I don't drink coffee

Miss Scarlett, in the (Soho House) Library, with the Cocktail Stick

2010-04-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

"Where exactly is it? We've been here before haven't we? Late at night. You know that time. After that thing. With that guy on his Crackberry."
"That was someplace else."
"Are you sure?"
"Yep. And it's here. It says on the door. After you."

The people on reception are busy finding Paul Rudd's bags. In real life, he's a total Baldwin - although there's something not quite right about him. A glitch in the matrix. It's not until we're in the lift that I figure it out.

"His head's too big."
"What, the actor guy? So you saw him too. I wanted to nudge you, but I was trying to play it cool."
"So you resisted the urge to tell him, 'I love you, man'?"
"Yeah."
"And 'slap-a de bass'?"
"Well, I was going to do that. Just as the doors were about to close. But then I worried that someone would press the button and we'd both be standing there."

Our brush with celebrity is far from over. It's the launch of a glamorous friend's fabulous book and there's a crush of stylish people and a rash of mistaken identities. If this were a romcom, the men coming up and kissing me would have been handsome young bounders, looking to score with a bestselling authoress, but then falling hard for my clumsy, unpublished charms after a serious of neat misunderstandings and amusing mishaps. As it is, it's sharply suited men of my father's generation, swooping in and hurriedly shipping out when they realise I'm the wrong short brunette. I try not to feel like an apple with a worm in it.

And then there's the actor. I spot him as soon as I walk into the room, because we've been to the opening night of his play the week before. I didn't know that it was either an opening gala or a play of his until I saw the collectable Playbill.
"Look who's here."
"You know him don't you?"
"Well, I've met him."
"So go say hi."
I pull a face. A passing waitress snatches back her tuna tartar in offence.
"Maybe later."

Several cocktails and coctail sausages later we snatch a goodbye with the real authoress and slip out. It's tempting to stop the lift on every floor and explore.

"You wussed out. You didn't say we saw the play. That we liked it."
"Yeah. I didn't get a chance."
"Chicken."

The receptionist doesn't glance up as we leave.
"Big heads."
"Hmm?"
"Big heads. They look good on film."
"That makes sense."

We set off, back to Brooklyn

Dog-Kicking at the Greenmarket

2010-03-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

There was something comic about the way he pulled his leg back and aimed a kick squarely in the small dog's hindquarters. With a yelp, the dog skittered behind the legs of a carefully accessorized Asian girl, and only then did it become clear that this wasn't horseplay, that no-one was fooling around.

As we got closer we saw the man shaking off his packages, telltale darkness blooming on the brown paper and puddling on the ground. So much filth from such a tiny dog.

"Get your fucking dog under control."

The girl failed to react. The chiuaua cowered in her shadow. The cute rom-con scenario was not playing out to script

"Here? How do you like this?" the hero asked, oddly calm. Leaning over her he wiped his piss-stained parcels - of canvases? of books? - on her coat.

She averted her eyes and jerked away, still saying nothing. No apology. No outrage.

All the Fort Greene folk who, like us, was diligently composting their food scraps (carefully stored in the freezer all week in reused plastic bags), looked at each other.

Now he was trying to wipe it in her face. Both dog and owner seemed to be getting smaller, shrinking back against the pungent garbage cans.

And then, with a final snort of disgust, he stalked away, and we went back to browsing the heirloom apples and the organic, free-range eggs.

The Night Shift

2010-02-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I spent the night sleeping on a camp bed in a basement room with sixteen men. Even with my ear plugs in, the symphony of night noises was incredible. Operatic snores were layered under creaks and mutters, counterpointed with sustained trumpets of flatulence. Time and again I woke in the shadow of a guest standing by the table at the end of my bed, though Chris swears I was dreaming.

The call had gone out that, due to a lack of volunteers, the shelter might have to close at the weekends. I'd signed us both up in a vague jag of well-meaning, despite the fact that it didn't really sound like my cup of tea. I like me altruism like I like my exercise classes: full of sweat and incident, with no time left over for awkward silences. Even among the securely homed, I lack the knack of aimlessly hanging out. As a rule, I'd rather be scrubbing toilets than making forced chit-chat. That Saturday night, however, that rule underwent a major revision.

By the time we arrived we were late and chilled to the bone after having spent the last half hour aimlessly circling the church in a snow storm. Drugged up to my eyeballs on cold medicine, I was heartily wishing we'd given up and gone home, rather than a phoning a friend to check if there'd been a last-minute email with contact details on it. But we had, and there had been, and here we were, making ourselves at home amongst the screened and vetted denizens of the city's day shelters.
"Yeah, we were wondering how the, erm, guests found it," I said, motioning to the unmarked door we'd passed and repassed several times that evening. "It makes sense if they're bussed in."
"I know. If someone walks in off the street and says he needs help..." The volunteer co-ordinater spread his hands in what I take to be an expansive gesture.
"You let them in?"
"No! Unfortunately, we'd be shut down. We have to turn them away."

The men who've made the grade are either sitting on their beds, or have nabbed one of the spots on the old sofas near the television. They seem tired - perhaps unsuprisingly, since the rules say we have to wake them at 5.30 for the bus back to the day shelter. There are white men, Hispanic men and black men, ranging from twentysomethings to haggard men in their sixties, although I don't ask and no-one offers those kind of details. Two, Pierre and Alabama, come and introduce themselves and thank us for volunteering. Turns out they are new to the shelter. Alabama's just got into town, and is still holding out hope of a job and cheap flat which a friend of his sister is supposed to be sorting out. Pierre is more of a mystery. Unlike the other men he isn't overweight or gaunt, and he's got the soft voice and direct stare of a ladies man or a con artist. He tells Chris that he can train him and 'get him ripped' - in a good way, we hope.

After some dallying over a Rice Krispies bar I sit down in the one free spot by the TV. I soon see why no-one's taken it. To my right, a scrawny old guy in a green t-shirt sits raking his skin with his nails. While I try to follow the plot of Law & Order his hands are furrowing under his shirt, scurrying round his back, delving into his crotch. Already I'm feeling itchy, and although I'm telling myself it's eczema, I can almost sees the fleas leaping over the cracked leather sofa towards me. There's a limit on how close I can sidle up to man on the other side of me (who snorts disdainfully whenever the onscreen detectives turn up yet another red herring) so at the first commercial break I jump up to use the toilet.

There's no women's toilet. In the interests of discouraging overdoses and beat-downs, the cubicles don't have doors on, but if I can get the room to myself I can lock the outside door. With the door closed the smell is overpowering; the toilets look like the set of Trainspotting and the floor is sticky with urine. Later that night I'll forget to put on shoes before venturing inside, and feel my socks sucking up the grime. Other girls might have bolted at this point, but I've been to Glastonbury, and I was made of sterner stuff

At least I thought so, until the aggro started...

Bellies Out at Sounds Like Brooklyn

2010-02-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

By the time we got to the gig the support act had finished and the headliners were on stage. Already the lead singer was glossy with sweat, and his Lycra bodysuit was pulled down perilously low beneath the generous swell of his belly. It was hard to look away. The songs came and went, and so did the light displays and the monkey hat, but the drama of the night was concentrated in that gleaming, jiggling stomach and the rolls of Lycra beneath it. It was the same tease they play with underwear models, whose shadowed musculature draw the eyes down and promise that that pants-on situation is purely temporary. This time, however, a thousand pair of eyes were holding that bodysuit up, searing it in place.

A few years back I watched Gossip play Bestival on the Isle of Wight: another mesmerising Lycra and lyrics combination. It was at the time when Beth Ditto was the UK media's darling, and here, yet again, the only thing standing in the way of control was a pair of pour-on leggings and a lot of sequins.

We talk about rock stars being larger than life, and there's something quite magical when they actually are. Everyone wants a piece of you, and there's more to go round.

But God bless that Lycra - the unsung support act of the year.

New York Intimacy

2010-02-02T07:10:00.000-08:00

Our Brooklyn neighbours have seen me naked more times than I care to remember. In our front room, more than thirty sets of windows face our window across the street, usually shuttered or sullenly dark in the daytime, but occasionally animated with ghostly life. In the middle room the window looks out onto an airshaft, and a peeping tom would need a wide-angled telescope to cop anything half-decent. Not so our kitchen. Washing up is like looking in a mirror. I turn on the water. My neighbour, standing less than two feet away, facing me, does the same. In unison we clatter our pots and pans, reach for scrubbing brushes and babytalk our mewling cats. The only acknowledgement I make of her is to angle my body to the side, as if sidestepping a mirror after dark - an echo of an older superstition.

The windowframe cuts her off at the chin and the navel. Even in winter she wears tank tops. Last year she turned on the airconditioning in April, and kept it nasally whining until well into the Fall. We have come to the conclusion that either her personal themostat is set on high, or she is just an enemy of the planet. She has probably heard these discussions, since we do not use our airconditioner and keep our windows flung open year round. Or perhaps her airconditioner drowns them out.

Our buildings are cheek to cheek, bending round the airvent to hug close again bathroom to bathroom. I smell the food she's cooking, the smoke when friends visit, which isn't often. I hear her door bell as well as my own, startling up from my desk and sinking back down when I hear the answering buzz of the door release. We don't often hear voices. Because she lives alone, it's easier to maintain the illusion of privacy. Like a child covering its face with its hands we insist: you can't hear us if we can't hear you.

The windowframe cuts me off from chin to navel. When I go to the bathroom in the night I run, my hands crossed over my chest. This is all my New York privacy. And as long as I never have to meet her, it's enough.

I Live to Lunge

2010-01-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

We're sitting at a table in a Burger King in rural Vermont, and for the second time in as many weeks we're overhearing a serious conversation about the Caveman Diet.
"I mean it totally makes sense."
"Yeah, if you think about it, they say that our brains have shrunk since we were hunter gatherers."
Although some of us have developed a sense of irony, in compensation.
"So yeah, part of my deal about getting back to, you know, a more natural relationship with food and exercise."
The girls at the table smile as he casually runs a hand over his biceps. I wonder if he also takes a caveman approach to dating.
"So yeah, you know. Lots of running. Raw food."
Yer man's a hedgefunder turned personal trainer. In fact, the whole table's so ridiculously Alpha that the fast food empire should be sponsoring them to sit here and eat their whoppers and burger shots.
"Sounds like you're building a really strong brand."
"I mean, this shit's important."

Living over here, it's sometimes difficult to remember that London has its own special breed of city arseholes, spraying Eastern European models with champagne and pricing the rest of us out of Zones 1 and 2. But this shiny bunch of Ivy-Leaguers are in a class of their own. They're smart, driven and attractive, and talking to them after a long day skiing is about as much fun as side-stepping up a bunny hill.
"But, I mean, everyone seems really nice," I insisted on the first night.
By the second I'd added the qualifier "...just not, you know, really our sort of people."
By the time we left words like "semi-obnoxious" were starting to appear.
"It's like fucking Jersey Shore in that hot-tub."
"You've never watched Jersey Shore."
"Yeah, but don't you find it weird that they all have six-packs? I swear one of those guys played a reality TV star in some teen movie. Seriously, the situation is outta control."

Accustomed to feeling like outsiders (what with having accents and all) that weekend it was like we a different species to the rest of the party. Things came to a head over breakfast when we were talking with some of the guys about cross-use skis.
G1:"I mean, it's great really challenging."
G2:"Yeah, because that's the problem with normal skiing. I prefer snowboarding because you get a full-body workout."
Chris and I munch our cereal and nod pleasantly.
G1:"Well you should try these kind of skis. You're really engaging your muscles. It's like you spend all day lunging."
G2: "That sounds awesome. You know, I live to lunge. I'd lunge all fucking day if I could."
A glance at her face tells us she's not joking, and we quietly slip away.

I Live to Lunge

2010-01-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

We're sitting at a table in a Burger King in rural Vermont, and for the second time in as many weeks we're overhearing a serious conversation about the Caveman Diet.
"I mean it totally makes sense."
"Yeah, if you think about it, they say that our brains have shrunk since we were hunter gatherers."
Although some of us have developed a sense of irony, in compensation.
"So yeah, part of my deal about getting back to, you know, a more natural relationship with food and exercise."
The girls at the table smile as he casually runs a hand over his biceps. I wonder if he also takes a caveman approach to dating.
"So yeah, you know. Lots of running. Raw food."
Yer man's a hedgefunder turned personal trainer. In fact, the whole table's so ridiculously Alpha that the fast food empire should be sponsoring them to sit here and eat their whoppers and burger shots.
"Sounds like you're building a really strong brand."
"I mean, that shit's important."
Obediently we troop back on the bus, having successfully foraged enough saturated fat to get us back home to New York.

Living over here, it's sometimes difficult to remember that London has its own special breed of city arseholes, spraying Eastern European models with champagne and pricing the rest of us out of Zones 1 and 2. But this shiny bunch of Ivy-Leaguers we're spending the weekend with are in a class of their own. They're smart, driven and attractive, and talking to them after a long day skiing is about as much fun as side-stepping up a bunny hill.
"But, I mean, everyone seems really nice," I insisted on the first night.
By the second I'd added the qualifier "...just not, you know, really our sort of people."
By the time we left words like "semi-obnoxious" were starting to appear.
"It's like fucking Jersey Shore in that hot-tub."
"You've never watched Jersey Shore."
"Yeah, but don't you find it weird that they all have six-packs? I swear one of those guys played a reality TV star in some teen movie. Seriously, the situation is outta control."

Although accustomed to feeling like outsiders (what with having accents and all) that weekend it was like we were a different species to the rest of the party. Things came to a head over breakfast when we were talking with some of the guides about cross-use skis.
G1:"I mean, it's great really challenging."
G2:"Yeah, because that's the problem with normal skiing. I prefer snowboarding because you get a full-body workout."
Chris and I munch our cereal and nod pleasantly.
G1:"Well you should try these kind of skis. You're really engaging your muscles. It's like you spend all day lunging."
G2: "That sounds awesome. You know, I live to lunge. I'd lunge all fucking day if I could."
A glance at her face tells us she's not joking, and we quietly slip away.

Battle of the Bowling Lanes

2010-01-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

"God, I love Brooklyn..."
We're at a launch party for the 2010 edition of Not For Tourists - Brooklyn, a hitherto hipster-skinny guide to the borough's best bits, now growing paunchy with maps of Bedford-Stuy and Clinton Hill. It's held at Brooklyn Bowl - allegedly the world's first eco-friendly bowling alley, and certainly one of the shiniest and most beautifully designed I've ever seen. At your lane, you can lounge on leather sofas and watch the live band in the next room, or order obscene portions of Blue Ribbon (and, presumably, blue-blood) fried chicken. Since it's a launch, the bowling and first drink are free, and we've teamed up with a couple of guys, both sporting prominent facial hair. At one point I'm trailing 30 points behind my nearest (bearded) competitor, and only a flukey strike keeps me from total humiliation.

It was only when we were walking home (several Righteous Ryes, 8 chicken parts, and one Haitian benefit later) that we realised that this new alley is literally a couple of blocks from its less glitzy predecessor. The Gutter has its own beaten-up charm. The way I bowl, the aerodynamics of the lane doen't matter. Moreover, they serve hard cider in big bottles, not just local beers for local people. And I like the way the frequent malfunctions add an element of drama and suspense. Yet it's hard to see how it will survive the competition shimmying into the neighbourhood. Sure, Gutter's cool, and it's a damn sight cheaper, but it's pitting vintage against state-of-the-art, a mailing list against a PR machine, a jukebox against guitars and drums.
"We should go back to Gutter next time," I say, as we march to the Nassau G.
"Yeah." There's a pause. "But they don't have fried chicken, do they?"

The Golden Globes

2010-01-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

"Wait you've got to watch this."
"She looks like Jessica Parker."
"She looks like Daryl Hannah."
"Her hair is ter-rible."
"What, I like it!"
"She's wrecked."
"I know, right?"
"Shh, I'm replaying it."

It's raining, both in LA and here in New York. From out of the floor-to-ceiling glass of our friends' Hells Kitchen apartment we can see that most of midtown is wreathed in fog. Even in Hollywood, people are cowering under umbrellas, shivering in chiffon and vintage lace.

Julia Roberts, arm slung around her agent, has on a simple black dress and her Pretty Woman grin. While everyone else is posing Pilates tall and making safe small talk, she's loose and half-lit. In the wings, a puffy faced Tom Hanks looks like he's concentrating very hard on standing upright and keeping his face straight as Roberts veers off the unwritten script. She calls out NBC, jokes about her sex life, and, best of all, draws attention to the absurdity of the interview process, where well-groomed hosts wax sycophantic for thirty second bursts before unceremoniously moving on to the next face before their inane questions are even answered.

Mostly the celebs smile graciously and melt away. Not our Julia.

It's clear from the host's body language that he's winding down the interview, but his stars are too A-List to physically walk away from.
"So, over to you, Natalie," he says, bizarrely thrusting the microphone at Roberts' face at the same time.
Before the cut is made, we hear her demand "Who's Natalie?"

"Yeah, who the fuck is Natalie?"
"She's priceless."
"Yeah, but what was that necklace all about?"

Later there's excited murmurs as Roberts steps up to present an award. The smile comes out again, but this time there's no manicness, no glimpse of the face behind the makeup.

"Her agent must have sobered her up."
"Guess so."

Glumly, we reach for the guacamole.

BAM and The Red Peril

2010-01-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

The post-screening discussion had gained momentum and now the panellists were beginning to enjoy themselves.
"And of course what the film doesn't show is that his wife was one of the richest women in America, the heiress to what became General Foods."
"And you know all those train scenes? Well, really they arrived on their luxury private yacht..."
"THAT'S NOT TRUE!"
Three of the panellists' faces say There's always one crazy in the audience
The fourth panellist clears his throat, a little guiltily.
"And we are lucky enough to have us with us in the audience the granddaughter of Joseph Davies, whose mother and father were portrayed in the film."
His fellow panellists try not to look like they've been slapped in the face. Suddenly their wry critiques and witty asides seem snide and disrespectful. Quick as a luxury sailing vessel, they change tack.
"So, ummm, it'd be great to hear what your mother's experiences of Russia were."
But already the ambassador's granddaughter is making her way to the front of the room and gesturing for the microphone.
"You're all laughing at the film, but my grandfather was there and he said that that was what was so amazing about the trials. The accused men really did just go off and, you know, hang themselves."
There are murmurs in the room. She is talking about the scene of the purge trials, which, as one of the panellists has already pointed out, showcases some of the ugliest and most biddable traitors in the history of cinema.
"And you've got to remember. There's a war on."
The panellists nod sagely at this. Granddaughter holds on to the microphone The event has morphed from a film panel to an awkward q&a. Unwisely, one of them persists with the question of the sailing boat. She's sure that was what her source said.
"Oh that was a different time. They didn't arrive in it."
From then on the discussion is strangely charged. What's at stake is no longer a Warner Brothers propaganda film, but a family's reputation, America's moral integrity, and the true story of the second world war. People start sentences with phrases like "As a person of Finnish descent..." and two historians in front of us almost come to blows over a third historian's assessment of the Trotsky-bloc plot.
It's tempting to join in. Both the film and the audience members talk about brave Russia fighting off Hitler alone, as if as a personal favour to America.
"Twenty-five million people. I mean, you can't even imagine. They died for us," the Granddaughter intones piously.
I half expect someone to shout an A-men.

A Full Range of Movements

2010-01-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I've learnt the hard way that Aqua Exercise is really the only slot in the schedule where I have half-decent odds of being the sleekest, fittest, most flexible kid in the class. On Monday I hit the jackpot.
"You new here?" The teacher is wearing a low-backed black swimsuit and legging combo that, were she in Bushwick, would easily pass for street clothes. And she can certainly rock it. Her figure would be excellent advert for the toning powers of low-impact, water-resistance exercise, except she never gets out of her Havanianas and into the pool with us.
"First time."
"But you've done this sort of thing before, right?" she checks, handing me my styrofoam weights.
I think back to the sessions in our local pool in Koshigaya, doing splashy jumping jacks to J-pop, shrug and smile.
I take my lane in between two plastic-domed old ladies and test out the weights. In the air they are faintly ridiculous: scaled-down versions of the sort of weights dodgy Victorian strongman might have painted black and puffed over theatrically. In the water they put up more of a fight. Twenty minutes in and my weedy arms are already complaining. But the tragic thing is I suspect I might be the only one hurting...
Geriatrics, it turns out, are a bunch of slackers. I've never seen so much cheating in a class, so many instances of blithe this'll-do-ing, such frequent stops to chat about brands of crackers and last night's TV. True to form, I'm the youngest by a good three or four decades.
I finish the class smug and sweat free (such is the joy of aqua exercise) but sadly the feeling doesn't last for long.
I'd forgotten my swim cap, and after a lot of back-and-forthing I'd persuaded one of the life guards to lend me his, provided that I wore it inside out. The problem was that when I got out of the pool I couldn't remember which regulation white towel was mine. Not wanting to invoke the ire of a pumped-up senior citizen I had little option but to go knock on the door of the pool office without one.
"Umm, Diego..."
The door opens and a quartet of lifeguards turn to look at me, trying to be all nonchalant in my dripping bikini and scalp-plastered hair.
"Ah. Oh. Thanks."
"No, thank you. Do you want me to rinse it?"
There's an awkward pause. He laughs, as if I've said something rude. Maybe I have in lifeguard slang.
"You know no-one's ever offered to do that before... Thanks."
I parrot another "thanks" and make a run for it up the stairs to the changing room, cheeks burning, arms aching, but still, Lord be praised, the right side of thirty.

Winter in Wave Hill

2010-01-04T12:28:00.001-08:00

"You know, you've got this place pretty much to yourselves."
"Odd that."
The man comes out of the side door of the booth. He's kitted out in heavy-duty gloves and scarf. His phone rings and he takes the call. We wait, the snowing whipping round us. The cold burns my nose when I breathe in, and I dream of long johns and global warming and hot chocolate that doesn't come in a packet from Burger King.

"Either of you students?"
I look hopefully at Chris, but he cuts me off my scam with a firm "No". This, after all, is the man who told the woman in the exchange booth that he'd given her too much currency - despite the fact she'd been rude, despite the fact that he'd run through his travelling budget and was living off brown bananas.

