I'm not about to apologise for what's to come.
So it's the afternoon after the night before and I'm on the sofa watching High School Musical 3. This peon to being true to your dreams and to sweet-as-apple-pie diversity (geeks who like body-popping/jocks who like to cook) has gotten my knickers in a twist. In terms of its attitude to getting it on across the racial boundaries, 2009's HSM3 is seriously lagging behind 1949's South Pacific. Where the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical explores its character's prejudices, Disney keeps shtum on the issue of miscegenation, instead pairing its kids up in perfect racial harmony like a supercute Noah's ark. Even the lead pairing of white boy, Latina girl (very East High Story) is following the old Hollywood game-plan of using a Hispanic women as a sort of safe intermediary, who like a good pair of jeans can go with either black (think of Will Smith's back catalogue)or white(just pick a J-Lo vehicle at random. Just don't make me sit through it.)
But what riled me up was the fate of poor Ryan Evans, Sharpei's pink-trilby wearing, dance-choreographing brother. Since the first movie in the franchise came out, Disney have been determined to keep Ryan in the closet. The official line has always been that he's got a crush on the goody-two-shoes heroine, although even a attention-deficient twelve year old can see that that her preternaturally buff amour is more his type. At the end of this movie Ryan gets given a scholarship to Julliard, but you can't help feeling it's a bribe for keeping HSM on good terms with the bible belters.
In this, the final episode, they even make him ask the impossibly smug little musician Kelsi to the prom, in a move clearly designed to make tweens think that there's yet another carefully colour-coded romance in the offing.
High School Musical 3
Good for: lingering shots of Zac Efron in a vest
Bad for: pedagogical perversity
Monday, March 9, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Mice will play
Chris is away and the cats and I are going to the dogs.
Mickey is drinking from the toilet bowl and I'm substituting ice cream for the other major food groups. There's a thin dusting of animal hair on every surface and the cats have taken to stalking me around the two and a half rooms of the apartment, even balancing precariously on the side of the tub as I take a bath. Like ballet dancers they make surprisingly loud thuds as they bound around. Mickey is particularly lacking in grace. Perhaps it's all those extra paws.
I was thinking about inviting my writing group to join me and the pusses at my apartment sometime, but was dissuaded by last night's meeting. It was in Midtown, in a fancy building complete with an officious doorman and snide neighbours. Inside the apartment however, it was like a veal lorry. Hot, panicky writers were crammed onto every surface. There was twenty-six people squeezed into a space that would have comfortably held half a dozen Dollshouse dwarfs and the heat was becoming intolerable. I crouched by the door in my sticky black sweater-dress and jeans and tried to write. Because of some power outage or other it had taken me a full hour to get there, and now I was stuck on the opposite side of the room from the coke and pretzels. Quel nightmare.
After an hour of writing there was cake and compulsory introductions. While I was waiting for my turn I started looking over the bookshelves next to me. What joy! The apartment owner had the biggest collection of romantic self-help books I'd ever seen. There were titles to conjure with - 'You have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs', 'Why all the Good Ones AREN'T Taken', 'Dating, Mating - and Cheating' - and a whole college of doctors, psychologists and PhDs. All at once I lost interest in the intros game and wanted everyone to leave so I could improve myself in peace. As a serial monogamist, the dating habits of humans fascinate me every bit as much as the mating habits of egrets presumably fascinate mad old Bill Oddie. Here, I sensed, was the single New York female in her natural environment. I could almost feel myself sprouting Manolos.
Then I noticed something strange. Something worrying. Amongst the other titles there were two different paperback copies of 'The Surrendered Single'. At once I jerked my hand back away from the shelves. Taking on a passive feminine role so that a "marriage-minded man" will woo you? What the fuck would Carrie say?
As soon as I've done my spiel I sneak out the door and away from the heat and surrendered females. The cats welcome me with blank feline stares and nose pointedly at their food bowls. Maybe they're just not that into me.
Mickey is drinking from the toilet bowl and I'm substituting ice cream for the other major food groups. There's a thin dusting of animal hair on every surface and the cats have taken to stalking me around the two and a half rooms of the apartment, even balancing precariously on the side of the tub as I take a bath. Like ballet dancers they make surprisingly loud thuds as they bound around. Mickey is particularly lacking in grace. Perhaps it's all those extra paws.
