New York missive no 95 - The 9/11 memorial trees; and "Hopper's Vision of New York"

Since 9/11 beautiful clear days in NYC have an ominous tinge. One morning last week the sky was a pristine blue. The temperature was like body temperature with a slight breeze to keep things fresh. The city contents were enhanced by clean light: its skyward walls, yellow cabs, the passing faces of people weaving fast along the sidewalks etc. etc. All that beauty felt fragile.

Maybe that’s even more the case at the moment given that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has just gone by, along with its saturated media coverage. I’d just caught snippets, thankfully, due to a 16-month-old JNH now permanently on the move. But I did see a bit of a documentary about the making of the 9/11 memorial, and in particular the bit about its trees.

They are about 400 swamp white oak and sweetgum trees. They’ve been cultivated at an arboretum in New Jersey, and must be among the most tended-to trees on the planet. Prior to their re-location to the memorial site each one had its own tub, with regulated conditions including a feeding and irrigation system. Each had its own perfect, private ecosystem carefully controlled by man.

There’s a video about the trees here.

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In the big New York Times “Book of New York” – a collection of 549 of the newspaper’s articles about the city – there’s a piece from 7 September 1980 by Alfred Kazin, called “Hopper’s Vision of New York.” I love its last two paragraphs. Sometimes in the thick of the daily rush a piece of prose, a poem, or a painting holds things still. What I like about these two paragraphs is that they do that, while discussing paintings which do that too.

“...But there was one exception to the cozy, picturesque painters of New York: Edward Hopper. Unlike so many American paintings just before and after World War II, 'representational' and 'abstract' alike, his work was not slap-dash, hurried, theatrically self-conscious. The immensely tall, immensely quiet man I often saw walking in Greenwich Village seemed tensely alone; he reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s impression of Robinson Crusoe – 'a man staring at a pot.'

"Hopper for me was like his unprecedented paintings of solitary people staring at the glass in New York bedrooms, coffee shops and offices. Perhaps he had taken the advice of the philosopher Wittgenstein: ‘Don’t think! LOOK!’ Yet you could not have guessed what the handsome man was looking at as he edged his way through Washington Square park. His figures never looked through the glass they were facing. Their masked, identical hawklike faces were concentrated in thought unavailable to anyone, perhaps, especially to themselves.”

New York missive no 69 - Closure of St Vincents Hospital

Last night we were supposed to be going to St Vincents for a free tour of the maternity ward. But the woman running it called in the afternoon to say it’s been cancelled because the hospital is closing – the hospital board announced the closure on Tuesday and it’s happening pretty much right away. So that’s that. 160 years of treating the population of lower Manhattan, and now the buildings will probably be turned into just more expensive apartment buildings. I came home via the hospital to see what was going on and passed a nurses protest – 800 will probably lose their jobs. Their placards summed up the situation well. “Condos don’t save lives," said one.

Round the corner I spotted a plaque on the wall about the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, where I learned that she was named after the hospital:



So our little Dobritican (the word C came up with for Dominican-British-American) will have to come into the world elsewhere. At the moment it’s looking like New York Downtown Hospital in the financial district. The description of its maternity ward sounds a little condo-like itself: “New mothers deliver in the Hospital's beautifully renovated, state-of-the-art Maternity Center, which is equipped with attractive, family-oriented suites for labor and delivery.”

But I won’t pass judgment too quickly. I’m sure all will be well and my obstetrician, who won’t change, will give us all the control we need over how the baby’s born.

New York missive no 58

Woman walking in a very short skirt through West Village with your dog, do you know that your legs don’t look that good from behind? I wonder...maybe so, and you don’t care. That’s cool.

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The yellow dress that Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s inauguration in January is on display at Fashion Institute of Technology, just over the road from my work. So I went to check it out one lunchtime. It’s there along with lots of other outfits by its Cuban designer Isabel Toledo, who, I felt (being as far from a fashion expert as possible hence not really in a position to comment), designs fabulous shapes but often misfires on the material. Michelle’s inauguration suit, for example, is an elegantly dramatic shape and a striking colour but up close the fabric looks a bit like a sofa cover, heavy and floral.

The exhibition is called "Fashion from the Inside Out," because, Toledo says, that’s the way that she sees her work. "I never thought of myself as a designer. I’m a seamstress. I really love the technique of sewing more than anything else. The seamstress is the one who views fashion from the inside! That’s the art form, really – the technique of how it’s done." The dresses on display were technical masterpieces (again - says I, the absolute novice). Ah, and of naming, which appealed to me of course. There were Origami dresses, folded to create sail-like collars and backs, the Double Tier Pagoda dress, Blossom Sleeve Bolero and Balloon dress, a Butterfly Wingspan jacket, a jersey dress called Tequila Sunrise, and the Cage dress, made of little black bars hung over the shoulders. Lots of descriptions and pictures here.

The week after seeing that exhibition, dramatic dresses caught my eye. There was the woman on the corner of Greenwich Ave and West 13th wearing a fluorescent green one, and the woman with pink hair and a whispy orange floaty dress at a Lincoln Centre Out of Doors concert (where I had a brightish blue sundress on). The concert involved 200 electric guitars. It would have been more dramatic had we got there in time to be in the centre of things rather than tucked away under the trees, but was relaxing in a zenny-summer evening way.

New York missive no 53 - Writing New York; Roth, Selby, McInerney, Fitzgerald

Naming

In Bangladesh, on 16 January 2008, 45-year-old Samir Shil was crushed to death while he was loading goods onto a ship at Clinker Jetty, Chittagong. In March in Comilla, three construction workers Abdul Haque (21), Md. Habibur Rahman (20) and Md Monir (32) all suffocated to death when they entered the sceptic tank of an unfinished building. In May, In Dhaka, Ms Kulsum Begum (35) was electrocuted to death when she tried to release herself from a machine in Young Star Sweater Factory. Her sari had become entangled while she was cleaning it.

Those are just five of the 305 workers named in a new report by the Center for Corporate Accountability, “Workplace deaths in the industrial, service and agricultural sectors of Bangladesh, 2008”. And those 305 deaths are only those that are reported in local newspapers. The ILO estimates that there are around 1,625 industrial and service sector deaths in Bangladesh each year.

