Sunday, February 22, 2009

Why am I soft in the middle (when) the rest of my life is so hard…or…The Return of the Motorcycle Boy

It is Oscar time and I confess to being more than a little distracted by the pending festivities. There are no Oscar parties on the horizon and I am not really that inclined to sit and wince through the acceptance speeches that are always the same. The red carpet waltz as the stars arrive doesn’t really interest me, except perhaps to see whether Angelie Jolie decides to wear her haute couture outfit back to front as she did (reportedly) at another recent awards ceremony. And I also admit that I am bemused at the choice of Hugh Jackman as compere. This decision prompted the previous host, Jon Stewart from the Daily Show, to declare that the awards must have been cancelled because he hadn’t got the call asking him to do the gig. So I am not sure how our Hugh will fare. Undoubtedly I would have preferred Jon Stewart’s smart arse Yonkers banter. As to the films nominated? I confess that I have only seen three of the films that are in the running. Loved Sean Penn in “Milk”, but then it is hard to find a dud in his cv (perhaps with the exception of his marriage to Madonna). Also enjoyed “Slumdog Millionaire” though I am not sure that it is the BIG picture that everyone is declaring. There seems to be something of a controversy circulating also that the film’s producer/directors exploited the young kids who appear in the film. But then that may well be down to the Machiavellian mud-slinging of the studios as they jostle to get their horses across the line. Which brings me to the heart of the matter, so to speak. It is all about the return of Mickey Rourke.

Bouncing back into contention, like Sly Stallone in Rockys 1,2,3,4 etc. He is back in the game. I am so glad to see Mickey Rourke back up on the big screen and nominated for a little nude gold guy for the “Wrestler”. From the moment that I saw him in “Rumblefish” I was convinced he was the next big thing. I still watch Keifer Sutherland running around on the tv show “24” and see the less-talented and not as good looking version of Mickey. Then there was the work that Mickey did in “Diner” and “Pope of Greenwich Village” which confirmed, for me, that he was going to be the next big thing. Of course subsequent films didn’t really bear out such rosy-cheeked exuberance. I went to see “Year of the Dragon” and squirmed throughout it, conscious of the glares from the other people who had come along on my say so. After that “Angel Heart” left you thinking that it had channeled a David Lynch episode of “Twin Peaks”. I am sure de Niro would happily lift that one from his resume. It could also be argued that this film outing was the career choice that put Lisa Bonet’s acting career into something of a terminal tail-spin, but I stand to be corrected on that one. But you get my drift. I am not even going to touch the execrable duo of 9 ½ weeks and Wild Orchard – oh well, yes I am, because 9 ½ weeks is also to blame for Joe Cocker’s wailing like a banshee “You Can Leave Your Hat On”. So Mickey disappeared into the back blocks of LA to take up boxing, and turning his back (reportedly) on a number of big ticket item roles in films like The Untouchables, The Rain Man, Platoon and 48 Hours. It was during this phase that, by all accounts, Mickey took too many punches, lost all his money and looks and took to shacking up in a run down place in LA with his pet Chihuahua. After a number of small roles in films over the years, though, we finally have his triumphant return. Cue to the sound of “Hail to the Chief” that they play usually for the arrival of the President.

For ages I thought I was the only one who had this faith in Mickey Rourke –a bit like being an English Football supporter whose team are in the Fourth Division and are absolute rubbish – but who never stops believing. One good thing about the blogging is that you find out there in the depths of cyber space other people with the same delusions or obsessions as yourself. I mean you could never enter a conversation about film with people at a party and offer up “well I think Mickey Rourke’s work in 9 ½ weeks is critically underrated” without people either calling you a cab or moving nervously away. It would not fly and I have to hastily add that my going in to bat for Mickey has never managed to stretch so far as to try and justify his worst work. At the wonderful blog “The House Next Door” (go to: www.thehousenextdooronline.com/ ) there is a really nice take on the return of Mickey and the numerous comments make me realize that I am not alone in my love affair with Mickey. An article in Salon by Cintra Wilson reflects on the appeal of Mickey as being down to the fact that she had “never seen a male movie star the compellingly enigmatic sexual equivalent of Mickey Rourke as "the Motorcycle Boy." I am not sure what it is about Mickey that makes me think of him as the great couldabeen champion. Admittedly he would never have had the depth and range that Sean Penn has showed, but he had real, big screen charisma of a type that pretty-boy Tom Cruise could only dream about and Richard Gere could never approach. And he was the bad boy when you get so many sanitized boring actors.

