on a crucifix) and sucker me signed up for their email updates – though despite visions of being inundated with pigeon emancipation bumph I’ve yet to hear from them. There was definitely an animal theme going on. Along the edge of the cathedral there were round pens strewn with hay yet eerily empty and a cluster of bird-less poles with chains, labelled “eagle”, “hawk”, “peregrine falcon”. At the front of the church, a crowd had gathered. I asked a woman what was going on. Matter-of-factly she informed me the animals would be coming out soon. Curiouser and Curiouser. Our hangover fuzz just made the whole thing more surreal. We climbed the steps of the church and were just in time to watch the procession emerge – we were at the “Blessing of the Animals” to mark St Francis of Assisi day. Priests and attendants of all ethnicities carried/led a veritable menagerie from the alter to the church door: there was the eagle (with its enormous wings boastfully outstretched), the peregrine and the hawk, a giant tortoise being pulled along on a trolley (too slow to walk), a scraggy sheep, a dog, a goat, and towards the end, a magnificent camel. They gathered on the cathedral steps for a Buñuel wedding-esque photoshoot.

The weekend rounded off in Soho. Mi and I nattered over a strong coffee then strolled around the shops. In one, selling stunning bright Indian fabrics and clothes, water started dripping and then pouring through the ceiling, throwing the woman who ran the place into an understandable tizz and a tirade against her landlords who keep upping the rent without fixing things. Then some hair of dog drinks in Café Feliz with La and co where the Brazilian music was pumping and the crowd dancing, squeezing the last drops of time out of the weekend…we stayed awhile then de-camped to the quieter Café Noir around the corner. Heading homewards I passed the IFC and decided to end the weekend as it began, with a film, this time The Pleasure of Being Robbed (more about the Pleasure of Robbing).

New York missive no 26

When K and H were looking for a place for the three of us to live in Camberwell I gave them various prerequisites, including wooden floors and yellow walls (they were tasked with finding a place while I was on holiday). I was only half joking. So when I discovered that 173 Elmington Road had wooden floors (at least, in the kitchen) and yellow walls, I was happy. 

 Now here I am at my new home, 211 W 109th Street, with wooden floors and yellow walls. A good omen. And there’s air conditioning! Luxury. Though I’m going to ration it to keep the bills down. Have just done a slightly lazy job of putting some wooden shelves into their frame, screwing in just one bracket per shelf on each side. Touch wood they’re holding up. 

So this morning was farewell to Weehawken Street. I packed quickly, in a slightly sleepy and hungover fuzz. Post-packing J and I sat on the roof watching a storm rolling in over the Hudson. Heavy black clouds, lightening and grumbling thunder announced a much-needed downpour. When it subsided we ambled out through the West Village streets in search of Eggs Benedict (not a difficult quest), passing a cast of Saturday morning characters. There was someone J saw but I didn’t hence I’m not sure they were male or female, sneaking out of an apartment where they hadn’t expected to spend the night and clad in someone else’s pyjamas; a woman in very short shorts and a sleeveless top (on the way to a sexy yoga class? About to go for a jog? Just posing?); an old bearded man on a tiny foot-push shooter he kept stumbling off. Mission was accomplished at Extra Virgin – not just the Eggs Benedict but Bloody Marys, black coffee and orange juice too. We inspected vintage sports cars at the Cooper Classics show-room on Perry Street on the way back and, yes, it wasn’t hard to be seduced by sleek lines of the open-top Merc, painted green, gleaming, and whispering “take me for a drive, you know you want to.” 

 Back at Weehawken Street people were soon added to the piles of suitcases and boxes with duvets stuffing out of them – the two young Colombians, Mau’s cousin and his girlfriend, who’ve descended for a few days, and Ch who was helping with the move. I’d booked a man with a van, recommended by S. He turned out to be more a boy with a van - K, a striking-despite-the-pimples southerner with long floppy dark hair and a rickety van brimming with the remnants of previous moves and parties. While we were loading the van he was quiet and surly. But as soon as we crammed in he revved up, wound down the window, lit a roly and it was like something had plugged him in - off he went describing how much he adores his other work as a sound guy at National Undergound - the bar on Houston with Allen where I’d seem M’s boyfriend playing a while back. And how he’s not doing that much driving now because, “Like I know the city inside out and it’s nothing new any more.” And how last time he and a friend had done a driving job, they unloaded the full van into the wrong storage unit, having to return the next day and shift everything into another one two units along.