I was thinking about inviting my writing group to join me and the pusses at my apartment sometime, but was dissuaded by last night's meeting. It was in Midtown, in a fancy building complete with an officious doorman and snide neighbours. Inside the apartment however, it was like a veal lorry. Hot, panicky writers were crammed onto every surface. There was twenty-six people squeezed into a space that would have comfortably held half a dozen Dollshouse dwarfs and the heat was becoming intolerable. I crouched by the door in my sticky black sweater-dress and jeans and tried to write. Because of some power outage or other it had taken me a full hour to get there, and now I was stuck on the opposite side of the room from the coke and pretzels. Quel nightmare.
After an hour of writing there was cake and compulsory introductions. While I was waiting for my turn I started looking over the bookshelves next to me. What joy! The apartment owner had the biggest collection of romantic self-help books I'd ever seen. There were titles to conjure with - 'You have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs', 'Why all the Good Ones AREN'T Taken', 'Dating, Mating - and Cheating' - and a whole college of doctors, psychologists and PhDs. All at once I lost interest in the intros game and wanted everyone to leave so I could improve myself in peace. As a serial monogamist, the dating habits of humans fascinate me every bit as much as the mating habits of egrets presumably fascinate mad old Bill Oddie. Here, I sensed, was the single New York female in her natural environment. I could almost feel myself sprouting Manolos.
Then I noticed something strange. Something worrying. Amongst the other titles there were two different paperback copies of 'The Surrendered Single'. At once I jerked my hand back away from the shelves. Taking on a passive feminine role so that a "marriage-minded man" will woo you? What the fuck would Carrie say?
As soon as I've done my spiel I sneak out the door and away from the heat and surrendered females. The cats welcome me with blank feline stares and nose pointedly at their food bowls. Maybe they're just not that into me.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Bad Jokes
"I'm sorry folks. I don't mean to disturb you, to hassle or dismay you. But I've lost my job, my mother died, I'm cold and I'm hungry. Trying to get some money together for a bed for the night. If you can find it in your hearts to spare something; anything. Some change... Food even..."
There's some shuffling with wallets and a lot of averted eyes. He changes tack.
"It's raining today. Real hard. I used to have an umbrella. Then Chris Brown stole it to beat up Rihanna."
For a minute this seems to work. A wired group of young girls laughed and got up to pole-dance around the subway car's pole. I could have told them from painful experience that there's really not enough space.
So some people suck in their breath and shake their heads and some people laugh. Thing is, I'm not sure how much money he got.
I understand Mr Panhandler's dilemma. There's nothing quite like a quip for making you feel like the King of the F train - but only if you pull it off. My problem is that I generally end up laughing alone. Like when I picked up the new edition of Time Out New York to see it was po-facedly blazoned with the logo "Spas issue". Even typing it now makes me snicker. When I try to explain why it was so funny - "come on people, you were in the playground in the nineties too..." - they look at me like I'm making fun of people with mental health issues.
"Who's watching the Watchman? We are!" Again, this rendered me helpless with glee, despite the fact that some Marketing impresario has almost certainly beaten me to this little gem. It's like when I had the idea for yogurts you could add fruit to and then Muller started selling their Fruit Corners. Literally, right after. Now I know how Willy Wonka must have felt about those everlasting gobstoppers.
Resolutely underwhelmed by either my "funnies" or my tales of dairy espionage, Chris offers a pun of his own which withered unappreciated. He was asked if one of his donors, Daphne Guinness, was from the Guinness family. He answered: "Yes, definitely. She came to see War-Horse and it took her a good three or four minutes to settle properly."
There's some shuffling with wallets and a lot of averted eyes. He changes tack.
"It's raining today. Real hard. I used to have an umbrella. Then Chris Brown stole it to beat up Rihanna."
For a minute this seems to work. A wired group of young girls laughed and got up to pole-dance around the subway car's pole. I could have told them from painful experience that there's really not enough space.
So some people suck in their breath and shake their heads and some people laugh. Thing is, I'm not sure how much money he got.
