The Ghosts of New York

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you. - The Police "Every Breath You Take", 1983

freed to talk privately

Me, I romp and stomp
Thankful as I romp
Without freedom of speech
I might be in the swamp - Dylan "Motorpsycho Nightmare", 1964

New Yorkers at the No Mosque Demo 2010

This is a story of two old guys, a basketball team, and a salt ghost.

I'm not much interested in sport, but I find this story interesting in that it pits anti-racism against freedom of speech. And this in a country where freedom of speech is often touted as the corner-stone of what many Americans think is the greatest democracy on earth, EVER.

The two men are accused racist Donald Sterling and American stand-up comedian and anti-racist, Bill Maher.

Sterling owns, or owned, a basketball team in California - the Clippers. At the time of writing I don't know if he still owns the team, but even if he still does, he won't for long because he has been exposed as a racist by his girlfriend who secretly taped a private conversation between herself and Sterling.

Once the tape was made public, the commissioner of the American National Basketball Association banned Donald Sterling from the Association for life. Which means of course, that he can no longer own the Clippers basketball team.

The other old guy is Bill Maher. I don't much like him either. Many of my friends expect me to like him, but I find him a little bit obvious, especially as he is considered, by himself and others, to be a satirist.

The connection between the two old guys is that Bill Maher unexpectedly defended Donald Sterling's right to privacy when the "racist" tape was made public.

"But, you know, the creepy part is when you get taped in your own house and then that goes to the world. Again, no one here is defending Don Sterling, but that's what's creepy to me is that we can't even speak in our own house anymore." (Bill Maher On Sterling)

I completely agree. It is really scary. I am sure I've made some politically incorrect statements, though not racist ones. Well, hang on, what about Polish and Irish jokes told between friends?

Obama commented on the racist tape by saying,"When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk". But Sterling wasn't advertising anything, he was talking to his girlfriend and to her alone - well that's what he thought.

Freedom of speech in the United States is protected by the First Amendment to its Constitution. According to Wikipedia, "The freedom of speech is not absolute; the Supreme Court of the United States has recognized several categories of speech that are excluded from the freedom, and it has recognized that governments may enact reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech" Restrictions such as making it unlawful to incite racial hatred or yelling out "fire" in a movie theater. But I'd always thought that private conversations between two people, conversations that were not related to conspiracy to commit a crime, were exempt from the exceptions.

While it is true that Donald Sterling has not been accused of a crime, he has never the less been punished economically, and been publically vilified.

And where does a salt ghost come into all this? And what is a salt ghost anyway?

The "Salt Ghost" is no other than the Statue of Liberty - according to a delightful three year old child who came to visit New York City last month.

He saw many statues in his travels around New York. New York is a city of statues - there are 162 in its five boroughs. Including Ludwig von Beethoven, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr., Socrates, Marquis de Lafayette, Douglass Frederick, five George Washingtons and four Abraham Lincolns.

Through the eyes of a young child these large, silent, completely stationary men and women were "ghosts". The ghosts of New York. "Statue" was not yet in his vocabulary.

But he was looking for one ghost in in particular - the "salt ghost". And eventually he found her.

"La Liberté éclairant le monde". The defender of freedom on Liberty Island in New York Harbor.

As to why he thought she was the SALT ghost -well that's another story.

Blue Jeans are Green

In my mind I’m gone to Carolina
Can’t you see the sunshine
Can’t you just feel the moonshine
Ain't it like a friend of mine
To hit me from behind
Till I’m gone to Carolina in my mind " - "Carolina in My Mind", James Taylor 1968

"Who is James Taylor?" - "Anon", 2014

New Yorkers in Jeans, DUMBO

Today, May 20, 2014, marks the 141st birthday of the Levi's 501 jeans.

At the 2014 Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna, Levi's CEO Chip Bergh claimed that Levi's "are the ultimate in sustainable apparel.... [They] will last a lot longer than most people's waistlines will." - (Levi Strauss CEO: Stop washing your jeans).   Good to know that Levis are cradle-to-cradle. But I have given up wearing jeans of any kind for some years now. Jeans might retain their shape, or shrink -but out bodies don not.

There was a short period where I weaned myself off blue jeans them by wearing them in black. But for at the past two years, even black jeans have ceased to have a place in my wardrobe.

Whoever said, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," might have shown some fashion sense had he added, "Don't wear jeans over fifty." Hang on while I google who said it.

It was Jack Weinberg who turned sixty on April 6, 2000. I wonder was he wearing jeans.

