New York missive no 9 - MOMA and orange

I walk into the Picasso room in MOMA and there – kerpow! – slap bang splayed in the middle of the wall is the Demoiselles D’Avignon. There’s something breathtaking about seeking a painting as powerful as that, which you’ve seen reproduced over and over in art books, in the flesh. Literally. I stand looking at it for a long time. At one point, a man crouches down by the bottom right corner of the painting, peering, it seems, right up at one of the women’s crotches. Guess he’s studying the paint strokes but it seems otherwise. He’s told to move along by a security guard. “Where would I be without the colour red?” says Matisse next to one of his paintings, in another room. Everything Matisse paints is in isolation, hanging in its surroundings in the lonely yet dependent way we all do. My colour of the moment’s orange, not red. Recent purchases (perhaps have caught the NYC shopping bug after all) have included a bright orange bag from Multipazz (favourite shop) when back in London last week, a stripy orange top for sleeping in and a black cardigan with bright orange flowers. 

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 7 - Iowa speech

I’d just got home on Thursday evening and gone to bed when I heard the TV on in the sitting room. J was watching Obama’s Iowa victory speech live. I rushed out to join him. Politics is suddenly alive again. In some ways the speech reminded me how bad things have got, because the hope he expresses seems almost unreal. But it’s there sure enough. It’s been kindled, and is now spurring to catch on throughout the country. Yes the power-per-se politics of cynicism and point scoring will try to douse the flames but I’ve got a feeling that now more than ever people here are ready for change. The crucial thing over the next few months will be for people to believe. Still you hear everywhere comments like “I can’t see it happening”, "America's not ready to vote for a black man", and people doubting whether they should vote for him for fear that not enough others will, hence opening the door to another Republican administration. It’s precisely those doubts which could jepoardise this unique opportunity. If all those doubters believe in the America they want to see rather than the America they see now, things will change. As Obama said in Iowa, his victory was an affirmation of the “most American of ideas – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

I’ve just moved here and of course can't vote but the sense of possibility is electrifying: I want to be in the thick of it, be part of it in whatever way I can.

This 31 December New York Times editorial – and the mass of letters it inspired – sums up the damage that’s been done to America in the past few years and the battering that belief has taken. And this opinion piece by Bob Herbert four days later captures the smiling relief that of course change is possible: it's all of our responsibilities to make it happen.

New York missive no 6 - Central Park at dusk, MCR bookshop & elsewhere

23 December

That’s one of the things I love about this city, its spontaneity. Got a text from Em to saying that she was delayed at Heathrow, so not to bother going out to the airport to meet her this evening. Then half an hour later, Em F calls out of the blue to say she’s in New York, and what am I up to this evening. So planning on lots of catching over wine and a meal somewhere in West Village, starting out in the Weekhawken Street apartment of course, which is now solely my territory for the week, as the others are all away for the holidays. Strange how when Em F and I were seven, eight, nine, we used to play at travelling the world, spinning the globe then pouncing on a random country which would be the place we’d travel in our game that day, taking skittles & M&Ms as our malaria tablets. Now we’re pretty much doing that with the real globe, having met up in Krakow earlier this year and now in NYC (didn't need malaria tablets in either though). How small the world can be sometimes, for those of us who can move around it freely.

***************************************************

22 Dec

I’m in S’nice at the bottom end of 8th Ave, one of those sit-for-hours cafés with communal tables where people work on their laptops, emanating caffeine-fuelled creativity or wannabe creativity. I’m struggling to eat a brie and pear sandwich with loads of caramelised red onions without getting it all over the keyboard. One day I’ll learn to do one thing at a time. Looking forward to a quiet, much-needed evening of recharging batteries before Em, H and M get here for a week of xmas antics, tomorrow evening.

This afternoon, or more like this dusk, I explored Central Park for the first time. When I finally made it there – after a ridiculously delicious brunch of poached eggs and hollandaise sauce on cornmeal bread with spicy black beans on the side with B at Miracle Café where he used to play his bass, and a trip to Union Square farmers market, where the statue of Ghandi with his stick and loincloth seemed rather incongruous next to the swarms of Christmas shoppers laden with bags of produce – it was already 4pm, so there was only an hour or so left of daylight. It was a cloudy, damp day, but still beautiful: with a trippy tinge due to a late night last night and some hair of the dog fresh hot cider, that’s being sold everywhere on street corners at the moment. As I walked through the park the sillouettes of the winter branches got progressively blacker, the squirrels more agitated and the joggers sparser. I just made it up to the Jaquie Kennedy Onassis reservoir before darkness fell and it was time to break out into the shiny shop-lined streets of the Upper East side. It’s nice to think of the park remaining there throughout the night, a patch of peacefulness in the heart of the city, undisturbed other than by perhaps a few rough sleepers, who must be getting fewer now that it’s getting so cold.

In the park I was keeping half an eye open for wild animals: I’d had my latest instance of accent incomprehension today, when B told me he’d once been surprised by a wild hog in Central Park. It was only when he mentioned that the hog was sitting in a tree, that I realised he meant hawk. Apparently the hawk flew down right next to him, grabbed a pigeon in its talons and retreated back up to the tree to demolish it.