Of course there is the down side to Mickey’s return, what we might term the clouds around the sunshine. The damage done by the boxing and the botched plastic surgery, and reportedly too much bad liquor, leaves the star of “The Wrestler” barely recognizable as the smouldering screen presence that first roared across the big screen as the Motorcycle Boy. When I saw the first publicity pictures I presumed it was make up. How else could Mickey Rourke suddenly resemble both the character Hell Boy and the actor who plays Hell Boy, Ron Perlman? No disrespect intended to Mr Perlman or, for that matter, Hell Boy. It is just that Mickey with his sardonic, wrinkled smile personified a latter day James Dean. During the Wrestler there are glimpses of the trademark wistful melancholy smile, but for the main it is puffed up lips and scarred face.Now he gets to strut his stuff again…which brings me to the Paul Simon lyric at the top from the song “You Can Call Me Al”.

A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard

So Mickey gets the shot at redemption, but in avoiding being a burned out has-been, mumbling (like his Bukowski character in Bar Fly) something along Brando’s famous line that “I coulda been a contender”, there is bitter-sweet irony to it all. Mickey is back, he’s a contender but it is some sort of Faustian deal because he ends up looking like a cartoon character, even if he has delayed the trip to the cartoon graveyard. So I hope Mickey wins, though I suspect Sean Penn’s role will triumph. I want to go back to my DVD’s of Rumblefish and remember a Mickey Rourke who didn’t support George Bush, carry around a yappy little dog and act as though he was still in character as a wrestler. But you still gotta love him.

All of which has brought me to reflect on what it means when you realize you are getting old. You no longer snigger when you hear the Who lyric that demands: “hope I die before I get old” or scoff at the Rolling Stones performing and refer to them as the “Strolling Bones”. At the risk of sounding like a scratched record (an allusion which of itself dates me) I am returning to the ruminations on getting older…perhaps it’s the impending celebration (!!) of another birthday. Sorry to my friend Chris from Bowral who has endured this rant before, but it has come home with increased poignancy in recent times with a number of things, beginning with the realization that after a few weeks in the Oval Office Obama (same year of birth as moi) is going grey. Then there was the eternal rock adolescent; that Peter Pan figure of Bruce Springsteen at the Superbowl doing the obligatory rock star slide on his knees. The only problem was that it ended badly when he slipped off the stage like a beer in a hackneyed comedy film that slides along the bar and onto the floor. As one pundit put it, it left the cameraman at the end of the abortive slide with zipper marks from the Boss’ crotch. Then there was the moment in the film “Milk” where the character Harvey Milk reflects that he is turning 40 and he hadn’t done anything with his life. All totally depressed me for a moment, till I remembered that my friends Rupa and Chris had both gone to see Leonard Cohen rocking out in Australia (at the sprightly age of 74) and wowing them in New York last week. He is still singing and painting. To borrow from Paul Kelly and Mark Seymour’s song “Hey boys, we’ve got a lot of work to be done”. Time to start doing things. But first I am going to take time to think about which cartoon character I would want to be if I was to end up in a cartoon graveyard. You have to keep things in perspective after all.

Same as it ever was




It must be getting on to a month since Obama took office (or, as Keith Olbermann would say for February 22 2009, “it is 2115 days since the previous President declared mission accomplished in Iraq”) and the Obama honeymoon is still in full swing. This despite the fact that the economy is still tanking and all you read in the papers are dire forecasts of job lay-offs and company liquidation. Still the love affair shows no sign of diminishing. Watching the Daily Show and you have Jon Stewart discussing the daily doings under the rule of Emperor Obama and then there is a silly, silly moment where, after he mentions the President, a voice from on-high can be heard moaning “Obaammmaaa” in a more than suggestive manner.

