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June 2004

30th June

Today's Independent has a very funny story about how Nicholson Baker's forthcoming novel Checkpoint will be not only a departure from the author's "ordinarily mild-mannered minimalism" but is also very likely to upset George Bush. "Checkpoint features two characters who spend much of its 115 pages discussing how to assassinate President George Bush," runs the report. "They don't actually do the deed, or even attempt it, but the book is - according to early snippets - replete with deep-seated anger and elegantly nasty epithets hurled at both the President and his cabinet." To add insult to injury - to Republicans, anyway - the book is due to be published on 24th August, the eve of the Republican National Convention in New York. Yay!

27th June

Alex Garland, mysterious author of bestseller The Beach, is interviewed in today's Observer as he publishes The Coma, his first novel in eight years. Asked about the creative hiatus (the screenplay of 28 Days Later notwithstanding) he explains candidly: "There were times when I thought, 'Fuck this, I've had enough of writing, I don't like the book world. I don't like most books, even. I don't like sitting on my own in a room for hours on end.' There were loads of times like that. I often find writing a kind of irritating way to spend my one shot at life. I never felt short of things to write about. It was more to do with the will to write. I'd read stuff I'd written and think, 'Who cares? I don't. Why should anyone else?'" Does the fact that I often feel exactly the same way put me and my book in the same literary bracket as Alex Garland? Okay then, maybe not.

*

Elsewhere in the Observer is a feature called The Bright Stuff, approximately 94 pages of profiles of young(ish) British persons shining in their respective fields, from DJing to politics, whom the paper "predicts" will, like, really shine in years to come. I don't know what it is about features like this but I can't help but find them extremely irritating. Is it because half the people featured are already hugely successful, and so hardly groundbreaking choices? Is it because I've never heard of the other half and therefore couldn't care less, i.e. someone has to be the biggest chef/writer/politician/entrepreneur in the next few years, so what difference does it make what their name is, except to them and their friends and family? On the other hand, could it be because I'm not in the list myself and am therefore incredibly bitter? Or is it to do with my feeling that, in reality, such articles have nothing to do with making "predictions" for the future and everything to do with the newspaper desperately trying to make itself look cool?

And another thing... I only found the URL for the feature by Googling for it, after several attempts at using Guardian Online's own search facility turned up no results whatsoever - not even when searching under the names of some of the profilees, or any variations on the headline, i.e. "bright stuff", "the bright stuff", "stuff bright", "top 5,000 successful tossers who aren't me", etc.

Okay, maybe I am in a bad mood today.

26th June

THOUGHTCAT IN AMERICA - UPDATED! (click here to go straight to the updated bit)

It's clearly about time I gave up the pretence that blog entries were posted on the day they're dated. This is partly because it's disrespectful to my regular reader who knows perfectly well that something dated, say, two weeks ago last Thursday wasn't there on that day or even the Friday following, but has only just turned up along with a load of other stuff. Mostly however it's because I went on holiday to the US on 10th June (principally for a Leonard Cohen fan convention in New York), came back on the 19th, haven't had time to update the blog until now, and it'll just look ridiculous posting stuff in the traditional format when I quite clearly wasn't here to do it. In any case, I find the standard blog formatting (i.e. with the most recent post at the top of the page, rather than at the bottom where it would be much easier to follow the flow of entries) really irritating. So I'm going to be about as subversive as I ever get today and post a report on my New York trip in a more reader-friendly fashion. (You really needed to know all that, didn't you?)   10th June   Take off from Heathrow on Air India, the only carrier we could find who provided a reasonably-priced direct flight to New York. Koy and I checked in early and managed to blag a pair of seats on their own at the back of the plane. The aircraft looks and feels a bit tired: part of the compartment cover for Koy's arm-rest has disappeared, as it also has on the seat of the bloke across the aisle from me. At one point he leans over it and looks as if he's about to throw up into it, thinking perhaps that's what the compartment (small as it is) is for; thankfully, he doesn't. The in-flight entertainment seems to be an Indian version of Benny Hill, with people running around in circles after each other and other people doing impressions of Charlie Chaplin. Lunch meanwhile is a very nice plate (or tray) of chicken curry.

The flight takes nearly 7 hours but we land at JFK apparently only two hours after we took off. This is our first trip to the US and I feel jetlagged already. After waiting in the immigration queue for about an hour, along mostly it seems with several hundred teenagers from Russia, we take a yellow cab to our hostel, located in - as I take some pleasure in putting it - "uptown Manhattan". It sounds flash to me, anyway. I give the cabbie the exact address, 257 West 113th Street. "What?" he says. "Where is that? That doesn't mean anything to me." It's not looking good, but as Big Apple virgins we don't realise until later that it can be somewhat useful to give cabbies the avenue intersection as well as the street name, rather than just the building number, but we don't know it anyway, so I blame the hostel. We've also been led to believe that NY cabbies talk the whole time, but ours stays silent for the whole journey. Something we said? I hope not...

