DOG EARED

I managed to avoid the Halloween Dog Parade in Tompkins Square today. Yes….you got it…..a parade of dogs dressed up as ghouls and bloodthirsty zombies or possibly the canine equivalent …the spectre hound or errr Cerberus?

In truth I’ve already seen more dogs in fancy dress here than I’ve had gin and tonics (and those who know me will understand the gravity of that statement), and that’s just in the elevator. It’s big to have a dog here, but only if the dog is really tiny. I mean really really tiny. Size matters and the smaller the dog, the bigger your status. The dogs in my neighbourhood are so tiny that I often feel like I’m residing on the film set of a Disney remake entitled ‘101 Chihuahuas.’ Most of them probably need clothes or they’d die of exposure, and hence they are very often dressed up in Christmas jumpers or bobble hats.

I also suspect that these dogs are too small to even walk, because most of them seem to be carried around in equally tiny handbags, pockets or push chairs, (which I believe are known as ‘pet strollers’.) I read today that the manager of ‘Le Chien’ in Trump Plaza (who recently sold a two-pound Yorkie to Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child), is often asked to provide a dog which will fit into a Birkin handbag.
But I guess if you’re that size, then just getting to the dog run would be like doing a marathon, so you’d clearly need to cadge a lift there in the handbag equivalent of a Rolls Royce.

Anyway, there are two points to this Lilliputian interlude. The first is to explain the ludicrousness of the photo below. The dogs in this picture can’t have been more than a foot long and were wearing pink bows. I spotted them today being used as GUARD DOGS for a building in the East Village, with a sign (I failed miserably to capture, obviously because I was so scared), which read ‘This property is being protected by guard dogs. Beware!’  
Uh?
Clearly people around here are so used to dogs being the size of a small rat that dogs this huge are considered really SCARY.

And my second point - I’ve been wondering lately why it is that so many American women communicate at a range somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000Hz, which is painful to the average UK ears to say the least. And then I put two and two together…..

                    

'Unleash the dogs of war!' (Julius Caesar) 

ONE NIL

Bookstore.
Information desk.
An aggressive, demanding, irate woman approaches and shouts at assistant:
‘Born to Kvetch!? I need Born to Kvetch now! Why can’t I find Born to Kvetch!’
Blimey.
Sales Assistant, slowly and calmly - ‘You mean the book about Yiddish and how it’s the language of complaint?’

Live music: Kindred the family soul – BB King Club NY

FLYING - A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Back in the mid ‘80s whilst walking through Earl’s Court in London one day, curiosity compelled me to wander into a derelict house which was about to be gutted and developed into luxury apartments. The building was beautiful and felt steeped in history, empty, aside from peeling walls, broken floorboards and one very dusty book lying face down on the floor. I took the book with me. It stayed unread on the shelf back at home until maybe a couple of years later, when, confined to bed with ‘flu’, I was searching for something to read.

The book was ‘Flying’ by Kate Millett, (set in London and New York.) I read the book straight through, then started again at the beginning and read it through a second time, and a third. It was the most moving, powerfully honest and (for that reason) extraordinarily brave autobiographical writing I had ever read. I was totally hooked, and subsequently sought out and read everything else this amazing woman had written.

Cut to 1998 and this article appeared in the Guardian. Here was one of the seminal writers and spokeswomen of the ‘70s feminist movement, who had written the groundbreaking ‘Sexual Politics’, and thirty years later she was all but forgotten. Many of her books were out of print, she was no longer called upon to lecture on the University circuit, and by all accounts she was barely earning a living..

Shortly after this, Kate was in the news again - the loft she had lived in for decades at 295 the Bowery was threatened with demolition due to the Cooper Square Urban renewal project. She, and other artists who lived and worked in the building, began the ‘save 295 Bowery’ campaign, not solely because they were about to lose their homes, but also as a fight to preserve a building with a wealth of history (see below) attached to it:-

‘The building had been a hotel during the Civil War, catering to returning soldiers. By the 1890’s it was a brothel and a dive where it is said a half-dozen destitute courtesans drank carbolic acid and died. John H McGurk, the owner of the saloon on the ground floor, then capitalized on the notoriety of the place by renaming it ‘McGurk’s Suicide Hall’.
Later, beginning in World War 1 and continuing into the ‘50s and early ‘60s, it was a flophouse for Skid Row veterans. In the mid-80s it was converted into artists’ studios.
Despite this colorful past, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission denied landmark status to the building, finding that it did not have sufficient historical, cultural or architectural merit’

In 2004, after a 5-year battle, the tenants, including Kate were moved out and re-housed and I went to take a last look at the building, hoping somehow that I’d be able to wander into (yet another) derelict house at the mercy of developers, whilst it still stood. Only this time it would be the building where ‘Flying’ was probably written, once Kate’s home. And the story which led to my discovery of her would strangely come full circle.
But the building was boarded up all around.

