28 September ‘07 - Evil Has Landed

This week was dominated by an event of epic proportions. Well epic for a kid from New Zealand, commonplace for a local. And that is a key distinction. New York is the coal-face, the gravel-pit, the frontier of all that is changing in the world. New York―along with Paris and London I imagine―is the lip of the lava that flows down a volcano’s side. What is created here solidifies and becomes a permanent marker, a monument to be absorbed, assimilated and adapted by the rest of the world.

And that paragraph may reek of Eurocentrism, it is, I believe, justified. For example, the event I refer to was the arrival of the Iranian President―Mahmoud Ahmadinejad―to Manhattan. Ahmadinejad, here for the United Nations General Assembly, was restricted to a 25-mile radius of a local landmark. His every move watched by the NYPD, the Secret Service, and most worryingly fanatical Americans. The New York Post, for example, the country’s eighth-most popular paper, announced his arrival with a headline that did not just dominate but completely overtook the front page. That headline: ‘EVIL HAS LANDED’. The following day: ‘WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR EVIL FACE’.

Columbia University falls squarely within the 25-mile range. As such, Ahmadinejad was invited to speak and he agreed. The announcement of his arrival was met with the most industrious and mechanical opposition I have witnessed. Overnight, tee-shirts, badges and laminated posters were produced which professed outrage at the invitation. Overnight a Semite army was born which donned said tee-shirts and badges and voiced their outrage. The following day the campus was plastered with photos of hangings, statistics, and quotes (in English) attributed to Ahmadinejad. The day after that the University President was forced to justify the invitation on the grounds of free speech. As Ahmadinejad’s speech neared, the protest intensified. Other groups, less professional than the Semite army, joined the fray, adding hand-drawn posters and playing instruments. More groups were represented than I knew existed.

And then the day itself. I arrived at school as I usually do―dark sunglasses, headphones on, bleary from being cruelly woken by my alarm―and climbed the stairs from the subway to the street. The sight that met me was, like so many other sights in this city, straight out of a movie. A Fox News van with antennae extending five metres skyward was parked next to a CNN van with a car-sized satellite dish was parked next to the black-tinted minivans of the Secret Service. And pressing through the gaps between the vans, the school gates, and the street were crowds of protestors, students and spectators with banners, placards, take-away coffees.

The event itself was even more remarkable. Ahmadinejad’s address was preceded by an introduction from the Columbia University President. To a group of 600 in the auditorium and a crowd of many thousands watching a giant-screen on the lawn outside, the University President lambasted Ahmadinejad, calling him a ‘cruel and petty dictator’ among other insults. While Bollinger’s speech was perhaps to be expected given the great might that the political lobbyists (and university funders) wield, I had no expectations of Ahmadinejad.

And sure enough the Iranian’s speech was rambling and nonsensical and like all good politicians he avoided directly answering questions with aplomb. Some of what he said, however, resonates with me still. Not because of the content but because he managed to unsettle some deeply held assumptions on my part. What these assumptions are I can not yet say – they are too fundamental, they are too well entrenched in the psyche to have labels. I shall spend some time digging them out and exposing them to the light. I just hope they are not found out to be rotten.

In other news, a friend from New Zealand came to stay with me for a few days. It was delight seeing a familiar face. Living in a city of unknowns means that anonymity can be assumed at any time – a luxury in certain states, in certain moments. The disadvantage is that individual identity is subsumed by an identity greater in breadth, history, and flexibility. You start thinking of yourself not as an individual but as constituent part some great machine. Meeting someone from a past-life relocates you, shifts you to the past, or to a different place, at least while they are here.

There is a scene in the Great Gatsby where the central character, Nick, moves to a new city and immediately feels lonely, isolated, alien. Soon after his arrival a stranger asks him directions and Nick is able to direct. From that moment, Nick’s status changes - he is now a path-finder, a guide, an original settler. And while Nick’s story and my own are not perfectly analogous, there are similarities. Whilst guiding around the city I became aware of, for the first time, the thousand little idiosyncrasies of the City that are now familiar to me. Those thousand little things that govern where you stand on a subway, how you insert a bill into a vending machine, which direction you take when you approach another pedestrian.