In America they have "Mom jeans". According to Wikipedia, "Mom jeans is a humorously pejorative term for a specific type of fit of women's jeans, considered to be both unfashionable, and unflattering to the wearer's body shape. This style usually consists of a high waist (rising above the belly button), making the buttocks appear disproportionately longer, larger, and flatter than they otherwise might."

Earlier this year Sarah Palin used the words to try to insult Obama. "People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates." It was enough to make me go out to buy a pair.

But no, I just can't do it. Jeans might be cradle-to-cradle, organic, and free-range, but they don't necessarily look good on women, or men, of a certain age. I intend to age gracefully. Of course you don't have to be under forty to look good in jeans and maybe I could even look OK in them. But the "Mom jeans" thing got to me.

Just another thing that I have lost. But then look how much I've gained. Growing old isn't all negative. Why just yesterday I discovered another until then unknown upside. I have completely forgotten all the books I read in my teens. I'm in the middle of Camus "L'Étranger". Don't remember a word of it.

Yes sister Helen Reddy.
Oh yes, I am wise
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
(Strong)
I am invincible
Invincible
I am woman

Yet but I still don't look all that great in jeans ...

But look how much I've gained ...

A whole new library awaits me.

Living in the Seventies

I feel a little crazy
I feel a little strange
Like I'm in a pay phone
Without any change - Skyhooks, "Living in the Seventies", 1974

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look
Spellbound an' swallowed ’til the tolling ended - Dylan, "Chimes of Freedom", 1964

Earth Day at Earth Fest, Battery Park, New York 2014

There's something about the seventies - they just won't go away.

I gave birth to my children in the seventies, and spent most of that decade in rural Australia. Back then Manhattan seemed a century away, as did "Swinging London" which I had recently left.

Days of macramé housewives, potteries, Fowler'sjars, and a fear of anything petrochemical. Needless to say we all drove 8 cylinder cars, but our hearts yearned for horse-drawn buggies. Memories of Gladydale, Victoria, Australia, The World, The Universe.

Where a friend of mine tried to grow rice on the side of a mountain top, in sandy soil with no irrigation or regular rainfall. My mind jolted back to the days of vinyl when children had names like Sunday, Zero and Chaos. When men sprouted sideburns and babies wore cloth diapers. When James Taylor was beautiful. Well, all of us were.

 Forty years on.

The bottom tip of Manhattan NY. Battery Park. Earth Fest 2014. Time warp.

Sunflower Seeds and Clay, Earth Day, Battery Park

A scattering stalls that may or may not have been selling something. It was hard to tell. Laid back and organic, with almost cult-like starry-eyed optimism, the vendors were all into customer participation.

A red-headed bearded man was showing me a few grains of rice, explaining that he had grown them on an island on the East River. I can't remember its name. Millrock perhaps? "Does anyone live there?" I asked and he told me no. I wondered how he got there everyday to tend a few clumps of rice. Perhaps he had a raft.

A band way playing songs I'd never heard of. Downbeat. I later discovered it was "Bluegrass" and performed by either "Gotham City Pickers" or "Five Mile String Band". Scorning advertising there was no sign. Actually I shouldn't be mean. It was all very pleasant. Laid-back and un-commercial. There was even a farm, based on strip-farming - the open-field system that was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages.

Kids rolled sunflower seeds into clay balls under the supervision of eager teenagers from one of the local schools. A communal bucket half-full of muddy children juice was available to clean tiny toddler hands.

But I am being mean again. I just can't help myself. I blame it on a guy called Bill de Blasio - New York City's new mayor. But that's another Letter ...

I'll Take Manhattan

My friends and I — we've cracked the code.
We count our dollars on the train to the party.
And everyone who knows us knows that we're fine with this,
We didn't come from money. - Lorde - "Royals" 2013

Hazel - single mother and actress, 1950

I was taught well by my mother. Hazel, who bought us up, me and Tim, all by herself in the days when there was no such concept of "single mother".

She instructed me on "the need for men". If ever she couldn't get the lid off a jar of honey, or my bicycle broke, whenever anything needed "fixing", she would sigh and say, "This is when you need a man".

I believed her. Until I grew up and had a man.

Was it me, or did I sense in the men I chose, something that would prove my mother wrong? For at least with the first significant men in my life, I chose men who couldn't fix anything if their lives depended on it. It was as if their inability to change a tyre or replace a spark plug somehow set them apart from the rank and file of Australian men.