We hand over a twenty and wait for change. There is, apparently, no off-season discount, no danger money.

I know people who swear they never venture above 20th, but here we were all the way up on 254th where there's nothing to stop the snow settling and the feral cats filling the holly bushes with tough, mewling kittens. Wave Hill is a nineteenth century estate on the banks of the Hudson. This time of year there are clear views to the Palisades opposite, although thanks to the blizzard everything was shades of white and grey. Well, most things.

We are the only two on the tour. Our well-prepared guide has double layers of gloves. The wind chill factor means it feels ten degrees colder than it is. Which is plenty cold enough.
"You must come back. The wonderful thing about Wave Hill is that there's always something in bloom."
Chris mutters something.
"Sorry, I didn't catch that..."
"I said, except this time of year."
Our guide looks alarmed. "Well, there's plenty in bloom. Did you not see the..."
She lists, and we nod apologetically. We did see the beautiful red berries. And the purple blossoms. Yes, they were worth a visit in themselves.
The cold pulls my skin tight across my face.

Later, in a coffeeshop in the Upper West Side Chris pulls a seedpod out of his pocket.
"Wisteria."
"When did you pick those up? When you pointed them out to the guide?"
"No, I waited til everyone's back was turned..."
"Sneaky."
He shrugged, and we both went back to our hot chocolates.

Gogol Bordello at Webster Hall

2009-12-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

I can't be the only person whose sense of social snobbery is most finely attuned in the mosh pit. Because I don't mind getting sweaty and bruised and crushed... as long as it's in the right company. They don't have to be beautiful (though that helps, if we're going to be breast to shoulder blade for the duration) but they do have to be into it. And have the right sort of facial hair.

As the support act took up their drums I did a quick reconnaissance. Surprisingly, given the band's late nineties vintage, there were groups of boys who barely looked in their teens - at least that's how it seemed to my tired old eyes. There were overgrown hobbity types and overweight men in European sports shirts, groups of students and thin girls with wild hair and a certain way of dancing with their eyes squeezed shut. I suspected we might have been the only ones who'd finally got round to downloading their albums the night before.

Once the main act came on stage, the mustachioed front man slugging from a bottle of wine, our carefully calibrated positioning went all to shit in the surge of the crowd. At one point we're close enough to the stage to feel the reverberations of the cymbals, but as the lengthy encore frenzied the crowd again and again we're gradually pushed inwards and backwards. After a slow, acoustic start the music is one incalzando after another, and although my feet are still jumping to the beat inside I'm shamefully begging the band to stop, to release us all, before we dance ourselves to death like fairytale villains. Yet when they finally do stride off the stage, the music coming from the speakers feels as thin and unsatisfying as gruel.

In the queue for the cloakroom we get one last encounter to take away with us. Taking advantage of a chaotic system, two ripped Jersey boys try to push in.
A man with a beard and a beer-belly taps one on the shoulder.
"Hey, you know that's not the line, right?"
One of the guys mutters something, but his opponent is not going to let it ride.
"Yeah, obviously it's A line. But not THE line. We're all waiting here."
"We've been waiting too."
"Well, you'll have to wait a little longer. Like the rest of us."
The two Jersey boys look at each other, shrug, and join the back of the line.
Half an hour later they're still talking about it.
"We could have had him. He must have been shitting himself. We would have, well, but we didn't want to cause hassle with you ladies around."

Chivalry lives on in the East Village.

Let it Snow...

2009-12-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's a heart-warming winter scene. We've been slugging back mimosas and bloody marys since one, and now we're huddled round a spliff in the darkness watching the snow bleach dirty old Alphabet City a virgin white. Someone - maybe me - starts with the Christmas carolling.

"Hark the herald angels si-ing..."

A week before Christmas, it's the first real cold-snap of the year, and the stretch of pavement outside Marie O's is ringed in adult-sized snow angels. Winter coats are soaked through to the party dresses below. Hair freezes in antic halos.

"Dashing through the snow..."

Later that night, ten hours into the party, we're trudging our way through the blizzard to a bar a few blocks south. Crossing Houston we lower are heads against the wind and wade through snow banks. We are the Scott, Oates, Wilson and Bowers of the Lower East Side.

"Well the weather outside is frightful..."

It's a Friday night in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city, yet we have whole blocks to ourselves. We have stumbled into the Day After Tomorrow wearing six inch heels. We try to step in each other's footprints to avoid sinking up to our knees.

"A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight..."

And then we're finally at Schillers, and it's packed with other people sheltering from the storm, and with all the wood and facial hair and European beer it's like we've reached a hut in the Alps after a treacherous climb.

"So bring us some figgy pudding..."

I unwrap my scarf, order a glass of cheap red wine and try not to think about the journey back to Brooklyn.

Me and My Self-Harming Cat

2009-12-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

"I can't believe you said that."
"Well... she's. I mean she's great She's friendly and everything, but she's not exactly attractive is she?"
"That's really mean."
"You said yourself, she's a bit gray..."
"I can't believe you're bitching about our cat."
"Well, all I'm saying is there's a reason why no-one wants to adopt her."
"Fine."

The following conversation came back to haunt me when I surprised my foster cat in the act of tearing out the fur on her head. The scratching was so fast tempo it sounded like the whir of a desk fan on the highest setting.
"Stop it puss. What are you doing to yourself?"
Small clumps of white hair polka-dotted the red blanket we'd laid over the bed to save the duvet from her claws and her cat litter footprints. She looked up at me, non-plussed. It wasn't feeding time, so she only kicked in the low-level purring when I put my hand to her face.

It was only when I got back from the theatre that night that I really saw the full extent of what she'd done. Her white head was slashed with red, where the ahir had been pulled up by the roots. She seemed to have forgotten all about it, whickering happily enough while I clumsily dabbed it clean with water and toilet paper.

I opened the bathroom cupboard, but the plasters and the antibiotic cream seemed all wrong. Wouldn't she just rip and lick off anything I tried to put on the wound, poisoning and chocking herself on my good intentions? I also thought about emailing the woman who had dropped her off. Did she need to go to the vet (and the selfish follow-up, and who would pay)?

With an internet connection like ours (purloined, unreliable) scouring is really the wrong verb for what we can do to the web, but I brushed up against a couple of cat behaviour sites and chatrooms looking for answers. The results were inconclusive, but one theme was repeated, in various hysterical and professional keys.

Our cat had low esteem. And it was all my fault.

A Friend in Jesus (I)

2009-12-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

Now I went to a Methodist boarding school and I've done my share of pew-sitting and hymn-book bothering, but the Jesus I was peddled was a jolly good sport. He excelled on the rugby field, but was never a sore loser. He abhorred cheating, bullying and drinking to excess. And in order to give JC a hand with that last one, the vicar ran the sixth form bar, making sure us sixteen year olds never went over our two-can limit. Those, as I recall, were the Scrumpy Jack years.

The Jesus we were praisin' at the Brooklyn Tabernacle seemed like a different fellow altogether, someone charming and charismatic, with an exacting taste in music and spectacle. In school we prayed apologetically, with heads bowed and eyes closed; here palms were raised to the ornate, opera-house ceiling, as if to catch the Glory raining down, and no-one mumbled over their Aay-mens and Hallelujahs. Now I love a hymn as much as the next girl, but back at school the choir's major attraction had been the A-House boys who sung in it. Here the music was praise, both tithe to and manifest evidence of the Almighty. And we got to clap along.

It was the Tabernacle's Christmas show, and we showed up an hour early, like the website said, to find all the best seats already taken by canny folk saving seats for their people. The crowd was a mix of black, white, Hispanic and Asian; out-of-towners and locals; people, like us, soon sweating in their Sunday best and others (the tourists? the real Christians?) in jeans and soggy sneakers.

We'd all come for the music. After telling a friend from Alabama about our expedition to Harlem to hunt out Gospel, he'd pointed out we had one of the most famous choirs in the world a block and a half from our apartment. In fact we'd walked past the Sunday service queue before, without ever really stopping to wonder why all those women in powder blue suits and pillbox hats would bother to line up there every week when there were more churches than bodegas in this part of town.

But now we were joining them, politely scrimmaging for the last few decent seats, then flapping leaflets about, trying in vain to cut a breeze through the fug.
Just as we were getting restless, the light dimmed. Everyone sat up a little straighter and shushed their grandkids. Showtime.
TBC

Cut-Price Christmas

2009-12-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

"Why didn't you stop me?"
"I tried. You were pretty adamant."
"But I shouldn't have been wielding a hammer. Not after that many whisky and cokes. I don't even really remember much after we got home."
"With the knobless toaster oven."
"I remember that much."
"Maybe we can prop it up so it looks less wonky?"
"I can probably get the nail out and start over."
"Won't that damage the trunk?"
"Well we can't leave it like that... it's like the leaning tower of Pisa."

Five minutes (and some grunting) later
"You're right. Let's just prop it up. Are you okay to get lights and stuff?"

In one of the budget stores in downtown Brooklyn I bought: 1 x string of Christmas lights, 6 x silvery baubles, 3 x kitsch, homemade snowmen, 2 x black feathered baubles, 1 x pack of tinsel threads ("no lead"). It came in under $10, including tax. I also watched an old woman stomp out of the store after being accused of shoplifting by an over-zealous till-girl, who shouted at her hunched back.
"Why she have no bag then? That's all I'm sayin. How she gonna prove she paid? She got paid stickers? Cos I don't see no paid sticker."
I made sure I got my paid stickers.

Back at home we dressed the wonky tree.
"Wow, you got enough lights then."
"A hundred for two bucks. And they're wired in parallel."
"Good GCSE knowledge, right there."

A few minutes later, we turned off the overhead light and pushed in the plug.
"Huh."
"Ummm... do you think we can make them stop? Is there a switch or something?"
"I doubt it. These are seriously old-school."
"There must be a button. They can't just flash like this all the time. They're making me feel sick."
"Maybe there was a reason why they were only two bucks."
"Look. Right here on the package. It says '5 Way Flash'"
"Yeah, and it's flashing in five sections."
"Oh."
Silence.
"The tree's still wonky, you know."
"Mmmhmm."

A Brief Encounter with a Toaster Oven

2009-12-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

You could tell we were in tony Brooklyn Heights because someone had taken the trouble to print out a notice in blue block capitals and stick down all the edges.
I AM/WORKING/JUST MISSING/A KNOB!
"Sounds like a haiku."
"Think it might be my new Facebook status."
Thanks to the opening night party we were already a couple of cocktails (or, in Chris' case, considerably more) to the wind, although it was barely half past eight. The party had taken place in a cavernous, empty duplex in a sprawling, fancy new building next to the freeway. As we pulled up in the coach we realise we'd actually walked past the building one nightmarish summer afternoon when we'd got stuck on the demon low road instead of the scenic boardwalk. We'd ended up walking for what felt like miles along the hard shoulder, as speeding cars and lorries whipped up clouds of dust from the disused industrial sites which boxed us in from the river. As it turned out, we got to relive that feeling of endless tramping as we followed sign after sign after sign round corners and through echoing corridors to get to the fabled suite 205. Once there, we got to take in the mind-blowing views of the Manhattan skyline, and the rather less awe-inspiring vistas of industrial decay. "Apparently there's going to be a park there soon," people kept on saying encouragingly.
We were so amply plied with premium liquor and lobster mac and cheese that we stayed until the average age of the guests had halved and the party was little more than us, the cast, their friends and the very amiable Brazilian barman. Stumbling home ("Look! This is how we escaped last time!") we came across a Black and Decker toaster oven balanced invitingly on a dustbin.
As we were examining it, a man walked up behind us and stopped to peer at it too.
"What have you got there?"
"Toaster oven."
"Ah, toaster oven. Very nice."
"Apparently the knob's gone, but it works fine."
"Always the knobs with toaster ovens."
"We're going to need some pliers."
"Well good luck with that. Best of luck in the world."
The man walked off, but Chris hardly seemed to notice. He was taking big sniffs of the inside of the toaster oven.
"Smell that?"
"What?"
"Just smell it."
"O..kay."
"Now answer me this," he said, slinging the oven under his arm, "why does our new toaster oven smell of weed?"
I checked to see if he was joking, then gestured to the guy who was sauntering away.
"I don't think it's the oven, sweetheart."
His face cracked into a relieved grin. "Ah, that makes more sense. Let's get this bad boy home."

Mercury Lounge: Rebel (Rebel) Orchestra

2009-12-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

The girl from Massachusetts, dark hair scraped back, cheekbones and elbows dangerously sharp, took the microphone. What came out was deeper, throatier and more studiedly English than Bowie himself could ever have tried for.
"Ground Control to Major Tom..."
"That was unexpected," we muttered beneath the cheers. But, to be honest, the whole thing was unexpected. We'd only rocked up because the Slavic party in Park Slope had seemed too far away and it was getting late. We had Plan B expectations, which were unexpectedly upgraded. It was unexpected that the orchestra would be so young, that the girls would be hot in body-con dresses and wet-look leggings, while the music-geek-boys let them take the spotlight. It was unexpected that the crowd of proud leather-clad parents and curious hipster waifs would work up such a sweat. And then there was that ball-clenching version of Under Pressure...
There were twenty-seven musicians on stage and the sound they created was thick and textured enough to feel on your skin. Our faces got blasted with trombone and viola; we had to drag our pints to our lips through thick bassoon and breathy backing vocals.
The lead singer, between conducting and flirting with little Ms. French Horn, gave shout-outs to his mother, who would be loyally flogging CDs after the show. Next he invited a cast of glorious misfits to take the microphone. Alongside the two gravelly and purringly glamorous female singers, there was a plaid-trousered rawk kid, a rangy opera singer and a spy, suited man with all the sinister charm of a child catcher.
When we thought it couldn't get any better, the leader singer's meandering intro took on a familiar flavour:
"You remind me of the babe."
"What babe?"
"The babe with the power of voodoo..."

Overheard in Central Park

2009-11-30T11:35:00.000-08:00

A man with a thick neck, sweating profusely, shouts at a boy with long hair curling over his eyes.
"You'll never catch it like that. Look I told you. Bring it in to your body. Kick me a high one and I'll show you."
Thunk.
"Jesus, I said a high one."
Mumble.
"What was that?"
"I said I'm getting tired. Can we stop soon?"
"You're tired. You're tired."
"Mom, can I stop yet?"
"You're tired? How can you be tired? I've just worked a seventy hour week. And Saturday, as well."
"Mom?"
"You're tired? How can you be tired? A twelve year old boy..."
"Ten."
"What?"
"I'm not twelve, I'm ten."
"Well I'm fifty and I'm still going strong. Just goes to show, doesn't it? I'm fifty years old and I've been working all week and I've got more stamina than you."
Swoosh. Thunk. Swoosh. Thunk.
"What are you doing? It's not... I don't know... karate football. What weird-ass moves are you doing?"
Mumble.
"What?"
Mumble.
"Jesus, I just told you how to do it."
Swoosh. Thunk.
"Did you see that? Now do it like I just did."

[half an hour later]
"Ok fine, we'll head back."
"Alright."
"But on the way we can play Golf Football."
Silence.
"So go on. Take the ball. Kick it towards that tree."
"But I'm tired. You said we can stop."
"We are stopping. This isn't football. It's Golf Football. See how many kicks it'll take you then I'll beat your score."
Silence.
The mother, who's sat on the bench staring out at the ducks, takes the ball from her husband's hands and thrusts it towards her son.
"You heard him. It's Golf Football."

Thanksgiving Food Drive

2009-11-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

"Sorry what was that?" I asked, dropping to my knees to force some more cans into her gray nylon bag.
"69... that was my first Thanksgiving." She smiled nervously, as me and the other young do-gooders fussed around with UHT milk and double-bagged turkeys.
"It's actually going to be my first Thanksgiving," I said, which was a lie that didn't really matter, since she didn't really seem to be listening.
"I worked for the government, you know. Me and my husband both did." She had the kind of subcontinent lilt I associate more with East London than with Manhattan, and her voice was low and quick, needlessly apologetic. "Such a lot of food."
"Yes, will you be able to carry it ok? Do you want to leave some and come back or..." I tailed off, not knowing for sure what would happen after our shift left at 11.
"You know I used to do this," the lady said, gesturing to the boxes of cans and pie crusts, "I used to help out in the holidays. We go to this church. But then my husband got sick, and I lost my job..."
We clucked, helplessly, looking at the floor.
"It's such a hard time for a lot of people at the minute," I managed, and she just sighed and heaved the extra plastic bags onto her shoulder.
"Have a good Thanksgiving."
"You too. Goodbye. Happy Thanksgiving!" we chorused until the lift came to take her and her non-perishables away.

The next person was an oriental woman in her sixties who flinched when the young white male helper tried to hand over her turkey. Again, her cart was soon overwhelmed by the volume of packets and cans that the schoolboys had collected for her. All the while she muttered under her breath, only letting out firm "no!"s when we tried to take things out of her bag to put the heavy stuff at the bottom, and a breathless "thankyougoodbye" when she left.

"Must be a story there," the worker said after she'd gone, and I shrugged, not really wanting to think about it.

Intellectually I know it's a great and godly thing to give all these people, 200 local families in all, a decent Thanksgiving, but when I was taking the subway back all I could think of was how these women looked when they left the church, bent double with the weight of 1 x pkt rice OR pasta, 2 x shelf-stable milk, 1 x pkt mashed potatoes (instant), 2 x can of soup (any flavour), 1 x frozen turkey (small) and of our easy breezy charity.

Bus to Monhonk

2009-11-23T10:01:00.000-08:00

Admittedly I was reading a book about Jewish boys playing baseball, but I'm figuring that with a mind so cloudy her eyesight wasn't that preternaturally sharp. After all, I myself hadn't realised what the novel was about before I got it home. It's one of those books where the back cover is used up with flowery praise instead of pedestrian clues about genre, cast or plot. In many ways these books give the same high-minded message as the unpriced sparklers at Tiffany's: if you need to ask too many questions, plebeian consumer, you don't deserve to take me home.

The woman came over just as I'd decided to abandon my Apple Snapple and Chris had shrugged off my latest suggestion that we head to the gate. There was still fifteen minutes ("seventeen minutes", Chris insisted) before our bus left for New Paltz, but since it was the last one for three hours, I was getting twitchy.

The woman who sidled over was white-haired and conservatively dressed. She had her head was tucked defensively into her neck as if expecting a blow from adversaries unknown. Her words came out in an unruly flow, as if she hadn't spoken for a while.
"I don't know if you're Jewish or not, you should watch out because they're really antisemitic around here."
She was staring at Chris, ignoring me, seemingly oblivious to the fact he still had his headphones on.
"Don't go over there." She gestured wildly to the Greyhound Desk. "They'll sell you the wrong ticket. And if you go there..." This time she pointed down an unmarked corridor. "...they'll shut you in. You'll get locked in. And you won't be able to get out."
"Ok, erm, thank you," Chris replied.
The woman nodded twice, clutched her bags to her and set off in one of the directions she hadn't warned us against.
"What she say?"
Chris repeated what the woman had said. Seems I hadn't been hallucinating, although the speed and intensity with which she'd delivered her warning had seemed so out of step with the prosaic surroundings of the grimy Port Authority cafeteria.
"God knows what that was about," he concluded.
"It's your beard. It confuses people."

After that he let me drag him along to Gate 34. I left my abandoned Apple Snapple, in case one of the waifs and strays wanted to finish it. It seemed like that sort of place.

Rock n Roll Kareoke

2009-11-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

"And singing Blondie, it's a first-time performer..."
"Ummm, actually..."
"Give it up for-"
"Actually I'm wussing out. Sorry. Next person."
The band shrug disdainfully. The host gives me an I'm-not-angry-I'm-just-disappointed look. She's still holding out the sheet of song lyrics.
"Why are you not going up?"
"Well my partner's wussing out, and I need him to start in tune..."
Chris rolls his eyes, and turns back to Big Buck Hunter. His was not the name they called out, after all. And, like his says, it'd be different if he knew the verses.

Eventually they do move on to the next person, and I go back to studying the list of song titles as if looking hard enough will reveal the meaning of life, or at least one of those Magic Eye pictures, the sort I could only ever glimpse cross-eyed. With well drinks this strong the corss-eyed thing wouldn't be a problem for long.

"Why don't you two do one together? Since you're both tempted to do one?"
Phil and I look at one other, shrug, and go back to scouring the song sheet. It's hard to choose how to pitch it: play for comedy appeal with Hit Me Baby One More Time, or go for guts and glory with some classic rock anthem that'll get even the most hardened barflys saluting us with sloshing pints of Brooklyn Lager. Or heading for the door.

In the end we stick with what we know best: Madonna, Material Girl.

Up on stage there's a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer. They tell us they'll give us the nod when we have to go in. Like novice bowlers, we also have a gutter-guard in the shape of a Hanks regular who stands at the front beating time and acting out the lyrics. His interpretation of "some boys lie and some boys cry" is to die for.

After a few stumbles, and some initial bum notes, we vogue our way through the song. About three and a half people whoop and cheer as we finish. We are rock stars. We graciously thank our support band, our parents, our third-grade music teachers, and then reluctantly leave the spotlights.

Five minutes later I have one finger running down the song list, another stuck in my ear, Mariah Carey style, as I try to sing out some Counting Crows over and above the guy on stage who's exhorting us to Put Another Dime in the Jukebox, Baby.

Then inspiration strikes. I run to sign myself up for one more taste of glory. Time After Time. I knew that all those evenings I spent age fourteen playing Mah Jong, drinking Baileys and listening to my parents' Best Love Songs Ever CDs would come in handy some time.

"You say, go slow. I fall behind. The drum beats out of time..."
My gutter-guard syncopates his air-drumming, and I flash him a grateful rock-star smile...

