Swearing to The Flag

Scientology Inc.

2006-03-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend and I were on our way to see the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Met the other day, because we're those kind of people. Unlike me, she was on a busy schedule, having to teach some people French later that afternoon. The sun was out, and we walked toward Central Park through the Upper East Side. I was getting mildly excited at all the perverse modern art I was to see, and then a sign, shimmering in the sunlight, distracted me:

SCIENTOLOGY CENTER

And underneath the heading, more fantastic still:

CELEBRITY BRANCH

Surely Tom Cruise had to be here. And John Travolta. Squinting in the sunlight, I lumbered around the front of the building, knowing the gates to this palace would forever be barred to me. But what note was tacked to a velvet board, propped by the front door. Yes,

PERSONALITY TEST.
FREE! COME ON IN!

I turned to my girlfriend. Her eyes already wore a look of resignation. I opened the door. She let herself be ushered in. The receptionist glanced up. The reception was a perculiar mix of the ornate and tacky, with marbles stairwells and numerous books that would resolve your life lining the walls, DVDs also. The receptionist appeared to wink. This was just like "Eyes Wide Shut": Tom couldn't be far. What does one say in such situations? The only thing one can:

"We would like a free personality test. Both of us."

The receptionist nodded. Phew! We had not disgraced ourselves or acted foolishly in a Scientology Center. We were bade sit down on the plush velvet couch, and five minutes later a woman wearing velvet and an intense stair glided down the stairwell. she beckoned us follow with supple gestures, and we were led into an expansive room with a full view of central park. On a table beside us was advertised a river cruise with added scientology, retailing at a cool ten thousand dollars for the full week. "Scriptwriters" would be there, to tell you how to get your life in order. Our helper lady fetched us two pink slips, on which were written many multiple choice questions. It would take half an hour, we were told, "and then we will feed the results into a computer, revealing all the details of your particular personality, and discovering how we can go forward from this point."

I looked at the sheet. Some questions tried to confuse you with the negatives. Like:

"Would you rarely attempt not to dissaude a small number of persons for sabotaging not your private space, but the private space of another?"

Yes, no or maybe?

Some were even trickier:

"Do you like to spend time with children."

Obviously here you want to come over a nice fellow, while somehow not a paedophile.

I jotted down my responses somewhat arbitrarily. My girlfriend had a furrowed expression. I was racing clear! This was just like school! I complete my pink slip in record time. "These questions are foolish, and ungrammatical", my girlfriend told me. I showed her how to finish them--that is, how to answer them arbitrarily. The helper lady returned just as we were finishing off, and looked cross, as if we were trying to cheat the system.

"She speaks French", I reassured her. This seemed to make the immediate situation better, but the larger one worse.

We were marched down backstairs, where we waited nervously while our answers were fed into a machine. I'm adopting a light tone here, but really I was very nervous to hear what the computer would say; there was a lot resting on it. My girlfriend was called to the evaluation suite first. Occasionally the sound of her laughter echoed down the corridoor. Was it her laughter?

A man came into the reception. "You deal with celebrities?" he asked. The receptionist nodded. "You help them stay underground." A nod again. "That's good" the man said. "That's useful to know."

"You know", he said after a moment's silence, "I used to be a Mormon missionary." the receptionist nodded. "I have my own Off-Broadway production. It's called Confessions of a Mormon Boy. It's all about my individuality breaking free from the restraints--fetters--of the church. Look at the internet. Just shoot up 'Mormon Boy Productions.'"

The receptionist seemed a bit more excited at this news. They exchanged advertising leaflets. "So this is all about diagenics?" said the Mormon boy. I knew the answer to this! I had been reading all about the foundation of scientology, and how the founder was able to divine a nuclear explosion in Russia, and all kinds of shit. But I kept my knowledge to myself. And then I was called into the room.

Even though I was expecting to learn some dire news that only an expensive Sceintology course could reverse, I was unprepared for the verdict that hit me. I still have the graph indicating my mental state. It rates me on several categories, such as balance, creativity, etc. It looks like the line on the heart-monitor at the sad point in the movies. My mental graph was awful. I was unstable and morbidly depressed. The only category I scored highly on was aggression. "Are you overly critical", the helper lady asked.

"I'm not overly critical", I shouted. "It's this graph. It's the method it uses."

"Ah-ha" said the woman, nodding her head sagely.

Apparently even though I was a basket-case things could still be improved to bring life to a tolerable pitch. All I needed to do was enroll on a course called "Personal Integrity", and purchase two books, "which didn't even require that much reading." I had learnt my lesson: I purchased one book for $5, and placed it in a shadowy corner of my apartment, concealing my graph of shame, while it accumulates dust until I am strong enough to face my demons and "score some wins." I can't afford the Personal Integrity, so if anyone could help out, I'd be much applied.

Later that night, I saw an advert for an Off-Broadway production, called "COnfessions of a Mormon Boy."

Shoot it up on the internet.

The Cloisters

2006-02-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

If you’ll allow me a piece of shameless cultural stereotyping, British people are generally not comfortable being conspicuous. The problem of being in America, therefore, is that it’s possible to be conspicuous by virtue simply of being British. As a representative Brit myself, I’ve frequently been embarrassed by the prominence of my nationality, to the extent that I have complied in whatever prejudices and inaccuracies have been inflicted upon my country. One of the many presumptions about Britain that I have had to swallow without making a scene, is that ours is a nation with a lot of history, and hence that British people in general are obsessed with their past.

These kind of cultural claims are actually pretty difficult to refute. But it seems to be almost impossible for any country, however recent its origins, not to be obsessed with history in some form or another. And America’s particular historical obsession, which in contrast to numerous claims certainly does exist, is noticeable in countless ways. Only this week, I visited an offshoot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right on the edges of New York City proper, at 191st Street. The exhibit in question was entitled “The Cloisters”, and comprises of a number of sacred objects, tapestries and architectural features broken off from their European mediaeval origin, and carried wholesale across the Atlantic, to be reassembled on a hill overlooking New York City. Ah, what some people will do for authenticity.

The project was executed in 1938, and, like so many projects of the time, was the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Upon your arrival, the most immediately striking thing about The Cloisters, is the strange sense of unity imposed upon a whole heap of disparate objects. The light cast in through fourteenth-century French stained-glass windows illuminates thirteenth-century Italian paintings; elsewhere, sculpture and altarpieces from Segovia, Burgundy, the Auvergne and the Rhineland compete for attention. Weirder yet, these sacred relics compete for space with a number of features that are irreducibly American: the medieval arches and supporting columns are plainly not sufficient to support the building itself, and so around these worthy objects an appropriately neo-Gothic design has been constructed. Throughout the cloisters, it is possible to see the joins, where thirteenth-century stone meets twentieth century concrete. The cloister garden may contain wild flowers appropriate to a medieval sanctuary, but visitors can only view them through thick, double glazed windows. For anyone that has viewed a monastery in its original, organic form, there is something distinctly odd about witnessing these crumbling, petrified relics, while the air conditioning pipes into the room constantly.

Sitting on a bench, deep in apparently intense conversation, were a sad-looking man and a Japanese woman.

All of this demonstrates that Americans most certainly do care about history: the question as to precisely what form that interest takes is harder to answer. Is the desire to raid and reassemble ancient European sites the product of simple historical curiosity? Is it the desire to understand something of an age unknown to this young nation? Or is it, like the British colonialists that raided Greece for its ancient monuments, a demonstration of power, of the defeat of historical grandeur through possession? Do the thousands of Americans that pack into these reconstructed cloisters each year fool themselves into thinking that the exhibit somehow represents an organic whole, a faithful reproduction of European models. Or are they aware of the forcible way in which the elements are brought together, but still marvel at the ingenuity of it all? Might they even think, perish the thought, that the American variant of the cloisters represents a functional improvement, a necessary modernization, of the outdated European model?