But I have to say that not everything is hunky-dory in Obama-Land. There are a few signs emerging that it is business-as-usual in the US of A. The most recent portent was the publication of the racist cartoon in the New York Post that linked the story of the chimp that savaged a woman and the battle of the President to get the stimulus package passed. The caption to the cartoon reads: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”. For all the misguided trumpeting that the election of Obama meant that race as an issue was dead in the US, here was tangible concrete proof of the racist undercurrents that percolate through society. Granted that the New York Post is not a broadsheet with any sort of pretensions to the type of seriousness that we might attribute to the New York Times. But to represent the President as a monkey is just so clearly a representation steeped in the racist past of the lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws and the claims that African-Americans were an inferior race. Although the NY Post apologized it was a clear indication that the election of Obama was a momentous event, but that there are ingrained, historical attitudes that will be hard to shift (adding the fact that the NY Post is presided over by the former Australian, Rupert Murdoch).

The second portent that things haven’t changed all that much was the manner in which the Republicans rebuffed Obama’s overtures for a consensual approach on the stimulus package. For all the hope and hype of bi-partisanship, it is clear that the dinosaurs from the Republican Party are reverting to the usual petty nit-picking politics – as if it were business as usual. So they lined up to block the stimulus package and declare that the government should be delivering tax cuts and that they could not, in clear conscience, saddle future generations with such debt. Leaving aside the fact that it all happened under the watch of their very own Dubya you have to wonder if they will ever learn? There was even the ludicrous comment from Republican (of course) Congresswoman Michelle Bachman who declared that she didn’t think that the stimulus package would work because “we are running out of rich people in this country”.

As if to emphasise the radical, iconoclastic nature of Obama as politician there is a constant procession of petty, provincial politicians with the snouts in the trough. Or, alternatively, you have the Republican governors declaring (presumably on ideological grounds) that they would not accept funds from the Federal stimulus package. No thought given to the fact that unemployment rates are rising by the month and the home foreclosures continue apace and the people that would be affected by such grand-standing would be their own constituents. If it sounds like I am offering up Obama for beatification or some other such recognition of a status of divinity it is only that his radiance is increased in comparison with the tawdry, sad pack of incompetents who (supposedly) represent the people in the Congress. It brings me to the inescapable conclusion that we do it better in Australia! Granted the Queen is an anomaly and the Governor-General did stuff up things in 1975. But it did deliver us the martyrdom of Gough and something for the Labor Parties true believers to cling on to. What I am talking about is the limited power given to the elected President and the power that resides in the Congress. My understanding of the history of the framing of the US Constitution is limited (with a lot of it drawn, I concede, from watching the HBO television series on the life of John Adams, the second President) but I have to say that I find it passing strange that the President who has been elected in a landslide has to battle against the Congress, and basically horse trade, to make sure that he gets his measures through. Even his own party (take a bow Harry Reid) for a fleeting moment, gave some indication that they would scrutinize Obama’s measures. So the President is elected to govern and then has to go around trying to placate the regional pork-barreling aspirations of every tin-pot senator and representative! What is even stranger is that the President can lose control of the two Houses (Senate and Reps) and continue to govern, as a lame duck President, for the remainder of his or her term. It is also strange that the opposition party leader, having lost the election, fades back into the crowd and they don’t have a key spokesperson to go toe to toe with the President. Constantly the petty machinations of politicians bring into stark relief the yawning gulf that separates them from the vision of Obama. I dread to think what will happen to the US if the forces of mediocrity frustrate any real change because the Republicans are trotting out more of the same. And that obviously hasn’t worked.

So there is little cause to celebrate the higher motives of most US politicians, but I have to confess that it is not all boring and bland. Once you move beyond the ridiculous notion that politics should be about serving the people (with the exception of you-know-who), you can glean at least some passing enjoyment from watching politics as a form of blood sport or extreme reality show. There has been, for example, the riveting spectacle in recent months of the impeachment proceedings against Rob Blagojevich, the Governor of Illinois, who was wire-tapped by the FBI touting the vacated seat of Obama to the highest bidder. Infamously Blago (as the media here have dubbed him) is heard declaring to his advisers, when it became clear that the President elect was not going to play ball, that he didn’t want to give this “motherf—-er [the President-elect] his senator. F—- him. For nothing? F—- him.”
(For more of Blago’s deluded, colourful rantings check out the politico site at: http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1D549536-18FE-70B2-A8DEA34624EA721A