Arrive an hour or so later at the Wanderers' Inn West, located in what looks to us like the wrong street, opposite a building which seems to be in the process of having its innards torn out. Next door though is a plaque saying Harry Houdini used to live there, and there are friendly kids playing and skipping rope on the sidewalk. The hostel inside has sickly lighting and smells of laundry. After checking in we are shown around by the manager, Vinny, who has an eastern European accent, looks uncannily like Moby and is camper than a row of tents, albeit in a melancholy way. "Breakfast is from 8.30 to 10.30," he says, "but it's best to get down early, because today by 9.30 everything was gone." The breakfast is free though, so this is fair enough, especially as we're on a tight budget. In my otherwise empty dorm, Vinny directs me to a specific (top) bunk, and there's a sign up on the doors of both bathrooms (i.e. showers, not toilets, although there's one of those as well) saying "There is no hot water today. We are having the gas repaired. Sorry for the convenience." Someone has taken a pen to the sign and added "in" to the last word. Koy's dorm is occupied by two or three girls. "Can't you knock before you come in?" one of them, a Kiwi, says to Vinny as he enters. "I paid for a girls' dorm and you just walk in here all the time without knocking. The other day I'd just come out of the shower!" I want to tell her that she probably has nothing to fear from Vinny, but decide to keep quiet. "You should keep your clothes on when you're in the dorm," he says to the girl. They continue the row while Koy and I stand around looking at our feet. Seems like it's going to be a barrel of laughs staying here.

After an all-too-brief rest we meet up with our friends and fellow Cohen fans Auntie Fiona and Uncle John, who have been here for a few days already and so no longer have jetlag. They walk us at what seems like a marathonesque pace across Morningside Park - where groups of children and one or two adults are playing variously basketball, soccer and volleyball - several blocks west to Broadway. Fiona & John are staying nearby in dorms at Columbia University, Leonard Cohen's alma mater, as part of the Cohen event. We wander along Broadway for a while, past Tom's Restaurant (as immortalised in Seinfeld and in Suzanne Vega's song Tom's Diner), and have dinner in an Italian place where the air conditioning necessitates us keeping our coats on for the duration of the meal. It's great to see Fiona and John again but Koy and I almost fall asleep in our dinner, so we head back early to the hostel. As there is nobody else in my dorm, I make an executive decision to sleep in the lower bunk. A few hours later I wake up in a stygian room to Vinny whispering to someone, "Ah, I see. I had told him he should sleep in the top bunk! Okay, I will speak to him tomorrow." I feign sleep.

11th June

After nice cold showers in our respective dorms, Koy and I meet downstairs for our free breakfast. We realise we both negotiated the cold shower the same way, by standing to one side of the stream and washing a limb at a time. The breakfast room has places enough for about eight people to sit and eat at any one time, and by the time we come down just before 8.30 all seats are taken and several other guests are milling about. A Latino guy prepares breakfast; it seems clear that the routine is that although most of the food - bagels, muffins, cereal and fruit - is already laid out, we have to wait until precisely 8.30 before we can eat it. Nobody is saying anything. The only sound comes from the TV news, burbling on a bracket on the wall. The main news seems to be that Ronald Reagan, who died on 5th June, is still dead, and the country is still officially in mourning. There's only one other news item I notice, about some vague "concern" that terrorists may be planning a chemical attack on the New York subway today apparently on the sole intelligence that "it's the 11th of the month". "Other terrorist attacks on New York and Madrid have also occurred on the 11th of the month," the bulletin helpfully explains. The magical hour of 8.30 suddenly strikes and everyone descends on the assorted foodstuffs. The breakfast is very tasty when we finally get our hands on it, although Koy's muffin looks big enough to feed a small town.

Cohenwise, nothing is happening until this evening, so we have a free day to wander and explore the city. We're both a bit grouchy from sleeping too long and the cold shower, so we amble gently from the hostel across the avenues to Broadway where we ate last night. We notice immediately how odd it is that you can be in one not-particularly-nice-looking street, then turn a corner and find yourself somewhere really lovely again, and vice versa. We start walking in a downtownwards attitude, thinking that the highly convenient grid system will deliver us to Greenwich Village in about half an hour of easy strolling. This proves deceptive however, as an hour later we've only covered about a dozen blocks, none of which seemed, although atmospheric enough, to be hugely distinguished, so we decide to let the subway take the strain for a while.

