Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

So it's tenth anniversary of the events variously known as 9/11 or September 11th. I imagine there will be a million blog entries about "where were you when it happened?" much like an earlier generation would talk about where they were they heard JFK had been assassinated.

Here is mine. I was sharing a house with some folks at that point in 2001. On what was our Wednesday morning, I got up and one of my housemates had turned the TV on - most unusual. On it was a shot of the second plane hitting the second tower, looped to run over and over again. Someone was being interviewed in the foreground, and both him and the interviewer turned to watch the second plane exploding through the building.

I said "What movie is this from?" and my housemate said "It's not this is really happening." I said "Oh fuck, what's happened to the two buildings?". She replied "They've both collapsed."

Shit, I thought, there's going to be a war. And I was right.

I also knew straight away who would turn out to be responsible - the same group that bombed the same buildings in 1993.

There are a few things worth saying about the US response to the whole thing, or should I say Bush and Cheney's response, but that's a whole other post. Lets just say I was one of hundreds of thousands of marchers who protested the resulting wars.

I finally made it to New York in 2009. By that stage the site was little more than a huge building site. With some oddness, such as the whole row of crazy conspiracy theorists with card tables loaded with books making assertions, who had all lined up along one side of the site. The one visible piece of debris was the World Trade Center Cross, which was found in this state, apparently, in the ruins.

New York had a great impact on me, as I'm sure it does on most visitors. I spent most of my time on Manhattan Island, which is like about ten interesting cities all crammed together on one small island. People talk about it as the real capital of the world, grand I know, but it does seem to be a place where a lot of interesting people gravitate and a lot of interesting things go on.

And in other words, it represents some of the best things about the United States. The USA can be seen as many things. A credible case could be made for it being an imperialist military power, this is the nation which routinely has twelve carrier battle groups cruising the world's oceans, each of which is more powerful than most nations air-forces.

But when you're in New York, you can forget what is wrong with the United States, and remember that with the bad they have some very good. I hear Boston and San Francisco are also amazing cities.

So my point is this, of all the places in the the US to attack, why that city? The Pentagon and the White House I can understand, but why New York? A cosmopolitan, accepting place, much more interested in art and food than taking over the world. OK, so, that's probably not as true of Wall Street. But why that city? A place so full of migrants from other lands that something like 54 nationalities where represented in the thousands killed when the planes struck. Why that city? The place were so many novels and plays and painters got their first hearings. The home of Andy Warhol and Laurie Anderson and indeed the United Nations. A place I would happily live the rest of my life, if I had that option. But no, a number of fanatics had to hit that place of all places.

Ah well, they seem to be recovering. And one day I'll be there again, riding the subways up and down Manhattan, watching my wallet in Times Square, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge again. The city is still there.

OK, I'm so RIDICULOUSLY behind on my blogging it's not funny! Where was I?

Ah yes. On a Thursday morning in New York. I went for a quick walk past a bike shop (strewth, was that Friday? I can't remember... Ah, it was!) Ah, I remember, having re-read my own twitter stream. I went for a walk through Central Park... No, that was Friday. Argh! This will teach me not to update my blog often enough!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah... Finally! Thank you twitter for replacing my memory! I spent Thursday morning in the International Center for Photography. Funnily enough, they don't allow photographs, so I didn't have any pictures in my Flickr stream to remind me :-)

There was an exhibition of Fashion photographs on. Not something I usually enjoy, but some of these dated as far back as the late forties, so they had a really great old-fashioned vibe about them. Lots of them were shot in Paris also, which must have seemed terribly modern and exciting at the time, but now looks so historic. So I really enjoyed the exhibition more than I expected.

Then I made my way over to the East Side, and ended up at the United Nations building. My hosts, Amanda and Vincent, work for UNICEF, in what sound like quite hard jobs. So they are in fact employees of the United Nations. So they checked me in as a visitor to the United Nations building! And I got to wander around.

It's an interesting and in fact quite old building. The main parts of it appear to date from the nineteen fifties, the decor and even the furniture being quite amusingly dated.

And being a visitor rather than a tourist, I got to go to lots of interesting places, like this one:

That's the security council chamber. I wasn't allowed to sit in any of the seats - there are all sorts of protocols, as you can imagine.