What was even more entertaining was the string of media appearances made by Blago, where he declared that the Illinois Congress was denying him the right to give his side of the story. Leaving aside the falsity of that statement it was hugely entertaining to watch the besieged Governor quoting Rudyard Kipling ("If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you."). This in turn lent itself immediately to parodies along the lines of:

If you can keep your job while all about you
Are fielding bribes and blaming it on you,
If you can duck the Feds while all men doubt you,
And bleep-ing show the charges are untrue,
If you can fight and not be tired by fighting,
Or, being wiretapped, profess surprise,
Or argue that there will be no indicting
Because it’s all a bleep-ing pack of lies....


Then, to trump it, Blagojevich went to old western movies to explain how he was being denied a right to be heard. He declared:
I like old movies and I like old cowboy movies. I want to explain how these rules work in a more understandable way. There was an old saying in the old west. There was a cowboy who was charged with stealing a horse in town. And some of the other cowboys, especially the guy whose horse was stolen, were very unhappy with that guy. One of the cowboys said, let‘s hang him. The other cowboys, hold on, before we hang him, let‘s first give him a fair trial. Then we‘ll hang him.
Under these rules, I‘m not even getting a fair trial. They are just hanging me. Under that fact pattern I just gave you, if the cowboy who charge was stealing a horse was charged with doing that in town, but, in fact, on the date and time that he apparently stole the horse in town, he was on the ranch with six other cowboys, herding cattle and roping steers, and then he expects that when his day comes to go to court, he can bring those six cowboys to say it wasn‘t him, because he was on the ranch herding cattle; even if he could bring those cowboys in to say that, under these rules, under 8-B, it wouldn‘t matter. The complaint that charged him with stealing the horse would convict him.


This is the man that was in charge of governing a State. He is undoubtedly barking looney mad, or perhaps an indication of what it takes to be a successful politician in Chicago. A further possibility does spring to mind from the conspiracy theorist in me (and we all love a good conspiracy, admit it). I couldn’t help but make a connection between Blagojevich’s rantings and the disturbing postscript to the film “Milk”. The killer of Harvey Milk was defended on the basis that he had an overload of sugar in his diet from fast food and so he was not technically sane. It was dubbed the “twinkies defence” and it worked! He got convicted for two counts of manslaughter (having also gunned down the mayor of San Francisco) but only served five years. Given that Blago will be indicated on Federal criminal charges I would suggest that these media performances aren’t going to hurt his defence. In any event Blago made for entertaining viewing. He even had the larger than life hairstyle to go with the larger-than-life political ego (matching even Donald Trump – the hair I mean, but possibly the ego too). The fact that Blagojevich comes from the same Chicago that delivered us Obama doe makes me a tad nervous, however, that the new Emperor might have feet of clay, that there might be some political scuttlebutt or past misdeeds lurking in the background. Then again if the right-wing extremists of the world like Russ Limbaugh haven’t managed to find anything then I can sleep comfortable in the belief that they can’t lay a glove on him…yet.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Falling at the first hurdle (blogging as a self-indulgent exercise)

Okay I have my lil sister Meaghan to thank/blame for this moment of uncertainty, this crisis of indecision. She was the person that first alerted me to the website of “Stuff white people like”. I skimmed it, smiled and went away. In recent times I have come back and looked again. The response is something akin to the Shower Scene from Psycho. I am wondering how long I will be in therapy working out (a) who I am? (b) who I should be ?(c) how white I am?
As to the website – well it is :

www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com

But the part that has really messed me up (thanks Meag) is #56 Lawyers. Which might seem inane because I am sort of a lawyer but it is the full text that really gets to the issue. Let me quote at length:

A common characteristic amongst white people is the need to over analyze things, so they partake in activities such as therapy, writing a blog, or becoming an arts major. So its rather obvious why white people love lawyers so much as it is the one profession that has mastered the art of “over analyzing things”.


