New York Transmissions

2 June 2008

2008-06-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

New York has changed for me as a friend changes with distance. Though we have remained in touch, trysted in the scraper’s arms, laid dumb in the city, one of us has changed and something is lost. I have moved house (Harlem was traded for the Upper West Side) and changed vocation (Columbia traded for the United Nation) and while I don’t feel much different, that is perhaps it. After all, change wreaks a tectonic shift on occasion—maybe the plates are misaligned, the strata contorted, the parallels bent. So it goes.

It is true that the similarities between last week’s lifestyle and this week’s are few. In the last I rose mid-morning and fell at midnight. Now my hours are more diurnal and because of my proximity to the early morning I meet an entirely different breed of people. As I student I mostly met other students, or still others who shared our atypical lifestyle: homeless, jobless, aimless, misanthropes, transients, travellers. Now I’m one suit amongst many. So many. Pinstriped maggots on a concrete cadaver, the subways heave. Thousands of us, replete with badges and wallets and umbrellas, perform the elaborate ritual every morn and eve—the dash to the train, the sidestep, the door-hold, the tacit acknowledgement of another familiar with the ritual, the less tacit disdain of those who are not.

There is much more to say but in the face of nine-hour days there is little stamina left to say it. Thus, I retreat for now. More transmissions will follow. If not for your sake for mine. So it goes.

2008-05-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

Aroha, Jeff, Laurence and Marie-Joelle. Matapalo, 2008

(more photos here)

9-15 May 2008

2008-05-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

Costa Rica

came down on us like a thunder-clap. The skies, for so long dormant and brooding, opened with the ferocity and mute indifference of a volcano, emptying great sheets of water, walls of thick globulous raindrops so perfectly formed they hit the ground and bounced back, rain so heavy, so lugubrious that we who walked through it had to resist the urge to extend our arms in a swimmer’s stride, pulling ourselves against the air like bathers at a waterfall.

This is Matapalo Beach, Costa Rica, a place as distant and alien from New York City as the desert is from the Arctic. In New York every edifice is drafted then redrafted to give the impression of civilization—civilization defined against nature, civilization constituted by layers and layers of steel and mortar and reinforced concrete, all built atop the rock and dirt of the island. In Costa Rica there is no such edifice. Nor is there the arrogant and fallacious view that human is not animal, that human has evolved past nature, that base human instincts and biological drives can be extinguished with culture. Nature in Costa Rica is inevitable. When one stops, listens, rests in Matapalo creatures all around move, chatter, work. Lying static on the beach, for example, is enough assurance for a mile of burrowing crabs to emerge from their holes and hurl a claw’s worth of sand from the entrance. Sitting stationary on the patio is enough to reveal a pair of geckos at every light fitting, flitting from one crevice to the next. Many animals simply ignore the barriers of human construction; in our house the pathway from the front to the kitchen door is, it seems, a thoroughfare for nocturnal crabs which, when a light is illuminated or the vibrations of a step felt, scuttle on the tiles as they would the silent seas. Birds impertinently and repeatedly tap at the windows, seemingly annoyed at the fetter to their flight (even now, two days after I wrote that line, the same pair of birds are hammering at the pane). At the opening of most crevices are the glowing eyes of insects or arachnids, each as wary of the human as an emperor is of a subject.

Even when the creatures are invisible they create such a cacophony that their presence is irrefutable. And herein lies one of the great shames of travelling. Namely, that the traveller is rarely able to convey the sounds of a place—indeed, it is perhaps true that when one is not expected to hear the sounds, or does not feel they can convey those sounds, one does not hear them, or hears them less—focussing instead on photos, seeing a place as a kind of exhibited abstraction, a lattice of portrait and landscape 6x4 frames. A ‘shame’ because in places like Costa Rica, like New York, sounds contribute—perhaps constitute—the atmosphere. In New York stereos on window ledges and in cars pulse with the quick rhythm and accordions of Latino music. On every street the rattling conversations of drug-dealers and checkers-players stutter like Morse code. And in Costa Rica the noises are even more striking. No one told me, for example, that when the monsoon comes the thousands of locusts that dot the foliage amplify their shrill ensemble so that even intimate conversation is difficult. I knew not that in the thick air of the tropics even distant lightning strikes let forth a roar so mountainous, so primal, that windows shake and the yawning frequency vibrates the blood and bone from foot to head. I had no conception that the combined force of millions of raindrops on millions of leaves and trunks and branches and roofs generates a sound so full, so oppressive that even the thunder is timid by comparison.

The sounds here really are startling. Like someone recently blinded, my sense of hearing has sharpened to that of a canine. Every discordant note of every cricket can be discerned, every heavy tumble of every wave resonant as it peels away to the horizon, every leaf stroking every other leaf a bow against string.

So this is Costa Rica. And what a relief it is to see the horizon, the forest, animals, sand and sunset. With such distance between me and Manhattan I dream of ripping my clothes off and hurtling into the jungle with a machete. Of climbing trees and howling as a feral beast. Of caves and fires and long days spent chasing down game. Of growing lean and wily and tan. Of defecating and procreating and hibernating. Of tearing at my hair and beard with a dull knife or a sharpened rock. So potent an elixir is this place I dream of casting off every fusty vestige of humanity, shedding all that fetters the freedom to live on instinct and instinct alone; to eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, think of your head as a skull, fuck when you are aroused. To live for once as we are, as animals.

But of course that kind of fancy is naïve. I write on a laptop. I have a fan stirring the sticky air of my room. I have moisturiser to salve the sharp and painful rouge on my back and neck. I have a mattress under me, pillows behind me. I balked at the prospect of six hours flying, then four hours bussing, then one hour taxiing. I continue to be alarmed when a six-legged creature I beat with my shoe suffers the blows and scurries on. I take as a personal affront any inconvenience, any filth, any delay. In my weaker moments I look forward to the first shower back home, where I can scrub the entrenched filth, salve the cuts and bites, and linger under the hot water. And sure enough soon I shall drown myself in humanity. As Baxter said, ‘it is better to lie Dumb in the city than under the mountainous wavering sky.’

***

As I have mentioned before, this particular medium gives rise to a tension between speaking of the mundane or of the abstract. Analogous, perhaps, is that when looking at photos most of us find most captivating the ones of people. Finely composed photos of landscapes, of mirror-lakes or exotic creatures, of sublime nature cannot compete with the stupid smiles of a close-up pair. Humans are trained to recognise faces. We are good at it. Given that writing and photography are both forms of representation, it follows that when reading, what is most interesting for most people is other people. The criticism I have fielded, then—that I talk too much of too little—is a just one.

In response to this criticism I offer two defences. The first is that while I acknowledge that my life is constituted by relationships, I am [still] not qualified to represent them. My pen is too blunt, my fingers too callous, my mind too sluggish. While this is perhaps a sophistry—it is easier, after all, to list hollow inanimate vignettes than to describe the lines of a face—that I am scared of hurting is true. Hurting by misrepresentation or by abject truth, it really doesn’t matter, the potential to alienate is the same. If I was to talk of people, therefore, it would be in a manner so banal that any detail would be impossible to make out.

The second defence is one of audience. Because ‘blogging’ (how I loathe that word) is a medium in its infancy, because I am a novice blogger, and because I am equivocal about the purpose of this blog, the question of who I am writing for is unclear. In the absence of clarity I revert to a default position: that of writing for myself. Thus, herein lies what I find interesting. Returning to the analogy of the photo, perhaps the only image that can trump the stupid-smile close-up is that which is framed by a mirror. And if I am to make any claim, it is that I am neither special nor unique. I am bound my human fancy as much as I am by instinct.

14 April ‘08

2008-04-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

There is, it seems, a space reserved in the human psyche for ambition, for that conscious or unconscious desire to attain that which brings glory, influence, power, et cetera. It follows, then, that when one does not possess such ambition, the space left behind is as glaring as that of a missing tooth. This left-behind space is not only empty but is the opening for a potent vacuum that exerts its pull on every other aspect of one’s life. For those of us who did not wake one day and know we were destined to be a builder or a bureaucrat, for example, the vacuitous nature of that space is a source of deep disquiet. Lacking some bone-lodged drive we spend much of our lives trying to sate the vacuum. For many, the way to sate it, the best way to plug the gap, is to fill it with some external force.

Religion is one such force, and a near-perfect one at that. Belief in fate is another that, while powerful, lacks the brilliant and self-contained answers of the various dogmas. Children, in some instances, are a further example of a satiating force, a further way to pass on the implicit and silently subconscious responsibility of deciding about one’s own life (in this final example, the silent and subconscious is replaced by the ability to decide on someone else’s). There is more to say here, but let me digress for a moment.

One of the reasons anthropology is on its last legs as a discipline is that much of what constitutes its scholarship is entrenched in age-old theories of evolutionism. Evolutionist theories suggest that all humans can be classified on a scale with barbarians at one pole and the civilized at the other. On this scale, white Europeans—as the most ‘civilized’ of peoples—are at the top while Australian Aboriginals, for example—as ‘barbaric and uncivilized’—are at the bottom. As well as shaping a nascent anthropology, evolutionism provided justification for various historical atrocities; slavery and colonization are two examples. In the early nineteen-hundreds, the reigning evolutionist theories were challenged and by the middle of the century were largely struck from popular use. Anthropologists today pat themselves on the back for having revealed evolutionism as the fallacious and racist theory it is. They treat as curious artefacts the texts evolutionism produced and blush and chaff when the ‘founding fathers’ of anthropology are revealed as the key proponents of evolutionism.

It is perhaps unfair, though, to blame evolutionism solely on anthropology. After all, it could be argued that like most disciplines and institutions, anthropology just reflects the dominant theories of the time. Indeed, the basic premise—that humans evolve from one state to the next—echoes in myriad other disciplines, development programmes, and covert ‘civilizing’ missions like those which enforce Eurocentric democracy (and unlike anthropology, those disciplines, programmes and mission flourish today). At the origin of these echoes is the fact that entrenched in the Western psyche—and perhaps others, I cannot say—is an ineluctable desire to progress, to develop, to advance. And given that ‘progress’, ‘develop’ and ‘advance’, are synonyms for ‘evolve’ there is a prima facie case at least for concluding that the subversive and infectious brethren of evolutionism cling to the Western psyche like leeches cling to a body. Leaving that thought in its infancy, I return to ambition.

The basic path most of us follow seems to agree with the notion that we are obsessed with progression. Toddlers attend kindergarten in preparation for primary school, primary school is attended in preparation for intermediate, intermediate in preparation for high school, high school for university, university for a job, a job for children, a partner and retirement, retirement in preparation for, well, death. So it goes. A grim and simplistic rendering this may be, the basic premise holds; that at the core of our existence is a perceived need to progress.

The implications of this need to progress are many. Of note here are just two. The first, to which I alluded, is that in the absence of any clear-cut path there exists in many of us a sense of deep disquiet. While some can allay this disquiet with religion doctrines, or a belief in fate or pre-destiny, or children, those who cannot must suffer the anguish of the vacuum, and the pull it exerts on other aspects of life. The response to this anguish—and here I speak solely for myself—is an abdication of responsibility.

One of the many little anecdotes I run with various people from time-to-time is that, in the course of my life, there is very little I feel I had agency over. That there wasn’t, for example, a morning where I woke up and decided I wanted to study anthropology in New York. Instead, I was quite sure that these things ‘just happened’, that I was a passive recipient rather than an actor, that various events and relationships merely fell on me like a shadow. A friend recently had me up on this point, quite rightly arguing that I do, of course, have agency and that all events in my life (save for those determined by external forces) have been my doing. That at this moment, who I am, where I am and what I am doing is my responsibility. I am liable for all that is going wrong and all that is going right. Even if taking full responsibility for one’s life is possible— surely such an act would involve recognising that there’s a version of the self independent from others, that there is something which constitutes the true ego?—the thought itself is, perhaps, too terrifying. For that reason I shall continue to abdicate, for now.

The other implication is that there are very few times in our lives—and here I teeter dangerously close to New Ageism—in which we are content to live in the present. Like those who live this life in preparation for the next (surely the most acute of tragedies) we live for the future, for a time we know nothing of and can do nothing to change (influence, yes. Change, no). There is merit, I think, in the practice of ignoring the hulking unknown and concentrating on what brings happiness in the present, in finding a niche between hedonism and philanthropy, between nihilism and rabid religiosity, or at least in not viewing the present as merely a condition of the future but as a valid and worthy time itself.

***

Okay, so that’s that. I leave behind the pseudo-philosophy, the preaching and proselytising, the immature tirade and lurch instead towards something more tangible. I’ve just returned from a New York comedy show which, later this week, will be complimented by a Broadway musical. The comedy was fine, gays, Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, the elderly, the young were all ridiculed equally. There was, however, the unnerving experience that occurs with most oft-parodied spectacles—here I’m thinking of street-theatre, parades, office relationships, the news—that when witnessing the live performance it is difficult to determine whether it is satire or reality, so close to the two coexist. The musical though, as part of a particularly loathsome genre, I am somewhat nervous of.

2008-04-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

Coney Island, April '09
More photos available here.

7 April '08

2008-04-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

A while ago I mentioned of a German word, Schadenfreude. A word that means, roughly, to take malicious pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. The Germans have an even better word—‘better’ because the meaning is even more nuanced, and the translation into English even more difficult—which describes when something is not as bad as you expected, and you are disappointed. The word, Scheissenbedauern, is an apt sign for the feeling I have about the New York Winter.

Last year, wincing at the heavy air that preceded an early storm, I described a shift in the weather; a shift from fetid, tepid breezes to bracing, bitter winds, a shift from the casual optimism of summer to the reservation and introversion of winter. Unfamiliar with the New York climes, you see, the nascent season in October made me quiver with nervous excitement.

It is with disappointment, then, that as the calendar determines the onset of spring I must let go of my fear of winter. There was snow, sure. The mercury dropped well below zero for a couple of weeks, okay. I saw cars sliding down hills, impotent against the ice, fine. But that all happens in Christchurch. And Christchurch is about as exotic as a haemorrhoid. I wanted doors to be immobile against great flurries of ice, roofs to collapse under the weight of sleet and slush, school to be cancelled because of impassable paths. I wanted to have to remain indoors because roaming outside would, like ninety-seconds in the Arctic, render my feeble body a glaucous blue. I wanted, if I’m being honest, injury and terror, disaster and abject misery. There was none and, hence, Scheissenbedauern becomes appropriate.