Not sure whether the guy typing on his laptop diagonally across from me appreciates my presence. He had the table to himself until I got here and was in a writing flow: now another ticking brain and typing pair of hands so close by has ruffled him a bit. I’ll just sit here quietly and hope things settle.

So it’s been a while since I last wrote here, due to long days of work and nights of play. Last Friday was the JBH holiday party: Ve’s husband runs a hedge fund, and given that there are only two or three employees, turns his end of year work party into a free-for-all in the Lower East Side apartment they use as an office (guess when you’re a hedge fund manager you can rent an apartment with city views for an office). On one of the walls a guest had stuck a note saying “Strategy for 2008: Buy less, sell more”. Apparently the party was more civilised than previous years. But the remnants, me included, who were left over at midnight decamped to Von bar and had no trouble injecting a couple of hours more life into it. Weirdly, J happened to be in the same bar. Manhattan’s small like that. And there’ve been several little coincidences that make me feel like things are in the right place.

Like the two books I bought the other day when MCR bookshop on Prince Street lured me in with its rows of tempting titles and smell of coffee. Both, after I’d bought them, disclosed on the inside pages surprising little connections with my life over the past few weeks. One was a collection of short stories by Daniel Alarcón, which I bought mainly because I liked its flimsy binding and soft thin pages, its title, “Guerra en la penumbra”, and the fact that Alarcón was born in Lima. Only after I bought it did I realise that although he was born in Lima, he was brought up in Alabama: the coincidence being that there’s been a bit of an Alabama theme going on with me at the moment (early days yet, so won't go into it). The other thing I realised only after buying the book was that the original was in English, and what I had was a Spanish translation, albeit with Alarcón’s input. A bit silly really, though good practice for my Spanish I guess, like my chats with Gloria the cleaner in our office. The other book was “Al norte del infierno” (another cheerful title) by Miguel Correa Mujica, whose trajectory has brought him from Cuba, to Florida (que sorpresa) then Manhattan and now Weehawken. Ok, not Weehawken Street, but still. Some people here when I say that I’m living in Weekhawken Street think that I’ve been conned by real estate agents who’ve successfully passed that area of New Jersey off as part of Manhattan. Apparently it’s happening with bits of Brooklyn, like one area that’s been described as part of “Wall Street” with no reference to the fact it’s over the bridge.

So to give a whistle-stop update on some of last week’s activities...Last Sat evening spent ensconced with B in the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, which is apparently where Dylan Thomas had his last drinking session before he died. Sunday was mostly spent in a vegetative heap on the too-comfy sofas in the apartment (which I’ve mentioned before), watching cheesy films with S. Tues was a chilled out evening with Mi – the first time I’d met her – listening to her boyfriend play his guitar at one of the “upstairs sessions” at the Living Room on Lower East Side. A girl perched on a stool in the middle of the stage asked the musicians questions between their songs, in an intimate radio chat-show format. Weds, a drink with L from PILI in the closest relatively good bar we could find to work: there’s a dearth of bars and restaurants in the Garment district, though that no doubt will be addressed one day. And Fri night, an “Oh Death” gig at mercury lounge along with various support bands. There were plenty of bearded fans jumping around in front of the stage but Oh Death didn’t seem 100% into the thing...

New York missive no 5 - DUMBO to Doris

Soon New York will be completely smothered by a patchwork of acronyms: the acronymed areas rapidly encroaching on those still with names. There’s TRIBECA (Triangle Below Canal), SOHO (South of Houston), NOLITA (North of Little Italy), DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), BELDEL (Below Delancey), now SOHA (South Harlem) – those last two, and probably many of the others too, the creations of real estate agents wanting to give a hip veneer to previously no-go areas and attract people who otherwise wouldn’t want to live there. The question, as always, is when those people move in, where do the previous inhabitants go?

On Monday night I was in DUMBO, with its warehouses now worth a lot, its tucked-away theatres and galleries and its fantastic views up to the towering Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, stretching their way over East River and yelling steely aspiration. One of the galleries I walked past had a whole carousel on display through its glass wall. It was spookily unlit and silent, its horses frozen mid-leap, with wild gazes and open mouths.

I was in DUMBO for an event at the International Center for Tolerance Education: an update on the “myth of the motherland” project that’s sending young US poets to African countries, so they can report back with poems that dismantle the myths of how Africa’s seen in the West. Other than a niggle that African poets are probably better-placed to do that, it was an inspiring event (that niggle was shared with a Sudanese woman I met there, who has spent a few months in New York on a fellowship at the ICTE. She’s been amazed by people’s urge to “do something” to help other countries and the way that the actions they take are based on a dangerously simplified knowledge of what those countries’ reality is: bottom-up action’s better than top-down was her message).