I’m fairly sure that if a building such as this were under threat in the UK, then all manner of preservation orders would have been slapped onto it and it would have survived. But weirdly, in a country with far fewer historical buildings to preserve in the first place, it fails to make the grade. (Or maybe it’s only acceptable to preserve the upstanding and moral examples of the past here, and this building had too seedy a history to warrant a reprieve?)
Earlier this year, 295 Bowery was demolished.

So today, I was in the area and went to take a look at the transient Bowery landscape. Kate has been re-housed around the corner in East 4th Street, and it’s a rather beautiful block. I am glad she is still in this bohemian and interesting, albeit rapidly changing neighbourhood

Hung around outside for a few minutes wondering if I’d dare speak to her if I saw her on the street. Part of me would love to meet her one day and have a chat over coffee. But maybe best not. That’s the thing about autobiographical writers – you somehow feel you know them a little, but you almost certainly don’t at all. And in truth I’m content just to cherish the love affair I’ve had with her writing all these years.

If you don’t know her work go check her out, read her books, and keep another bit of history alive.
               

 

MOTEL CALIFORNIA

The heating in our block came on big time yesterday, so the apartment has gone from a fairly pleasant temperature to the sort of tropical conditions only found at botanical gardens and in OVP’s flat. As all the radiators are totally boxed in, turning any of them down or off involves getting Henry the lovely handyman up from the cellar to take half the walls down.
In a climate like NY where not only the temperature but the seasons change drastically on a daily basis, I think Henry and I are going to become very good mates.

Anyway, along with this sudden heat wave came a gargantuan cockroach (because just everything is jumbo-sized here), spotted today in the living room. I am informed by NY friends in the know, that I should purchase a ‘Roach Motel’. We’ve barely got our own living quarters together and now it seems I have to sort out some sort of fancy neon-lit accommodation for the roaches too.
Another trip to the hardware store called for then. Oh joy. Better set aside a whole day to explain this one….           

This one's for Catster...... 

NOT TOEING THE MRS N LINE

So I visited nice Dr Podiatrist today who confirmed my suspicion of an infected ingrown toenail. Given the choice of having the offending piece of nail lopped off (and hence providing what may only be a temporary cure) or having a whole section of nail removed right the way down (gross….but a permanent cure), I of course optimistically opted for the former. Having just finished the latest Harry Potter book, I had a mind full of horcruxes and obviously didn’t fancy the possibility of removed parts of me re-appearing all over the place.
Yeah right.  
I was just being a coward.

Dr P asked how I’d found him (well errrr the net of course….how else does anyone find anything these days?) and strangely found it most amusing that I’d chosen him because he had the smiliest podiatrist picture in the whole of Manhattan on his website.
Mrs. N, who has been checking on toe situation with alarming regularity and keeps trying to get me to show said toe to her and her husband, was horrified yesterday when I told her I didn’t know which school Dr P had been to off the top of my head.. ‘But you must see MY Doctor’ she insisted. (Yeah, like I’m really going to take a doctor recommendation from her, having seen ‘Rosemary’s Baby’…..)
So I related this story to Dr P and he said to tell her he’d been nowhere at all after kindergarten.
Am liking the GSOH. Could come in useful if we are forced to embark on toenail cure stage 2.

Meanwhile, had glorious ‘tourist’ day yesterday. One of those perfect Autumn NY days – warm, not hot, with a faultless blue sky and lots of good air (and about time too). After Tai Chi, wandered around Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chinatown, the Bowery and finally down to South St Seaport where the gadget shops have the most amazing massage chairs you can try out. (They still haven’t noticed the frequency with which I pretend to be considering purchase – currently at least once a week, in all three stores).  Then out to dinner for lots of catching-up chat with the lovely Sonia, who is staying with us for a couple of weeks whilst she attends opera auditions in NY.
Tonight off to see my current favourite drummer Mark Guiliana perform with his own band Heernt.