(Part of the reason there were no problems is that this city’s inhabitants are proficient—nay, masterful—at managing whatever inclemency the skies divvy out. At the first sign of sediment the pavements were dusted with thick granules of salt, after every inch of snow that fell walkways were cleared with an arsenal of shovels and spades. All these actions were performed with the same monotonous regularity that a factory worker inspects product, they were as natural as).

So, spring’s here, summer’s coming. So it goes. And after four paragraphs on the weather I shall move on.

***

I recently learned that I will be in New York City for at least another two years. Previously I was, in all likelihood, to return to New Zealand this May. To accommodate this extended stay, a significant shift in mindset is required.

I have lived in New York, on Manhattan, in Harlem, for eight months. Every day I have caught the same train from the same subway station, every week I have bought groceries from the same market. Despite this regularity, this routine, there is little that binds me to this city. It is difficult, for example, to think of myself as anything more than a tolerated guest in this neighbourhood.* (Antilogous perhaps—and here we return to the theme of words-in-other-languages-that-have-no-direct-equivalent-in-English— is the example of the Māori word, turangawaewae, which crudely translated becomes ‘place to stand’. Extending the translation, turangawaewae refers to a place where one has a sense of belonging, an ancestral homeland. I find that the best approximation for one’s turangawaewae is the place that, if you were to die tomorrow, you would like to be buried).

While this is no doubt attributable, at least in part, to my non-comprehension of Spanish, there are other factors. I have mentioned previously that New York is a city of transients. In a great tidal movement of blood and tissue, millions of people alight then leave the island every day. Every year millions more come to settle in one of the five boroughs or depart to populate somewhere else.

Even what remains—the buildings, the streets, the sewers—lack permanence (especially since two of the great symbols of the city were razed seven years ago. So it goes). The City is a vehicle, a chaotic junk made from concrete and steel. It lists, careens from one side to the next, is kept afloat by coincidence and coincidence only. It is, for now, a location at which meaning and novelty radiate in ever-widening circles.

* I should mention that while the disconnect between the psyche and City can be disorienting, there is a peculiar—and sometimes exhilarating—freedom in having no roots, something akin to that felt by nomads whose incessant wandering makes them at home everywhere and nowhere.

2008-03-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, March '08
More photos posted here.

23 March '08

2008-03-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

There is a soldier in Heller’s Catch 22 who falls in love with a prostitute. The prostitute initially shuns him as he takes her to dinner, buys her presents, and pays her just to dine. She laughs at him when he dissuades her from sleeping with other men and humiliates him in front of his peers. The more desperately he pursues her, the more mocking she becomes. That is until, by some dint of coincidence—a forced night-in because of a bomb threat, perhaps—she gets a good night’s sleep.

As it turns out, the prostitute was simply tired. Not just tired but haggard and exhausted, somnolent to the extreme, weary from the rigours of war. After sleeping through the night and most of the day, the prostitute wakes and spies the smitten soldier next to her. In her refreshed state she falls in love, ceases prostituting herself and the two hold hands and walk towards the sunset (except that, in classic Hellerian fashion the soldier, a pilot, dies in a dog-fight the next day).

The reason I bring all this up is that the situation is—in some respects—similar to mine. For the last eight nights I have been awake and inebriated and for the last eight days I have, variously, navigated unforgiving US airports, participated in tedious conference workshops, and kept a car glued to the white line at the edge of the road as miles and miles tick over with the regularity of a metronome. Thus, I have sympathy for the prostitute’s plight. There is, after all, nothing in the world that glows with holy radiance when the eyes can barely remain open. And there is nothing that comes close to the raw, instinctive, physical appeal of peaceful and uninterrupted sleep when the one is tired.

It was a testing drive, for example, from Boston to Montreal in the morning after Saint Patrick’s Day. Absurdly, of the five grown men in the car, I was the only one qualified to drive. As the other four slept, their heads listing from one axis to the next as the camber of the road changed, I drove. As the other four sated their thirst and hunger with juice and fruit, I sipped noxious coffee and scoffed sugary bars in an effort to remain alert. As the others woke, refreshed and jocund, I scowled at them and complained. There were parts of the journey when, desperate for company, I broke suddenly or took a corner just harder than I needed to, so that the sleeping passengers would wake. It was in this manner that we tore from city to city in a car resembling the bizarre mutant child of a spaceship and a drunken wrestler. It was the same car, actually—complete with dents, jammed trunk and game speakers—that ferried me et al around Canada on the last trip.

Montreal was, this time around, grey and cold. The permanent snow that was powdery and light on my last visit was, like an acne-scarred face, pocked with the holes of raindrops. Footpaths and streets were covered in ice and dirty snow, gutters ran rivers of brown slush and detritus. When the skies weren’t beating down with frigid rain, gusts shook the road signs on the canyon streets. The city itself is flat, monochrome, industrial, soviet. The only discernable landmark is the incongruous Olympic tower, a throw-back to a discarded nineteen-seventies aesthetic.

Still, I am rather infatuated with Montreal. There are many—too many—pretty cities in the world. Cities where the streets form neat cross-work patterns, where building-lights glitter and reflect in some serene waterway, where everything works, where the weather is balmy, the people friendly, where historical sites proliferate. These cities get tiresome quickly. Once the tourist has taken a photo of the church and the mountain and the statue there is little left to do, and the sanitised, sterilised atmosphere takes hold. Montreal and New York are similar. In New York, for example, once you have seen the Statue of Liberty, climbed the Empire State Building and walked the Brooklyn Bridge there is little, ostensibly, left to do. The most rewarding experience in New York is distinct from all the obvious landmarks. Just walking in this city, just sitting on a bench is fulfilling. New York, like Montreal, has a depth that transcends superficial beauty. Both cities, perhaps because they are so ugly, are thriving in the arts, music and literature. Both cities reward time spent, time doing little, time in stasis.

A fitting contrast to the previous week, then, when on the largesse of the United States Department of State one-hundred and forty-three other Fulbrighters from seventy-or-so countries and I holed up in a four-star hotel in the New Mexican desert under a mountain that, at in the late evening, glowed incandescent from the collected light of the day. This is New Mexico between seasons, a place so dry and brittle that dust clouds take their place as the demented doppelgangers of clouds. If it weren’t so cold, every inhalation would be like sucking down the air from a furnace, every exhalation a re-enactment of a volcano’s eruption.

The conference itself was characterised by what conferences are usually characterised by— seminars, workshops, seedy attempts at networking—and is therefore uninteresting. What is perhaps more interesting is that which occurred on the final night. As context, the hotel we were staying is located on the reservation of the Santa Ana Pueblo. After Alaska, New Mexico is the state with the highest proportion of Native Americans. Indeed, reservations dot the state’s topography like freckles. Our hotel capitalised on this, lavishing the rooms and lobbies and restaurants and halls and bars with native memorabilia. That memorabilia was, however, the end of it. Although we were taken to the state’s capital to talk with legislators, although we were imbued with the history of the state and its geography, there was no further mention of the myriad tribes that reside in the area, no talk of colonisation, of the rich cultural diversity that is unique—in the entire North American continent—to New Mexico and perhaps a few other states.

This was all to change, it seemed, on the final night when, as I was told by some salivating student, a troupe of Native American dancers—referred to by organising committee, without a hint of irony, as ‘the native dancers’—was to entertain the dining Fulbrighters. The dancers, it seemed, were to provide the cultural experience we had all been lacking.

Like my friend and colleague who argues her point here, I felt deep disquiet as the dancers emerged and chanted, as the diners watched then grew impatient and returned to talking and eating, and finally as most of the one-hundred and forty-three other Fulbrighters from seventy-or-so countries gushingly rushed onto the stage to have their photos taken next to the dancers. The disquiet gave rise to predictable questions: why would the dancers reduce themselves to this? Why would they ‘reduce’ their—presumably sacred—dances to token entertainment?

Unlike my friend and colleague though, I cannot come to a firm position. After all, what right do I have to impose my notions of what should be culturally sacred? Who am I to question what is authentic? Who am I to tell someone they are being objectified? Who am I to object if someone chooses to perform whatever they choose to perform for money? What right do I have to tell someone what they should do—or not do—with the material aspects of their culture? The answer to these questions is, perhaps, more complex than a simple ‘no’. Decades of inequality and centuries (millennia?) of fascination with the exotic determine that it must be. Nonetheless, because of the questions above I find it difficult to condemn, without equivocation, that final night of the Fulbright conference. To do so, it seems, would be to reinforce the reduction in the dancers’ agency.

***

In what is perhaps the greatest achievement of these transmissions so far, I have been informed that the last one about Nick Cave and his impish posse was banned by the Chinese government. The protective and paternal arms of China’s censors extend, like the Great Wall, in a cool embrace around the country. Any news website that criticises—or even discusses—the government is blocked. Many websites, like that of CNN, are blocked arbitrarily. So it goes.

When I was last in China I woke one day to find that all the internet cafes in the country had been shut down by order of the central government. The reason, as the government’s spokesperson insisted, was that a fire had broken out in one of the many cafes in Beijing and thus all cafes, throughout the 9,596,960 square kilometres that constitute China needed to be ‘inspected’. Although there’s much to be desired in the rule of a tyrant, by god they’re efficient.

2008-03-10T19:17:00.001-07:00

New York, March '08

2008-03-09T19:32:00.000-07:00

New York, January '08

9 March ‘08

2008-03-09T19:31:00.001-07:00

Nick Cave entered from the right and departed the left. He wore a black suit and white shirt, had a head of receding black hair and a skinny black line on his top lip. Next to him on one side was an imp with a child’s guitar and a full beard. Anent the other were a four-tier keyboard and a mess of pedals, leads and amps. Behind him were two drum-sets, each sending claps of deranged thunder with the regularity of a heartbeat. The combined sound he and the Bad Seeds made was that which would ooze from a metallurgic pit. It was a rumble from the belly and a screech from the diaphragm, a clapper striking a white-hot bell that peals then recedes leaving the air ringing with vacuitous silence. The combined image he and his band presented was that of a demonic, writhing dance in Hades.

It was a fine concert, a messianic concert, a concert with music that is now etched in the brain with the tenacity of a drill-bit.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds followed Dizzie Rascal, St Vincent, Jose Gonzales and others. In between acts a comedian desperately tried to gain mileage from hipster jokes. Desperately because the audience was as unidirectional as a torpedo; the only act of the night, as far as they were concerned, was the finale. Jose Gonzales, for example, singing with an acoustic guitar, was impotent against a restless, talkative crowd. And Dizzie Rascal, a stalwart member of the UK hip-hop scene, though impassioned and enthusiastic was about as relevant to the mainly thirty-something audience as African famine is to the world’s middle-class. Even worse were the Plug Music Awards—ostensibly the primary reason for the night—which, like the pre-Cave acts, were borne as necessary chore. The disinterest of the audience is perhaps understandable. Nick Cave is, after all, in the [animate] musical pantheon with the likes of Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen, Neil Young et al.

He is thick with history and has an oeuvre diverse enough to appeal to most demographics. As a performer he is a tall, lanky, apparition of a man, half demon half sprite. The music he produces, when he’s on form, is half heavenly, half ghoulish. And like all great art that is spawned in the conflict between good and evil, attraction and repulsion, love and hate, Cave’s music resonates with blinding energy and maniacal force. William Blake wrote that he ‘saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock’ who with corroding fires wrote prophecies for those on earth. Nick Cave in his best moments is that devil on the rock, gorging on blood and bones and spitting out the fibrous innards. He is unrestrained and hedonistic. And so he should be, after all, ‘those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained’.

This week I head to Albuquerque, New Mexico for a ‘Fulbright Enrichment Seminar’. I do not know, yet, just how I will be enriched—reports from those currently at similar conferences in other parts of the country talk of mock elections, high-school talks, and dinners with local families… just the sort of contrived events that normally dominate such gatherings—but there’s always hope, I suppose. Next Sunday I arrive in New York at midnight, hire a car, fill it with gas and return to the heavy sky and sweeping horizon of Canada.

2008-02-29T22:02:00.001-08:00

New York, February '08

(last photo of the ol' girl, I promise)

29 February '08

2008-02-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people… Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is a blasphemy. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant look which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal illusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

I am in possession of a rather curious trait. This trait determines that I am deeply impressed by most of what my senses pick up. That is, most books, movies, sights, et cetera leave a mark that while delible, is not easily erased. Thus, after seeing Fight Club I become violent. After seeing the Last Samurai I investigate the martial arts. After reading Blake I source the opiates and delve into mysticism. After reading Raymond Carver I mistrust women and relationships and drink whiskey like water.

Perhaps this is not curious at all, perhaps most people are subject to it (it is surely the psychological trait of our species that allows advertisers to profit). Whatever the case, Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book I have been leaning on for a week-or-so, has leeched its way, by process of osmosis I suppose, through my skin, tissue and blood and has settled like plaque on the bone. I should preface what follows here with the assertion that I really am fond of this country; more particularly, this city. I am a vocal proponent of New York and the United States (indeed, I have often been in the peculiar position of defending America to Americans—many citizens I’ve met here a deeply apologetic about their country, their leaders, their domestic and foreign policy, et cetera—by asserting, as I do believe, that no country in the same position as the United States could claim to have done anything differently. Humans are, after all, the same the world over).

Back to the book, then. After reading the opening pages I saw a movie with some friends. As we sat down, a great guffaw erupted from the seats behind. I looked back to see a saggy man fisting big handfuls of popcorn. Staring at him was like staring at an old sock on a clothesline. His eyes were fat black slugs sunk in pink holes, the skin on his neck dripped to his chest. He was vulgar. In a children’s book snakes would be crawling out his armpits. If the Grimms had seen him he would have been immortalised sitting atop a throne atop a mountain eating children like drumsticks. If Shakespeare had written of him, the man would skulk around on stage executing his wives and eventually dying of syphilis. The man laughed when there weren’t jokes, talked when there were silences, belched at the climax and farted at the dénouement.