The report is powerful because it names the workers who died. It tells us who they were, instead of merely subsuming them into statistics. It reminded me how much we overlook the need to name. “Important” people’s names, yes, we’re all familiar with those and they are always s-p-e-l-l-e-d o-u-t i-n f-u-l-l. The rest, well, they’re just the rest. I’m reading Studs Terkel’s fabulous book “Working” at the moment, which is essentially the transcripts of detailed interviews with workers in 1970s America, from farmer to receptionist, gravedigger to actor. The workers’ own words convey so much more meaning than any removed professor or reporter analyzing their worlds could do. The first interviewee is a steelworker, called Mike Lefevre. He says:

“Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody’s going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building – these things just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names.”

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I’ve been inspired by two girlfriends recently.

RF has just run a 150-mile marathon in the Namibian dessert. It was about six days of running, with one non-stop run of 24 hours. “You’re mad”, people had said while she was training, running around Manhattan with a heavy backpack of rice on her back. “Our bodies aren’t made for that.” “Why are you doing it?!” She carried on regardless, coming 79th out of 220 people (most of them brawny men), and raising over $2000 in the process for WEECE, that provides micro-loans to women in Tanzania. She showed that when you want to do something and focus on it, you can. “Well, within reason,” she pointed out in a typically sensible way. “Not everyone can become an astrophysicist."

And inspirational MJ, who died in May after battling cancer with a boundlessly optimistic and energetic spirit. Going to the cafés we used to go to, reading back on her enthusiastic emails, it’s so strange to think that she’s not here any more. AL has created a blog in her memory, The Mia Abides. I can’t help feeling, why her, why not me, of course there's no reason - life’s a fragile and precious gift and it’s our responsibility to treasure and value it.

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Last Sunday I was a happy tramp feeling proudly incongruous as I walked back through West Village from a sail on the Hudson, hair bedraggled, bruised legs and even a rip in my shorts. I have no idea how the rip got there. It could well have been while we tried to get our Soling waterbound again after running aground somewhere off the Edgewater shore. Eventually a speedboat-full of fluorescent sunglass-wearing Russians towed us back into our depth.

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So is New York City redundant? That was the thread of the discussion in the last session of the New School course on the city told through its writers. New York was born as a merchant, commercial city, a trading post where goods were brought, sold and shipped on. And then in the 19th and early 20th century, it was an industrial city, a whirr of production. Then the corporate city, focused on processing information. Through each of those phases, its body of buildings and factories and transport links was designed to fit those purposes. And now? Interactions, transactions, money-management and information-generation can all be virtual, leading to the question of what the city itself is for. Yet people still come.

They come because they’re dreaming of realizing a kind of life. And because other people are here doing the same thing. In that way the city will never change. It’s the ultimate “place to be”, both life-challenging, and life-affirming. Here, those dreams collide in their thousands and feed of each other. More often than not the dreams themselves aren’t realized but through their breaking and changing a stronger humanity emerges. The truth of the city is constructed of those dreams, of imagination, and of experience, more than with bricks and stone. And words and stories are the most capable tools we have to capture that truth (a futile but inevitable and essential endeavour). In the thick of it all, writers document actions, reactions and interactions, save moments and carve out specifics – those tiny details that speak for everything.

The writers we read for that course put distinctive voices to work, showing how people react to the city and vice versa (it's that process of osmosis again). This isn’t right, or wrong, they said, it’s how it is, at this time, for these people in this place. Now it’s up to you, reader, to react. The authors were Melville, Henry Roth, Dos Passos, Scot FitzGerald, Claude Brown, Toni Morrison, Hugh Selby, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Paul Auster and then finally a token (though in itself brilliant) “post 9-11” story, Patrick McGrath's Ground Zero, from Ghost Town. (A novel that successfully captures this time, JS felt, is yet to be written. Which is rather depressing given that we’re eight years on now). I could wallow a while on each of them but for lack of time will be lazy – here are a few my reactions from when I read them. They don't make much sense without the accompaniment of the books they're about, but thought I'd post them anyway.

First, something general on the city and its inhabitants: “It’s impossible to say if our lives are impoverished or enriched by our relationship with the city. They’re both at once. It’s a relationship like so many others. Passionate, intense, with rejections and make-ups and misunderstandings and ecstatic moments but with the somewhat sick difference that one partner in this relationship feels nothing, nada, for the other. Or am I mistaken? City, do you miss me when I’m gone?"

Call it Sleep, Henry Roth:

Call it Sleep is David’s journey forging an identity in a city that ignores him. Right at the start of the novel he is already aware 'that this world had been created without thought of him'. His challenge is how to exist, how to 'be' in that world. The challenge manifests itself in language and light. And at the same time he uses language and light (wrought together so dramatically, climatically, in the penultimate chapter) sometimes consciously, sometimes not, to meet that challenge.

David’s existence dangles in the boundary between the initially alien English world of the Lower East Side streets, and the familiar Yiddish world of home and his mother. She has a taught rope linking her back to Austria and soon dismisses New York, 'one grapples this land at first closer to one’s self than it’s worth.' Initially David clings as close as he can to her. She’s safety and something he knows intimately – he photographs every tiny beautiful detail with words in his mind as she goes about her chores in the kitchen – as compared to the wild unknown city outside where, when he gets lost, people don’t understand him as he tries to say the name of his street. He wants time to stand still. He saves the old paper days from a calendar. But that connection has to be broken. Not only because she’s his mother, but because unlike her he’s not tethered to their homeland. He was too young when they left to remember it.

Through his encounters with other people – the father who rejects him, Luther who competes for his mother’s attention, Bertha who takes him to the 'wilderness of man’s work' that’s the Metropolitan museum, Leo who is, in David’s eyes, the epitome of un-tethered ('There was no end to Leo’s blessings – no father, almost no mother, skates,' so he belongs to a 'rarer, bolder, carefree world') David is exposed to the humanity of the city, 'on feet, on crutches, in carts and cars', and navigates it. He starts to name streets. 'The Chinese laundry near the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue C'. [Aha, the weight of names again].