Live music: Heernt – The C Note NY
          

TAI CHI

(Or chai tea as a certain bass-playing tea-loving friend prefers to call it), is my new obsession. I can’t remember the last time I went three times a week to anything (except work - and that wasn’t necessarily willingly), especially if it involved a half hour walk through torrential rain (last week) or hurricane-force winds (the latest fun the weather is having with this fine city). And to be honest it’s not like me to do anything AT ALL when even vaguely sick. The toe is much the same, thanks for asking.
I am now into the 3rd week of classes at my gym with Joseph, who is a superb teacher, and I’m loving it more each time I go, (not least because J’s vocal delivery is in the style of  a couple of characters from my all-time favourite movie Glengarry Glen Ross). The class is small and ‘mature’, but they have the ‘24’ off pat and are fast approaching a convincing ‘42.’
My actual 42 can only produce a 3 at the moment, and even that’s not consistent, but there’s no stopping me now.
Bring on those high numbers.

J is extremely generous to me with class time, spending maybe 20 minutes of the hour tutoring me alone. Far from being annoyed about this, the rest of the class are extremely encouraging and keep urging me to come back. I guess that’ll be the ‘chi’ then…..
Today I was told I’m the first new pupil for years who has persisted beyond the first week, and probably because of this, J is now being extra specially attentive and continues to teach me moves on the way to the changing room and even on the street as I leave the gym. Last Friday in my extra curricular street-club time, we went through the martial applications relating to the Tai Chi moves I’d been learning in class. (These have come in particularly handy when the TH is snoring in bed. Though I’m not sure how ‘chi’ it is to attack someone whilst they’re actually unconscious…..)
What struck me as a little odd though, is that whereas I get stared at all the time in the street normally (mainly because black is not the new or old anything here and nobody else wears it), whilst fighting quite convincingly with a man on the sidewalk in broad daylight, nobody stared at all.

But I digress.  I honestly can’t recommend Tai Chi enough - it’s exercise, but so much more- it’s spiritual, it’s relaxing, it’s aesthetic and it’s the thing most likely to make me give up smoking, because you kind of have to breathe and it makes you really want to….

In the meantime, I got ID’d again today. Result!              

ID'd again..... 

One of our Persian rugs... 

CARPET SLIPPERS

We have been reliably informed by the ever-helpful Mrs. N, and indeed by our lease, (which the TH has only just got round to reading despite signing it in several places a couple of months ago - tut tut), that we are required to cover at least 80% of our beautiful wooden floors with carpet.

Mrs. N suggested a Persian rug store, which if you’ve got around $100,000 to part with I’m sure is just the place, but unfortunately we haven’t, and what’s more, carpeting 80% of this vast apartment is probably roughly the equivalent of carpeting Luton airport.

Since this discovery, and the ensuing paranoia that the rich and famous people living in the flat below (no tabloid name-dropping from me you note) will somehow manage to get us thrown out should they hear the slightest pad of a slipper on their ceiling, we have been TIPTOEING around in bare feet.

However, the marvelous house guest that is Jonathan has solved all our problems by bringing home 4 rugs yesterday. Ok, so they’re only a few inches long, but they’re definitely Persian and we can attach them to the soles of our feet and hence be walking on carpet all the time.

Genius!
              

Livebait 

DR NO

Endeavoured to find a doctor this afternoon due to aforementioned infected toe. No joy. We have health insurance, but actually finding a way to access any health is like trying to leave the apartment without Mrs. N’s dog/pig squealing the block down.
The health insurance Co. has a website, which works up to about the 25th screen, just when you’re about to get to the useful page, and then gives a very helpful error message ‘there has been an error please log-in again’. When I finally managed to get in through a dive-bar entrance, it presented me with the names of five GP’s I’m ‘allowed’ to use. Five phone calls later (actually four, because it appeared that the fifth didn’t have any qualifications) and two were on answer-phone till Monday, one didn’t want a new patient and the remaining one was apparently ‘in theatre all day’. Which is fine with me, as clearly I don’t want a bloody actor messing with my foot.
So it could well be reality TV ER for me this weekend.