 

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It’s been an apartment-themed week. Thursday night was last Writers Studio’s class for this season. Went out for a meal afterwards when JH filled in a few more details about his apartment – a sprawling place with high ceilings, huge round windows and lots of plants in it on the corner of Bleeker and Broadway. He’s lived there since 1975 and hopes to be there for a long time having finally won a court battle with the landlord. In late 70s when he had double the number of rooms, a guru and his 12 followers lived in half the apartment. He’s still in touch with the guru, who has now retired on the basis that guru-ing wore him out (no doubt there was more to it than that – including the fact that gurus of that kind are less in demand these days). 

 Then on Friday found myself in a massive Tribeca loft, apparently underneath one owned by a Beastie Boy. Actually it’s not officially Tribeca, nor West Village, as it’s in an un-defined pocket South of Houston but North of Canal, sometimes referred to as “West SoHo” for want of a better name and which no doubt will be christened with a new acronym by real estate agents before long. NoTriBeCa?. SoWeVi? Unlikely, as both too-defined by the more glamorous neighbours to the South and North. The couple who live there, friends of R’s, had recently bought the next door loft as well – their Friday dinner party was to celebrate the descent of the wall between the two, traces of which you could see running through the middle of the room. The woman proudly showed us the view from the fire escape. I didn’t mention that their outlook over the UPS loading bay roof and with a gap through some buildings that gave them half a view’s-worth of river wasn’t a patch on the Weehawken Street roof panorama. 

So things that I’ll miss (or not miss, depending on mood) about West Village. Sights such the man and his dog queuing for coffee outside the orange “Mud” truck on the corner of 7th and Christopher the other morning: the man wore an open-necked expensive shirt revealing a semi-hairy chest; the dog had a Louis Vuitton handbag round its neck and protectively rested his front paws on it. The black transvestites hanging out on the Christopher Street corners. Yes, despite the recent rather sinister “clean up our neighbourhood” campaign in the Villager I like them, they’re part of what makes West Village what it is. Drinking coffee, eating overpriced (but delicious) yoghurt and berries and granola in Mojo at breakfast time, while reading the paper, watching the procession of well-groomed dogs and well-groomed mothers with their babies and getting into conversations with local divorcees. Whisky-drinking in the White Horse (though more of a Winter thing). The new pier at the end of Christopher that’s a surrogate garden for all and sundry in Summer-time. The higgledy piggledy streets lined with beautiful buildings to dream about owning.

 

But the new ‘hood's got plenty going for it too, like salsa-rhythmic barbeques on the pavements, wide roads, lots of trees and a big sky, food of all nations within a 10 block radius, booky vibes from Columbia and the buzz of not-yet-totally-gentrified Harlem just up the road.

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Café Tacci’s changed venue – ostensibly while the Waverley Place location's renovated, though according to the word from the regulars the shift’s for a dangerously undefined period of time. A bunch of us went last Friday. Thankfully the atmosphere’s still the same, even though the new place - Papillon on E. 54th - “is French”, Leopoldo the Italian matire-d confessed to me with more than a trace of shame.

New York missive no 25 - Abyssinian House in Harlem

No rushing in NYC at the moment. It’s too hot. This weekend everyone’s been longing for a thunderstorm that hasn’t yet come. In the meantime the heat is building, building, pushing into people’s heads and making them oh so slow and sleepy. Of course that doesn’t stop them doing things, just makes them do them at a more considered pace.

I spent yesterday morning with kids from Abyssinian House, a transitional shelter on 138th Street in Harlem. It has brightly coloured murals that soften the blows of tough times, a bit. Sh, who organized the morning, had planned an Olympics theme – reading about the Games in the air-conditioned library nearby, then going to the park to for a mini Olympics and medal ceremony. We cut out the park part though because it was just too hot to be running around.

There was J, whose Mum came too. She’s Scicilian-Irish-American. His Dad’s Jamaican and was deported to Jamaica a few years ago so now it’s just the two of them. His Mum missed watching the Tour de France this year as she hasn’t had access to cable. She used to watch it with J’s Dad who’s a passionate cyclist, and she had endless stories about the trials and tribulations of previous races – I realised how a long-distance bike ride can in fact be exciting. J is beautiful from inheriting all the best features of his mixed parentage and grandparentage. He’s a voracious reader. Mum described how once, while she was working with PSEG when they were remediating sites in New Jersey, J, then seven, got into conversation with the geologists, jaw-dropping them with his smart words and questions.