But he has an acute imagination so this navigation and exposure are inevitably treacherous. It’s an imagination that can make a leap from a window shade spring to an image, in his mind, of Puss in Boots bounding over rooftops then exploding after the mouse Puss has consumed transforms into an ogre. It’s an imagination that, more dangerously, turns his feelings about his mother into an exaggerated truth ('she’s dead!')– a truth fed by the fragments of her love story that he had been able to understand (the other fragments having been spoken by Bertha and Genya in Polish). His imagination causes the cowardice he battles against. And his imagination also means that the 'humanity' of the city is not enough for him. He can see beyond it and knows that there’s something bigger than it. Places, experiences and objects become hooks that he grasps and loads with meaning along the way to defining himself: cellar, picture, coal and finally rail.

When we’re first exposed to David’s mind he’s 'regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away.' He’s already yearning after bright lights. Bright, gleaming light is a challenge, a threat, and something he has to attain to overcome its threat. 'David often dreamed of his father’s footsteps booming on the stairs, of the glistening door-knob turning, and of himself clutching at knives he couldn’t lift from the table.' Getting to light is key to his survival. He’s transfixed by the fire created by boys burning a doll in the street outside his house, by the 'shadowy lamplighter' going about his work, by the hypnotic brilliance of a shaft of sunlight on East River. Sometimes, he thinks light is God. But it’s more than that. It’s peace, liberation, and the transcendence ultimately enabled by his creative/destructive imagination. Of the story he heard his mother telling Bertha, he thinks, 'all one had to do was to imagine that it wasn’t there, just as the cellar in one’s house could be conjured away if there were a bright yard between the hallway and the cellar-stairs. One needed only a bright yard. At times David almost believed he had found that brightness.' Or climbing onto the rooftop, 'he had only to conquer his cowardice, and that solitude and that radiance were his.' Once there, 'Gee! Alone…Ain’t so scared.' Then by the end of the novel, when he is driven like a crazed animal from his house, his senses frenzied by fears of his father’s violence, of incomprehensible religion and of the dizzying power of his imagination,

'…Only the steely glitter on the
tracks was in his eyes, fixed there like
a brand, drawing him with cables as
tough as steel.'

Light and language converge as he gives himself a dazzling electric shock and the city suddenly notices him, crowding round and talking in multiple tongues that are interwoven with the isolated lyricism of David’s unconscious experience. When he opens his eyes, 'behind, between them and around them, like a solid wall, the ever-encroaching bodies, voices, faces at all heights, gestures at all heights, all converging upon him, craning, peering, haranguing, pointing him out, discussing him.' He exists, but as what?

Is the light he found an ultimate truth, so he can finally 'be'? Or is it a blinding white-out, an empty tragedy? It’s both (and might as well be called Sleep).

Great Gatsby, Scot FitzGerald (only tangentially go into the New York city elements here, I got a bit waylaid on other things):

Jay Gatsby’s world is a kaleidoscopic one – a world of enticing impressions that are out of reach and transient. It’s a world shocked with echoes of Segismundo’s lament from La Vida es Sueño: 'que toda la vida es sueño / y los sueños, sueños son' (that all of life is a dream, and dreams themselves are just dreams). Yet here, even the dreams are dead, in Gatsby’s case the ultimate dream of love: as Tom starts dismantling Gatsby before Daisy’s eyes by disclosing his illicit business deals, Gatsby tries desperately to defend himself but gives up, 'and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon skipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.'

I’ve pre-empted myself – first I was going to describe how dreams dominate on various levels and then mention that the dreams themselves are dead, but hey….here are those levels anyway:

There’s Gatsby himself, from so early on in his life an invented person, a dream of who he wants to be, chasing an elusive green light.

There’s Nick the totally unreliable narrator, a perfect conveyor of dreams who occupies a place amidst and within his characters, like air, or 'within and without' as he describes it, all the while trying to deny being a part of them. He is as unauthentic as they are, and all we can do is laugh at his dishonesty when he says things like, 'I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known', or of Gatsby, 'I disapproved of him from beginning to end.'

Then there are Gatsby’s guests, the cast of amorphous characters who are drawn to him, 'foul dust' [that] 'floated in the wake of his dreams', only to vanish into the shadows like so many ghosts when he closes up the house, leaving tiny pathetic tremors of their presence in the form of a telephone call inquiring after left-behind tennis shoes, or of a car pulling up at Gatsby’s front door, seeing the party is over, then pulling away again.

The characters live in a bubble, insulating themselves from an outside 'real' (?!) world that they both exploit and feel threatened by. Fitzgerald gives us glimpses outside the bubble from time to time, whether through Tom’s reference to Goddard’s 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' followed by Daisy’s whisper 'We’ve got to beat them down,' as she winks 'ferociously toward the fervent sun', through Nick mentioning that near the Yale Club 'There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work', or through this fleeting, vivid comment on class, 'There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.'

Yet how come, despite all the melancholy emptiness in this bubble, the book is so vital and full? The thing that endures through all the ephemeral dreams is the story itself. Fitzgerald the author achieves that by masterfully manipulating his unreliable narrator Nick. He stands just behind Nick, makes him have that 'intense personal interest' in Gatsby which is the only way this story can be told, and occasionally steps forward to spell his message out:

‘A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded
“Absolutely real – have pages and everything…See!...It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter.”’

It can’t be a coincidence that owl-eyes is the only party-guest (other than Nick) who appears at Gatsby’s funeral.

With language, FitzGerald turns a cloud of colliding dreams into something as solid, enduring and real as his novel.


Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hugh Selby

Selby uses a fluid narrator, rushing through one character, then a group of characters, then another character, to take the reader into the eyes of lots of hurricanes. Each of the individuals in the book is at the core of a vortex/hurricane, the world of the city swirling around them – at the same time each one is part of that hurricane for others. The city itself is like a hurricane too, spinning and drawing everyone in to it without a hope of escape, and yet it has no (real) centre, so all that people are spinning around is each other. Selby captures this experience so well, so intensely, because he’s zoomed in on a corner of the city – the world of these people, in this part of it: if he had tried to do that for the whole of New York (like Bonfire) the impact would have been far less powerful.

Selby’s characters are trapped. They are trapped in the city, trapped in their own experiences of the city, and all of them will ultimately be suffocated. Each character brings about his or her own destruction. They try to escape the loneliness at the eye of the hurricane by entering into its course, like moths to flames. And at the same time their destruction is brought on them by others, by the 'crowd' that swirls about them, within which they struggle to assert their identity (their only hope of identity) – clinging to a group that sets itself up in opposition to another because confrontation is the only way to exist, or clinging to objects of love and desire – and yet which is ultimately ruthlessly oblivious to them, able to destroy and then walk away laughing, wiping its hands of the blood, able to turn its back and ignore, ignore totally, as is captured in the last lines of the book…'Abraham slept.'