One of the poets was an honest, inspiring Palestinian American woman called TS (when’s a woman a woman not a girl – anyway, she’s 20). Along with her studies at Columbia she’s a youth worker and is getting her first book of poems published by Penguin next year. The poem she recited was about a gutted fish… “And I sew her, back up”…Right at the end of the poem the image of the gutted fish fuses with a victim of rape. TS is wary of her poems being captured in Penguin’s print, because she’s a slam artist and all of her work so far has involved standing up on a stage and improvising. The book’s going to be called Respect the Mike.

On a table at the entrance to the event there were scattered, books, leaflets and free CDs. Flicking through one of the books, a fat hardback called “Face of human rights”, I came across something Sergio Vieira de Mello said soon after he became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “We all know, after all, instinctively, when rights are being violated.” It’s important we remind ourselves of that powerful simplicity from time to time.

Well one minute I’m talking about dangerous over-simplification and the next, the power of simplicity. Within both though, is the need for reality and directness, and to prevent distance from distorting.

[J’s just got home excited with a new drum from Guinea: his old one had collapsed from overuse].

****************************************************

It’s got cold in New York all of a sudden, and people are walking around like penguins wrapped up in thick dark coats (I’m one of them). Not as cold as Chicago, according to A, whose also just got home, back from a work trip there. Christmas commercialism is working its way through the city too: the ersatz Christmas songs in the shops and bombardment of advertising is not good; the smell of pine from the stacks of Christmas trees lined up on street corners is.

****************************************************

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech resonated with me, with its appeal to strengthen the direct, physical connection with literature that we get from books and from teachers, and its warning against the seductive virtual connection to the “inanities” of the internet. But I do wonder if she’s talking from experience about the internet; I can’t see her being an expert at Google searches, nor as having explored the way the internet can bring abuses straight to the attention of people who can do something to prevent them, exposing and provoking. And if travels on the New York subway are anything to go by, books are not as neglected as she implies. Every fourth or fifth person is clinging with one hand to a handle and with the other to a book that they’re engrossed in. And with a mysterious third hand to a plastic coffee cup.

Speaking of internet connections, my Verizon debacle is nearing a resolution, though I’m wary of speaking too soon. Another connection confusion made me laugh yesterday, when it transpired that the reason why my first foray into the New York dating scene wasn't going anywhere was a wrong digit in a phone number. So on my list of things to do today is to call the right number.

Walnut interlude

I suddenly realised today the new office needs walnuts. In the London office, there is a regular supply of walnuts brought by U from his farm in France. They provide the perfect distraction from the computer, involving physical exertion (to an extent), making noise, some random and slightly dangerous shelling, and something good to eat, all in one. But I won't be smuggling them over in my suitcase next time I come back from the UK. I'll have to find an alternative, or an American walnut farm.

New York missive no 4 - Hudson hangover cure

Just discovered an effective hangover cure - walking out onto the pier in the Hudson river park on a bright winter's day and letting the biting wind whisk the fuzziness away. The fuzziness is a result of too much wine during a night in Nolita, with a mainly English crowd. A connection there, I think, between the "too much wine" and the "English crowd". What is it that makes us incapable of drinking in moderation? Not to nourish national stereotypes or anything... The evening started civilised; met S's friend Al for a meal at Nolita House. At one end of the restaurant was a rowdy office party, but in the main area we could, just about, hear ourselves talk over the hubub. Gorgeous chicken empanadas and an asparagus thing, followed by not so exciting salads. Then to Tom & Jerry's to meet R and others, on to a random party saying farewell to a guy who works for an advertising agency and who's moving back to Australia, who none of us knew, and then a lower east side club for dancing till started falling asleep.

Weds and Thurs were Upper East side evenings. On Weds, the launch of Michael Conroy's Branded! at Carnegie Council, which I only caught the tail end of after learning that getting a taxi during rush hour doesn't mean getting round Manhattan quicker, then catching up with J over sushi. On Thurs, a delicious meal at Park Avenue Cafe (currently called Park Avenue Winter, guess it's a seasonal thing) with cousin K, V and two foreign office friends currently posted at the UN. The restaurant was white, spacious and sophisticated, somehow managing to be cosy within the whiteness.

This is turning into a bit of a restaurant guide.

Got very angry with Verizon on Thursday, trying to sort out a phone line and internet connection for the new office, which you wouldn't have thought was that unusual a request. But my anger was abated on realizing that it's shared - everyone else who's ever had to deal with them is also angry. It was one of those experiences of spending about three hours getting passed on the phone from one unhelpful sales assistant to another, to another, only to arrive back where you started (or even further back). Tried going in to the shop thinking that face-to-face contact would help, but the guy there had to phone the company up too, and went through exactly the same process. About three times. It was so extreme it was almost surreal [might add some thoughts expanding on that when I've got more time]. But hey, unhealthy to get frazzled by that kind of thing. Remembered P's advice, from when we shared notes about the unexpected pot-holes, bumps and dead-ends you come up against in relocating to NY; they're inevitable and you just have to ride them.

Had better stop writing or I'll miss my plane from JFK back to London for next week's trustee meeting. Am already relishing the thought of 7 hours watching movies on a Virgin plane...should sleep, but know I won't.