There were the mischievous girl twins with near-identical names. I tried teaching one of them to write the word MARATHON, which proved ambitiously long. We got there though – albeit in a muddled two-letter-per-line pattern filling the page, with some of the characters lopsided.

MA
RA
TH
ON

There was C the funky puertorriqueño who slipped effortlessly from Spanish to English. Back in Abyssinian House and after our lunch of cheese and ham sandwiches, chocolate cookies and watermelon, he wrote a story about his trip to the dentist. He’d called the dentist rabbit woman because of her buck teeth, had got scared when she started treating him and ran away, “through the rainforest." But rabbit woman ran after and gave him a toothbrush to take away. Moral of the story, he announced, “don’t judge people by appearances.” And there was born-to-act M who had seemed shy all morning then had us in stitches with his “shower dancing” sketch about a boy who loved dancing to MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This and Michael Jackson’s Thriller in the shower, to the annoyance of his family members queuing at the door.

Then back to Weehawken Street for a rooftop barbeque, a swan-song as Sa described it because in a fortnight’s time I’m moving to Morningside Heights. Lots of beers, burgers, too much salad that didn’t get eaten, then a sweaty boogie at Cielo. And now time for a long sleep – up really early tomorrow to interview the first four of our Ukraine candidates.

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A July Friday night in the meatpacking district: to be witnessed, enjoyed, and not taken seriously. I found myself on the Soho House roof again – S had been invited by someone through work. More than the previous time the roof oozed attitude. Women still in their bikinis from the afternoon’s poolside sizzling purred beside men in jackets and chinos. The air was zig-zagged by gazes hunting out someone better to talk too. We downed our Margaritas then explored the rest of the building. In the 6th floor lounge, we had a second extravagant Margarita. A girl and three guys discussed the plots of crime shorts on the cluster of velvety sofas next to ours. One of their girlfriends sat beautifully and bored on a chair behind them, gazing out of the window, sipping a glass of red wine, glancing from time to time at a book on her lap and at her phone for messages. A few floors further down we snuck into the cinema and rather randomly watched Hancock, the new Will Smith film.

Then we escaped. Perched on the concrete slabs positioned for posing in the middle of the cobble Gansevoort-9th Ave intersection we watched a procession of open-roof sports cars rev by, got chatting to a physiotherapist and his patient who were on a date of some kind, and a pair of fabulous fifty-year old women down from Westchester Country with their well maintained manes and trim figures (one’s a personal trainer), glowing with the energy of a night on the tiles. Their eyes widened when we told them where we’d just been. S had the bright idea of giving them our pass. Say you’re A and S and friends of Charles blah-de-blah, and you’ll be in. The next thing we knew they were texting us from the rooftop, their night out made.

Tom Wolfe’s article in New York about its former editor, Clay Felker, who died the previous week, described a man obsessed by status. Does status still seduce in New York? In places like Soho House perhaps yes, where a combination of connections and cash (or in the case of S’s guy, more dubious means, he implied) is what gets you a membership. But status seems to be loosing its lustre. Not that I can talk from experience. People can’t resist aspiring to it but on arrival, mirage-like, it’s disappointingly empty, easy and fragile, quite capable of disappearing overnight with a quiver in the market, a negative headline, the discovery of an infidelity. And for most people in the city there’s no time to think about it. Instead there's ambition, whether to get a pay rise, find a better apartment, fall in love, make a bigger profit, write a bestseller, be content.