Did what any sensible person would do under the circumstances and headed for my favourite bar, to partake of that well-known kill or cure minus the lemon. Hey it’s worked before. There is a collective consciousness in bars at this time of day. We lone and silent drinkers share a chuckle as we watch the opportunist fly-poster slapping flyers onto the tops of umbrellas. The clink of glasses is interrupted occasionally by ‘it’s never rained like this before - never’, followed by a collective shake of heads.  
Reminded of times past in similar bars in many cities and amongst these strangers felt strangely at home.          

WET WET WET

Ok, so it’s my fault for wanting some rain, but all I was really after was a nice British shower. This rain is something else. St Swithin would be proud. It’s been sheeting down now for days without respite. Even J curtailed his ‘must see 150 jazz gigs a day’ obsession yesterday for a couple of hours, due to adverse weather conditions. (He is, however, back to his wild-eyed and diminished-5th ‘I’ve been up all night’ look this morning…)
Everything in this town is extreme. One day it’s 90 degrees with 100% humidity, the next day it’s 60 degrees and a monsoon. Either way, one is always wet.

As a result of this sudden climate change, everyone is suddenly sick, (except for me, unless you count an infected toe, which I have been watching the progress of with growing alarm this week at the thought of having to tackle the vast and complex insurance issue that is accessing the medical profession here).

So everyone is talking about sickness and the weather to total strangers the whole time (which clearly I am now guilty of too).

In the elevator today someone I had never seen before in my life spent 13 floors telling me how sick her nephew currently is. (Who? What? And this affects me how?)
Unlike the UK, where nobody even talks to their best friends in lifts, it is compulsory here to talk to absolutely everyone you find yourself in an elevator with, preferably about very intimate and private matters. I am familiar with the entire contents of a Will someone on the 9th floor has just written, courtesy of a recent elevator ride. (So tough luck, whoever you are’s brother….).

Then there was yesterday at the local hardware store. I had been warned about the staff in hardware stores by the good Rev. on arriving in NY - ‘they’ve never heard of plugs, taps, torches, monkey wrenches or wire wool’ he advised. They actually don’t understand anything us Brits say AT ALL. After about 20 minutes of trying to explain that I wanted something to put in the plughole to stop anything blocking it up, and getting nowhere, our talk turned to the weather. Big mistake. There then ensued a stream-of-consciousness weather-monologue loop (without the aid of an echoplex) for the next half hour or so, which said assistant had absolutely no clue how to get out of. I hung on in there trying valiantly to steer the talk back to plugs, but to no avail. ‘We should sell something to plug the sky’ was about as close as we got. I reeled out into what was now the darkness, seemingly days, and in this town probably Seasons later, with no item purchased whatsoever, feeling like I’d been in a tardis with Jimbobwoof all afternoon.

All these small everyday trials and tribulations bypass the good TH like water off a New Yorker’s back. He is already accustomed to the weather and the quirks, he understands the people much better than I do, and partakes in their foibles with good grace and even enthusiasm. Whilst I, like a true Londoner, still vainly endeavour to keep dry for a certain percentage of the day and stand silent and motionless in the corner of elevators facing the wall, praying ‘please don’t speak to ME’.    

SERIOUS JAZZ NIGHT

Jonathan is staying with us this week, which is a great excuse for me to head out to see a trillion gigs with him.

Live music:
The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra – Village Vanguard NY.
Fantastic Thad Jones compositions and the most mind-blowing baritone-sax soloing I’ve ever heard from Chris Karlic. A stunning band.
Steve Coleman rehearsal workshop – Jazz Gallery NY.
‘Blah blah, now, logically, you might think that the next tone you have to play is A, because if C is the axis and if the E flat is a minor third above C then you would think you have to play an A because A is a minor third below the axis tone C.  But you can play C and E flat and then play B and E natural blah blah…..’
Obviously.
Blimey.
Didn’t understand a word.
J understood about 5 words.
But to be fair we arrived half way through. If we’d heard the whole thing we’d have understood everything. Definitely. Without a doubt…..
Jam Session – Smoke NY.
Arrived at midnight. A really happening vibe, loads of musicians, listeners and the best sort of low life. Good bar, great atmosphere and the sort of perfect sound where you can actually hear the piano. The closest feel to London’s 606 Club I’ve found here so far, even more so as we immediately crashed into the Fishwick brothers (Matt has recently moved to NY), and then (the new slimline) drummer Mark Taylor who moved here from London 9 years ago. Really good to see him again and hear his awesome American accent, man.
Home at 4am for bagels and jazz chat.
Perfect evening.
                     