But leave all these questions. When I went to leave, before I turned into the sacred gift store, I passed the same couple. The man was crying, and the Japanese woman looked aloof. History. Who needs it?

On a lighter note, here is my radio show for this week. I talk about Canada and the State of the Union. Yes, how innovative. But come on you pussies, where are the music suggestions?

http://s59.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2T2I56YOE35UB2UEF5J7NLYVOT

Self-Advertisement

2006-01-31T18:35:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, each week I present a radio show commenting on American life, in a slightly less sardonic tone than that reserved for this blog. It too is called "Swearing to the Flag." It is broadcast on London station Resonance FM, hence the link at the side. Some of you may be in for a surprise if you hear it. But that is the risk I am poised to take, as I have belatedly worked out how to put each show on-line, for you to download at your convenience, or perhaps inconvenience given the size of the file. In this week's show, I visit a strange monastery, laugh at James Frey, and speculate on whether, erm, new media is any good.

Hmm...perhaps you'd just better download it and take a listen.

http://s64.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3EQAJBECLAJEG14YFEQ1YA4QLK

I also play music, which this week comes from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and The Spinto Band. Suggestions welcome for tracks in the future. They have to be...American. So that only leaves a few. Nat King Cole? Anal Cunt?

The Impatient Tribes of Man

2006-01-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

A very happy new year to each and every one of you.

In the past months I've received a fair few death threats and one request for intercourse, so something must be going right.

I've attended performance art festivals and parties in warehouses in Brooklyn, and sometimes it's been difficult to work out which is which. I've been on the receiving end of two strikes. All the while, buried in the middle of nowhere in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, I've been praying for this "gentrification" I read so much in the papers about. Every now and then, a good-looking woman passes by wearing a hip coat and thick-rimmed spectacles, and I think the prayed-for wave is upon me. But then five or six crazy people pass by, and ask me if I want to pay them to sing, just like usual.

My dear mother and sister came to visit over the festive period: I recommend anyone to juxtapose their mother with the impossibly camp East Village. As families do, we managed on Christmas Eve to have a blazing row about little in particular (Alison, Mum, if you're reading this, we were all in the wrong.) Rage spurred me to catch the subway to Manhattan, where I had little to do other then militantly pace the near-deserted streets, while my anger slowly faded, to the point where I was even conciliatory. To demonstrate my regret, I purchased a New York edition of Monopoly (the Statue of Liberty allegedly "is" Mayfair) and rented a copy of Stanley Kubrick's psycho-erotic final work, "Eyes Wide Shut."

After a brief flare-up of hostilities upon my return. we were happy families by the end of the evening.

The strikes, since you ask, concern the university I attend (the dispute in question being far too lengthy to unravel here) and secondly the entire public trasnport system, which was put out of action for three days recently, as a show of union strength. Of all the impatient tribes of man, New Yorkers are perhaps the most impatient. Monuments to New York restlessness can be grand, as in the contours of the Manhattan skyline, or petty, as in the bustling, seething crowds disgorged from the subway each morning, and this grandness and pettiness defines the city. So perhaps no other community on earth would be less equipped to withstand a temporary paralysis of their daily routine; and that, of course, is exactly what New Yorkers faced. As September 11 proved, New Yorkers can handle colossal disruption, so long as they can mobilize a response, be the response practical aid of grief. But the one thing that they cannot tolerate is a disruption that renders them idle.

On the morning of December 22, impatient New Yorkers were faced with no means of getting to work and, equally bad, no means of getting to play. Subway stops were taped off. Streets that were formerly deserted back-alleys groaned with traffic. The three bridges leading into Manhattan, Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, filled with commuters marching to a near-military pace and step. In Brooklyn, the traffic crawled; in Manhattan, you were fortunate to see it move at all. Despite the evident standstill, desperate or deluded commuters stood at the roadside, flagging yellow cabs already full to bursting. Internet sites filled with postings from people prepared to trade a lift for a blowjob. As decimations of a city go, this was obviously nothing to rival the scale of Hurricane Katrina; but from the despairing looks on the faces of some of those hailing individuals, you would hardly have noticed.

Once the general air of disbelief had subsided, however, the residents of New York surprised onlookers from within and without the city, by the small acts of kindness which began to pile up. Drivers with available room pulled over to give commuters straggling on foot a lift. Red Cross ambulances parked by the foot of the major bridges, dispensing hot chocolate and fig newtons to weary walkers. During the brief transport hiatus, swindlers and con-artists doubtless emerged, and more than one morally dubious buck was made. But the sight of New York drivers, notorious for clinging to their lane as if it were a birthright, actually moving over to let vehicles past, will live long in my memory.

Like many, I was forced to make the ten-mile round trip on foot to Manhattan, and like resourceful New Yorkers, I managed somehow to extract a moral from the proceedings, to wit, that I was "exploring the city in a way I never had before." This meant largely traipsing through East Williamsburg, an area famous for its concentrated Hasidic Jewish community. My prior contact with the Hasidic community extended only as far as my landlord Moses, who had a perennial stutter, and took his religiously-mandated clothing very seriously. Walking through East Williamsburg, I realised that everyone here was Moses, or a little Moses, or an ancient Moses, with hair grown long at the sides, ruffled dungarees, all-black clothing, and carefully-shined black shoes. For a ten minute stretch you meet nobody who is not a Hasidic Jew, and begin to feel conspicuous in the off-black Carhart jeans slung around your hips. The writing is no longer in English. To all intents, you are in another world.

I was enjoying a late lunch with my girlfriend the other day, when into the apartment burst Moses, along with three other people, none of whom I had ever seen. Moses had a grin on his face.

'I have sold your apartment!" he declared.

We were stupefied over our baguette. Had we lost our property?

"These are your new owners!"

And that was all we heard from Moses; all, except from his desperate attempt to escape with half of my $2,400 deposit.

Intercourse News

2005-12-21T18:43:00.000-08:00

Here then is my belated account of Thanksgiving with a religious community in Pennsylvania.

I was transported on a coach out of New York with fifty-odd foreign students from various nationalities. We were told that we would be separated into two groups: mine, alas, was bound not for the wonderfully-named town Mount Joy, but prosaic Lititz. There, we were told, devout families would earnestly await our arrival. For six in the morning, there was too much enthusiasm in the coach. It's a problem I often encounter: I'm not an enthusiastic person, but occassionally, a curious one, and often in life the two feelings are so confused as to lead to the same situation. Anyhow, there I sat, with enthusiasts, who always hasten time with photographs and card tricks, until we pulled into Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, where a horde of persons more enthusiastic still clustered, they were almost rabidly enthusiastic, and waving placards.

On the placards were all our names.

One by one the names were announced, and the foreing students led off, the understanding on their faces fitting for persons facing the firing squad. But, of course, the enthusiasm. A Taiwenese girl was mobbed by a family with six heads, and bundled into the black range-rover waiting. There a frail Japanese boy was smothered in an embrance that became a transporting clinch to the nearby car. It was one of the single most sinister sights of my life. I cringed below window-level in the overly-conditioned bus, shouts from outside, anticipatory cooing inside, and the deep gnawing fear that my language would be nowhere near exotic enough. In the melee, I made out my name, scrawled loosely onto cardboard, thrust aloft my three young boys with identical fringes, whose strength was clearly already beginning to flag. I had disappointed them. I had disappointed them already in my slowness. Finally my name was announced, and with a face I tried to push as far from hangdog-gallows as possible, I descended the coach into a restrained hug with the three fringes.