Strumming their All at Union Hall

2009-11-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

"Is it just me, or are that couple rocking matching plaid?"
"Shh, they're right there."
"Whatever. It's not like they don't know what they're wearing..."
It was a beer-on-an-empty belly night, and the nudging got started when the first act was still doing her sweet southern thing. The his-n-hers hipster lumberjacks were seated in the row in front of us, and were putting on a good sideshow of nuzzling and head-leans. Chris, plectrum still warm from his sixth guitar lesson, was providing a helpful running commentary on the chord changes.
"That's G. I can do that one... and there's D. It actually looks like quite an easy song... see, now she's moving into A7..."
Up on stage, the blond kept on playing away, blissfully unaware of the backseat strummer down in the cheap seats. When she started singing a song that rhymed "clean" and "Aberdeen" ("I have to admit, I've never been to Scotland") we started a brutal round of thumb wars.

During the break between sets I visited the unisex bathrooms and managed to drench my top with scalding water from the faucet. But by the time I returned Chris had exciting news to distract me from the spreading dampness.
"Matching plaid girl... she's in the band!"
"I knew it! And don't you think she looks just like..."
We both nodded.
"Yeah, that's what I thought when I first saw her."
The bassist, as she turned out to be, was wearing a flannel dress, and not a shirt as I'd first assumed. She didn't scream rock star, but her ankle-boots certainly did. I coveted hard, and decided for the hundredth time to start a band, or at least to wear my ankle-boots more often.
When the group was announced they were presented as a blond and her backing band. The plaid-clad bassist was stood at the back, next to a guy who made drumming look like occupational therapy for the mentally challenged. But that didn't stop her beau. Throughout the entire set he balanced a camera on his knee, angled towards stage left. In his director's cut of the gig, his partner in plaid had a spotlight shining right on her. She was the stand-out star of the show.
When I reached for Chris' hand to point out this boyfriendly devotion he mistook my gesture. Pinning my small thumb down with his supersize one he whispered: "Ha. That was almost too easy."

Taking Turns

2009-11-16T08:39:00.000-08:00

"Do you want to go first?" I grudgingly asked the little boy, already knowing the answer, and he leapt for the steering wheel with a precocious and startling avidity.
I smiled an apology at my niece, who was sitting on the bench behind, thumb in mouth, shoulders beginning to slump with exhaustion and an excess of MTA-themed fun.
The little boy stamped the pedals. And spun the wheel. And flicked all switches. Then he did all of the above over and over again while we row-rowed the boat and waited for him to get bored.
However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a child in possession of something that another child wants immediately forgets their twenty-first century attention span. There is nothing so like a dog in a manager as a big boy in driver's seat with a toddler looking longingly over his shoulder. And nothing so likely to get you in the shit than moving along other people's dog-in-the-mangerish children.
"Shall we go look at something else Martha?" I asked, loud enough for driver-boy's parents to hear.
They took the hint.
"Let's go look at the trains."
"Time to get off now."
"Come on now, you've had your turn."
"Let's see what else we can find..."
He ignored them until an adult arm firmly yanked him out of the seat.
By now Barney had joined his little sister in the back seat. He nodded unenthusiastically at the idea of Martha getting a turn, and watched as she gurgled and beep-beeped away on the fraying seat.
"Ow!"
I turned around and driver-boy was back, sitting on the bench with Barney, elbows foremost.
"Now Barney's going next, then it's your turn," I decreed.
"I'm next," Barney agreed.
At that, driver-boy whirled his fat little hands at the boy in front of him in the queue.
"Hey stop that!"
I grab the boy's fists, and his parents come back and spirit him away, flashing me a dirty look for my troubles, as if I manhandle pint-sized yobs for shits and giggles.
"He's a naughty boy," Barney said loudly.
"Yes a very silly boy," I agreed.
"Is it my turn now?"
And a weary-looking Martha got swept off to push more buttons and twirl more knobs.

Takes Two to Tango

2009-11-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

We were into the fourth hour of the workshop, and our third teacher definitely wasn't getting the tone right.
"Come on then. What else did you learn?"
We looked at the floor, at our aching feet, at the clock. There was still forty minutes to go.
She tutted. "Look, I know and I wasn't even in the class. I just peeked in. You did the hesitations too, didn't you?"
Collectively, we refused to be cajoled. Show us something new and easily mastered tango lady, or let us out into the sunshine.
She obliged with a move that halted the followers feet, and an arm gesture inviting us to step over our own foot.
"Remember, you're not forcing her. You're just giving her an invitation," she reminded us. I wasn't sure about the others, but it was getting to the stage in the afternoon where I couldn't be bothered to RSVP.
Unlike the other dances I've done, Argentinian Tango involves leaning in to your partner, as if the two of you are building a human house of cards. Three and a half hours of holding my body forward in four-inch heels had knackered my back, and at every pause I slumped in half, trying to stretch the ache out. There was also the question of hold to negotiate. Our first teacher, a slim, ethereal young mum in khakis had talked about the "hug pose", where your arms wrap around your partner's neck, faces close enough to kiss, as if it was an entirely natural, nonsexual posture. Maybe it is in the bordellos of Argentina, but in a strip-lit studio in Flatiron, things didn't feel that simple.
"Oh, you want to do it like that?" my partner asked, eyebrow raised, as I crossed my arms and leaned against him like a tired genie. "I guess it's safer that way."
I ignored the implication that the only thing stopping me from throwing myself at him was my training stance, and merely quipped,"Yes, no close hold please. I'm English."
I don't think he got it, but at least he didn't tread on my toes. And the clock was ticking down with each fumbled ocho.

Accomplice: A froggin'

2009-11-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

We waited outside the herbal medicine store for our guy to come back with a translation. The message in the two fortune cookies had been in Chinese characters, and since they weren't the kanji for school, student, big, small, girl, boy, rain, snow, north, south, mountain, river or electricity I couldn't read them, and neither could any of the rest of Team Accomplice. Now that the sun had gone in it was getting cold, but Chinatown, with its neon signs and strange smells, seemed more vivid and filmic than I ever remember it being, crossing through it in the prosaic light of day on the way to the more concentrated attractions of Little Italy or the Lower East Side.

We'd volunteered our guy because he was half-Chinese, and although he came out the door shaking his head it turned out he'd come through for us.
"So the woman helped. The old guy just kept on saying it was a load of shit and asking who'd given it to me."
"So what does it say?"
"Can I have one frog, please."
"Frog? One frog?"
"Yeah, the old guy said it was a load of shit."

When we reached the address on the back of the note, it wasn't a sweet shop or a toy shop or anyplace else like we'd conjectured. Instead, it was a sort of fishmongers, overseen by burly men in mismatched t-shirts. After a bit of mumbled embarrassment I handed over the three dollars we'd been given and got a frog in return. A live frog - a supersized one at that - in a plastic bag, as if I'd won a prize at a fair and they were all out of goldfish.

"He's not real is he?"
He's definitely real. He's moving.
"It's not alive, surely?"
He's moving. Don't poke him.
"Can I take a picture."
I think we should call him Gerald.

We ended up being instructed to hand Gerald over to a construction worker, who ended up leaving him behind a dustbin. I was sad to see him go. I'd liked the weight of him, the calm way he'd sat in the bag on my outstretched palm. He'd only cost three dollars - less than a carton of organic milk - and he was the right sized pet for our apartment. The only problem I could foresee would be the fly-food.

It was only after the game was over, and we were having a drink with the actors and creator, that we found out what would happen to Gerald. Turns out for the last five years ten groups a day have been buying frogs from this same shop, and at the end of every day the construction worker returned them all, or released them by the river if the game had run late and the store had closed for the night. What's funny is that the Accomplice people had never explained to the fish and frogmongers what was going on, and they had never asked. They just sold frogs to tourists every hour, and then accepted them back at the end of the day, with an admirable absence of curiosity.

No wonder Gerald had been so blase. He'd seen it all before.

Models and Skaters (or Cake, Art and Breasts II)

2009-11-05T13:46:00.001-08:00

Before the crush and schmooze and breasts of the gallery we were standing in the Rockefeller plaza watching the skaters. While the dating couples and the grimly clutched-together families made ragged progress round the edges of the rink, the experts laid claim to the centre. The showiest was a leggy little girl with flesh-coloured skates, who twirled and spun in elaborate patterns, breaking only to play a knowingly unfair game of tag with a precariously-balanced boy of roughly the same age, who had scant little of her skill and even less of her grace. More evenly matched were the group of teenage boys who took time out from their busy flirting and cussing schedule to carve up the ice with breakneck sprints and turns, or to play a slippery version of chicken. Their white-jeaned girlfriends wisely stayed well back from the crash zone.

Only one of the inner-circle skaters was on their own: a tall, slim man in a gray suit, dapper scarf and shaggy white hair, who, with a look of total bliss, danced across the ice for the benefit or no one or everyone or himself alone. In time with the music he skated back and forth, side-stepping and throwing his arms into the curve. Every new track seemed to delight him, and his style never altered as the beat changed from 80s disco to hiphop and back again. He, the boy-tormentor and the hockey studs whirled in elaborate, complementary patterns round each other, on and on, as in the slow lane people struggled to stay upright.

I was reminded of those two lanes later in the gallery, as we struggled to get out. For an instance the sea of people seemed to part, and a small man buoyed up by a tall teenager on each arm emerged from the foyer. I was in heels, but I still had to crick my neck to get a look at their faces, which turned out to be just as blandly lovely as you'd expect.
A man next to me nudged his companion. "Look, models!" And perhaps emboldened by the free Chablis raised his voice above the din: "Hello models!"
The companion cringed, but then, as one, the girls turned, found the man with their doe eyes and waved back.

I wondered if they were used to being hailed collectively ("Are there any models in the house?") and whether the skinny girl from the rink would grow up to look like them, and whether it's harder for a woman to excel for herself, rather than for an audience, and whether that matters anyway.

And then I vowed to learn to skate backwards without falling over before the winter's end, and to avoid the sort of art gallery openings that let outer-lane people like me in.

Cake, Art and Breasts

2009-11-04T07:39:00.000-08:00

We'd spent the previous fifteen minutes watching skaters on the Rockefeller rink, because Chris had been insistent that we didn't arrive at 9.30 on the dot. When we turned up to the gallery it was clear that the other liggers hadn't been so scrupulous. Ten minutes in, the crowds resembled were packed as tight and elbowy as Christmas Week shoppers, clutching coats, plastic cups of Chablis and each other.
"Wine!" whinnied one brunette, pulling her companion over to the table where an equally pretty girl was pouring glass that were snatched away as soon as she moved the bottle on.

We didn't know it then, but despite the high percentage of beautiful people, things were about to get ugly. The theme of the night was cakes and art, and it was definitely the former half of the formula that had got us up in Midtown East on a chilly autumn night. From the way the crowd was scrumming this way and that, noses in the air, eyes everywhere but the gallery walls, we weren't the only ones. As if part of some elaborate tease, one room showed a video of exploding treats, cream splattering across walls and faces, while in another cake-eaters with gold leaf on their mouths were projected onto a blank white wall. Menawhile, a camera on a miniature blimp recorded the crowd's reactions.

We tried to follow the river of heads and elbows towards a live performance, but ended up so tightly crushed and towered over that we barely got out with out Chablis intact. Then, amidst all this studied oddness, I hear a familiar strain...
"Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind."
A tall, black girl is holding a half-empty tray of cakes above her heads. When a woman tries to take one she pulls the tray away.
"Hey Mickey. Hey Mickey."
At the hand claps she stops, thrusts out a hip and lowers the tray. A red-faced ex-public school type saunters over
"Oh Mickey what a pity you don't understand.You take me by the heart when you take me by the hand."
The girl gives him a sultry look and pushes the cake into his mouth, like a bride on her wedding day. The man, smirks as best he can with his mouth full. Backs away.
"Oh Mickey what a pity you don't understand. It's guys like you Mickey..."
The girl moves on. She is wearing shorts and long socks. Her breasts are bare. There are two or three more 'Mickey girls'. All are black, with light brown skin, pretty faces and full, naked breasts. The men eating the cake and recording the girls on their iPhones are older, less attractive, white. This is an art show, but it feels like a cross between an x-rated Hooters lounge and a slave auction, except that no money (and not even a lot of cake) is changing hands in the open.

Later on, when we can't bear the crush any more and our Chablis is getting warm, we start the slow push towards the exit. Standing by the wall I see the first Mickey girl again. She's standing on her own, looking at the crowd, and she has a plain gray vest pulled on over her outfit, like she's heading to the gym. Strangely, she looks more vulnerable with her clothes on.

We leave without getting any cake.

Banjo Jim's

2009-10-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

At bigger venues they may be happy to let you cool your heels between sets while techies fiddle with amps and one-two microphones, but at a tiny East Village dive like Banjo Jim's you take too long in the bathroom and you're suckered into staying for the next act, even if your wallet and your beer bottle are looking perilously empty. When your table of three is both out in front, and represents a good third of the total audience, quietly slipping out isn't a viable option. And, let's face it, it takes a harder heart than mine to walk out on the first Big City gig of a fresh-faced, one-armed guitarist.

We had headed along early to see ragtime piano being hammered out by a white-haired man with syncopation in his soul, and his wide-eyed, skinny-jeaned protegee. When we missed our chance to leave at nine with the serious musos, we found ourselves up-close and personal with Tony Memmel from Milwaukee. Using a plectrum gaffer-taped to the stump of his left arm he strummed out a collection of gorgeous songs about mosquito bites, and driving all night with his new wife to take their first holiday in Cleveland, Ohio. I didn't ask why they hadn't ever taken a holiday together before that. Perhaps his beard was a gesture of support for our Lord and Savior, rather than a nod to hipster chic.

Tony Memmel had a honey-soaked voice and a beautiful way with a guitar.
"He's playing at least four chords in the bar." Chris muttered. "I can only play one, and I've got two hands."
"Yes, but he's probably had more than two lessons. He also knows more than three chords."
This seemed like a fair point, so we hushed up, drank up, and let the boy play.

Buns and Puns

2009-10-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

Of the myriad things that one would assume were vegetarian, but aren't (Bloody Marys, Welsh Rarebit, unexpected varieties of Walkers crisps) it was the Jello shots that really got me. And I mean really got me. I mean bantering-back-to-the-headline-act sort of got me. I mean arguing-about-the-equal-rights-implications-of-manscaping-in-front-of-a-room-of-strangers kind of got me.And this is how it happened...

We were at a late night, East Village comedy show which sold itself on three things: video projections of Jane Fonda-style workouts, home-baked buns and free vodka jelly shots. The first was equal parts mesmerising and distracting. I found myself losing the rhythm of the joke in pining for my old LA Gear hi-tops and wondering at how outmoded the chunkily aerobaticised bodies looked. The buns were an unqualified success. When my friend placed her first jello shot in front of me I looked at her askance and she had to give me the old gelatin talk. Manfully I agreed to look after her share from there on in, and proceeded to wriggle and slurp my way through the first five comics, including a mercifully funny funnywoman, who we applauded with added gusto.

It was when the final guy, the hyped-up headliner, was bitching about his girlfriend asking him to wax his back the jello moved me to speak. Aloud. And loudly.
"But you expect her to shave her legs, don't you? What's the difference?"
In fairness, rather than slap me down with a snappy line the guy actually started to defend his position. A few minutes later we moved from stand-up to debate team with the ease with which my tenth jello shot had slipped down my throat.
"...And also girls are trained up to shave their legs aren't they? I didn't even have hair on my back til I was, what, twenty-five."
"So what?" I counter, in what I imagine is an urbane fashion. "Lucky you. You had a period of grace. Am I right ladies?"
The ladies (who happily seem to be fellow gelatin-slurpers) whoop tentatively.
"Do you have a hairy back?" He asks, rather lamely.
"Not so much."
"And where are you from?"
"Brooklyn."
"No, I mean. you have an accent..."
I pause, sorely tempted to give the room my riff on the ridiculous and heartbreakingly earnest way that Americans seem to genuinely believe that they are the only people on the planet without an accent, but my vegetarian friend is looking increasingly alarmed, and I don't have the microphone, and I'm pretty sure the effect of the jellos shots is mostly psychosomatic, so I play nice and say, "Brooklyn via London. Land of the hairy backs," and let him move on to less hirsute comic territory.

Musee Mechanique

2009-10-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

"People talk about bad losers, but you're worse. You're a bad winner."
"I'm not gloating. I just think the score speaks for itself." Chris corrected, helpfully.
It was 10:3, and not in my favour.
We were both so busy not-gloating and not-sulking that we left the black and white photo strip lying on the edge of the table football table. This scenario has apparently played itself out so many times - over Foosball, over Pac-man, over the one-armed bandit - that the museum has issued a book of these abandoned photo strips that you can buy for $20 from a vending machine by the door, which only took $5 bills.

Our library-loaned Fodor's guide had pointed out Musee Mechanique as the only must-do attraction amongst the clam chowder stalls and tourist hoards of Fisherman's Wharf. And it was easy to see the appeal... In amongst the retro shoot-em-ups and the Amstrad games were PG-rated peep shows, mechanical batting games and the monstrous Laughing Sal, whose maniacal cries had been drowning out conversations and making babies cry for a hundred years or more. In keeping with the vintage theme, most everything cost 25 cents to play. Clutching in my hot little hand a whole tower of quarters I got to wander the vast warehouse space, looking for where I could get the most bang for my buck, like a kid in a penny shop weighing white mice against space invaders in terms of value, sugar-rush and tongue-feel.

The football grudge match used up the last of our quarters - to the extent that we had to beg the bus driver to let us ride back to our hostel when we found only a couple of sorry singles lining our collective coffers. It was as we were paying our leave to Laughing Sal we remembered the photo strip.
"Glad we didn't forget these."
"They're not bad are they?" I said, "Except this one I mean..."
"Yeah you like like..." Chris trailed off.
"What?" I asked, frowning at my reflection in the square.
"I was going to say, you look like a loser, but that would be acting like a bad winner, wouldn't it?"
I snatched the photo strip back and tucked it away in the Fodor's, letting old Sal have the last laugh.

Blazing Saddles

2009-10-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Whatever the man in the cycle shop tells you, the Bay Area, just wide of the Golden Gate Bridge, is not "just like the South of France". It's especially not like the South of France on a dark and blustery Sunday, which feels even more frigid thanks to the warm, sunny-natured days that proceeded it. Not, in any case, unless the South of France has been covered with strip malls since the last time I visited.

"Just to let you know, I'm definitely walking up this last hill." I muttered, as the unnervingly hyper staff of Blazing Saddles cheered on an anguished looking biker as they grunted up the sharp incline to the store. We were being fitted for helmets.
"Then they won't clap for you."
"I don't want them to clap. In fact I'll warn them in advance not to clap."
Chris shrugged. You could tell that if I was going to get off and push, I should plan on doing it alone.

We started off in San Francisco, where a vicious headwind meant the flat, scenic bike path along the Marina felt like it'd been tilted uphill. By the time we were actually pedalling up the steep path to the bridge, my hill-addled legs were ready to mutiny.
"Sorry. We're cheating!" ho-hoed a couple who whizzed past us on electric bikes. Despite the evil glares of more than a dozen panting, unelectrified cyclists they singularly failed to fall off or run out of juice.

Cycling the bridge itself, watching the fog roll over the Marin headland and seeing the tops of pelicans plunge-diving for fish, was worth the climb - mainly because we knew we were taking the ferry back. In the end we had to sprint up the side of a dual carriageway to Tiburon to catch the boat at the last possible moment. Drinking sweet rose up on the top deck we ignored two venture capitalists verbally marauding South America and watched the sealions playing in the ship's wake.
"What is that, a porpoise?" Venture Capitalist 1, asked, jabbing a plump finger, but his friend was busy launching a mental raid on Brazil.

Back in San Francisco I found myself, against better judgement, sweating up Hyde street to Blazing Saddles HQ. Despite all my posturing, they clapped, I smiled, and I didn't even set them right about Sausalito and the South of France.

Beer on Bear Mountain

2009-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Despite growing up in Germany, the only Oktoberfest I've ever been to was held last weekend in Upstate New York, and featured a felonious long sausage queue and an equally criminal cover band. Their version of La Vida Loca made me long for some Ohm-pa action, and from the look of the dirndled grannies I wasn't the only one.

We'd spent the morning scrambling up rocks and then down quiet wooded paths. My legs had started to stretch out, and my feet were only just starting to stumble over rocks and branches. They always seem to realise they're tired before the rest of me catches on. I was heading up a splinter group who had taken the long route down (worryingly, I'm pronouncing this r-ow-t in my head) and we spent most of the easy downhill stretch speculating about whether or not we'd beat the others to the fest (we did). People were making craving noises about beer, and I tacitly joined in, just like I do when English folk get thirsty for tea, or girls get wistful for wedding dresses - because there's no prizes for raining on the parade. In the end I managed about a quarter of a pint of "German-style beer" before giving in and buying a plastic glass of Riesling, the only other booze on offer.
"Ohhh, it's really good. I'm getting drunk already." This from the only other non-beer drinker in the group. I feared I may not have been in the most sophisticated drinking company.
"Let me try that." Chris manfully pulled my cup away from me.
"Oh my God. That's so sweet, how can you even drink it?"
"It's...ok." Because it's not beer.
"No it's not even like wine," Chris persisted, "more like..."
"Wine cooler?" someone put in helpfully.
"Yeah, it's great isn't it?" the girl cooed.
So there I was, stuck between a stranger's preteen taste in liquor and my boyfriends practised wine smuggery, with the world's worst faux-German band giving it a tuba-heavy version of My Song in the background.
Well, in for a Pfennig, in for a Deutschmark.
Ignoring my toothache I downed the sweet, viscous liquid and slammed the glass down on the table. The gesture would have been more dramatic if I hadn't been drinking from a flimsy plastic container.
"Right. Who's up for another?"

Belly-dancing Virgin

2009-10-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

"Think about your line ladies. You wanna be on the diagonal. We gotta see those tattas."
"That's what I'm talkin bout!"
My tattas are unenticingly encased in a sports bra and a sweaty gym t-shirt. My booty, which I'm tilting and tucking and dropping and popping in ways which are going to hurt tomorrow, is not looking its best in gray sweatpants from the charity shop. All around me, strong, beautiful women in floaty skirts, jangling belts and the sort of crop tops I used to wear when my stomach was tween-concave, are shimmying up a storm. I'm the only white girl here, one of the handful under forty, and the only one who looks like they got lost on the way to a cut-price pilates class.

