America February/March 2009

Author's Disclaimer.

I know that this is quite a long post (it is nearly as long as my dissertation was) but there is something about traveling on your own that means all the thoughts and conversations you would have with your traveling party don't get out of one's head. I haven't done any blogging of any kind since my maiden blog on my myspace page regarding my trip to australia. I think it is no coincidence that that was the last time I travelled on my own. I've been back now for about 5 weeks and I really felt that I had to get some of the trip down on paper (albeit cyber-paper). There is also a reasonable amount of guilt about not having sent any postcards. If nothing else I reckon the following might be a decent stab at a postcard substitution for those readers who might ordinarily have received a postcard from me. In any case, whoever you are, I don't expect you to read it all (certainly not all at once) and I wouldn't have thought anyone would be in the business of following all the hyperlinks, most of which (but not all) are photos I took on the trip.

So, anyway, here goes...


America (Connecticut and NYC) February/March 2009

Two and a bit weeks in a wintry Connecticut. The connecting flight from Newark to Bradley International, so short the Captain barely had time to turn off the ‘fasten seat belts sign’, gave us a premier view of NYC as it banked over Manhattan and flew on up to Connecticut over the Hamptons and Long Island Sound. A fortnight of hard work and icy blasts followed. Two snow storms and constant face-numbing coldness tempered by multiple trips to O’Rourke’s boxcar diner, the all you ‘care to’ eat buffet at the student union and the full blooded participation in an American Mardi Gras – A Little piece of Louisiana recreated in a small town Connecticut Main Street bar.

With the show packed up and Barry’s delicious Gumbo and Jambalaya still stuck in our teeth we got back on the plane for the ridiculously short trip back to Newark Liberty. Off the plane I waved goodbye to my colleagues as they left to make their connecting flight and I took the monorail and then the train to Manhattan.

I’d swapped small town America for Big City USA, and it really hit me. After checking into my grimy hostel having laboured across Manhattan with 2 bags I was suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the city and the scale of the distance from home. My comrades in exile over the last fortnight or so were now jetting back to Blighty leaving me to fend for myself. The prospect of 4 nights in NYC was somehow much more daunting than the 7 nights I’d had in Australia 2 years ago. In Australia the distance was considerably greater and yet the road trip – the journey – was a comfort. I could move on if it got hairy or intimidating. Maybe it’s a Commonwealth thing that made the difference, maybe it was just a case of post-tour blues, maybe it was the extreme contrast in size between Middletown and Manhattan. Whatever it was it was only a few hours in and I was already intimidated and there was no epic, adventurous journey to make – at least not until my 7pm Sunday evening flight home.

As there was nothing too appealing about spending any more time than I had to in my hostel I bit the bullet and went for an evening stroll into the unknown of the East Village. My explorations soon presented me with a nice independent bookstore where a copy of the Rough Guide to New York was purchased. I walked up 3rd Avenue and cut across to Union Square via a street scene being shot for a movie. Adopting a Hollywood smile I sauntered as close to the security cordon as possible trying to catch a glimpse of the glamour and hoping the director would spot me and say, “Hey you, British guy! You’re exactly what I need for my movie ‘The British Guy’. Have any Winnebago you want, you’re in the movie business now kid.” No such luck. All I could see was a very well lit catering truck. “Hey you, British guy! Here’s an apron. Wash some dishes. You’re in the catering business now", I almost heard them say.

On the return leg back from Union Square I stopped at B Bar and Grill (the B standing for Bowery) – fish and chips providing a homely comfort for a slightly homesick man. Then bed on the creaky plastic mattress of my open-ceilinged hostel room all snuggled up in pink/brown polyester sheets that might once have been white.

Waking up the next morning I felt the intimidation of the night before relinquishing its grip and being eclipsed by a feeling of excitement. The intimidation factor was still sufficient enough for me to decide to memorise the map to my first port of call so as to slightly disguise my touristy appearance.

It was a lovely morning stroll south towards East Houston Street (pronounced How-ston) along the narrow streets lined with tall tenements each gilded with concertinas of iron fire escapes, and with soft drinks trucks making their early morning deliveries of cola and root beer to the stores at ground level. Nearing my approach to the Tenement Museum through the Bargain District I crossed the wide expanse of Delancy Street stretching out East towards the looming supports of the Williamsburgh Bridge that take the street over the horizon and the East river and into Brooklyn. With last night’s brush with Hollywood still fresh in my mind, the view to the bridge, like many of the views in New York, looked like a film set. The bridge obscured the horizon and the far side of the bridge wasn’t visible from this angle. It looked like it could have been one f those trompe l’oile sets that if I were to walk towards the bridge it would gradually become miniature making me look like a giant – like that scene in Willy Wonka when they walk up what looks like a very long corridor to a normal sized door but is actually a short corridor with a tiny door. I would get half way across the bridge to find that the set ends just beyond the view of the camera where, feeling gigantic I would look to where Brooklyn should have been and see similarly gigantic backdrops, lighting equipment and a catering truck where I would be invited to wash the giant dishes.

I arrived at the Tenement Museum at 9am to discover that it didn’t open until 11. I was left with no choice but to patronize a nice little trendy café on the corner of Orchard and Broome who were offering French toast and bacon served with Vermont maple Syrup. The café had a trendy clientele. Half reading my Rough Guide and half eavesdropping on my fellow diners I overheard plans being made for über-trendy warehouse parties and music events. Solitary regulars came in every so often, ordered their usual and sat in the window with their macbooks making use of the free WiFi and engaging in familiar and affectionate banter with the serving staff. At an adjacent table two young women spoke Dutch to each other, bringing to mind a pre-British Governorship era of New York when the city was called New Amsterdam and when Chinatown and Little Italy were in fact ‘Keine Deutschland’. At another table a young computer whizzkid was meeting with 2 men who looked like they might have been former Apple or Microsoft employees. They were showing him some sort of technological kit that would offer him the processing power to give conference presentations in high definition.