New York missive no 24 - Gay pride

Last Sunday the tighter, brighter and more minimal the attire the better for Gay Pride. A day when heterosexuals are a minority. I didn’t see the parade itself but caught its before and aftermath. The previous night, slender male bikinied bodies erected white screens on the brick wall at the corner of Weehawken Street where they projected florescent visuals. The next morning, expectant mixed-age crowds lined the length of Christopher Street, penned in to an extent by police barriers. Old women perched on deckchairs, selling rainbow flags for waving. Then on the way back later that night the street heaved with a headiness enhanced by the torrential storm that had drenched the procession at around 5 in the afternoon. Coming down through Chelsea I passed a many-kiloed man whose T-shirt, stretched over his rolls, said “fat and sexy”. It was true. It’s a day when everything and everyone is sexy. A pair of black transvestites in skimpy floaty things swung up the drunken street making everyone else’s get-ups look tame. A group of friends sitting on a West Village stoop – usually the territory of the occasional pampered pooch or heeled and handbagged Jessica Parker aspirant – dialled a friend on a cellphone then shouted down it in unison “Happy priiiiiiide”. When I reached my doorstep, standing on it was a giant of a man wearing nothing but a red G-string.

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“Where’s the pattrain?” the young Indian guy asked me as I turned into Christopher Street from 7th on my way back from the gym one evening. I didn’t catch what he said.

“The train, the subway station? It’s just here,” I took a guess.

“No, the pattrain. The pat.”

I thought a moment. “Oh, the Paaaath train.” His eyes widened with a mix of relief and surprise and I suddenly felt very conscious of my long a’d English accent just as I’d been conscious of not understanding his. Here were two people in New York but definitely not yet New Yorkers finding a way to communicate with each other.

I told him it’s a few blocks down on the right. We walked along the road next to each other, half-talking half-staying separate like strangers as we weaved in and out of the huddles that are always on the pavements outside the bars. I imagined him having just emerged in New York off a plane from India, heading through New York to New Jersey to be met by relatives, experiencing that giddying sensation of arriving in a city you’ve built such clear pictures of and which on arrival presents bits of those pictures but tricks you with how utterly different it is to them, so much closer. “You just arrived in New York?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Where from?”

“Chicago.”

I went into a corner shop to buy a banana and pointed him to the Path stop that was just half a block further down. When I came out of the shop, he was waiting outside looking agitated. “I can’t find it.”

I was beginning to wonder if in fact the Path stop had suddenly disappeared overnight. But no, there it was, the old stone doorway and stairwell leading down to the trains. Off he went.

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Sailing last Saturday. This time with Dutchman Mic rather than with B, who was having the day off to play softball – and with J and D from the previous week. In the morning there was a steady wind and bright sunshine. (I got burnt, lobster style. Attempted to tone down the red traffic light effect with some makeup that evening when I went to M’s leaving do in Hell’s Kitchen – she’s been re-located back to Seattle. I decided, however, just to rely on the darkness of the bar to disguise the large bruises on both my knees from bumping around in boats).

By the afternoon the strong tidal currents had picked up and the wind had died. Not a good combination. We drifted steadily Northwards and found ourselves having to paddle some of the way back, dragging ourselves up the Western edge of the river. Then lots of boat-towing and manoeuvring as NYCSA is shifting the Solings over to some moorings round the corner from the marina because it’s cheaper. There’s something melancholic about the fact that that the Solings – that people actually sail – are being shunted out to make way for yet more fibreglass monsters of motorboats that never move because their owners, having splashed out on a boat, don’t take it anywhere either because they can’t afford the astronomical fuel costs or they’re too afraid of damaging it. Then, when we were in the bay tying up the Solings, a torrential thunderstorm. The kind that soaks you to the skin in seconds. Exhilarating. To top it, a perfect rainbow arched its way over the whole of Manhattan. The illusory pots of gold were at the Northern and Southern tips of the island.

New York missive no 21 - Change in Weehawken Street

Change is afoot at 11 Weehawken Street. Last night Stephanie and I stuffed the fat cat Murray into a maroon pet carrier. She's taking him to live with a couple of her friends in Idaho. And the age of the purple dinosaurs is coming to an end: the landlord's started ripping them off the green hallway walls to prepare for painting.

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."

New York missive no 8 - xmas shenanigans

Well, alongside the Obama phenomenon my own tales of Sex in the City Tours and champagne brunches seem somewhat frivolous, to say the least. But this is the place for recording them. Had a wonderful week over Christmas and New Year with H, Em, Me and Ch: exploring parts of the city I didn’t yet know with them, and showing them places I do know. It involved a lot of food and drink, colds – which everyone else was suffering from badly yet I managed to get off with lightly – and quite a bit of navel-gazing: I was surprised to find that all of the others are having therapy of some kind, whether Freudian analysis, relationship counselling...I thought that was a New York thing not a London thing? And am I just too stable for not needing or wanting a shrink? Maybe I should seek professional advice on that.