I would like to tell you, of course, that the family, three-fringes and all, belonged to a strange religious cabal. (Curiosity once again that compensation for want of enthusaism.) But the truth as often proved plain, hospitable and generous. If it helps fuel American steroetyping somewhat, two of the three children were home schooled. But the four days I stayed seemed designed to offer an object lesson in community, to a poor atomized individual like myself. No sooner had I arrived, then the mother of the family took me on a tour of the neighbouring area, which took in a children's playground carved from wood. As the firing squad reference from earlier might imply, I'm no military strategist, but I'd say this imposing structure was larger and harder to scale than Alcatraz. My host mother informed me that it had been planned, financed and constructed by the local community.

I knew that any melancholic furrowing of my brow would be badly taken, but I could not but recall the rusting imitatition tractor-frame, clambering upon which so many of my own childhood hours had been half-enjoyable whiled away. Three spots of snow drifted down. We clambered into the all-purpose-terrain car.

Driving home, a man was bent almost double by the side of the highway, wearing nothing over a lumberjack shirt, pushing his bony thumb out at the traffic. That, said my host mother, is Norm. Norm, it transpired, was severely handicapped, showing signs of celebral palsy, and lived on his own. The church took care of him. My host mother stopped the car, and for once I felt useful, opening my door and offering the seat to Norm, who wished to get to K-Mart. My host mother asked him when there if he wished us to wait. No, replied Norm, jerking his lumberjack shirt into the masses of K-Mart.

That night I fell asleep early, and woke in a young boy's bedroomm, with Lego on the floor. I was beginning to lose the last sixteen years of my life, which had proved so crucial in forming value-judgments.

I went to a chocolate factory, which began to assume a strangley appealing air. The factory was built by Charles Hershey, the world's first chocolate baron. Hershey deemed that not only should his workers receive a decent wage, health insurance and the like, but they also required - that universal American right - a playground ride. Not only this, Hershey constructed an entire town in which to house these factory workers. At the intersection of Chocolate and Cocoa Avenues, my host family informed me, tourists could often be seen scratching their heads in wonderment. We returned home. I began to play a promiment part in the grace said by my family before mealtimes. As in:

"Lord, thank You for bringing Ewan to our homes, to educate us in many things."

Or, the next day:

"Lord, may Ewan have a good day, with many good conversations."

The whole while grace was said, the hyperactive family dog yelped uncontrollably. I felt like the yelping dog.

The final full day in Pennsylvania was spent chasing Amish, the resident religious community notorious for spurning such technological innovations as electricity and modern hairstyles. Photography is to the AMish "graven images." The women wear their hair tightly slicked-back. This and about three other facts I learned in a trip through AMish country, or what purported to be it, yet seemed suspiciously like tourist bric-a-brac. An Amish horse-drawn carriage (such is their form of transport) moulded into a keyring! Amish jam! A vendor dressed as a real Amish! More fun was had in the towns through which we travelled, which seemed purposefully constructed around the industry. Each building looked like a residential unit, until you entered and found someone trying to flog you a stick of rock. One town, my favourite, was called Intercourse. There were bumper stickers procaliming I LOVE INTERCOURSE. I picked up six copies of the local rag, "Intercourse News" - those who ask first, are elcome to them...

"Billy, it's performance art"

2005-11-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

As the last installment of my shambling coverage of Performa05, the performance arts biennial, I now present an account of Marina Abramovic's performance at the Guggenheim. Sadly, Marina is no relation, though there was a strong Russian theme to the evening. You could barely miss it, what with the irritatingly-punctuated "Russia!" exhibition showing at the Guggenheim. For those of you who don't move in the right circles, Abramovic is a performance artiste who rose to prominence through nearly dying for her art. Twice.

On the first occassion, the artwork in question involved Marina lying down in the centre of a flaming crescent. As the rows of fire burned beside her, the oxygen supply dwindled so rapidly that an audience member had to plunge in and save her. Her most famous work, Rhythm 0, refined this idea further. Abramovic gathered together seventy-two objects of various destructiveness (knitting needles, razor blades, a loaded gun) and told the audience to manipulate them in any way they pleased. The crowd had already slashed away her clothes, and made cuts on her body, when one man commanded her to hold the gun to her head - which she did - and to fire. At this point, the audience once more intervened, turning against this man who would push the frontiers of art.

Over the last week, Abramovic has been performing "cover versions" of famous pieces of performance art (you know, the one where the artist is nailed to the Volskwagen, the one where she crushes the wine glass and, yes, yes.) So if any of you are feeling at all queasy, console yourself with the idea that what she's doing is really akin to that nice band UB40.

I went to see her second performance. It was my first time to the Guggenheim, which is a sleekly beautiful building. A large crowd had gathered outside. A printed legend on the curved white walls informed us that the patron for the "Russia!" exhibition was none other than Vladimir Putin. How things change, eh? But the most striking thing, was that as people wandered along the curved balustrades of this space-age structure, moving between the dulcitly-lit Orthodox iconography, and flattering portraiture of seventeenth century Russian noblemen, there on an elevated platform was a woman with tight leather trousers with the crotch missing, cradling an automatic rifle in her hands.

Was it to be expected, that the audience showed almost no sign of consternation at Marina Abramovic's crotch? At times, the lack of reverence bordered on the sloppy, as when punters accidentally wandered over the cordon, (very performance art) to be shouted back by the burly security guards, whose moral world must I presume have been slightly disturbed, though they showed no sign of it. Childred careered freely around the foot of Marina's platform without incurring similar censure. In the obliviousness of children, arms flailing, was either the final validation of performance art, and its conviction in participation, or else it's death knell - I couldn't be sure.

Some of the children looked up at their mother's with puzzlement, pointed at the lady's crotch and asked "Mother, what's that?" And the mother's every one of them, looked back sternly, and replied "Billy, it's performance art", or at least so I imagine.

On a note so entirely unrelated as to pose linking problems for even a children's television presenter, I am going away to Pennsylvania for an extended Thanksgiving weekend. While I am away, I ask you in true holiday style, to submit me the most vulgar and terrifying death threats you can produce. I have a friend, who when I moved to America promised to send me genuine death-threats, with the crazy lettering and all. They're yet to arrive, and she knows who she is. Though you don't get the benefit of crazy lettering, you can use the handy comments feature to behave like a psychopath, annonymously - and I, I receive the substantiation that only a victim can understand...

A Guide to Kultur

2005-11-19T13:00:00.000-08:00

You have to work for your culture in New York. The other day, my girlfriend somehow twisted my arm to go to a Japanese death-metal group in Brooklyn. When we arrived at the venue, a notice on the door read:

"TONIGHT'S CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELLED, DUE TO A TRAGEDY."

Repelled with such vagueness, I turned to the bouncer and asked what was the tragedy? It transpired that the Japenese death-metal group had been involved in a car-crash that day, were in intensive care, and that the drummer was dead. Of course, you cynics snigger, it had to be the drummer. Perhaps it was due to my infrequent patronage of death-metal clubs, that left me a lingering, foolish sense of culpability for the rest of the evening.

Nonetheless, I made another stab at being a cultured person, by visiting Chelsea the following day. Chelsea, for those undernourished souls not acquanited with either cutting-edge installations or champagne, is a place in West Side Manhattan, where the rich hang out and purchase art at exorbitent prices. Like all good aristocrats, they have the sense to let mortals lesser than themselves gather at a hygenic distance from them. To facilitate this, they have set up rows galleries lining 23rd Street, 24th Street, 25th Street, all free to the public; and impecunious shameless people like me are happy to turn up in droves, and give them the validation they need.

