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.