Bon Iver concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, From Spring / Summer
I wonder at what point Obama realised he had become a pop culture icon. The fact that many young people treat him like a rock star is old news by now, of course, but to see it in action is still startling.
But the most amusing part was seeing everyone go nuts when the band brought a cardboard cutout of Obama on stage. At one point they tossed it into the audience and the cardboard Obama crowdsurfed around. People were as excited as if it were a 1997 Radiohead concert and Thom Yorke had jumped into the crowd.
The picture at the top of this post is from a separate concert by Bon Iver, possibly the best show I've been to in New York. Now that it's winter time it seems appropriate to showcase one of his tracks.
Sam recently told me about a moment she remembers clearly from many years ago. She was walking down the street and saw a homeless woman rummaging through a trash can. As she pored through it, a homeless man walked up with his cart, dug in it, pulled out an apple and offered it to the woman. On the busy street, no one paid attention to the generosity and care of the ragged people at the trash can.
As I sit in a coffee shop in DC taking a short break from work, I'm thinking of that moment she related to me for various reasons. What jolted my memory was seeing a homeless woman walk in a couple hours ago and take a seat at the window. A while later another woman joined her and they sat talking. As I sat with my drink, secretly eating a sandwich I brought with me, a man walked in and also joined them. It looked as though he wasn't familiar with the other two, as he introduced himself. I saw him ask one of the women for some money, which she lent him with a pat on the back. Who are these people? Where do they live? What do they do every day? As they catch shelter from the grey rainy day outside, it's an interesting glimpse of a community I know nothing about.
Before the man said a word I could tell he was in a bad mood. He opened the door with stormclouds on his face, and without giving me the chance to whimper "sorry to bother you," he barked, "the next time you knock on the door like the police are gonna bust in, think about all the people round here that have babies you're waking up!"
I looked at Jeremy, my partner in crime, and tried to find a way out of the situation. In the best of times I don't like pressing my views on people. How were we going to convince this man to vote for Obama when we landed on the wrong foot before saying a word?
"We're apologise sir," Jeremy said, "we didn't realise how hard we had knocked." The truth was, so many people hadn't answered their doors we weren't sure that anyone could hear us use the tiny knockers on all the doors in the apartment complex. By the end of the day we would have knocked on approximately 140 doors and talked to just 15 people. We weren't sure whether to believe so many people were truly out of their apartments on a grey and soggy Saturday afternoon so we had become a little over-enthusiastic trying to get them to answer.
To my surprise, we ended up having the longest conversation of the day with this man. After introducing ourselves as volunteers for the Obama campaign and asking if he had made up his mind who he would vote for in next week's presidential election (he hadn't), we asked what issues were most important to him. His primary concern was health care – the current situation was "ridiculous" – and his wife, a teacher, wanted to know whether Obama planned to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act.
Just over a week later I sat in a bar in the Lower East Side with friends and watched the election results start to roll in. I had decided to treat the night like New Year's by pairing the spectacle with drinks. I figured no matter which way the results turned out, I'd be happier if I wasn't sober. I had watched the Palin/Biden debates in the same bar, and like that prior evening the crowd was boisterous and vocal.
We watched CNN roll out an increasingly ridiculous array of computer generated effects to illustrate the vote counts, capped with the crowning achievement of using an actual hologram to project a commentator into the news studio. In between trying to determine how much better informed I felt by hearing news from a live Princess Leia, as opposed to the more pedestrian norm of a pundit's face on a giant plasma screen, I kept track of which way states were swaying. It was certainly interesting to see CNN predict state outcomes after only the first 2,000 votes had been counted. And I found the more I drank, the less I cared how statistically insignificant a 0% vote sample was.
The crowd was so loud by the time the election was called for Obama that I had no idea what state had first handed him the victory. Virginia? Pennsylvania? I couldn't tell. All I knew was that a spontaneous cheer went up. People were hooting, clapping, pounding the tables. The bar passed out glasses of free champagne and everyone toasted.
Soon after, we spilled out onto the street and made our way to another bar. We were some distance from the real party in the streets up in Harlem, but nevertheless celebration was in the air everywhere. By the time Obama gave his acceptance speech I was another couple drinks down, which made it that much harder to believe he was really there, that he actually won the election.
Where did this ecstatic feeling come from? It's not because I expect Obama to make a lot of progress with this country's problems. I have very modest hopes for what may come of his administration. The simple and sad truth is that 8 years of one of the worst U.S. leaders of all time has lowered my expectations to the point where I am excited by the prospect of an intelligent person in the White House. Someone who seems to grasp how the world works in reality. The fact that he showed one of the most nuanced understandings of the issue of race in this country is icing on the cake.
And it is that issue of race which I have been thinking about most in the days since the election. I voted for Obama because I thought he was the best candidate for the job, and his physical appearance had nothing to do with that opinion. Now that he is the president-elect, however, I have let myself think about the colour of his skin and am moved by what has happened. There is a song by Nina Simone I've been listening to a lot recently.
Nina Simone recorded the song in a performance she gave 3 days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Her emotion shows through in only a few places in the song, but it is enough to glimpse just how devastating the period after his death must have been.
"Will my country stand or fall? Is it too late for us all? And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?"
Many interviews with potential voters before the election showed just how far from resolved the problem of racism in America is. The New York Times has been covering reactions to the election from all over the country and the world. In one clip from a school in Brooklyn, a black child is asked what he thinks of Obama's election. He replies, "since a black man became president, then other people that would usually think that black people would become something bad or anything else like that, we can become presidents or whatever we want to." This child feeling like people look at him as a problem is one of the sad realities of life in the U.S. An article in the New York Times on Sunday showed the attitudes black people have to grow up dealing with. In response to Obama's success, one woman interviewed commented, "I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks. From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive."