The rules for dealing with the idiosyncrasies are imbibed unconsciously - they seep into your head and influence your motor functions without you even noticing. But when you show someone else the rules are reflected on and identified and all-of-a-sudden you realise that you actually know something about something, that the City is no longer a stranger to you, that slowly―ever so slowly―you are beginning to feel at home.

18 September '07 - waiting for the snow

Three days ago a cool breeze rolled in from the north. It displaced the sticky atmosphere―the incessant muggy haze that demanded cotton and punished polyester―for a portentous wind. Also three days ago a look of apprehension surfaced on the faces of my neighbours. The domino players outside my front door who laugh and argue all day and most of the night now argue less and there is resonance to their laughter has diminished as the echoes must now compete with the moving air. The street-sellers, whose wares once dominated the pavement and part of the road have drawn their racks and displays close to them. The homeless, especially, have an air of restlessness. Summer alleviated their condition. Now they, like everyone else, are waiting for the snow.

And like people who hear that war has been declared in a neighbouring country, the preparations must begin. But these people are used to war, for them it is routine. The shift in psyche was as swift and sharp as the shift in the weather itself. These are seasonal people. They have to be – the climate they inhabit is as regular in its movement, in its state of flux, as the city itself.

And so the second week of class ends. The comments in my last transmission, which alluded to Columbia rather disparagingly, have had the scaffolding surrounding them torn down. They have been revealed as a stinking and unclean mess. Two of my classes consist of discussion at a level I have not encountered at a university so far. I do my best to keep up, to unravel what they’re saying, but the experience is akin to trying to understand James Joyce’s novels or the cadence of Sylvester Stallone. It is humbling to not have anything to say, truly humbling. So often I speak just to bring controversy, to elicit an impassioned rant from a classmate so I can attack them at the legs. But in these classes at least, such callousness would be refracted with a glance and struck down without a whimper. And so I listen attentively and take notes and hope that soon I shall find a voice.

As part of my resolution to capitalise on the free entry to various cultural institutions my Columbia ID attracts, I went to the Museum of Modern Art. As it happened, I was nonplussed. So fat have I grown off cultural experiences, it seems that I am now indolent to the effort required to take it all in. I walked past Picasso and Rothko and Monet and Steichen with no more than a courteous nod. And then there were the fat, sluggish, creatures standing, leering, at poor old Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Taking photos next to it, expelling foul breath on it, waving greasy fingers at it, they stood in crowds and wore baseball caps and shorts and sandals with socks.

I think perhaps my animosity came primarily because I was hungry. So often it happens that way―when the senses are heightened and each smell is distinguishable, when the guts contract, when you can taste the air―the world becomes a hunting-ground. A place of survival, of winner takes all. Man again becomes animal and other men become competitors. As the body pursues a meal, pretences at high culture and eloquence are dismissed and the right hemisphere is blanketed white like the eyes of a hunting shark.

Although New York is probably as far from hunting grounds as any place, instinct remains. Because the City’s inhabitants are so far removed, are so urbanised, perhaps, unlike other Americans, they cannot satisfy the craving for blood by revelling in the proximity of the wilderness. Perhaps that explains the incessant movement of the City, the regularity of flux. Or perhaps this is a poor hypothesis of a fool trying desperately to understand the madness of it all. The latter is most likely and in the meantime I shall go eat.

11 September '07

The one-month anniversary of my time here in New York coincides with the sixth anniversary of the World Trade Centre bombings. A coincidence? Probably. The two are on opposite poles of a spectrum of importance. The New York Times led today with a lest we forget-esque headline and evocative photos. I led with a bowl of 99c raisin bran. Flags were half-raised in remembrance. I rolled my jeans half-way up in a futile effort to save them from the monsoon rains. People all over the country presumably thought not about the victims or the 'terror' of it all, but of where they were on the day, how they felt about it, who they knew that was involved. And this is where the poles converge. This shoddy narrative is so introverted that it fits well with the self-interest inherent in our species. And such is the nature of this type of transmission.

I am tempted to - but will not - use clichés like the 'time has flown by'. And of course, as it must be, clichés alone are the most apt. In thinking about what this last month has consisted of all I can think of is the subway. This is, perhaps, fitting. That small window of time waiting for or riding the train is the only window a person has in this city to pause and reflect. Once the rider is above ground movement really begins and one cannot help but be caught up in it. One cannot help but be reduced to mere flotsam in a frothy, dirty, thick tidal wave. Even when you stand still in this city the force exuded by the movement of the 15-million people around you makes your blood turn in a vortex, your head spin, your mind wander. In a word you are never static. When you stand still you become the sun around which the planets orbit. When you move you must accelerate to the pace of the other planets lest you be nudged and bumped and flattened and reduced to fragments that are themselves nudged and bumped and flattened until all that remains is dust that hovers like a cloud - less of a person and more of a idea.