I remember standing at the kitchen window, watching with horror and fascination as husband #1 attempted to build a chook house. From scratch. He approached the job in a linear manner, using what is now called in the IT industry, "Agile methodology". First he hammered into the sandy ground of the Yarra Valley, one long pole, which was meant to be  one of four  vertical support beams. Just the one.  That being done he went on to hammer in the planks that were to make up the front side. I think the roof came next. I couldn't watch.

Some years later I met Rachel. Rachel lived in a big rambling weatherboard house in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. The first time I visited Rachel some rocker-looking guy in a navy singlet was sanding the floors, part of his project of "renovating Rachel's house". I was impressed. Rachel introduced him as her new "boarder".

He was one of many that came into her life in the next decade. From boarder to renovator to lover, they all prided themselves in helping out "the little woman". Rachel had it down to an art. She would advertise for a boarder on the notice board of a well known book shop in the then trendy Melbourne suburb of Carlton. That way she would attract a man who read books. No bogans for Rachel. She'd pick the sexiest -looking "applicant", install him in the spare bedroom, and them bemoan the fact that the house was run down and how could she, a single mother with a full-time job, a low-paid social-worker, do anything about it?

I am not sure about the order in which the next events happened, but happen they did. The boarder would be elevated to lover and house remodeler. The best thing about it, Rachel confided in me, was that they would all be testosterone-driven to show how bad the last bloke had been, and how much better HE was in fixing her house. Things just kept getting better. She had the whole process worked out.  "Poor Rachel!" Peter the rocker said to me as he put the sander down to light a cigarette. "The last bloke here knew nothing about wood floors. I am replacing the lot with jarrah".

Several men in as many years later, Rachel had one of the best renovated homes in Brunswick. I was envious. But no way could I be like Rachel. For a start, I didn't pre-screen my men. Her "boarder" idea was a good one. She quickly got to know the men's habits, skills, taste in music, and their politics, before deciding their usefulness and abilities as lovers and renovators.

I found out later, and only ever had one lover who was good with his hands in both senses of the expression. I think it is because I grew up sans any sort of man, that I was conditioned early in life to fear anything breaking. TVs, cars, tables, phones. As soon as anything went even remotely on the blink I'd get neurotic and just want it replaced with something new. I am still like that today.

But now I live in an apartment in Manhattan. We have "maintenance men" on site, 18 hours a day. You just pick up the intercom and say, "This is Kate and my dishwasher is making a funny noise," and there they will be, at the apartment door, tools and replacement parts on hand.

I think that is why I stay here, in my apartment in New York. That and the fact that I don't need a car. I remember way back when, going into a panic if the fridge made a noise different from the one it made before, or if the engine of my car made a whining sound. Who could I turn to? The men didn't know. They didn't even notice such things.

I yearned for independence. For a life without scary breaking-down things.

When I am feeling particularly neurotic I wander around my apartment in Manhattan, where I live alone. Checking for things that might beak in the near future. No man around to be able to not fix things. That closet door today for example. It wasn't closing flush. I picked up the intercom. "This is Kate," I said. "I don't like the way the closet door in the hallway closes." Five minutes later there's José at my door. Not a problem. He had spare roller things to replace in the slider top thing. He'd do it right now, though it would be best to replace the hinges. That'd be $100 per door plus tip. Cheap at half the price.

Now, if I had been with one of the can't-fix-it men, it'd be a different story. It'd be, "There's nothing wrong with the door!" And I'd say, "But what if it gets worse?" And on and on and I'd dream of doors falling off onto the heads of little children, maybe maiming them for life, even killing them.

The lack of sleep. Having to talk to the man over breakfast, hiding my neurotic fears, and peeling the damp plastic wrap off the Melbourne Age that the paper boy had delivered to the front lawn.

Now it is all about reading the New York Times, online of course. Eating breakfast alone. Or even not eating breakfast. And having an army of men ready and willing to fix every little thing!

Ah, the freedom of it all.

Eat your heart out Rachel!

Past Imperfect

The imperfect is a verb form, found in various languages, which combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can therefore have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to walk." - Wikipedia

Take another little piece of my heart, now baby
(Break it)
Break another little bit of my heart, now honey
(Have a)
Have another little piece of my heart now, baby
You know you've got it if it makes you feel good - Bert Berns and Jerry Ragavoy,  better known for Janis Joplin's rendition

Crowd gathers to remember George Harrison
Central Park 30th November 2001

I was posting on Facebook. I am usually very careful of what I post on Facebook. Nothing inflammatory.

