Apologies for breaking the wonderful silence that has settled over this blog. I'm far from finished with my online life. In fact, about a month ago I hatched a cunning plan to launch an all new and improved blog. It's now running in a functional enough state that I'm ready to unveil it. Behold the new hotness!
It's not just one new blog, but 3-in-1. I plan to post photos weekly, music whenever I'm inspired by what I'm listening to, and blog posts... well, I'm not guaranteeing a return to my travel days, but I'll make the occasional post. Please update your bookmarks or your RSS subscriptions if you're using a newsreader. I will cease to update this blog and instead direct my attention to the new site. I'll be online more often, and hopefully in a more interesting way.
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.
There are certain things I miss about San Francisco. The architecture, the hills, the beautiful views, the Bay, the food. New York pizza, as an aside, is highly overrated. I've heard people defend it by saying, "it's great because it's cheap and it's on every block." You know what? So is dogshit, but you don't see many people raving about that. Something doesn't add up and I think the error in the equation is false pride. I digress.
What I really miss is the feel and culture of the city. A place where an event like the Love Parade is allowed — thousands of people dancing in front of City Hall with police standing by as weed smoke floats through the air and people run around dressed up in costumes or dressed down in nothing.
All is not lost here in New York. Occasionally I catch snatches of San Francisco invading the less whimsical nature of this city. Several weeks ago my housemate Carlos joined thousands of other people dressed up for SantaCon. The entire event consisted of nothing more than dressing up as Santa and parading all over Manhattan, stopping at plenty of bars along the way. There was a shared festive attitude which induced total strangers to talk to each other and livened the atmosphere for everyone who happened to stumble upon the event.
No-one knew what the parade route was ahead of time, but the organisers sent out text messages which were forwarded from person to person until the entire group of hundreds all headed as one to the next stopping point. At that point everyone would mill around the streets, fill up all the bars in the vicinity, and generally cause a commotion. The fascinating part was that no-one seemed to know who the organisers were. It seems that terrorist camp training can be put to good use.
A couple weeks later I was surprised to find old subway trains taking up space on the V line when I walked into the 2nd Ave. station on a Sunday morning. It reminded me of the old streetcars from all over the world running along the Embarcadero, down Market Street and into the southern area of San Francisco. For a second I thought I needed to go back to bed to clear my head, as the previous night had been inspired by a 5-litre wine bottle on display in a store which Erik and I bought and shared between not quite enough friends.
Once I affirmed that I was indeed awake, I got on the train and found that each carriage was from a different decade, stretching back to what looked like the 20s or 30s. The advertising space was lined with old ads for Pomade and filtered cigarettes ("The Healthy Cigarette!"), and the MTA authorities let people wander from one car to the next as the train was moving. The cars ran as a special event each Sunday in December, completing a loop of the city every hour and a half. It was lucky timing that my brunch excursion coincided with it.
Picture the quintessential high society party — sipping champagne and snacking on caviar. Looking out on a city 60-some storeys above the ground. Catching snippets of smalltalk about business partners and recently closed deals while a piano man plays jazz in the background. Congratulations, you've just pictured the Google Christmas party. If it sounds a little pretentious, well, it wouldn't be New York if it weren't. Relax. You obviously need to grab a couple dry martinis from the open bar. Then leave the wine- and cheese-tasting room and hit the dancefloor.
It turns out that there are benefits to long distance relationships—wait, I should rephrase that. There are benefits to other people's long distance relationships. It's good luck for me that Jasper is in one as I was his replacement girlfriend for the party.
In terms of being his invited guest.
Not afterwards.
Who would have thought that people who sit in front of computers all day long would attend an event in elegant evening dresses and stylish suits? I suppose it's understandable that people will make the effort if you rent out the entire Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center, but I wasn't expecting it. I wonder if the case is the same in California, or if people there show up to formal office parties dressed in shorts and sandals.
There are two alarms which wake me up in the morning, both of them unreliable in their own unique ways. The first is a cheap plastic one I picked up in Peru when my previous one crapped out. I travelled for a year without a watch, but the number of bleary-eyed 4am rises made an alarm clock a necessity. The alarm on the Peruvian clock is accurate to the minute, give or take 20, which means I have to make sure to set it especially early, then curse it when it goes off and deprives me of those last precious minutes of sleep. It's all the more dangerous for not having a snooze button — several times I've woken up an hour late with no recollection of the earlier 15 seconds of semi-consciousness it took to turn the alarm off.