The whole area of Chelsea has a peculiar feel, because it is the most perfect coincidence of art and capitalism. I suffer terrific anxiety trying to distinguish the white-washed ultra-minimalist offices, from the white-washed ultra-minimimalist exhibition spaces. I am relieved when some giveaway sign appears: a video screen showing naked people swimming (that's Bill Viola!); an artist biog; a mature couple circulating, the kerchiefed male tush-tushing, "Nah! S'more like a Jacko-Metti!" One with the art punters thronging the pavements, my eyes gaze into rooms that are never paritioned with a wall, always by windows of pure crystal, as if to say, in an act of superior transparency, "Look at me. You can see everyhting there is to see. I am wealth." Sometimes my eyes meet a fresco, sometimes a receptionist. When in one of the buildings, I see a Japanese woman with an asymmetric fringe before a laptop, letting one finger slowly fall with a kind of suspended brutality upon the keypad, I do not know which category her action falls into.

You feel a modern voodoo reigns, when you are in Chelsea, and the trick is never to react to anything, however untoward. I strolled into one of the galleries, which was showing some new work by Tracy Emin, and there was the woman herself, dressed in cheap leopardprint, and with her letterbox mouth working.

"It's dead simple. I just - put myself into the work. It's just honesty. I put the honesty down", the mouth was saying.

I thought that perhaps Tracy was part of this exhibition, along with the three or four American men standing entraced beside her, and wondered briefly if I kissed her full passionately on the lips, would I be part of the exhibition too? But it turned out she was just Tracy Emin, as regular as she would be drunk on Newsnight Review; she was quickly ushered into the rear of the gallery, and I practiced my measured walk around the juvelinia she was exhibiting, as if nothing had happened at all.

Performa

2005-11-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

I don’t know whether any of you have lingering idyllic fantasies about Broadway from any number of cheap musicals of Hollywood productions, but if so, allow me to rudely disabuse such notions. Broadway is a road that carves Manhattan in two like a festering scar. Wander along it on a Saturday, as I did last Saturday, and you will be assaulted, if you’re lucky enough only metaphorically, perhaps by the brightness of th shopfronts, the group clinch of the trudging crowd of shoppers, and the men trying to sell you apples at an inappropriate time.

But New York is a city where redemption, if redemption of the most sordid kind, is always just beyond the corner. So it was, that on Saturday you could slip into the inauspicious building before Canal Street, take the elevator to the third floor, and step out into a white-washed room that represented something like a sanctuary. I say something like, because somehat undercutting the tranquility of the scene was the distinct sound of wood being chopped, and numerous mingling voices. I am toying with you somewhat, by suggesting that I arbitrarily enter buildings; of course, I ascended to the third floor quite purposefully, because it contained a piece of performance art.

Beginning last week, the Performa 05 festival, the first biennial of performance art, aims to celebrate and revitalize a medium that is definitively New York. The scene that lay before me, which formed part of the festival, was appropriately chaotic. The exhibition, or installation, or action, or dissolution of cultural boundaries, or whatever else you chose to call it, took the form of ten simultaneous pieces of performance art, each of which was enacted over a continuous period of twenty-four hours.

In a white-walled corner, a black hammock was slung. Just visible through its meshing was the stublled face of an Italian performance artist, whose performance consisted of his sleeping throughout the 24hr duration, so that – and I quote the official handout – “he would register nothing of the proceedings.” By the foot of the wall is a plastic stool; standing upon it, your eyes are brought level with a small circle cut into the wall, through which, dimly perceptible, a Korean performance artist, so the handout charitasbly informs me, rummages around, attempting to construct something out of chicken-wire and lidless tin cans.

The sawing sounds, it transpires, are emanating from a couple of young workmen stationed towards the rear of the room, who diligently measure out and saw a series of wooden planks. The entirety of their labor is captured by a wide-lens camera mounted on a tripod in the center of the room. Over the next twelve hours, these workmen will assemble rows of wooden benches; in the twelve hours immediately following, these benches will provide seating for an audience to watch, yes, the construction of the benches. From the window overlooking Broadway, a small ray-gun-like device is visible on the roof of the facing block. This device, it turns out, is designed to capture Orgone, the grounds apparently of all energy upon Earth, and in so doing produce rainfall.

Elsewhere, there is a recreation of Yoko Ono’s famous “Yes” painting, which occasioned Jon Lennon’s love, and a “Pinochio Device”, used to simulate the sensation of one’s nose growing very rapidly. One piece of art was a specially-invited, unannounced guest, who had at some point traveled to the South Pole, and the crowd accordingly viewed one another with a greater suspicion than is usual even at performance art stagings, attempting to infer whether anyone had a distinctively Arctic look. The most daringly subliminal piece was to be created precisely by a member of the audience, who was to leave the exhibition without warning, to get a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, which was to be strictly undocumented.

This exhibition maked the commencement of Performa 05, the first biennial to celebrate performance art, an enterprise that strikes me as somewhat similar to trying to preserve hot lust in formaldehyde, but which nonetheless I shall shambolically cover over the next two weeks for your amusement. I couldn't stay as long as I wanted at the ongoing performance, which is a shame, because a Swiss friend tells me it got wild at around 3am. But in case you're wondering, there was no rainfall over New York City that night.

American Mythopoeic Fantasy

2005-10-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

A few days ago myself and some other foreigns were officially "received" in New York. Having been oriented, twice, before coming out, and now received thrice, with one further welcome to follow, and a thanksgiving weekend with an Amish family in Pennsylvania to look forward to, I feel very special indeed.

This latest reception took place at the New York History Museum, which had mounted an exhibition on slavery. Senselessly ariving two hours early, I had little to do other than spend five dollars on the showing, an output I later discovered was unnecessary. For part of the formal proceedings was a free tour of slavery, and for a while we strolled around, looking at the images of brutalised Afro-Carribeans, and documents of punitative statutes enacted against them, glasses of wine in hand, and sliding trays of sushi and crumbling biscuits.

In the reception proper, a woman got up to tell us that if the world had more Fulbright scholars, there would be a greater chance of world peace. I scanned down the list of this year's batch of scholars, and found some interesting trends. The Czech Republic had only two scholars, each of whom appeared to have the same name, and be studying the same discipline at the same university. There was only one French scholar. I had heard rumours of an Afghani Fulbright, but no evidence on the list. Germany did well, but was outdone by Poland, not by number, but by variety. In the midst of the dull conventional procession of Columbia and NYU, political science and psychology, was a Pole, whose name I groundlessly forget, who apparently was studying something called "american mythpoeic fantasy." Where each other subject attained the nobility of capitals, only a.m.f was rendered in racy modern lowercase. I resolved to seek out the Pole.

There were only two British in attendence, myself and my friend sat beside me. My name was not printed, for some reason. It was announced that we would all stand up in turn, as our countries were announced. This made my friend wince. There are simply so many countries on the map.

By the time we got to Estonia, I was already bored. Let's stand up when they read out Sri Lanka, I suggested to my friend. He demurred. The token Frenchman stood up; did I imagine hollow laughter? How would they receive us? I began to panic. There was only one "Tom", and two of us: it would look rediculous. The Poles were asked to stand. A group of ten stood up together, and across the auditorium, a single figure, detatched, pensive, barely remembering to stand. That must be my man, bigger thoughts on his mind. Holland was announced twice in the alphabetic chain, once as "Netherlands", once, briliantly, as "The Netherlands." Up stood a fat Mexican, studying Gifted Education. This was just like bingo.

Finally, the United Kingdom's turn came, and Tom and I stood up, both representing "Tom", with an anguished posture that would anyhow have given our origin away. There was perplexed laughter, we did a short bow and sat down.

Afterwards we were encouraged to mingle for peace. Although the mingling had been conceived in a spirit of cultural diversity, when the multiple strangers approached one another shakily, there was nothing to go on save the name tag, which revealed only the stranger's country of origin. The best way to initiate conversation, I therefore found, was to culturally sterotype. An Argentian wobbly on her pins staggered up, and we talked of the Falklands War. My friend the true Tom looke monumentally bored, so I suggested we find the american mythpoeic fantasy scholar. Around we trailed, bumping into Slovaks, Finns, Spaniards, but not our elusive Poles. "Have you seen any Polish people", I asked a pretty Russian. "There are Poles over there", she replied, and I felt as if I was involved in Cold War espionage, but with added canapies, so, in a John Le Carré novel.

