8 o�clock in the Mezzanine at the hotel Clarence Ashley: quiet hours before the leisurely tourist breakfasts begin. A strange grizzled foreigner in a foreign land serving a foreigner just a coffee, Clarence Ashley own brand no less, cooked up by a reputable beanier, twitching that I don�t want to hand him twelve bucks plus for a croissant. Yellow cabs pass below on 31st street and I wonder about generations of capitalist aesthetics: the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, whatever are OK, but take the black checks off the cabs and everyone says the romance is gone. How long will it take for millennial Manhattan to look gilded? I read the Rough Guide, five years out of date, telling me the subway will cost $1.50. Adjusting prices from this book is like converting from sterling, a perpetual and imprecise necessity. Tales of crime in the city are five, maybe thus ten, fifteen years outdated. The New York postal system, the book warns, is poor. Stillness, waiting for the world to wake, New York starting its Saturday, till back upstairs out of the white the telephone rings. It seems to buzz from different corners, bleeping like a fire alarm, impolite with unconventional urgency. Odd world of hotel calls, aimed at transience, passing through. I call Brooklyn, find it awake on the bright morning. Space. Past the doorman I head out; - how are you today, sir?. � Oh, I�m good, thank you: yes, determined to have a real good time. Art of positive replies you must learn. I am surprisingly unprepared for the city�s majesty: through the doors to the sidewalk stones the impact and momentum of its late-winter air, the rush of location, back in the land of the high green street signs. The Empire State is a sudden casual sight, waiting for my arrival, hanging on when I�m long gone; the strange happy durability of buildings is something that those who live among them don�t quite see. The early-spring wind of the world�s finest film set, arbitrariness of the way across the grid, east seeking a first diner: blitzed by the sensation of the avenues, tunnels of air, magnificent lines of vision, epic scale of moving city. Park Avenue, Lexington Avenue, casually they come, I wonder if I even know how to cross a street here, and think of �Sunday Morning�, all the streets you crossed, as the world�s most famous roads just drift past like they�re Tressilian Road or Chandos Place. That all this can still happily catch me unawares catches me unawares. Modesty of the eastern streets. I order a regular folks� breakfast, Belgian waffles with syrup, plus two little sausages that are actually tasty, five refills of coffee. I am determined to read the whole guidebook this time out, discovering Chinatown on the plane home if need be. I read the Rough Guide to Murray Hill. Like Chelsea further west, it lacks any real center, any real sense of community and, unless you work, live or are staying in Murray Hill, there�s little reason to go there at all; indeed you�re more likely to pass through without even realizing it. Odd how they�ll so deprecate such places; this is the heart of Manhattan, people! Get excited! I plan payment like a military campaign, try to work out where the tip goes, how much extra cash they�ll add, time movements, till, table, door, across the street and out of range. Noon South down Madison: the local mixture of history and the now, the new America that isn�t the same as all that though it walks the same streets, that has places to go and Britney Spears videos to watch. Union Square�s great Saturday spaces. Place to await a lassie. Upstairs in B&N below the painted writers I read of how The Gates costs $20 million but not a penny from the city. She shows and on the road shows me her badge. Line of unorthodox cops, Ironside, T.J. Hooker (no, he�s orthodox, that�s his schtick maybe), Spender, now the ex-bus driver and frustrated Orange Juice fan in DMs. Out in the air the guidebook bespeaks a slightly gone world; we try to map this one to it. Seek the American Savings Bank, lose Tammany Hall. The road into the East Village, where everyone and their daughter used to work for the Voice; the brown signs of Broadway tutti frutti that seems to start to split and multiply, as though its shadowy Bowery cousin weren�t diagonal enough. The local talent assembles for the week�s first fancy a pint, fancy a burger, FAB. In and out of the candle shop: scents on sale include Laundromat, Dirt and Ginger Ale. Out of the SoHo crowds like Suze Rotolo. Right from the start I couldn�t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I�d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid�s arrow had whistled by my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard. Unbelievable bathos of that paragraph�s end: �She was just my type�. Tom & Jerry�s: ambiguity of the name, queer instability of local knowledge. Who would have thought so many different bowls existed with �Tom & Jerry� on them? The reasons are unfathomable. Scrabble is in use; only game in town is count the numbers for the forthcoming FAPs. Everybody has plans round here. Back at Union Square�s subway pavilion the day going, going fine, how to buy the necessary card at something like 2/5 of the equivalent London cost. No wonder the tunnels are dirty. I like the stops� earnest announcements: �This is - 14th Street - *Union Square*�, or is it, �*Union* Square�, where the stress falls. In the Hotel Chloe Kiel the telephone rings: a voice out of Mike