More concretely, the weeks since my last transmission have been occupied largely by school. Classes have started – all five of them – to various paces and levels of interest. I am taking Anti-Colonialism, Culture Politics and Ethics, Transnationalism and Principles of Anthropolgy. The last is supervised research. The first week of classes left me fairly nonplussed about the university (it is hard for the professors to match, I suppose, the grandeur and authority of the campus – the blocks that Columbia occupies are riddled with towering gothic churches, marble halls fronted by carved Greek-style columns, bronze sculptures and statues with Latin inscriptions, granite walls, elaborate facades, manicured lawns). I have the suspicion (which has been deflated, though not eradicated by this week's classes) that Columbia has been so gorged by its reputation that it has become indolent and fat. Like Greenpeace, the university was too successful, too well regarded. What formed that reputation then – revolutionary scholarship and academic prowess – is now less important that the preservation of the reputation itself. If I'm right, which I doubt, the university will feed off itself until there is nothing left to sustain it. Then it will crumble and implode and be little more than a memory preserved by alumni and op-shop sweat-shirts. More likely is that the first classes were introductory and the pace will increase and the content deepen and the classmates will quit acting like students in the first week of a first-year tutorial and will say something of note.

It is nice, however, to be back at school. The classes at least have the potentially to challenge and it is that I look forward to.

Other events of note, let's see. Last week I bought a Yankees cap and went to the game. Me and 50,000-odd other fans in caps at the Yankees Stadium watched them thrash, err, somebody else. The game was great. Some guy nicknamed 'A-Rod' scored two home runs in the same innings – a historic moment, so I was told. The beer I bought from the guy yelling out if I wanted to buy beer was served in a giant red plastic cup. The frankfurter for the hotdog I bought from the guy yelling out if I wanted to buy hotdogs came from a sack with other frankfurters suspended in a stainless-steel tub on the guy's head. On Saturday I tripped to Coney Island, an experience right out of an 8mm video. Coney Island is a strip of beach boarded by a retro theme-park-meets-circus replete with a wooden rollercoaster, freak-show, carnies, at least two ghost-train rides and myriad hot-dog stands. The whole experience was surreal, cast in Technicolor, a mix of lurid hues and burlesque costumes, hairy women and dwarfs and strongmen, tourists, natives, pick-pockets, bikinis, live screams from the rollercoaster and tinned screams from the ghost-ride - all this while sweating in 35-degree heat. What I'm beginning to realise is that countries like India, China, Mexico don't have a monopoly on madness. America is perhaps the maddest of them all. Made more so because it thinks it is normal and sane.

Other than that I have been spending time with friends, drinking, eating and navigating that most untranslatable of human phenomena – humour. I have found a new place to move into on the first of October. The room itself is much smaller and is only six blocks away but is significantly cheaper at $740 a month, an important variation as every step in this city requires the surrender of a couple of dollar-bills. My current landlord threatened to keep my deposit and kick me out until I brought his attention to the illegality of his actions and the number of my law-school friends at Columbia who are all aching to whet their teeth on a test-case.

There is more but that will do for now. It's 7:45 in the evening on Tuesday 11 September 2007 and all is well.

31 August '07

Three weeks in New York has crept up without me even noticing. Not much of note has happened, but there are many subtleties of the City that are now familiar, and I guess that's about as good as can be expected. I have learnt, for example, to lean just in time for the slight jolt that comes at the end of the subway's slow deceleration at every station, a jolt just strong enough to destabilise a unprepared rider. I have learnt to speak more slowly and emphasise the 'e' in 'Ben'. Too many conversations have consisted of:

"what's your name?"

"Ben".

"Bin?"

"No, Ben."

"Huh?"

"You know, like Benjamin… shortened."

"Oh…. Beeeeen".