The fluid narrator means Selby can crack urban life open. He enters minds and apartments, zooms in on street corners and parking lots, spills violence in forensic, totally unemotional detail ('…the ragged flash of the cut cheek flapped against the bloodied teeth and a skull was opened with a club…'), lays out bare the destruction left in the hurricane’s wake. The reader is as complicit as the characters, discarding one and moving on to the next…left confronted with the feeling of having no feeling (like at the centre of a hurricane)? And there's Selby's implicit social message - 'so, you're in this too. Is this the city you want it to be? If not, are you going to go about changing it?'


Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney

'You will have to learn everything all over again,' says 'you' the narrator at the end of the novel, and that seems to sum up the process of erasing, and of learning then unlearning that runs through Bright Lights Big City.

The narrator’s driven to 'belong' / desperate to belong, yet the world he tries to belong to unravels him, and is permanently unraveled itself.

The unraveling plays out against the backdrop of the city: he’s really precise about Street-names and locations as if clinging to solid reference points – by locating himself on the map he’s trying to make his existence more rooted and real. Yet the atmosphere of the city echoes his actual disorientation…descriptions like 'You cross under the rusting stanchions of the old elevated highway and walk out to the pier…' which has 'holes through which you can see the black, fetid water underneath…You watch the solemn progress of a garbage barge wreathed in a cloud of screaming gulls, heading out to sea. Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.'

McInerney's descriptions of the city show the overlapping layers of old and new, and of real, unreal and sensationalized; the processes and people that keep the city functioning (garbage barges etc, fleeting acknowledgment of people whose lives the narrator brushes e.g. Lucio the elevator operator who with a 'week’s training could probably take over your job'); and the 'groups' that people use to define themselves through ('I’m one of them') or against ('I’m not one of them'). 'Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation' he says when a group of Rastafarians gets into his subway carriage. He wonders why 'all the coffee shops in the city are run by Greeks', why 'all the vegetables in the city are sold by Koreans.' Self-absorbed, the narrator can’t take us any closer than that to people who aren’t part of his immediate world…but he does make a point of acknowledging them, as if to say here’s my (‘your’) story, it’s just one of millions.

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After a few weekends out of Manhattan (and, not surprisingly, returning to find it just the same and indifferent to my return) – in Puerto Rico, sailing with P in Maryland, and at S’s wedding in Philadelphia - I have had a weekend here, involving lots of films. 24 City on Thursday with C, which gently bears testimony through a mix of documentary and fiction (can you bear testimony with fiction? I believe so) to a changing community of workers in Chengdu as their factory is knocked down to make way for a swanky new housing development. One of the character's descriptions that stood out for me was a student who decided to try out being a factory worker. He said, "So off I went, in my uniform, carrying a lunchbox with a spoon rattling inside it." He didn't last long before he couldn't bear the monotony of the task he was given, and decided to go back to his studies. Easier for some than others.

On Friday, a rather comical showing of WovenWays with RB. The substance of the film isn’t comical – it’s about the ways that uranium mining is impacting the native indigenous Navajo community in New Mexico. But the context was. It was shown at the Community Church on East 35th Street, to an audience of about 8 or 9, us included. It took about half an hour to get the DVD and projector connected properly, after some politely hesitant technological suggestions from audience members, then once running, the film periodically stalled for a few seconds. Then yesterday, two Human Rights Watch film festival films. First, the fabulous “The Reckoning” that tells the story of the International Criminal Court, the cases it has taken on or is investigating regarding Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia and Darfur, and its struggle for the powerful idea of international justice as conceived at the Nuremberg trials to transcend seemingly relentless political obstacles. And finally “Crude”, about the ongoing lawsuit brought by the indigenous people of Nueva Loja in Ecuador against Chevron, for contaminating their water, land, their way of life.

New York missive no 52 - The compost heap approach to poems; New York Women Social Entrepreneurs

In an interview in Poets and Writers magazine the poet Ann Lauterbach gives the following description of Obama, which seems to capture his qualities well – and by extension the qualities that make inspiring leaders: "I think that Obama has a certain nobility of character – and nobility is not a word one uses lightly. I’ve been reading his book Dreams From My Father, where he makes clear his struggles to become himself. But if you learn these hard lessons and don’t allow yourself to become self-pitying or bitter or paranoid, you can gain a kind of responsive detachment, clarity and courage. My advice to him is, ‘To thine own self be true’”.

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Speaking of words of wisdom from poets, last week I went to one of the Writer’s Studio craft classes, with the poet RW. We were in classroom 3B at the Village Community School. High up along one wall were some big coloured paper birds nests with eggs and $ bills inside them – outside the classroom some pigeons were cooing loudly as if disgruntled to have been separated from their nests. The man sitting next to me was wearing red socks, and there was a tiny dot (a bit bright for blood) on his white shirtsleeve. About half-way through, a tiny sparrow-like lady with a makeup-caked face snuck in and crouched down in between us, trying to be quiet as she rummaged through her handbag for her notebook.

Despite these quirky distractions I caught most of the class. RW’s a small, gentle-looking woman in round glasses, which contrasted wonderfully with her feisty descriptions of her poetry-writing process. She talked about tackling a poem about a painting by “fighting” with the painting (to avoid slipping into the trap of simply describing or eulogizing it). She talked of “cannibalizing” others’ poems – in particular the ancient Greeks’, which she reads in the original Greek – of her “jacknife” poems that are “short, sharp and just a little dangerous”, and of how war emerged as a theme of her latest anthology, both war in the geopolitical sense and wars that get played out between bedroom walls.

Oh and she gave a great compost heap analogy. She’ll write a poem, or the first few drafts of a poem. Then she’ll leave it to compost for a while. Then she’ll go back, lift up the compost bin lid and see how it’s doing. If it’s not ready for a re-write, she’ll ruffle and rake the compost about, put the lid back on, and come back a few days later. No wonder it takes her on average nine years to complete an anthology. But from the poems she read at that class, it’s worth the wait. She has a refreshing disregard for the pressures of the publishing industry, which expects prominent authors to churn out a new book every few years. “All I care about is the poems,” she said with a grin.