It is possible, of course, that I imagined the man. Or that he was not, in fact, as depraved as I have described. Whatever the case, it matters little (if he didn’t exist then, he does now, so it goes). The book, for the moment, has infected me, thickened my blood, turned my skin wan, a pallor more fitting of an apparition. The man is a symptom of this blood-thickening, of this infection. Events that last week I would have laughed at, or at least dismissed as curiosities, this week seem to confirm the myth of this country as, so says Miller, ‘a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed’.

It is possible that the plaque will crumble away—I started taking vitamins today and bought mouthwash to spur the process—and that the bad taste which lingers currently will be replaced. Until it does, however, experiences give way to a sickly, synthetic aftertaste, like that left behind after eating cheap chocolate or drinking diet soda. A cleansing ritual needs to be performed, a sacrifice of the highest order, something nascent and forged in fire that emerges spitting and steaming, drawing bitter effluvia from the body with the force generated by the spinning earth. Either that or I shall date a cheerleader and watch a romantic comedy. The end point, in all likelihood, will be much the same.

***

In other news, school continues to run its course. In a little over two months I will have finished the coursework component of my Master’s. In a little over two weeks I will know whether I am to remain in New York until May ’08 or May ’10. In the meantime, little changes. The City exacts its tidal drag, the atmosphere is frigid, the water from the tap, sharp. Little changes when change itself is the standard.

* The rest of the Miller quote is as follows:

Returning to the boat we passed bridges, railroad tracks, warehouses, factories, wharves and what not. It was like following in the wake of a demented giant who had sown the earth with crazy dreams… It was a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed

** Today is the twenty-ninth day of February, a day that has occurred five-hundred-and-two times since the birth of Christ. At the time Christ was born, the Romans had no numeral for (and therefore, based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis no comprehension of) ‘zero’.

2008-02-22T11:43:00.001-08:00

New York, February '08 (click to enlarge)

(additional photos here)

22 February '08

2008-02-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

On arriving in New York City, one of the few discrepancies between my expectations and the city as it lies (as I have maintained on other occasions, there is an uncanny similarity between the two) was the lack of graffiti.

In due course I learnt that during his 1990s tenure, his righteousness Mayor Giuliani, campaigned to render wholesome the mean streets of New York. During his campaign those troublesome squeegee bandits were excised, dark and steaming alleys were flooded with light and disinfected with fire-hoses, the nomad homeless and the ubiquitous crack dealers were pushed to the boroughs, Times Square’s adult stores were razed and replaced with neon Disney-o-rama, Williamsburg became the old East Village, Harlem became the old Upper West Side, the Bronx became the old Harlem. In short, the city was stripped bare and freshly painted, sanitized and sterilized, made family-friendly and welcoming, less Gotham more Smallville, less melee more milieu. And with sterilisation comes sterility. So it goes.

Those who have been here a while disagree on whether the sanitisation was positive. Many rue the loss of character, more rue the rise in rent and consequent need to move to the odious suburbs where bus-stops and discount stores reign. Others celebrate the drop in crime and the reduction in scattered piles of trash. Whatever the case, certainly the New York of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs et al is a world away from today’s. Theirs was as raw as a scar, a frontier-land wet with the creative and the new, a foul mix of drugs and sex and bad jazz, but a mix that yielded poetry, art and beatific energy. Although that I haven’t yet been mugged is at least in part due to the white-wash and fire-hose, I cannot help but feel nostalgic for a place I have never even known, the New York of old. While this city is still one of great frontiers of the world, art it seems has moved off the island and into the dark interior. And the vacuum the artists left behind was filled with fanny-pack-toting tourists and skinny hipsters, all drunk on their own particular version of the City (the tourists sigh, speak in whispers, and click their cameras at the cavernous rent left behind by the twin towers, the hipsters sit on the pavements and smoke cigarettes and congratulate themselves on setting the precedent for cool). But then perhaps I am no different. One day I will take a photo of the house where Kerouac spent weeks at a hot-keyed typewriter chattering out one-hundred feet of palimpsest. One day I will walk down a street in blue-jeans, hands in pockets, head bowed against the cold, a smiling girl clasping my arm, a la Dylan’s Freewheelin’. I have already portrayed the city as a furnace for the apocalypse—that image is now so well entrenched in my psyche I have dreams of the four riders galloping down Broadway—and will do so again. I have also repeatedly used the metaphor of the frontier, a metaphor I believe in. Not for geography, of course—there is, after all, little left to discover in the world (that said, there is a group of determined trackers in New Zealand who believe that moose exist in Fiordland and spend much of their time tracking the brutes. So far their search has yielded little other than grainy footage and a tuft of hair. Similarly, when a helicopter crashed en route from one major North Island town to another, searchers weren’t able to find it for weeks, so superficial is the human colonisation of the land. The point being that even in a country as small as New Zealand there are tracts of land so dense that if there ever were footprints on the soil they were made a hundred years ago by some lost hiker)—but for economics and politics, both of which are largely decided here. The beauty of a frontier, I guess, is that is depends on change. The permanence of the flux endues the frontier with its particular energy and charisma. The only downside is that there’s no place or sympathy for nostalgia. What’s done is done. So it goes.

Back to the graffiti then. A treat it was to catch a train to Queens and come across a building, loosely called a museum, dripping with the stuff. Every surface—ledge, wall, fence, floor, whether plane or in relief—of the building, which occupies an entire block, is covered in the most exquisite art. Some of it stylised, bold, two-dimensional, striking. Some of it as intricate and elaborate as a master’s oil painting (indeed, there was a Mona Lisa on the building that rivalled Da Vinci’s for finery). See photo below of one of the walls.

***

This transmission is a rather auspicious one, the twenty-fifth so far. I’ve been in New York for over six months, now. And it is increasingly likely that I will be here for another twenty-four. If it wasn’t for the injection of horizon and heavy sky on, for instance, the Canada road-trip, the prospect of two further years would be a daunting one. After all, one can only live in a canyon for so long before one craves the light.

I woke up this morning to four inches of snow on the ledge outside my window. In the last two hours that four inches has turned into five. The city has a pillow pressed to its face: a sky that is nondescript, uniform, blanket. In a few hours it is predicted that the snowfall will turn into rainfall and thus the snow will turn into sludge. Little here is permanent. So it goes.

2008-02-22T11:30:00.001-08:00

New York, February '08 (click to enlarge)

2008-02-15T17:23:00.001-08:00

New York, February '08

15 February '08

2008-02-15T17:22:00.001-08:00

It was Valentine’s Day in

America

yesterday. I say ‘in

America

’ because there is no other country I have visited that adopts such absurd holidays with the same kind of breathless fervour that the

United States

does. This country lurches from one celebration to the next. A few days after Christmas, tweaks were made to shop foyers and facades to transform them into citadels of New Year-o-rama. A few days into the New Year, the foyers and facades were tweaked again in expectation of Valentine’s Day. In a few days, I expect there will be further tweaking so that Saint Patrick’s Day, or Easter, or Founder’s Day, or Independence Day can be celebrated in the correct manner. That is, with hordes of inflated balloons, festive hats, emblazoned tee-shirts, novelty glasses, or any combination thereof.

My output, of late, has been low. I feel bad about it, mainly because writing of this nature requires discipline and regularity lest it fall away altogether. The low output has its genesis in a few events. The first—quite concrete—is that a number of friends have made their way through my apartment over the last month. The other, more abstract, is that I’ve sunk into a rather powerful creative and emotional torpor. The origins of this torpor are many and varied and too complex to get into here. And I wouldn’t mention it except as an excuse for a fusty transmission. It is just that in this state the mind is sluggish, the body lethargic, nascent ideas are stillborn and the intellect lists in and out of consciousness and is mostly replaced by a dumb laugh at the foolishness of inane characters on television sitcoms.

Of course there has been much happening. As I have stated and restated and will do so again, New York has no sympathy for idleness. So much of this city is built on the idea of movement and flux—millions of students, travellers, workers drift on and off the island every day—that there is the simple expectation that those of use who are left behind will, like the tides against the moon, be pulled into activity by the immense force generated by so much movement.

For example, last week I visited the Museum of Natural History, where to access the South Pacific Peoples exhibit you must first pass the primates, then the Native Americans, all frozen in ludicrously-natural-and-therefore-all-the-more-unnatural poses. And all testament the evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth and parts of the twentieth century and, even today, pervade scholarship and popular opinion with an age-old potency. There was, of course, no exhibit of colonizing white men or even of picket-fence suburbia. The natives, it seems, are still fascinating as static exoticisations.

But more on that some other time. Now there is work to be done to redeem myself from this funk, gain a level, and take aim at something great.

2008-02-04T15:13:00.001-08:00

Washington, December '07

25 January '08

2008-02-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

I am going to abandon the regular tone of these transmissions, for the moment, in favour of that more vitriolic. This week, after the miles and miles of Canadian highway where the horizon stretches in a great circumference from pole to pole, I returned to Columbia for the first week of the spring semester, the final semester of coursework required for my degree.

As I mentioned in an earlier transmission, I had very high expectations of Columbia as some sort of bastion for the intellect, a university at the vanguard of research, at the coal-face of all that is new and changing and exciting about this usually dry academic world. I had further expectations that because of the absurd, almost grotesque amount of money that myself and my family needed to scrape together to pay for a year’s tuition,¹ I would be treated by the university the same way a patron with Bennys dripping from his back-pocket is treated by the staff of a hotel. I do not mind that the first expectation was not met. After all, it would be naïve to think that the intellectual rigour of one institution is markedly different from that of another. Great minds exist universally, institutions exist merely to contain and direct them. And I do not mind that I am not treated as a celebrity. That expectation, too, would be naïve given that in a lifetime I am unlikely to earn what the university is bequeathed most days.

What irks me, and what has been compounded this week, is the complete antipathy, the arrogant indifference, the institutionalised marginalisation that Master’s students are met with at Columbia. Example: one component of the MA degree is a thesis. A thesis requires a supervisor. Last semester, after much wrangling, I managed to meet with a professor whose interests aligned with mine. That professor, after some deliberation, decided he did not ‘have the time’ to supervise me. ‘Fair enough’, says me, ‘I’ll try someone else’. That I did, only to receive the same answer. Beginning to lose hope, I tried again, with the same result. One of the great fallacies of the academy—and I’m sure this is not restricted to Columbia—is that once faculty are conferred tenure, there is very little impetus for them to do, well, anything. Teaching becomes an obligation, supervising a distasteful affair with no real reward, research a token exercise to keep up appearances. Thus, the lowly MA student enters his second semester unsupervised, seeking—with the same desperation that a dog at the pound seeks an owner—the acceptance of a professor. Example two: this semester I enrolled early for an anthropology class that seemed particularly interesting. During the first iteration of this class it was clear that there were more people who wanted to take it than there were spaces. Even though there were non-anthropology students in the class, it was the anthropology MA students who were excised, cut from the class like some festering ganglia, the scalpel a token email professing the professor’s ‘profound apologies’. When I emailed the professor asking for his rationale in cutting students, he did not answer.

These examples may seem petty to an outsider, I do not know. While they are, of course, subjective generalisations, they are examples shared by many of the other MA students at this university, and others. Given that Columbia is unlikely to offer some prostrate overture by itself, I will have to bring the situation to its attention.

***

As I mentioned, this week marked the return to school after a month of break. The last few days of that break were spent as the last week was, driving. Driving relentlessly in that spaceship minivan that, like Bucephalus, brought me home to victory, in the end. Now it is a new semester and a new year. There is much to be done. Many trees to rattle and many strides to take, many ideas to fructuate. There’s revolution in the air.²

***

¹ The cost for two semesters at Columbia as an MA student is over $36,000 US dollars. Most doctoral students, in comparison, pay nothing, have their housing taken care of and are provided a monthly stipend.

² Well, the revolution was stymied by technology. My laptop, for reasons I prefer not to expand on, toppled from my window ledge and fell ten metres to its ignominious final position as a scattered mess on the concrete, its parts distributed in a sick constellation of plastic, wire and steel, its insides revealed with the same disinterest as a stripper reveals her body. Whatever the cause (okay, the explanation: my laptop overheats, my room is often tropical, I was talking to my sister on Skype when the computer overheated and shutdown, I perched it on the window ledge so I could continue talking, the last thing my sister heard was “oh shit” then the ominous sound of the phone being disconnected (‘ominous’ because I’m in Harlem), the laptop, my main vehicle for communicating with the world, spent the first part of the week being further dismembered in an attempt to save my data and the second part of the week first in a garbage can, then a garbage truck, and now, presumably, lies in state beneath a pile of rotting pizza and plastic bags. The computer has now been replaced, most of the data saved, and with the onset of school work all, including the regularity of these transmissions, returns to normal.

2008-01-20T16:15:00.001-08:00

Quebec City, January '08

20 January, '08

2008-01-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

New York is behind me, by ‘miles and inclinations’. For a good part of the last three days I have kept the front-right tire glued to the white line in the middle of the highway as mile after mile of tarmac, concrete and snow stretch and shrink and gain perspective in a thin trail aimed at the horizon. New York to Boston to Quebec City to Montreal to Toronto to New York. Two thousand five hundred kilometres, sixteen-hundred miles, all in a beige minivan, all with ballad and anthem and ditty emanating from the two working speakers, all with fine company and bad food, all with the unremitting desire to keep moving, to—feeling like Moriarty—pursue imminence, to crave what’s ahead, always ahead.

Most of the driving was done at night. The headlights on the rental were feeble—a torch with weak batteries—illuminating a length of road too short to allow for adequate response, and therefore me at the wheel craning my neck at the windscreen, studying the white line, hugging the white line, worshipping at the church of the white line until it levitated from the road, came over the bonnet, past the windscreen wipers, skirted the eyeball and lodged itself next to the optic nerve. Following—no, chasing—the white line become a religion and driving prayer, accelerating like chanting ohm until absolution explodes in cosmic fury: absolution behind the wheel the holy state, the perfect speed, where cars are passed in a gentle weave, the camber of corners and the chassis merge and harmonise and the car drives itself and the meditative Zen of it all makes the lights of small towns lose definition and the hulking number of remaining miles topple like a slot machine.