The second alarm is on my phone. It's much fancier than the standard beeping function that comes on other phones. Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30 I get a wake-up call, usually in the form of a Spanish-speaking lady asking for a Señor Cristobal. It's never the same woman who calls twice, although the call is always from Florida, leading me to believe there is a personal assistant service based there with an unusually high turnover rate.
This level of personalised attention is rare in the modern world, and though impressive, some days I receive 3 calls while on others I don't receive any, making the utility of the service questionable at best. In fact, the reliability seems to be worsening. Two days ago my phone alarm went off at 9:30 in the evening, and I picked up to find someone calling from Chile who took quite a bit of persuading before she accepted that I was not, and did not know anyone by the name of, Eduardo.
The unintended side effect of all this is that when an unknown number calls my phone, I pick up expecting to hear Spanish. It's funny how your mind makes nonsense of English words if it's expecting to hear another language, and responding in Spanish asking the caller to repeat because I didn't understand has resulted in more than a few confused conversations.
At this point I've decided that the Spanish alarm service isn't much use, but waking up is coincidentally when I am least able to speak coherently in another language, so I have yet to be able to unsubscribe. Finding a way around this catch-22 is my current challenge, and I'm hesitant to bring a 3rd alarm clock into the mix.
I'm sitting behind a large one-way mirror with computers and monitors strewn all over the desks around me. The lights are off, and on the other side of the glass is a brightly-lit room with two people sitting in it. If the table was bare metal and the people sat facing each other, it might be a police interrogation room. Unfortunately for the thrill-seeking side of me, I'm taking notes for a usability study rather than a murder investigation.
I made the move to New York 4 weeks ago. In that time the weather has gone from making me sweaty in a t-shirt to giving me chills walking around in a winter jacket and scarf. I'm living in one place but freelancing, which provides me with the same sense of instability I had over the last year moving to a different town every few days.
Watching the participants try to use the virtual world being tested, I'm reminded why I like this work so much. Also in the room watching the proceedings is one of the developers of the virtual world, and hearing his occasional exclamations as the participants get confused is one of the most satisfying parts of the job. The first point of surprise is inevitably when people click through all the instructions the programmer painstakingly included, explaining in step-by-step detail how to use the program.
"Why did they skip all the text? Why didn't they read what was on screen?"
Bridging the gap between how the programmer assumes people will use their creation and how everyone else actually uses it is what it's all about. A lot of the time all the advice from a usability expert isn't half as effective as having a programmer sit and watch someone else use their creation for several hours.
Particularly interesting is when a participant like the one I'm watching comes in — someone in their 30s who hasn't used the internet in years and who has no email address. It's easy to forget people like that exist. Especially in a wired area of the country where real life soap operas such as NYGirlOfMyDreams.com make up the background noise of life.
As I make my way towards a normal working life, I'm enjoying having some of the important pieces fall into place. I now know where to go for photography equipment, and having discovered a nearby developing studio, I'm excited again about taking photos. On that note, the following are from the last month.
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 with most people, I’ve been on the receiving end of many a scam email over the years. As irritating as they are, it puts a smile on my face when I see one of them getting creative.
“Dearest in Islam,” begins the one I received today. The salutation is unique enough to divert my finger from the delete button. I can imagine the scam artist leaning back in his chair, stretching his arms in front of him and cracking his fingers while he thinks, “What character should I invent next?”
Running down a mental list of candidates, he crosses off the Nigerian desperately trying to move his money outside the country, the Russian woman who is looking to "do friendship or more than simply friendship", and the co-ordinator of Lottery Winners International who needs to know how to deliver the jackpot money. Then he reaches “Widow”. Not an instant sell, but maybe it’s got potential. His eyes fall on a copy of The Atlantic Monthly lying next to his keyboard (what, the scammers in your world don’t have a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly? Come join me my friend, my world is a far richer place) and sees an article on President Ahmadinejad denying the existence of gays in Iran. He sits upright, snapping his fingers. “Muslim widow!” he says out loud. “Now that’s an angle!”
Religious affiliations allow our author to appeal to both devotion and fear simultaneously. “Please, let this message not come to you as a surprise, but a divine duty,” begins our widow. I’m already halfway to giving her my bank account details. No one wants to be on the wrong side of God. And no one wants to reject a woman whose husband died and who is herself struggling with cancer. Oh wait, not dire enough. She’s “battling with both cancer and stroke”. That’s more like it. It’s a good thing she didn’t keel over before hitting send. Time’s obviously limited. I better help her quick.