So there you have it. Where Lionel Ritchie could croon that she was “Once, twice, three times a lady” here I am once, twice, three strikes as a sad case. So I can always lie about therapy but I am pinned, like an insect on a piece of card. Yes I am a lawyer (sort of…sorry Neil, guilt by association), and I have an arts major and yes I blog. So I am inescapably damned for that one. I love to over-analyze things…and make lists…and drink too much red wine. But it isn’t that bad is it? Well it is not…unless you start checking through the list of stuff white people like. There is a book too and it is slightly different from the website, but check it out. So, for the record I will concede that I do have a partiality the following:

For #23 microbreweries
White people don’t like stuff that’s easy to acquire. Beer is no exception.
They generally try to avoid beers like Budweiser, Labatt’s, Molson, Coors, and Heineken because if it’s mass produced it is bad. No exceptions.
So when they need a beer, they turn to microbrews who seem to be located almost exclusively in New England, Ontario, Quebec and Colorado. Being able to walk into a bar and order a beer that no one has heard of makes white people feel good about their alcohol drinking palate.
A friend of mine once met a white guy who brought a notebook with him to every bar. He would then keep a record of all the beers he drank and his experience with them. He called it his ‘beer journal.’
Also of note: most white people want to open a microbrewery at some point. One that uses organic hops
.

On wine (#23)

Within white culture, you are expected to know what a good wine is, what wine is not acceptable to like, and the names of prominent wine growing regions.
But because there are thousands of wineries, thousands of wines, and a limited time to try them or learn about it, often times, white people need to fake knowledge. If they are exposed as not being knowledgeable, they will look like fools and their peers will consistently make jokes about them liking Boone’s Farm, Thunderbird,
Steeler, or Lakeport. This humiliation can crush a white person for years.
When a white person offers you wine, you take a small sip and then say “ooh, that’s nice. What country is it from?” then they will say the name of the country and you say “I love wines from that country, I would love to get a villa in the wine region there.” White people will nod in agreement as they all want to have a second home in a wine region like Napa, Tuscany or Santa Barbara.
It is also a good idea to say that your favorite wine is from a small winery called [make up name like 'Spotswood,' 'Red Duck,' Random Spanish name] in [Australia, Argentina, France, California, or Chile] that is hard to get in whatever country you are in. White people will be impressed that they have not heard of this wine and consider you to be a very smart person. They will also make a note to try to find that wine, and when they can’t find it, your status will rise even higher.


In addition I have to confess to a love of breakfast places (#36), the Daily Show/Stephen Colbert (#35), indie music (#41) and sushi (#42) and dinner parties (#90) and the “idea” of marathons (#27)

In life, there are certain milestones of physical activity that can define you. A sub 5 second 40 yard dash, a 40 inch vertical leap and so forth. To a white person, the absolute pinnacle of fitness is to run a marathon. Not to win, just to run.
White people will train for months, telling everyone who will listen about how they get up early in the morning, they run when it rains, how it makes them feels so great and gives them energy.
When they finish the marathon, they will generally take a photo of themselves in a pair of New Balance sneakers, running shorts, and their marathon number with both hands over their head in triumph (seriously, look it up, this is universal).
They will then set goals like running in the Boston Marathon or the New York Marathon.

If you find yourself in a situation where a white person is talking about a marathon, you must be impressed or you will lose favor with them immediately. Running for a certain length of time on a specific day is a very important thing to a white person and should not be demeaned.

And so, for the record, I also like Barack Obama but not because if I don’t say that people will think I am racist (#8)

Of course there are those ones that are too culturally specific to America, such as #75 (Threatening to move to Canada). Mind you, if Howard had stayed in power it was looking like a good option. The there is #100 (Boston Red Sox, substitute Collingwood?) #30 (Wrigley Field, read MCG and it is the same). As to the rest, there are the ones that I don’t think apply (joining a religion your parents don’t like, bad high school memories, organic food, not having a tv, veganism, Toyota Prius, rugby, multilingual children, Japan, graduate school, snowboarding, musical comedy (you have GOT to be joking!!). Then there are the others that might need to go to the third umpire and I will no doubt dispute them.

All I can say is thank god I no longer have to eat organic food, promise to learn a foreign language (read: Portugese – bloody hard) and pretend to like classical music. Instead I am going to pack up t-shirts, shorts and my outdoor gear (#87 think Katmandu or Paddie Palin) and drop them at St Vinnies, donning a flanny shirt and getting some meat pies and Budweiser beer and/or Jim Beam. Then I am going to crank up the Lnyrd Skynrd (must learn to spell their name) and watch NasCar on cable. Which makes me…??? Hmm …confused I guess.