I was warned at the beginning of the session that "we have a lot of fun here", but between and after and during the fun there's a whole lot of stomach isolations and deadly reps. You don't realise how many muscles you use to shimmy until you've shimmied for an hour and a half straight. By the end of class one-armed sit-ups would have been a blessed respite.

"Come on ladies. This is going to give you an hour glass figure. Hour. Glass. What you want? You want cuckoo clock? No? Then five, six, seven, eight..."

As always, the hardest part is the five minute break, which I spend smiling shyly at people and hiding in the toilet. But when I come out for the last session something clicks into place. As long as I don't look in the mirror I too am a strong, beautiful woman doing snake arms and undulating my womb.

When I look in the mirror I am the awkward before-version of a dance makeover film, the white girl who studied ballet for years and takes notes after ballroom class but can't shake her booty for love nor money.

But I figure if I can just get my hands on one of those jangly belts, I'll be ready to start the dance-training montage.

99 Cents and Up

2009-10-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

"Hey Miss..."
"Yo, white girl."
Looking around, this is me. Althusser, eat your heart out.
A bunch of schoolkids are shouting across the crossing at me. I haven't dropped anything. They don't seem to be lost. I give that embarrassed half smile you never want to see captured on camera and head into the 99 Cent store. In my work-from-home uniform - blue knee socks, green t-shirt, orangey-red wrap - I'm not dressed to banter, and, in any case, it's a tiring sport over here, where the accent means you have to say things slowly and twice.

But inside, things are different. The shop planners of this store are geniuses of manipulation. I lose a good five minutes of my life staring at the display of Pedi-Eggs near the doorway, priced at a tempting $2.99 (everything is, as promised, 99 cents and up). It's only when I read the packaging more carefully, about how the egg is cunningly designed to hold your "skin gratings", I regretfully put it back on the shelf.

Likewise, customers standing in line are subjected to a blast of cheap mind-gamery. Below the counter is a wall of sweets more various and enticing than anything I've seen outside of Harrod's food store. There are Scooby-doo lollys, pixie stix and "internationally flavoured" fat-free coffee candy. Along the back wall, as high as a guilty parent can reach, are party favours and knick-knacks, plastic sunglasses and miniature pool tables, streamers and gee-jaws. And all 99 cents and up.

As I leave the shop, clutching my green tea and Tupperware, a middle-aged woman in front of me half-shouts
"Hey you!"
I brace for crazy, but she just pats the startled woman in front of her apologetically.
"Sorry. Thought you were someone I knew. Look just like her."
The woman nods, and the three of us leave the 99 Cent Store, and the ergonomic Pedi-Eggs, behind us.

Spaghetti Arms

2009-09-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

Agony Aunts who recommend that lonely singletons take up dance classes to meet the man of their dreams have clearly not been fox-trotting down Dance Manhattan way. Our smooth ballroom class is a pungent mixture of the schlubby, the silent, the short and the smugly coupled up. Since some of best dance experiences have involved being whirled around the floor by shaky geriatrics and borderline sociopaths, I try to keep an open mind and a strong frame. Both of these become less easy during a too-close encounter with Mr Spaghetti Arms.

With axe-murders, it's always the quiet ones, and with dancefloor pervs, it's generally the vaguely presentable ones. Perhaps a modicum of success with women has addled their brain, or perhaps they'd just always figured that what worked for Swayze (God rest his soul) would work for them. They often adopt a style that Americans refer to as European: shiny shoes, flat-fronted trousers belted high, tight t-shirts. They wear hair product and too much cologne (presumably another suspiciously Euro trait). But the only way to really know that you've got a Mr Spaghetti in your arms is when the music starts and you get clamped to his sweaty chest, Argentinian tango style. It doesn't matter if the music, teacher and class title are all screaming "lindy-hop" or "waltz", because he won't be content until your breasts are flattened into him and your thighs are second-base entangled.

Dear reader, I got a bad dose of the Spaghettis last night. All the warning signs were there: 80s heartthrob hair, Simon Cowell trousers, muppet voice. When he danced with the instructor, he kept her at respectable arm's length. But out of the spotlight it was a different story. When it was my turn to dance with him, his arm snaked round my back and my hips were crushed into his. The worst of it was that he held me so tight I couldn't twinkle properly.

Wanted: Reverse-Strip Gypsy Trapeze Artiste

2009-09-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Hungarian folk orchestra started up again, but this time they were joined by a dark-haired girl sitting on the trapeze with her back to us. In time with the fiddle she made the swing sway, rippling the fringes of her shawl to show that it's all she's wearing. As the music gathered tempo, so did she. Swinging down off her perch she contorted herself in front of us, hanging from her knees, her ankle, her neck, and letting the scarf float where it will. For a full-frontal nude show there's something very innocent about it, especially when, to whoops, she lets drop the shawl and concentrates on her routine. Now the music passes in flashes of well-muscled arms, sinewy back, improbable breasts.

We all start clapping when the musicians start to jig, and the trapeze dancer's scantily-clad male helper brings her a pair of tights. Grinning and grimacing she wiggles, pantless, into the laddered fishnets, then into a halterneck read leotard, tied upside down. By the time the musicians finally slow she's fully decent and ready to take a bow.

So far the Hungarian Cabaret has tended to mostly focus on nudity and moustaches(in that order) but this reverse strip (like the cross-gendered Alanis Morissette, unlike terrible Zsa Zsa Gabor drag act) is like a reverse case of the Emperor's New Clothes. The body, unveiled, is factual, strong, unambiguous. The sexiness gets wiggled into with the fishnets.

With this half-formed thought I go back to devouring my chocolate coins and admiring the mustaches in the Soviet Era adverts.

Invasion of the Invisible Mutts

2009-09-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

“Where’s your dog?”
“Right here.”
“No! Where’s your fucking dog? That ain’t no dog.”

The street was full of people walking empty harnesses, but this girl was not prepared to play along. Coming out of the Bergen subway, meaty hands on meaty hips, she bawled out passersby.
“What the fuck you playing at?”

Friends with leads gave their wards a tug and walked on. They only slowed when they were out of range of her belligerent confusion, letting their dogs hump and sniff and drink water only when they were safely out of reach.

The girl looked on, disgusted, as the full extent of the nonsense unfurled. Smith Street was crawling with the things. Kids, walking Great Danes or flying Chihuahuas, gathered outside an art shop. Couples strolled hand-in-hand, transparently well-trained hounds trotting along in front. A man in an electric wheelchair posed for photos with his silent best friend.

The girl disappeared back down the subway stairs, shaking her head.

When a fully-fleshed canine finally appears, he looks like the punch-line of a joke that his owner should have been in on.

Getting Down, Ambassador-style

2009-09-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

It was when the dance corridor formed, and a senior diplomatic figure began crotch-hopping down the catwalk, that the night really became surreal. The caddish actor-turned-Hollywood star had already joined the embassy band for some gravelly-voiced renditions of 80s soft-rock hits, and now, with the DC socialites all gone home, and the semi-ironic scotch eggs all eaten, the joint really started hopping. All at once the polite arts social had turned into a raucous home counties wedding.
"Come on, don't be shy!"
Awkwardly I sashayed down the line, much to the approval of the open-shirted security guy, who'd we'd earlier mistaken for an 80s yoof icon. Actors smoked with junior staff. Senior staff flung each other around the improvised dance floor.

"Shit, I want to be an Ambassador," Chris muttered (not for the first time that weekend) as some over-exuberant dancing nearly landed some embassy staffers in the garden's flood-lit swimming pool.
"I think you need to be good at languages."

And, by the looks of it, the electric slide.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

2009-09-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

I'd often wondered where New York's mad folk went in the summer, when the subway stations get too warm to rave and spit in. This weekend I got my answer: West Virginia.

It started as soon as we got the train out of DC. The man behind us, his face covered with a sheen of sweat, his voice pitched unnervingly loudly, began asking the usual questions. You're not from round here are you? Where youse heading? We told him Harper's Ferry, and he just repeated over and over again "Yeah, I like that place. I go there all the time. Great place, that. I like it. I go there all the time. Lovely place. I go there a lot."

Turns out he wasn't the only one. We were greeted on the towpath by a bear of a man with a walking stick and a belligerence barely reined in. After failing to get a rise out of us by insulting our ancestors and casting aspersions on our orienteering skills he let us pass, shouting the ominous warning that he'd see us at the hostel we were all staying at.

Later that night we tried to play Scrabble while he bludgeoned a nervous middle-aged women into silence with an attack on vegans, veganism and the likes of her. When no-one will contradict him anymore he tells stories of his time as a prison guard in Alaska. We concentrate on our triple word scores, and wait 'til he's gone to his dorm to joke about the story that has dominated the day's headlines: mental health patient escaped in national park. Call em up kid, the search is over.

For some reason the new story seems less funny when I'm in the tent in the dead of night listening to twigs snapping outside. Thoughtfully, I wake Chris so he can listen too.
"What the fuck is that?" I hiss.
"It wouldn't be a bear. We put the toothpaste in the tree."
"And we're near the river. Bears don't like water."
Even to my own ears this doesn't sound very convincing. I try again.
"Maybe deer?"
"Probably rats."
"Rats?" My voice has leaped an octave.
"Well mice then. Or, umm, drops falling from the trees."
Now it's my turn to roll my eyes.
"You don't think it's..."
"What, crazy guy? Prowling round the tent?"
We laugh uneasily.
"I mean, I'm not serious."
But still I assess the tent for defensive weapons. DEET spray. Spare pegs. Guy ropes.

I fall asleep and dream of rigging elaborate man-traps in the West Virginia Hills and wake to find myself, and the treebound toothpaste, unmolested.

Beer Table, Park Slope

2009-09-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

It's difficult not to love a place where the food menu is so brusque and the beer menu is so lovingly rendered. Yes you can have baked eggs, waffles and bacon. No you can't have orange juice. You can have water or even maybe ginger beer, but only because it's got beer in the name. There's no messing around with sunny-side-up, no-foam-skim-latte type pandering to A-type New Yorkers. Nor is there any pussy-footing with calories and lean alternatives. The bacon is cut thick and fatty, like the quivering hunks that Yorkshire vet James Herriot gets offered by grateful farmers after he delivers a breached calf or two. And it tastes damn good.

If you're after a liquid brunch, however, it's a totally different story. Alongside the rotating drafts and the three suggested "breakfast brews" (cover your ears, you temperance ministers and sun-over-the-yardarmers) there is a daily menu, which blends from light ("pear, white bread, amiable") to dark ("chocolate, tobacco, hedonistic"). For someone like me, who tastes with their language centre as much as with their tongue, it was skillful beery propaganda. Conveniently forgetting that I don't much like taste of hops, I let my eyes linger over the descriptions. Mixed in among the fruits and floral notes were more intriguing influences, moods and feelings, inedible objects and abstract expressions. What, say, was "funk",outside of a 70s disco context, and did I really want my drink to have it?

We were there to cadge some swing-top bottles to pour our homebrew into. When the flubberiest bit of rind had finally defeated us we left, empties in tow, vowing to come back for one of their beer tastings. Yet still our Grapefruit Ale sits in its glass bottle, stowed away at the top of our wardrobe, the sediment forming a sinister off-white layer at the bottom. If only old Herriot were around, with a tub of hot water and his bag of stainless steel implements, to help us birth our firstborn brew. We could even take him for bacon in Beer Table to say thank-you.

Getting Down in Monkey Town

2009-09-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Chris was generously taking time out from his busy dancing schedule to fill us in.
"And this next scene, the one where she falls through the window, this was reshot thirty years later. Same actress. She's amazing. An amazing actress."
We smile and nod, as the amazing actress unwinds her snake and lashes out at Harrison Ford. On the opposite wall Tron casts neon shadows on the assembled crowd of moon-faced Brits, Yanks and Japanese.

We're came to Williamsburg's Monkey Town for the drum'n'bass, but stayed for the hellish monochrome murals and the toilets that talk back to you.
"I think it's something about STDs," our friend mumbles.
"Definitely a comedy routine." I correct brightly. "Jokes about mother-in-laws. Nothing too toxic."
A few drinks later and a different choice of bathroom later and I have to admit that the public-health spiel was not a product of her fevered imagination.

A couple of hours into the dancing and the music cuts. I take the opportunity to drag Chris away from the screens and refuel with a dollar coke.
"Bargain." We say to each other, but we still share.
Back in the back room the music's up again, but the dreadlocked, hard-bodied crowd have gone to smoke outside and swap Bladerunner trivia. At the birthday boy's instance we take the floor alone, throwing some swing-outs and backwards Charleston in with the usual sharp-elbowed, pointy-fingered, loose-hipped solo moves. The DJ spins on, unmoved.

In the background Rutger Hauer gives his famous improvised soliloquy. This time Chris doesn't even have to point it out. The dancers slink back in and raise their fists in salute.

This Wine's Got Legs

2009-09-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

"First drink the wine. Then try it with a WASABI BEAN."
We laugh, but he's entirely serious.
"Just try it, and tell me it doesn't taste of buttery popcorn. You just try it."
The girl next to me squeals even before the bean hits her tongue. It's sort of sweet that despite living for years in the Trader Joe-d, Whole Foodified city she's never had wasabi before. I tell her the story of how I ate a spoonful of the stuff the first time I ever went to sushi. She's too busy glugging the wine to smile.
"It certainly takes the burn off. I'll say that much."

In the end, after being bribed with cashews, grapes dirty from the vine, and three varieties of chocolate, it's the rose we buy.
"We grow all our own grapes. Not many people do that. Not that I blame them. Look at my hair!"
We take the cue and laugh. The words are worn and shiny with use, like the wooden poles down in the basement where the grapes are beaten out of their skins. There must be a kind of bravado involved in taking them out yet again for another sceptical public. It's easy to laugh at the owner, with his heavily accented English and his unpalatable wines. A little too easy. The mother and daughter opposite me are making fun of the way he says "tort" instead of "tart". I want to ask them how many languages they speak, how many words of this man's native tongue, which we keep on trying to guess.
"He'll be Czechoslovakian." The mother says, ending the argument. "He sounds just like my gardener."
I keep quiet, and empty my glass. Really it isn't that bad, even without the wasabi bean.

Live at the Mercury Lounge

2009-09-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

You probably know that Willy Mason isn't an old-time crooner with a young soul. You probably never got him mixed up with Willie Nelson, or had a couple years time-lag before you discovered the Where the Humans Eat album that your Mum was probably already listening to when it topped the pops. You'd probably not be shocked to hear that he's two years younger, and in every sense a little huskier, than I am. Let's just say he wasn't big in Japan.

"So who are you here to see?"
We nudge each other. We'd like to see all the bands please. That's what we paid our twelve bucks for.
"Willy Mason."
The girl at the door marks two more dashes against his name and stamps us in.
The venue is small. We've seen our friends' band play to bigger rooms and massier crowds. Almost as soon as we arrive a self-depreciating guy with a guitar and too-big shoes comes on. His name, Dave Godowsky, doesn't warrant bold type at the door or on website but he's got a lot of charm and some sweet, twisted tunes called things like "I hate the world, and everyone in it." Despite the Emo pose I catch him smiling when folks clap.

Willy's up next (the space is too small for formalities) and during the change-over we argue about whether it is sad or not sad to play at a gig where they tally the people paying to see you to see if you're worth your stage-time. We both think our arguments are strengthened when Willy thanks the Fung Wah bus service for getting him here in time. We've taken that bus before. Maximum points for gritty authenticity, minimum points for swanky superstardom.

For the record, Willy Mason has a voice like the strongest hot toddy you ever drank - equal parts bitter lemon and whiskey and honey - and each song he played sounded like a story you knew by heart but had somehow forgotten. He didn't play Oxygen, and no-one cared.

But the kids were here to see the dark and lean AA Bondy. Judging from the bodies pressing in for his set his tally chart was looking pretty healthy. His perfectly-formed songs appeared in unexpected clearings in his bands' dense soundscapes.
"Thanks for coming out tonight. You're a good looking crowd. Not that it matters, y'know. But it's nice that you look the way you do."
AA Bondy must have been dazzled by the spotlights, because I can tell you that we were a misshapen draggle of fans: too fat, too thin, too apt to spend our time alone. But we clapped and swayed our sweaty bodies and let ourselves be taken out of ourselves by his sweet-talking and dark strummed fairy tales.

Cat Attack

2009-09-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

We always knew Brooklyn wasn't gone to be one of those cutesy I Has Cheezburger kittehs, not least because she never sat still long enough to capture on film. What we didn't expect was the spitting, clawing hell-cat that ran across the room to sink her claws and teeth into Chris' bare legs. She'd hissed at him before when he'd crossed her path or accidentally backed her into a corner, but this was something different: a bloody, full-throttle attack that only ended with Chris physically throwing her away and us barricading ourselves in our bedroom. This was the same cat that had sat peaceably on my lap all morning as I typed on my laptop, purring like an animal possessed. Who rubbed herself in and out of both our legs as if trying to tie us to her.

The mewing from the other side of the door was pitiful, but when I opened up she ran past me to spit and arch at Chris once more. It took all my wheedling (and a tray of KitEKat) to distract her while Chris eased past and out of the door, holding a towel, matador-like, in his bleeding hands. I followed and our positions were officially reversed: Brooklyn held the bedroom, while the living room (complete with litter tray and door to the outside world) was ours.

It was to prove a hollow victory. In our haste to escape another mauling we'd left our wallets behind in the other room. While Chris washed off his cuts and bites I called the woman who had landed us in this fine mess in the first place.
"Look, are you sure it was a deliberate attack?"
"She ran from the other side of the room, and then she clamped on and wouldn't let go. It was scary."
"If you're really scared, just let her out a window."
"We're on the third floor."
"Look, I've thirty cats and dogs here that I'm trying to get adopted... can I come pick her up tonight. Seven, say?"
With a little firm talking I battled her down to a couple of hours. Which in reality, turned out to be five.

More pressingly our insurance cards were shut away in the other room and we had $2.80 in cash, scavenged from the change-bowl. And now we were about to have our first encounter with the much-demonised US health care system.

Meanwhile, locked in the outer room, Brooklyn yowled as if she knew she had just got herself exiled again...

The last days at the Double-D pool

2009-09-04T07:58:00.001-07:00

"Hey honey, you look like a million dollars."
I smile tightly, thinking Oughta get back to guarding lives Mr Life Guard and narrowly avoid crashing into a kid practicing handstands in the shallow end. It's all shallow end at Gowanus' 'Double-D' public pool. Maybe that's why the lifeguards can afford to be so cocky.

Other things you should know before you get your feet wet.
1. The moniker is misleading. Call me dirty-minded, but I was expecting a poolside crammed with buxom beauties, like the girl I saw coming out of the subway whose GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN tee got edited by her curves down to the more enigmatic GIRLS FUN. But so far, so very little like an MTV Girls Gone Wild shoot.

2. It's an institution, like a prison is an institution, with certain shared features. Expect to be checked for wetness before you're allowed in the pool area. Cue unpleasant flashbacks to enforced showers at school.

3. Beware the velvet rope. The sectioned-off lanes at the end of the pool seem to be VIP lanes that you can only get in if you're wearing a whistle. If you attempt to gatecrash be ready to cover your ears. If your name's not down, you're certainly not coming in without a cacophony...

But the dog days, the salad days and the summer are coming to end, and on Tuesday the Double-D pool will be drained, the bulky shower-room attendants moved on and the life guards released back into the wild. And dusty Gowanus, with its garages and corpse-clogged canal will be a sadder, quieter place for it.

Soft heart, sharp claws

2009-09-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

"So can you take these two home? Even for a night or two?"
The woman's practiced brand of beseeching and bossiness was working its magic. The ancient Siamese rasped once more through its broken front teeth, and it was clear we were cracking. All that was left was to sign on the dotted line.

We'd walked up to the van intending to make vague noises about being available to foster at some point in the hazy future and within a couple of minutes had been guilted into stepping up and signing up for a pair of purring old timers.
"So you can take them home in a carrier right now?"
"Well..."
"Don't worry, if you don't have a car we can drop them off tonight. Shall we say seven?"
It wasn't really a question.
"What about this fella?"
"Ah ha ha..." For the first time her bustle slowed. "This one's not so friendly."
"Looks quiet enough."
"Oh no, it's quite freaked out. I think it'll need a few days shut in my bathroom. Just watch."
Gingerly she opened the cage door, and the meek black and white kitten transformed into a spitting whirl of claws and fury.
"Right. Gotcha." We turned back gratefully to our purring, placid twosome.

At six thirty that night we got a phone call. Turns out there had been some misunderstanding, and a frantic owner had come to pick up the two old dears.
"But you know, we're just round the corner. And don't worry, because we still have that other cat..."

Fire Island's Famous Plover Lovers

2009-08-31T11:37:00.000-07:00

"You're camping right?"
It's raining, my bag is heavy and the mosquitoes are biting me through my knee-length socks. I leave Chris to talk to the annoying German woman and continue along the boardwalk.
"Don't you know there's a hurricane coming?"
Bitch. I throw her a bitter smile and keep trudging forward.
"Just stay clear of sites 23, 24 and 26. And 18. Then you should be alright."
Turns out German woman is a park ranger. And she's not kidding about the hurricane.

We manage to pitch our tent and gradually the rain dries up long enough to have a walk on the beach. It's the end of plover breeding season and there are dozens of the critters playing chicken with the tide, bustling after the drying rings of wet sand and away from the white horses. Their bodies don't seem to keep pace with their whirring legs, like tiny dancers who've perfected their isolations.

After a couple of beers on the beach Chris and I are dancing too, practicing lifts and handstands and cartwheels. We get inquisitive looks from the plovers and the surfers riding the swells. Unlike us, they are here for the storm, which is supposed to break tonight.

Next morning after a sleepless night in a wind-lashed tent and a renewed mosquito attack ("I thought they weren't supposed to like the rain?") we give it up, wave goodbye to the plovers and go home to civilization, and to Brooklyn.

