Oh Lordy! It's MACY'S PARADE!

I'm kind of quite settled now here in the city - in a way as restlessly content as I was in London, only with added curiosity to explore where I live. It's a curious thing: I can see myself belonging here, I have   a lot of zeal to go and explore the rest of the states, slowly, but ultimately still see myself returning to UK - but to do what? Very strange. Love seems the only thing that could occupy that hole. And that leaves me now, feeling like I'm just having fun until I leave - that is not a nice feeling. But in way that is life no? Ha.

In any case I am certainly ticking the boxes. I ticked a box this last week which I didn't no existed: Macy's amazing Thanksgiving Parade.

Mona suggested we go and watch the parade's balloons be blown up on wednesday night, a classic romantic thing to do apparently, and on the upper west side, which is an area I don't get to that often though I do like it for it's classy avenues and blocks, the ayurveda centre, cosmopolitan-ness and Cleopatra's needle for free jazz. And I thought "hmm I don't think I need to watch balloons being blown up" and I opted for the early night.

Thursday was thanksgiving day itself and so a welcome day off work. And happily I could answer the frequent question "what are you doing for thanksgiving?" with "having dinner with a friend's family downtown". And this was to be in the early evening. Joanne's e-vite "Dinner with the Millers" had said "we will serve dinner at 6.30". I took this to be a note on promptness rather than formality (although the two are related I guess). So I wasn't late, but, what to do in the morning? Well it was a gorgeous sunny blue-skied cooold morning and what with things being closed and the city feeling a bit quiet, I took out on my bike at 8am thinking I might check the parade, which begun at 9am. And I must admit I wasn't really sure what to expect though I know I do like a marching band and I do like cheer-leaders and tight tight marching choreography very much. So after queuing for my splendid coffee beforehand I made my way to 772nd street, upper west to see...

Lots of fathers around with toddlers on their shoulders, one of whom I heard asking a street-bum how he liked his eggs. A fine kicking piles of fall leaves feeling around. Then I heard the voice on loudspeaker of a commentator which usually makes me shudder - oppressive, conformist and too loud and electric. This lead me around the corner to...a giant Sonic the hedgehog balloon bobbing facedown in the street with about 60 blue-suited humans beneath and around him pulling on strings which attached to him like in Gulliver's travels when he wakes up on the beach. BIG balloon - the size of a juggernaut (see pics below of course). What a thing! And funny to watch all the whistles being blown and co-ordination below to get the bobbing mono-expressioned game character edging towards Central Park West Avenue where the parade was processing.

Then I started to see the magnitude of the parade, which is in its 82nd year apparently and sponsored all this time by the family department store Macy's. So there are dozens and dozens of such huge balloons in gradual convoy bobbing above Central Park's trees, and the crowds (who assemble from 6am to get good spots), dancers, other floats and yes, majorettes trotting along like horses lifting those feet up waving first left then right in unison. Works for me!

Then the commentator, pointing out celebs like Woopie Goldberg on a pirate ship float and balloon characters just joining the parade from a tributary street like Sponge Bob Square-pants. Here is some commentary which I mind-snapped:

"and what's this! It's Sid the Centipede - the wildest insect in town! Over 70 feet in length and with no less than 30 controllers. He's capable of making some fun manouvres as he makes his way down the parade."

Once I remembered that I didn't like huge static crowds and that my bike was a major hindrance, I elected to try to race the parade on my bike down a parallel quiet avenue. This was actually more surreal. I would stop in the cool air and watch the space between 2 scrapers in the distance.

And lo! A giant crawling Spiderman would start to emerge between the buildings at about 6th story, above the park trees in the background. Very funny sight. And so it went on as I cycled and watched all the shapes, going in close towards the end so that I could see more bands and drummers.

And I made it back for 11pm for a parental skype. Somehow crazy, very American and traditional, not my thing at all in a way but definitely magical.

I wondered how far into a depression the US would need to be before a parade like that was considered an extravagance. Maybe they would do it anyway - who knows. Just such a strange juxtaposition when there are still 1000s of unliveable homes by the ocean after the hurricane. I'm not moralizing at all - just reflecting on the colo(u)rs life has.
I also now get how watching the balloons being inflated with good company, a slice of pumpkin pie and a flask of chai might make a fantastic evening.

