Appointments

So, this Compatrido I barely know decided to return to “his country” (this is how Compatridia is described if you criticise Outposters, otherwise, it is “Motherland”, thank you very much). He made me power-of-attorney to sell his car and left me with the key (if interested, reader, it is still up for sale). Why me? I was the one person he trusted, he said (no, this has nothing to do with me being trustworthy or with my character and ethos).

This Outposter rang me last Sunday and asked me to drive the car to his place (some 8 km from here) so that he can have a look. I explained to him I am busy and whether he would be so kind to come over to my neighbourhood, where the car is parked, on Wednesday. He eagerly agreed, got the address and detailed directions and made me an appointment for 5.30.

I had the car washed this morning (well, there is another prospective buyer). I effectively organised my whole day so that I can be home just before 5.30. Obviously the git never showed up. I understand he might have had second thoughts or that he may have found something else by now. Still, the fact he did not bother cancelling the appointment hardly surprised me, although it annoyed me. Six years on, I have somehow learned to automatically file such lack of consideration for people’s time as typical Outposter behaviour. To be honest, I actually realised he was not coming to the appointment after he had been late for 45 minutes and after he had not rang me at least twice for directions — they do that a lot.

New York: air conditioning

By the way: I resent going around with a sore throat for three days because Americans set the air-conditioning to ‘polar’ when the temperature creeps above 19 Celsius (I dunno what this is in Fahrenheit). Far more seriously, I resent Bangladesh drowning and glaciers melting because New York hotel cleaners set air-conditioners to ‘frostbite’ and also open the window right above it because it is sunny outside.

New York: the city that always eats

Back from the gym. To my relief, I have actually lost a kilo in New York. I thought I would have gained at least a little weight, with all this food on display (and we would oblige).

I have never been to a city where so much and so diverse food is on offer throughout the city. The ubiquitous chains (plus some more local ones), delis, soup places, cafes, diners, restaurants, bistrots, fried chicken joints, pizza places, chinese places, trattorias, brazilian churruscarias, hot dog carts, gyros carts, doner carts, knish carts, pretzel carts, bagel carts… you get the picture. And they are everywhere (well, many of them). Most of the food on offer is fried, but it only takes walking 2 or 3 blocks before you find something suitable (or suitably fried, for that matter). If you would rather make something yourself (we couldn’t) the place is full of grocery shops with shiny apples and luscious mangoes on display.

Walking in the streets, you can always glance at places selling food: they are rarely empty. People also eat on the go. Actually, queuing up for immigration (“step down! step down please!”) in JFK airport, an overpowering smell of fried garlic filled the place. It was like someone was fixing themselves a snack in the Homeland Security officers kitchenette…

As for martinis (I know you have been waiting for this), there is bad news and there is good news.

The bad news is that I now realise how pointless it is to order martinis (or any other straight-up cocktails, which New Yorkers happily collectively also call ‘martinis’) in most places in the world, with exceptions including this place and that one.

The good news: after trying martinis up and down Manhattan, I realised I make them pretty well, myself. Not bad at all.

New York / Outpost: audiences

Tonight we went to a flamenco show in the recently renovated Muni Theatre of Capital City. Right after I got to my seat, I started feeling jittery: the nouveau-riche attitudes, the Bourgeois Gentilhomme outfits, the small-town ‘everyone-knows-everyone’ small talk around me. Spectacularly stupid (and loudly uttered) random comments during the show followed this prelude, as well as some people’s inability to comply with a request not to shoot flash into performers’ eyes.

Then I remembered the two shows I saw in New York. The first one was Spamalot. The show was inept, flat, awkward (or should I say maladroit? English pigdogs!): a fretful playing-out of the original film with some extra tits (tits, bits — whatever) added. The audience just loved it. They were raving. They were orgasmically ecstatic, some were maybe ecstatically orgasmic, too. They gave it a standing ovation. We did not think too much about it: it was a musical, after all, most of the audience were out-of-towners and stupid tourists like us — end of discussion. Jod even came up with a clement excuse: “Maybe they haven’t seen the film; in that case Spamalot could even pass as hilarious, with Clay Aiken, fake English accents and all”.