So far away, so close…

From the moment I first saw the news of the bushfires I have felt a strange tightness in my chest, not unlike an asthma attack. That was how the impressions of the bushfire hit me. It is strange because here I am, half the world away and I feel a sense of dread and fear and sadness. The media here gives the fires a cursory fifteen seconds of coverage so I find myself glued to the internet, constantly hitting the refresh button to see if there are any update. The internet is a blessing because I can get a real sense of where the fires are burning and friends and family can sent me updates, but then I find myself waking in the middle of the night and going to the computer at 2am, at 3.30 am at 6 am to see if things are any better or worse. Hewie has sent me a letter that had been forwarded by email from another teacher who he had worked with and was in a town that had been decimated. It was heartbreaking to read a letter, from a complete stranger, talking of the kids in a town that they knew were dead. Nandini has kept a stream of bulletins on the state of fires and posted links to the ABC website and Mum kept me up to date on the family that were close to the hotspots. I know that my nephew Cleon was heading towards Alexandra and that my auntie’s house in Warragul had been in the path of the fire and the embers had been falling onto the roof. While the media here in the US has hardly made mention of the fires, De’s mother rang from Rio de Janeiro. Everything was okay there, she told De, but that she was worried about my family in Australia. Then De’s friend Ni, who hardly ever uses the internet, sent a message asking whether the fires were near my family and De’s nephew, Daniel, sent an email asking the same thing.

It was only in 2007 that I was in Australia and the fires were burning through California and threatening San Diego, so much that the University was shut down and people who I work with had to leave their homes and be evacuated to the local sports stadium. There wasn’t the same sense of dread, however, once I knew that De was safe and not in the path of the fires. The images were scary but the names of the places that burned didn’t resonate. This was different – it was the names of towns where I had friends and family. There was a notice on the La Trobe mail server that acknowledged that many staff and their families were in the areas that were burning. Whittlesea is on the doorstep of La Trobe, Flowerdale is where my friends Kate and Charlie have a place, Churchill is where I lived for a time, Warragul is where I have family. And there was Marysville…where I didn’t know anyone but it is etched in my memory for the weekend that De and I visited, taking photo after photo of the snow around Lake Mountain and of the parrots that congregated on the porch of the b & b we were staying in. Now Marysville is gone. It is just beyond comprehension. The scenes of the aftermath of the fire are so apocalyptic, like a war zone. So I watch the footage of people sifting through their burned homes, and so often it seems as though their past and their future, their dreams, are all in ashes. It is impossible to comprehend. I shudder at the images of burned out cars where people haven’t managed to make it out. For all my talk in the past of what it is to be away from Australia it is now I have a sense of the country, the people. Here in the US there is so much investment in the American sense of nationhood, with the flag and jingoistic patriotism. But it is here and now when I see the Australian character– without the need for elaborate pageant or overstated pomp – that I am struck with by an overwhelming sense of belonging and pride in the people who are there in the midst of the bushfires. There are the exhausted firefighters, covered in soot or hobbling from burns and the resilience of the people who have lost everything yet refuse to give in. All this is playing out against the images of a countryside that I love but is scarcely recognizable. I don’t pretend that I would be doing anything different if I were in Australia. I would be on the internet or watching the news in the same way, but for some reason I just feel at this moment that I am so far, far away from home and yet so close.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

I’M IN A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND (STILL)