The Ranger flashes a told-you-so smile as we huddle under our umbrellas in the line for the ferry.

UK Interlude

2009-08-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to concentrate on keeping my wheely bag straight, but the accents send my head whip-cracking. My mind's still mid-Atlantic, wondering at the impeccable behaviour of the four (drugged?) Hassidic children behind me, and here in the terminal every voice - the man overtaking me, the family dragging behind, even the tannoy announcer - sounds obscenely familiar. They are my long vowels. My illogical pronunciations. And I am home.

Growing up near our barracks in Northern Germany a young English voice meant someone I knew, or at least recognised by sight. Despite having the highest density of self-made millionaires of any town in the district (a fact I heard only once, and have since refused to verify or disbelieve) it wasn't the sort of place where tourists would go, and mine was the only British school within driving distance. Though there were Scots regiments and Northern regiments and officers and other ranks all the voices seemed to slur into one estuary English medley. In a small German town, it was easy to hear us coming.

Five years of boarding school and university left its mark on my voice, and stopped my head from swivelling, pack-like, when it caught familiar cadences in streets and trains and bars. And then Chicago, Tokyo, London - antennae raised, lowered and then safely shuttered down. Now in Brooklyn an English accent raises my hackles. I stare at them, and inside I say, in my coldest RP tones, Who are you, and why are you invading my territory?

But here, in the echoing corridors of terminal three I smile at the man and the family and the tannoy who sound to me like cider and black on a summer's afternoon.

Central Park Bacchants

2009-08-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

"Look! Dionysus is being played by Mika!"
We sniggered into our programs. Even with my new glasses on the likeness was uncanny... the blood-hungry, woman-maddening God in the body of 2007's favourite fey Lebanese pop poppet. When Phillip Glass' ambient score swelled around him, actor Jonathon Groff seemed only a pout away from launching into 'Big Girls, You Are Beautiful.' No doubt the Bacchants would have enjoyed that.

Meanwhile out of the spotlights, in the darkness of the sticky night, a conspiracy was mounting. Central Park is not used to being upstaged. When the puny special effects aped a storm, the real thing swept in, lightening cutting up the purple sky. As the thunder rumbled, nature's soldiers readied themselves for a stage invasion. Singly at first, then in lines of ten together, they trotted out of shadows and onto the set.

"Look! Raccoons!"
Whispers and nudges were passed along the audience, and it took some serious Theban cross-dressing to drag our attention back to the play. In response, the raccoons raised their game.

"Fuck me, there's one under the seats!"

And after that not even Mika and his glittering trousers could compete with the Grace Kellys of the animal world.

East Hampton Hard Hitters

2009-08-18T06:56:00.001-07:00

"Too much Snapple and vodka in the sun." The tight-faced matron muttered, but if the heckler heard, he didn't seem to care.

"You've got nothing. Nuuuuu-thing. Call your editors, boys. It's time for a rewrite."
The crowd laughed, as if in spite of itself, and then turned back hurriedly to the field.

We were at the bottom of the 7th innings of the 61st Annual East Hampton Artists vs. Writers baseball game, and this year the sun was decidedly hotter than the celebrity sightings. Alec Baldwin and Chrissy Brinkley were both, improbably, batting for the Artists, but most of the players were a straggly collection of half-familiar names and determined faces. Despite the heat they were playing hard, and the scoreline was tight. As the commentators kept telling us, this was one of the most exciting matches in the history of the oldest charity event in East Hampton.

"Hah! What are you playing at? Writers, where's your fucking white-out?"

We were huddled in a tiny patch of shade watching silver-haired men walking their models around the perimeter fence. The girls towered above their consorts and the rest of the capped and reddening crowd, all shiny hair and sunglasses and painfully angular limbs.

Behind us, the voice grew louder and more raggedy, its puns worn thin and brittle with use.

"You're all over the place. Where's your three act structure now, eh? Whaddareyou... Jeeee...zus. Your team's a... what? An ellipse. Heh heh... Bunch of pen-pushing pussys. Strike! Isn't that what you do best, eh Writers? I said, isn't striking what you pansy-asses do best..."

Canada V: We Will Rock You, Tadoussac

2009-08-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

We suspected the driver of the Gaspe peninsula bus had a couple of lucrative sidelines going. Several times during the four hour trip from Quebec City to Tadoussac the bus would stop on a dark lane and a small boy would come sprinting out to deliver a box of oranges or to take possession of a parcel carefully wrapped in brown paper and string. This suspicion was confirmed when less than five miles from our destination we pulled in to the car-park of a roadside restaurant and were told that we were stopping for forty-five minutes, like it or not. The waitress refused to serve us Irish coffees unless we ordered a meal each (she didn't clarify whether her qualms were legal, financial or moral) so we kicked up the road to a one-pump garage and asked if they had a torch we could buy. They didn't; or perhaps they just didn't understand our pidgin French. By now the sky was inky, and the prospect of pitching a tent in the pitch dark, by the light of a novelty keychain flashlight, wasn't appealing.

When we finally arrived in Tadoussac it was like we'd stumbled into a Quebecois replaying of Woodstock. Around the bonfire people were strumming and swaying, while strangers got acquainted in the shadows of the beached pirate ship. Minutes after we arrived the band started playing, amid clinking beer bottles and stamped approvals. Slinging down our backpacks in the corner we went to try and find someone who could tell us where we could set up for the night. A girl with long dark hair and a preternaturally chilled-out voice gestured vaguely into the darkness.
"It's easier in English, yes?"
Yes. Sometimes.
"There are some spaces. Just find somewhere you like and tell us where it is."
She smiles and turns to the next travel-creased punter. Dutifully we grab our bags and trudge outside. It's been raining all day and we're in flip flops. By the light of the fire we see a level area crammed with tents, and then a dark hump of trees, rocks and canvas. Swearing quietly, we scramble up slippery rocks with packs on our backs, looking for a free wooden platform where we can set up.

It's a marker of how dark, wet and confusing it is that it takes us the best part of an hour to find one. Behind us the Frog Rock band provide a pounding background track.

It's a new tent, and the only other time we've put it up was on a lazy Saturday afternoon in Fort Greene. Now the conditions are decidedly more adverse. With a bit of Heath Robinsoning we finally get the pegs in and stumble and slide back down the hill to pay.

Half an hour later, when we're sitting out on the deck, we get talking to a guy from Montreal.
"So you're camping... here?"
Uh huh.
"You know there's a campsite down the road where you can hear the whales from your tent, right?"

We shrug, clink beers and go back to listening to the good people of Tadoussac rock out.

Mammoths and Mammoth Poseurs

2009-08-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

The guy in the cave-man vest shook his club in the air and a couple of hundred cooler-than-thou hipster types raised their fists in salute. Behind him, a black faux fur bikini was grinding away as if she'd got herself into the background of an MTV shoot. But it was the mammoth we were all saving our whoops for. Naturally.

PS1 is the Queen's overshoot of Manhattan's MOMA, and from the looks of some of the exhibitions it seems to function as a convenient cultural overspill site, a sort of museum mop and bucket. Apart from the eerily lovely swimming pool installation, its rooms hold a variety of hmm-that's-quite-interesting-I-suppose pieces and shrug-offable delights. But every summer Saturday PS1 brushes off the cobwebs and opens its doors to the sort of people who will pay to be seen at a dance party in a sculpture garden. People like me.

To add considerably to the fabulous factor, it is very much a sculpture garden, singular. At the minute the courtyard is graced by a hairy habitat, a where-the-wild-things-are structure of caves and misting spray, which handily separates the dancefloor from the beer stalls. Hence, I'm guessing, the inspired Bedrock-themed party, which is going on on the backyard overlooking the museum's garden. It may only be three in the afternoon, but they seem to be partying pretty hard. It's difficult to tell whether it's the caveman cocktails or the envious looks which are getting them more intoxicated. I seriously consider scaling the wall in my flip-flops.

Down below the self-fashioned VIP party, the beautiful PS1 people are getting their dance on. On the steps of the old school, a group of self-consciously hot Russians are going all out. The two girls are doing semi-ironic dance routines, while their ramped-up escort alternates between a matt black 80s waistcoat and a glistening 80s six pack. There is a lot of serious dance face, muscles clenched in quasi-painful appreciation as the DJ drops a fresh set of beats.

Inside the crowds are huddled around the loos, and the corridors echo forlornly. Guards watch to make sure no-one jumps in the ersatz pool. Surely it's only a matter of time.

Courage, comrades

2009-08-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

The google search were not encouraging. I'd typed in the name of the feminist, grass-roots organisation I was thinking about volunteering at, and instead of finding the address I found blogs accusing the organisation of being a socialist cult, and harbouring guns for a red militia. They were written by mothers who'd finally rescued their "brainwashed" daughters from the group's clutches, by concerned citizens, and by paranoid people who couldn't spell "commeee barstads". Still, I'd signed up for an orientation ("Not an initiation." I reassured myself as I headed down into the depths of Gowanus) and my curiosity was piqued. Would they really try and enlist me to the cause, and if so, how would they take my embarrassed English demurrals: "Universal worker's solidarity sounds lovely, but actually I'm really just a freelancer. Can barely be called working, really. I'll just sit this one out, if you don't mind." This Revolution will not be Quite my Cup of Tea.

Inevitably, the meeting turns out to be anti-climatic. Instead of a charismatic cult leader urging us to sign up we have a pleasant girl reading in a dirge-like monotone a lecture on the history of the organisation (media: bad; internet: bad; workers: exploited), and showing us community newsletters and fliers for bake sales that their members have produced. The bake sale seems largely apolitical and unsubversive, to my unseasoned eyes at least. It also happened almost a decade ago. I am smiling tightly and trying to see the point. Then they bring out actual cake and I find myself agreeing to help members edit their self-published projects. Already as I'm nodding and forking in the cake I sense this might be unwise.

When the pleasant girl is replaced by the charmless autocrat I'd already suffered over the phone ("So can I find out about the organisation./Come today at six./I can't come today, I'm afraid. Is there any other.../Orientations are Wednesdays and Saturdays./Great. So I can just come along to one?/ No. / So.../You can't just drop in, when you feel like it. Do you want to get involved?/Well-nervous laugh-I want to find out a bit more first...") I make my excuses and leave.

Flopping down at our regular table at Trout I can see that Chris has already told the others about my orientation.
"I hope you didn't drink any Kool Aid."
I shake my head, wipe the last tell-tale Tiramisu crumbs from my mouth, and decide they wouldn't really understand about the Schedule and the Benefits.
And so it begins...

Canada IV: The Beaver Hunt

2009-08-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

"Is she sportif?" The walk leader asked sceptically, as I trotted off to get some trousers to put on under my Primark sun dress.
Chris replied with a Gallic shrug. "Un peu."

We set off from the hostel at a breakneck pace. The bearded old man lead us away from the path, through bushes and over fallen trees, over brooks and under thorned branches. We were Bella to his Edmund, Jane to his Tarzan, the camera man to his Challenge Anneka. Every time he paused to let us catch up I'd slap at the insects and try yet again not to ping the foliage back into anyone's face.

But already we were seeing signs of the beavers. It was like a company of midget loggers had been at work in the pristine forest. Everywhere you looked trees were felled and branches gnawed through. Sometimes a deep, triangular rift had been bitten into trunk, only for the beaver to lose interest and leave the booby-trapped tree precariously in place. And then there were the dams: whole systems of minor dams to allow the beavers easy access to the heart of the woods, then huge, Gothic structures which acted as their winter homes.

Our guide pointed up towards the canopy. He let out a rapid volley of French. "Giant beaver!" He explained. Apparently beavers can walk on the top of the ten to twenty feet of snow this region gets every winter, and use the elevation to take wood from the tops of young trees. We laugh and marvel, obediently.

But it is when we are waiting for the grand final - the money shot - that our guide drops his favourite joke. It's sun-down, and we're watching the lake for signs of the beavers themselves, when he breaks the silence. He mutters something. Everyone laughs. I look confused.
"Did you get that?"
I shake my head and smile.
"Why do beavers have flat tails?"
"Je ne sais pas."
"Because ducks give blow jobs."
I "ahh!" and nod furiously, feeling that something may have got lost in the translation, and keep scanning the horizon for beavers.

All Points West: Half-full

2009-08-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

Since the festival is held on a state park, drinking at All Points West is confined to the over-21 Beer Gardens, which also feature free cigarettes, queue-less toilets and seemingly the only dry grass in the site. But all the landscaping in the world couldn't disguise the cold hard facts: the organisers were forcing you to choose between beer and beats, between kicking back and rocking out, between inebriation and intoxication. Luckily we'd left our IDs at home, so the only dilemma we had was how much breast-warmed vodka to pour into our toggle-topped bottomless lemonade.

We hit the music hard. Steel Train - giving a jovially bitter little acoustic set in a random tent after being rained off their stage. Silversun Pickups. We Are Scientists - as catchy as swine flu. Elbow - MDMA-grade euphoria from the bearded Mancunian and co. Mogwai. Lykke Li [dance dance dance]. Coldplay. MGMT. [sneak back] Coldplay. Etienne de Crecy [danse danse danse].

But it was Coldplay, good old Gwennie-boffing, planet-loving, mum-approved Coldplay, who blew everyone else away. Feeling like traitors to the Brooklyn hipster cause we abandoned our Grand Plan (and a less than sparkling MGMT) for some more of the old boys' razzle dazzling. And then it happened. It was like God and Chris Martin were working together to wipe out the storms, the lines, the four hours in the ferry depot. The band disappeared from stage. We watched the screens jealously as they walked passed the tightly-packed fans at the front, heading to...
"They're coming. RUN!"
Grabbing my hand, Chris sprints across the mud. Unlike most of the flip-flopped crowd we're in sturdy hiking boots, so we splash and weave and jostle until we're there and they're there and fucking hell we're close. Coldplay are on a platform behind the soundstage, less than five feet away. They play one song after another. We scream. We sing along. We move our feet so that we don't get sucked down into the quagmire. I shout "thank you, thank you" over and over again.

Trudged back to the ferries, after even the dance tent has gone dark, a girl behind me is trying to describe it to her friends.

"It was... incredible. I think I got Chris Martin's spit on my face."

All Points West: Half-Empty

2009-08-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

We're standing near the front of the line to get into the last day of the All Points West Festival. We were on the first boat, and it's almost an hour after the gates were supposed to open, but for the minute we're happy to be under canvas and out of the rain. Not everyone is so lucky, and already the back of the line is starting to look like a wet t-shirt competition.

One of the security guards whistles. He has a great whistle. His voice is harder to make out.
"Listen up people. We've got some really bad stuff coming in."
Security is pretty tight. I shift uncomfortably, a bottle of vodka hidden in my cleavage.
"So we're asking you to all head back to the ferry terminal..."
"WHAAAA????"
"...no need to make a lot of noise. It's not safe to stay here. Now head back to the terminal..."
Thunder and lightening punctuate his sentences, and it's a measure of how amenable the festival goers are that after some grumbling they obediently head back out into the storm and the pouring rain, and trudge the mile through the mud back to the dock. Already people have started to abandon their flip-flops, and are squelching their way barefoot amongst the crowds.

We spend four hours in the terminal building, continually being nudged around the concrete floor by police packing machine guns. Woodstock, it ain't.

People continue to flood off the ferry until there's several thousand of us in there, killing time by queuing for the toilets or the one overwhelmed snack stand. I become personally responsible for introducing the alphabet game to a new generation of New Jersey youth. No-one can think of a country beginning with O.

After a lot of false rumours we're finally allowed out the door, only to be held for another hour, like pigs in a pen, a half mile from the gates. After a day of torrential rain the sun is out, and I'm frying. The vodka has now spent five hours down my bra. While we wait, we drink the whiskey which was down Chris' pants. It's pleasantly warm. People tut jealously.

To Be Continued...

Canada III: If You Go Down to the Woods Today...

2009-07-31T07:53:00.001-07:00

"What is this like, silver foil or something?"
The first-timer shrugs apologetically as the man in a chain mail vest flicks the floppy end of his home-made sword.
Even from my vantage point at the edge of the clearing I can see what the battle-hardened warrior is thinking: this guy and his pansy-ass weapon won't last two minutes in there. But he lets him play anyway. Him, and the two overexcited American kids who keep refusing to die like they're supposed to.

We'd been told about the strange world of Montreal medieval battling at the youth hostel in Taddoussac, by the Ottowan guy who reminded everyone of somebody.
"Yeah, if you're there on a Sunday go to Mont Royal - you know, the big park in the Plateau - and there's drumming and strange people shooting arrows from trees. No one understands the rules. Maybe not even the players."

Either there are no tree-hugging archers the week we are there, or they've become ever more skilled in the arts of guerrilla warfare, because all the action seemed to be on the ground. Pitched battles splintered off into intense one-on-one or (in the case of a particularly stout fighter) four-on-one confrontations. Loyal girlfriends cheered from the sidelines. The thuds of foam clubs on metal armour made me feel for the nervous, bearded newcomer and his shiny, useless Blue-Peter, sticky-back-plasticked sword.

So while down by the memorial statue the city's bohemians and ragamuffins drummed and danced and smoked, up here the white, anglophone boys (and one double-sworded girl) battled it out for glory and bonus points.
"They've got no tactics. They've just got no tactics at all." Chris muttered as I finally dragged him away from yet another mass collision.
As we passed the drummers and tramps he stared back up the hill wistfully.
"What they need is a leader..."

Canada II: Only happy when it rains

2009-07-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Looking at the nonplussed faces in the crowd, it was clear that Montreal ("Mon-ray-aaal") was no cheer-topia. While the kids formed human pyramids and doled out rictus grins and hi-Mom waves the people brought their hands together as if to clap, then thought better of it, and hugged their handbags closer. They'd dutifully gathered to watch the parade which marked the last day of the Just For Laughs festival, and I wanted to poke them all with a giant spirit stick.

The next group were a film club, and had made an ingenious travelling scene where a middle-aged couple sat on cinema seats watching a love scene being shot. Between takes the actors skulked at opposite ends of the rowing boat, checking their messages and submitting to the attentions of hair and make-up. The man who was resting his belly on Chris' back said that it was Very Clever. He managed to make the words sound vaguely disapproving, as if ingenuity was at heart morally suspect.

Watching the faces of the young performers as their tightly choreographed performances were met with polite blankness wasn't funny. It made me remember the last - and surely the only - time I took part in a parade: the Awa Odori in my Japanese suburb. There families arrived hours early with picnics and plastic matting. When the performers dance they whooped and cheered and clapped and danced along for the full three hours of the festival. Then they rolled up their mats, threw away their rubbish and within ten minutes the streets were pristine again.

There is a distinct lack of whoopage here. Ripples of enthusiasm get smothered by the low-key masses. It's all very polite... that is until the heavens open. Then, all at once, the streets are full of children, shrieking and running and laughing. It's like a summer downfall is the best show they've ever seen.

Huddled in a bus shelter I have a front row view of the action. Couples hold hands as they careen down the streets. Whole families give up on dryness and turn their heads to the skies. Quite the finale.

Canada I - Trains, Pains and Automobiles

2009-07-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

"And so she came and told me that people were going around staying she was showing off by dressing up for church. And I told her not to worry. She wasn't showing off, she's just... German."
The Canadian couple nod sagely. Her husband closes his eyes like he's heard this one before.
"I mean, that's just what they're like isn't it? Elegant, I mean. That's how they always seem to me. Very elegant. It's just their way."
When no-one jumps in to agree, she digs her husband in the ribs. "Isn't that what you found dear. When you lived over there?"
Turns out husband is an army brat, like me. Perhaps he too remembers an elegant nation with trousers swinging up over ankles; a country with excellent environmental policies and a communal reverence for C&A's polyester delights.

Husband takes the opportunity to change the subject.
"Yeah everything worked so great over there. You should see the trains..."
Canadian husband hears his cue and rises out of his seat in his eagerness to deliver his lines.
"Actually me and my father had the opportunity to travel there ourselves. We had the very great good fortune to ride all the trains there. He's a bit of a train enthusiast, my father. We took the local trains, the inner-city trains and the expresses..."
American husband lets out a bellyfull of breath. "Phew. They blow me away those expresses."
"Yeah, I can't remember the exact translation equation, but they were going 200, 300 miles an hour. Saw the whole country that way. Must be ten years ago now."
"How do you even see when you're going that fast?" American wife churps up. "Wasn't it all a blur?"
"Nah... you just focus on something..." he founders.
They all look out of the window. So do I. We're coming up to the border, chugging through one of the no-horse towns that the tracks cleave in half.

The journey from New York to Montreal is scheduled to take a little under twelve hours. On the way up we arrive three hours late. By car, the journey is rumoured to take six hours. Lucky it's so beautiful, and lucky we know so many card games.

The seats in front have started talking again about Times Square and how to navigate the subway and don't seem to notice when our train gets overtaken by a boy on a bicycle. I watch him gain on us, draw level and then peddle off towards the horizon. He never even breaks into a sweat.

Oh Canada...

2009-07-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Canada, land of draft-dodgers, maple syrup, husky attacks, canoeing with whales, defining yourself against the Americans, polar bear trains, lumberjacks, jagged little pills and frenchness. And now (temporarily) me.
Back in two weeks...
au revoir.

Spinning Michael's Tunes

2009-07-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

"I thought I'd be too sad to come to work today guys, but you guys got me through it - like I knew we would."
We whoop. This is a class where whooping is mandatory.
As a reward, he tells us to crank up the resistance, and hops from bike to bike, wiping our sweaty foreheads and urging us on. I'm embarrassingly pleased when he comes to halt in front of me, wipes my sweat too.

The last time I was at a spinning class there was no live DJ spinning Michael Jackson tunes under blinding UV light, and the Mr Motivator was a softly-spoken, power-crazed Japanese guy called Kenji who would interrupt our peaceful cycle along a beautiful cliff road with a demonic cry of "And here comes... za MOUNTAINS!" This time there's also more than three of us in the class. In fact there's 50 bikes, and few are empty. I can hide at the back, my teeth glowing in the darkness.