And so one night of such driving, with red eyes and an aching back, we crossed the moonlit tundra of south-eastern Canada, the sides of the highway encroaching on the car as four-lane America gave way to two-lanes, all the time the air outside falling colder until the windows of the car were slick ice and the bubble of warm air around us felt fragile in comparison. This is how we arrived in Quebec City, thrust into traffic lights and intersections and buildings after six hundred miles of highway where the warning signs about moose conjured cervine spectres in every shadow and dark, silhouetted trees lined both sides and grew soft into the darkness.

When we arrived, in the very early morning, the temperature was minus sixteen. When we woke, the sun was out and the temperature was a tepid minus five. The part of Quebec City that is old comes replete with churches, grand arches, Romanic columns and cobbled pavements. All of these were witnessed by Jon*, Toby and I whilst wrapped in as many layers as movement would allow. Minus six, you see, even with a light breeze, causes the body to leak warmth so quickly that within a minute all that is left is that which you can catch with folded arms and head bent forward. We did not, do not, have the right clothes and thus dashed from site to sight and then to a coffee shop for warmth.

Aside from the beauty of Quebec City—said churches, arches, columns and pavements were, indeed, stunning, though after seeing EuroDisney’s imitation it is difficult to see them as anything but a thin façade—what most struck me was the frozen sea. In my last transmission I talked, briefly, about the alien nature of the landscape in Oslo. In Quebec City, this alienation was even more profound. The city sits at the edge of an inlet fed by the North Atlantic Ocean. In winter, parts of this inlet freeze over, creating landscapes so solid and still that without prior knowledge I would not have known that beneath the ice and snow lay salt water. A frozen ocean is, in the limited scope of my experience, as cataclysmic as rivers turning blood red or the earth finally giving way to the oppressive weight of gravity, events so holy and unholy they emanate a sacred aura, transforming the familiar and tame to the alien and wild.

***

Included with our rental van was a GPS unit: a calculator-sized screen personified by a soft and stuttering feminine voice, resembling—as Jon noted—Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. Clara as she became known, the eponymous descendent of Foster’s character, attached herself to the dash and thenceforth the cabin rang with the peal of her directions. Clara’s usefulness, however, is difficult to gauge. By some dint of technology, Clara was usually about six seconds behind the actual location of the car. Thus, her directions sometimes came six-seconds after their usefulness expired and we had departed on some other course. Throughout this ordeal Clara did not remonstrate nor snarl. Even when the blunders were mine she silently—obediently—recalculated the route and changed her instructions. If there was admonishment, it was silent. If there were repercussions, I did not notice.

Before maps, travellers would have consulted the stars and read the myriad cardinal signs present in nature. Before Clara, the traveller would have consulted maps and paid attention to road signs. With Clara, the three of us listened only to music and watched only the cars in front. Thus, when Clara was errant we were lost. Sans global-positioning we were floating in space, errant and clueless travellers.

Clara is representative of one of the great fallacies of technology. Most of it, when you really consider it, is of negligible use. There is very little about a cellphone, for example, that redeems its obnoxious presence. The only time I have really needed, needed, to use my cellphone was when my car broke down in the Wanganui back-blocks. Of course, in that instance, I was out of range and the device was useless.

***

Today we begin the long stretch home, skirting the great lakes, driving through mile after mile of semi-industrial, semi-residential squalor, all of it testament to our species’ profound ability to transform the landscape, to build and build and level and level until everything is uniformly drab, uniformly human, and not a bit natural.

*see Jon’s perspective on the trip at knotstiedinstrings.wordpress.com

See photos from the trip at:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129706&l=a82e5&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129787&l=74ceb&id=585700346

2008-01-12T13:37:00.001-08:00

Oslo, January '07

(more photos at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=82654&l=d244a&id=585700346 and http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81967&l=f4afb&id=585700346)

12 January '07

2008-01-12T13:25:00.001-08:00

A couple of nights ago I flew back into New York. When I first arrived here, five months ago today, I requested a window seat. As the plane came down over the city I pressed my face to the Perspex and marvelled at the city lights that spread like a bushfire from horizon to horizon. This time, in a sterile airport in Dusseldorf, I requested an aisle seat—the more practical option—and gave but glancing attention to the city as the plane descended, preferring instead to ready my carry-on for swift alightment. Later, the shepherding through border control, then baggage collection, then customs, then transport home was met with grim resignation rather than nervous excitement.

While the loss of novelty may initially seem just that, a loss, in its place came an altogether new feeling: familiarity. Arriving in New York, this time around, was arriving home. Although most of my friends are away, and the route home from the airport was novel, there is enough that I know in this city to feel comfort just being here—the idiosyncrasies of the subway, the manner in which you hold your head when you walk in my neighbourhood, the twist-jerk-turn the mailbox lock requires—all of these contribute to a sense of belonging that, for the moment at least, is enough.*

The last few days in Oslo were covered in a layer of snow. A thick layer, as light as down, punctured only by the intermittent hoof-prints of various woodland creatures. Snow is still novel for me, a strange and alien substance. In response to my yearning for New Zealand summer after witnessing photos of bush, bach and beach, a friend remarked that my photos of Oslo induce quite the opposite response. New Zealanders are—to varying extents, granted—creatures of the landscape. Whether it is a deep-rooted symptom of our settler heritage, an extension of the Māori concept of turangawaewae, or some other psychological condition, there exists a heavy reliance on the landscape as a marker of identity. When I yearn for New Zealand, I yearn for the unique and ubiquitous rocky coastline and scraggy bush. And when faced with a different—violently different—landscape it is difficult to understand it with anything but the mute fascination that a visitor ‘understands’ a beast at the zoo. There is distance from it, little engagement with it, a curious observance of it. As such, my friend felt no connection with the Norwegian landscape as depicted in my photos and I, while there, was a disconnected spectator.

The last few days in Oslo also saw me increasingly astounded at the expense of the place. Four-dollars for can of vending-machine coke. Six dollars for a plain coffee. Eight dollars for a loaf of bread. If it wasn’t for the largesse of my family I would have exhausted in two weeks what I spend in New York in two months. I just cannot understand how the same product service can be so absurdly different from one country to the next. Especially when the countries run up against each other, are complicit in the same union, work from the same currency.

***

A friend from New Zealand has just arrived and will stay a day or three. On Monday we set off for Boston, then Montreal, then Quebec City, then Toronto, then the Niagara Falls, then home. All of this in a minivan with a dent in the door and a trunk that doesn’t open, on the right side of the road in the ice. There will, however, be good company, a fine soundtrack and another country to transgress.

* (Also, typically New York, were the occupants of my subway-carriage home. Opposite me was a bald albino repeating in a resounding clamour the financial advice proffered from the priest in his headphones. At one end was a Haitian princess in full garb, with a two-foot hat and hollow, unsmiling eyes. At the other a homeless man resplendent on a nest of plastic bags chuckling to himself while suckling on a bottle of anonymous fluid).

Oslo, 4 January '08

2008-01-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

Katherine Mansfield noted that there ‘there is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw’.

Waking in Oslo, just before midday, with the sun at its zenith slung low in the sky, shrill crystallised rays clip the tops of trees, reflect and are refracted by the snow and ice and cast the city in a light akin to that described by Mansfield. These are high-pitched rays, rays on the edge of the tonal spectrum, rays coming not from a source of light but from darkness in the negative—darkness inverted—grey rays that like heat-seeking rockets, programmed, find a retina with the precision of a scalpel, rays that reduce sunglasses to a whimper, rays so sharp and keen most parts of the world can only accommodate them for one hour a day, one season a year. This is winter in Norway, where a hand lodged between forehead and sky is the only way to bring to relief objects directly in front of you, and even that hand glows with a halo that itself is sharp enough to punish more than a casual glance. Norway in winter is twilight. Norway in winter is betwixt and between, neither here nor there, a integer or a fraction, a solo numerator, one arch of the rosy crucifixion, a masturbating Adam, an amputated Jesus, a purgatory so profound that green foliage and brown trunks turn black, white is illuminated holy, frozen tundra appear at night great wastelands to Hades or mythological landscapes of the frozen lunar poles. A winter where the sun makes oblique and hurried arcs from horizon to horizon and at night an unknown light source fires the frosted trees, houses, cars and streets a pale and ghostly hue. A winter where every breath is a cloud of steam, every indoor passage an elegant ritual of dressing and undressing. A winter where the New Year is marked by the cascading slipstream of bonfire sparks and the horizon is lit up with the thunder and lightshow of fireworks as dull and mute air-strikes in a distant town.

In Norway I paid twenty New Zealand dollars for a whiskey and dry. In Norway I discovered that I really do snore. Not just snore, but cough out great sonorous, startorian gasps—enough to prompt an industrious uncle, when faced with the problem of woken and complaining children sleeping in the same room, to stuff their ears with plugs and hold them in with duct tape. Said uncle even brought duct tape to Paris and, to his credit, used it often. Whether he used it because he brought it rather than because of an innate need to have duct tape is hard to say. He would argue that it was essential, being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I’m not so sure—that reverberate and perplex others while leaving me restfully sleeping. Snoring is a rather peculiar affliction. I have no control over it and it has no discernable effect on my own health. An analogy: I once lived in a house that, in its decrepitude, was an anomaly in an otherwise very fine neighbourhood. I wondered, often, where the exact point in the house’s decrepitude would be when it started to negatively affect the value of the houses adjacent. That is, if my house had a slumping ceiling, a blotchy paint-job and overgrown lawns, it would, presumably, detract from the value of the house next door. Thus, it would be economical for the next door neighbour to invest in the repair of my property as that investment would add value to their own. Snoring, while having no effect on me personally, affects those around me. It seems that I have reached the point where those around me are losing sleep themselves because of it. What happens next, I know not. And yes, twenty dollars for a whisky. Fifteen for a beer. Ten for a Big-Mac. The price of, well, everything in this country is absurd, nay grotesque, nay odious! That such a discrepancy can exist between one country and the next is, again, beyond me.

It's a Small World After All EuroDisney, December '07

Norway, it seems, in sharp contrast to my last two days in Paris. Or, rather, at the Paris EuroDisney. The theme park is an almost perfect institution. It is both the source of the craving (escapism, thrill, fantasy, et cetera) and the source of the fix (themed ‘wonderlands’, rollercoaster-esque rides, ‘magical’ lands). EuroDisney, and presumably its other iterations are a a perfect one and minus-one, the yin and the yang, hot and cold, dharma and karma, déjà vu and jamais vu. The park as a mathematical formula would sum at zero. It is the alpha and omega, literally, the beginning and the end. EuroDisney is set apart from Paris. From the centre of the city it takes about thirty minutes to reach the park. Surrounding the park is a monopoly set of hotels and motels designed to accommodate the park’s patrons. Connecting these hotels and motels with the park is a series of shuttles and busses. Servicing these hotels and motels, as well as the park itself, is an assortment of restaurants, souvenir stores, and imitation gimmicks. Another analogy: a common profession for anthropologists to pursue is advertising. Companies pay anthropologists to identify ways in which products can be more successfully marketed. In this manner, in one instance, an anthropologist was called on to help market a particular game. This anthropologist began by visiting a school and identifying the most ‘popular’ students. Once this task was complete, six of the most popular children were given the game, along with an extra to give to a friend. Within a week nearly student at the school wanted the game. Within two weeks nearly every student at the school had the game.

Returning to EuroDisney, one very quickly gets the impression that every element of the theme park has been conceived of at some higher level by some omnipotent board of scientists, advertisers and specialists. The purpose of this conception is unclear. It is likely to maximise profit, to sell merchandise, to promote television programmes while maintaining the guise of simple, honest fun. A conspiracy theory this may be, but when you consider that every physical detail of the park has been thoroughly considered—the concrete floor of the outdoor Frontier Land, as an example, was textured to resemble the trodden mud of a real ‘ye olde’ frontier town. Horse-shoe prints were even intermittently stamped and era-relics were casually discarded at the roadside—it seems reasonable that every other aspect of the park had been similarly considered.

It was unnerving to experience that kind of perfection. EuroDisney is a kind of totalitarian dictatorship sans politics. Resistance, in the form of aversion to spending, is promptly stamped out by child-luring rides, signs, and furry characters. Detractors of the park either don’t attend at all—which is fine for an self-containing institution—or are led their by their children. Further, detractors cannot air their grievances as disliking Disney Land is akin to disliking puppy-dogs, or orphans, or ice-cream. Revolutionaries there may be, though I fear that—like the lead-droog in Clockwork Orange, who was brainwashed with Beethoven’s Ninth—their revolutionary character has been driven out by endless repeats of It’s a Small World After All, surely the most disturbing ride in the entire park.

See photos from Oslo at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=82654&l=d244a&id=585700346 and

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81967&l=f4afb&id=585700346

2008-01-04T15:37:00.001-08:00

Edmund, Oslo, January '08

2007-12-27T07:29:00.000-08:00

Eiffel Tower, December '07

Paris, December '07

2007-12-27T07:22:00.000-08:00

When I finally left the southern hemisphere, it was to travel to China. The first two days in Beijing affected me so much I spent the third sheltering in the hotel room, anxious to avoid the madness that proliferated outside. What caused me to shelter—this considered, of course, in retrospect—was the sheer incomprehensibility of the city. Beijing and its residents operate based on a logic that has its roots in a system that is as different from mine as one is from zero. Thus, when I tried to rationalise the city, I failed. Nearly all aspects—the shops, the people, the transportation, the footpaths, the rituals, et cetera—did not make sense, and as a result, with Beijing beating down on my chest, I suffocated in the congestion of the streets, the weight of the feeling forcing a sharp intake of breath. After a full day in the room I decided to give up trying to understand the city and instead let it all roll over me like a zephyr. That moment—the moment I decided to give up—was a revelation. The city and its madness could now be viewed in the abstract, viewed with no shadow from above. No longer did I have to try and reduce it all to the limited scope of my own understanding. That revelation remained with me, thankfully, for the rest of the trip through Asia and it remains with me still. This is lucky as there are many other places and experiences on this blue planet—the United States included—that are as unforgiving to the psyche as Beijing was on those first few days.