I understand Mr Panhandler's dilemma. There's nothing quite like a quip for making you feel like the King of the F train - but only if you pull it off. My problem is that I generally end up laughing alone. Like when I picked up the new edition of Time Out New York to see it was po-facedly blazoned with the logo "Spas issue". Even typing it now makes me snicker. When I try to explain why it was so funny - "come on people, you were in the playground in the nineties too..." - they look at me like I'm making fun of people with mental health issues.
"Who's watching the Watchman? We are!" Again, this rendered me helpless with glee, despite the fact that some Marketing impresario has almost certainly beaten me to this little gem. It's like when I had the idea for yogurts you could add fruit to and then Muller started selling their Fruit Corners. Literally, right after. Now I know how Willy Wonka must have felt about those everlasting gobstoppers.
Resolutely underwhelmed by either my "funnies" or my tales of dairy espionage, Chris offers a pun of his own which withered unappreciated. He was asked if one of his donors, Daphne Guinness, was from the Guinness family. He answered: "Yes, definitely. She came to see War-Horse and it took her a good three or four minutes to settle properly."
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The Battle for Boerum Hill
"...I mean it's a great place, but you have to make sure you're in there before midday."
"How come?"
"Because at lunch time all the mothers descend." He says 'mothers' the way most people say 'traffic wardens' or 'republicans'.
"And they take up space?"
"Yes, with their kids and their talking." This time 'talking' sounds synonymous with 'public defecation' or 'dealing in hedge funds'.
It's clearly a sore point, so I change the subject and he tells me about the Park Slope Co-op instead.
Now, eighteen months on, I finally see what he was getting at. On Brooklyn's quiet, leafy streets, a stealthy war is being fought. The battleground is the neighbourhood's cafes, and there is no more bitterly contested territory than the Park Slope Tea-Lounge.
The Tea-Lounge is largely responsible for me moving to New York in the first place. The National may have sorted out the flights, but it was the Tea-Lounge that was the dangling carrot, drawing us through the interminable dramas with insurance and visas.
Imagine a place full of mismatched sofas and low coffee tables, where the counter is piled high with cookies and whoopie pies, and the clatter of keyboards is soothed over by unobtrusively cool music. By day there's a coffee and tea menu the length of your average nineteenth century Russian novel, and at night there's cocktails, quiz nights and bearded Brooklyn boys strumming acoustic guitars. Basically, it's a little slice of heaven. But like the equally enchanting Kashmir, it's very beauty has meant that it's become the backdrop to a terrible conflict.
Fighting in my friend Rui's corner are an army of no-good students, lay-about freelancers and would-be journos. They set up camp with their files and lap-tops and make a no-fat Chai Latte last all afternoon. For these guys (who am I kidding? - for us guys) WiFi is like cat-nip. We catch a whiff of it and there's no moving us. In London these guys might be hanging out in their local Starbucks, but most would be at home or in the library, keeping their non-traditional working culture safely underground.
The opposing forces wouldn't look out of place lunching in Clapham or shopping in Borough Market. The Tea-Lounge is where Yummy Mummies get to play after their little darlings have worn themselves out at baby yoga. I suspect they are the management's favourite customers because they actually eat and drink, and buy things for their children to pick at and flick around.
So far, so gentrified. White people love independent coffee shops, after all. But the E-commuters hate the Mums for, y'know, wanting to have a conversation, while the Mums hate the e-commuters for sitting in every third seat as if they were determined that no social interaction will disturb the peace (which is in fact the case).
Since I'm a lover, not a fighter, I take my notebook and I go to Victory Coffee on the corner of my block, and pretend to write while keeping a sharp eye out for Michelle Williams. Someone should congratulate her on Heath's Oscar, after all.
"How come?"
"Because at lunch time all the mothers descend." He says 'mothers' the way most people say 'traffic wardens' or 'republicans'.
"And they take up space?"
"Yes, with their kids and their talking." This time 'talking' sounds synonymous with 'public defecation' or 'dealing in hedge funds'.
It's clearly a sore point, so I change the subject and he tells me about the Park Slope Co-op instead.
Now, eighteen months on, I finally see what he was getting at. On Brooklyn's quiet, leafy streets, a stealthy war is being fought. The battleground is the neighbourhood's cafes, and there is no more bitterly contested territory than the Park Slope Tea-Lounge.
The Tea-Lounge is largely responsible for me moving to New York in the first place. The National may have sorted out the flights, but it was the Tea-Lounge that was the dangling carrot, drawing us through the interminable dramas with insurance and visas.