The Poles were huddled conspiratorially in a crooked circle, which I supposed corresponded to some national emblem of unity. I introduced myself, and after a few bits of rudimentary, necessary smalltalk, dived in. They did not know the scholar of american mythopeiac fantasy, but had heard of him somehow, and knew he was in the building. Behind my back, I could hear Tom explaining to an ethnically diverse crowd that I was a homosexual, and had a particular thing for "Polacks."

The Argentian returned, shouting, "You are so an English-!", when one of the burliest figures I have witnessed approached slowly. He was with a much shorter fellow, who looked seriously at me through his thin-framed glasses, and said, "I gather that you are interested in my friend's work." It was indeed the scholar I had been seeking, in a jovial half-meant manner, come to talk with me. He was writing a book on american mythopoeiac fantasy, he told me. I was out of my depth, and made a few awful stabs at the link between Homer and Hick Finn. It was not that sort of fantasy he was examing, he told me, but largely the "Earthsea Trilogy" by Ursuela le Guin, a book I had fortunately read when ten, and an insufferable child. The evening proceeded smoothly from that point.

All Shall Have Projects

2005-10-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

The truth has slowly dawned upon me, that New Yorkers all have twenty-eight or so jobs.

In addition to these twenty-eight jobs, they have nigh on a thousand "projects."

When I lived in England, I had a hard task finding one thing to truly lay my name by, and that was perfectly alright. Here, I decided to prepare myself for what I was told was "New York's work-hard, play-hard mentality", by at least cooking up one thing that I did. So at parties, I announce myself with the one task that defines my idendity - I'm a fireman, I'm a terrorist, I'm one-quarter of the Gang of Four - and find that even my best-laid, and lying, plans are insufficient. Every New Yorker trumps me in having things to do, so much so that the conversation we're holding becomes I think, surely a strain on their precious time, unless we can legitimise it by calling it a project - and my the looks of their earnest eye-contact, that's precisely what they're angling for.

Everything is a project. Hanging out is project, properly done. Brewing tea is a project, with meanings I can only guess at. Catching the subway uptown is a project. Subway downtown is a project. Croissant is project. When I had a lot of international calls to make, in the days when promises to Mother could still be kept, I would always phone from the same payphone, by Washington Park Square. There, beside my payphone was a homeless man, who never seemed to move from his station. In England he might roll in the gutter a little, or offer you drugs that on closer inspection were toasted banana skins; but in New York, this homeless man had gotten his act together. He had rigged up a table on the sidewalk, and placed upon it an upturned, transparent perspex bottle, which contained the money he had received that day. Affixed to the outside of the bottle was a scrap of paper, on which was unclearly printed "HOMELESS ASSOCIATION." As people passed, he yelled out "Feed the hungry. Because nobody should go hungry."

He was clearly a homeless man, collecting money for himself. But nonthleless, he had set up the operation, until it was a larger project.

Four days ago, I was on the subway back to Brooklyn. When I changed for my connecting train, everybody looked as if they'd just been cracking up at a very funny joke. When I'm new to a scene like that, I presume the joke was me, or will be the whoopee-cushion designed for me; but on this occassion, my selfish self-flagellation proved inaccurate, as when the train took off once more, a man started shouting, and sent the whole carriage back into hysterics.

"This one time", the shouted, "I get on the subway, right? Now, there's just this one woman there, with a bag on the seat to one side. Now I see her when I get on the train, and I see the bag sitting there easy beside me. Well now, am I imagining it, or when I get on the train does she hug that bag so tight to her as if it were the lucky love of her life? Goddamn, I want that woman to hold me the way she holds that bag! If that bag was a child, it's be all suffocated to death! Do I want your bag? Do I want your bag?! No - I WANT YOUR MONEY! Simple as that. I am not a robber - I just live on the street."

Across from me, a Puerto Rican policeman was sitting on the seat, vibrating with laughter.

"Now this other time. I get on the subway. Damn me if there isn't one guy got this cell phone, playin' around with it. Soon as he sees me, he puts the phone right in his pocket. Excuse me? Do I want to make a call? Who I got to make a call to? I don't want a phone - I WANT YOUR MONEY! I found a phone once. Must have been broke. Didn't work. Looked like 'swas about twenty years old. What could I do with a phone?

"But the worst thing is, when you gets on the train, and you ask for money, and they reach into their pocket real slow, like they gonna bring out a little something for me, and - and - nuthin' comes! What happened in there? Hey? You get cold or sumthing? You go cold on me in there?

"This one guy - he reaches into his pocket - brings out a whole dollar note - and he brings it across like in front of my eyes - and he puts it right back into the other pocket! Man, are you trying to lead me on? Hey hold on, s'my stop-"

And the man stood up. I hadn't seen him before. He waddled very gingerly to the doors. Something was wrong with his legs. He had one eye that looked sewed shut.

As the doors were sliding shut, everybody was smiling at one another. The man's voice could still me heard from the platform. "I'm going to the liquor store. The doors shut. He shouted: "Can't we all make this work a little better?"

Agora

2005-10-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

Consider a large patch of decrepit urban land. To a British audience, it is that place where teenage hoodlums hand out, and mug you for your purse, poor grandmother that you are; or, a deserted space upon which a new Tesco will soon be built.

In America, such a patch of decrepit urban land is potential in rough concrete. In other words, it is apt for a piece of performance art.

This cultural distinction became apparent to me, when over the weekend I went to see a piece of performance art that artistically braver people than myself tell me is "site-specific." The site in question is the McCarren Pool, a massive building whose history reads like American history in microcosm: an F.D.R New Deal project (one of eleven pools built that year, all of which every new model citizen would presumably use in the same day), the pool fell into postwar disrepair, subject to the humilation of graffiti, weeds and oxidised ironwork.

I walked around it one day, before the art came to down, and it was a truly eery experience. For it is a frighteningly empty big place: measuring, to be exact, 50,000 square feet. You have to take your hat off to a nation that conceives of a public swimming pool three times that of standard Olympic size.

The name of this artwork was Agora. The agora, as every self-respecting classicist will hastily inform you, was the civil focal point of the republican Athens, which they will also inform you was wonderfully pure. I suppose that these notions of civil participation and local memory are explicitly referenced in the choreographed piece, but it was also an opportunity for gloriously nonsensical dance routines. As a young child, my sister and I would regularly watch Top of the Pops; when the featured song became too painful or inane, we would manipulate the television so that the image of the backing dance troupe remained, but the sound was teken from another channel - dialogue from Heartbeat, or the last night of the Proms. If only we had, at the ages of 10 and 7, have realised we were cultural montage artists: we could have marketed ourselves as precocious, the avant-garde Hansen. No matter, it made our infant faces smile, and the effect was curiously similar to Agora.

Before the show began, a man reclined on a sofa in the corner of the pool, watching television. As the action unfolded around him, he slowly began to push the television screen to the opposite corner, oblivious to the high-kicking breaking out either side of him. The music modulated between the unspecific bass hum that gets mistaken for challenging music, and scraps of melody from old blues or samba records. The dancers jostled, filled paddling pools with water, swam, rode bicycles, staged pillowfights, pushed one another on skateboards tied to their backs, and, in those bursts of melody I just mentioned, danced very beautifully. The crowd must have numbered a thousand, divided between "stationary" and "floating" audience members. The latter had freedom of movement, which was designed, I suppose, to efface the division between performers and audience. I was a "floater", and had high hopes for my engagement. Yet, as a British man, I felt unsure as to how to begin to involve myself in art, and continually guilty for not doing so. Nonetheless, for a British man in particular, the whole unaccustomed effect was quite overwhelming.