We're in a gym, in the shadow of BAM, and today is the day of Michael Jackson's funeral. After 45 minutes spent making a collective offering of sweat (sweetly wiped) we are lead in a minute's silence, as our legs gradually slow their phantom pumping.
"I'm sure we all have memories - both good and bad."
I catch myself nodding along. I wonder if this is what it's like to join a cult.
"We should just be thankful for the beautiful music..."
The funk is cranked up as we stretch out the workout, and I spend the rest of the day haunted by the chirpy tones of the Jackson Five.

Last curtain call on the circle line

2009-07-07T09:04:00.001-07:00

"Not that you need to know this..." He takes a deep breath, and his white captain's uniform strains across his less-than-shipshape torso, "but I have a Masters degree in dramatic art."
Those who are listening raise their eyebrows dutifully. The rest continue their efforts to stifle screaming toddlers and elbow themselves some space at the railing so they can spend the next hour and a half filming a wobbly version of the Manhattan skyline.
"Yes, I came to the city, and took this very tour. Many years ago." He smiles wearily and shakes his head. "All I can say folks is to be careful what you wish for."
We laugh nervously, but he's gazing out across the water at the hard glass shapes casting their shadows over the Hudson. He says it again, but this time the forced tour-guide cheeriness has leached out of his voice. He sounds less worldly than when he was talking about losing friends to Aids ("that terrible disease"), less stoic than when he told us of the remains that are still being found at Ground Zero ("it used to be 60/40 unidentified, but recently, through technological advances, they've reversed that percentage"). Two decades on, the boats of the circle line are his stage, and we his captive audience.
He moves the microphone closer to his lips.
"Just be careful what you wish for."

Independence Day

2009-07-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sat between my Mum and my teenage sister on the sticky tarmac of 42nd Street trying to ignore the fact that the guy wrapped round the girl in front of me is looking to slide into second base. She returns his kisses (perhaps a little less enthusiastically) but keeps one hand free to pin her skirt to her thighs. Soon she's yanking him to feet and demanding to get closer to the action. Folks round here want to smell the cordite in the air.

The only reason we got close enough to sit on this little island of frotting couples and subtle brown-baggers is through disobeying a direct police order. We'd tried to cross over 11th Avenue, but had been vaguely pointed south by an officer who was busy trading derisive retorts with a mouthy reveller. At 41st we're told that it's rammed all the way to 32nd, though we can all see the empty street ahead.
"Keep moving!" The policewoman barks, wielding a pointed finger and a hefty bosom as though they qualified as riot-gear.

Most people grumble forward as the crowds push and surge behind us. There's nothing so dehumanising as a shuffling queue of bodies. We could be steerage on the Titanic. We could be lining up for bread after the crash. We could be queuing for the fabled 'nice toilets' at Glastonbury.

We decide to double back and sacrifice proximity for space, but when the first policeman turns his back we see the chance to slip through, and we take it. We find ourselves directly opposite one of the firework barges, and spend the rest of the wait congratulating ourselves on our cunning and steadfastly refusing to join the chants started by the alphas in their roof-gardens.

The fireworks, when they come are a half hour of blazing stars and golden trails across the sky. It's probably the most expensive display I've ever seen, but although it's beautiful the crowd's reaction tells me that it wasn't everything they pushed and shoved and planned ahead for. It's the kind of night where you have a longing to be part of something epic - but instead we're all out here in our thousands watching tinsel in the sky. As the guys standing next to me puts it, "I want more... boom." New York is powered by people wanting more boom, people like the people watching the skies tonight, looking for more than Chinese magic tricks. And with citywide unemployment pushing 10%, who couldn't do with just a little more bang for their buck?

RIP Wiz-kid of Pop

2009-06-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

It's hard to say what the scene would have been like if Michael Jackson hadn't died on Thursday night. Would people still have been lining up an hour beforehand to secure their seats, or would they have succumbed to the siren call of Top Gun (showing in the Before They Were Scientologists screen downstairs) or the tripped out Smiley Face next door? As it was, Cinema 3 at BAM's all-night movie fest turned into the most raucous of celluloid wakes, fuelled by nostalgia and Brooklyn lager and a desire to remember Jacko before the Wacko; to see him again as the kid who eased on down the yellow brick road.

I'd never seen The Wiz before, unlike the majority of the mostly young, mostly black audience, who sang along with the cast and cheered on Diana Ross as she transformed from a shy Bronx kindergarten teacher ("24, and never been south of 125th street" to a kick-ass heroine who could sprint in vertiginous sparkly heels. There was something magical about being there in the heart of Brooklyn, and watching the action unfurl amidst a dystopian Coney Island playground (the Tin Man's comment that there's "nothing amusing about the closure of an amusement park" was met with howls of agreement) and to see the yellow brick road span across a neon-lit Brooklyn Bridge.

But it was Michael we were here to see. Almost unrecognisable until he let rip into song, his nineteen year old face is covered in make-up and his dancer's frame is padded out with straw and apt quotations. It's a more benign disguise than the one that the singer later carves out of his own skin, and it doesn't hinder the mad capering and knife-like physical precision that makes him so mesmerising to watch. There are whoops and screams and hollers throughout, but it's near the very end that the crowd explode. After discovering that the great Wiz is a fraud Michael, as the supposedly brainless scarecrow, finally comes up with his own aphorism: "Success, fame, and fortune, they're all illusions. All there is that is real is the friendship that two can share." It's a painfully, preternaturally apt realisation from a man who seemed so miserably alone in his own glittering Emerald City.

After the credits role the crowds surge upstairs to the 'all-night dance party', many belting out showtunes on the way. It's only then that I realise that people have been stood up at the back throughout the two and a half hour movie. Upstairs it's back-to-back Michael Jackson hits. With all the media hype about collective emotion and false grief there's something genuinely touching about watching a room full of people - most of whom were too young to remember Jackson as the revolutionary black artist to break through MTV's racial apartheid - dancing to Billie Jean and singing their hearts out.

You could tell we weren't in London anymore, because there wasn't a single joke about blowing bubbles.

I'll Be There For You, David Schwimmer

2009-06-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

Now I know how the priest feels when he sees, with a sinking heart, the snaking column of the unwashed lining up for holy wafers and a sip of sweet wine. There's something strangely ritualistic about repeating the same interaction over and over again with a line of people. Some folks already have their tickets clutched in their hands, others stick to the script and pretend they haven't heard me make the same small jokes with the people in front of them. Perhaps they figure that if you break that fourth wall, who knows what else might come tumbling down...

My mission is an uncomfortable one. I have to pick out the important people from the also rans, and steer them towards a cocktail reception that I am missing because I am "working the queue". The guy at the front arrives a clear two hours before the show is due to start. He's well-prepared for life outside the velvet rope - sunhat, folding chair, Blitz spirit. Others aren't so hardy. We're late opening the venue and there are discrete, spitting bundles of irritation, and tales of gammy legs that would make Tiny Tim guiltily give up his front-row seat.

When the floodgates finally open I sneak downstairs to swig a glass of white wine and hoover up the canapes. Two familiar figures are doing the same thing, making me worry about whether I should be shooing them off. One's Man Number 1, who (after presumably staking out the best non-VIP seat in the house) has snuck down for a sneaky glass of glass of VIP vino. The other is Ross from Friends. Both are wearing baseball caps and looking shifty. In my head I practice things to say to David Schwimmer. It's important that I come across as graceful hostess, rather than scary fan. I'd be putting Mr Schwimmer at his ease, not asking for an autograph. While I'm getting the tone right the bell rings and they traipse, separately, upstairs.

In the beat before I follow them, I try to exchange an amused look with the model-perfect serving boys, but they're all too busy talking about the death of Michael Jackson. After the screening, at the even more exclusive reception, Man No. 1 returns, and manages to put away even more canapes than I do. Ross, meanwhile, has left the building.

If I said you had a beautiful body...

2009-06-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

"See it's like this..."
He curls his finger at me and I shuffle forwards, avoiding eye-contact with the rest of my sweaty classmates. When I'm within punching distance he starts the routine. He grabs my hair, and then mimes jerking it down on his knee, and then slamming it in the floor. It's hard to know what to do with my face. I'm not used to being cast in the role of the fearsome attacker.
"See?"
We all nod grimly, even me, his vanquished adversary.
"Thanks." He flashes me a smile as a stumble back to my place, and then, as if wanting to add a personal touch, "And remember to keep those fists up."

I used to go to a Body Attack class in London, run by a friendly (but presumably deadly) girl my age who always got us jabbing and kicking in formation to retro tunes, like a chorus of ineffectual fembots. This time round it was a sample class at a health and vitality expo, and the testosterone factor was pumped up to the max.

Which was more than can be said for me. Thirty minutes in and I'm panting like a bitch and fantasising about the cooldown. The girls flogging anti-aging skin care and flax health bars are watching us sweat and kick and grunt, presumably grateful for some entertainment after a hard day of guarding their samples and scrutinising their fine lines.

Our ripped leader, though, shows no signs of tiring.
"Rule no.1: Stay on your toes." He starts weaving to the hip hop beat, fists guarding his face. (That's rule no.2.) It's obvious he's a pretty good dancer - light on his feet for someone of his build.
"Say someone's coming up on ya. You wanna be all like, 'I don't want to no problems man' but still. You want them to know... to know, right? To know they ain't gonna be messin with you."
I nod eagerly, muttering "True dat!" under my breath, forgetting for a second that I punch like a girl.

But he's not finished with the demonstration. This time be picks on a tiny Asian teenager to his left. She looks pretty fragile next to him, especially when he gets her in a headlock and starts demonstrating the places on her body where he's aiming his kicks. Blissfully unaware of the uneasy spectacle he's presenting - muscles bulging as he shows us how to pummel her slender frame - he turns to us with a grin.

"Hot, right?"

I just concentrate on my slams, and try not to choke up my green tea energy drink.

Prep

2009-06-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

The first time I read it I was under the influence of countless gratis caffienated-vodka-and-pomegranate juice cocktails, and it seemed somehow profound. The second time I flicked back for it and reading it over gave me the same unsettling feeling as looking up from my plate to lock eyes with an mirror-unready version of myself chewing over some meatballs. There are some things you'd rather not see reflected back. It also made me wonder if there was a secret army of militantly insecure teenage girls from which I had unknowingly made my way up through the ranks, convinced I was a hardy guerrilla force of one.

“Maybe he just thinks you’re pretty?”
I winced. This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was and he wouldn’t be entirely wrong – nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was always any of these things, but in certain situations, it was conceivable. But to be seen as pretty was to be fundamentally misunderstood. First of all, I wasn’t pretty, and on top of that I didn’t take care of myself like a pretty girl did; I wasn’t even one of the unpretty girls who passes as pretty through effort and association. If a guy believed my value to lie in my looks, it meant either that he’d been somehow misled and would eventually become disappointed, or that he had very low standards.

The heroine, Lee, is battling her way through an elite boarding school and a hierarchy much more glossy and vicious than any known to exist outside of high school, the SAS and reality TV shows. What struck me so much about the passage was what an unflattering characterisation of teenage boys lies at the heart of it, one bitterly familiar to any reader of Just 17's he-snogged-my-best-friend, he-doesn't-talk-to-me-in-public, he-says-it's-over-if-I-won't problem pages. And what a mad contrast there was between that and the achingly sweet portrayal of Brooklyn boys in Don't Let Me Drown, the indie-flick that had just opened the BAM film festival.

Although the themes were weighty - racism within the Hispanic community, the literal and metaphorical fall-out of 9-11 - what really got me was the way that the teenage hero was so relentlessly besotted with his friend's cousin, that love letters from the high school hottie got crumpled up and ignored. As the credits rolled I turned to Chris and asked, for the sake of my fourteen-year-old self and problem page readers everywhere, "Are teenage boys really that sweet? Can they really be that sweet?"

Several hours and caffeinated cocktails later I watched the teenaged actor dancing dirty with his twentysomething admirers. Whatever the truth behind the celluloid romance, they seemed to approve.

PopCo

2009-06-19T09:49:00.001-07:00

A little part of me died as I handed over the packet of Parmesan Pita chips to the panhandler on the A-train ("My name's Homeless Jo, but you can call me Homeless"). I'd been hoping to pull something else out of my Mary Poppins bag, like the "gently caffeinated" green tea energy drink, or the packet of wholewheat, sugar-free cookies some bright-eyed health nut had been pushing at the Vital Juice expo, earlier that afternoon. With those pita chips went my last little piece of Google swag. And it's not like I even had a chance to get my hands on their rank of scooters...

At 6.30 yesterday I presented my passport (old one, edges cut off, photograph that looks like a more saintly version of my younger self)and was admitted to Google HQ in the meatpacking district. It all looked pretty normal until we reached the fourth floor, and then I saw that all the rumours had indeed been true. Like a yuppie version of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory, it was a white-walled wonderland of performative creativity. Whiteboards in the corridors were scrawled with in-jokes and blue sky thinking. Instead of desks there was a games room, with foosball and pool. Instead of a coffee pot and water cooler there was a kitchen stocked with m&ms and gummi bears and boiled eggs. Instead of swivelly chairs there were yoga balls. There was a man-sized ballpool, atari computer games, coaches you could make-out on. To be honest, it looked so much fun that I wouldn't be surprised if you had to pay to work there. This is, after all, New York: the spiritual home of the year-long, unpaid internship, which you have to fight a Battle Royale and sleep your way around the middle management to secure.

Being there made me think of Scarlett Thomas' brilliant novel PopCo, which is set in a cooler than thou toy company, and features the most subversive group of vegans you're ever likely to come across. It made we wonder if Google has its own group of gummi-bear refusers, ready to subvert the company from the inside. Are there employees who deliberately design bad Fourth of July illustrations or make sure that when you search for "sweet little kittens" you get directed to Viagra sites? Or is the rebellion subtler than that? Are there a band of non-conformist Googlers (Nooglers, perhaps?)who scorn the Lego room and refuse to hot desk? Do they bite their collective thumbs at the dress-down ethos and and warehouse parties come in Armani-clad and shoe-shone, pigheadedly making cabbing it up to Midtown after work to hang out with the other suits?

Vive la difference.

Hoods

2009-06-17T10:34:00.001-07:00

Back in London we used to regularly indulge ourselves in a little casual torture. Fine weekends would be spent wandering around Clapham, or Greenwich or Notting Hill, looking at the houses and choosing which one we'd want to live in. With the aid of our trusty pack of London walks we'd idle along tree lined, litter-free streets, peering into bars and delis and parks and wondering what life would be like lived in a place where the menus were hand-written rather than backlit and badly spelled. It wasn't that we didn't love our scrappy bit of East London, with its canal path and Victorian pubs and grown-over cemetery, but the glitter of gentrification kept us riding the subway and pounding the streets, searching for not-so-hidden gems.

These days a perfect weekend for me is one where I don't have to leave Brooklyn. Since I work from home, I no longer have the commuter's burden to shrug off, but still, there it is; this sense of wanting to stay within striking distance of Prospect Park and Michelle Williams' favourite cafe.

Both the cafe next to Michelle Williams' favourite cafe and the Caribbean restaurant on the opposite corner have closed their doors in recent weeks. Although it seems as though my neighbors spend their lives eating and drinking and tipping a clear 20% I guess even that's not enough to support all the cafes, bars and restaurants within a five block radius. But whereas back in Mile End we used to look at the empty junk store on our corner - the one with the ginger kitten forever sleeping in the window - and fantasize about coffee shops and delis and second hand bookshops, here it's hard to think of what we need, what we lack. Already on the street there are restaurants (French, soul food, New Orleans, Thai, Vietnamese), laundrettes (two), boutiques (innumerable), bodegas (five), thrift stores (two) and quirky-cafes-with-wifi (three). We can buy cards, children's toys, jewellery, vintage signs and organic icecream sundaes; Time Out, yoga clothes, flowers and wedding lingerie. There's even the offices of a private detective.

Shamefully, after talking it over, we realised that there was only one thing we really wanted to put in the empty store-fronts, and is wasn't anything that would help us shop local or organic or get us drunk on happy hour margaritas. Oh no, we want Bank of America cashpoints. Somewhere between those dreamy walks through London parks and writing this blog The Man has well and truly got our souls.

Manhattan is my playground

2009-06-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

The strangest sights of the weekend were the unscheduled spectacles. The bride moonwalking across the Times Square intersection. The man with a boa constrictor necklaced round his throat, who looked at our players like they were the odd ones. The Iraqi dignitaries who stopped to watch the circle rules football match, nodding politely beneath blue embassy umbrellas.

Come Out and Play Festival is many things to many people. A chance to chase one other across midtown or break some hearts at a roll of the dice or outgeek your geekiest friends by bringing an old Atari game to life or solving puzzles based on Midsummer Night's Dream and Mortal Kombat moves. People play in suits, in pigtails, in costumes that you only assume can be the remnants of some past game which you should have signed up for too.

I spent the Sunday in a hat wide enough to score me an extra subway seat, weaving in and out of Times Square's tourist crowds. As part of the game, Earpiece, three players had to obey the instructions on their MP3 players, in what amounted to a try-out for a nebulous organization called The Agency. My mission was to track them, to weave in and out of the Georgians, Scousers and Midwesterners keeping the confused, plugged-in players in sight, and blissfully unaware of their tail. Then about seven minutes in, they were supposed to be told to look out for me, and I'd watch as they picked me out, eyes clutching at what they had serenely glid over just minutes earlier. It was like a Where's Wally game brought to pushing and shoving life, and I was the little guy in stripes.

My favourite part of the game was the bit where two of the players were told to get close to the player they trusted most and avoid the player they didn't trust, while the other was asked to do the opposite. The shuffling, roundabout dance of evasion and attraction brought me right back to bright afternoons in the playground and similarly arbitrary patterns of friendship and betrayal. She's my best friend. Go away. We don't like her any more. Except this time round the dance lasted less than one awkward minute, and when the players took their headsets off again the subtler, less frenzied grown-up games of alliance politely resumed.

Happy and Glorious

2009-06-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

It was only when One of the UK's Leading Jazz Singers started with the whole star-spangled banner business that the cream of New York's British expats realised they should have been singing along. Personally, I felt vindicated. Mine had been one of the few reedy voices piping along politely to our own great national anthem, desperate to prove I knew all the words. As, I saw with relief, did Prince Edward. Jolly good show.

But listening to the pomp and circumstance of the more lustily voiced American song, I started to wonder whether the differences in our great nations may in fact have been encapsulated in the lyrics of the songs closest to their heart. While my first thought was to compare Girls Aloud's Maneater with Britney's Womaniser, neither song seemed forthcoming (even in a pleasant blues-lite arrangement) so I plumped for the national anthems instead. Admittedly it's a long time since I did a comparative practical criticism, but you don't have to be smugged-up English student to hear the contrast between:

God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!

and

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Basically, the first is bigging up the Queen (rightly so, given that we were singing it on her official birthday and the decided lack of candles for one to blown out) while the second is aggrandising the singers themselves (the self-styled Free and Brave). Now leaving aside the questionable taste of leaving the word "brave" to resonate at the end of the verse - with all its connotations of the native American tribes whose manifest destiny it was to be wiped out by smallpox and perfidious treaties - there's something very striking about the American song's line endings. While both of the English lines finish with an emphatic exclamation, three of the four star-spangled sentences end in question marks. It's as if the song needs to be constantly iterated in order to answer its own rhetorical questions about nationhood.

Then there's the language itself. Compare the way that Queen is made to rhyme with, well, Queen (could anything be more fitting?), while the other lines all end in a an "-us". Brainwashing 101: the Queen (bless her!) and "us" are inextricably linked... only the Queen comes first, as is only natural. By contrast, the US version is like any American TV remake: glossier, flashier, better teeth. Here the "bite", if you will (stop groaning at the back!)comes from the intrusion of the realities of war ("rockets" and "guns") into a ceremonial song. The same topic is only hinted at in the other song via that very English word "victorious" (with it's acquired echoes of Empire). In terms of being glossier and flashier, you only have to look at the latinate words and self-conscious poetics of the US verse. The language is quite literally "gleaming" and "streaming", as its fanciest rhyming pair would have it.

But before I can engage anyone in a heated intellectual debate along these lines, the canape waitress floated past, and all thoughts of linking gerunds to geography flew out of my head as I set off, elbows ruthlessly bared, to hunt down those sausage rolls.

Bottle Service

2009-06-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

"Hey are you guys getting bottle service?"
We have bottle of corona - one each - complete with slices of lime. Apparently this doesn't cut it.
The barmaid unpretties her face for a second to mime an awkwardness she clearly doesn't feel. "Well, in which case we'll be needing this table. Feel free to grab one of the others if you want."
Since the place is full of tables, we do as she says. Then sit and watch while our old, A-List table sits empty for an hour. Eventually a group of guys and girls arrives and they are ushered to sit down, while the beaming waitress scurries around her.
"What's that about, then?"

Turns out that what it's about is paying $500 for two bottles of Gray Goose vodka (retail value: £30 a pop). That's half a month's rent on a studio apartment in Brooklyn. That's more than you'd pay for a decent vintage of Domaine Romanee Contee. That's more than the price of a flight to France and a suitcaseful of Normandy cider. What in God's name are they thinking spending that on an elegantly cooled supermarket brand of gut-rot?

Now I used to read the free London rags and their pre-slump tales of city boys spraying each other with vintage Moet, but we were on the Lower East side, home to Rent's starving Bohemians, and the place which used to boast a population density ten times that of the most crowded high-rise Bronx hood. A quarter of all Americans can trace their ancestors directly back to people living in these ramshackle blocks (and that's even more than can claim to have Irish nobility and/or Rob Roy in their family trees). There was something far more obscene about that cultural dissonance than anything I'd encountered in the Museum of Sex a few blocks north... and that includes Paris Hilton's sex tapes.

Do the Fandango

2009-06-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

The social strata of dance classes is as painstakingly calibrated as the most cliquey American high school. Where you'd have jocks, geeks, stoners and the queen bees you get lindy-hoppers, waltzers, east coast swingers and salsa crazies. It's a phenomenon that spans continents, and is no respecter of skill-level. You can see the clan resemblance between the most ineffectual foxtroter and the professionals on Strictly. So before you sign up for the bogo pogo, it might be worth figuring out whose arms you want to be held in, and where your face will fit.