Christmas eve Em and I picked up H, Me and Ch from J’s apartment on West 10th street, where they were staying. The building – one of those elegant red brick townhouses that I salivate over living in once I’ve made my fortunes writing children’s books about wizards (or flying tigers) – must have won the prize for the most ostentatious external Christmas decorations on the street, maybe in Manhattan. The building was adorned in fairy lights, wreaths, ornamental cabbages (bit of a fad for them in the West Village flowerbeds at the moment) and purple ribbons. A Barbie doll clad in a purple dress perched in one of the windowboxes. And no, J was nothing to do with it, though could well have been.

Brunch in Bleeker street was followed by some Magnolia Bakery cupcakes which we ate in a touristy way sitting in the middle of the pavement. V’s right that they’re nothing special despite the long queues outside. They’re fluffy, and chock full of sugar. We strolled through West Village up to Chelsea market to buy food for Christmas brunch the next day, getting waylaid along the way in the Diane Von Furstenberg shop where Me managed to buy three designer dresses, and where Em made a dramatic appearance from the changing rooms wearing an expensive blue floaty thing with her scruffy green converse trainers sticking out the bottom.

We had a Christmas eve dinner in Fanelli’s on Prince Street. It’s apparently the 2nd oldest restaurant in Manhattan (not sure what the oldest is, should check that out), part French-tabac with its long zinc bar, part café with red and white checked table clothes, part comfort-food pub, serving things like delicious shepherd’s pie and blackened catfish. Then midnight mass on West 10th street. We got there in the middle of a musical prelude that we hadn’t realised started at 11, so crept into one of the side aisles. When the service started we were ushered into the central pews crowded with well turned out, oldish, predominantly white Greenwich Villagers, probably because they were keen to put some young(ish!) things on display in their midst.

Christmas morning everyone came round to Weehawken Street for croissants, berries and yoghurt, bagels & cream cheese, and several bottles of champagne. We drank the first glass up on the roof, accompanied by the cold winter wind, a clear Christmassy sky, the glinting Hudson, whirr of the West Highway traffic, and phone calls to family and friends back in the UK. We eventually emerged from the apartment at 2ish, for a stroll in Central Park. We’d thought of going ice-skating, picturing ourselves with rosy cheeks and scarves flying out behind us, à la cheesy New York movie. But hundreds of others had the same idea, and we weren’t so enthusiastic that we were prepared to wait in the endless queue (multiple Magnolia-bakery length). Instead we headed up to Ch’s apartment on Upper West side, where we flopped on the floor in snoozy heaps drinking herbal tea. Apparently it used to be where Marlon Brando lived. Sceptic me presumed that was a tale spun by the real estate agent to the young Australian recently arrived in Manhattan, but no, apparently Ch only found that out after she’d moved in, from a woman who’s lived in the building for many tenants-worth of time. It’s got all the features of a desirable Upper West Side one-bed apartment: shiny wooden floors, big windows, exposed brick walls, and walking distance from Central Park. And of course, it’s double the rent I’m paying. For now I’m very happy in Weekhawken Street with J, S and S, the dinosaurs, and Murray the cat.

We had our Christmas dinner, unconventionally, in a Puerto Rican restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen: Ch and I had margaritas with our meal which was the perfect wake-up drink. B joined us for the last part of the meal, and ended up staying up till 3ish back at the apartment having meandering small-hour conversations. A perfect Christmas day.

There are many more things I could be writing about here but sleepiness and some work to do will cut this entry short. Among those things, was the sex in the city tour that I was kicking myself for having succumbed to paying $75 for but then loved, and which means I can now walk around Manhattan knowing where to find Carries’ stoop, Samantha’s transvestite-disrupted apartment in the Meatpacking district, the pleasure chest, Big and Aidan’s bar and the tiny church where Samantha targeted "Friar Fuck" to no avail. There was a long and lovely walk with Em through China town, over Manhattan bridge and back over Brooklyn bridge; a visit to the fascinating Tenement museum on Lower East Side, steak sandwiches at the NY-epitomizing Katz diner where Me got into conversation with the Iraq vets who were working there, a whizz around the 20th century art floor of MOMA, Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the Met (which, built as part of the Lincoln Centre built in the 1960s, is a stunningly perfect combination of simplicity and the opulence that opera asks for), and lots of dancing (making me a very happy creature in the way that dancing does) at Nublu on New Years Eve.