The end of the performance is somehow triggered by a sign for the audience to clamber down into the pool; and clamber down each member does, some sprinting towards the center, where the numerous dancers seem mysteriously to have vanished into thin air. People mill around under the spotlights, smiling, greeting friends, scrutinizing one another in a bid to discover whether they might have just been dancing. Then, again out of nowhere, the performers appear in rank file at the rear of the pool and, en masse, perform a strangely conventional curtain-call. As you slowly file out from the venue, it is for a while very difficult to separate the reality of the outside world from the spectacle just enacted in front of your eyes. Regular people walking on the sidewalk seem as though they could possibly have some artistic merit to their movements; and if a toddler where to collide into you, or a car mow you down, you would swear it was down to some larger artistic scheme.

Intellectuals of the world unite, you have nothing to lose other than your superior sense of solitude

2005-09-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

There I was, sitting like any sane person in the vegan coffeeshop in hip Williamsburg, when a notice on fluorescent green paper caught my notice.

"Seeking Brainy, Cultured People In Your Area?",the notice opened. "Then hook up to Intellect Connect, the best way to meet intellectuals, and have a good time." Ah, the restraint. I reproduce the link for your convenience:

http://www.intellectconnect.com

Wishing not to demean myself by looking too much at the connections that intellects can make, I can only speculate about the activities. So, some speculations:

Intellectuals Go to a Destruction Derby
Intellectuals Go to Prison
Intellectuals Kick a Dog Till its Eyes Bleed

Maybe that's just the bright crowd I hang out with.

Having lived on the East Coast of America for four weeks, I now feel tolerably well-equipped to make the generalisation, that Intellect Connect is missing a trick with the broader American populace. No, what we need is something more like "Dude Connect." Somebody patent the URL, while I follow the thought. Now I see it: Dude Connect, could be, like, a place for dudes together and...hang. Tag-line:

"Dude Connect. For dudes, who wanna, connect, dude. Sorry, dude, I said a word other than dude."

Actually, I lie, when I claim that trawling classefied ads is beneath me, or even something I don't do each and every night. If you look on Craigslist, that bastion of the new age in offering cheap furniture and no-strings homosexual sex, you often find romantic missives from people with interesting definitions. Like "European." Not infrequently, the phrase "looking for a European-style relationship" crops up, normally delivered by lonely women. Once, I found the answer to what was codified in this term: "i.e.", continued one post, "a relationship with integrity, not fantastic sex on the first night."

As a European, I quail at this reading. And not for the reason you think, Sarah-

A Kind of Tempered Utopia

2005-09-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, I hit upon a great scheme, which was for a kind of tempered utopia. The real estate market in the South of England, as all you Kent-dwellers will testify, has been stratospherically high for some time. While strivers paid over the odds for small boxes in proximity to London, whole swathes of property was left dormant in the North of the country. In particular, many of the old mining communities emptied out during Thatcher's reign, leaving whole streets to become decrepit, with individual houses on the market for four-figure sums, and never getting sold.

My plan was simple: myself, and say one hundered of my friends, would buy up a whole area of one of these former mining towns. Instead of working ex nihilo, or changing everything we found there, as most utopians want to, we would work with these run-down buildings. Those friends more practical myself would use devices like welding, or whatever practical people use, to transform them into interesting, urban dwelling-places. Instead of imposing our community on the space, we would look to interact with the former miners and unemployed that had chosen to remain in the area. If nothing else, we would rink with them in the pub, and so prevent the pubs from closing. We would record their stories on dictaphones.

The plan was foiled by my general skittishness, and the fact that I do not have one hundred friends, and no more than six who can raise even a four-figure sum. But I still liked, in my skittish way, to imagine the unrealised project as some sort of abstract ideal, possessing an untainted perfection.

Imagine my horror, therefore, when I discovered this week that a New York artist had conceived a much better variant of my plan, back in 1972.

Gordon Matta-Clark, who also has a much better name than me, was already an avant-garde pin-up, before his death in 1978 at the callow age of 35 meant he never had to try hard again. His artistic signature was the purchase of unwanted, near-unvalued scraps of land, sold off by the New York government. He called these scraps "gutterspaces", and they were intended as artworks in their own right, or else small art-galleries for the showing of new work. These spaces were mostly in Queens; some were probably bigger than hip underground galleries in Bethnal Green; some were almost inaccessible, and essentially fenced-off corridoors. The idea was that these pieces could be a calculated escape from the reality of, well, living in Queens; but also that you might accidentally trip over a piece of performance art, on your way to grab a Diet Coke, or beat up your wife.

There are many retorspectives of his work currently showing. They all, to a greater of lesser extent, miss the point of his art somewhat, being housed in static, coventional art galleries themselves. But the much-neglected link between art and the bus surfaces in the most interesting retrospective, where you can travel out to see how these "gutterspaces" have evolved through the years.

Some of the recent pieces designed to fill these spaces were moving, and my anger at seeing my wonderful idea plagiarised by a man who died before I was born subsided. As Matta-Clark languishes in obscurity in England - or perhaps I do not read enough, or rightly - I resolve to disinter my mining village plan, and bask in undeserved originality. All of you with four-figure sums to throw about, take out your maps of Gateshead. Let us build this community.

Komar and Melamid

2005-09-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

There is a great theme that will slowly emerge in these posts, and that theme is democracy.

I'm forever on the look-out for it, which is why I was happy to stumble over the work of two Russian scientists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. In true Renaissance style, the Russian scientists are also painters. They are also, surprisingly for Russians, democratic and deeply sardonic. These two strands fuse into their project: which is to establish a democratic basis for art.

To do this, they travelled around the major countries, like America and Finland, and simply asked the inhabitants that they encounetered what they liked most and least in a painting. The results were tabulated, and Komar and Melamid set about reproducing the most and least popular paintings. They are all available for viewing at:

http://www.diacenter.org/km/

There are some wonderful pictures. I recommend particularly Italy's least popular: a lower torso, suggestively that of Christ, dangling phallus, thighs punctured by darts; on the rear wall, a graffiti of the Power Rangers, and a framed painting of Elvis Presley.

Diamond in Rough

2005-09-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

I am learning to think of my apartment, which lies in an uncouth area of Brooklyn, as a dimanond in the rough. In the twice-daily sprint between its rickety door and the subway, I've not been mugged once.

But I was shouted at by a man in a car recently. Foolishly, I went in the direction of the shout. This was around 3am, and small animals had dominion of the street. The man at the wheel wound his windows down. He was a Hasidic Jew, dressed in full get-up.

"You from here?" he asked.

God damn isn't New York the place that anyone makes it? "Yes, I am" I said.

"Speak Yiddish?", he asked.

"No I don't."

"Ah-ha. My English not so good. I in Williamsburg?"

"No. Williamsburg is that way" I suggested, with an approximate arm-thrust.

"Ah-ha. Listen to me." I leant closer. He whispered now. "I want somewhere where - where, you know, I have good time."

Good time? On moral or epicurean grounds, I had no idea of what he spoke. "What do you mean by good time?" I imagined to myself, with what imagination endured at this stage of the nights, of what this state could comprise. "Drinking, dancing?"

I prayed to God it wasn't the whore-fucking.

"Ah-ha. I want place, a bar. Understand, I am from very religious family, in Israel, I am not allowed to have good time." He looked downcast. "Which I want", he added reasonably, despondently.

"Well look, Williamsburg's got lots of bars. Like Galapogas" He cut me off. -"Yes, yes, but understand - I am from religious family. Is this place only Jewish?"

"No no, there are people of all kinds there."

"I see," he interjescted. "Women?" Now we were getting to the meat of the matter. "Yes, women have been known."