Maybe it is just the people I am "friends" with on Facebook. Whatever. The people I "know" there are a polite group, except for one or two eccentrics who seem to be tolerated for their amusement value.

A few weeks ago I had been watching Scorses's "Living in the Material World" on the life of George Harrison, and was thinking about how affected I am upon hearing about the death of artists who I particularly like, and who were part of the youth of my generation.

I nearly posted how I feel, on hearing such news -  that a little bit of me dies with each such passing, and how "what a drag it is, getting old". I tried to explain, then remembering  my virtual reality whereabouts, I did not click on "post". Too negative. To confrontational. Definitely not the time or place. Cancel.

Then this week I saw a  photo of Mick Jagger published at the time of the death of his partner L'Wren Scott, in Manhattan this month. Jagger in the sixties, Jagger now almost in his seventies. What a transformation, though he looks good for his age, as people like to say. I prefer his line, "What a drag it is getting old", although he penned those words when he was young and brash.

I remembered hearing of  Jimi Hendrix's death in September 1970. And then Janis Joplin's the next month. Joplin's "Take another little piece of my heart, now baby".  The first sense of loss. Lost youth. So apt.  I decided to post something about getting old.

My circle on Facebook, as vanilla and polite as it is, seemed hardly to notice when I posted  - "Looking of photos of Jagger on hearing of his current partner L'Wren Scott's suicide, after seeing him as a twenty year old in a documentary a few days ago, I thought how sad it is that the young get old."

Hardly anyone commented. Two friends agreed. Another posted about enjoying getting old. Another seemed non-plussed - what on earth did I mean?

We are so polite on Facebook. Is is my circle of "friends", or is if Facebook? I suspect it is the latter. After all,  I read the other day that young people are deserting Facebook in droves, leaving it to "old people", preferring other social networks where young people hang around in a universe that is not dominated by cutesy sayings embedded in retro-fonts in rectangle graphics with yellow backgrounds and photos of grand kids.

Can't say that I blame them. Though a part of me thinks, "what a nerve!" Who invented the web anyway? Do they have "like buttons" on those other sites and apps? Is there the young equivalent of the cutesy sayings?

It is something I will never know. Like how to change a car tyre, or how how electricity works. It just isn't worth the effort.

Instead I joined a knitting circle. It's so much fun. People sit around drinking coffee, talking about films, and knitting.

But even there I feel a bit past it. Conversations about "Girls" on channel whatever, and how much better it is than "Sex in the City" was. How much more realistic it is. SO New York.

I wouldn't know. I just sit there knitting.

I told a young friend - well not "told" in the sense of speaking words, I messaged her, about how I joined a knitting club. "Whatever for?" she messaged back. Genuinely perplexed. I was sort of glad she was bemused. It meant perhaps that she didn't see me as "old".

But I re-thought. Should I be thinking that way. Where was my gray pride? Old should be good.

But it isn't.

I fear that I am entering that age when one is assigned to the rubbish bin of life. An age when even people of forty scoff at the music of "My Generation". But deep down, behind the wrinkles and grey hair I know that we, the baby boomers, are right. We were always right. And if we hang out in Facebook boring the hell out of younger people, at least we "like" each other.

It might be that we no longer get our kicks, on Route Sixty Six, and that the biggest arguments we have on Facebook are about things like whether spring starts on the equinox or on the first of April or September. So what?

"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."

Talking Points

You think that I don't even mean
A single word I say
It's only words, and words are all
I have to take your heart away - "Words", Bee Gees 1969

Did she go to work or just go to the store
All those things she said, I told you to ignore
Oh why can't we talk again
Oh why can't we talk again
Oh why can't we talk again
Don't leave me hanging on the telephone
Don't leave me hanging on the telephone - "Hanging on the Telephone", Debbie Harry, from The Nerves - 1978

Comfort, Texas

I have a friend. She is a really good friend. An American friend. I really like her. I will call her X.

I have been friends with X  now for many years. I usually argue with my friends. It is just how I am.

My excuse for the arguing is that I really care about them (on my side),and they are very annoying (their side).  X  knows she is annoying, and I think it is because we are at one on this point, that the friendship has continued for so many years.

X is special. I don't have many American friends. Also she is "centered" as they say on the West Coast. Well, here as well. And in OZ. But I think it started on the West Coast. Being centered as opposed to self-centered I mean. X is both. I don't think she can see the difference between "centered" and "self-centered". I fact I doubt she has even thought about centeredness - in terms of her own behavior, that is. And as for me, I am impressed!

