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 28 - Rooftop films

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

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

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

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

Belize interlude

Belize, a small country where people have arrived by force or fancy and made themselves at home. They include, at various points in time: British pirates who set about stripping the forests of their wood – the saying goes that Belize City is built on foundations of mahogany logs and empty rum bottles; African slaves; Mayans fleeing wars with the Spanish and now poverty in Guatemala and Honduras; Mennonites; Chinese shopkeepers; North Americans and Europeans in search of their corner of Caribbean paradise; Garífuna who were shipped from St Vincent to Honduras by the British in 1797.

P and I spent a week on holiday there in August. For the first four nights we stayed in Hopkins, two thirds down the coast. For a tiny town that’s essentially a road running along the sea with buildings on either side of it, Hopkins is home to a surprisingly diverse cast of characters. They live in relative harmony with one another yet the village dynamics are being churned and tested by the fast growth of tourism. Not long ago the majority of the villagers were subsistence farmers living off plots of land between Hopkins and the Southern Highway. Now only a few of the subsistence plots remain. And income from the banana plantations nearby has been drained by competition after the region's trade preferences were lifted. The stretches of beach to the North and South of Hopkins are now strung with expensive resorts run by foreigners (mainly South African), that at first did their best to prevent guests from venturing into the village in an attempt to keep tourism dollars within their confines. And at the Western Union in the nearby town of Dangriga winding weekend queues of people waiting for remittances from the US increase the temptation to emmigrate.

We hopped off the bus from Belize City on the Southern Highway turnoff to Hopkins at dusk and were readying ourselves for a long walk to the village when a woman pulled up in her car and offered us a lift. She was called Shona. She was excited to learn I work for a human rights organization. “Me too,” she said. She works with the Human Rights Commission of Belize on indigenous rights, land issues and awareness-raising, and said she was eagerly waiting for materials to arrive from contacts in Geneva to use for the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration. Shona has lived for periods in New York but its city-madness doesn’t appeal anymore. “It’s fun when you’re young,” she said.

We stayed in Hopkins Inn, run by an Alaskan, Greg, and his wife Rita (who wasn’t around while we were there). It consists of four cabañas in the middle of the village, on the beach-side of the street. Greg was among the first Westerners to move there. He negotiated the right to his patch of land with the village authorities by promising he’d be running accommodation only – his guests would patronise the local businesses and he didn’t want to wrinkle the fabric of the community. Greg is nostalgic for how Hopkins used to be and is even considering moving on somewhere new, somewhere that hasn’t been overrun by tourism. While his cabañas are low-impact and integrated into the village, it’s hard not to argue he was the first to push the door open for tourists and it was inevitable that crowds would follow.

Not that there were big crowds while P and I were there. It was rainy season. And hurricane season too, though we weren’t there for one, and amazingly there was only one daytime rainfall during the week of our stay. On the first morning we hired rickety bikes with back-pedal breaking from a grandmother who lived in one of the wooden houses up the road from Hopkins Inn. Her grandchildren were still on their summer break and pattered in and out of the house with friends to be served up the food she had going on a stove in the corner. I’m tired but yes it’s fun having them around, she said. We rode the bikes Northwards along a red-earth road to Sittee River village, a little inland. Bumping over the potholes, sweating from the hot sun but energised by the breeze – that kind of exercise beats a treadmill in a Manhattan gym, but the fun would no doubt diminish if that's how I journeyed to work each day. The appeal of what’s different. In Sittee Village we rented a couple of kayaks from a very stoned woman and set off down the jungle-lined river, pausing to watch turtles, iguanas and herons on the banks. The one animal we haven’t seen, I said as we paddled our way back after a couple of hours, is a crocodile. And perhaps that’s no bad thing. Just then there was a swoosh as the scaly back of a big croc rose out of the water next to us as it swam upstream. For the rest of the kayak we paddled faster, our hearts pumping with the sensation of very-dangerous-animal-somewhere-nearby-unseen. It was with a mixture of relief and disappointment that we later learnt from a man who served us cold Belikin beers (the only beer to be found in most of Belize) at an empty riverside bar near the kayak place that the Sittee River crocodiles have never been known to attack a human.

P and I being P and I we did less sitting still and relaxing than we’d planned. But there was plenty to slow my mind down and relax, including a peaceful morning I spent while P went diving, sitting on a wooden chair under a palm-leaf roof near the cabañas and not moving other than to swim in the sea. I spent the morning engrossed in tales of Greenwich Village exploits in the early 20th Century as recounted in the fabulous “Republic of Dreams” (about which more later), daydreaming, and sleepily observing. A lizard strolled over a wooden beam above me, doing a few press ups each time it paused. A group of kids came and played in the sea for a while, the big ones throwing the little ones over their heads to land with a splash. A couple of orange buoys hung like a pair of saggy breasts from a palm tree. The ground was scattered with broken coconut shells, flotsam and jetsam.