Salsa: There's a certain type of person that's attracted to the dance form I like think of affectionately as "the cheesy sleaze". Pretty girls in supportive bras and friendship groups, looking a couple of penis earrings short of a hen night. Blowsy middle-age women who look younger from the back. Oddly attractive men in their forties who've realised you won't focus on their bald patch if they're spinning you across the room. Short men who shuffle their feet.

Ballroom: Now as you get further up the food chain the dancers get more streamlined and intimidatingly made-up, but even before they learn twinkles and rictus grins, ballroom types usually fall into the following categories: Asian girls tottering in high heels. Elegant older women with long necks, who remind you of your primary school headmistress. Men with paunches and anxious eyes. Engaged couples who hiss at each other when one of them gets the turns wrong.

Lindy-hop: Despite my obvious personal interest in this category, I'd still argue that this is the easiest type to spot limbering up outside the studio. Look out for... Self-consciously quirky girls in tea-dresses and seamed tights. Men old enough to have danced it the first time round. Earnest couples who look like they also do guerrilla gardening. Stiff suits trying not to step on your toes. Unfeasibly attractive people you're too scared to dance with.

Ballet: A class which is not for the faint of heart, or loathe of leotard. If you step up to the barre you can look forward to be joined by... Very handsome, very gay men. Straight men who struck out at ballroom, salsa and swing and are now terrified they'll never meet that special someone. Girls with no breasts or thighs. Girls with breasts and thighs, and no preserving sense of shame.

The other truth (universally acknowledged) about dance classes is that, for many attendees, "want of a wife" (husband/lover/top/bottom/soulmate) is a major motivation for mastering an eight-count rhythm. Here my advice is simple: get thee to a ceilidh. After a few sweaty, raucous attempts to strip the willow you'll be much closer to getting your rocks off than you ever would be in a harshly lit dance studio, trying desperately not to look at your feet.

Swapping Duds at the Brooklyn Yard

2009-06-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

Since moving to the BK I've learnt to spot a thousand shades of hipster at a hundred paces. Although leafy, green-blocked Boerum Hill is hardly "edgy" Bushwick, we still get our fair share of PBR-swilling action. This Saturday, after a confusing couple of hours pulling weeds by that former Mafia body dump, the Gowanus canal, I stumbled into a veritable hive of facial-hair and youthful irony at the Brooklyn Yard. There was mashed-up music, free watermelon and poi wars. My heart broke for the little Brooklynites; so clearly desperate for a British-style music festival; so very determined to hula hoop the afternoon away with their tongues firmly stuck in their cheeks.

The beds of my fingernails had been thoroughly mulched, and the dirt clung to my arms and face where I'd got a little slap-happy with the sun-tan lotion. I hoped that everyone would assume that I'd been doing something artisanal - like hooping my own wine barrels or building an eco-treehouse in McClaren Park. I'd lugged with me a load of dubious $1 book buys in the hope that I could exchange French existentialists for summer clothes. Happily, since it was a laid-back, too-cool-for-school swap, we were told to just drop off our books and take whatever goodies stole our fancy. There was no points/quota/value system to get in the way of a good time. Naturally we had to compete for the gems with pointy-elbowed hipsters who looked like they were prepared to fight to death for an angora sweater, or some knackered old braces. I'd always done well in the polite, English affairs I'd attended back in London, but this was, I soon realised, the roller-derby of swaps, and it would take a quick eye (and a quicker right hook) to grab myself a new wardrobe.

After a while I dropped back and played spectator. A striking redhead made a turban out of a yard of green cloth. A skinny, bearded guy squeezed himself into a pink polo neck. Two friends dared each other to try on a billowing acid trip of a dress.

Then the watermelon was finished and my bag was full again and the sun went behind a cloud and it was time to go. I left the rummaging kids behind and walked slowly back to streets where no DJs played and to shops where you can only buy the things you had enough money for.

Life's a Beach

2009-06-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

"What are you dooooing? You're ruining it!"
"I'm not, I'm making it pretty."
"Get off. It's miiiine."
No, not more block greening, dear readers (although there was some hot mulching action over the weekend), but a little light sand play. The girl's standing, tiny fists balled into skinny hips, glowering at the little boy who's just started making windows without her say so. You can sort of see her point. The sandcastle is a communal effort that towers over both of them, but bearing in mind its probable defensive function, you can see why bay windows wouldn't be part of the master plan.
The argument's effectively solved by another bigger boy leaping onto the castle and squashing it out of shape. The female architect now has a new object of loathing, and is only appeased when she gets dubbed the queen of the trodden-down turrets.

We're in the new Water Taxi Beach at Manhattan's South Seaport. I squint and try to imagine it as a lively nite-spot, but on an overcast Sunday afternoon it looks like someone's tipped a load of sand into the space of a downtown studio apartment and poured in a load of fractious children and some fake palm trees. Who in hell needs the Hamptons?

The walk to the beach is even stranger. We follow shiny footprints through a Disneyfied arcade and shopping centre, stopping only to look at the carts of innovative lifestyle solutions en-route. Across from the table of springy laces (semi-sinister signs threaten you'll "never tie your shoes again!") is a 3D portrait booth. "Look you could even get your head as a keyring," the stallholder enthuses, "isn't that neat?" What she's holding up is a tiny cube of plastic, with a face carved into the middle of it, like a lo-tech hologram. What is eerie (or, I guess, "neat") is that you can turn it from a front-on face to a side profile, to... another front on view. Perfect for anyone who's ever felt the lack of eyes in the back of their heads, the 3D portrait has no room for boring hair and skull shots. The version of you encased in crystal will be always looking, never resting.

I suggest Chris gets one of me for his desk. He laughs, as if I wasn't being serious, and mimes a 3D version of my photo-face. Perhaps I could get a doubled-up back-of-head shot instead.

Hot competition

2009-05-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

The competition to be the most verdant street in Brooklyn is heating up, and we're the new kids on the block. It's an evening of discoveries. Behind the green veneer of climbing ferns, window boxes and mulched tree beds ("tree pits just sounds so negative") there's enough simmering rivalry, power struggles and cunning plans to content an army of green-finger Machiavellis. It's like the Archers, but with toy dogs instead of cows. It's like Eurovision, without the camp. That's how serious it is.

Chris and I drink the wine and sample the spread ("it's raining, so we're munching not mulching!") and eye the photos of last year's winners. The reconnaissance work is impressive. The group seems torn between cooing "oh, very nice" (it is) and firmly pointing out that last year's judging was purely political ("after all, they can't let us win every year!"). After the relative ignominy of tying for second place last year, we're definitely in it to win it. We talk outside faucets (which get stolen by local rogues for the valuable copper), 'erb gardens (but isn't Brooklyn a little toxic?) and a fountain for the Children's playground (which could, our host sweetly suggests, be renamed the Kool Kidz Garden).

It's admirable how much effort these men and women are willing to put into beautifying their little piece of New York. There's even an understanding attitude towards residents who don't take it so seriously; after all, everyone is so busy these days, aren't they? Too busy, even, to water the blooms the street provide in big barrels outside their front doors. Only occasionally does the talk turn to less comfortable topics. Our block marks the very edge of Boerum Hill, and gentrified, green-streeted Brownstone Brooklyn. South is the fair and pleasant land of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, with Park Slope an easy stroll down 5th Avenue. North is Downtown Brooklyn: which, as everyone hints, but no-one says, is black Brooklyn.

Beneath the stories of noisy neighbours and unsuccessful block parties is another story: a story about Downtown Brooklyn intruding on Boerum Hill. It's a story told in songs, of loud "urban" music making already irritating parties unbearable. Of a church DJ playing, "you know, that P Diddy hip hop stuff" which was "totally inappropriate. Quite insulting actually to the older people round here." It's a story we want to block out, because these are palpably decent, kind, welcoming people, and we want to help out and get our hands dirty.

But we don't want our hands to get that dirty.

All Greek To Me

2009-05-27T12:46:00.001-07:00

The group of girls standing on the bench look, to my jaded eye, like a line of Malibu Barbies, lovingly posed. Their skins are smooth and tan (as they say here). Their white teeth flash in the May sunshine, and their floral dresses look as good on their girlish frames as they did on the Anthropolgie mannequins. But these girls ain't no dummies; in fact today they're graduating from Yale grad school. Beneath those Hollywood-perfect mortar boards lie five or six of the finest minds of their (our?) generation. They're so matchingly, toothsomely pretty that they're hard to count. But whether there's five, or whether there's six, you can bet your $60,000 tuition fee that they were in a sorority.

At the American University where I was a (sweatier, more hungover, generally less picturesque) graduate, we didn't have the Greek system. There weren't even the "dining houses" that allow for a reined-in version of the same rampant social Darwinism. Perhaps that was wise. This was, after all, the same school where undergraduates cut out Saussure quotes and stuck them to their Old Navy backpacks. I never got the impression that U of C shysters were much cop at the age-old student skills of varsity sports, underage drinking and getting laid. To be fair, their math scores were out of sight.

Looks like Yale's a whole other ballgame. We walk past another group of cheesecakes, these ones posing on the steps to a shadowy looking building. This, we learn, is the headquarters of the Yale Skull and Bones society. Like a fraternity on crack, its workings are secretive and its entry requirements highly selective. Fifteen new "bonesmen" are chosen each year to swell the numbers, and past members include George W himself. Rumour has it that during World War 1 Bonesmen took possession of the skull of Geronimo, and native American chiefs are now demanding its return. If things get too hot for the society, they can always retreat to their private campsite.

We walk on, without seeing the skull, without learning the secret handshakes. By now the Malibu Barbies are all high-kicking in unison. The Skull and Bones boys nod approvingly.

The Museum of Sex Chronicles: Part II

2009-05-22T08:39:00.001-07:00

I woke up sweating in the night remembering things I didn't want to remember from the Museum of Sex. The slugs that chew of each other's (or, if pickings are slim, their own) penises in order to procreate. The sexually aggressive koalas spreading a chlamydia epidemic through the entire cuddly species. The duck rape flight saga. That last one was the most disturbing. A scientist (who went on to be awarded an Ignoble award for his paper on the subject) watched as one male duck chased another around his garden. The pursued, evidently desperate to get away, smashed into a window and died. His pursuer then mounted the victim's corpse and proceeded to copulate with it for the next forty five minutes.

Now that's dedication to the cause.

Perhaps it's the hormonal excesses of Fleet Week, which are making these facts stick so doggedly in my head. Manhattan is a sea of hungry sailors, honking middle-aged women and jail-bait teens giggling behind their chipped pink nails. Or perhaps it's the little not-quite-love scene I overheard yesterday on the subway. I only caught the Hoyt-Schmerhorn to High Street section, but I'm guessing the pair had been sat next to each other all the long trip from JFK.

"So I'm probably just going to hang out with my Grandma. Go see Terminator, you know." He glances across to see how that deliberately quirky mix goes down. She smiles an approval.
"Well I'm sitting in on my sister's class. Crazy times in New York, I know."
"Well..." a hint of panic flickers in his voice, "I'm getting off at the next stop, but you should ride it all the way into Manhattan."
They both look down at their luggage. The girl speaks first.
"Well it's been really great talking to you. If you're ever down Denver way, come to the Boudoir. That's where I work."
"Oh yeah? What kinda place is it?"
"Oh you know, a sort of bar restaurant place. We could hang out..."
"Sweet. Yeah, Definitely. And look..."
But we're at the station.
"I guess..."
"Well have a great trip."
"Yeah, you too. Have fun with your Grandma."
"Yeah you as well. Your sister, I mean."
"And like I say, it was nice..."
But the doors have already closed behind him. She plugs herself into her Ipod and stares straight ahead, heading for the city.

What I learnt at the Museum of Sex

2009-05-21T07:48:00.001-07:00

1. That Amazon Ducks have spiked, 45cm long penises that dangle down into the water like obscene, angry fishing lines.
2. That a monkey's scrotum becomes less blue whenever it loses social status.
3. That the first vibrators looked like electric mixers and were sold as "beauty aids" in the Sears catalogue.
4. That one of the most controversial children's book of recent years tells the true-life story of two gay penguins who raise a chick form an abandoned egg.
5. That deer enjoy threesomes.
6. That snake pit orgies can contain 15,000 writhing reptiles.
7. That Paris Hilton looks annoyingly good in her sex tape.
8. That sea lions deliberately undershoot when they're jumping through hoops because they like the sensation of brushing against them.
9. That female monkeys, even when they're not in heat, partake in gg-rubbing, where they rub their swollen genitals together until they display signs of orgasm (clenched feet, grimace, howling).
10. That lurking around the dark booths of gallery two (Sex on Film) on your own is liable to make you look like a pervert. Even amongst people who choose to spend a sunny New York afternoon in the Museum of Sex.

Laundry Day Blues

2009-05-19T07:12:00.001-07:00

Now it seems to me that the very essence of blogging is airing your dirty linen in public. It's like writing a Top Secret diary and leaving it hanging around for your mum or the Park Slope Co-op to read. In fact the very idea of laundry has acquired a new symbolic heft for me since moving out here and away from the rumbling machine in the pantry. Even the very idea of a pantry seems quaint and improbable in our brave new world of two room walk-ups and swollen fridges.

One of the myriad ways that my super and I are uncomfortably in tune is the fact that my dirty laundry always reaches a critical mass on the day that the recycling does too. Backwards and forwards I pass, loaded up like a donkey with Ikea bags brimming with worn pants and cat-hair infested sheets. It feels oddly intimate to stand there making small talk about dogs and the weather and swine flu when only a thin layer of blue plastic separates us from a sluttish avalanche of musty intimate apparel.

"Achieve stuff?" He asks, as I return from the post-wash, pre-dryer run, carrying the damp T-shirts that Chris doesn't trust to the maws of the Atlantic Wash Center dryers.
"Mmm hmmm." I say, thinking of the Heidegger essay I just unmangled over a cup of hot chocolate. "You?"
He doesn't even have to answer. The barricade of clear plastic sacks does the talking.
"Have a great day!"
"You too."
My smile is so cheesy it could clog your arteries.

In 35 minutes I'm due to run the super-gauntlet again, and for me, it is a gauntlet. Working from home rubs away tough the outer social surface that used to let me deal with irate authors and dismissive journalists without flinching. Now normal pleasantries embarrass me, and I know that it won't just be the fug of the permanently pressed clothes making me flush and sweat when I come to finish the weekly duck and dive through the stressed-out mothers and sardonic professionals.

Back at home, finding the basket empty, the cats get busy dirtying up next week's load.

Eggplant soup for the soul

2009-05-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

When we lived in Japan we went the whole year on an anti-intuitive diet, denying ourselves fruit and vegetables. While all sorts of raw, suckered tentacles and green-tea cheesecakes found their way into our shopping baskets, the exquisite Fuji apples and swollen peaches remained stacked in their velveteen show cases. With the perverse economy of former students, we figured that while we could afford to spend a thousand yen on a beer, we couldn't afford to spend the same amount on an avocado or a red pepper or a handful of lychees. Instead we'd stalk the produce aisles looking for free tasters, then stockpile the satsumas we were given for school lunches, gorging on six or seven at a time in a desperate attempt to ward off scurvy.

Five years later we're in New York, and we're still trying to kick that habit. After living on organic vegetable boxes in London, we'd gotten used to European stockpiles of swedes, carrots and softening pears. Despite the vast farmlands of the American plains, the produce that makes it to Brooklyn reminds me of Tokyo's less appealing department stores: it wouldn't matter that it was so tasteless, so sprayed with death-dealing chemicals that you can blithely forget it in the bottom of your fridge for a month, if it weren't so stomach-twistingly expensive. After the Co-Op debacle I feel like we've been excluded from the garden of Eden and forced to wonder through a barren, bodega-strewn desert until we reach the promised CSA land at the end of June.

In the meantime, there's always soup. Roasted aubergine and red pepper and mushroom, with beefsteak tomatoes, onions, garlic and celery. Thyme, Parmesan rind and bay leaves, and a pinch of red spice which might be either paprika or chili powder. After a wince-inducing shop, and several hours of chopping/roasting/sweating/bubbling I had created a thick stew that smelled of health and happiness. It wasn't until several portions later that I realised I'd forgotten to add the liquid stock.

"Delicious." Chris murmured. "Kind of like pasta sauce."
Eventually he noticed my death stare, and the way that I'd let my spoon drop back into my bowl.
"What? What did I say?"

This week we'll be mostly eating Hamburger Helper and PopTarts (fruit-flavoured).

The Other Football

2009-05-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

We're huddled round discussing plays, and I'm trying to look as if I'm taking it seriously.
"What we're going to do is a double-hand off. Who is faster out of you guys?"
I shrug and point to the other guy. That's almost certainly true.
"Right. So you come up behind me, and then you pass it straight to him, and he'll do a running play. Meanwhile she'll go wide, he'll stay short and we'll see how far we get..."
"What do I do after I pass it?"
"Get out of the way. And into their way. See what I mean?"
I nodded dutifully. We'd already been playing for an hour, and this was the first time I looked likely to touch the funny-shaped ball. So far I had been mostly running around and trying to look like I knew what I was doing... which is precisely my preferred tactic on the so-called soccer field. I must have been doing whatever I'd been doing pretty efficiently, because we had a pretty healthy lead. But that was all about to change.

We lined up and I stared down my opponent. She was a tough broad, and I got the feeling that she wasn't fooled by my game face. Personally, I thought my game face was pretty intimidating until I got tagged in lots of photos looking like a gnome. Bet that quarterback that married Gisele (in a bid to make the world's most beautiful babies) never had that problem.

When the grunt sounds I move as if in a slow motion playback. For a horrible second it looks like I'm going to drop the ball which has been placed directly into my outstretched arms, and which I am charged with conveying a full 10 inches backwards into my teammate's hands. The runner hardly has time to shoot me a quizzical look before he's taken down by one of our strapping opponents. Shouts of "Smooth" come from their side of the field. Although this America, land of free speech, drop kicks and fumbled irony, I'm not entirely sure they're in earnest.

In the next play my natural aggression and butter fingers are put to better use with a bit of tactical body-blocking. But however much I barge and snarl and run like the clappers in my flowery dress the game has turned and lady luck is smiling on our enemies. They finish victorious just as the sun goes behind a cloud. It doesn't matter. I'm one step closer to being an All American Sportswoman... and I have the gnomish photos to prove it.

Let's Leave Baby in the Corner

2009-05-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Pride comes before a fall... or at least sustained public humiliation. The minute I signed up for that Tuesday class I knew I'd made a fatal mistake. We were drunk on the sweaty swing tunes and the bumbling beginners' atmosphere and in our heads our six-count swing-outs were a cut above the hoi polloi. Why would we bother with intermediate classes when we could go straight for advanced? Why indeed.

A week later, and it was obvious that the dancing we'd done in our heads was not translating to our feet. To mine, in any case.
"Ow, she's hurting my hand!" my partner squealed, as I apologetically relaxed my death grip and tried to remember anything I'd ever known about lindy-hop. Our old teacher Simon used to start us off with a One, Two, We Know What To Do. Without his cheesy charms and the anonymity of a packed dance-hall I'd lost the plot, the beat, and all semblance of expertise. My body is a rigid cringe of embarrassment; my footwork a fudging mess of incompetence.

"I just can't make my feet behave" I quip to my severe-faced partner, as the cute, elvin teacher looks at me through narrowed eyes, wondering what she's done to deserve a pupil like me.

The "Truth Combo" she's devised to warm us up and weed out the weaker links gives me a syncopated tasted of the rhythms of rendition. Five minutes in and I'm ready to spill my guts and admit defeat. Yet at the end of the class she insists we are not the weakest of the three couples. Somehow this little sop to my pride makes me promise to practice, and stick it out.

Now the hours are ticking down to this week's class and swine flu is looking like a more and more attractive prospect.

Throwing Stones in Gingerbread Houses

2009-05-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

Now as someone who grew up thinking that they probably-weren't-but-might-just-be a vampire, it is strangely gratifying to see Bloodsuckers trumping Spell-casters in the zeitgeist hit parade. Although I remain leery of mirrors after dark, I still enjoy charting the success of those Twilit characters who are brazenly "out of the crypt" and serving as role models for the hitherto reluctant undead.

Sadly for my craven brothers and sisters, it seems a new moon has dawned over New York. For the past week it's been witches everywhere I turn - and not young, perky, OWL-studying ones either. In The Witch's Trinity, hunger turns the inhabitants of a German village against each other, and once you're accused of witchcraft the only way out is via a burning pyre. More prosaically, the play Gingerbread House presents a mother who sells her disappointed children, and is branded a witch when she decides she wants them back.

While Erica Mailman's book played into my obsessive Horrible History reading habits (I can, to this day, recite a dozen authentic tests of witchcraft, none of which involve a duck and a pair of scales), the play's magic was a little dark for me. When the ghostly illuminations of the missing children stopped hinting at the horrors they were enduring, and started openly describing their abuse, the spell was broken. For anyone who's ever worked on a misery memoir it felt like the grimiest sort of busman's holiday. In contrast, even the fetid atmosphere of Transylvania felt like a breath of fresh air.

Compare active ingredients to Vicks NyQuil

2009-05-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

It's hours since I took the last couple, but still my eyes are moony, pupils dilated like an anime character. Anime is on my brain - or should be in any case. But each time I come back to my desk from gazing at my kuwaii reflection in the bathroom mirror I can't get my thoughts to sing in tune. I'm writing a treatment for a series of Young Adult novels, and one of the categories on the form is What Is It Not Like? This, to me, seems a question of infinite possibilities. It is not like Anna Karenina. It is not like Sweet Valley High. It is not like Lego, or cauliflower, or irony.

I give up on producing and decide to try being an idle consumer instead. If my head was cloudy before, it's now a whirl of candyfloss and it is only with effort that I can relate one scene of the Dollhouse to the next. I'm not sure whether the problem is mine or Joss Whedon's.