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JB and I found ourselves in the top floor of ABC Carpet and Home one evening last week, in a lushly furnished living room-type area brimming with well-turned out New York women. (They were not over-dressed but all looked like a certain amount of care and attention had gone into their smart-casual outfits). They sat on the stylishly-upholstered sofas and chairs clutching glasses of wine. Late arrivals, including us, sat on the floor on cushions. A scene from a modern-day Jane Austen novel.

The occasion was a meeting of the New York Women Social Entrepreneurs – the women speaking included Patti Carpenter, Founder of Carpenter + Co, Amy Chender, VP of Social Responsibility at ABC Home and Rebecca Kousky who at the age of 24 founded Nest, a microfinance non-profit that helps women create arts & crafts businesses. Patti described ways in which sourcing high-end textiles from indigenous women suppliers in Bolivia, Guatemala and elsewhere is a learning process on both sides. Not all of Bloomingdale’s doorstopper of a supplier's manual with questions like "location of fire escape?" applies to women working from their one-room homes, for example. Rebecca talked about the difference between a 'male', linear, business-plan oriented approach to establishing and running a business, and the 'female' approach she used when she set up her company, asking a wide group of friends and contacts for advice and support. The economic downturn, she suggested, was partly a product of too much male, not enough female, approach to doing business. How little things change...that was a point I made in an article I wrote back in 2002 on the World Conference for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

New York missive no 49 - Where Frederick Douglas landed

“There’s no room in the human rights business for pessimists. We have to be a pessimist of the intellect, but an optimist of the will,” (à la Gramsci), says Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China, in this interview.

And a very different interview which also belongs here...Irish Times has just published this article on the Writers Studio director Philip Schultz. It highlights the irony of his winning the Pulitzer last year for an anthology called "Failure" (based on the "failure" that was his father's life).

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Springtime’s coming out onto the streets of New York and with it New Yorkers and tourists in their thousands are coming out onto the streets too, flouncing as-yet-un-sunned bodies of all shapes onto the Christopher Street Pier, cramming into the square by Bleeker playground to scoff overrated Magnolia cupcakes, getting brushed if they're lucky by falling white pear tree blossom (there are lots of blossoming pear trees which is funny because I don't remember them from last year - these ones don't bear pears apparently, which makes me wonder if they can really call themselves pear trees), congregating at sidewalk cafés, photographing each other in front of much-photographed New York symbols – yellow taxis, police cars, jagged skylines. This afternoon I lay for a while in a Sunday sun-daze on the pier. From there the statue of liberty looked, as I scribbled in my diary at the time, like a misshapen missile pointed at a jaunty angle to the sky. Its trajectory was destined to descend somewhere in the Gobi desert. That is to say, off whatever its target may have been.

The previous weekend I ambled further down the river in search of a quiet place to finish reading Last Exit to Brooklyn. (Accomplished, in North Park, a patch of presumably reclaimed land jutting out into the river just North of the World Trade Center site – an incongruously calm place to finish that book with its relentless riff of violence). On the way, in an echo of the Cambria play, I happened to pass the place where Frederick Douglass’ boat came in when he first arrived in New York. A plaque marking the spot is inscribed with a quote from an article he wrote in July 1848, after attending the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls: “Standing as we do on the watchtower of human freedom, we cannot be deterred from an expression of our appreciation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character and condition of any members of the human family.”

A little girl walked passed me with her Dad towards the river while I was reading the plaque. “That’s the ocean!” she said.
“No, that’s a river,” he replied.
She insisted. “No, it’s the ocean.”
“Well it connects to the ocean, but here it’s a river.”
“It is the ocean.”
I liked her persistence and her foresight.

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Weekends have got pretty nocturnal recently – time for a spring-time shift to more diurnal habits, getting out sailing again, venturing on excursions outside the city. There’s been one of Sam’s epic dinner parties that ended with survivors finding themselves on a West Village bar-hop till the early hours, Ji’s Colombian fundraiser in Brooklyn, slam-poetry at Nuyorican Poets Café and last night, many deliciously sweet caipirinhas at D’s…

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My bedroom window slides down to close itself unless there’s something stuck in the bottom to hold it open. So I’m using books, different ones depending on how much I want to keep the window open by. Belize Lonely Planet guide for just a little gap of air, Satanic Verses to let in more.

New York missive no 48 - Call it Sleep, Great Gatsby

Café frequenters coming and going like ghosts. Some chew on pencil ends, some leaf through pages, some alternate typed sentences with spoonfuls of granola. Look up from your book and the person across the room has gone. Am in Doma, the epitome of a West Village café for people writing, reading, chatting quietly, any upbeat tune followed by a classical one or something peaceful, out of respect for customers trying to think.

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New York might have a reputation for ceaseless progress but I’ve been struck by how many people have nostalgia disease. An affection for things past. Not pride in the past, in the way European city inhabitants are proud of their historic monuments, those solid stepping stones of progress (here there’s no need, the evidence of progress is now, everywhere, and it doesn’t always look good). More an anti-progress sense of past. A resistance to the “achievement” that’s meant to define this city. Hence the mourning of markets that make way for high-priced apartment blocks. Hence the fond capture of surviving eccentricities through words, photos and recounted stories, keeping them alive a little bit longer.

Two recently-read New York books are filtering into my days at the moment: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (don’t really need to preface Great Gatsby with “Fitzgerald’s”, but did so to be fair). Call it Sleep is infused with light – light in the form of “bright brass faucets”, the flame of a “shadowy lamplighter”, the hypnotic brilliance of a shaft of sunlight on East River, light that’s analogous to language and that the child narrator David uses to navigate his experience growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of last century. So I’ve been noticing lights about the place more than usual. Light trickling along subway tracks before a train emerges from a tunnel. Plates of silver light lying on wet pavements after rain. Gold light catching on thousands of windows at sunset.

And then Great Gatsby for various reasons, including its playfully relentless life’s a dream message (echoing so many other life’s-a-dream-messages gone by, “que toda la vida es sueño / y los sueños, sueños son”). For example saw B for the first time in ages last Sunday. I was amused to realise that much of what I’d been feeling was the result of an over-active imagination. The dreams themselves are real though, even if transient. And even if the dreams are transient, the fiction that captures them (in Fitzgerald’s case not mine!) endures.