With a couple of hours killed spying on the folks of the Lower East Side (not to mention satisfying my maple syrup addiction) the Tenement Museum flung open its doors. With a choice of themed, guided tours of the tenement I opted for the Moore family tour. It told the story of the Moores, an Irish Immigrant family, who lived in the building in the mid to late 19th century. A slightly creepily smiley tour guide entertainingly navigated us through the building fielding the boring and time-consuming questions of the family who formed the majority of the touring group.

In the back yard we were told about how families of 6 or 7 in each of the 4 apartments on each of the 5 or 6 floors of the building all shared 4 outdoor toilets and one outdoor water pump – carrying gallons of water up and gallons of excrement (in bedpans) down the narrow communal staircase. One member of the boring family regaled us with an account of how she had once shared a building with many more families than that and only had one outdoor toilet between them all when she lived in London in the 70s. I wasn’t brave enough to point out that cholera wasn’t such an issue in 1970s London nor did she have to contend with open sewers or the contents of a communal cesspit seeping through the soil and contaminating the communal fresh water supply or well. This tone continued from her and her fellows, all clubbing together trying seemingly to give the impression that they had had it far worse in their lives that anyone in 19th Century New York. This was punctuated occasionally by exclamations by a number of them that certain decorative or constructional features of the tenement were also endearingly present in their holiday home in Scotland. As you may sense from my tone this to-ing and fro-ing between competitive sympathy seeking and displays of opulence really got on my nerves. It was difficult to accept the hardship of their lives in the face of their clearly very privileged circumstances and in the face of what was being described regarding the Moore family. I should point out that, in spite of tales about London and Scotland, these people were not Brits. They were Americans who, as far as I could work out without actually bringing myself to make conversation with them, now lived in Israel. Needless to say, sadly I learned more about them than I did about the Moores (through no fault of the lovely people at the museum).

The Moores had 4 daughters. Only one daughter survived into adulthood. 2 daughters died in early infancy. The last part of the tour had us re-enacting a wake for one of these infant daughters. A tiny white coffin in the corner gave an indication of her age. She died having contracted cholera and T.B. The week before my visit my aunt had done the same tour and, knowing her propensity for crying, I imagine this part of the experience did her in. Although moved, I stayed strong and managed to remain tearless right through the march back to the gift shop and beyond.

With $4 having been spent on some nice postcards (which never got sent) at the gift shop I hopped on the subway and went uptown. Emerging at street level from Rockefeller center station the first bona fide tourist site presented itself in all its neon glory. Standing in front of the Chase Manhattan building I whipped the camera out to photograph the Radio City Music Hall. I imagine judging by the resulting photograph I was standing on the very spot where thousands of photographers, professional or amateur, have stood before to take the exact same picture. I seemed to have captured the place from pretty much the same angle as any other photo I have seen of it. It’s all part of being a tourist in New York I suppose. You have to take pictures of the city as people perceive it at home – you can’t take pictures of the icons of a city in a way that challenges their iconography and recognition. The fact that the photo I took existed already in countless other photo albums and memory sticks didn’t stop me from taking one too and in fact it my have predetermined my composition, just as the hundreds of people each day at Pisa will take pictures of each other pretending to hold up the leaning tower in spite of it being an old joke.

I walked up the street slightly, towards the Rockefeller Centre past ‘30 Rock’ (the nickname for the NBC studios and setting for the TV series set there) and on up to the entrance for the ‘Top of the Rock, the observation level of the skyscraper. $20 seemed quite a steep price to pay for the privilege of traveling 67 floors directly up but I had been assured by friends that once up there it was worth every penny. I got in the lift and was amazed at how quickly I had reached the top. I knew theses elevators were quick but that was impressive. The trip back down will surely produce weightless conditions if the decent is as speedy. Of course it didn’t take long to realize that this elevator had taken me to the Top of the Rock exhibition just one floor up. Feeling a little sheepish, but certain that nobody will have spotted my error of altitude, I mad my way around the exhibition, pausing to watch the videos about the history of the building, the man himself, Rockefeller Jr., and finally the Rockettes.

After all that I followed the yellow brick road to the real elevator. The doors closed just as the steward outside informed us that the trip would take us up 67 floors and would take us about 30 seconds to get there. With that the frosted glass ceiling of the lift cleared to expose the entire shaft above us. The lights dimmed and atmospheric music was played and as the lift ascended the young boy in the car with us counted the blue lights denoting each passing floor out loud until we were going too fast for him to count them. Thankfully we slowed to a stop just in time as we reached the top of the shaft. The doors opened and another steward cheerily welcomed us to the 67th floor.

The observation deck takes up floors 67, 69 and 70 of the building. I don’t know where they keep floor 68 or, indeed, if it even exists. The views up here were breathtaking. It was a fresh, early March day. The sun was fairly low in the sky but warming enough and bright enough to suggest the beginnings of Spring and the early lunchtime haze in the air reduced many of the buildings to the south to silhouette but accentuated their scale and the space between them. To the North the park and the suburbs around and beyond in Harlem and the Bronx were bathed in the sunlight, almost visibly melting the snow on the rooftops and in Central park.

10 years ago I went up the Empire State building which was quite impressive but I have to say that I think that the Rockefeller gives a much better view, in part because you get a fantastic view of the Empire State building itself, which of course you miss out on if you’re looking over Manhattan from there. You also get a spectacular view of Central Park, which would also be visible from the Empire State building if it weren’t for the fact that the Rockefeller is in the way. The only thing, in my opinion, that the Empire State has over the Rock is a better view of the Chrysler building.