Nonetheless, it is impossible, I think, to completely abandon the need to make sense of things. Returning to China, the only way I managed to glean any kind of ‘sense’ was to approach the country against the relief of India. China and India are the pair of upturned matching in a game of Memory. No other countries can be aptly compared and, continuing the metaphor, once the two are matched they are removed from the table. Both are colossi, both defy average measurements. Both defy, relentlessly. In this manner China—a mystery by itself—could be understood against India. India, for example, would likely resemble China if it, too, was the subject of a one-hundred-odd-year repressive regime. Both countries top a billion people, together they occupy a quarter the land on this earth, both are controlled—a flag atop a mountain—by governments in Beijing and Delhi, respectively.

It is from this angle that we get to Paris. As with China and India, Paris and New York are an upturned pair. It could be argued that London would form a triumvirate, but I haven’t been there so cannot say. Paris, perhaps, is an older brother to New York, a much older brother who is steeped in the restriction of adulthood and must be taken seriously. New York can act up, can be mischievous and daring. Paris, on the other hand, has reputation and responsibility. It is a bastion of art and culture, a centre of revolution, great battles, monuments, cathedrals, towers, and history. New York is an adolescent. It is intemperate and volatile, prone to violent change and dynamic because of it. Paris is dynamic, sure, but its dynamism comes after its maturity. Paris decided to become dynamic. New York cannot help but be. And therein, surely, lies the difference between the two. Paris has history New York cannot fathom. New York is both scorned and envied by Paris for its youth.

There is not so much different between the cities, however. I suppose that when any two entities share many of the same features, the possibility of divergence lessens. Wherever there is a polis there is politics, and whenever there is politics there are monuments to politicians. Whenever there is a surge in population, there is a concurrent surge in diversity. As diversity increases, people forge identity against the identity of others. Consequently, districts, neighbourhoods, blocks and streets take on personae. The surge in population leads people to demand the many trappings of city life; parks are built for recreation, great edifices for utility. Discarded buildings become historical sites and are eventually usurped by more historical sites and the combined effect of it all is that layer upon layer upon layer of humanity is shovelled onto the city, inching higher and higher and becoming more and more refined, and as the pile turns into a mesa turns into a hill turns into a mountain, like the survival of the fittest, the possibility for divergence from the historical tangent becomes more and more difficult. And for every mountain there is a legend of a mountain. And New York and Paris have been shrewd enough to appropriate the myth of themselves, lay it down and use it as foundation to build anew. In this manner, the myth of Paris and the myth of New York are born.

I arrived in Paris twelve hours late (my grasp of the international date-and-time line is as tenuous as my grasp of the international economic system). Luckily there was no one to meet me at the airport and as such my presence was not missed. That was almost a week ago. A long and exhilarating week of towers, arches and museums, cheap and heady red wine, language difficultly, promenades, restaurants, my family’s largesse, hotel beds, early mornings, crowds, gloves, jackets and hats. Paris is a wonderful city, in the true sense of the word. It is very hard here to do anything but flit one’s eyes from one vision to the next with a kind of religious wonder.

Much time in this city has been spent queuing. The line for the Eiffel Tower was two hours, the Louvre one, the Arch de Triomphe half. For the most part the waiting was tiresome. The alternative, however, is that you would enter immediately, experience immediately, and depart very soon after. There is a commonly-held belief—one which has been proven by various experiments—that chronic gamblers actually prefer to lose rather than win. That is, there is something in the chemical reactions of the brain that belies the fact that gamblers derive more joy from losing than they do from winning. Hypotheses about the psychology of this phenomenon suggest that when a gambler loses, they have an excuse to continue playing, to continue the action, to try and recover losses. Returning to the queues, then, I doubt I would derive the same satisfaction from the Eiffel’s summit or the Louvre’s richness or interior of the Arch if I had been able to access them immediately. Waiting, like fasting before a meal, builds expectation and desire. When you are hungry your body reverts to animalism: senses heighten and most else is forgotten in the carnal desire to eat. When the hunger is sated food tastes better as a result. A world in which every desire was sated immediately would be an insipid world indeed.

My last night in Paris was also that of Christmas Day. Paris during Christmas is a very special time and a place to be a part of. Much of the city I visited was luminous in blue and gold and white lights. A refined choice of colours, one fitting for the Parisian sensibility. Red would be too garish, silver too cliché, green downright common. Paris demands blue and white: every tree along Champs-Élysées glowed with the colours. Countless churches and castles and palaces were lit from below with spotlights so piercing that the entire buildings were lifted off the ground, hovering above their gardens like apparitions. The Eiffel Tower, high-definition in the distance, periodically took on a scattering of lights, synchronised, no doubt, to some grand opera outside the range of my hearing. All of this was set off by a Ferris-wheel at the end of the parade from which I took my perspective. Just a Ferris-wheel, nothing else—like a kamikaze-ride or bumper-cars—that would cheapen the mood. A Ferris-wheel of which every axis and strut was itself emblazoned with blue and white.

The effect of all this colour, of all these ubiquitous sights, was twofold. On the one hand Paris reinforced its mythical status, exhibiting itself as a kind of exploding star, courting the associations of an astral being, raising itself to the level of the cosmos, aligning itself with cosmogony. On the other hand, the city became an elegant and complex show. Half burlesque, a quarter parody, and an eighth each of mime, circus, aloofness and mocking humour. Indeed, Paris laughs at you not with you. The city does not need more friends or admirers. It does not need to court the casual visitor, it doesn’t even need to try and please. Paris is confident and arrogant, its residents the same. And as they should be. I applaud the gall of eschewing world trends to avoid cigarettes, obesity and excess by continuing to smoke indoors, continuing to satisfy the carnal pleasure of eating with the same fervour that many countries devote to military endeavours or patriotism, continuing to lavish cashmere, gold and diamonds on the person atop exquisite dress.

***

Tomorrow I leave Paris for EuroDisney. Forty minutes away from the CBD, it is one of the many iterations of DisneyLand. The place will be, I imagine, as surreal as Paris itself. At the very least it will be an experience in anthropology, a way into the lunacy and folly that characterises our species.

***

It is difficult in these transmissions to find a way to talk about people. My grasp of the craft is still so clumsy that I have not yet learnt how to portray without betraying. This could be a problem. Even the most spectacular photo of a landscape, the most startling photo of architecture, the most emotive photo of anything inanimate falls short—well short—of a photo of a person, any person. Although this phenomenon is likely testament to the arrogance of the human race rather than any innate quality, it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is current and real. Any form of writing, I hazard, is similar. There is very little about non fiction that is interesting when it doesn’t involve people, aside from subjects for specialists such as bird-watching or river-kayaking. Until I have more control over the ‘pen’, however, people shall remain on the peripheries and in the abstract. That does not mean, of course, that these experiences have been experienced alone. This trip to Paris, for example, first involved a dear friend from New Zealand and then an extremely generous uncle and his family. In New York I am lucky to be surrounded by very fine people, some good friends and a couple of enemies. I have mentioned before that the greatest part of this trip has been the people. This, I assure, holds true.

NB: A small selection of photos from Paris is available at (no Facebook membership required):

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79126&l=3151b&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=79129&l=a6c81&id=585700346

2007-12-14T16:00:00.001-08:00

Washington, December '07

(more photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75213&l=21435&id=585700346)

14 December '07

2007-12-14T15:59:00.001-08:00

It is sometimes held that in the language of the Inuit* there are more words for snow than in English. The number of Inuit words varies from seven to four-hundred depending on how many languages are counted, how flexible the categories are, et cetera. Related to this fact is a volunteer-fireman from the United States who noticed that people did not heed gas-cans once they were emptied of gas. The cans, it was understood, were ‘empty’, and thus no longer existed a fire danger. After witnessing numerous gas-can explosions (petrol vapour is, after all, violently more flammable than the liquid) the fireman—let’s call him Whorf—deduced that the cans were considered harmless because they were termed empty. That is, the word ‘empty’ was so influential to the gas-can owners that they simply could not conceive that it might be dangerous. This phenomenon got Mr. Whorf to thinking, and here we reunite with the Inuit. As the theory goes, because the Inuit have ‘n’ words for snow, they are able to recognise ‘n’ different types of snow. Thus, if we believe that in Inuit there are twice as many words for snow as there are in English, Mr. Whorf would have you believe that the Inuit can see twice as many types of snow than speakers of English. In this manner, whereas I can only recognise powder, sludge, ice, and flake, the Inuit can recognise snow that is crusted on the surface, drifting snow, still snow, remembered snow, forgotten snow, snow that falls in large wet flakes, snow that falls in small flakes, snow that falls slowly, snow that falls quickly, snow that has melted and refrozen, snow that has been marked by wolves, blowing snow, snow that has been packed down, snow in beards, melted snow, snow mixed with mud and so on. In this manner, language determines one’s view of the world. The word precedes the perception.

If there is a way I can justify reciting all of that, it lies in the fact that in the two weeks it has been snowing in New York, there has not been one day the same. The first day, for example, was Disney snow: flakes that you can catch in your hand or on your tongue, flakes that are so permanently frozen they are dry, flakes that land on other flakes forming impeccable, ubiquitous blankets. The next day the blankets shrank and melted, lining the gutters and causing perpetual torrents to chase the furrows in the middle of streets. Yesterday we had hail: small rocks of ice that bounced and ricocheted and rolled. Today there was wet snow: flakes that melted as soon as they came up against something solid, flakes interspersed with drops so that the whole street and the tops of cars, and flowers, and every surface that could bear the weight was covered in white slush. Minutes later that slush—which won’t freeze because it was too warm and won’t melt because it was too cold—was marked by footprints and stained with mud and coagulated in piles.

Now, if you and I spoke Inuit, I presume that whole paragraph would be redundant; it could be replaced by one sentence and a list of words. Perhaps I cannot justify.

It is a disconcerting experience trying to cope here when it is snows. All other residents in my neighbourhood, without breaking stride, simply change clothes, change shoes and roll on with whatever it is they were doing before it began to snow. I, on the other hand, am as inept as a child. I have the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes. I walk in the wrong places and look at the wrong things. It is considered unbecoming, so I gather, to treat snow as anything more than a dull inconvenience. Even the children here regard it with the same indifference as they would a broken appliance or a slump in the stock market. It is a phenomenon that exists outside of their control, that affects their lives by proxy. Perhaps if they could suture the snow at its source—the idea is not so absurd: the United Sates military is working on ways to induce fog and bad weather to disorient and demoralize the enemy. One method involves literally pouring chemicals into clouds—New Yorkers would. Until that time, they don trench coats, lower their heads, clasp at their chests, and carry on walking.

***

This week has largely consisted of long spells sitting in front of my computer starting and finishing essays, conceiving ideas, thinking, researching and then trying to compel them onto the screen them with blunt force. My approach is to spend as much time in possible with hands at the ready. Eight hours staring at a screen results in about two hours of actual work. Two hours of actual work produces about five pages of text. Five pages of text is about a sixth of two essays. I was, luckily, adept at the calculation. Thus, as of now, the essays are completed and my first semester at Columbia—presuming the essays are adequate—is over.

The week was preceded by a flitting trip to Washington DC. Four-and-a-half hours on the Greyhound getting there was followed by twenty-one hours in the city was followed by four-and-a-half hours returning (I shall talk of the Greyhound bus line in another transmission. There is much to talk about (the Greyhound bus line in the United States is the transport of the masses; people were frisked and scanned for weapons as they boarded; see the Onion’s parody at www.theonion.com/content/news/30_miserable_lives_lost_in). It was a fine experience to get off the island, to sit in mute awe at the industrial sprawl that extends from city to city, to cavort in the bars and walk around like a don in the hotel.

I am the owner of a video Ipod, a now outmoded device that can hold around twelve days of music. On the bus home from Washington, the right headphone coming from the Ipod ceased to produce sound and no meddling could remedy the situation. A quick test revealed that the Ipod itself was broken, rather than the headphones. The workings of my Ipod, like nearly every single other technological device, exists far outside the realm of my understanding. The internal mechanics of even the most primitive computer, for example, the calculator, are as opaque to me as that of the physics governing a black hole. I assumed, therefore, that my Ipod would either have to be discarded or salvaged by a professional. As the device is no longer current, paying a professional to assess it would not have been economical. I thus turned to the internet, which, as it transpires, is heavy with sites that aid the Ipod-owner to repair their own device. After ordering a part for a nominal investment and waiting two days for it to arrive, I followed the instructions on one of the websites and took the Ipod apart. I did not understand what I was doing, and my work was clumsy, but I fixed it. I fixed my Ipod. It was a revelation!

The reason I was so ecstatic is that, for half an hour at least, the gulf between the luddite and technology was bridged. For thirty minutes, the two were united. The feeling is, perhaps, akin to sparking fire without matches or accelerant. Or building a shelter without nails or tools. Or catching an animal, and cooking it, and eating it. The satisfaction was immense.

***

So, the first semester is now over. Next week I head to Paris and then Oslo to meet with family. New York is a fine, fine city and I have some very good friends here, but there's nothing quite like family: nothing quite like knowing you have the same ancestry, knowing you have stood on the same part of the earth, knowing you have shared memories, and above all the indelible, ineluctable bond that comes from having the same blood flooding your veins.

* Also known, derogatively, as Eskimo

2007-12-14T15:57:00.001-08:00

Washington DC, '07

2007-12-06T20:44:00.001-08:00

134th Street at 8am (1/2)

7 December '07

2007-12-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

In a few days I will have been in New York for four months. This week I learnt that the weakest part of the human body is the neck. I have, for a reason I cannot quite isolate, a need to connect these two ineluctable facts. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the need arises from the kind of apocalyptic disposition this city elicits. The kind of disposition I tried to describe last week.