Imagine a place full of mismatched sofas and low coffee tables, where the counter is piled high with cookies and whoopie pies, and the clatter of keyboards is soothed over by unobtrusively cool music. By day there's a coffee and tea menu the length of your average nineteenth century Russian novel, and at night there's cocktails, quiz nights and bearded Brooklyn boys strumming acoustic guitars. Basically, it's a little slice of heaven. But like the equally enchanting Kashmir, it's very beauty has meant that it's become the backdrop to a terrible conflict.
Fighting in my friend Rui's corner are an army of no-good students, lay-about freelancers and would-be journos. They set up camp with their files and lap-tops and make a no-fat Chai Latte last all afternoon. For these guys (who am I kidding? - for us guys) WiFi is like cat-nip. We catch a whiff of it and there's no moving us. In London these guys might be hanging out in their local Starbucks, but most would be at home or in the library, keeping their non-traditional working culture safely underground.
The opposing forces wouldn't look out of place lunching in Clapham or shopping in Borough Market. The Tea-Lounge is where Yummy Mummies get to play after their little darlings have worn themselves out at baby yoga. I suspect they are the management's favourite customers because they actually eat and drink, and buy things for their children to pick at and flick around.
So far, so gentrified. White people love independent coffee shops, after all. But the E-commuters hate the Mums for, y'know, wanting to have a conversation, while the Mums hate the e-commuters for sitting in every third seat as if they were determined that no social interaction will disturb the peace (which is in fact the case).
Since I'm a lover, not a fighter, I take my notebook and I go to Victory Coffee on the corner of my block, and pretend to write while keeping a sharp eye out for Michelle Williams. Someone should congratulate her on Heath's Oscar, after all.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Most Fatally Fascinating Thing in America
On first visiting New York, James Weldon Johnson wrote: My blood ran quicker, and I was just beginning to live. To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium to one addicted to the habit. It becomes the breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain and misery; they would not exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it. (The Auto-Biography of an Ex-Colored Man)
This makes me think of: beautiful grimy studios in the Lower East Side; the old remorseless ascent of London property prices which made the idea of ever owning my own home seem faintly ridiculous; the push of people into crowded restaurants while their neighbour stands forlornly empty; the hum of Manhattan's streets and the more subtle syncopation of Brooklyn's tree-lined avenues.It makes me plot my own history from village to small town to university city to big city to foreign capital to London to New York and wonder where next I can go when I need a bigger hit of urbanity. New Delhi? Hong Kong? Beijing?
For it is the cities themselves I love, not the crush of humanity in them. In a crowd my heart starts to race and my breathing quicken; I look around for an escape, and all I can see is blank faces and pushing bodies, just as deadly and impersonal as any other animal stampede.
So what exactly is it, then, that makes up the base elements of this "breath of life" that animates this playground of steel and shops and people and toy dogs and hot-dog stalls and parks which are like the countryside but better kept and more alive? It is a calm, open sense of possibility amidst the chaos, a freedom that no endless horizon could ever offer, the chance to disappear but also to carve yourself out a small world from the sprawling, unmanageable one you've gotten lost in.
And I like all the happy hours.
This makes me think of: beautiful grimy studios in the Lower East Side; the old remorseless ascent of London property prices which made the idea of ever owning my own home seem faintly ridiculous; the push of people into crowded restaurants while their neighbour stands forlornly empty; the hum of Manhattan's streets and the more subtle syncopation of Brooklyn's tree-lined avenues.It makes me plot my own history from village to small town to university city to big city to foreign capital to London to New York and wonder where next I can go when I need a bigger hit of urbanity. New Delhi? Hong Kong? Beijing?
For it is the cities themselves I love, not the crush of humanity in them. In a crowd my heart starts to race and my breathing quicken; I look around for an escape, and all I can see is blank faces and pushing bodies, just as deadly and impersonal as any other animal stampede.
So what exactly is it, then, that makes up the base elements of this "breath of life" that animates this playground of steel and shops and people and toy dogs and hot-dog stalls and parks which are like the countryside but better kept and more alive? It is a calm, open sense of possibility amidst the chaos, a freedom that no endless horizon could ever offer, the chance to disappear but also to carve yourself out a small world from the sprawling, unmanageable one you've gotten lost in.