There is something about being that high up that really is exhilarating. Apart from the thrill of achievement of scaling a mountain it must be part of why mountaineers want to get to the top – to be high above everything. It presents an almost God-like perspective over the world – see the world as a big game of SimCity. I got it from the plane journey in and out of Newark but it was over so quickly. Here I could stand on my own 2 feet and get nearly the same view and the same experience and it could last as long as I wanted.

Also worth a mention is a little installation on the 69th floor in a room between two viewing balconies. Sensors in this all white room sensed when someone entered the room and turned on a bunch of LEDs to make a coloured cross above your head which stayed above your head wherever you were in the room until you exit. With multiple people in the room each individual had different coloured cross above them. In the corner of the room was a TV monitor showing a 3D computer generated overview of where people were in the room. I spent a bit of time in here and was surprised how many people failed to notice anything about the room at all. One would think that most tourists in a place like New York would spend their whole time in a constant state of curiosity and observation and yet these people had no idea their presence in the room was an interaction with an art installation. Needless to say that several children (and occasionally myself too) spent sometime enjoying the installation and even trying to enter the room without being picked up by the sensors – we all failed. Then it was back down the lift, a sneaky sidestepping of the gift shops and out to the Rockefeller plaza to look at the skaters struggling around the famous ice rink.

The next stop was Times Square. I walked down the Avenue of The Americas to the world’s most famous crossroads and spent the next 10 minutes or so looking up at the neon and LED screens and all the other wall-to-wall adverts while trying to dodge the Broadway leafleters. The obligatory photos were taken, although I think I struggled to get the classic view of the square unlike my Radio City experience. It is an impressive place but if you’ve been to Piccadilly circus then you’ve been to Times square too really.

I walked up Broadway towards the North. I passed the theatre where they film the David Letterman show in time to have missed the arrival of one of that night’s celebrity guest by a matter of seconds – I still don’t know who it was. Onwards and Northwards to Columbus Circle and the regular haunt of my last trip to New York 10 years ago, Comic diner. When I got to Columbus Circle, not only was Cosmic not there anymore but also the New York Coliseum had been replaced with the impressive Time Warner building. The changes didn’t stop there. The Mayflower Hotel on Central Park West, the base for hour 4-day visit a decade ago was no more. I couldn’t quite work out if it had simply changed its name or been turned into apartments.

In London I live in a complex of buildings, each of which is named after somewhere in America. There is California, Boston, Nevada, my friend Godders lives in Colorado and I live in the Dakota Building. With this in mind I continued up Central Park West past home time at the Ethical Culture School and on up to The Dakota Building on a pilgrimage to the only thing I have in common with John Lennon. The Dakota Building ticked off the list I cut into Central Park to Strawberry Fields to have a sit and a think about where to go next. It was about 3:30pm and there was about an hour and half of day light left. I decided I would meander through the park towards Central Park South. I stopped at a payphone in the park to call home which used up most of the daylight left. I bought a hotdog from a vendor, which was nice, but I’d rather have one of the hotdogs available outside the Hawthorns on match day. Frankfurter in hand I took in the snow covered municipal softball fields, the children’s play areas, the rocky outcrops where the local teenagers (and international tourist teenagers) sat smoking dope and listening to music. They seemed to be far less intimidating than the hoodies of South-East London – perhaps the overt wrongdoing of the New York youth somehow reduces the intimidation you might get from the ‘anything-could-happen-now’ British hoodie.

I got the Subway back Downtown to Astor Place in order to take a picture of the venue and HQ of the Blue Man Group so that I could do a facebook tagging joke for my friend Gareth who plays a Blue Man in the Berlin franchise of the show. Mission completed I went back to Hostel to get changed and headed straight back out to meet a friend for a drink at East 51st Street.

We went to a wine bar on 51st Street called Le Bateau Ivre. All that needs to be said is that some fun was had, some wine was drunk and I can remember some of the journey back to the hostel afterwards. Michael had a flight to catch to Kentucky the next morning – I hope he made it.

The next day the morning was pretty much a write-off as you might expect. However, a little after noon, with hangover under control, if not entirely tamed, I took the subway downtown a couple of stops to City Hall to begin the hike across Brooklyn Bridge. Pedestrians and cyclists alike share the boardwalk on the bridge. Pedestrians for the most part are taking their time and taking in the changing views over the East river, often looking back towards Manhattan. The Cyclists on the other hand are trying to get somewhere. Every so often a cyclist would tear past bellowing their discontent with us pedestrians standing in the cycle path area of the boardwalk while we took photos of the bridge, the East River, the Statue of Liberty in the distance to the South, The Empire State Building in the distance to the North, the Brooklyn skyline and the Manhattan Skyline. It’s a big bridge, made bigger by a hangover, but once on the Brooklyn side the air had cleared most of the fuzz from my head. A stroll down to the water at the Fulton Ferry dock area and an ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory cleared the rest before a very nice low energy stroll around the Brooklyn Bridge Park and the DUMBO district. DUMBO stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass and is an area formally made up of industrial spaces and warehouses that are now used as galleries, theatres and other cultural purposes.

After jumping back on the subway back over to Manhattan I alighted in the Financial district with the intention of going down to Battery Park. I happened upon Ground Zero. As you might expect the atmosphere changes slightly down here. This might be a self-imposed observation rather than what is actually happening there but… The light is different. In this part of town the skyscrapers are so densely packed together that the sudden absence of a skyscraper that is Ground Zero lets in a considerable increase in daylight. The other thing that was noticeable was this feeling of there being something physically there that isn’t. I’m not sure if that’s a particularly articulate way of describing it but I don’t know how else to go about it. Throughout the rest of the city, as with most large cities (London especially) all the natives are going about their business at speed and with their eye line directed firmly downwards and about 4 feet in front of them. At Ground Zero this changes. Of course there are some that continue the eyes down gait but everyone else slightly raises their eye line. Maybe it’s a reaction to the light, like sunflowers turning towards the sun. But there definitely feels like there is a communal awareness of an imaginary point in the sky where the top of the towers would have been. Meanwhile construction continues on the Freedom tower and the other new buildings of the World Trade Centre. Over time that imaginary point in the sky will become an actual physical thing again.