If I needed further proof that New York is a vision of the end of the world—I did not, by the way—it came a few days ago. On Sunday morning, when I woke, the only sound was the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.*That is, against the relief of the buildings outside my window were snowflakes. Hundreds and hundreds of snowflakes, landing on the sill, the cracks in the brick, on every edifice of the fences and paths below. Although the snow itself was a revelation (the first time ever, I would say, that I’ve been snowed on) its effects are what I will mention here.

As I waited underground for the subway later that day there seemed to be greater-than-usual preponderance of rats. Indeed, the tracks were throbbing with fat, spotty, callous rats. Rats that were all but impervious—they would pull up, hesitate, then continue—to missiles hurtled in their direction. Rats so sizeable and audacious —just one or two, basted over glowing embers, would make a good meal; they cared less about a stomping foot than they did aforementioned missiles—that the bubonic plague for an instant, did not seem so far away.

As I fixated on the rats, a busker on the platform opposite triggered his stereo, raised his violin to his neck, and after the introduction, began to play the theme from Phantom of the Opera. The background orchestra is terrifying enough by itself: dropping—no plummeting—through the octaves, then rising to new heights, all fronted by a scaling violin. Combined with the rats, the atmosphere was too perfect, too precisely apocalyptic. There was a second when the approaching train sounded like hoof beats.

There is a wonderful word in German—it escapes me now—which describes the phenomenon in which things are not nearly as bad as you thought, and you are disappointed. As the train arrived, and the rats scattered, and the violin was drowned in the screech of metal-on-metal, I experienced a similar feeling.

Back to the desire to reconcile the two facts, then. Although there is probably no link between the fallibility of the neck and fast-approaching four-month anniversary, in a world—yes, New York is a world—that has an air of immanent implosion, there is a need to connect seemingly incongruous facts. Whether it is to find order in chaos, or meaning in vacuity, I do not know. Indeed, it is likely that the need arises out of nothing more profound that a narcissistic desire to mark one’s life with transcendental experience, to rise above the mundane and heave a yard-stick into the great wheel the Fates control.

***

Tomorrow I am to bus to Washington DC to attend the Australian Embassy’s Christmas party. It was not any antipodean connections that prompted the invitation, but rather a journalist friend from Kentucky. Thus, I really have no right to attend, but welcome the chance to escape the island, if only for a night. There is a reason most of the photos I have taken in this city are filled with sky.

There are a couple of photos at the following links, should you be interested. You do not need to be a member of Facebook to view them.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=59133&l=9aad8&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=73277&l=c7f45&id=585700346

*This line is stolen, I do not wish to give it back.

2007-12-06T20:41:00.001-08:00

134th Street at 8pm (2/2)

2007-11-30T15:17:00.001-08:00

New York, November '07

30 November '07

2007-11-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

In usual circumstances I would be loath to issue forth a photo of a sunset. But this photo—by no means a special by itself—illustrates a feature of this city that has been getting to me like an itch.

A couple of nights ago, as I was waiting for a friend on a busy street, an old man stood up from a huddle of blankets and bags under a makeshift shelter, walked to the corner, and began screaming. Held aloft in his right hand was a bible, held below in his left was a handful of proselytising pamphlets. The man, turning to face whoever approached, bellowed crude theology in a thick accent. “Jesus, Jesus, Jeeeeeesus”, “Lord God, Lord God, Looooord Gaaawd”, on and on and on, over and over again, until the words began running into each other and all that emanated was guttural noise. He stood screaming, a rock in a river, as the lights changed and a crowd streamed past him. When there were no pedestrians, he stood screaming at cars and trucks, even as their engines flattened his voice and rendered him a comic, dancing, mime.

In one part of the world the man would be locked up, in another he would be canonised and made to perform the unction. In this city he was left to babble, so that his voice became as regular as the braking of traffic and his body as common as a shop’s façade. That the man was fanatical is of no great interest (there is, after all, little difference between the rabid fervour of religious extremists and that of environmentalists, for example. And both are plentiful). Rather, it was the atmosphere that the man helped create.

And here we return to the photo. If there is anything redeeming about the photo, it is that it hints at hyper-modernity, a kind of futuristic dystopia, a future akin to that depicted in myriad science-fiction movies and novels, movies and novels that trade in the currency of a dirty, stolid, seething brave new world where nature is replaced by culture and then culture is usurped by sentient machines, where the skies are lit up red by nuclear fumes, where there is either permanent, blistering sun, endless twilight, or stygian darkness, where the only music that suits is that of a thundering male vocalist, the only art that which is minimalist, barren, epic.

This sort of post-apocalyptic vision is what is conjured by the screaming man and the red sky. And it is this vision that is strengthened by the canyon streets, the decrepitude of the alleys, the great City that at every vantage point sweeps from horizon to horizon.

This kind of thinking is not new. Many writers and artists have venerated the City through their craft. Gotham City, for example, was described by the writer of Batman as ‘Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November’. But this is precisely what has been irking me. New York City, as with the rest of the United States, has spawned innumerable parodies, distortions, and caricatures, most of these in the dark and gritty vein described above. So prolific and effective are these parodies, however, that they end up replacing the actual city. Thus, perhaps the man screaming on the corner was only there because every vision of a post-apocalyptic city requires that a man be screaming on the corner. Perhaps the sky was only red because skies tainted by pollution and full of acid-rain must be red.

***

In other news, the mercury hit minus-five a couple of nights ago, or so they say. Gloves and scarves are now left home at your peril. Hands and neck I have mastered, but I have yet to figure out how to protect the face (there is, you see, the rather troubling bind of having a hypochondriac’s sensitivity to frostbite and a not-yet-local resident’s sensitivity to wearing a balaclava in my ‘hood). In combination with the tropical heating of most buildings and my bedroom, the cold weather demands an oft-daily ritual of dressing and undressing, donning and discarding layers. I don’t mind though, I like rituals. They force you to slow down, to stop and think. There has not yet been any significant snow, though stories of flurries on the outskirts of the city come through like war correspondence. There are fronts approaching and all we can do is wrap up and head for the shelter.

2007-11-24T06:48:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York '07

23 November '07

2007-11-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

On Monday I woke to what looked like rain dropping past my window—I say ‘what looked like’ because the background against which I judged the substance is a brick wall interrupted only by the bathroom windows of people in the apartment building next door (if I wish to see the sky I must press my face to the glass and crane my neck at the gap between the buildings) and thus the substance could just as easily have been air-conditioning fluid, window-cleaners four-floors above, etc—yet there was no sound. I ran downstairs to the street to find that it was snowing. Well, ‘snowing’ is perhaps somewhat generous. There were, indeed, snowflakes but they liquefied six-feet above the ground and gathered in puddles that broke and rolled down the street.

Nonetheless, the snow is here. The season has changed. Winter is coming.

And with it a change in attitude. Gone is the exuberance, the unadulterated flaunting joy with which I first met the city. In its place—and here I speculate as the feeling is still new—is not resignation, is not melancholy but is something akin to the stance of a man who wears a thick jacket and bends forward, hands in pockets and head down, to walk into the rain. A new kind of joy must be sought, a new kind of experience also. This experience will, I hope, be grounded in a deeper appreciation of the city, an appreciation that comes from the changing relationship of stranger to acquaintance to friend to intimate.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that ‘one belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much as five minutes as in five years’. This statement implies that I, along with the eight-million other residents, will continue to plane the surface of this city. Wallowing in the shallows, aware of the depths but not able to reach them. I hope Wolfe is wrong.

This Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that is, in this country, of at least equal importance as Christmas (unlike Christmas though, Thanksgiving exists as a bastion of non-commercialisation in a country where even the advertisements have advertisements. So eager are shopkeepers to attract the patronage of New Yorkers that on the night of Halloween shop displays morphed from Jack-o-Laterns and witches to garish Santa Claus dolls, boxes dressed as presents, plastic trees (one had a Hillary Clinton figurine as the ‘angel’), fake snow and spray-painted pleasantries. And today, the day following Thanksgiving, stores ravenously outbid each other to open early—some at 3am—in the hope of luring the bargain-hunters who camped outside the stores with sleeping-bags, pillows and children to save $150 on a Nintendo). This year’s marketing is expected to be even more aggressive than the last. Americans are, apparently, less willing to spend this year because of the depressed economy. That said, there are advertisements on television that urge people to buy new cars for their lovers or spouses or children. New cars! The thought of it is absurd, almost grotesque.

In Harlem, where I live, Christmas thankfully attracts less cheer (thankfully because the neighbourhood, lurid enough already, would be veritably incandescent if shades of green and white and red and gold and silver were added). Save for the token stocking hanging from the display windows of a minority of shops, the few blocks that are my home remain as they always are. One effect of eschewing the tinsel, however, is that emerging from the ground downtown becomes even more assaulting. So garish were the floats and balloons at yesterday’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, that, emerging from the subway, I had to shield my eyes and wear sunglasses.

As the heavy weather comes down, as the snow falls and covers the pavement, as the sun shines from lower and lower in the sky, the reflection of window displays, the impeccable windows themselves, the carols in the stores, the buskers carolling on the street will all add to an atmosphere that has a sulphuric, caustic edge. A wonderland where the wonder is thinly-disguised as rampant blunt-force commercialism. And so it should be, we have little need for saints when we have idols. ‘Tis the season, after all.

P.S: Some of you have asked about school (my lack of discussion on the subject has left some concerned that I’ve stopped going and instead fill my time with sleep-ins, daytime television, and late-nights in the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen). The truth is that nothing much has changed since I last talked about it. I am still taking five classes, four of which have actual contact time. Of those four classes, two are deeply interesting. The professor of one, for example, is so incisive, so relentlessly interrogative and so rigorous in his analysis that I am often left reeling. His intellect is so well honed—for this particular application, at least—that there is little to be said in the response. Or there is much to be said, but little to add, to contribute. The invocations I would so often bait my classmates with in previous classes—just to elicit a response that I could cut down at the knees—are worthless. As I mentioned last time, such arguments would be refracted with a casual change in angle of the sword. They would glance off the blade, be exposed as fraudulent, and hit the ground without even a whimper.

In contrast, I have another class which is no more challenging that my first year at Victoria. And it’s even worse because there is none of the thrill of a novel way of learning, or the assumption—because of lack of comparison—that this is as good as it gets. Instead, the classes are sluggish, ineffectual, the professor indifferent, many of the classmates, and myself, likewise. Nonetheless, I am scoring fairly well on assignments and should be finished with the MA (sans thesis) in May ’08.

2007-11-23T15:26:00.001-08:00

Imagined Skyline, New York '07

2007-11-16T19:30:00.000-08:00

New York, 2007

16 November '07

2007-11-16T19:08:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago a great majority of television writers began a strike. Almost immediately, the production of current-affairs shows was halted. In a few weeks most sitcoms will do the same and in a few months the stockpiled scripts of the various dramas, thrillers and comedies will run dry and they, too, will cease production. For a nation infatuated with television, the strike seems, ostensibly, as dangerous for social cohesion and public satisfaction as the rationing of food during the depression and world-wars (television, after all, is almost as potent an elixir for a wandering mind as alcohol) The television networks, however, are well aware of the need to maintain programming and, thus, broadcasting continues: current-affairs shows are currently on repeat, sitcoms and dramas will soon do the same. So seamless was the transition by the networks and so well-versed are we in repeats that it’s difficult to notice any change (there is a similar occurrence in Orwell’s 1984 where Eastasia, the warring enemy for years, overnight becomes an ally and the previous ally, Oceania, becomes the warring enemy. There is also a similar occurrence in the Simpsons when Bart breaks Milhouse’s goldfish-bowl, killing the goldfish. Rather than admitting though, Bart convinces Milhouse that he never, in fact, actually owned goldfish).

About the same time as the writers struck, a group of Columbia students began a hunger strike. Sleeping in dome-tents with tables of Gatorade outside, the students hoisted placards expressing their resentment towards a litany of grievances, ranging from the University’s appropriation of various Harlem properties to a perceived culture of ‘hate’ (Columbia is currently expanding its campus by purchasing a swathe of properties. One of these properties, it turns out, is the building I currently occupy. Thus, and here is a rather delightful irony, I may be evicted from my apartment in February by the very university I attend. Touché, Moirae, touché).

While the hunger-strikers are of no great note—indeed, middle-upper class students everywhere have been the most vocal and able protestors for some decades (testament to their ability to do whatever-the-hell they want to without the need to earn a meal) just as workers everywhere have always battled for more money—the reception they have received from their respective institutions is interesting. The television networks, as I mentioned, are merely repeating old shows, and given that M*A*S*H is still being aired on some channels, this repetition could presumably continue for some time. Columbia University is merely ignoring the hunger-strikers as are, it seems, most of the twenty-thousand students who pass by their tents everyday. It is likely that both strikes will result in some small concession by either side. It is likely that the hunger-strikers will pack their tents, trash their signs, and be carried by supportive friends to their apartments, stopping at the hospital on the way for precautionary exams. It is likely that the writers will eventually settle with the networks and return home, feeling only slightly guilty that for the duration of the strike they continued to write for reality television, a genre not covered by their union agreement.

When thousands of people marched on Washington last year to protest the ‘n’th anniversary of the war in Iraq, the photograph that Reuters carried of the march was a person holding a placard that read ‘I couldn’t think of a slogan’. The absurdity of that placard, the nihilistic humour of it, points to one fallacious aspect of traditional protest. Surely an action that is state-sanctioned—no, encouraged—cannot possibly effect any real change? Surely complicity with the perpetrator cannot aid the cause of the victim? It is tempting to think of traditional protest in the same voice as the ‘hatespeak’ sessions in 1984. Hatespeak sessions, as Orwell depicts them, involve a room of usually sedate individuals venting a kind of animalistic rage at the government-vilified enemy on the giant screen in front of them for a pre-determined hour a week. The first part of the Sontag quote below seems to approach this argument (I have included the whole paragraph as it is so on-the-money), whereby traditional protest can, perhaps, be seen as a way to reconcile anarchy with patriotism.