New York missive no 2 - 11, Weehawken Street

24 Nov

I’m sitting on the ridiculously comfortable purple velvet sofa in the Weehawken Street apartment. Murray, the plump ginger cat who was inherited from the previous occupants, is purring at me. I know what he wants. I’ve been feeding him this weekend as the others are away for thanksgiving so now whenever I get home he expects a can of turkey Friskies. He’s going to have to wait, at least an hour, and I’m going to have to resist his pleading. Apparently six months ago he was almost dead he was so fat. I’m worried the two cans per day I’ve been giving him are too much, so will be a bit stricter from now on and let him know who’s boss.

Oh-oh I’m talking pets and I’ve only been here a week.

This is a city of things coming up out of the ground. Film-famous steam spills out of manholes and spurts in columns from red-and-white striped tubes as the subway releases its heat into the cold Manhattan air. Heads emerge through pavement trapdoors from cellars, the underbellies of buildings that no doubt brim with things that don’t fit or shouldn’t be seen above ground. I’m amazed at how this island doesn’t sink under the weight of life it bears. Good thing it sits on granite.

Weehawken Street has its pavement trapdoors too, but most of the flotsam and jetsam is on full display at street level. It may be the shortest street in Manhattan but what it lacks in length it makes up for with character. It’s one of the last bastions against the Duane-Reed-Starbuckisation of the city. It’s now part of the Weehawken Street Historic District, hence protected from the glassy sky-reaching new apartment blocks that encroach to the north of it (the kind that are marketed as “artists lofts” when no artist could possibly afford them). The sea-faring industrial ruggedness of the Weehawken Street buildings still seeps through from behind the graffiti, the corrugated iron door-fronts, the “do not urinate or litter” sign that’s carved in stone on one of the walls.

At the Southern, Christopher Street end is the “Dugout” gay bar, with its bright orange beer banners hung outside, open till 4am seven days a week. At the other is a tiny art gallery that I haven’t yet explored, where, apparently, you can do things like poke your hand through a window to get it hennaed. And in the middle, on the East side, is our building, no. 9-11. Can I lay claim to it in that way having only been here a week? The historic district “designation report” describes it as a 3-story, neo-Romanesque style stables building with upper-story residence (i.e. the apartment I’m in now, along with purple sofa and ginger cat). It’s made of dark red bricks. It was clearly once elegantly functional and is now lopsided and fallen into disrepair. It was used as a stables till 1922, and since then has been “Lynch’s Garage”, “Weehawken Garage”, “Ray Electric Co”, Meier & Oelhaf marine repair, then GLC Productions – a music production studio. Apparently the fluorescent green walls of the stairwell decorated with enormous purple dinosaurs are a legacy of GLC, who left a few years ago. All the floors apart from ours are now empty, but ours is busy and colourful enough to make up for the quiet downstairs.

Time to give Murray his Friskies.

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Went on an Annabel exploration today, taking the L-train out over Queens to the end of the line at Flushing, where I emerged into a forest of Chinese-language signs. I followed my nose down a wide road of supermarket warehouses and gas stations to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a former dump described by Scott Fitzgerald as a “valley of ashes” and now the largest park in Queens. It’s a cross between the football-pitch part of Hackney marshes – open and windswept – and Regents Park, with its wide tree-lined paths and its Canada geese shedding feathers and droppings beside man-made ponds. Actually that doesn't do it justice, there's a lot of beauty there too.

The sun stays low at the moment, even in early afternoon. When planes flew over head on their way to La Guardia airport I’d look up only to be dazzled; there’d be just brightness and the loud roar of the engine.