I continued south towards Battery Park and passed the New York Stock exchange, Trinity Church and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Ventilator Building (the location of the Men In Black HQ in the film). In Battery Park I caught another distant glimpse of the Statue of Liberty form the shore by Castle Clinton.

Last year Stan’s café came to New York to do the rice (http://www.stanscafe.co.uk/ofallthepeople/index.html if you don’t know what I’m talking about) at the World Financial Center just up the road from where I was. Although the poster boy for that gig I wasn’t in the team that time but I imagined as I passed through the East Coast war memorial in Battery Park that someone in a brown coat had been dispatched to count the names of the American service men and women who lost their lives in the Western waters of the Atlantic Ocean during WWII (4,597 as it turns out). One of the things about working on that show is that when one is in full stat-mode the concentration of the exercise is in finding the numbers and developing the narratives within the comparisons. This means that sometimes (and to a degree the performance quality of what we do nurtures this) there isn’t the space for a performer to have the kind of emotional reaction to elements of the show that we see the audience having. In my experience there is a strange duality of emotion when simultaneously one experiences, on the one hand, the thrill of finding a usable statistic and turning that into a pile of rice – a piece of art – and, on the other hand, dealing with any emotion the subject matter throws up, particularly in the case of stories of human atrocities and loss. Sometimes it feels like laughing at a funeral. Sometimes (and probably unavoidably so) we come somewhat immune to the power of the show. And now, here I was engaging with a piece of public art which in many ways serves to do what we try and do with the rice. It was graphically representing individual human beings to go some way to tell their stories. I was glad to have the opportunity to experience the gravity of an event in a similar way to what Of All The People In All The World allows people to do but without the numbing effect that donning the brown coat can sometimes have.

With the name, rank and home state of 4,597 war casualties still fresh in my mind I was distracted by what sounded like a whale surfacing. All along the sea wall near the Liberty/Ellis Island Ferry terminal are what are probably best described as drainage holes. They appear to drop from pavement level directly down to the water, the swell of which forces air up and down these little shafts. The sidewalk seems to breath with every ebb and flow beneath. In a moment of reasonable stupidity I decided to look down one of theses drainage pipes and with that I got a blast of air in my face accompanied by a light spray of the waters of the Upper New York Bay. Like in a Keaton film (Buster, not Michael) onlookers would have seen what was going to happen long before it did. There was almost a Keaton-esque pratfall from me in reaction to this along with a Keaton-esque dabbing down of my deadpan face. Keaton would have gone further though, next he would have had his hat sucked into the drain with its next ‘inhalation’. The set piece would continue with him trying to retrieve it before getting stuck in there himself – just a pair of legs sticking out from the pavement – and finally being popped out of the drain only to land squarely on his bottom with his hat back on his head. I however moved on and made my way to the Staten Island ferry terminal.

I didn’t need to wait very long to get on a ferry and before I knew it I was setting sale from the convergence of the East and Hudson rivers on my reasonably pointless journey to an island I didn’t want to go to. But then again that’s what a lot of people on these Ferries are there for too. At 6pm-ish on a Friday the Staten-bound ferry’s compliment is (apart from the crew obviously) split, it would seem, roughly down the middle between Statenites trying to get home and people like me, tourists who have missed the ferries to Liberty Island and Ellis Island and/or want a free to trip to get a decent view of the aforementioned attractions. As I sat on the tourist side of the boat, the side of the boat that provides a view to the West and gives all the photo opportunities, I wondered if these Ferries needed special ballast to counter the fact that there are substantially more people on that side than the colder, uglier, less interesting, less famous side facing East. These Ferries don’t turn around either. They just fling it in reverse and head back to Manhattan so the good side is the same side coming back. Maybe the keel (if ferries have keels, I don’t know) is slightly off centre to compensate for any listing – ‘The Liberty List’ or the ‘Tourist Tilt’. On the return leg the Commuters were replaced by trendy Manhattan partygoers making an early start on their Friday night reveling and the tourists were the same tourists who had been on the outward leg who, like me, had just got straight back on the next ferry back to Manhattan. I say the next ferry, it was actually the same ferry but we were all instructed to disembark only to make our way through the ferry terminal and back to departures so we could re-embark. Anyway, the standard photos were taken on both legs of the journey. I was pleased to have timed the trip so that I had daylight conditions on the Staten bound leg and sunset/dusk conditions on the return leg. As we were docking back at Battery Park the lights in the buildings of the famous Manhattan skyline were beginning to come on so I really feel I got the best of both worlds.

With the excesses of the night before my legs were growing weary so I made my way back to the hostel via a bite to eat. An early night with a thorough read of the rough guide to help me decide what day 3 would have in store and a short period of time trying to get to sleep blocking out the sounds of my fellow hostellers snoring, talking, farting, kissing (or possibly even worse) and puking.

“Hey Jack, What’s Friday night in Manhattan like?” People will ask when I get home.

“I don’t know, I had a shower and went to bed early.” I will reply

I can be so middle-aged sometimes.