Two evenings there we ate un-beautiful but scrumptious southern Indian food cooked by a woman from Bangalore who ran a restaurant by the beach. We never learned when and why she’d come to Belize. She got the special ingredients from Belize City, imported via the States. We drank beers and checked email (just once!) at Oliver and Pam’s place – he’s a German who moved there to set up a bar and windsurf, she’s his beautiful young Belizean wife who’s apparently gone from shy to strong and assertive since taking up her new life with him. Each morning Margarita, from Honduras, slowly and methodically cleaned our cabaña, sweating profusely. Only two of the cabañas were occupied, so it was fine she took her time. We bought snacks and random essentials like flipflops from the two Hopkins stores, both run by Chinese families. Apparently one is friendlier to the locals than the other.

Next stop was Mama Noots’ “jungle resort” about forty minutes drive inland from Hopkins. Its owner, Nan, spends a lot of the summer months away so we were lucky she was there and happy to have us to stay – Greg had called her up the day before. There were no other guests. Mama Noots is a huge clearing in the rainforest turned into a tropical botanical garden with a few cabañas dotted around for guests and a square restaurant in the middle, with transparent mosquito-net walls. Nan’s family founded the second-largest rum company in Belize. After a period living in the US and working as a nurse, Nan decided to realize her dream of establishing a botanical garden and renewable energy centre in Belize that would attract people from around the world as a "sustainable living" showcase. Her Dad told her about a place surrounded by waterfalls and inaccessible by road where he and his friends used to go hunting. She bought it, built a road, and set about creating her garden. Since then, the land all around hers has been designated a national park (though Nan has concerns that illegal logging may be going on further into the jungle – why else so much more flooding every time it rains?). But the dreams have proven to be just beyond Nan’s reach. She separated from her partner a while ago and now tries to keep Mama Noots going on her own – though with help for a few months at a time from her two daughters and of a few people she employees to look after the buildings and land. But although she taps some of the waterfalls for energy, there hasn’t been the money to turn it into the internationally-recognized eco-project she had forseen. She's now looking for a wealthy environmentally-minded buyer.

We went on two walks that day, swimming at the top of each one in a cold natural pool and having a shower, Jacuzzi and pummelling massage all in one under tumbling cascades. At the first waterfall there was no-one else. At the second, there was a couple. The guy had stripped down into his trunks for a swim. The girl was sitting in her trousers, t-shirt and walking boots sulking. Perhaps she was ill from the climb up. We suggested that we leave them alone for a while and come back later but the guy told us it was fine to stay. We probably annoyed the sulky girl no end by climbing right in and swimming about enjoying ourselves. The guy tried to undo her shoelaces. She did them up again. She put her head down on her hunched knees. Eventually, somehow, he enticed her. She swam around, carefully, but looking much better.

Then back for dinner with Nan who entertained us with her stories. For example that of her second cousin, who has made a fortune selling rum to Travellers. He is setting up a rum museum in Dangriga and approached Nan’s first cousin asking to buy the huge copper drum that their grandfather had used for distilling and that they had used as a swimming pool when they were kids. Nan heard of the proposition just in time, she said. She intervened by insisting the drum is “priceless” and that 2nd cousin should pay the 1st cousin several thousand more dollars than he had offered. No doubt he will agree.

Our third and last stop in Belize was Millers Landing on the Placencia peninsula in the South, run by Annie and Gary Miller. Annie’s from Texas and first came across the peninsula when she was sailing around the Caribbean in the seventies. Gary was in the navy (just old enough to have been a Viet vet?). They met somewhere in the Pacific. They are trying to perpetuate an idyllic hippy-seventies existence at their resort but it’s tarnished by alcohol – Gary knocks back neat liquor all day long and Annie almost keeps up with her beers. Their beloved Alsatian, “Brandy”, helps keep the fragile peace. The resort, which they built themselves, has elements of creative beauty – whether the wild flowers that fill the garden, the pathways marked out by pebbles, the colourful paintings on the walls of the rooms – and elements of bedraggled abandon. Gary explained as a thinly disguised apology that there’s no point in doing annual fixing and renovations until just before the busy winter season begins, in case a hurricane comes and wreaks its havoc. That was no doubt a good reason, even if not the only one. A few years ago Hurricane Iris flattened some of the nearby resorts, including Turtle Inn that had just been bought by Francis Ford Coppola. Apparently Coppola wasn’t too fussed – the resort’s former décor was funky but tacky by his tastes and the hurricane made it easier for him to start from scratch, giving it the impeccably elegant style it has now (one evening we went in to savour a cocktail among dining honeymooners, to the sound cidadas and a Mayan band). Iris swept through Millers Landing too of course. Floodwater filled the house to the ceiling. But it remained standing.