Steve Coleman demonstrates symmetrically derived laws of motion. Or something......
 

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra Bible. 

Live music: Stacey Kent – Birdland NY.
Stacey very kindly put us on the guest list for this last night of her 5-night run at Birdland. Lovely to see/hear her and Jim and meet her family. Great band – Art Hirahara (piano), Ben Wolfe (bass) and Mark Mclean (drums - who I’ve seen a couple of times before in London and Montreal and whose playing I love.)
Birdland is a really good-vibe room - one of my favourite venues in NY. Good sightlines and sound, friendly staff and even good food.

WHOLE LIFE ERROR 401

No I can’t remember the six digit code I set up about 11 years and 150 4/6/12 digit code/words ago.
What was the name of my first pet? I’ve never had a bloody pet! ‘That’s not the answer we have here. I can only accept your first answer’

Have spent/wasted the entire day trying to salvage back credit cards and remain connected to the internet, not to mention yet again endeavouring to get a bank account sorted here, which now appears to depend on non-existent pet details satisfying some call centre in Asia.

The result of today’s many futile hours of phone calls is that I now have no access at all to any money in any country and I’m tenuously holding on to an email address which requires me to have a UK phone number.
So if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s why.

RIDING THE INTERNET HIGHWAY

You’ll never guess what.
No, you really won’t.

I joined a gym today.

If there is one thing that was going to get me to a gym, it’s the fact that there’s internet access on the exercise bicycle.
How cool is that?

What they didn’t tell me before I signed up is that you only remain connected if you pedal like a motherf**ker……

I ache in places that I thought I’d left back in London.          

NOLA COMES TO TOWN

Well how was I to know it was a urinal? It looked like a large fish tank to me, and by far the most visually interesting room in club XL. So I led the entire party in there to look at the fish. After a second or two Pamela pointed out dryly that there were men having a pee just underneath the tank. Men who were looking slightly, (although not considerably, it has to be said) disturbed by the arrival of the shark-aquarium-tours spectator gallery.
Saturday night NOLA style. The Marquis on club guest lists and drinks for free.
By the time we got to Bellevue we were decked in a veritable Christmas tree of wrist bands and brandishing and we’d been asked for ID at least four times. (Which is all a bit tiresome frankly, when you’re 42 and look it.)  So there we hung out until closing, because it simply had to be done. ‘I closed Bellevue’ - the Marquis, as he joined us in the diner next door at 4.30am.

Much much fun.

Am greatly admiring the feisty resilience and party spirit of these displaced lovely people.  Traumatised and far from home yet resourcefully making the best of it all and punctuating every heart-wrenching tale with humour and a wicked irony. And they can SO party, like nobody I’ve yet met in New York……

Earlier, over several bottles of pre-going-out wine the Marquis brought out his Red Cross debit card to show us. ‘Not for purchase of alcohol, tobacco or firearms’ it read.
Apparently FEMA and the Red Cross issued debit cards for up to $2,000 as an ‘efficient’ way of distributing aid in the days following the Katrina disaster, but later there was a big brouhaha because it transpired that some beneficiaries had been using their cards to purchase designer handbags and for payment in strip clubs.

This seems a rather futile complaint to me after the horse has bolted, or the strippers have stripped, and who’s to say what people spent aid-money on from grants that were paid directly into bank accounts? Nobody was checking up on them. Actually, who is to judge what ANYONE spends their money on when they’ve just lost their home, livelihood and maybe even their friends and relatives? We’ve all heard of retail therapy. Whilst I can understand the concern over morally dubious aid-spending when some folks probably had great need of extra cash to actually feed their families, this is clearly just another post-Katrina administrative fuck-up. There should have been much more immediate and direct aid in the form of actual food and accommodation in the first place and then, if the cards were meant for just food and accommodation they should SAY SO.  Or perhaps someone should have thought up a much more imaginative list of rules and restrictions beyond the obvious…. (P. added that someone had even spent their $2000 on a boob job!)……these are New Orleanians after all…..

We are invited to Mardi Gras in New Orleans next February. ‘It’s going to be a really special one’

No doubt in their minds at all. Or mine.

Executive summary: (for Sylvan) –  Drinking NOLA-style

The Marquis. My other bike's a Porsche.