The next morning, at 8am, I was woken by the alarm clock of a couple who had checked into their room/cubicle at about 4:30am, talked loudly and then been the perpetrators of the kissing (or worse) mentioned above. I didn’t mind waking up at 8am, in fact it was fine having had an early night and because it meant I could get on with my day, but it did really irritate me that they could be so oblivious to how their behaviour (nocturnal or otherwise) could affect the rest of us on the 3rd floor of the Bowery Whitehouse hostel. Keeping my anger from bubbling over into a fully blown “What the hell do you think you’re doing coming here making loads of noise as if you’re the only people staying here?” or even just a timid yet definite “Shhhhh.” I left the kissing couple to their noise making and made my way to the D train, the subway to Coney Island.

The subway was, as you might expect, underground for a couple of stops, emerging into the light of day on the bottom tier of the Manhattan Bridge. On the Brooklyn side of the East river the D train briefly returns to a subterranean existence but for the majority of the journey across Brooklyn it is elevated above the streets. Glimpses of whole communities enjoying the early arrival of the springtime sun passed by outside the window. A family of orthodox Jews were spotted out on their balcony enjoying the Shabbat and watching the world go by. Weekend flea markets and Nickel and Dime stores lined the streets. Brooklyn seemed to be slightly more relaxed – less highly strung than Manhattan. People started talking to each other on the train – Strangers smiling at each other. Outside was Sesame Street country. I half expected a large animated number and a talking puppet bird to come into view. The sun was out (I was regretting wearing my thermal t-shirt and warm coat) and as we neared Coney Island itself the population of the carriage seemed to gradually unwind and exhale in an atmosphere of relaxed contentment. With carriage emptying slightly with every passing station I had the elbow room to stuff my coat into my already quite full rucksack.

Off the train I was greeted by something that filled me with schoolboy giddiness and excitement. I knew it was there somewhere but I had no idea that Nathan’s Famous Hotdog restaurant would be so soon (and easy to find) in my explorations of Coney Island, right there directly opposite the subway station. It was only 11:15am but I had accidentally skipped breakfast and so there was nothing for it but to get a hot dog. Nathan’s is the venue for the prestigious annual Hot dog eating competition. It is the absolute pinnacle of competitive eating. The winner wins the coveted Mustard Belt, which is the World Cup – the Jules Rimet trophy of its sport. It’s the prize that all speedy eaters want above all else. ESPN, the American sports network, go as far as to televise it complete with action replays, mostly of people disqualified for doing a ‘Reverse Roman’ (regurgitation – vomiting to you and me). In 2007 national pride was restored to America when Joey “Jaws” Chestnut beat Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayasha to end the Japanese domination of 9 of the last 10 years of competition, breaking the world record in the process, eating 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Last year, after a draw of 59 hotdogs each, Chestnut and Kobayasha competed in an eatoff with each other, Chestnut retaining his title being the first to finish a plate of 5 more hotdogs. Each year 30 – 50 thousand spectators gather to watch this festival of gluttony take place. I often translate that spectatorship into piles of rice when I’m doing Of All The People… to provide a lighter narrative in amongst the slightly more depressing statistics about McDonalds customers and childhood obesity, and here I was at the Mecca of Major League Eating. I’d made the pilgrimage to the Nathan’s Wall of fame and to where the magic happens, the restaurant itself. In contrast to Chestnut and his friends I chose to eat mine as slowly as I could and it was good, real good.

Belly full, I walked up to the seafront and to the boardwalk. With the sun on my back I walked the entire length of it to Brighton Beach and back. I stopped occasionally to read the information signs telling me about the previous life of Coney Island and its attractions, only some of which remain. The Elephant shaped hotel, for example, is long gone, burnt down in a fire that started in the cigar shop in one of its legs. I stopped to watch the predominantly elderly Russian immigrant population of the Brighton Beach area playing chess and sopping up the sunshine and conversing in strange Eastern languages (Russian, mainly, I expect, but it all seemed very exotic when you consider that the immigrant groups in Britain don’t gather in communal areas quite like they did here – in such numbers and with such extrovert interaction, and if they do they don’t speak Russian) and also watched a few rallies of handball on the municipal courts. This was not the type of handball the Scandinavians are very good at, not the handball that team GB are rounding people up off the streets who look like they can run around a bit and play an obscure sport for 2012. This handball is squash without a racquet. This handball is to squash what volleyball is to tennis only a volleyball ball is bigger than a tennis ball and a handball ball looks to me like it is pretty much the same size as a squash ball. In any case I couldn’t work it out so the last hope of my 2012 ambitions went out the window and I need never walk the streets scouring for a team GB handball recruiter to bump into.

I really liked Coney Island. It was a fascinating place. It is clearly a place in need of regeneration and investment and yet it is its knackered-ness that gives it its appeal. The fairgrounds were closed and run down, the food stands and candy outlets had seen better days but they all had a charm. The tackiness and colour that would have once made Coney Island the attractive retreat of choice for most New Yorkers is still there to see if a little faded and frayed around the edges. Of course some things were closed because it was still Winter season but I got the impression that even with the Ferris wheel receiving customers Coney Island will still feel a bit run down in the Summer, and be better for it. There are signs of a resurgence. The Boardwalk is being renovated and a new baseball stadium is there for a new Minor League Brooklyn Cyclones baseball team, but even without all that, the first sunshine of the year quickly brought the families of the 5 New York boroughs out to Coney. It feels like its dilapidation is an important part of its heritage. If it being a bit crap can still draw a crowd then why change it too much? The former parachute ride stands tall like some kind of former zeppelin landing point, dominating the skyline, serving as both an icon of the resort’s disrepair but also as a heritage point – a memorial – of a halcyon era. A fun time relic left in stasis waiting for someone to pull the dustcovers off. British seaside towns could learn a thing or two from Coney. Too many of them seem to be caught between a state of regeneration and disrepair, pruning their charms and their populations with a flat-pack high street and high property prices on the one hand and neglecting infrastructure, amenities, culture and heritage on the other hand. Coney wears its scars well, in a way that Blackpool, Morecombe, Skegness and Bognor perhaps don’t.