Leigh that yet seems to know his NYC. Share a cab downtown? No � see, I�ve got this *card*, I have to make it worthwhile� From West 28th street I head south to where every other query is a mock exam question, every other assertion a prank. A Miami man wants to drink beer with me. I never do make it. Derrida�s infinite capacity for making dumb people feel like they had just said something very interesting: �a genius, in that sense�. I make it somehow back up the cold thirty streets North. Another doorman coated against the night awaits to welcome me in. - Would that be the *phenomenal* Paul de Man, sir? - Oh, I wouldn�t go that far. Cars both ways on 5th Avenue, the terrific morning bright and crisp. Flatiron building a scaffolded postcard. On 12th street it needs more assurance than I yet have to pass the guards without blinking. A blonde in black with no trace of Red Indian. Outside the downtown skyline against a pretty Sunday, nineteenth century Wall Street, halted docks and stern ministers, Henry Fonda joining the trek to church out in the civilized West. 6 hours later I hear a new definition of the function of criticism: to remind you of how good books are. Don�t laugh, I could buy that one. Leigh�s pal walks me home in afternoon light, marvelling at sudden skyscraper visions: marvelling even though it�s not new to him, 20 years ago he would fly to and from his Brooklyn girlfriend. He likes the locals� pride in their city and the naivet� he finds in the acronyms: SoHo, TriBeCa, so simple. A kind soul, he says he�ll come by with a sleeping pill; I never see him again. Sleep won�t come, the day�s still light, so out at 5 uptown on 5th, passing bars and pubs and wondering about them, wondering why they feel more occulted here, not advertising themselves to me. Perhaps it�s the thoughts tristes of solitude, the lack of anyone to discuss or seek them with. The Empire State lit red white and blue at its top, the steps of the Public Library that�s just closing near six, where Peter Venkman seemed about to start to sing in Ghostbusters. The midtown city is fading and beautiful, mobile and lonely, tantalizing and memorable. At the Hotel Freddie Francis I call Sugar Loaf, talk to a father. His daughter calls me back out of the black on the K-mart bill and we rate the imaginary museums. Down the street I seek the right price for a bite, ask a gay fellow in Pinch for a pizza: first unnerving thing he does is ask my name. - So you want 7 inches, huh? It looks slim to me, tasteable enough but not quite my idea of $9. Under the stilled television, by the high window, the Brooklyn lager label�s artful symmetry is beautiful. I have brung three LRBs, which proves optimistic (I never get through the cellophane of more than one) or pessimistic (this is New York � it�s too important to be spending your time reading the LRB). �Unfortunately, Will In The World is very much not that book�: odd mix of negation and emphasis for a closing line. I pick up the book of the week, read something like They circled under the on-ramp to find stone stairs up into the sunlight of the bridge�s walkway, then started across, over the river, traffic howling in cages at their feet, the gray clotted sky clinging to the bridge�s veins, Manhattan�s dinosaur spine rotating into view as they mounted the great curve above the river. Line by line you can tick and nod your way through a book, even one as overlong and partially rebarbative as this; but looking back out of order, I wonder how a writer finds so many fresh phrases, so many different ways in one book to say �Manhattan�s dinosaur spine� (which is fine, to start with), and notice the buried echo of �The Great Curve�. Blue light on the clock fades out, waking time civilized by one hour, just another Manhattan Monday below, unpromising skies above. In the Mezzanine a shaven fellow who never visibly sits tells me I can return for a refill: when I do he congratulates me. - That�s good, taking advantage. Always the cool music playing here, not even quiet enough to be background. We talk about location, the quiet centre. Murray Hill: yes, a hill; mostly they were razed when they settled Manhattan. Algonquin, Manna-Hata: Island of the Hills. Downtown in the rain on the arrayed, at the foot of Madison Avenue I walk into Wendy�s, no luxury spot, and buy a combo meal whose price shoots from $5.99 to �biggie� (?) 50c extra to taxed $7.04, jeez, bargains always vanish into air. I eat upstairs, scribbling on Hotel Donald Regan paper my introduction, while a plump Plutonian in the corner sings along with the bad music, a live recording of an old ballad. That�s what I get for trying Wendy�s. Wild ride around the corporate halls, watching and listening to the enforced greetings. In their rows of desked seats the kids gather: contra yesterday�s rumour they�re not all armed with laptops. Sarcastic mode of the US professor addressing the unruly class, wondering out loud how long the assessment should be � 3k? 5k? � asking one of his former students, the last person to ask. On 12th street hours later the rain is lashing carelessly. Over one beer after another I talk to a high roller, have to admit that I don�t like HobNobs, Snow Patrol, Garden State, don�t remind me. A voice twelve years dated says Queer is the new way in: there aren�t two sexes, there are thousands. I can�t think what they�re called. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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