And I like all the happy hours.
Monday, March 2, 2009
White People
Unlike the other shop, where second hand paperbacks and crumpled art books were piled up like sandbags against an attack from the outside world,this one invites in the gallery-crowd with its glass and warehouse space and blown-up photos of photogenic boy soldiers. I'm flicking through a Trade Paperback, calling out to Chris every few pages. He's hmmming and trying to concentrate on the trained child killers. I can see he's thinking: This is even worse than Wednesdays when she gets the new copy of Time Out.
But the thing is it's uncanny. I'm reading this book about 'What White People Like' and its like an inventory of our weekend. White people like dinner parties, brunch, Brooklyn, farmer's markets, co-ops, films with subtitles, book shops. What starts off being funny starts to get a little worrying as I read on, turning the pages in the desperate hope of finding something that doesn't fit. No such luck.
White people like cycling ("my commute is along the canal path"), The Wire ("so authentic") and Japan ("such a bizarre place, when you get below the surface.") They're into bread-making, having gay friends and gentrification ("we like to think of it as Meel Ende, not Mile End"). They hate republicans and guns, but love irony (and, if they're white people in their mid-twenties, will almost definitely have had a conversation about whether Alanis' examples are authentically ironic).
I close the book with a frown. It sucks being a racial stereotype.
Reaching into my bag I pull out the organic, fairly-traded artisan-crafted, sugar- and dairy-free chocolate I bought at the ironically titled Brooklyn Flea Market for seven bucks ("I always like supporting local food producers"). Now, that's better.
But the thing is it's uncanny. I'm reading this book about 'What White People Like' and its like an inventory of our weekend. White people like dinner parties, brunch, Brooklyn, farmer's markets, co-ops, films with subtitles, book shops. What starts off being funny starts to get a little worrying as I read on, turning the pages in the desperate hope of finding something that doesn't fit. No such luck.
White people like cycling ("my commute is along the canal path"), The Wire ("so authentic") and Japan ("such a bizarre place, when you get below the surface.") They're into bread-making, having gay friends and gentrification ("we like to think of it as Meel Ende, not Mile End"). They hate republicans and guns, but love irony (and, if they're white people in their mid-twenties, will almost definitely have had a conversation about whether Alanis' examples are authentically ironic).
I close the book with a frown. It sucks being a racial stereotype.
Reaching into my bag I pull out the organic, fairly-traded artisan-crafted, sugar- and dairy-free chocolate I bought at the ironically titled Brooklyn Flea Market for seven bucks ("I always like supporting local food producers"). Now, that's better.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Cats
Yesterday we moved an important step closer to becoming real New Yorkers. Now all we have to do is sign up with a shrink and stop expecting bars to kick us out at 11.20. To be honest, we really should have gone for a squash-faced Boston terrier, but as it is we've still got one animal and one person per room in our apartment. I feel like we're really getting into the tenement spirit.
Mickey Paws and Minnie moved in yesterday afternoon. Mickey has the broad-shouldered walk of a gangster, and the feet of a sideshow freak. Mother Nature obviously wore herself out making him extra toes, and didn't bother so much with the brains. He spent most of yesterday under our bed, only coming out to try to bury his bowl of cat food under our hardwood floor. Minnie seems smarter. In fact she's proofing this entry over my shoulder, mewing whenever I overuse commas, which is often.
Cat lovers are a strange people. Now that I've joined the tribe I have a very real urge to put up pictures of the cats, or at the very least convert my sentences in meme-friendly argot. I can has kitteh blog? Fail.
Mickey Paws and Minnie moved in yesterday afternoon. Mickey has the broad-shouldered walk of a gangster, and the feet of a sideshow freak. Mother Nature obviously wore herself out making him extra toes, and didn't bother so much with the brains. He spent most of yesterday under our bed, only coming out to try to bury his bowl of cat food under our hardwood floor. Minnie seems smarter. In fact she's proofing this entry over my shoulder, mewing whenever I overuse commas, which is often.
Cat lovers are a strange people. Now that I've joined the tribe I have a very real urge to put up pictures of the cats, or at the very least convert my sentences in meme-friendly argot. I can has kitteh blog? Fail.
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