Our second theatre night this time was traumatic audience-wise, though. We got tickets for Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with James Earl Jones, a spectacular Anika Noni Rose and an altogether wonderful all-African-American cast. This should have been a totally different story. The audience looked different, too: they mostly seemed regular theatre-goers and the majority consisted of African-Americans. The play is a sombre bitter-sweet interweaving of many yarns (homosexuality, the politics of sex, alcoholism, sterility, money-hungry religion, moneymaking, prejudice crushing individuals, old age, cancer, dysfunctional families, poverty and how it degrades people) woven around a thread: mendacity. So, it’s not funny. It’s actually very potent T. Williams fare. It’s not even bitter-sweet, really. At times it is sarcastic and venomously sardonic. That’s it.

Now, the audience treated the play as ‘you-will-laugh-you-will-cry’ material. They behaved like they were waiting for sitcom cues to burst out laughing in unison. They laughed a lot. They laughed a lot LOL-wise. They laughed and they laughed. I was continually perplexed and horrified. During the first break I asked Jod whether I was missing something, whether there was something in the way the piece was directed playing on the (conceivably) funny bits of the text. “No, it’s not you, it’s not the director, it’s not the text, it’s not the actors: it’s them, raised on sitcoms”, she said.

The play was magnificent (of course, it was also given a standing ovation — maybe this is just a sort of mild stretching exercise after all). However, the audience was largely insolent and insensitive, living up to the stereotype of superficial, clueless and philistine Americans.

Bile aired, I’m off to bed now.

New York: catchphrases

Last time we were there, the ubiquitous catchphrase was ‘Talk to the hand!‘.

This time it was ‘Oh my God!‘. Same intonation, too.

New York: hard currency

When I went to Prague in ‘98, I had many opportunities to marvel at American tourists going around in pocket calculators, converting all koruna prices into US dollars and periodically exclaiming how cheap everything was. I secretly deplored them back then. But then, one should be careful of what one deplores: sooner or later we will find ourselves in the shoes of too many deplorees.

While I was in the US, there was roughly $1.52 to a euro. Which means that it was my turn to go around mentally calculating all prices in euro and grabbing the bargains there and then.

But it is not just a matter of exchange rates: Europe is by now an expensive place. So, if you can buy something worth $100 (which is serious money) for 65 euro (which — alas — is not that serious anymore), then you will end up acting like those poor American tourists in Prague back in ‘98.

There is an additional factor here, too: if your currency goes a long way in a market like Prague (or, say, Bali or Egypt), there is still only so much on supply in such markets: classical recordings and strip shows (in Prague), food, drinks, souvenirs — and so on. However, if it is in New York where your money can go a long way — a market already reasonably priced and full of bargains for things like books, music, videos, electronics and clothes — then imagine the depravity circumstances will throw you into (ah! bloody circumstances, always being thrust upon the innocent ones) when an orange, a red and grey banknote can get you Ben Franklin’s worth…

Let me confess: we were hardly innocent and unsuspecting. We had suspended most shopping for clothes, books and electronics for months, in anticipation of our trip. To give you an idea, we were most frugal when it came to books, as we only bought $600 worth of them: they are heavy and we didn’t want to pay for overweight luggage…

New York: urban beauty and comics

I am still wildly jetlagged. I have to be up to get up to go to work in less than six hours but I am wide awake. I also feel happy and fulfilled. Have you ever before read here about me being happy ? There you go.

I spent twelve nights in New York, on business. We also went out a lot, shopped a lot, walked a lot, took in all this urban life, motion and feel that will keep me sane for a little longer. Fun was had aplenty. We saw Viennese Rhino and Harvard Nun again, who drove all the way from New England. Harvard Nun being a New Yorker (you know, one of those lamenting the gentrification of East Village), she gave us a few valuable tips. Much of what was felt and seen can be glimpsed in my recently updated New York photoset. Some of it I will be writing about. Some of it is for me to keep.

Just one little thing to start with: We were in New Jersey on a bus headed to Port Authority, in the queue for Lincoln Tunnel. The Manhattan-bound traffic was slow (obviously), night had fallen in the meantime. After a turn, looking to the left, I saw lit-up Manhattan occupying half the horizon. It was the definition of urban beauty. It was heart-stopping. Or, really, it was plainly beautiful and majestic, just like the way approaching Venice from the water is, only significantly more powerful. I was overwhelmed, I physically gasped. Part of this wonder can be sampled here (badly and artlessly rendered):

Actually, photography hardly ever does any justice to New York: too many things happen in a single frame, there is too much complexity in a single picture which can easily be mistaken as noise, the context can easily be lost. I think that only comics can do justice to the city, in their annotated complexity, in the deliberate choices of what goes where and in the way zooming and change of angle can carry interpretation with them. No wonder comics love this city.