He looked delighted, then suddenly cut by a sharp implement. "Ah-ha. Then I cannot go. I need men only. If the family would find out..."

My patience was wearing thin. "Okay", I said, and thought of a standard name for a male bar, no easy task. "Go to Clive's. Same direction."

He looked at me. "Is only men?" "Only men."

"Is gay bar?"

I nodded, and he depressed his foot on the accelerator. God speed him-

Hitch

2005-09-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended an event that somehow lived up to the hilarity it promised. It was George Galloway arguing the toss with Christopher Hitchens, over whether the war on Iraq was just or necessary.

The event was organised by a small independent publisher, The New Press, who happened to have published Galloway's new book, in the wake of his bizarre appearance before the US Senate, or at least around two of them. Like most leftist media organisations, they dealt with the practicalities of the event in a somewhat oblique fashion. There was a scrimmage of people outside, and the turnstiles-style device for letting them in was reminiscent of a Football derby from 1972. I even found myself nodding along to the Daily Telegraph's New York correspondant, who, sweating profusely through his standard-issue Telegraph pink shirt, remarked that this was "quite appallingly arranged."

When we were finally seated, an announcement went out that the evening's proceedings would be further delayed, due to problems with the metal detectors. It was good to see social revolutionaries at least trying to get to grips with security issues.

The atmosphere on the floor was heated, and people were plainly spoiling for a fight. I made sport in the delay trying to work out who would be rooting for Hitchens, and who Galloway. Having the svelte, collar-and-tie brigade down for the former, and those wearing expressions of doom for the latter, I concluded that if the discussion issued in an outbreak of violence, Galloway's gang would win, hands down.

There was indiscriminate cheering and hissing, as antagonists took to the stage, sadly not mediated by Jane Fonda, as the evening's bill had promised. Hitchens, who had been circulating fliers on the street outside the theatre before the event, spoke first, and was conventionally urbane. Galloway, took time to break into his stride, but by the time his face had rouged with pique, was well away. The oratory effect of Galloway is difficult to record in words, but it has something to do with a stuttering, delayed cadence, that at first sounds awkward, and then, by some unfathonable mystery, magesterial. He delivered lines like:

"Ladies and gentlemen. You have witnessed. The first ever natural phenomena of its kind.

A butterfly.

That changes into.

A - slug!"

This was Hitchens. The crowd, roughly 65/35% in favour of George to begin with, were elated. Hitchens could only parry with academic profundities, and re-trotted phrase like "slobbering dauphin" and "sinister piffle." He looked a beaten man by the end, which I never expected to see, though by this stage of the evening the hall was in uproar, with people springing to their feet, waving fists, facing one another down, throwing a shoe onto the stage, hissing at the orbiting security guards, and from all directions, the ubiquitous, perfectly American shout, "Shame on you!"

Hitchen's thin voice carried on, like a crumbling Alexandria being sacked.

And the man from the Telegraph, a lone force, applauded him with sudden vigour.

A democratic approach to Cindy Sheehan

2005-09-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

I'm interviewing Cindy Sheehan later this week. For those of you who don't know, Cindy Sheehan is the grieving war mother, parked (at least, was parked) on George Bush's lawn. I started interviewing her yesterday, but she was in Texas, a small Southern state with rednecks, and poor mobile coverage. In the name of democracy, I've decided to open up the interview to anyone who's curious. So, if there's something you've always wanted to know about Cindy Sheehan, but was afraid to ask, or never thought about phoning her up, let me have it. For those with want of imagination, here are a couple of suggestions (bear in mind I'm interviewing her while she's in a hotel):

What are you wearing?

Four star or five?

What's in the fridge?

Is the American-sponsored War on Terror REALLY a Zionist conspiracy?

God Manifests Himself as a Tannoy in the Outdoors

2005-09-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

I'm so keen to trace the pulse of American life, and if their oft-repeated abstract virtues can be embodied in good solid English fare, so much the better. So the other day, I went to see Shakespeare in the Park, which combined classic values like freedom, (nobody was forced into viewing the play, as is the case in the socially determining class structure of British society), freeness, access and the transcendental absolute that is nature (the park being Central Park, very beautiful when floodlit at night.)

The best bit of all this was that as an English subject, and a former literature student at that, I got to be thoroughly offended by the monstrous dismemberment that they enacted upon the Bard's work. The play was "The Two Gentlemen of Verona", which has its blatant limitations even without being a musical, which the directors of Shakespeare in the Park had turned it into. The actors careered breathlessly through the impacted blank verse that had survived the adaptation, with a whole audience sighing with boredom, before the music kicked in, and a collective sigh of relief was breathed. The link was particularly jarring, because the added lines were as bad as:

'I find love alarming,
I'm much happier farming'

, which nobody is going to convince me even early-period Shakespeare wrote.

Thankfully, one of the transcendental American virtues, nature, intervened, by bucketing rain down among us during one of the extravagant dance routines. FOr a moment there was the kind of audience reaction that an avant-garde theatre director can spend his professional life striving for, before the crowd mobilised decisively, and began looking for umbrellas. The actors were skidding around on the liquifying stage, clinging to a desperate professionalism, which most American dancers and performers epitomise. It was all rather exciting, and I hadn't brought an umbrella. At the end of the dance, the performers withdrew, and a tannoy announcement (which, in openair venues, is the closest many secular folk get to experiencing something of God) announced that there would be a pause, in order to dry the stage and bar the actors from mishap. I rather hoped that the pudgy attendents that emerged with cleaning mops would have had some gravedigger-from-Hamlet-style nonesensical banter to spout, but no.

So I exercised that abstract virtue that resides in all of us, the democratic, and left the theatre with my friend.

Central Park was very beautiful at night, though I was told by a knowledgeable American that I was forunate not to have been stabbed. Instead, I ended up in an expensive bar by a manmade lake, drinking whiskey and listening to the babble of drunks. My friend Jenny had gone to the bathroom, when a slurring old crone dressed in a tracksuit top and tennis skirt, sitting across the table, took an eternity to say:

"You're Lance Armstrong. Well done."

After five futile minutes of protestations, I conceded the point in desperation, and confessed that yes, I was Lance Armstrong. Jenny returned from the bathroom, and was unsurprised at the news. Nothing much surprises her. The drunk crone looked at Jenny, and explained she was from Norway. She was an artist. Robert de Niro liked her work. "They" were trying to turn her into the next Andy Warhol, but she wouldn't be whoring her soul to the talkshows. "Look after him", she said. "Make sure he trains seven hours a day, miniumum. And you!" turning to me, "Should not. Be drinking!"

The man accompanying her was ushering her in the direction of the parking lot. His anxious face conveyed an embarrassment in her actions, and the eager desire to get her home and give her a seeing to before she passed out.

American Democracy

2005-09-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

The other day, a friend illicitly procured me a VIP ticket for a Joss Stone concert. I hope no serious money or other goods were involved, because it's not as if I'm really a fan; but when someone's truly convinced of their own generosity, it's so difficult to refuse.

Joss Stone was playing on the Today Show. I felt immediately returned to the safe world of British culture, until somebody told me that Today was America's most-watched breakfast TV show, and then one of the presenters emerged to intense whooping, looking tanned and much unlike John Humphreys. We VIPs were herded like thoroughbred cattle into a small pen by the side of the stage. Seperated from us by an iron fence were the unwashed celeb-watchers, who shot looks of icy hate at us, that almost smashed their ersatz Gucci sunglasses. It was 7.30am.