We wandered the building some more, and my hosts were amused that I'd turned up in shorts and an Einstürzende Neubauten t-shirt - my tattoos got lots of odd looks as well! And so we couldn't make our way into the fairly formal upstairs dining room, and had to make do with the very busy cafe, which did however have a great variety of food.

Eventually they had to head back to work, and check me back out again as an ordinary civilian. I wondered down to the UN gift shop, which had terrible naff trinkets from lots of the member nations.

So that was my morning and my lunch. In the afternoon, I went too... The Museum of Modern Art!

Once again I did my gallery thing - although with lots of breaks because my legs were killing me after nearly two weeks of walking all over the united states. So I dismissed whole areas as being of little interest - but that still left stacks of galleries I had to wander through... And again I had that "Crikey, that very famous original painting is right here before my very eyes!" Including Picasso's rather revolutionary (and quite large) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Salivador Dali's somewhat revolutionary (and quite small) "The Persistence of Memory" on almost the opposite wall.

There were also galleries and galleries of great Pollack's and still more Rothko's, and Robert Indiana's and Andy Warhol's. And also random things like a jeep and a helicopter...

And in all my travels and in all the galleries I've been to, I've yet to see one Australian work. Not one. Not even folks who you'd think might have a following outside Australia, like Peter Booth or Jeffery Smart or even Brett Whiteley. Or Howard Arkley for that matter. These folks are all extremely good artists, but it does make me wonder that maybe they're just big in Oz. It's not like their subject matter is specifically Australian, apart from the odd view of Sydney Harbour. Ah well, maybe I'll come across some in the London galleries I have yet to make it to...

And then I spent the evening in a diner, and then doing bugger all. Which was a nice change. The diner was ace. They're dying out apparently, seen as a bit old fashioned. But the Motzah Ball Soup was great, as was the lasagne and the really friendly guy who waited on my. Manhattan Diner on Broadway, up around West 77th or 78th Street, go there if you're in the town. And it's still there!

OK, where did I leave off? Ah yes, I had been out to see the Wet Spots Saturday night. And, strangely, after running around Manhattan for sixteen hours, I was a bit tired! So I slept in Sunday, for the first time in ages. I didn't wake until about 12.30 in the afternoon - blissful!

I was going to take it easy in the afternoon, but then thought - well, heck, I'm in New York, better make the most of it. So I went to visit the Empire State Building.

(There are some pictures towards the end of this set.)

The subway here gets me all disoriented. They deliver you across town, but then you come up some stairs on to the street and you have no idea which way you're facing or where you're supposed to go. The exit signs usually say useful things like "West 72nd Street, NW Corner" or the like. So I emerged from the subway station near the Empire State, and pulled out my map, trying to work out which way to head... Then I looked up. The Empire State building is quite a big one, as you can imagine... And there it was, about a block away! So much for needing directions.

The building is actually quite old, it was finished in the 1930's, so it has this lovely art deco thing going on. There are actually two observation decks, one on the 86th floor and another on the 102nd. The process is: queue. Buy a ticket to the observation deck. Take elevator to the 80th floor. Take another elevator to the 86th floor. (Later) buy another ticket to the 102nd floor. Take yet another elevator - this time an amusing retro one complete with attendant who manually opens the door - to the far smaller 102nd floor.

Most of the observation deck on the 86th floor is outside, and damn it was cold when I was there! Great view, obviously, but I didn't feel I was any higher than, say, the Rialto back in Melbourne. Maybe because New York is proportionally bigger!

It was interesting to see just how big Central Park is, it must take up fully 15% of the island of Manhattan.

I took the elevator up to the very top observation deck, on the 102nd floor, which was blissfully less infested with other tourists talking very loudly. It was quite amusingly retro as well, with art-deco designs on some of the glass features. You could also see some of the girders holding the thing up - I patted them to reassure myself that the seventy year old steel was holding up just fine.

The inevitable gift shop was full of the usual kitsch crap. You could even buy a DVD of King Kong, since it features the building in question!

After that, I headed back to the apartment, and eventually made my way to the West Side YMCA to use their gym. The YMCA is actually a hotel of sorts here, but has a huge gym. Unfortunately I mis-read the closing times, and they turfed me out after only about an hour. However they do also give you a towel with which to mop up your sweat!

I think that was more or less all I did on Sunday... I have been a busy cookie, before and after...