In which I qualify as a New Yorker in one more respect

There has been a mouse in my house for about 6 weeks. After dark and I'm in bed, I hear her scuttling and gnawing behind the fridge area. I don't know what she does but I've gotten used to it. Sometimes I put in earplugs. We tolerate each other. But then! One day I came home to find...droppings under the grater on the counter! Now it's got serious. How does she get up there? And suddenly I can't eat at home until I've solved this one. And I'm biggest and I pay rent and I have artistic projects, so she has to move out. Now the hardware store offers the following methodologies: poisoned, twatted hard with iron bar on spring ("blood everywhere!" the Hispanic owner says triumphantly), or get stuck to gluey surface and rip off your fur/tail as you die of thirst or of squeaking. The internet has traps where they walk in to a plastic room and can't get out - sounded good but it got me thinking: can't I make one of those? Hmm maybe not. But surely I can trap a mouse....I use more internet and...

I get into bed at 10.30pm and start appreciating my memory foam once again and the newly applied duvet now that it is cold here. My mouse trap is set and I start to get out earplugs ready to cocoon off into slumber. Bang! My kitchen trash can receives a visitor landing from on high! "Dang!" I think, having only set it 4 minutes before. "I guess I set it much too teetering and its gone off on its own". But no! I hear intermittent scampering sliding little body sounds. My trashcan contains mouse! I get up, light on, absurdly slightly nervous checking out the can for my roomie. She's not there! Ah! But she is...and no bigger than my thumb and doing the stealth thing in the shadow of the corner keeping everso still. I give the can a shake. She squeaks and does several jumps up the can's plastic walls. I am glad I used the can and not my slow cooker now as vessel now that I see that a mouse really can jump 18" like the internet said.

Here is the trap:

1. Make a long cardboard tube.

2. Wipe blob of peanut butter on inner lip of end of tube.

3. Teeter tube over edge of kitchen counter.

4. Place trashcan beneath counter and tube.

5. Go quiet and wait.

Mice love a) peanut butter - oh yes they do! 4 minutes!  b) tubes - they just gotta do a nice tube if they see it!

So I put a tablespoon of water in the can and a little more peanut butter (pilfered from dandy 'olde' style peanut butter machine at work) to see her through the night. She jumps all night on and off - I shout "you're not going to die! Get some sleep..." She jumps and slides more.

In the morning smell of piss. I try to coax her into empty olive-pot for transportation but she is extremely skilled at fast slither manouvres though squeaks a few times at possibility of failure. So...she comes on my trip to work with me in the open-top trashcan. I resist introducing her to fellow pedestrians at numerous traffic lights. I walk 6 whole avenues to reach Central Park where she now resides. I place the can horizontally angled down a bit on the wall. She comes sliding off like a bmx rider and plops on the leaves a few feet below. She scuttles and sniffs. I take in her teeniness compared with the big bad city and of course...she finds a little pipe, a little hole, and I get why mouses love tubes. Safety! They can't be got.

The night is very quiet without her. I fantasize about her finding her way back from Central Park to her gnawed kitchen home. But so far the counter top is disinfected and sporting guacamole, sourdough, pickles and salads again....all for me.

Public chats of no small amusement

3 older women.

There was Carlotta who sat next to me on the bench outside nearby coffee shop of a sunday afternoon. She wore copper chords and tall boots, a long tawny merino cardi to her knees, Raybans, a little purse-bag - subtle green old suede with a big solid silver fastener, lots of blond hair, immaculate. Must have been nearly 60 and looking well. She used dowsing to sell paintings, was a health consultant (private) and was currently dowsing for gold in Colorado as a project. Her mother told her on her deathbed never to give up the pendulum. She came across sane but certainly eccentric. She said there were 6 rodents for every human in the city when I told her about mine. She believed life was too short to buy 'nack-offs' or copies of designer items. We celebrated Wholefoods.