Mmm, well a little cynical perhaps. There are real things too!

New York missive no 44 - Word bites

Look at the length of some of these blog entries. Some of the paragraphs within them even. Long. No wonder I’m postponing a plunge into Twitter-land with its 140 character-limit on “Tweets”. Not that I’m adverse to short sentences. In fact I love them. I just feel that channeling all our communication through sound-bitey bursts can’t but fragment our already fragmented thought-processes. Give me a lengthy New Yorker article any-day. Oh and the time to read it in please. Of course, even though I haven’t taken the plunge Twitter has started lapping at the edges of my world, and before long might just suck me in. There’s a merging of medium / media going on. Just now I was reading last week’s Sunday New York Times magazine, still sitting bereft as Sunday supplements often do, on my kitchen table. One of the front pieces was called “Being There – The subtle art of the Facebook update.” And then over the page was “A successful failure – How an image went from e-card to Twitter icon.” No doubt that article in turn provoked a flurry of Twitters.

Am sitting in an 80% packed up apartment. The remaining not-quite-throw-away-able nor packable 20% of random odds and ends has prompted procrastination…and will no doubt still be there till right at the last minute tomorrow when it gets stuffed together in a random odds and ends box. I’m moving back to West Village. It didn’t take long for downtown to lure me back.

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 29 - Bohemians, theatre, street festivals, a soup kitchen

Oh to have been a Greenwich Village bohemian in the early 20th Century. I’ve been reading "Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village – the American bohemia 1910 – 1960” (with an emphasis on the 10s and 20s), by the Village Voice journalist Ross Wetzsteon. He died in 1998, two years before the book was published. He reveals the intimate and extrovert existences of a place that became a cauldron of interaction between artists, playwrights, rebels, social activists, feminists and the occasional philanthropist. They were fuelled by a potent mix of narrow self-promotion and broad dreams of social change (some of which were realised). There was Edna St Vincent Millay, the red-headed poet who everyone fell in love with, Mabel Dodge the salon-host, Jig Cook who determindly kept the Provincetown Players running till eventually he ran out of steam and retreated to Greece, Max Eastman the editor of the Masses, Jack Reed the dashing young journalist, the whispy playwright Eugene O'Neill...Between them they formed and dissolved movements, established magazines and watched them combust, and slept with one another. The lesson that it's easy to practice free love onself but hard to accept it in one's partners was repeatedly learnt and unlearnt.

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Monday and Tuesday nights last week, two events on wooden stages with different subjects but posing the same resounding question: what is a government for? The first, a reading at Joe’s Public Theatre of JS’s play (written jointly with two others) about Hurricane Katrina, The Breach. The play switches to and fro between three stories. Of a family stuck on their rooftop as the waters rise around them. Of a bar tender wheel-chair-bound by multiple sclerosis who just survives the storm to learn shortly after that his son has been killed in action in Iraq. And of a young, earnest white New York journalist pursuing the “truth” of black New Orleans. At first the journalist attempts to dissect fact from rumours (primarily rumours about the levees having been purposely exploded to direct the force of the damage towards the poor and predominantly black ninth ward), then realising that a chunk of truth lies in the origins of rumour, whether or not they can be substantiated.

The second, a PEN event “Reading Burma” at Cooper Union involving writers and exiled monks who were involved in the Saffron revolution a year ago. At one point Kiran Desai and Orhan Pamuk were on stage. She read testimonies from victims of Cyclone Nargis, including a woman who went into labour as it struck. In-between the testimonies, Pamuk read excerpts from the government’s mouthpiece “New Light of Myanmar” trying not to wretch as he released its words. The excerpts poured scorn on international relief efforts. Surely, the paper said, the people living near the Irawaddy were resilient enough to find wild frogs to eat.

Whatever the sins of the Bush administration I’m not going to start comparing it to the Burmese regime. But both Katrina and Nargis exposed government neglect for all the world to see. Has that changed anything?

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On X’s last Sunday in New York we went to China Town for the Mid-Autumn festival. It turned out there were various other festivals going on around China Town at the same time. A pickle festival on Orchard Street (lots of tents with lots of pickles and lots of crowds sweltering in oppressive heat). A farmers’ market. And the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy, involving ice cream-stands, temporary restaurant terrazzas and fairground rides with booming music manned by grumpy women in tight t-shirts. We met Mi and co for iced tea to cool down in a nearby café, ambled on to a dumpling bar for a $11 Chinese feast, bought mooncakes to take home then wandered over to West Village via the concrete Picasso statue of a woman’s face that I’d never noticed before in the midst of the NYU student housing off Bleeker Street.

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“What motivates you?” is what the now 96-year-old Louise Bourgeois asks of young artists who attend the weekly salons at her townhouse in Chelsea. Her scrutiny, no doubt, can be transformational or devastating. She’s someone who speaks her mind, and her mind is forceful, permanently unpredictable and renewed. She’s also someone whose life and art are one and the same. When P was in New York we watched the documentary about her, “The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine”. Then a few weeks later Sa, Lu and I, energized by a huge brunch at Kitchenette and walk through Central Park, went to her exhibition at the Guggenheim. There we saw one of her enormous metal spiders (representing her mother’s spindly resilience and calm), several variations of “cumuli” – clusters of mound-shapes in marble or wood apparently evoking either penises or breasts though they looked much more like the former to me – and her “cells”, rooms that you can glimpse into through cracks and gaps in the walls to see organised-disorganised objects like spools of red and blue ribbon, a child’s train running over a red bed, a pillow embroidered with “je t’aime”, a mirror propped up against a wall, and dresses hanging on bone coat-hangers, as if you’d been given permission to watch someone’s subconscious and experience laid out together on a vivisection table. The spiral of the Guggenheim worked perfectly for her art which is full of spirals itself, inspired partially by the twisting of cloth at her parents’ tapestry restoration business in France when she was a child.