Last evening X called me. X is the only person I know, who puts people on hold when SHE initiates the call. "I haven't got a lot of time," she told me when I picked up. She was in a pharmacy and was asking one of the workers about the different body exfoliates.

All I could hear was her discussion with the pharmacy person,  interrupted by "I am still here, just be PATIENT!" Then I heard the cash register ring and she said "I am getting on the train to the East Village now," and the phone went dead. That's what it's like having X as a friend. There is no point in saying anything. It is a put-up-or-shut-up sorta thing.

I was at X's house last week, when  she got one of those annoying calls. You know the type. When someone who you have never heard of, from a company you have never dealt with, calls and says, "Hello Kate (or whoever you are). And what sort of day are you having today?"

I usually answer something along the lines of, "Who are you? " Or "I'm busy!" Or "This isn't Kate; she is in the hospital. with a terminal illness."

X just snapped at the caller, "If you can't say what you are calling about in one sentence, then I'm not interested."

I can't do that. I am  more passive aggressive, or so I have been told. Sometimes I just put the phone down and go to the bathroom. By the time I get back they have gone.

But there ARE times that I rise to the occasion.

Like today. I took a call. "Hi can I speak to Eric?" it asked. "No!" I answered in a very firm voice. "He never wants to talk to you again."

Last week I had a call from a young woman with a name like "Madison" spelled wrong. It was about ten in the morning on the East coast, even earlier in the morning on the West coast."

"Good afternoon," she said, "my name is Madison and how are you feeling today?" "It isn't afternoon," I said. "Well it feels like afternoon," she replied. And then, "I would like to talk you about retirement villages."

I hated her. I hated her before when said about the retirement villages - I hated her when she didn't know what time of day it was. "I am not interested in talking to someone who doesn't know what time of day it is," I answered,  and - well you can't "slam the phone down" anymore. So I just double clicked the home button on my iPhone and went upon my way.

Ten days ago I needed to call my bank in Australia. Now I have an excellent phone service in New York. It costs me nothing to call OZ, but  the Commonwealth Bank of Australia doesn't know that.

Mid Town NYC

I had been in a prickly mood all morning. It was around 11:00 am in New York - 3:00 pm in Sydney when I came off "hold" and the Men at Work musak. Wanting to get back to whatever I'd been doing, I went straight to the point, and explained that I was calling from New York and it was quite expensive to be on hold, so I hoped we could get to my question.

Being Australian, the customer service person was called Janelle and not Madison. "Oh what's it like in New York?" she asked. This was coming from one of my own people so I didn't snap her head off. "It is very cold,"  I answered." "And what is it like to live there?" she said. I tried to summarise 18 years of living in NYC into one sentence.

"Jeez," Janelle said, "I want to go there one day How did you get there? D'you think I'd get work?"

My tolerance limit was reached. "I am calling about my bank balance and I really can't give you a travelogue on New York City," I said, in a nasty voice, thereby justifying all of the expats-are-annoying-especially-the-ones-in America thing, and undoing my attempt at being a nice person. The line went dead.

I guess Janelle wont be coming to New York anytime soon. As for me, I am going to take politeness classes from my friend X.

She's nailed it.

Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same. - Little Boxes, Malvina Reynolds, 1962

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right. I'm jumpin jack flash,
It's a gas! gas! gas! - Jumping Jack Flash, Jagger/Richards, 1968

I'd always believed that "Little Boxes" was written by Pete Seeger. I should have known that such a clever song was written by a woman! No offence to Pete, a man who never craved the limelight.

I only discovered that Malvina Reynolds composed the song when I checked the lyrics today -  thinking about Pete Seeger who died last Monday in New York.

End of an era.

A mere six years between "Little Boxes" and "Jumping Jack Flash". Between the gentle, almost self-effacing Seeger, and the bold rebellion of Jagger. Who would have thunk it?

I can actually remember where I was when I first heard  "Little Boxes". I was with my father in a car on the way to the Sir Colin MacKenzie Fauna Park - otherwise known as the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary.

It was on an access visit. My father was driving, and left-wing socialist that he was, he referred to the wild-life sanctuary by its correct name, "The Sir Colin MacKenzie Fauna Park". That's what he was like. Having never learned to read and write until he was a grown man (a big thank you to the Saint Augustines Boys' Orphanage), he prided himself on getting things right.