Patricia, over 60, sat opposite me in the big well-lit cafe upstairs of Wholefoods near where I live with a big smorgasbord help-yerself cardbox box of raw stuff. A cold day, I was glad of choosing hot macaroni cheese and hot provencal white beans with some roasted tomatoes. In her brown broad shouldered suit and stretched tight facial skin and small eyes, she owned a Broadway theater and nonchalantly said she'd just bought Charing Cross theater in London with joined pub and was offering membership deals to the PriceWaterhouse-Coopers employees who worked in the stories above it. She didn't smile once but seemed to be enjoying things. She told me that Romney promised to make women   into prisoners if they had abortions. Why are women voting for him she exclaimed - I dont understand! Crazy times.

Adele I met on a bench outside the library. A character full of humour with a worn serious face. We enjoyed bitching about the miserable library staff, one of whom had told her off for being loud when she had a stern word with a child who was being loud. They are a funny staff. Adele must have been 70 - loads of rouge and black eye-liner and copper died hair. Black velvety outfit on her teeny frame sitting there with crossed arms and legs unamused by it all. She had worked in PR all her life and said they were all sleaze-bags. They had tricked her out of an artistic career. I described Madmen to her and she nodded. She added that PR were way ahead of advertising. I described Downton Abbey to her and we seemed to agree, based on my descriptions only, on its superiority owing to the couple of redemptive characters in it - who were kind and noble and interested in justice. I mentioned the wife in Madmen as a victim. Fascinatingly she took real objection. She closed her eyes and shook her head and said 'dont call her a victim - it's far more complicated than that.' I laughed and we chatted on. When I handed her my book 'The joy of living dangerously' (which I'm not yet but have made in-roads there) she held it one INCH from her good eye and scanned the title letter by letter. Her advice on buying a card for a pretty woman at work who only wears black ever and who I don't know, was not to risk a colourful card. She said she might freak out. I agreed.

John, my musical partner pointed out that the closeness of everything in Manhattan/Brookyln meant that you can get a lot done in a day in the way of meeing people, short trips etc. Made me think how that coupled with the ease of public chats must do a lot for business and development.
Carlotta claimed that staff in stores are expected to bring in clientele - a bit like having your own business but she dowses for Gold in Colorado.

Photos just uploaded!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/debrooze/
I just began using my flickr account. Now it has pictures from trip to Portland, Oregon and Cold Spring, New York.
Will post some writing soon.