On the way back to the subway I was relieved to have experienced Nathan’s before the now enormous queue that had formed outside its main doors and took a little detour to the Coney Island Museum. The museum is a beautifully executed attraction run by local artists. In an upstairs room above an old store on Surf Avenue is a collection of old slot machines, bumper cars, bits of other rides and rollercoasters, postcards, billboard advertisements and other relics from the funfairs and freak shows of a bygone age. Vintage film footage of a chimpanzee visiting the funfair rides narrated with unintentionally humourous voiceover had me chuckling away while a band of 3 young brothers entertained themselves with the salvaged ‘Hall of Mirrors’ mirrors on the other side of the room. The mirrors and the Chimp were well worth the ¢99 entrance fee on their own. Definitely worth a look.

I got back on the subway and traveled pretty much as far West as I could from Coney and got off at 8th Ave – 14th Street station in the where Chelsea borders the West Village. Just down the road from here is where Friends was set and the trendy bistros, delis, bars and clubs all seem to be occupied by real life Rosses, Joeys, Chandlers, Phoebes, Monicas and Rachels. I grabbed a burger from a modern independent burger joint and continued on for a mouth-watering walk through the former biscuit factory that is Chelsea market. Here I resisted the numerous artisan bakeries and patisseries, the crowning glory of which was a store exclusively devoted to the manufacture and sale of cookies and cupcakes. Eleni’s Cookies looked like a little Willy Wonka outpost with icing on display in more colours than a Dulux chart. I also resisted the charms of the farmer’s produce grocery stores and seafood lunch bar but the chocolate ice cream milkshake at the Ronnybrook milk bar was too much of a temptation and by the time I left the market I was almost down to my last slurp.

I came out of the market at the other end and emerged under the shadow of the elevated train tracks that meander this area and the neighboring meatpacking district. Most of them are out of service now but, as they follow the roads and occasionally cut across whole blocks, disappearing momentarily through blocked up openings in old warehouses and factories, you can see how busy these manufacture and trade routes might have been once upon a time. There is also a retro-futuristic feel about them. In the early to mid 20th Century this is how people thought we’d be living at the beginning of the 21st Century, with elevated mass transit systems like monorails. Separate yet parallel forms of transportation webbing across cities and linking any two places we would care to go – teleporters on pipelines on monorails on roads all with floating homes and cars above it, like The Jetsons.

I was on the lookout for a particular bit of elevated track called the High line. This stretch of disused track has, over the years, become little belt of vegetation held aloft the concrete and asphalt of the streets below. Wild flowers, birds, insects – all sorts of flora and fauna – have gradually usurped the tracks and sleepers. The local population has since adopted it as a treasured landmark and, when the High Line was faced with demolition the Friends of the High Line were formed and set about persuading the City to buy the thing and turn it into an urban park. Construction on the park is due to finish any time now and I had heard a rumour that a small part of it was already open. I walked the entire length of it at street level heading north, passing another movie set on location and then walked all the way back again at street level unable to find a entrance to get up there. Nevertheless it was an interesting walk. Even from street level you could see the park taking shape. At the southern end of it the landscaping was visible with trees, plants and shrubs poking their heads above the structure. The further North the more industrial it remains. Heavy construction vehicles were parked up at track level and construction aggregate, bricks, concrete slabs sat lined up with root ball trees all waiting to be planted into position. I think it is going to be lovely when it’s finished.

With the clubs and bars of cobbled streets of the West Village already in full flow I headed back to the subway and to my now home districts of the East Village and NoHo. Here I had a pint in an Irish pub while watching the football highlights from home and then went to see a film (Push – it was rubbish).

The next morning on a tip off from a phone call home. I went off in search for Cosmic Diner, the eatery I had lamented the loss off on my first full day here when I was in Columbus Circle. Apparently it still existed but it had moved to somewhere else. In fact I had found it on a map the night before and had arranged an old-fashioned rendez-vous with another NY based friend for an 11am Sunday brunch as Cosmic’s. Through a mixture of undiscovered loss of Mobile phone credit, low credit on a phone card, over reliance on Facebook and email, and general rubbishness from us both, Anne and I had failed to meet up during my trip. Late on Saturday night I wrote off the chance of a Saturday rendez-vous and with one last-ditch roll of the dice I left a voicemail message for her to say that I would be at Cosmic’s at 11am on Sunday having pancakes. This is how we used to arrange to meet people before mobile phones came along. The trouble is we were more organised and we would make these kinds of arrangements in plenty of time. As it was Anne wasn’t able to pick up the message until it was too late and so I cut a solitary figure as I wolfed down my lumberjack pancake special. Yummy. I’ll have to go back to see Anne and have more pancakes, both good excuses if any were needed for a return to the Big Apple.

I made a quick phone call home with the last minute of my international credit available to celebrate my rediscovery of Cosmic. And with that I made a quick detour to pick up some last-minute tacky souvenir gifts and I ♥ NY t-shirts from Times Square and back to the hostel to pick up my things and check out before a taxi to Penn station and a train back to Newark-Liberty airport.

On the plane I felt glad to have weathered the storm of my early trepidation. I had had a great time. 4 days was just enough time to get to see lots of things but also not long enough to feel like you had to try and pack it all in in one visit. My attention turned to the in-flight entertainment system. My cockles were warmed by the fact that Back to the Future was one of the movie options. I reclined my seat for a session of jigowatts and DeLoreans. It was good to be going home.