Of course none of the gray looking people on the streets of Melbourne had a clue as what he was talking about. "Sir Colin MacKenzie Fauna Park" indeed!  A lover of the proletariat by political conviction, my father could never quite cope with the working class in the flesh.

Bill lived in New Zealand and my brother and I, in Australia. It was in the gray years of the fifties, that extended their dull influence to the early sixties in Australia.  The country we expats now call "OZ"  - being run at the time by a political party several degrees to the right of the American Tea Party that was to come later.

Of course we never made it to Healesville to see the koalas and kangaroos. My father, like me and my brother, had spatial dyslexia, and couldn't read maps or find his way out of a box. He drove round in circles, passing little boxes all the same. I remember he kept stopping to ask the gray-looking pedestrian pedestrians of Melbourne's outer suburbs, "Can you please direct me to Sir Colin MacKenzie Fauna Park?". He said in his best Sir Laurence Olivier British upper class actor voice. Olivier, his hero.

Tim and I cringed. We cringed a lot in those days. When to be accepted one had to be normal. When to have divorced parents was definitely not.

We were access visit, latch-key kids.  Now I think of it, we were ahead of our time!

I was going to write about Greek ruins in Northcote, and how it is so annoying when customer service people ask what sort of day you are having...

But  listening to "Little Boxes" did me in.

Thank you Pete Seeger.

It was because of you Pete Seeger,  that we were able to grow out of our "boxes".

Valé.

A Circle Game

I've never seen a diamond in the flesh
I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies
And I'm not proud of my address
In the torn up town, no post code envy - Lorde, Royals 2012

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey
But it's really not my home - Joni Mitchell, Carey 1970

About a hundred years ago, when I had just arrived in New York, I used to visit art galleries almost every weekend. Back then the Frick, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were things of wonder.

I had almost forgotten about those salad days of exploring New York until an article in The Guardian by Andres Serrano jogged my memory.

I remembered going to Brooklyn to see the much advertised "Piss Christ" by Andres Serrano - a  photograph of  small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine.

Before then I had not realized that art could be hype - that art didn't need to be  about technical expertise or embedded creativity. It could be about ideas represented in some visual media.

Some time in the late 1990s I went to see a photo exhibition comprised of portraits of homeless people wearing clothes from "Gap". I don't remember what the photographer was trying to achieve, what he was trying to convey, but I guess I got it right. What I saw was a bunch of photos of homeless people wearing clothes from "Gap".

And it was around then that I figured that Marshall McLuhan was spot on when he said in 1964 that "the medium is the message". The Gap homeless exhibition and the Piss Christ photo were really just about getting an idea and having the balls, confidence and connections, to realise it in a piece of self-referential object d'art art, before anyone else could think of it.

Serrano's latest piece of art is a collection of signs that he purchased from homeless people in New York - usually paying $20 a piece. He cleverly titled the collection "Signs of the Times". You can read his take on it in The Guardian's - A Creative Times Report - "I purchased 200 signs from homeless people in New York City. ... I call this piece a collection because that's what it is, a collection, and I’m the collector. But I’m also an artist and I’ve made my collection a work of art"

Apparently he wasn't the first person to think up the idea of collecting homeless people's signs, but somehow he didn't know about the ones that came before, and so wrote about his achievement in The Guardian as if he were the first person to conceive it.

By now you are probably wondering why I have chosen to illustrate this post with drawings of people. Well one person - in different guises. They are Facebook profile pictures that my brother Tim drew. Over a period of three months he uploaded the drawings, one by one with about a week in between,  in the sequence you can see here. I decided to put them together and put them in one of my blog posts,  and then I had an idea.

I do hope that it is a first.

 I remembered reading that Mark Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook from American university year books - paper books published annually which included photos of the students' faces - hence "Facebook". My idea is to turn Zuckerberg's idea on its head - or  should I say, face.

I plan to make a paper book of Facebook profile images. Of course I will ask permission of the the owners of the images,  and I  will not do an Andres Serrano, offering $20 for each sign and exhibiting them,  without even attributing the signs to the homeless people who had made  them.

But I WILL make a book, a paper book. Of course I won't be able to call it Facebook. I can't call it anything with the word "face" in it,  as I am certain Mr Zuckerberg would complain. But I do have a few ideas as to what I will call my work of art. However right now it's under wraps.

The only clues I will give is that it is self-referential, backwardly compatible, intuitive,  and no homeless people will be used in its production.

 Stay tuned!