“According to the doctor, my medical report quotes a very short life sperm due to my health status presently.” You want to laugh at the typo, but the situation is too tragic. Poor woman, she doesn't even know what she's saying! By now she's endeared herself to me. I can almost hear our author laughing at his own subversive tactics. I’ve played right into his hands. “Now I’ve got him by the emotional balls,” he thinks.
“Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a devoted Muslim individual or a Muslim organization that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein,” continues the widow. As a rule of thumb I try to be honest. I don’t fit into the categories she listed, but then again with the typo she already made, how am I to know she didn’t make a simple grammatical mistake here? Let me fix it. “... I decided to donate this fund to a devoted Muslim, individual, or a Muslim organization that will utilize this money...” Now that’s better. I’m an individual. Sign me up.
“When my late husband was alive he deposited $1.5Million (One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) with a security and finance company here in Cote d' Ivoire. [...] I am searching for real brother or sister in Islam to assist in using this fund.” Well sister, I’m real. And I’m glad you decided to take a chance on my random email address.
“You will be entitled to 5% of the total amount for your time and kind assistance.” Amen to that! Oh, excuse me, I mean insh'allah. My help’s on the way.
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.
I woke up on my birthday totally disoriented. My head was heavy with drinks. I couldn’t see clearly. I had gone to bed barely half an hour earlier after hitting a couple bars in Istanbul with a friend, yet already it was light outside. There was smoke everywhere. The 23 other people I was sharing a rooftop dorm with were making their way down the stairs. I vaguely remember following. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the curb outside with my head on my knees, trying to shut out the pale morning sky. I couldn’t stay awake. I drifted in and out of dreams. A while later I ended up back on the rooftop, asleep in my bed.
My alarm woke me a few hours later. Feeling slightly dazed, I packed and went to the airport to catch my flight to Berlin. After checking in I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and splash water on my face. Details of the previous night started coming back to me. I remembered one of the bars, and laughing upon finding out that the local slang for “prostitute” is “Natasha”, a token of appreciation of the Russian influence in Istanbul. (This came out in the course of conversation, not through a birthday present.) I remembered trying “Raki”, the local alcoholic drink tasting of anise. And something hazy about an electric shower heater left on, melting and setting a room ablaze. I looked in the mirror and was surprised to find my nostrils black with soot. So the fire and smoke in the hostel hadn’t been a dream.
I knew I would have some readjusting to do to get used to western prices after a year of discount travelling. Consider London shock therapy. Economists use the Big Mac Index as one measure of price comparison between countries. I’m finding it hard to break the habit of comparing everything against an index based on a particularly cheap dorm room I stayed in in Egypt.
A meal does not register in my head as £15; instead it becomes an outraged, “I could pay a month’s accomodation for that price!” Needless to say, this is a thought pattern I will have to change soon. Otherwise I’ll be forced to dye my hair grey, wear slippers and a cardigan, and start making up stories about my days as a young boy, hiking uphill through knee-deep snow to get to school.
Driving from our house to the Delhi airport, my father decided it was time to introduce some order to Indian roadways. As we approached a red light, he slowed down and stopped. Meanwhile, cars and trucks in the other 5 lanes continued speeding past in both directions.
In Delhi at night, traffic signals undergo a transformation. Instead of guiding vehicles they become roadside entertainment: just another set of bright lights, like distant cousins of the mini Ganesh shrines decked out in flashing LEDs found on so many dashboards.
And so the end of my last trip to India served up one more example of the many futile struggles that occur when West meets East. (Another notable incident includes questioning the difference between your “good name” and your plain old name, and what about your bad name?)
I hadn’t planned to end up in India again, but when I got the news that my mother broke her foot and was in a cast for 6-8 weeks with limited mobility, I soon had tickets for a surprise visit. The tears of surprise on my mother’s face when she opened the door one morning to find me standing there let me know it was a good decision. I have high hopes of exchanging the brownie points gained from that trip for a big present at Christmastime. Maybe one wrapped in shiny paper, stationed outside, in the shape of an Audi convertible.
I apologise for the month-long silence. I've been lazy, but the blog's not dead yet.
Today, the 13th of August, marks the one year anniversay of my travels. It’s been quite a year, yet being in the UK, back in more familiar territory, it feels like I never went away. Thank goodness I have this blog to remind me it wasn't all my imagination.