I couldn't spot much difference between the VIPs and the Lumpen, except for the former had fewer placards, and proudly-displayed passes around their necks. From my study, both groups looked similarly malnourished. The placards bore messages: some stated the origin of the wavers with pride, and some made jovial advances towards Joss Stone. Just before the band emerged, the iron fence seperating the two groups was briefly lifted, and the placard-bearers pushed at our backs. Those in the proletariat section could have made their way right to the front, if they had elbowed and gouged enough. It was like a symbol for American democracy. A man with great silver whiskers and a shirt unbouttoned to reveal chest hair that was surely an assortment of velcro patches he had purchased from a utility store, and a huge piece of jewellry that looked as if it it had cost inverse money, turned to me knowledgably, as one VIP to another, and said:

"Andy Warhol, the artist, once said something about people having their fifteen minutes of fame - that's precisly what's going on here."

Apropos Randy

2005-08-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

Apropos Randy Jones, it strikes me that something should be done to make him a force to once more trouble the charts, perhaps in solo guise. I note from his business card that he has a website, the appropriately cosmic "Randy Jones World", where we can only imagine the inhabitants are strictly choreographed, and luminous. You can, and should, find it at:

www.randyjonesworld.com

He has a new single out, appropriately titled "New York City Boy" - so if you want to understand NYC life, give up on this, and go out and buy.

Also, I learn that there is a photo of Randy and yours truly, occupying some corner of cyberspace. But, ha ha, you'll never find it-

Deborah and Randy

2005-08-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

Some nights after my inititation into East Village life, I had a better initiation. This was Wednesday.

Debbie Harry, who makes even my father's voice quaky, was playing a show at Mo Pitkins, one of these polymath venues that combine all sorts of innovative features, like drinking and singing. She was playing with her jazz band The Passengers, who were hanging out in the downstairs bar, drinking jazz-sized helpings of spirits - but of Debbie herself, there was no sign. You could tell the photographers, because they were the people who didn't look happy to be there.

Eventually, I was shown up to meet Debbie and interview her on East Village life. The up direction in this case involved rather steep black steps, and I could make out her still very recognisable cheekbones for what felt like fifteen minutes before I had attained parity. Those steps were pilgramage. God never looks like you expect, I suppose, and Debbie Harry had a black, broad-rimmed hat pulled down over tightly. She looked quite cross to see me, and as if I had crawled up above my natural rung.

After we chatted for a while at the top of the stairs, she mellowed somewhat and ultimately even brought herself to say a pursed "Good luck." I told her she could say a little bit about The Passengers, and she said "I don't need a plug. It's Jazz!", which I did not think was a helpful description.

The performance space was inevitably packed to the rafters. The Passengers played very idiosyncratic, slightly spastic jazz. The saxophonist was particularly watchable, he had his feet turned inwards like on the Elvis Costello album, "My Aim is True", and managed to move them at high tempo. His solos were exceptional, and the man beside me was understandably nodding along. Hell, I could even excuse his mouth being deliriously wide open...but hold on, doesn't he look like the cowboy from the Village people?

"Hi, I'm the cowboy from the Village people."

Randy Jones, for so was his impossibly apposite name, had to curtail his introduction, for Debbie Harry at that point took to the stage late, first protruding a limp, dangling hand from the behind the curtain, and then her whole person. She launched into the first track immediately, with the nonchalant ease of someone singing in a perfectly acoustic bathroom, and Randy's capacious jaw charted new dimensions. A scrum of photographers had been formed by an invisible referee, and in the melee I could make out several of the unhappy-looking moonfaces I'd seen earlier. One of them had been sitting at table with Randy and myself, and she punctuated her frantic zooming with a return to grab extra reels of film. When the frenzy abated, she settled back at her seat in a state almost of equilibrium.

"So you're from England?", she demanded. Randy had told her. "I gotta lot of friends in England. A lotta friends." I nodded. "And I know a lotta people. Debbie and I go a long way back. I knew her before Blondie, I knew her before any of that."

That was very good, I said. She was wearing a lumberjack shirt loose, and had many missing teeth in her mouth. When I asked her name, I discovered it was also Debbie.

Waitresses are very prompt in America, and one was naturally circulating at this point. Randy took it upon himself to order me another Pinot Noir, generosity that I received with untutored gratitude. Debbie made some small gestues heavenwards with her hands, and the photographer sprang back into action. Debbie took off her hat, and they snapped in chorus. I noticed that Randy was still, unusually, yet to receive his drink. Have some of my Pinot Noir, I suggested. He dipped his moustache, and whispered into my ear:

"No thanks sweetie, I'll drain yours later."

I was untutored, but the signified meaning seemed readily graspable.

I tried to concentrate on the rest of the concert, really I did, and many of the melodies still linger in my head, but I was in a state of bemused agitation throughout. At one point, Randy bent (sorry) in low and whispered something that sounded like:

"Now all we need are the triplets of Belleville!"

The triplets of Belleville? Was that supposed to be code? Code for what? After the show had ended, Randy showed me his, wait for it, mobile phone, which was replete with snaps of Randy with many celebrities. There was Randy with Debbie Harry. There was Randy with someone I didn't recognise. Randy was ubiquitous. After a while, the postshow bonhomie made me relax a little - so much so, that a group of us ended up at a nearby punk club till 3am. At some point I was bundled into a taxi, and awoke the next morning to find Randy's "business" - i.e. being himself, being photographed - card in my front pocket. He must be in his twenties from the looks of the respectfully-demure image, and I would like to say he hasn't aged a bit. I'd like to. Save for the rushing in my temple, I had all the important things intact, and I staggered to the kitchen, and made myself a cup of Earl Gray, as if nothing had remotely happened.

British mornings, American nights

2005-08-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Manhattan from London this week.

So, British mornings, American nights.

On the first full day of my stay here, rising at a preternaturally early 6am through jet-lag, I took the L Train into Union Square. That day coincided with the opening of a festival called Howl, which honours Ginsberg in an appropriately loose fashion. Howl aims to celebrate those prodigal excesses of Village life (drag queens, junkies on corners, etc.) and highlight factors conspiring to threaten their continued existence (real estate vultures, the daftly arcane "Cabaret Laws" invoked by Mayors Giuliani and now Bloomberg.)

The first event kicked off at the Bowery Poetry Cafe, a charming place opposite CBGBs, which appears to be living its life like a person in reverse: having achieved an effortless cool in the 1970s, it has now regressed to an adolescent age full of angst, with nu-metal bands heading the bill, and their outsize t-shirts hanging in the shopwindow. The imminent lease expiration means that CBGBs is at risk of - as many adolescents will say of themselves - having its existence terminated.

At the Poetry Cafe, performance poet Janet Hamill played a 2pm Sunday slot, so there were only a few stragglers to listen to her meditations on cosmic essences, which she half-sang, half-incantated above a steady, sub-Velvet Underground drone, while moving her hips in concentric circles, in a long green skirt.

But a better time was had at that night's official opening night.

In a small club off Delauncey Street, a crowding and sweating bearpit assembled downstairs, and some of us could even see the rapid-fire cabaret acts performing onstage. There was a hulking, bearded man dressed in a skintight see-through blue bodysuit, with a pair of pin-on azure ears. This was the Blue Rabbit. After gurning entertainingly at the crowd for a few moments, he turned his back, and out of nowhere, the string stabs from Psycho started up. Slowly, Blue turned around, holding tight in his hand, like a dagger, a bunch of carrots. Bringing them down in a beleivably murdering arc, he stuffed them into his mouth, ground them to a pulp, lauging maniacally, and spitting out the flakes of carrot onto the floor. His set had finished. Rapturous applause broke out.

Later in the evening, we witnessed a human lady dressed an alin reading what purported to be an extract from the autobiography of her dog, a naked hula-hooper, and a female singer-songwriter delivering strumming traditional folk ballads about her cunt.

In the words of Murray Hill, the evening's host, and self-appointed "hardest working man in showbusiness", "welcome to a celebration of our life of doing nothing at all!"

Murray Hill, of course, is a lady with a moustache.