At one end of the park is the Queens Museum of Art, with its huge architectural scale model of New York city that gives people a birds-eye view of the metropolis and that helped me get my bearings. Two of the artists currently exhibited there fired my imagination. Tahera Seher Shah, originally from Karachi and now living in the US after periods in Belgium and the UK, whose “Jihad Pop Progression” pictures are crazy constructions of pencil lines that combine Islamic symbols with architectural drawing to expose souls' struggles in an urban environment. Or something like that. And Yue Minjun from China, currently living in Beijing. He's labeled a pioneer of the “cynical realist” school but I doubt he likes labels. He paints wonderful bright pink Chinese faces with hundreds of evenly-sized teeth that stretch their mouths into eerily ecstatic grins. In one series the faces are clad in professional hats, a soldier, a fireman, a naval officer etc, in another painting they clamber over the Statue of Liberty, another they are striking martial-arts poses, another they are lined up like the terracotta army. A dramatic dismantling of authority and political symbolism, that also questions what follows.

From the art museum, I went on what was a much longer than intended – my fault for being map-less and underestimating distances – meander through Queens suburbs (past a temple with the sign "Ashram Inc", but not much else of note), till “boom” I hit Roosevelt Boulevard in Jackson heights, the heart of Americanised Colombia / or Colombianised America. La hora del almuerzo. Spoilt for choice of restaurants I went into one creatively called “El mesón Colombiano” and had a bandeja paisa; practically half a cow and half a pig on a plate (in the form of steak, sausage and chicharones), along with rice, beans, eggs, avocado and plantain. And an arepa. Despite the long walk back down to Manhattan afterwards, I’m still digesting.

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A changing-room conversation I overheard in the gym, between two women in their forties (maybe fifties? Women work hard to look young here):

“Oh” (as if she’d meant to ask earlier), “how’s your sister doing?”

“She’s doing fine. She had her first chemo the other day. It wasn’t pleasant, but wasn’t too bad. This stuff happens. We’ve got her a nice wig, for when her hair falls out. She’s had her hair cut short already, so it doesn’t come as such a shock.”

“My friend’s hair didn’t fall out till right after the last session. Then wompf, it all came out in one day. She was going round the house with a vacuum to pick it all up. You know, it’s just not genetic any more, is it? Everyone’s getting it."

It sounded a bit like she was talking about a fashion accessory.

"How about the place that’s treating her?”

“Yes, it’s a good one, out of town.”

“Because you want to feel like, well, pampered. Not quite like being in a spa, but…comfortable.”

They finished drying, dressing and make-up applying, said their goodbyes and headed out to work.

Then in the café where I worked that morning (due to a temperamental internet connection at HRF) – ok yes, it was a Starbucks – the guy sitting next to me took three pills of different colours and sizes from his bag, laid them out on the table and swallowed them along with his coffee and muffin.

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Tom Wolfe may have tried burning the vanities in Bonfire, but they survived. The flames just make them stronger.

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25 Nov

There are clear signs on the streets of New York that the social safety net has big holes. On every block and in every subway train there’s someone who’s slipped through, pushing their home in a shopping trolley, searching through bins or rattling a McDonald’s cup containing just a few coins, holding out hope for more. Most turn a blind eye but some step in to fill the gaps. Like the Colombian Jorge Muñoz, profiled in yesterday’s New York Times. Alongside his job as a school bus driver, he cooks mountains of food everyday to take at 9.30pm to the day labourers sheltering under the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 73rd Street in Jackson Heights. Some of them will be back from work, others will have been waiting there all day for a job, without luck. Jorge gets his food from sporadic donations by local shops and from friends who work in the Long Island food industry, who told him one day of how much is thrown away, prompting his idea for the night-time kitchen.

Speaking of food donations, saw V for lunch in Brooklyn today - the Park Slope area inhabited by lots of young professionals, some with pushchairs. When she arrived in NY she worked for a while in the Cup Cake Cafe till her costume-designing jobs built up: at the end of each day piles of cup cakes would be left behind, which they distributed to people sleeping on the streets nearby. According to V the cakes there far surpass Magnolia's (of Sex and the City fame) - the long winding queues of people outside Magnolia are misguided...Having not tried either I've yet to pass judgement. V's found time here, along with cake-selling, costume-making, fashion-showing, gig-going etc., to learn to trapeeze.

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For thanksgiving on Thursday I, along with hundreds of others, got the Southeast line from Grand Central out of the city, passing an explosion of Autumn trees. I spent the day at cousin K and V’s house in White Plains, where along with two of their daughters and a gaggle of grandchildren we feasted on turkey and all its trappings, chatted and played games. It was a relief to be in the still of the countryside. But I still got a rush when I arrived back in the city that night.