So, to the week. Yesterday I woke early to lay with some friends on a blanket on a tar seal footpath in Central Park. The idea was to get there at 7am to be among the first in line for free tickets to that evening's performance of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. As it turned out, when we arrived we were already 60th in line. And the tickets weren't handed out until 1pm. So for six hours I sat there, every minute the line growing until it snaked around the corner of the path 200-or-so metres away. It is testament, I think, to something quite sacred about a city when people line up for that long to see Shakespeare. Shakespeare! Justin Timberlake I could understand, but Shakespeare? Many of the people in the line missed out and returned to the theatre that evening to line up again for standby tickets As it turned out, the play was exceptional. Many recognisable actors performing in an open-air theatre with the illuminated giant-trees of Central Park serving as a backdrop. The audience was receptive, the wine flowed freely, a fine evening.

Much of the rest of my time has been consumed by trying to navigate the bureaucracy of Columbia. The campus I can navigate just fine, but registering for courses/libraries/insurance/gym/ID card/work is time-consuming and tedious. In addition, I have now been oriented four times by various groups. Last week the International Students Office reminded us to shower before going on a date and that the best way to indicate interest in a girl is to make eye contact. Useful information. I have now met most of the other anthropology MA students – a good bunch of people, it seems, and it's nice that my nationality is again a novelty – I've spent far too much time with internationals.

On the housing front I am still in Harlem. Yesterday there was a shooting about 100-metres from my house. Two Mexicans apparently. They had a stand-off. When the NYPD-guy told me that I had to restrain a chuckle. Not an appropriate response when the block is teeming with police, ambulances, yellow DO NOT CROSS tape and detectives with badges hanging from their necks. I have resigned myself to remaining in the room for another month – finding housing is just too difficult at the moment.

No doubt more has happened – various drunken nights, many fine meals, good conversations with good people, more conversations with idiots, momentary pinings for home, many moments of exultation where I feel like yelling out loud for the madness of it all – but they are of little consequence.

In New York, my ability to generalise is slipping. Every time I try to record my experiences, they are reduced to a series of unconnected vignettes. Not completely unconnected of course – they are linked by me at the very least – but lacking any common theme, occurrence, or idea. The vignettes are startling though – always notable.

Last night, when catching the subway home at 2:30am, for example, the carriages were just as crowded as they were at 5pm. In any other city I have visited, it would be easy to characterise the passenger as youthful drinkers, or wary seniors, based on the time of day and location. Not in New York. In New York at 2:30 in the morning there were children, seniors, hoods, backpackers, crazies, blacks, whites, Latinos, babies. Every demographic was represented and no one looked surprised. I just can't understand it.

Or today, as I sat sweating in the subway station, a woman stood on the platform opposite. Prone to admiring beautiful women, this time was no exception. I watched her as she stood with her friend, laughing, throwing her head back. Then there was the sound of her approaching train. I urged her to look at me before the train arrived, but she did not. I resigned myself to staring at the sides of grey carriages until in a wonderful turn, the windows of the carriages aligned and I was offered a filmstrip of the beauty. Each frame a flash of aligned windows as the train slowed. Every image offering a nuanced perspective, a rapid-fire model shoot.

Or on the weekend when a woman was holding a steel cage with wheels in front of her as she descended the stairs. The woman leaned backwards to counterbalance the weight of the cage. At each step the wheels teetered on the brink before landing with a thump on the step below. All of this was of no great consequence until, when passing the woman, I spied the contents of the cage. Sitting with his legs crossed like Buddha was a small boy. He fitted the bottom on the cage perfectly, covering exactly the amount of area he needed to cover – no room to spare, no room to be dislodged. And as the boy was ferried down the stairs, each one jolting him slightly, he did not raise his eyes from the brick game he clasped between two hands.

I guess vignettes constitute a vision as much as anything else. And it is probably naïve to expect more – a big city is only as large as it is filtered through a small mind. Still, there is promise, there is future, and there is a year left to try and make sense of it all.

18 August '07

Tonight, as I sat eating in a taco-ria, the man next to me tapped me on the shoulder, and as I watched, poured the remaining two-thirds of his beer into the shoe he had just taken off his right foot. Impressed with the width of my eyes he raised the heel of the shoe to his mouth and drank before returning the shoe to his bare foot, erupting into cackling laughter and slapping me on the back. No one else raised their eyes from their tacos.