The subway looks just like that scene in The French Connection where Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey are dodging in and out of a train trying to outwit each other, or at very least like the cover of the Simon & Garfunkel album Wednesday Morning, 3am. You can incidentally also hear the trains rumbling beneath your feet as you walk on the streets above. We buy one-journey tickets for $2 apiece which look like flimsy credit cards, and then attempt to negotiate the swiping mechanism at the gate which doesn't seem to like the ticket being put through either too fast or too slow. The trains are a delight - air-conditioned, spacious, clean and fast, reminiscent much more of the excellent Paris metro than the dear old London underground, Victorian in just about every respect.

From an illustration on the tourist map we were given free at the hostel, it appears to us that the Statue of Liberty is on the West Side somewhere around 34th Street, so we get off there and emerge into a textbook New York scene - the buildings taller than we've ever seen them, the "shock and recoil of traffic" (as Amy Lowell once put it) directed by the traffic cop with his shades and gun, the signs saying "Don't block the box", the adverts, the accent and, although we hate to say it, the obesity. Really big people - not just a little overweight, but hugely so - are much more frequent than we imagined. We head westwards, still not entirely sure where we're going, and stumble on the Empire State Building. We take a diversion inside to see if we can't take the elevator trip to the top. It's alarmingly easy to get in - you just go through an anonymous door from the street, no baggage checks, no x-ray equipment, no strip-searches - and we wander about the stunning marble-and-silver art deco interior for a few moments before finding the queue for the trip loftwards is an hour and a half long. We decide against it, but upon attempting to go back out the way we came in we are accosted by some serious-looking security guys in suits demanding to know where we're going. When we tell them we want to go back out, they hustle us in a different direction where, bizarrely, this time we do have our bags checked. "But we're going out," we protest. "Still have to put your bags thru the machine," says the ratty security guy. Having been checked to make sure we're not going to blow up the street, we eventually find an exit through, it seems, a sandwich shop.

Shortly thereafter we find ourselves outside Macy's. Koy has been asked by a friend from back home to obtain some Bobbi Brown cosmetics, which (like many consumer goods) are a lot cheaper than in the UK, so this seems a good place to start. We're barely through the doors and looking at a display of face-moisturising-type-items (albeit not of the Bobbi Brown brand) when we are approached by an assistant, a slim, pretty woman dressed entirely in white, to see if she can help. Koy buys a couple of things from her counter to begin with, noting the oddity that the marked price is exclusive of tax, so the bill comes in slightly higher than we expected. That said, the VAT-equivalent is less than half that in the UK, which is a nicer surprise. We wander around some more on the trail of Bobbi B but can't find her anywhere. Inevitably we bump into another sales assistant from a different concession, this time a large, dark woman with a witch-like demeanour and a plastic disposable apron. As we approach her she's talking to someone, but as we pass she turns to us instantly and asks - with a leer of a smile, as much unctuant as she can ooze and dollar signs ticking in her huge, ravenous eyes - if she can help. "Yes, please," says Koy, "I was looking for some Bobbi Brown cosmetics." The woman's smile not so much drops as goes to hell for all eternity; er, something we said? "We don't do that here," she snaps, and without a further breath turns straight back to the person she was originally talking to and continues the conversation, leaving Koy and I looking at each other in disbelief. "Well, that told you, didn't it?" I say sarcastically to Koy, hopefully loud enough for quite possibly the rudest shop assistant I've ever met to hear. But I think she's deaf, in more ways than one.

Laughing about the encounter, we head out of Macy's and proceed to try and find the Statue of Liberty. Consulting the map, we trudge towards the river across several intersections for about half an hour, but when we finally get there, there's no "there". It's the river, all right, or something watery anyway, but apart from that there's just this big road and some dusty-looking warehouses and people jogging. Not only is there no Statue of Liberty but we seem to be in the middle of nowhere, at least by New York standards. Where the hell is the damn thing? We consult the map again. "Oh no!" says Koy suddenly, laughing, "Look!" She shows me the map. A photo of the Statue of Liberty arrow-pointed to the spot we've been trying to find turns out to be the location of a company that provides helicopter trips around the statue, while Liberty herself is right at the bottom of Manhattan - about another 30 blocks south. I know what it sounds like, but, well, we are jetlagged.

...TO BE CONTINUED!!

The New York report is being updated gradually, so stay tuned... click here to return to the top of the page.