The Girl With the Long Pretty Hair

I met a musician guy to play music with the other week. A guitarist, turns out he "majored in music/guitar man". He responded to my vocal advert for such when I played open-mic a few weeks back, and we finally had a play to see if it was fun. It was fun - he writes good music, excellent guitarist and good singer and we sounded alright together. But what is most story-worthy is the way he makes it work for him in the big city.
So John is Californian, about 30, muscular, deep tan, thick 5 o clock shadow - especially under the nose which makes him look slightly Spanish or Greek maybe. But generally looks like a regular Californian dude.
I make my way to N14th street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A confusing angular part of the road grid, I am guided by the streets to my left which end in water then scrapers, and to my right a parched park of baseball players enjoying the hot sun and lazy days. The neighborhood changes flavor very quickly; from pretty treed brownstones with folks tapping on ipads on their staired porches, to flip-flopped dog-walkers walking through chicken-wire fenced nondescript lots and half-finished looking corner shops (hand-written names) with tons of water melons outside. I arrive at N14th, which is a long typically empty street of huge abandoned looking warehouses, graffiti and has-been garages.
But today it is full of roaring Harley-Davidsons, tattooed and leathered folk and a loud live band playing at 1pm it is, with 3 lone sweaty moshers. Quite a sight and sound.
I call John from under a scruffy tree and he agrees to walk out as I cannot see number 180 for guns nor roses on any warehouse anywhere. He emerges from behind a chilli-dog BBQ table, with his slow Californian pace and I follow him into the huge blue concrete building.  He says he had no idea at all that this was going on. How? I think.
It is cool and shady - and quiet, apart from a distant crazy drummer practicing. The corridors of identical padlocked doors put me in the mind of the store of all my worldly goods in London, only here the rooms feature concrete rather than corrugated iron - and they are more cramped and a little less loved. No paid cleaner I'd say, scruffy but uniform. And pristine in the sense that the outside world ie. bikers party is completely shut out. Not a sound nor window.
We are standing in John's rehearsal space - which he mentioned when we first spoke. 8 foot square room, musty, industrial carpet, lit only by laptop as apparently the makeshift and very low metal overhead lamp heats the room quickly. As my pupils widen, I begin to see...guitars! Leaning, propped, hanging, dangling. Speakers. Oh a vinyl record collection. And what's this: a commercial food blender on the floor. How interesting.
"Your den of creativity!" I say - referring to the pretty good set of uploads he has on youtube.
"Ya..."
"And so you sleep here too?" I say in gest. And then I wonder - because I now can see carpentry - a permanent step ladder arrangement leading up over his shelved record collection.
His yes response puts me in the sweet spot. Are we joking? There is no window. It is teeny. What?
"No I really live here" he states indicating a bed shelf above our heads. He doesn't look remotely offended and my mind fills with questions. So he washes in the gym. He knows the super (-intendent aka caretaker) who encourages this economical choice. And on our 2nd rehearsal, he is drinking directly from the large blender goblet. He gives me the secret recipe. No trendy kale/spinach green-goddess inner brush here:
1 banana, 6 eggs, 1 T Hershey's chocolate powder (which he brandishes) and peanut butter.
Now if I ingested that, my digestion would cross its arms and say "and what do you suppose I can do with this?" But the whole arrangement comes to settle in my mind and on the side of charm rather than horror. I am reminded of the year in my early early teaching career where I slept in a tiny room in a sleeping bag, rolling it up in the day. I got off on the monkishness of it and enjoyed the low cost. But sleeping through guys rehearsing rock and roll down the corridor - one of the bands has a cracking drummer who can play double pedal bass like Napalm Death! Later we feel it pump in our ribcages. He says he sleeps through it all and does odd jobs. Rent is $300 pcm. Makes sense.
The fact that he has the sweetest song/video called The girl with the long pretty hair (very Californian sounding) adds to the contrasts around perfectly. ...which we harmonize and play with a huge whirring floor fan making us feel cool.

Male company!

Some more great characters last night in the city.

I met with a bunch of guys to go out to bars to people-watch and talk to the ladies on saturday night. The lady stuff was very fun - I met the perfect bunch of guys for enjoying it with.

They included a young French guy who is trying his luck as a magician in NYC - his card tricks were mind-blowing but he preferred not resort to those for his flirting - I guess as it his day job he's had enough. And a long dread-locked Carribean guy called Thol whose approaches were hilariously relaxed and with whom great exchanges were had about music. He seemed pleased that a Brit knew as much as I did about that, and gave a very nice compliment having established he liked British women and wanted to visit:

"Well man, you know having met you I'm gonna put another extra dollar in my trip to UK jar"

And Al, a guy who spoke like Al Pacino. Turns out that Al works in NYC for the UN and had a 2 year clandestine relationship with somebody much younger at work - and which was very much disapproved of for various reasons when it got out (the policy is "don't shit where you sit - don't screw the crew!"). But you have to imagine him recounting the situation in his accent. He was explaining how he dealt with all the gossip once it got out. Seemed like he knew how to handle the politics and information flow of it by starving it out when people asked him. He basically gave nothing away:

"Oh really, is that so? We lived together for 2 years? And no one knew? How many kids did we have? Well l must be fucken Houdini..."

We're all a bit backward at venturing out and talking to beautiful women so to help ourselves out we put it that it was all about rejection - let's see how many we can get, rejections that is. I must say I found it very funny talking to women having removed the need to succeed. I found myself bursting into laughter half way through the interaction which seemed to come across as happiness. Plus it was a noisy bar which covers, and generates, a multitude of sins. I got lots of tips on where to go later on in the night. Which isn't my thing so I went off home to bed, this time anyway.

I reflected on how city bars are probably very similar the world over now - same drinks, same music, same lighting, same crowd. 

First snaps with sony nex5

Double-click on image to get slideshow...

a/c colony

on brooklyn bridge

one-handed bike ride through brooklyn heights

statue of liberty

my street

sunday evening south brooklyn

view from my bloomberg tower 24th story with black corners

still don't know how to use new camera