New York missive no 27- Country first

“Country First”, “Drill Now! Drill Now!” said the placards festooning the arena at the Republican National Convention last week. I was on the cross-trainer at the gym and when I switched on the TV thought perhaps the channel was showing a spoof show, a parody extrapolating the aggressive rhetoric, war-mongering and insularity to an extreme. But no, that was the real Mitt Romney on the stage. “We need change all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big government liberals and elect John McCain!” Hello? Ah the administration of the past eight years must have been liberal then. “Did you hear any Democrats talk last week about the threat from radical, violent Jihad? Republicans believe that there is good and evil in the world.” It could be funny if it wasn’t so scary.

You could feel a fired-up fear of change among the delegates, who were apparently a few degrees more homogenous than previous years. They were clinging (oops mustn't say that) to the comfort of each other and of unity in the face of a threat. Never mind the precise form of the threat, just that it’s dangerous. Huckabee was up next. Midway through his speech he also suggested that Americans do want change. “When gasoline costs $4 a gallon…You want something to change.” The crowd prickled. Change? Ok it’s bad that gas costs $4 a gallon, but change? Isn’t that a dirty word? There was a trickle of hesitant applause. “If you're a flight attendant or a baggage-handler, and you're asked to take the pay cut to keep your job, you want something to change." Nervous clap-clap. "If you're a young couple losing your house, your credit rating, and your piece of the American dream, you want something to change.” Hesitant agreement. “But let me say there are some things we don't want to change.” Phew. A palpable wave of relief through the delegates. “Freedom, security, and the opportunity to prosper.” A tremendous cheer, as Huckabee proclaimed those powerful familiar values.

What wasn’t asked of course, was freedom, security and opportunity for whom, and at what cost for the rest? In what way does the legacy of the Bush administration – which would be perpetuated by McCain – represent freedom, security and opportunity?

Huckabee told the story of a schoolteacher who one day emptied her classroom of desks. She told the students they could have their desks back when they told her how they should earn them. None of them guessed "right". Eventually 20 veterans in uniform carried the desks in and the teacher said, "You don't have to earn your desk, because these guys, they already did." Recognition of the sacrifice by veterans, fine. Perhaps it would be good to think about ways in which that sacrifice won’t have to be necessary in the future. But instead the implication of that annecdote and of so many other remarks made throughout the convention was that this is a country whose freedom – even the education of its children – owes its very existence to the defeat of adversaries in warfare. Is that what the founding fathers had in mind, even if implicitly, when for example Jefferson concluded the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that "for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." For all the superficiality and razzmatazz of the national conventions – both of them – they are fascinating in the way they strip naked the American ideal, posing questions about what exactly it is and how it can be achieved. And they expose the contradiction between a single national identity and ideal founded on values (epitomized by the “Country First” slogan), yet one that rests on the primacy of the individual. Obama, despite the disappointing compromises he’s been making in the crucial effort to win, seems first and foremost to be about reconciling that contradiction. In his acceptance speech he articulated clearer than ever the “common purpose" that runs through his politics. He recognizes that the individual is at the heart of politics and that in a country / a world in which different values, beliefs and ideals are permanently jostling against one another the solution is not to push them all to subscribe to one value system but to find ways to make them work together. The question is how to convince them to work together. And how to make working together go far enough, when some interests wield so much more weight than others.

I’d been on the cross-trainer for an hour, feeling physically weary from the exercise and mentally weary from the addictive pantomime on the screen. And I needed to get a shower before the gym closed at 11. But I wanted to catch Sarah Palin’s speech too, so on I pounded through Giuliani’s snide jokes about Obama (he spoke in front of a projection of the New York City skyline of course, driving home the permanent threat of terrorism and his own heroic response to September 11 - not necessarily in that order). "Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada… He worked as a community organizer. What? He worked — I said — I said, OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the resume. He worked as a community organizer.” Raucous laughter from the delegates. The Obama campaign couldn’t let that one go. “Let’s clarify something for them right now," it responded. Community organization is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”

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.