*

Meanwhile, I had a few nice surprises upon returning from the US. Firstly I found that the Guardian Weekend magazine dated 12th June had published a letter I'd written. The subject is old news now, and it wasn't even really new news at the time, but for the sake of completeness (oh alright then, vanity) I'm linking to it anyway. My original letter, prompted by Alexander Chancellor's column the previous week, was edited, and (for total Thoughtcat trivia freaks) originally ran as follows:

Dear Weekend,

To borrow a catchphrase from one of your other columnists, is it just me or has Alexander Chancellor drifted to the right since his old "caring, thoughtful" photo [to illustrate his column in the magazine] was replaced by the "wacky, eccentric" one? In his criticism of the Daily Telegraph's "rejoicing" in the news that Lord Hesketh has to sell his stately pile for umpteen million (the poor sod), Chancellor laments the possibility that "somebody richer than Lord Hesketh" will buy it, "even if that somebody is a Russian or an Arab billionaire". Horror of horrors! Johnny Foreigner snapping up our national heritage! Apart from the fact that poverty-stricken Hesketh would doubtless sell the house to anyone with the right money regardless of where they came from (heaping hypocrisy on top of bigotry), the place can hardly be said to be "a part of our national heritage" if it and its 3,000 acres have been in private ownership for "hundreds of years". Which incidentally is another reason why it makes no difference who owns it.

Yours etc.

So my letter was de-sodded! Sods. Still, all publicity is good publicity, eh?

The second surprise (brought to my attention, I should add, by my East Molesey correspondent via a lovely Jackson Pollock postcard) was that the Guardian's regular "Pass Notes" from 19th June focused on my home town of Twickenham. That said, as is the case with just about every other Pass Notes feature - a tongue-in-cheek daily rundown on a topical subject presented as an amusing dialogue between someone who knows about the subject and someone who doesn't - you won't learn much about the town except that rugby is played here a lot and, er, I'm one of the residents. Here's an extract:

Any famous residents? Alexander Pope lived there, Greg Dyke still does. [I've never seen him - TC.]

5th June

British journalist Elena Lappin, who was recently deported from the US for the crime of not having a press visa (TC 11th May), writes about the experience again in today's Guardian Weekend magazine. Perhaps the most depressing part of the feature is not her account of the indignities she suffered as a potential felon (not very nice but evidently a lot better treatment than that meted out to certain other prisoners of the US), but the response from the officer who took her fingerprints when she said that, as a journalist, she would be writing about her experience as soon as she got home. "'No doubt,' he snorted. 'And anything you'll write won't be the truth.'" At least though she's received a number of sympathetic messages from US liberals such as Jonathan Franzen, who wrote, "On behalf of the non-thuggish American majority, my sincere apologies."

^..^

4th June

Woody Allen is interviewed - sort of - in today's Independent. The journalist freely admits that the revelations several years ago about his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and his messy custody case with Mia Farrow put her off him for life and she now considers him "past his prime". At least this is honest, I suppose - although including the sublime Sweet and Lowdown in her list of Woody's recent "increasingly desperate" movies exposes her own increasingly desperate personal agenda against the man - but to then interview him despite these opinions smacks of more than a little hypocrisy, not to mention a total absence of journalistic objectivity. But of course, "one never passes up the chance to talk to a movie icon," she explains. As interviewers say, there's nothing like trying to get the best out of your subject - and this certainly is nothing like trying to get the best out of your subject. Personally of course I can't wait to see his new film, Anything Else, which incidentally has had pretty good reviews elsewhere.

*

Leonard Cohen fans may be interested to know that a revised version of Thoughtcat's review of the Brighton tribute concert to the great Lost Canadian - complete with photos of the performers and an account of the last few songs by Cohen cohort Duncan Bartlett - has today been posted to The Leonard Cohen Files, the original and best Cohen site on the web. (If "site on the web" isn't a tautology, that is - I mean, where else would it be?!)

^..^

3rd June

Thoughtcat contributor and Russell Hoban websitemaster Dave Awl writes with the sad news that his longtime feline companion Dragon Lady has died at the age of 14½. "I'm confident that I will never have another friend like her," he writes. "There is nothing quite like the bond you form when you live alone with a cat for nearly fifteen years, from your early twenties to your late thirties, sharing that animal solitude and camaraderie without any other roommates, pets or significant others around to dilute the bond." It seems only right therefore that Dragon Lady should be honoured as this week's cat, and Dave has also contributed another piece from his excellent book What the Sea Means entitled Reservoir, which was directly inspired by "herself". More of Dave's work can be read on Thoughtcat's poetry and fiction page.

*

This is actually the second of Thoughtcat's friends' cats who has died this week. Auntie Elizabeth of Vermont writes of her cat Floyd, who was also well into his teens: "I packed him off with a bunch of wildflowers from our yard. Purple and white phlox and lavender asters and something yellow whose name I don't know. The phlox has a lovely sweet scent. I put him and the flowers inside an old flowered pillowcase, so he can go off to the next world with something from the house and something from the outdoors."

^..^

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