But despite the disorientation, the fuzzy-mindedness, the vague discomfort of being tripped-out on over-the-counter medication I still reach for the poor man's NyQuil before going to bed. Anything that can string me out this much, must be making me better, I reason, woozily, trying to push aside the suspicion that what I am doing is akin to amputating my foot to cure a fungal infection. Surely I should just shut up, dose up, and put my trust in the American pharmaceuticals?

Wash your mouth out, Village People

2009-04-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was because there were so many dirty stories blueing the air that night that Chris decided that he needed to sanitise The Bitter End.

You could see his point. The story of one wife's twenty-six minute birthday treat to her husband (think TiVo, whipped cream and a seriously craned neck) was nothing compared to the profanities being spilled between the acts. This was New York's most popular story-telling night, but after some of the lasciviously-charming hostess' tales I'm sure not all the audience members were sitting entirely comfortably. After all, the bare-brick bar is only just round the corner from NYU, and the collective adolescent hormones were bucking and grinding despite the cool-shower effect of the fierce air conditioning. I sipped my coke and watched the room flirt. It's scary how quickly after graduation that students become just a punchline to you.

The jokes of the tellers were landing and missing and getting stuttered over, but it was the stories with - and I can only type it with an apologetic smirk on my face - heart that really worked. There was the girl whose deaf, scrappy father ratted her out to the prison warden after she smuggled him some birthday Juicy Fruit. There was the Jewish kid who wondered over to his neighbour's house drunk, and got mistaken for a "dangerous little Mexican" loose in his upper-middle class suburb. Best of all, there was the red-bearded, musical-obsessed guy remembering how on his sixteenth birthday the guy of his dreams told him he only thought of him, "as a little brother - one who I let give me blow jobs".

It was after Red II won that Chris gave a shout of disgust. His back pocket bloomed dark. The hand sanitiser that was meant to ward of swine flu had been busy sanitising his boxer shorts. When he reached for it, the slippery little customer fell through his hands and squirted out across the club's floor, spraying the feet of the twittering girls at the table in front of us. Quietly, he picked it up, wiped it down, and put it back in his pocket. It was nice to think that we, too, had at last shared something intimate with the good people at the Bitter End.

Oh, those Summer Nights

2009-04-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

Today I wake up with myxomatosis eyes. I smile askance at the reflection that zombied back at me, for the redness augers that summer has finally come to Brooklyn. If anyone asks: I'm taking one for the team.

Up until this weekend there have been flirty spells of sunshine, but nothing strong enough to take the puritan chill out of the evening air. But suddenly it happens. The sun ups its game, and the air above the sidewalks begins to waver.

This weekend Central Park became a Glastonbury crowd - with the sun the headline act. There were queues to get in and queues to leave. There was, admittedly, less ostentatious drug-taking and mud-wallowing, but the jostling for elbow room was no less fierce for all that. It was competitive recreation at its animal best.

But on that first festival day of summer we're not in Central Park. We're stuck in traffic on the wrong side of the Lincoln tunnel and the sun streaming in the back window is broiling us. Then I'm sitting outside working my way through my fourth bottle of Miller(the champagne of beers)and my jacket is still bundled up in my bag, although darkness has well and truly fallen. It feels like a personal victory, and looking round,I see that I'm not the only one with a triumphant gleam in my hay-feverish eyes.

All the nice girls love a sailor

2009-04-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

In the Pernod-sodden pages of Kerouac's and Burroughs' And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks the guys talk about the young sailors who ride the subways with their legs splayed and their eyes wide open. This being New York, where the happy hours keep truth and fiction pleasantly indistinct, no sooner had I finished the chapter than I realised that I had a real, mouth-breathing specimen splayed out on the seat next to me. He was out of uniform, and in the mood for conversation.
"So do I get off here for Broadway Lafayette?"
"No, you need to wait til we get across to Manhattan. Couple stops."
"Gotcha. I thought that since it was Broadway Junction, maybe... I don't know. Maybe all the Broadway trains crossed here or something."
"Nah, doesn't work like that. Don't take the A-train much then?"
"Never taken the subway before."
"Where you from boy?" (I never said that it was me he was eager to talk to)
"Texas originally. But I've been in boats in this district for the past five years. Know New York like the back of my hand. Just, y'know, not the subway. Know all the harbours though."

Turns out our man is in the merchant navy, "the fifth arm of the armed forces" as he put it. The phrase was meant to be grandiose, but just made me think that the US military sounds like a fairly grotesque body politic, a lopsided god of war. It's one thing to be in a branch of the services so elite that you can't really talk about it, quite another, I imagine, to always have to explain that what you do is y'know, really just like being in the army, navy or airforce. Same, same but different.

But even after he waved goodbye at Broadway Lafayette, I couldn't stop thinking about this other New York that the sailor knows. My Gotham must be a place apart from the one this man navigates, where it's not blocks, but shipping lanes that matter, where the city limits are marked not by Bronx Zoo, but by the ports of the Catskills, and where Jersey is not a joke but a port of call like all the rest.

Outdanced

2009-04-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

The joint only opened its doors a few minutes ago but already the floor is full of couples. These are hardcore hepcats, and their moves put me to shame. Now I know my Charleston kicks from my Lindy turns, but these kids have the sort of swing that god just didn't give me. There's one red-head, long and lithe, who should be on the stage. Perhaps she's on a night off from high-kicking her way through Chorus Line. The thought doesn't make me feel any less like I were all elbows and lumber. Clutching my five buck coke I shrink into the shadows, and try to take notes.

The band strike up a slinky jazz number and the dance floor empties. Red stands her ground. So would I if I could dance like her. You wouldn't be able to drag me out of that moody spotlight for love nor money, whatever the moony lyrics say. Red's partner keeps it loose and easy, dipping her and spinning her in a lazy swing which has a tango-sensuality and a bluesy syncopation. I'm trying to enjoy the show, but it's hard when I hate them so.

Thing is, in the world of Lindy-hop, no baby can stay put in her corner for very long. I've almost worked up the courage to try a little spinning in the shadows with Chris when a hand comes out and pulls me out into the glare of the lights. Now I'm whirling past Red, trying to make my feet behave. She's still out there in the centre, passed from one eager partner to another, lighting up the dance floor. I wonder if she's this elegant, this sought after, in everything she does. I imagine waiters arguing over who gets to serve her coffee; business men laying their suit jackets down in puddles to keep her feet dry - anything to watch her trip the light fantastic down Broadway way.

The Dollhouse Dash

2009-04-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

I'd scarfed down the bacon-cheeseburger and the dive-bar-stiff Jack-and-cokes and now I was pounding the pavements of Adams Morgan trying to make it back to the hotel room in time. It was the first night warm enough to sit outside and eat, and on either side of road lazy sun-addled punters glanced up at us curiously as we sprinted past them, hands clutching our sides.

Now I'm betting that Paula Radcliffe doesn't load up in Maccy D's before a big race. But what we lacked in style, skill and tactics we definitely made up for in determination. It was 8.45 Friday night. If we got back up to our fraying Pop Art room in the next fifteen minutes we'd get to watch the next installment of Josh Whedon's trash-fest on a fuck-off big screen. Having made do with Hulu and a dodgy internet connection ("Wait! It needs to buffer. Again") for the last three months, it felt like a bloody red letter day.

We stopped for nothing. Except liquor stores. Every time we passed one we desperately scoured the shelves for screw-top bargains. The minutes were ticking by. My stitch was getting worse. Chris started singing "nhah nhah nhah naaaa naa, nhah na na naaaaaa" to keep our spirits up.

With over a minute to go, and a bottle of overpriced Californian Syrah stowed in my volumunous handbag, we made it back to the hotel. I drummed on the faux snakeskin walls of the lift as it climbed teasingly slowly to the fifth floor. Finally we were back in the room.
"Turn on the main lights. I need to find the remote."
"There are no main lights."
"Sod it, I've found it. What channel again?"
"Fox. Hurry!"
"Can't be Fox. It's Prison Break."
"What'll we do?"
"You flick through the others. I'll look it up on the internet."
"Shit! It'll be starting..."

Turns out that Dollhouse was taking a break that week. Our epic dash had been in vain. Instead we spent our Friday night in Washington DC watching a film about kids watching bands in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.
"We really should see more live music."
I nodded placidly, and took another slug of the Syrah.

Monday to Sunday Best

2009-04-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

Now I love a good renounce as much as the next girl, but since the days of compulsory boarding-school chapel I prefer not to spend my Sundays on my knees.

I'm guessing it wasn't a chore for her though. She was climbing the stairs ahead of me in that deliberate way that people do when they come to realise that they can't take their movements for granted. Usually I gently squeeze past those careful climbers, offering up a quick, silent prayer for eternal health and youthful legs as I stride past.

But even from the back she was arresting. Her suit was a soft purple, and her pillbox hat echoed the shade exactly. One hand gripped the banister, but the other held a gold bag just as tightly. The same gold was woven through her shiny high-heeled sandals and jangled from her wrists. Fashion vampires may warn us against the allure of matchy-matchy, but this was one lady who was not buying what they were selling. She was put together. She had an outfit. She was heading back from Church with her head held high and her gold bag in a death-grip.

This lady in purple and gold made me think of the frocks languishing in my own wardrobe, waiting for a Sunday Best that never comes, or squandered on some Tuesday whim. For once I don't hurry past. Instead I wait until she's swished up the final step and watch her head back to her workaday week.

The Flip-cup Chronicles

2009-04-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

It's ridiculous how pleased I am with my new-found flip-cupping skills. I should have guessed really - the only games I've ever been able to win have generally involved either international drinking rules, treble word scores or a cunning combination of the two. Imbibe = 36 points. If only I'd had a D, and I'd be wiping the beer-sloshed floor with you, my worthy opponent.

On the court it's a whole different ball-game. This week I don't get the full-face, jaw-jolting shot, but I do suffer a lot of smaller hits to my person and my dignity. The stinging slaps to my arms and stomach which are already blooming a royal purple. The soft balls I throw and they catch, when I should have been the one catching and keeping my team in the game. The dodges I shoulda woulda coulda made. I do make one catch - from a girl who throws like a girl - and for a second in my head it's glory and tinsel falling from the sky and I'm a Mighty Duck being slapped on the back by a grinning Emilo Estevez who is a Sheen in all but name. Then it's a dull thud to the thigh and the glory is over.

Not so in the bar afterwards where the beer is cold and cheap and smells like acrid lemonade. Round after round I flip that cup like a pro. I discover that my Peter Pointer has just the right combination of strength and agility to do the job quickly and without incurring the half-joking wrath of my team-mates. For once, I am not the weakest link.

Fraunces Tavern

2009-04-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

It was as if they'd given up by the time they'd gotten to the bar.

The entrance was imposing. The coat check was an elegant parlour, with two lovingly upholstered armchairs flanking the fire. The toilets had the sort of discreet piped music that made you keep an eye out for Lizzy Bennett emerging from the next-door cubicle. But the bar itself - the room where a revolution had been plotted over mugs of porter and snifters of bourbon - that was two parts mid-town sports bar, to one part Williamsburg dive. I half expected to be fallen over by an unfriendly Polak.

As my Dad and I sipped our Pinot Grigios in the table by the window we talked about what made the effect so jarring. Maybe it was the fact that one wall was covered with the old Union Flag, with the stars going round in a circle, while the other held a flat-screen showing the DOW index. I suppose we were only steps from Wall Street, and even bankers deserve their post-work pint after a hard day of gambling with other people's money. But the silent UEFA match being played out on the third wall was equally out of place. That old soak George Washington surely wouldn't have approved of this distracting incursion from the Mother Country.

For me it was the music - the kind of music that you'd expect to hear belted out from the next-door karaoke booth (your party's choices are, naturally, a little more eclectic). If we'd been drunk or driving or drunk-diving down America's vast, straight freeways it would have been perfect. We could have rolled back the roof and belted out American Pie with the best of them. In this small, candle-lit room, surrounded by mementos of a glorious past, it just didn't fit. Even the football players weren't kicking in time.

So maybe the kids don't want to listen to chamber music these days, but couldn't we at least had something a little more weighty? Don't you know, talkin bout a revolution now.

Man Walks into a Bar...

2009-04-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

Back-lit by the twinkling fairy-lights pinned to the far wall, the expressions on the punters' faces were far from welcoming. Now I've turned up to village Brauhauses in remote regions of the Southern German hills where old women rock themselves into oblivion and each generation gives off the heady whiff of in-breeding, and I've been to joints on Chicago's South Side where I've felt so white it was like my skin was glowing toxic. All over the English and Irish countryside I've been to local pubs for local people, where the conversations halt as soon as you step in the door. But nowhere have I got quite the kind of chilly reception that we encountered in this dive on the edges of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

The men - it's all men - look up as one. There's a sudden, uncomfortable silence. We move automatically to the bar stools, as the keep chokes out a welcome. Then, as if in slow motion, one of the men lets out a yell in Polish and falls to the floor, clattering chairs in his way. For a second we hover by the chairs, uncertain of what to do. The men are all yelling at each other. As if we've wondered into a Slavic Tennessee Williams fight scene out of a Noel Coward drawing room farce we make polite English excuses and back away to the door.

Once outside the door we shake our heads.

"You don't think... he was faking being that drunk. To get rid of us? I mean, that's ridiculous, isn't it?"

The question hung in the air as we clattered down the steps to the G that would whisk us back to the reassuring surrounds of Brownstone Brooklyn.

Coke Float

2009-04-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

It was piled obscenely high, and fizzing down the far side of the glass. Clearly designed for those who had always secretly thought that coke wasn't sweet enough, it added layers of yellow ice-cream, soft gloops of cream and a demure swirl of pink-flavoured sauce on top. There was a pint of it. I'm not sure why they didn't go the whole hog and make it Irish - it seemed uncharacteristically restrained for the guilty hands behind the diner's counter not just to add a slug of Jameson's and be done with it.

We were sitting outside in the sunshine, and I'd rolled down my knee-length socks to tan my magnolia legs. I was on tour guide duty, and as usual I'd managed to programme exactly the sort of day I wanted to have. We'd taken only semi-ironic photos in Times Square, then wandered up Broadway to Columbus Circle. Being inside the park made me breathe easier, although as always with my guide hat on, I'd found myself scanning around for possible insufficiencies. Aren't those daffodils a little small? Weren't there usually more squirrels? Is that hot dog going to give an authentic New York hot dog experience when we can't actually see the onions frying on the hot slab?

But it was the Conservatory Water that really made me catch my breath, from both sides of my Janus-face (one half looking out appreciatively as an evangelical new New Yorker, the other darting around to check she hadn't over-sold this once-in-a-lifetime experience). There were toy boats on the pond. Dozens of them. For a moment I was taken back in time before cheap long-haul flights and digital cameras; before ice-cream floats even. I saw Central Park as it must have been when it first emerged from the wasteland above 60th street, landscaped and templed to within an inch of its fresh, fake new life. I saw a boy dressed in a sailor suit, putting down his stick and hoop to watch a miniature sail boat cross a tiny lake.

Then I saw the stall. These boats were not owned by eccentric toy-spotters or bequeathed by generous uncles - they were rented by the hour. For a second the sun went in behind a cloud, and the boy with the hoop disappeared.

Later in the cafe, I thought how much he would have enjoyed a sip of my coke float. I would have had plenty to spare, after all. But now we were on Amsterdam and a Duane Reed on the corner was intruding on my Upper Westside story, so it was time to pull up my bobby-sox and continue the tour.

Animal and Daffodil Lovers, Please Look Away Now!

2009-04-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

Now I’m not saying that my cat’s a pervert. I know that there are a ton of other animals that have an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and to be fair, in the two-roomed world our feline friends inhabit, this little white corner with its strange sounds and flushing water is the nearest thing they’re ever going to get to Disneyland. So I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised that every time I scrape back my chair Mickey (him of the Mafia toes) makes a clumsy sprint for the bathroom in the hope that I’ve decided it’s time to ride Splash Mountain again.

But just because you love Disneyland, it doesn’t mean you want to be locked in there overnight after all the rides have been switched off. It might be a great scenario for a choose-your-own-adventure book, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be a whole lot of fun. That, anyway, seemed to be what the cats concluded after last night’s trial incarceration.

Last week we had a guest sleeping on the sofa, and all I was able to get out of them in the morning were some dark mutterings about being kneaded awake as dawn broke by a purring pile of neurotic felines. So with my Dad flying in tonight, we decided that it was time for our babies to get a feel for minimalist New York living.

Despite the fact that the pair have the run of the house during the day, as night drew near we became obsessed with purging the bathroom of anything that a suicidal cat could use to make a desperate cry for help. Razors were hidden away in the medicine cabinet, and anything potentially toxic was stowed out of the way. The cats didn’t really understand the new game, but let themselves be locked in with the minimum of yowling. As we retreated to the bedroom Chris and I exchanged looks of amused guilt, like those you see on the faces of the people who leave a bad play early, even if they’re sitting in the front row. And are friends with the second spear thrower from the left.

Less then ten minutes had gone by before the paranoia kicked in.
“Did you happen to close the bathroom window?”
“No, but it’s got a screen on it.”
Ominous silence.
“The ball of yarn’s in there now, isn’t it?”
“Mmm-hmm”
“Well you don’t think they could...?”
“What? Strangle themselves?”
“You’re right, I’m being stupid.”
Guilty silence.
“I might just check they’re okay.”
Of course, the moment the door’s open, the cats slip out like butter and refuse to be coaxed back in. We are secretly grateful to give up, and hope in vain that there’s no hard feelings.

The cats, in return, have declared war on my daffodils. Words cannot describe the silent massacres that have taken place on our windowsill. I just do the whole ‘I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed’ spiel. And vow to try the bathroom test again tonight. Except this time I won’t leave them enough rope to hang themselves.

Double Denim

2009-04-06T05:06:00.000-07:00

I knew that she was trouble the minute I saw her. She was sporting a look I was fond of myself back in the early nineties (back when I used to crimp my hair and put it up in a side pony-tail, and team my dad's aquamarine t-shirt with a leather waistcoat and fluorescent-specked leggings) and talking loudly about the fact that she hadn't ever done any walking before. The problem was that looking at double denim girl, this wasn't too hard to believe. This was New Jersey after all, home of the drive-in bank, and this girl definitely seemed built for the SUV rather than shank's precarious pony.

Now there's something about lacing myself into my hiking boots that really brings out my inner bitch. Maybe it's because wearing all that gore-tex and moulded plastic makes me feel like that I'm ready for the first reels of the disaster movie to unfurl, and that my boots have cast me as the tough, resourceful heroine, while everyone around me is just a tragic statistic waiting to happen. Or maybe it's just that they make me want to walk far and fast, without any denim-clad encumbrances. Whatever, those boots do strange and unnerving things to me.

So when I glanced across the platform at double denim girl, my mouth said Hello, but my inner hiking bitch said, There's going to be a lot of chafing on the trail today. Turns out I was being optimistic. Less than 10 minutes into the easy 8 mile clamber we'd lost her. Somehow she and a group of stragglers had missed a turning and we had to wait half an hour for the rescue party to bring them back. By this point the boots were getting restless.

By the time we were all reunited a decision had been made to split into two parties, so I got to leave the double denim faction behind and clamber over rocks to my boots' content - give or take a few enforced 'separation' comfort breaks. But even then I felt like a dog choking herself as she strained at the leash. How come we had to stop so often? Why did people needed to sit around in the sun like lizards when everyone had finished lunch? Couldn't we just go already?

Gradually I came to the unwelcome conclusion that somewhere between puffing up the Himalayas and beasting the Time Out book of Country Walks I'd turned into a hiking fascist. Why shouldn't double denim girl enjoy the countryside at her own pace? Why shouldn't we stop at the top of the mountain to shoot the breeze? What was wrong with taking it easy in the spring sunshine?

Because we're made for walking, the boots muttered, and kicked up the dirt in disgust.

I don't drink coffee

Miss Scarlett, in the (Soho House) Library, with the Cocktail Stick

Dog-Kicking at the Greenmarket

The Night Shift

Bellies Out at Sounds Like Brooklyn

New York Intimacy

I Live to Lunge

I Live to Lunge

Battle of the Bowling Lanes

The Golden Globes

BAM and The Red Peril

A Full Range of Movements

Winter in Wave Hill

Gogol Bordello at Webster Hall

Let it Snow...

Me and My Self-Harming Cat

A Friend in Jesus (I)

Cut-Price Christmas

A Brief Encounter with a Toaster Oven

Mercury Lounge: Rebel (Rebel) Orchestra

Overheard in Central Park

Thanksgiving Food Drive

Bus to Monhonk

Rock n Roll Kareoke

Strumming their All at Union Hall

Taking Turns

Takes Two to Tango

Accomplice: A froggin'

Models and Skaters (or Cake, Art and Breasts II)

Cake, Art and Breasts

Banjo Jim's

Buns and Puns

Musee Mechanique

Blazing Saddles

Beer on Bear Mountain

Sponsored by Drambuie...

Belly-dancing Virgin

99 Cents and Up

Spaghetti Arms

Wanted: Reverse-Strip Gypsy Trapeze Artiste

Invasion of the Invisible Mutts

Getting Down, Ambassador-style

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

Beer Table, Park Slope

Getting Down in Monkey Town

This Wine's Got Legs

Live at the Mercury Lounge

Cat Attack

The last days at the Double-D pool

Soft heart, sharp claws

Fire Island's Famous Plover Lovers

UK Interlude

Central Park Bacchants

East Hampton Hard Hitters

Canada V: We Will Rock You, Tadoussac

Mammoths and Mammoth Poseurs

Courage, comrades

Canada IV: The Beaver Hunt

All Points West: Half-full

All Points West: Half-Empty

Canada III: If You Go Down to the Woods Today...

Canada II: Only happy when it rains

Canada I - Trains, Pains and Automobiles

Oh Canada...

Spinning Michael's Tunes

Last curtain call on the circle line

Independence Day

RIP Wiz-kid of Pop

I'll Be There For You, David Schwimmer

If I said you had a beautiful body...

Prep

PopCo

Hoods

Manhattan is my playground

Happy and Glorious

Bottle Service

Do the Fandango

Swapping Duds at the Brooklyn Yard

Life's a Beach

Hot competition