On creators and builders and being cool

Yesterday, a child came out to wander
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star - Joni Mitchell, "The Circle Game", 1968

Well let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
The way she'd act and the colour of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there - The Zombies, "She's Not There", 1964
 

The Cool Factor

Do you know what a creator is? A creator is someone who makes an idea. And then there are builders. A builder is someone who builds the idea. When I grow up, I want to be a creator AND a builder."

This from a child who looked to be about eight, on the M15 bus, sitting next to a little girl who looked to be slightly younger.

Perhaps the child was just parroting a teacher, but I think not. He was just being cool. Manhattan-eight-year-old-cool.

I have thought a lot about "being cool" lately. I used to think it was merely used as an affirmation. As in, "Let's meet around seven?" "Cool." " I just bought another pair of reading glasses." "Cool!".

People around my age used to use the word "cool", meaning hip, and it was applied to people who had read books like Kerouac's "On the Road" and who went to Igmar Berman movies which were called "films" by the seriously cool.

It was sort of easy to be cool back then, especially if you were a girl. You just had to hang around with the cool crowd and you sort of became cool by association. You didn't atually have had to read "On the Road", you just had to know it was a book.

Eventually I grew up and forgot about "cool". Until I had kids and they went from babies to children and started using "cool" as an affirmation when they were very young.  Saying cool" as in "Yes" or "OK". "Do you want an icecream?" "Cool". "It is time to go to kindergarten." "Cool".

I only just found out about the recycled meaning when a young Australian friend visited me in Manhattan last month, and explained contemporary cool to me.

It can now be used in its old meaning - of  " hip"  -  not necessarily meaing  "OK" or "I agree".  It can mean something more like 1960s "cool". Both meanings are now in use. "Those shoes are so cool!" "Cool!"

I could have missed its recycled meaning altogether. I could have remained an unenlightened old person wearing Sarah Palin type reading glasses. Scary!

It  was a little sad to learn that  people of my generation - people  who were definitely "cool"  in the sixties - are now mostly "uncool".

Yes, during my friend's visit I discovered what I have secretly suspected for some years - that I am definitely NOT "cool".

For a start I watch CNN for the news. Uncool. I knew that.  But it is easy - "news candy" for the unlenlightened old people.

And then there was the matter of my reading glasses. I already knew mine were "uncool" so I snuck off and bought new ones from the West Village cool reading glasses place, "Moscot".

I was pretty pleased with myself and I was suitably rewarded with a "They are so cool!" from my young friend. She even iMessaged me (see above) a cool person face that she photographed on my  very own TV which was now tuned into MSNBC instead of the uncool CNN.

The iMessaged face was no other than that of  Malcolm Gladwell, though at the time I had no idea who he was. But my young friend explained that the face was cool because it was wearing cool  glasses like my new ones, and it was not to be inferred that the person himself was cool.

I threw my old uncool glasses away. No bad thing - they were starting to look like Sarah Palin's glasses. Heaven forbid.

Though one never knows - I am so sick of Obama and his Obamacare fiasco that maybe ... no no no. Never in a thousand years. But one can never tell. Maybe voting Republican will become the new cool.

My young Australian friend left but I  stayed true to my new cool self  -  tuned in to MSBN -  being cool.

Then a few days ago I cheated and turned on CNN. I felt like an ex-alcoholic falling off the wagon. I poured a wine and tuned in to Anderson Cooper on CNN. And sat, my eyes transfixed.

There on the TV was  the not-neccessarily-cool person, complete with my glasses,  being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. It was then that I found out his name. Malcolm Gladwell. I double-checked the messages on my iPhone. Yep the same chap.

I'd never even heard of him. Apparently he lives not so very far from me in Manhattan. He doesn't have a doorbell and writes all his novels and articles in cafés. At least one of his books is on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Not only had I found the out whose face my young friend had messaged, but there he was actually talking about being "cool". "People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am," he said with a laugh. "I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception."

Cool.

So there you go - I had never even heard of the guy. So cool he is un-cool. Or is it the opposite?  So un-cool that he is cool?

I'm not sure, but I have sneaking suspicion that NOT writing  books that have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List is even cooler.

An Australian Dinner Party in Manhattan

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you ;- Lesley Gore but the Bryan Ferry version is better!

Joseph's face was black as night
The pale yellow moon shone in his eyes
His path was marked
By the stars in the southern hemisphere
And he walked his days
Under African skies - Paul Simon, "Under African Skies"

Blah Blah Blah Realty Upper East Side

I hadn't been to a dinner party in Manhattan - well not a "real one" that is. Not what us Aussies would call a "dinner party".