We caught a red-eye from LA to New York on the Wednesday night to go to New Brunswick in New Jersey. De had to give a paper at Rutgers University and so I thought I would tag along and we would spend the weekend in New York. We arrived at JFK at 6am and had to catch a train and then a cab out to New Brunswick. We took the shuttle down to Manhattan before getting another bus out to New Jersey. As Frank sings it, it’s the city that never sleeps. Here we were at 7 am and the streets were packed like Collins Street at midday. From there we travelled out to New Brunswick, which is a pretty little campus town – with all the things that students and academics like: Starbucks, brewery pubs and various types of chain restaurants. The trip to and from New Jersey removed any romantic notions about Jersey though. From the Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits references (“Jersey Girl”) I had the romanticized vision of working class USA. From the train the landscape was covered in snow gave it a rural bucolic feel, but always away in the distance there were refineries and transport depots and factories. All along the route and the colour of the dirty snow was matched by vapour belching out from the factory smoke-stacks. The car-plates from New Jersey claim title it “The Garden State” but I have to say the parts we saw aren’t from any garden I know (and I am a bad gardener). From the train we could see three bedroom houses on postage stamp sized blocks of land. The strangest part was that quite a few had swimming pools, both in-ground and above ground, that were nearly as wide as the backyard - and they were all frozen solid.
We spent Friday in Manhattan – doing the long walk from our hotel on 42nd and Fifth Avenue to Central Park. The snow had covered the park and there were skaters on a rink – and crazy tourists who were disregarding the signs that warned of the thin ice and walking over the frozen ponds. There were only flurries of snow but the Park was beautiful and, in parts, it felt almost as though you were in the country. Walking back down to Times Square in the freezing cold (the temperature was about 3 Celsius and the following day it didn’t get above –2 Celsius) I couldn’t help but be impressed by the fortitude of the New Yorkers who stood out in the freezing night air for hours for the New Year festivities. I mean that was seriously cold.
All the time we were in New York I found myself noticing the differences between the East Coast (or perhaps NY) and the West Coast. I think that it is something that Americans do (and in Australia we have/had the Melbourne vs Sydney rivalry…does that still exist?), the constant evaluation and checking of the two coasts. I know that much of the population of the USA envies the Californian lifestyle with the beaches and the weather, but New York is like being in a real city. Even the food is different. In New York as you walk along the streets there are the vendors selling the artery-hardening, high is saturated fat delicacies such as pretzels and hot dogs. And the smell wafts around you, strong and not at all fragrant, but part of the streetscape. So you can walk up the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art scoffing a hot dog with ketchup and mustard without a twinge of guilt. In California there would probably be a by-law preventing eating such unhealthy food in public and the punters would be chugging down organic tofu wraps. I know California has its share of bad food (and the chains are universal in their badness) but in New York you know that it will not all be over-priced and bland (sushi and Mexican are good in California, but it ends there). We ate Brazilian one night and Portugese the next down in Greenwich Village and then went out and listened to too some blues and drank too many dirty vodka martinis. By the end I was oblivious to the wind chill gusting along the streets (but that is not what I meant by a “New York State of Mind” I might add).
Another thing you have to love about New York is that you feel like it is the city that you inhabit, albeit vicariously, through all of those movies and television shows. The streetscape has a familiarity to it born of the famous films (try googling and the list is awesome) and the television series (for me I confess to “Law and Order” and “Sex and the City” as obvious candidates). If I liked Woody Allen (although I don’t think “liked” is the word you would use for him, would you?) I would have got more out of the Brooklyn Bridge according to De, but ah well.
From Brooklyn we headed up through Wall Street. It was the weekend so it was closed (and cold as charity in those streets where the skyscrapers are so high there is perennial shade) but we noticed that they had erected barriers around the Stock Exchange. There was a private company van erecting the bollards in one of the side streets and it struck me as appropriate that the security companies in the US have morphed into “counter terrorism specialists”. Given that there was news that the Citibank executives had paid out bonuses to their executives in the realm of $17 billion the big end companies probably are in need of protection. This was the company who received a substantial handout from the government coffers in the period before Christmas, prompting Obama to call the Wall Street bonuses “shameful.” I see Kevin Rudd is trying to stimulate the Australian economy with a $42 billion Aus (roughly US$28 billion) package. Remember that the Citibank bonuses were for just one company…I think Barack was understating it by calling it shameful. But then that is why Wall Street is such a part of the American Dream and it belongs in New York. The city has it all, from the trashy, greedy, gaudy to the sublimely beautiful and supremely stylish. At the risk of embarrassing myself by referencing to Billy Joel (a sure sign of the on-set of dementia, or at least hearing impediment) even though we are back in San Diego and the winter temperature today was 26 Celsius, I’m still feeling in a New York state of mind.