Australia

Monday, March 12, 2007

Tales from Australia Part 1: Monday, Bloody Monday. Where did Monday go? Australia is a bloody long way away. So long, in fact, that I will never have a Monday 5th March 2007! (Well except for a couple of hours in Singapore airport, which might as well have been any airport in the world at anytime of any day). Still, I make up for it by having a Tuesday 20th March, which will last about 36 hours, which is great because I'm fulfilling the Michael J. Fox dream by doing so much time traveling. For people who don't know why I have come to Adelaide check out www.stanscafe.co.uk and seek out a show called 'Of All The People In All The World'. We were performing at the WOMADelaide music festival, which was great because we beat all attendance records for the show - 3000 in one day and nearly 6000 over the 2 1/2 day weekend. Fucking hot though. 37c on Saturday. Tough work in a big tent in the middle of the of a field humping 1.3 tonnes of rice around for 8hrs at a time wearing a shirt and tie and heavy brown dust jacket and suffering from jet lag. Even tougher when you have to clear up the mess left by a 7 year old girl who had decided it was ok to walk along the top of the pile representing all the millionaires in the world (nearly 9 million by the way). Her name was Grace (Grace's Mother: "Grace! GRACE! Oh Jesus Grace! Get here now. Grace! Grace! Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace" exits quickly - embarrassed). It's fair to say she might have been more graceful in her engagement with the rice. Just a bit of housekeeping. There will be no photos on this blog since I left my brand new camera in a taxi on Thursday night. I've been punching walls ever since, fucking Screw- up that I am. WOMAD is a funny festival. All a bit yoghurt weaving for my taste. What is it with people at festivals that makes them think it is a good idea to buy an over priced silly hat that they will only wear for one weekend in their life? Some cool stuff though. Some French street theatre and some bands and artists who I have already forgotten the name of and, of course, we were pretty popular. (Note Mum and Sally: That Mariza women was there. Thought of you both when she was on. Sorry. Can't see what the fuss is about. Not my cup of tea) We're staying at the Hilton. The luxury of which made us all cry after 24hrs in the air. As WOMAD artists we have executive entitlement, which means free access to the pool (and gym - but I prefer to have a sit down and a bag of crisps) and the roof top tennis court. One match so far. Jake beat me 6 2, 6 2. One tennis ball was lost, nearly causing a multi-car pile up on Sir Donald Bradman Road and factor 60 was applied at every change of ends. A day off on the beach today with a book and a bottle of factor 60. I pick up my campervan on Wednesday for a week along the great ocean road to Melbourne with my Ben Folds CD and, unfortunately, a disposable camera. Will keep you posted.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Tales From Australia Part 2: How the other half live. I'm going to be found out. Jake and Heather left this morning so they have gotten away with it. All of us were given executive access to the hotel, which means we can use the pool etc and use the club lounge. We seem to be only WOMAD artist with access to it. That can't be right. We were tucked away in the visual arts section of the WOMAD programme. We think our privileges were meant for a head line act. But in the words of Basil Faulty, "I think I mentioned it once but got awy with it." The club lounge, by the way, is the breakfast room on the 16th floor with a great view out west back towards the ocean. When breakfast is cleared it becomes the brunch room then the elevenses room and so on right up until 8pm when it is the having an early evening drink while watching the sunset room. There is basically an opportunity to eat and/or drink at any point throughout the day. Quite handy really. This Morning I was reflecting on the contrast between the last week at the Hilton and my next week in a van. Of course I was doing this whilst jumping between the sauna, Jacuzzi, and rooftop pool. It's very nice having all these things but I can't help thinking whether I'm just using the facilities because of they are there and it is a way of feeling decadent. Do genuine executives with executive privileges really make use of this stuff? I mean, how enjoyable is sitting in wood-paneled cupboard on the third floor with the heating turned up? I've spent my week moving between air conditioned buildings in to blood boiling heat as a matter of necessity and survival and here I am doing it as a leisure activity. How will I cope with a solar powered camping shower and a rented sleeping bag next week? There are a few faces at the hotel. As well as all the WOMAD artists staying there, Murray Walker of Motor Racing fame was there when we first arrived. The Australian under 23 Olympic soccer team arrived this morning ready for a warm up game at the Hindmarsh stadium tomorrow night. And a team from China with an impossibly long name that gets shortened to Shandong were there earlier in the week. They were playing Adelaide United last week in the Asian Champions League. Jake and I went to watch it. It was a pretty bad match. Shandong were a bunch of dirty bastards but we decided not mention it at breakfast. Adelaide lost 1-0 to an own goal but the sunset on the terraces washed down with Coopers Pale Ale made it almost as good as a wintery goalless draw at the Albion. Perhaps West Brom could organise a ground share with Adelaide and then Harry wouldn't need to wrap up with 6 layers of former Baggies shirts.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Tales from Australia Part 3: The Bush Tucker Trial. After feeding myself up with masses of Hilton bacon and eggs it was down to the hire place for me. After the guy behind the counter had raped me for money to cover hidden extras and extra insurance (it turns out that buying the full whack insurance option to reduce the deposit it still doesn't cover the roof or the undercarriage!) and an over complicated guided tour of the vans fixtures and fittings it was just me, The Shins, Ben Folds, Nickel Creek and the open road. Up over the Adelaide Hills and down the Princes Highway stopping for petrol at Naracoorte 'Australia's Tidiest Town'. The welcome to Naracoorte sign had a list of every year they had won this prestigious title. I thought the place could do with roughing up a bit. South Australia is flat. East Anglia is mountainous in comparison. Vineyards followed plains followed vineyards. I might stop for a tasting on the way back to Adelaide. And the dusty landscape was dotted with those very Australian trees with the sun-bleached trunks and branches some of which are dead and hollowed out and are apparently protected by law for some sort of Indigenous spiritual importance. I let out a small cheer as an emu crossed the road in front of me - my first sighting of an exotic animal (apart from a dead roo on the Prince's Highway). A long drive into Victoria crossing a time zone and stopping to stock up on beer for when I finally camped up for the night (camped up as in camping with a caravan not as in John Inman RIP - Is it too soon?) followed by a short pre-sunset detour to the lighthouse at Cape Nelson near Portland. Cape Nelson Lighthouse is the perfect lighthouse. Ask a small child to draw one and he/she will draw this one. A roadside truckers rest stop (free of truckers) would be camp number 1. I say it was roadside. It was quite a long dust track to get to the picnic table and BBQ stove that denotes every trucker's rest stop here. As the sun set the crickets sounded and a terrifying rustling came from the undergrowth. After a while the rustling had move to the treetops - Possums! Phew! Eaten alive by dingoes or giant snakes or... stingrays wasn't part of the plan. A Pot Noodle and a beer while scanning the atlas for tomorrows route was just enough to send me to sleep. Only to be woken of news that West Brom had lost to Crystal Palace. Boo!!!! This Morning I am writing from a place called Port Fairy having just driven the 50km or so along the coast taking the famous Crags, an impressive formation of rocks sticking out from the surf viewable from a platform on the cliffs above. Going to have some Brekkie now as my internet time is just about to run ou.....