‘America is an odd country. Its citizens have a strong anarchic streak, and they also have an almost superstitious respect for legality. They worship amoral success, and they also love to moralize about right and wrong. They consider government and taxation to be deeply suspect, almost illegitimate activities, but their most heartfelt response to any crisis is to wave their unconditional love of country and their leaders. Above all, they believe that American constitutes an exception in the course of human history and will always be exempt from the usual limitations and calamities that shape the destinies of other countries (Susan Sontag, from ‘A Few Weeks After’)

It seems the stolid and formulaic style of essay-writing has leaked into this transmission. It is difficult, I suppose, to separate-out parts of the self when the left hemisphere of the brain is so well connected to the right. By process of osmosis the thought-patterns housed in the left much leech into the right. But when the thought-patterns of the right, governed by the same principle of nature, flow into the left they are assimilated by logic and reason. Thus, this transmission reads like an essay. Shit, there’s even quotes. I apologise.

This week, like the two before it and the four to come, was dominated by schoolwork. Thankfully it was interrupted by a sterling concert from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! The concert itself was superb, the band a class-act in a disheveled, hipster kind of way—like Sinatra stoned, or Bing Crosby in the morning.

Also superb, and here we edge towards the greatest part of this trip so far, were the people. It is usual for us, as social beings, to collect acquaintances with the same kind of embedded fervor that drives a philatelist to collect stamps (one of the fallacies of Facebook is that acquaintances that would normally be cast-off, or shed as naturally as a locust’s shell, are hoarded so that they become meaningless). In New York there are, indeed, acquaintances, but there are also those who elicit a more passionate response. In New York I have met some fascinating people. People whose take on the world is so strikingly different from your own that the planets fall out of alignment and the whiplash-crack of it can be heard all the way to Irkutsk. These people have the same effect on me as an apocalyptic vision must have on a religious man. For a moment there is nausea as the neurons in the brain fire, burning tracks through the hemispheres. Then the body’s motor-reactions flood the cranium with adrenalin and serotonin, catalyzing a cloud of euphoria that leaves the corpus so light it displaces air and gravity and, like a shuttle launching, levitates a foot above the ground billowing dry-ice and shrapnel. In a billionth of a second you return to the ground but the mark of the flight is on you. The residue and smell of the smoke sticks to the clothes and the tracks in the brain are indelible.

These people, by their very presence, humour, and charisma spark such a reaction. These people are holy relics, mundane saints. These people make the city, they make the experience. These people cannot be collected, for their gait is so light they leave nothing tangible to collect. And it is partly for this reason that these people are so enthralling: they must be pursued, for they bend everything around them into a verb. They only exist in the present.

Anyway, it is getting late so perhaps I will just leave it to Kerouac:

'the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “AWWW!”'

2007-11-09T11:23:00.001-08:00

New York, November '07

9 November '07

2007-11-09T11:22:00.001-08:00

Fox News—which, as with most dogs, I cannot tell whether they are genuinely stupid or are so intelligent that they can pretend to be stupid to avoid games of ‘fetch’, or in this case serious reportage—has a weather segment in which a gushing man told us that snow may be on its way this weekend. Indeed, the week has demanded gloves and scarves, jackets and jerseys, socks pulled all the way up. The white noise of the air-conditioner in my window has been replaced by a somewhat unnerving sound of metal-on-metal coming from the pipe in the corner of my room that provides heat (New York apartments are almost uniformly heated by steam that is pumped from underground pipes into a machine in the basement of each building. That machine, in turn, pumps the steam through pipes and radiators to warm individual units. Residents—in my building at least—have no control over when and to what degree the steam is pumped, so that the temperature of rooms can reach that of the tropics (as I was writing this transmission earlier, my computer rolled its eyes, went blank and attempted suicide. On inspection, the steel connectors at the back were hot enough to glow in the dark). Indeed, the only way to regulate the heat is to open a window. The steam that feeds the machine that pumps the heat that makes Ben warm is, however, free and unlike New Zealand’s chest-freezer houses it is deep Autumn and I am in a tee-shirt). The sounds emanating from that pipe, which is presumably connected by some intricate lattice of similar pipes to the basement, could, given the sound-conductive quality of steel, have its origin anywhere along said lattice. Thus I am powerless to stop the tinks and dings and therefore, as with other background noise—neighbours, computer fan, and the countless humming electronic fields—it shall be evicted from consciousness.

More than usual last seven days have been a haze of sleep, coffee, irregular meals, subway stops, the Columbia library, late-night treks home, red wine, whiskey and so it continues, except now it is sessions in front of the computer that punctuate. Sessions writing essays and forever trying to restrict myself to language that is orderly, direct and unequivocal. There is a skill to it, yes, but the skill is nuanced and uninteresting. I am bolted to my chair. I read, then type, then read, then edit. Thus, like the machine in the basement that receives steam and pumps heat, more often than not, writing essays breeds a kind of resigned stupor, an automatic response to a mechanical call.

On that note, I shall return to the essay, less I get away from myself. To substitute for the second-half of this transmission I have attached a photo of the Statue of Liberty and a Helicopter. Make of it what you will—I have my own ideas.

Halloween

2007-11-02T16:19:00.001-07:00

My night photography, it seems, needs work
(click to enlarge)

2 November '07

2007-11-02T16:18:00.001-07:00

This week I left the Island—Manhattan, that is—for the first time. I crossed the border of New York and New Jersey via a tunnel struck deep beneath the Hudson River. It was almost a relief to be on the mainland. The Island, like the city itself, lacks permanence. When the polar icecaps melt, it will be among the first tracts of land that is reclaimed by the ocean. And even before then, I would not be surprised if the earth gives way to the immense weight of steel, concrete, brick, stone, blood, tissue and bone that sits atop the Island and envelops it all in some cavernous rent.

In any case, along with thirty-odd other students I boarded a bus en route to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Traveling above ground was, in itself, a revelation. The subway system is by far the most economical and efficient means to travel the city. Thus, all my crisscrossing of the Island has been subterranean. And being subterranean there is very little to look at. It is considered rude, I gather, to meet anyone’s eye. Consequently one must either glaze-over on some indeterminate vision or flit one’s eyes from one strategically-placed advertisement to the next. Further, because the whole experience occurs in artificial light and without significant markers, it is difficult to conjure any sense of spatiality. The distance between origin and destination is only as real as the ten-inches that separate the two on the subway map. The only marker of distance when underground is the ‘dud dud, dud dud, dud dud’ of the tracks, which after a while become meaningless. As such, the only possible measure of a journey is temporal: the time it takes the rider to arrive at their destination. On the bus this all changed. Focus shifted outwards to the passing cars, the passing people, the mile after mile of factories, bulk retailers, used-car yards, and anomalies like the Jam Shop, the viability of which must surely be precarious at best.

Soon into the journey the buildings next to the interstate were replaced with trees. And not just isolated, ordered plantations but real, wild forests. The Island has trees, sure. Central Park is a sprawling, swaying mass of them. But even in Central Park there is the knowledge that if you walk too far in any direction you will, within a few minutes, find your feet on concrete, then tar seal, then carpet. For this reason the experience is little more satisfying than the illusion created by romantic comedies. A forest in a city is as mythical as a chance encounter with a long-lost lover in some forgotten corner of the earth. But Mountain Lakes has real forests. Forests with beavers, deer. Forests without hobos piles of cigarette butts. And Mountain Lakes has lakes (granted, these lakes are the work of a reckless developer who dammed rivers, which then swamped pristine wildlife). Mountain Lakes doesn’t, for the record, have mountains (but then Manhattan is, I assume, no longer a good place to collect bow-wood, as the Native Americans originally named it).

Mountain Lakes also has a warm and generous family who housed me for the night, fed me, and wisely kept me away from the weekend’s formalities (which were, by all accounts, rather dull). We picked pumpkins, then carved them. We make pumpkin pie, then ate it. We dressed up and went to a Halloween party at a mansion, its owners so inebriated with the holiday spirit that the decorations extended from the scale cemetery in front yard to the jack-o-lantern toilet paper in the bathroom. We walked down to the lake and kayaked. We drove to the forest and walked. It was, in short, a rejuvenating experience. The American host family was extremely generous and welcoming. There was no hint of arrogance or self-importance, traits that in my part of the world at least, are characteristics of the American stereotype. Traits that have proved themselves to be fallacies considering the Americans I have met so far. Indeed, the host family—like many other people on this continent—are constantly try and atone for whatever imagined or real faults they see in their country, most often in its foreign policy. So prolific are the apologies that I often find myself defending the place: ‘It’s not that bad’, ‘all countries have violent histories’, et cetera. Somewhat of a role-reversal, the tourist as the patriot.

In some of my earlier transmissions I talked at length of the uncanny experience of having the surreal rendered real. That is, I talked of the many experiences in New York that are familiar to me, despite never being here before, the many symbols that I have previously encountered that appear as strangely familiar apparitions. The Mountain Lakes weekend was very similar. I cannot understand whether Americans parody themselves, or whether the parody comes as a result of action. The latter is most likely but I continue to think that the parody is a key driving force in the continuation of tradition. Let me explain: there is something absurd, almost ludicrous in the fact that Americans actually do, for example, pick pumpkins, carve them, and convert them into pumpkin pie. Something reeking of hilarity in that Americans, and many others in the world, dress themselves, dress their children, dress their houses in garish plastic costumes and prance around the streets. Simply, Hollywood parodies the United States. Then the United States assumes the parody. Witness New York on Halloween day. With some friends I dressed and traveled underground to the Lower East Side. Emerging from the subway station was like emerging into a Christian nightmare. Pagan costumes and pageantry abound. Three miles taken up with dancing, shuffling, rolling people and floats. If you are suitably attired you can join the parade. This we did and witnessed the spectacle from the inside, as it were. Thousands of people, mostly sober, dancing and singing in costume.

A friend and I were once talking about the compulsion we both felt when, for example, walking over a bridge suspended hundreds-of-metres above the sea, to jump. Not that we were suicidal, but there seemed, to us anyway, to be a human compulsion to at least flirt with the idea of death. My friend then told me a story—the details of which are now long-lost so I shall falsify—in which during World War II, say, a Greek island was invaded by Turkey. On this Greek island was a village situated on the edge of a cliff, a cliff that plummeted to black-rocks and waves below. When the Turkish soldiers approached, rather than surrendering, the inhabitants of the village—men, women, children, all—jumped from the cliff, to their death. Some who have speculated about the motivation for the villages to jump have argued that, like the pedestrian on the bridge, they had always flirted with the idea of jumping. Living so close to death, it was never far from their minds. The compulsion to act was only suppressed by reason. The invasion of the Turkish soldiers, then, was merely an excuse, a justification for action.

Returning to the Halloween parade, a similar speculation can be leveled. That so many New Yorkers were so quick to abandon their suits, their stockings, their glasses and don the clown suits, the bras, the bizarre and whacky outfits is testament, I think, to how thinly sanity and convention are in control of this city. So quickly and so blithely did so many people march, dance and sing in the parade that ‘holiday spirit’ or some such platitude just cannot explain it. The Halloween parade was a release, a vent for otherwise un-channeled animalism. The phenomenon is similar to that of night clubs, rock-concerts, riots, but none of those events are on this scale. This was a whole city, or at least half a city, gone mad.

26 October '07

2007-10-26T19:23:00.001-07:00

Last week I mentioned, briefly, that a shooting had occurred in the apartment building adjacent to mine. About fifteen minutes after I left the house, shots were heard. Two guys were seen fleeing the area, two more were found inside with wounds to the chest. One of those inside died, the other is in intensive care. When I returned home, at about 3am the next morning, the police had just left. Indeed, the only trace of any ‘disturbance’—what a horrible euphemism—was the discarded ‘Do Not Cross’ tape in the gutter. I only learnt of the incident when I left the house the next day as the police presence had resumed. And what a police presence it was. A great, crime-fighting machine was turned on and went about its work, mechanically: a van was parked on the street with a mounted megaphone, looping a plea for information in a booming Orwellian voice (except that the voice was female, a sign of an NYPD conscious of their public image); posters were stapled to all posts also calling for information, promising a reward and anonymity; a forensics truck spent the day parked outside, white-suited officers coming and going. Curiously, there was a lack of media interest. Not surprising, I suppose, for a country saturated with crime to not be titillated by a mere shooting.

Once the police left, a shrine was erected on the steps of the house opposite the crime scene. Below a photo of Jose Batista, the 15 year-old deceased—another horrible euphemism—lie a row of candles, flanked at the corners by opened bottle of Corona. In the first couple of days following the shooting, people sat by the shrine. Now they do not, though the candles continue to burn.

Now that a week has passed, the shock of the shooting has largely evaporated. For a while it was, actually, quite disarming. I don’t, and never did, feel in any danger—the facts suggest that this wasn’t a random shooting, and thus could have happened anywhere—so the cause of the disarmament must be located elsewhere. As I wrote in the last entry, the feeling of listening to rap music about gang or drug shootings when walking past the site of a shooting is uncanny, almost perverse. The perversity comes, I think, from being that close to violence but not being able to comprehend it, except through parody. In this case the RZA saying ‘Keep it in the hood, niggaz walk with they gun / Keep it in the hood that's where we come from’. And because it is incomprehensible, the violence, the ‘incident’, is ignored and forgotten. So that now the posters calling for information have, like the police tape, fallen into the gutter, and the cardboard protecting the shrine from the wind has been heavied with rain, and has sagged and crumpled.

And so we get to the ‘incident’, the ‘deceased’, the ‘disturbance’. This country has to be the world-capital of the euphemism. New Zealand is, of course, guilty too but the extent of it here is remarkable. You do not go to the toilet here, for example, you go to the bathroom or the water closet. What this euphemising reflects, I’m not sure. I do know that it is linked to the desire for sterility that the advertisers of household cleaners and accessories feed off. A professor once related an anecdote in which he was visiting a winery on a bus with other tourists. Wineries often run sheep also, letting them graze on the grass in between the vines or in adjacent paddocks. In one of the wineries that my professor visited, a sheep lay dead—presumably of natural causes—in a paddock near the driveway. The tourists refused to buy wine from the winery, associating the dead sheep with some imagined contamination in the wine. These tourists, like the alarmingly high percentage of American children who don’t realise that meat in Styrofoam containers in the supermarket come from actual animals, or the patrons who obsessively and compulsively clean every surface of their house with lemon-scented bleach, or, indeed, the perpetrators—like myself— of meaningless euphemisms, are disconnected. Disconnected from nature, from the smell of ferment and sweat, from the feeling of grease and surfaces tacky with accumulated scent, from the sour aftertaste of milk that has just expired, from the sight of death and unconcealed, uncontrived, emotion.