As sad as it is to hear those comments, I am still blown away by the person we have elected to be our future president. If nothing else, it will hopefully spark more progress on the problem of racism, and recognition of the unhealed wounds of America's roots.
On that note, I've been following up Nina Simone's song with this more uplifting Marvin Gaye-sampling track by Brother Ali.
Shortly after I moved into my apartment last year, the superintendent for the building was fired. As a parting farewell, he destroyed the locks on the outside front door. It seemed he had neglected to perform any kind of maintenance as the next superintendent found serious plumbing problems, and corners of the basement were apparently piled with rat droppings.
Next up was a very personable superintendent named Al. Al grew up around the corner from where I'm living. The East Village. More specifically, Alphabet City.
This is an area where a large part of New York comes to dine and party at night. It's lively, and it feels like a neighbourhood as opposed to faceless blocks of apartments. Al told me stories of the history of the area. A couple decades ago few people would set foot here. Broken down apartments, drug addicts, and trafficking ruled the streets.
People would drive in from Jersey, put money in the one small window of an apartment block that wasn't boarded up, take the drugs that were handed back, and drive out. A network of tunnels connected the basements of apartments along Avenue B from 2nd St. all the way to 14th St. Useful for escaping when the police mounted an occasional raid.
2nd St. and B is where I live now. The gym I go to is situated in a basement of a building on B. There are at least 5 bars and restaurants on the one short stretch of street between 2nd and 3rd. Every Friday and Saturday there are crowds of people dressed up outside these places.
I moved without the faintest idea of the history of this area of New York. It's strange to think how it's changed. Not all traces of the past have been erased, of course. The East Village still has a grungy feel about it. Uneven pavements, pothole-strewn streets, lots of brick and concrete. A few weeks ago I sat in Tompkins Square park, the site of rioting and police brutality when police tried to evict homeless 20 years ago. As I ate my falafel, I saw a fight break out between a group of drug addicts. Nearby on the grass people lay tanning and young families with babies picnicked. A strange mix.
I've yet to delve into the history of New York. Maybe because the size of the city makes it a daunting task. It's a shame I don't know more people like Al to make it personal. Now I don't even have Al to hear anecdotes from - he quit after a short time, and the building management has managed to get through two more superintendents since then.
Imagine moving to a new city. What could you hope for on your first day there? I suppose the first thing you would want to sort out is accommodation. It's a big city with a tough housing market. You luck out — the very first place you visit has lots of light, is in a great area of town, and to top things off has a beautiful rooftop with a view. You click with the housemate. Done deal.
Next up is some kind of work. You make a call and set up a meeting for the beginning of the following week to get started.
Anything else? Some entertainment maybe. A night at the Metropolitan Opera watching Anna Netrebko in Romeo & Juliet.
You can see why, traipsing around town in constant rain with soaked shoes, I was happy as could be. Welcome to New York.
As soon as I slowed down I realised I was making a mistake. I had just come out of a job interview and was lost in thought as I walked through the SoMa neighbourhood to the San Francisco CalTrain station. The man looked at me as I passed as if he knew me, and I returned his half-smile with a curious expression on my face. I pulled my mind from the interview and back to the present. Did I know him? Maybe we’d bumped into each other when I was working here last year. I stopped and turned around.
“Hi, I’m Jack,” he said, extending his hand.
I shook it and said, “I’m Nigel,” realising a second too late that all was not usual with the situation.
“Where are you headed?”
“To the train station.” And then, because walking away seemed rude and I didn’t know what else to say, “What about you?”
“Wanna go back to my place?” he replied.
“Uh, sorry, I gotta get home,” I said and turned and walked on. If only the companies I’m interviewing with would make me an offer so easily...
After a day wandering Chicago’s city streets, from Bronzeville to glitzy retail stores in The Loop to a nighttime view of the skyline from the Hancock Center, I headed to Giordano’s for some Chicago-style pizza. I passed an old lady begging for money.
“Can you spare 10 dollars?” she asked.
It was the surest evidence I’ve seen that the dot-com era is back.
There are a few things I miss about Washington DC. One, the people I grew up with. Two, bagels and whitefish. Three, the sudden summer downpours. So I was more than a little pleased when my bus from New York dropped me off at a DC Metro station just as a storm burst from the clouds. The air became heavy and the sky turned a deep, dark purple. Lightning cracked through the air. And water poured over everything.
Listening to my sister’s thesis defense presentation, the culmination of 6 years of hard work, I found myself simultaneously impressed and baffled. The thought crossed my mind that getting a Ph.D. is like learning a language only you and a handful of professors are able to understand.
The passport control guard looked at my customs declaration slip, then suspiciously at me.
“What were you doing in all these countries?” he asked, referring to the long list of names I had written in the “countries visited on this trip” section. I wondered if he might confiscate my passport and accuse me of being un-American.
"Travelling," I responded. His expression didn't change, but as I had shaved recently he didn't send me for further questioning. At customs I was diverted from the green “nothing to declare” lane and sent to an inspector. He began questioning me and asked me to put my two bags on the table to be searched. I hoisted my backpack up.
“Oh, a hiking backpack. There’s no way I’m digging through that,” he said. “What’s in the other one?”
I started to list the items. “Some t-shirts, a bottle of vodka—”
“Go on, go on,” he cut me off. "You're fine," he said as he waved me through.
So here I am, back in the States, preparing myself for a string of job interviews. I felt an odd mixture of familiarity and foreignness as I stood in the dark night air after the bus from the airport dropped me at a deserted car park. It’s going to take a while to get used to living here again.