I have been to one Sedar, to a birthday in a restaurant, and to a weird gathering on the Upper West side.

Probably the gathering on the Upper West Side was the closest I've come to an Australian dinner party - Aussie only in the sense that we were all gathered around one table and a central theme evolved. On pets.

One of the guests was passing around a photo in his wallet, of his pet parrot. No to be one-upped another guy at the party actually called his pet cat from his cell phone.

But no one laughed or made sarcastic remarks. Every one was very polite. "So cute your little birdie!" "What a clever cat!"  Fortunately the "party" only lasted one hour. Nah, not anything LIKE an Australian dinner party - too short, no arguments, and the guests were unfailingly  polite to each other.

In the past decade,  I've only been to two Australian dinner parties.

The first one was in Australia, in 2009 when after sixty minutes into the gathering, guests somehow got involved in discussing Catholicism and Protestantism - the central theme which one was better. All authentic Australian dinner parties have themes. Themes that are unplanned, but are themes never the less.

I'm not sure what "side" I was on. at the Catholic-Protestant dinner  party. I didn't want to be lumped in with the English - no way could I support those responsible for the potato famine in Ireland over a century ago. But I was brought up to be an anti-Catholic agnostic. I vaguely remember trying to be neutral, but that didn't work. You have to take a side in Australian dinner party debates.

I have a memory of going to the back yard - leaving them all to argue, while I looked up at that beautiful midnight-ink dark antipodean sky lavishly sprinkled with stars - that beautiful generous sky that can only be seen in the southern hemisphere.

Back in Manhattan, I'd given up expecting to go to an Australian dinner party outside of Australia.

And then, quite suddenly it happened - I landed in an Australian dinner party, in the heart of Manhattan.  At the Members-only dining room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which boasts "full waiter service of contemporary American cuisine in a sophisticated, elegant setting with expansive views of Central Park."

Season of Mists - Fall in Manhattan

It started off as a genteel gathering  the family members, two women and a man - all Australian - who were having a Manhattan evening, with their niece,  my friend who is also a fellow New Yorker. It was their last evening in New York before rejoining their cruise.

My friend had chosen the venue - we both like it for its over-the-top elegance - un-Manhattan-like with plenty of room between tables, flatware (how I love American for cutlery) that is not re-used between courses, waiters who keep a discreet distance while you read the menu whose contents are in reverse proportion to its physical size.

There we were -  five Aussies  making polite conversation. You know the sort of stuff - "How long have you lived in New York?" "Are you enjoying the cruise,?" "How did you and Michelle meet?

We'd almost forgotten  that we were there to eat, when one of the head waiters materialized. "Would you like to see the menu?" The sole male member of the gathering, in thick Aussie accent replied. "Well you've taken bloody long enough mate."

I instantly warmed to the stranger from the cruise  who was sitting on my left. I was transported to that happy place down under where  people call a spade a shovel. Even the sky over Central Park which I could view through the Members' dining room windows - even the sky seemed to have more stars.

We ordered wine for starters,  began to relax  and  become - Australian.

I remember I discussed men, with the elegant family-member-from-the cruise who was sitting opposite. She didn't think much the Australian culture of "mateship". Me neither, We were chatting away when her husband - the one who had made the crack to the head waiter - butted in. In true Australian fashion he sided with his mates, 12,000 miles away.

"A man has to support his mates!" he opined. "Not so!" the women cried. "Not so!"

The food arrived. "Too rare!" complained the elegant woman opposite, who had ordered duck. "It's meant to rare." "Not THAT rare!" On and on we went,  arguing about whether duck should or should not, be served rare.  We all had different opinions. There was no stopping us. Rare, medium rare, done, well-done, burned. There were as many varieties as there were people at the table. And then, from the pro-mateship man, "If you don't like it send it back."

Which she did. And them marched off to the restroom. "She always orders duck, and always complains! Every time" said the pro-mateship man. We sat stunned. "Are you sure?" I asked. "Bloody positive," he answered.

The conversation meandered back to how mates should stick together. Why  many women don t like the mateship . Mateship, the underlying concept that the Australian nation is built on.

I stared out the window at the stars which were multiplying minute by minute. I could be anywhere, Balwyn , Carlton, Perth, Adelaide. Even, yes, even Castlemaine.

A little bit of Australian in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What could be better than that?

You can read more on Australian dinner parties HERE.