Yesterday, as I stood on the corner of Park Avenue and 45th Street a convertible driven by a topless woman gruffed past. Occupying the back seat, and extending southwards so that it dragged on the road, was a life-size paper-mache model of a giant squid. This was no gimmick, there was no advertising. No one else on the street missed a step in their march.

And thus ends my first week in New York City.

A week dominated by Fulbrighters and seminars on American culture. The Fulbrighters were by-and-large a lackluster group, the product of 18-ish years of competitive education I suppose. They all took notes and listened attentively – it made me sick. That was during the day though, at night the transformation was canine in proportion. The air was thick with hormones and sex, again, I suppose, the production of 18-years of competitive and restrictive education. It was like first-year in a hostel, I suppose. At the very least I am more familiar with Manhattan, having been from Brooklyn Bridge to Ground Zero to Greenwich Village to the Meat Packing district to the Upper East Side. The city is wonderfully exact with its streets. Streets ascend as you walk north, avenues as you walk east. Thus every taxi ride is like a game of battleships – every destination plotted by two coordinates.

Am now back in the hovel after a week of luxury in the hotel. Ambient natural lighting has been replaced by fluorescent, air-conditioning by fans (today 35 degrees and humid), blissful silence by raucous Spanish dance music from the 141 street block party. To assuage my bitterness I stole two towels and contemplated stealing the iron until I realized it was permanently affixed to the wall. At least this time I have a friend staying with me – a Swede here to study journalism who is temporarily without a room.

I will not describe the events of my days as that would tend towards tedium. There are more revelations, they are just not revealed yet. It is not that I have a tense relationship with New York. Rather, the city and I need to get to know each other. We are strangers still talking about the weather. There are questions I want to ask but common ground is needed first. Until that time I shall talk of giant squid and foot-warmed beer.

13 August '07

Well I've been in New York City for just under 48 hours now. The city emerged from the skyline like a bushfire, an entire landscape covered in embers, stretching to the horizon. The flight itself was nothing remarkable. Passengers on airplanes act like pedestrians with ipods. As soon as cruising altitude is reached, out come the headphones and on go the personal televisions. Interaction only when necessary and even then one must pause one's movie before conversation can begin.

I've been trying to think how to best articulate the city (as I'm sure myriad fools and travelers have in the past). Being in New York City, walking and sampling New York City is, if you will allow, akin to a child finding that Never Never land exists. So much of this city I have seen before. The rows and rows of brownstone buildings, the steps coming onto the street, the families or gangsters sitting on those steps playing cards, chatting or dealing. Downtown its streets are the labyrinth of a man with no imagination. Avenues are perpendicular to
streets. Streets names ascend as one moves north. Avenue numbers ascend as one moves east. I expected all this. I expected what was here. And for once expectations are met – not exceeded, not disappointed. This city that I have often thought about is at it is. The New York as presented by the media is – as far as I can tell – the New York that exists on Manhattan Island. The whole experience is bizarre. The surreal is rapidly becoming real. Every time I see/smell/hear a symbol of New York, one more dimension of the imagined city becomes concrete. The sacred is rendered profane. The surreal, real.

I am, as you would expect, still digesting. The city, I am sure, will outlast the depth of my imagination and soon new symbols will erect themselves on the ruins of the old.

The room I secured in the house in Spanish Harlem is, well, a hovel in a dive. Perhaps that is too cruel but it certainly isn't nice. 'Fully furnished' is a convertible couch and a leather chair. Close to Columbia is a half-hour walk (okay now but in minus-seven?) My only towel is the bathmat. Every 7 minutes a cockroach flits from one side of the room to the other. I am worried there will be more. The room is large but spare and dark and has a lock on the outside. All this I can
cope with. More disappointing is that the three other roommates haven't yet left their rooms. I've heard them, and met one, but she quickly left and referred to me as 'the sublet' even after I told her my name. The neighborhood is fairly rough also – drug deals, late night burnouts, no intimidation yet but the potential for it. I have begun searching for a new place – tough at the moment because of the influx of uni students. Perhaps I am being dramatic and the place is
comparatively good. I shall soon find out.

Overall the experience has been fine. Today I bought a phone, opened a bank account, and cracked the subway system. Not bad for a country boy. Especially when it's swelteringly hot (30 today, so they say). Tonight I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel (cheers William J Fulbright) and have a four-day orientation programme, beginning tomorrow with a scavenger hunt.