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The stretch of Broadway between the express 2 and 3 subway stop at 96th Street and 109th Street where I live is a Manhattan microcosm. On the sidewalk, the rich from Riverside Drive penthouses rub shoulders with the poor from the projects on Amsterdam, and at any given time there will be haitians, jews, southerners, dominican republicans, native New Yorkers, old, young, students and shopkeepers. When I walk home at night there are always people on the street corners asking for money. Yet last week on the night after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt suddenly it seemed like they’d doubled – at least three on every corner. That must have been a coincidence, but the atmosphere everywhere is one of economic fragility and current or pending struggle. In the elevator the next morning a man and woman were talking about a mutual friend who’d found a job. When the woman said the job was in the postroom the man sounded disappointed. “Well at least it’s a job,” she replied.

Every other morning a queue of people, most without jobs or homes, forms outside St Bartholomew’s Church on Park Ave and E 50th. Inside, breakfast is served with military efficiency. Enter, hand over voucher, pick up tray with cereal, hot stew, sandwich and banana, find a space at one of the trestle tables, eat, call out for whatever you want more off “Juice! Cereal! Stew!”, eat, tip the rubbish in the bin and exit as another enters, hands over voucher, picks up tray...At 10am the room has to be emptied of the last breakfasters. “Time to go home,” called one of the volunteer organizers on a Sunday morning when I was there. Her colleague laughed and corrected her, “Well, time to go…”

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 23 - Two rivers and Soho House

Three scenes: Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, Soho House and sailing on the Hudson.

A few weeks ago I went with a bunch of kids from Daniel Hale Williams School in DUMBO and other volunteers to dig up weeds and plant seedlings in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The new park’s much loved but attracts latte-sipping white parents and their kids from the swish new riverside apartments more than it does the predominantly black kids from local projects. The idea was to say hey, this park is your park too, and hopefully inspire the children to bring their parents back to see the fruits of their labour.

First, we listened to an introduction by one of the park wardens. She explained how the East River is part salt, part fresh water, as the sea gets sucked upstream on the incoming tide. A while ago some conservationists drew nets out over the river bed and pulled them up to the park to see what lives down there. They found a seahorse, among other things. “Does anyone know what a seahorse is?” she asked. On cue, one of the girls said, “Yes, I have one!”, and plucked a purple plastic seahorse from her pocket. No further explanation needed.

Then, the weeding. We were shown which plants to dig up, which ones to leave, and got to work with our trowels: much delight as the first weeds were unearthed, pulling up roots as long as the plant itself. I relished as much as the kids did that feeling of mucky hands, tugging at leaves and earth stuck beneath nails. Enthusiasm waned a bit by the time we got to planting and the kids' attention switched to new things like the pizza they’d been promised for afterwards, at Front Street Pizza round the corner: one was really restless and said she’d like to jump the park fence.

Post-pizza they had a new burst of energy. A reminder that a day for a young person (these kids were 7-9) is like a hundred days, changing and renewed by the hour. They chattered their way back to the school. One recounted how she’d once had a finger bitten – by a polar bear – on a trip to the arctic – and that Santa had given her a new one.

Soho House on a Tuesday night, an altogether different scene where mud beneath nails would definitely be frowned upon. It’s a member’s club and hotel for New York’s Notting Hill set, monied and media/artsy rather than banking/financial, confident on its corner overlooking the meatpacking district with its rooftop terrace swimming pool surrounded by loungers and dining tables. Much disgruntlement though that the Standard’s new hotel under construction to the West of it will steal much of the evening sun. I was much less blonde, much less skinny than the majority of the women there but happy as an observer. And laughed when I remembered the Sex in the City Scene in which Samantha sneaks in by pretending to be an Englishwoman called Annabel: I didn’t need to pretend to be either.

And yesterday, sailing in a Soling on the Hudson. Give me a boat with sails, some sun and wind and I’m happy. Three of us were having a “basic keelboat” lesson (thought I’d start at the beginning to get used to the boats) with the guy who runs the club, BR. He's a non-fiction literary agent who intersperses his teaching on points of sail and how to tie a bowline with historical and geographical anecdotes. How the Hudson used to be called North River, how old schooners couldn’t sail close to the wind, how Los Roques islands off Venezuela have been adopted by Italians and how the Chesapeake’s oysters have all been fished. For thirteen years he’s run the New York Community Sailing Association to provide affordable access to sailing: buying a bunch of 10 sailing sessions as I’ve done for after the course works out at $15 per session unlike other places where it’s more like $150. It’s an ongoing battle though to keep it going. No-one in NYC has a lot of time on their hands to help out maintaining the boats; people who start there go on to buy their own boats (yes, despite providing affordable sailing it’s hardly attracting underprivileged teenagers from the Bronx); the hard-core winter match racers go off cruising in exotic places during the Summer months. If I had a few extra days kicking around each week I’d love to help build it up: help secure the re-location to the Manhattan side of the river (the boats were moved to New Jersey post 9-11), approach foundations for funding for more boats, increase the membership etc. But that’s not the case. So for now I’ll enjoy the sailing and muck in as much as I can.

New York missive no 22

The weather's been inclement. One moment an unblemished sky, the next a rugged storm with broken black umbrellas abandoned in bins on the pavements, looking like dead crows. Right now there's a post-rains fluorescence.

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What was amazing about hearing Mahler’s 8th symphony in Carnegie Hall, music aside, was the audience: it's so rare to see a crowd of New Yorkers sitting still, their attention held.

Because this is a city on the move. No wonder there are so few charity collectors on the streets – the chances of someone stopping to chat, let alone give a donation in the midst of their rush from a to b, are minimal. On the subways the announcement “stand clear of the closing doors” begins almost before the doors have opened, instilling a mild panic in the exiting and entering passengers. And Ch and I both had similar first reactions to our separate recent trips to Boston: how everything feels like it is in slow motion. Meanwhile, SJ, at the Boston meeting, said that every time he finds himself on the streets of New York he feels he’s going to be pounded underfoot by a stampeding crowd. He lives in Geneva. Yet in the midst of (because of?) the crush, there is still room for interaction. For unpredictable New York moments like the woman who said to me the other day “geez that boy nearly got run over by a Hassidic skateborder”, as a skull-capped boarder spun passed. Or the man who’d attracted a curious crowd on Christopher street as I walked home in the early hours this morning from a balloon-filled loft party. At first glance it seemed he was recovering from a near-fall down one of the rickety cellar trapdoors that lurk along the pavements. He was straddling it, one hand on the ground. But when I turned to look again I saw he was holding a 5 ft snake, writhing as he dangled it back into its canvas bag.