There is, it seems, more and more that classifies as obscene. For Heller writing in the middle of the twentieth-century, the sight of two leg-stumps on a raft in the ocean was what it took to draw people to peek guiltily through the bushes at the edge of the shore. Fifty years later, we are so diligent at sanitisation that asthma cases have increased because we’re no longer so resistant to the detritus the world hurls at us.

This week has been a long one, school has been draining with myriad essays, presentations, books to read, notes to take. Tomorrow I head to Mountain Lakes New Jersey for a night as part of a United Nations conference. I looked up Mountain Lakes and, as it turns out, there are no mountains. And the lakes are man-made. Someone, somewhere, must be laughing at us.

19 October ‘07

2007-10-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

At the bottom of this page, you will notice, are now advertisements placed by Google on behalf of various companies. And Google’s intuition is such that it predicts, based on the content of my writing, what visitors to this site will be inclined to purchase. Thus, in the unlikely event that I spend a paragraph talking about microwave dinners (of which I just enjoyed a particularly lacklustre example―fettuccine with broccoli florets―in which the florets exhibited a plastic chemical tang and the fettuccine was laced with rubber and the whole dish left an aftertaste somewhere between asphalt and pine-bark, but hey, it was three dollars and according to the label had less than 7 grams fat) the advertising below will reflect this and presumably offer visitors to this site an incentive for assessing said dinners or some such ruse.

The advertisements are an optional service provided by Google, the owner of whoever owns this website. Every time a visitor clicks on the advertisement, one ten-thousandth of the advertisement fee―or some equally miniscule amount―is tallied, set against my name, and after an indeterminate amount of time a cheque arrives in my mailbox. As I have no misconceptions about the amount of traffic this site generates, I expect the cheque to be somewhere between one cent and a dollar. It is a relief, I find, to give over to it―whatever it is―and let the tide of commoditisation wash over those possessions of mine that do not bear some birthmark of their origin. The experiment will occupy some time, anyway, and at the very least I will acquire a talisman―in the form of a cheque that’s quite literally worth less than the paper it’s printed on―of the unbridled capitalism this country is the beating, feverish heart of.

And unbridled it is, the metaphor holds true. The system has bolted and is running at a speed and in a direction I doubt even Marx or Nostradamus predicted. Certainly those who herald-in the new age of electronics and transactional relationships (myself included) did not. Witness last Sunday, at the Empire State Building - an apt example, not only of the ruthless commercial assault that capitalism (is that it?) elicits, but of the artery-clogging, gluttonous obesity that it infects systems with. From arriving at the bottom of the Empire State to the ten-minutes on the viewing deck, to the ground again took a friend and I two hours. We entered the building, rode an escalator, and arrived at the back of a queue that zigged and zagged the entire mass of a hall that, once surely reserved for events of class, now served as the pen for the awaiting masses. At every corner, as we advanced towards the x-ray machines and metal-detectors, some lackey tried foisting on us pamphlets detailing the upgraded viewing-deck tour, or the audio guide, or the 3D map, or the countless other trinkets and plastic souvenirs that, once they serve their purpose are crumpled and tossed at the overflowing bins outside the building. Once through the x-ray we enter another queue for the ticket booth. Once through the ticket booth we enter another queue for the lift. At the lift we hand our tickets to one usher who rips the stub off and hands it to another usher who scans it who hands it to another usher who strikes it with a pen who hands it back to us. Once on floor 86 we enter the queue for the lift to floor 96. At this stage we tire of queues and opt for the stairs (recommended as more efficient by various signs on the wall) only to land behind a flight-full of similarly-inclined tourists. As we try to exit the building the same process is followed. The only difference being that the descending stairs are closed. Excessive and lethargic in its conception, the process proved equally so in its execution - the offspring of a sluggish and ineffectual system.

Ah, but the view at the top of the building was remarkable. To all horizons stretched towers, houses, schools, parking-lots, ghettos, sports-fields, motorways, freeways, highways, road-signs, lampposts, potholes, sewer-pipes - interrupted only by rivers and the sky, and all of it teeming with organisms that with the benefit of indoctrination are identified as people. To the unbiased eye they seem like parasites on agar or maggots on a cadaver. And as a mass they possess the same beauty as maggots or parasites – a beauty that comes from complete and total consumption, of purely animal instinct, of action caused by internal forces alone (a beauty that can be compared with the voracity that a pack of piranhas are said to take to a bovine, reducing it to a skeleton in under four minutes. Or similarly, when I was a child, the experiment conducted by my grandmother and I in which a dead mouse was wrapped in a net and set in the garden for a week. On returning, the mouse had been reduced to a perfectly-preserved silhouette of bones, a remnant of some prehistoric era).

As you ascend 96 floors to the viewing platform of the Empire State Building, the observable vestiges of culture, of human-ness, descend, so that from the top all seems uncannily natural. As the ape is at home in the tree, the human is at home in the city. So perfect is our conception of an ideal environment, and so indifferent are we at marking the world, that all adjusted to suit. There is a profound beauty in this perfection. And while this beauty―like that of a supermodel―elicits a kind of jealous repulsion, for those of us who are uncertain of how or why to fight it, the whole conception is endearing enough to lie prone in front of and worship.

PS – last night, about thirty minutes after I posted this blog, a shooting occurred in the apartment building next door. One man was killed, the other injured. Two Hispanics, so it has been reported, were seen fleeing the building. I was out at the time, en route to a friend’s house, so all I knew of the incident was the yards and yards of discarded Do Not Cross tape lying in the gutter of my street when I came home six hours later. I happened to be listening to some hip-hop as I left the house today, the reports from the news channels (see link below) still resonating. The band was the Wu Tang Clan, and the lyrics were about shootings in Harlem. The experience was unnerving. More on this at some later stage.

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=74768

West, North, East from the Empire State

2007-10-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

You Plastic Crab – 12 October ‘07

2007-10-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

It began violently raining two hours ago, thick rain, heavy rain, monsoon rain. Two hours ago it started and it hasn’t yet let up. Apparently, if it rains for long enough, the subways flood and all service to the Island shuts down. It is gratifying to know that one of the world’s greatest cities can still be humbled by the weather - that all the architects and city planners and billions of dollars still haven’t found a way to subdue nature. This week has been a blur. The days have rolled into each other―mornings stretch into evenings stretch into mornings―and sleep is but an inadequate punctuation. There was a time when I was working that the ‘rolling’ continued for weeks and weeks until I realized that the details of entire months were obscured and had no form. Routine exacted a kind of muting force - sending a fine mist over hours and days until they were indistinguishable from one another.

Of note, perhaps: on Saturday, like many people back home and a few here, I joined some friends to watch the rugby. Also like many people back home it seems, before the game I just did not consider the possibility that our team might lose. So alien was the idea of a loss that when it happened the words to articulate it were not available. Thus, when the game ended, no one said a word. We just sat and stared and occasional cussed, to break the silence more than anything else. It is not so much that I mind us losing―though the French I had been riling all week with attacks on their inferiority exacted a swift and humiliating revenge―it is more that the result was outside the scope of my comprehension. I simply couldn’t understand it. And while the ramifications of the loss are unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as the reporters back home are making out, it is still disappointing. Rugby is the only thing I can think of that comes close to entering the global arena that New Zealand should win. Not just ‘might’, but should. For once we weren’t the underdogs, for once we weren’t the long-shots. It was ours to take, the conditions were right, but still we did not, or could not do it. And this distinction, between ‘did’ and ‘could’ is, I think, crucial.

Last week I went to a concert of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Last night, The National. Aside from the hordes of hipsters with square-glasses that were dubiously lacking in magnification, the music was divine. Another holy distraction from having to think and really consider (really consider) things. Another way of keeping myself―ourselves―occupied so we don’t have to try and explain the madness and absurdity of it all. Like the feeling that comes from staring at something for long enough so that it becomes bigger and bigger or darker and darker until its true shape is lost in the liquid at the back of the eyeball. Concentrating on something so much that the layers or rationality heaped on top of it are stripped away and what is left is pale and sickly, like a stomach after winter, and is in the same way easily burnt by the sun.

There are those who say that commodities shouldn’t make an individual happy. Or least that the craving and satisfaction that comes from acquiring a commodity is superficial and reflects a shallow individual. Last Saturday the camera I bought on Ebay arrived. It is beautiful – large, heavy, black, shiny – an intricate composition of plastic and wire and solder and motherboard and glass and crystal. And I am happy to admit that it makes me happy. Every time I look at it I grin. I like the camera. It is benign and dumb, like a big slobbering dog with a stupid grin. The camera makes no attacks on my time, does not interfere with my thoughts. There are other devices that are more subversive, malignant - they infiltrate lives on the pretext of improvement. I am not sure, for example, whether the cellphone I possess is mine or whether I belong to it. So good is its grip that I mother it and fondle it. So pervasive is its sound that I cannot think of anything else but the peal it sends forth. So seductive is its potential that I cannot be without it. So comprehensive is its colonisation of all other possibilities that I cannot be rid of it. It is a devious device which, like email, Facebook and occasionally Minesweeper, makes claims on my time that extend far beyond the real usefulness. It is part of the technological fallacy of improvement that I think Ted Hughes is getting at below.

Do not Pick up the Telephone

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores
The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone
Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

O phone get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in your breathing
World's emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses
Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone
A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone
A dead body will fall out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone

2007-10-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

5 October ‘07

2007-10-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

And so what is around me has changed. Gone are the uneven floors with their many burrowing-places for persistent cockroaches, indignant at the threat of my raised shoe. Gone too are the light fittings that never managed to truly light, only stave darkness away and remain that way, pressing constantly, the darkness always encroaching. That is, I have moved house. I have a new bed (a new bed - the first one I have ever had, I think). Its memory is young and its surface hard, but at least springs and cushion have replaced lumpy foam atop the steel bars of the fold-out couch that has been my resting place since I have been in New York. I have walls to fill with photos and soon will have shelves to fill with knick-knacks. I have new roommates, new spaces to acclimatise to, new areas to explore.

Moving was an ordeal. In little over seven weeks I have―by a crude calculation―gathered twice the volume of what I have arrived with. And since I am stubborn, and my new house is only six blocks from the old, I insisted (to myself, I suppose) on carrying everything. Six round-trips later I regretted the decision and spent the eight dollars I had saved on a cab on ice cream and a sandwich.

The new place is much smaller, but I have no problem with that, especially coming into winter. Less air to heat and fewer spaces for the warmed air to escape. My roommates are friendlier, though still reticent as those who meet by chance often are. One is an actor – see www.jackfitz.com – a lively fellow who signs off sentences like letters: ‘stay cool, man’ or ‘carpe diem, man’. The other, a share broker. Nice guys who subsist, it seems, on microwave dinners consumed in their rooms. There is an equipped kitchen also (my last place had four can-openers and no knife). This is important as I have grown fat and lethargic from eating out twice every day (though I have mastered the art – there are six places within a 2-kilometre radius that have meals for less than five dollars. Thus, all I need to do is rotate between these places and nuance my selection to avoid the vapidity that would result from a monotonous meal routine – beef and broccoli on Monday night, beef and string-bean on Thursday).

In Spanish Harlem, more so than in other neighbourhoods I have visited, streets are an important marker of identity. My old street, 141, for example, had its local domino-players, crack-sellers, housewives. The new street, 134, the same. And the street that connects 134 with 141 repeats the same stores over and over: deli (read dairy) is next to a hairdresser is next to a Chinese-food joint is next to a dollar-store is next to a deli and so on. And each of these stores, like the streets has its locals, the folk who carry deck chairs and spent balmy evenings on the pavement half-heartedly watching the baseball on the television through the window of the store. It took a long time, perhaps a month, for the locals of my street and my shops to advance through staring at me during the first week, ignoring me the second and third, and giving me a tacit nod as my place in the neighbourhood was tentatively confirmed in the fourth and following. Now I must repeat the induction, be initiated through simple acts like holding the door open for residents in my building or kicking a ball back to some kids.

Scientists once conducted an experiment based on one of Einstein’s lesser-known theories, from memory, whereby lasers were mounted in aircraft and receptors mounted on the ground. By some secret of science which is beyond me, these scientists proved as incontrovertibly as scientists can that time actually does slow down as you speed up. The effects are miniscule – a commercial pilot, for example, would be a second younger over a lifetime than a land-dweller – but the effect measurable nonetheless (Einstein hypothesised, if I remember correctly (there are so many of these ‘facts’ which I dream, steal or simply make up) that a merry-go-round travelling clockwise faster than the speed of light would advance through time, a merry-go-round travelling anti-clockwise would navigate the past).

The reason I mention all this―and perhaps it is a trite observation, I have not investigated whether anyone else has already said it, though the ‘New York minute’ cliché is well-known―is that I am quite sure that Einstein was wrong – the faster you move, the faster time speeds up. People who have lived on Manhattan for 10 years, as an example, age 15. I have been here for two months, it could easily have been three or six. A friend noted that many people in the city are transients – the population of eight-million swells to twelve-million during the working day. And that’s ignoring the Manhattan residents who are students, temporary workers, et cetera. The sheer volume of that movement, of that amount of transience, perhaps contributes to the speed of the place. Perhaps the kinetic energy of four-million people moving in and out of the city has the a pull on those who remain akin to that of the moon on the ocean. Twice a day, as people come and go, we are tugged in all directions, our blood collects closer to our skins, our lungs press against our ribcages like the tide, our organs rumble. You feel yourself getting old in the this city but rather than seeking rest, rather than allowing yourself to feel weary, you move faster, you push against the tide, you seek the thrill, you scorn lethargy, and forever you try and escape the scythe at your back.

28 September ‘07 - Evil Has Landed

2007-09-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-11T18:11:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

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.