Friday, March 16, 2007

Tales From Australia Part 4: PPPPPick up a penguin. I thought I saw my first wild penguin yesterday on a little rocky outcrop just off the beach at warrnambool (a place name unpronounceable except in an Aussie accent). It was definitely a penguin... until it flew off. Then I really did see one. Too far away to photograph but there was an unmistakable penguin waddle. Overnight in a caravan park in Warrnambool. I am beginning to feel very attached to the van. I imagine I would have a similar feeling if I was doing this journey on a horse. I have stopped short of giving it a name though. I could live in one of these vans. They're very comfortable and well fitted. I think I would need a bigger one for permanent dwelling but it would be great. The one draw back is the type of clientele at caravan parks. "Oh I see you've got the voyager 3000. What's the fuel consumption on that thing? Does it have satellite TV? That's a good looking barbie you got there - does it plug into the 12 volt or have you got a socket on the outside of the van?" Anyway. It pissed it down last night so I was glad to be in a van and not in a tent like some of the poor souls out there. I've made half way along the Great Ocean Road today (It is lunch time as I write). Lots of photos - a geologist's wet dream. Too much to write about on this installment because I have limited internet time. Will reveal all in Part 5. I'm at Port Campbell and will head Further East a bit before heading in-land to set up camp in the rainforests of the Otway National Park (hopefully).

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Tales From Australia Part 5: Down to Earth With a bump... a wedgie and bruising around my groin Madness took hold of me last night. At 4pm, just as I completed the last stretch of the Great Ocean Road, I turned right at the sign saying 'Australian Skydiving Centre' and by 5pm I had booked a 9am jump for the next morning. This morning at 9am I got in a plane and at 9000 feet I threw myself out of it. Luckily I was attached to someone who knew what they were doing (not that it showed though). The same thing happened when I learned to Scuba. A serious person makes you sign all the waivers that say skydiving can kill you (and WILL kill you study every bit of small print for to long). Then follows a sequence of encounters with people who simply aren't taking it seriously enough. My diver for the day was Mark. As Mark strapped me into the (soon to be internal harness) he parroted off the instructions for what we do when we 'leave' the plane cracking jokes and bantering with the rest of the lunatic (or whatever the collective noun for sky divers is). It doesn't make me less nervous to be made to laugh. I am laughing BECAUSE I am nervous NOT because you are being funny. I am also not made to feel less nervous when handed the steering cords shortly after pulling the chute. Needless to say I landed us safely and we are both alive to tell the tale. IT WAS FANTASTIC!!!!! Going back a couple of days. Just when you start thinking the Great Ocean Road is just another road it changes or shows you something breathtaking. The Bay of Islands stands out as the first of many geological encounters along the 12 Apostles National Marine Park. Then the road takes you inland through the middle of the Great Otway Forest National Park with its undulating alpine horseshoe twists and turns. Followed by a perilous cliff-side section with sheer cliffs up and down on both sides of the road. At one point I thought that me and my little van would be re-enacting the last scene of the Italian Job. The night before last I stayed in a camping ground with a compost toilet at Blanket Bay on Cape Otway. A 6km dirt track showed the way across numerous creeks and streams, through 2 gates and past several signs saying four wheel-drive vehicles only in wet weather. I prayed for it not to rain over night in my little section of dense forest by the sea and under rustling possums. It stayed dry and first thing in the morning I went to Cape Otway Light Station. The $12 entrance fee included the telegraph station, the keepers cottages, a WW2 radar bunker and of course the lighthouse. At the top of the lighthouse sat Pat, a friendly guide and former lighthouse keeper who was worth the $12 on his own. He told me that the light, lenses and mechanism were made in Birmingham - Smethwick in fact!!!! The lenses were made in the 1840s at the Chance Bros works in Smethwick and shipped to Oz in time for it to become operational in 1848 (2 people drowned getting the gear off the ship and through the surf at Cape Otway. In turn I told him everything I know about Smethwick and played up its involvement in the birth of the industrial revolution and told him to get in touch with the historians at the Black Country Museum for help with information on the Chance Bros works. It turns out that every light on every lighthouse in the world was made by the Chance Bros. (A fact I think I already knew but had forgotten). Now I am in a town called Beaufort (North West of Ballarat and Melbourne) on my way to the Grampians (by nightfall I hope) making me well placed to get back to Adelaide via the Prince's Highway by Monday Night.