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There’s been a lot of music recently. Starting 2 Fridays ago at Café Tacci with M and D, a restaurant on Waverley place. It's nondescript on the outside yet on Friday and Saturday nights it comes alive on the inside with the sound of opera singers performing on a small stage at one end of the room. They're accompanied by the 80-something year old diminutive pianist, Iya, from Siberia. Leopoldo Mucci's the omnipresent effervescent owner - he must give at least 200 cheek-kisses each night to the diners, many of whom he knows, and the singers, who see him as a father figure. The restaurant brims with laughter and a natural warmth. It becomes increasingly raucous as the night progresses and the singers start performing from all parts of the room. By dessert, you feel as if you’re on stage with them.

That Saturday night was the Frank Weiss quintet in the basement jazz bar Village Vanguard. Frank Weiss is almost as old as Iya. He walks with difficulty even with the aid of his stick, and wheezes when he talks, yet somehow conjours a pounding sound from his saxophone.

At a small reception before the Mahler symphony at Carnegie Hall (I’d found myself there through P, as one of his clients is a sponsor), the hall’s resident historian described how when Andrew Carnegie built the hall it was surrounded by fields. Carnegie had noticed that the buildings of rich Manhattanites were creeping slowly up the island, so had the foresight to realise that one day that location “way up North” on the fringes of the city would soon be slap-bang in the centre of the action. As a wealthy philanthropist I guess he had the freedom to operate on a long time-scale, not needing to make a short-term profit (that, he'd already done through his steel business). Gradually, the kudos of performing at the hall and being able to attract an audience up to its then Northern location grew. To sell out at Carnegie came to be a mark of virtuosity, and after a while musicians were falling over each other for the challenge of performing there. Talking the following evening with M at a very different concert – a bunch of youthful teenage rockbands mostly from California – she said that’s the sign of a true businessman, someone who thinks not five, but fifty years ahead. She should know, working for Bill Gates. It seems now though that the destructive domination of short-termism drowns the efforts of long-term visionaries, or imposes such rigid immediate demands that the impact of their endeavours is minimised. Ideas and arguments for creating a carbon-free economy are out there percolating, but I’m doubtful they’ll be realised and scaled up before our addiction to oil’s got the better of us, for example...

The mostly-if-not-all from Calfornia rockbands (Phantom Planet, the Hush Sound, Motion City Soundtrack and Panic at the Disco – yet we didn’t see Panic as we decided to prioritise eating Mexican food and catching up instead) were performing at the Roseland Ballroom. On the wall in the entrance was a board covered in ticker-tapes with the names of married couples who had met there. I wondered if the hall had considered adding a green dot (or something) next to those that are now divorced, then felt bad for snuffing the romantic magic. There were many tickers from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, then fewer and fewer in more recent decades. Gone are the days when ballroom dancing provided a practical mating ritual. Now people resort to other tactics.

Then the following Friday, music of a different kind. Em was in town again and I went with her to a Ukrainian folk music concert at the Ukrainian museum (aptly), where Mic's friend JK combined the music with tales of “rough and tumble steppe Barbarians” (liked the sound of them), battles, love affairs and fickle shiftings of allegiances from the 16–18 Centuries. There was an exhibition of maps from that period on the walls, enhancing the sense of borders blurred, bloody and loved. JK was accompanied by two other musicians, one of whom was the bright-eyed IT, whose mini bio in the program described him as a “multi-instrumentalist”. He lived up to that title during the concert when he played everything from a guitar to a tiny mouth-harp to a hurdy-gurdy. Then at the end of the bio was the note, "In his spare time, he researches the genetics of pearl oysters at the American Museum of Natural History." After the concert a bunch of us found ourselves (aptly) in the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant – next to and more authentic than Veselka – drinking beers, eating pierogis and listening to the sound of the tango night going on in the ballroom at the back. Mic recounted how he recently attended a Roma wake in California, marking the year's anniversary of the death of a guy called George. In accordance with Roma tradition, apparently, George’s clothes were distributed among the family members, everyone ate his favourite food, and on leaving were presented with things he had enjoyed – or, as a friend of Mic’s who was also there pointed out – the things that killed him: packets of cigarettes and potato chips.

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I’ve been reminded on several occasions recently of the impact of the September 11 attacks on the city. When M and D and I got the Circle Line round the island, the commentator referred frequently to the towers, pointing out the gap where they used to stand and talking about events as “before” and “after”. Yesterday, on an exploration of downtown, I walked passed ground zero and went into St Paul's Chapel, now filled with photographs of the dead and stories in words and pictures showing how the chapel became a refuge for rescue workers after their long and horrifying days scouring the rubble and dust: podiatrists working on feet in George Washington’s pew, cots lining the walls for workers to sleep on, volunteer registers for people providing food. Prior to a Ford Foundation meeting, I looked up the bio of the woman J and I were meeting, and learned that she had set up a project to develop models of resistance to fundamentalism, following the death of her mother in the attacks. And when the Writers Studio gang came round for a barbeque last weekend somehow the subject of 9/11 came up and people started describing their very personal experiences of that day and its aftermath. Cl on how she had to deal with the children at her school, where the decision was made not to tell them what had happened yet one had sensed something was wrong and piped up “I’m scared”. Al on how he had seen one of the planes flying low down over Broadway and phoned S to say how crazy, now they’re doing aeroplane tours of Manhattan. T on how she’d found herself pulled into a close-knit circle of transvestites at the bottom of Christopher Street on West Highway for a loud and passionate prayer session, how the highway was lined with people clapping as the relief workers drove passed, how she and G had tried to take blankets down for the injured, responding to the instinctive drive to do something, yet was told there was no need – there were no injured, only alive or dead. How when they drove back into the city after several weeks of living outside (their apartment was below the line marking where people had to be evacuated), with a sense of relief at returning but trepidation of another attack, her heart sunk when she saw a police cordon blocking the road. She asked the police what had happened. They said don’t worry, we’re filming an episode of Law and Order. So yes, the city’s back to normal, the world didn’t end on that day. Didn’t quite end, G added.

That was a tragedy in which people’s grief was exposed for the rest of the world to see and channels of support were wide open, compassion flowing along the shock lines. Unlike the victims of cyclone Nargis in Burma right now, who are being left to die by their own government and who have no way of knowing that the international community is trying to send help.