Breaking Up: Final Blog Post

I'm sitting amid a pile of boxes and suitcase. In about 20 hours my plane to South Africa flies out from JFK. These are my last hours in New York.

That makes this the last blog post from New Mokum.

I spent my last evening, by chance, in the IHouse Pub with Brian DeBono who I met when I went to the House to sell my old printer.

I spent my last weekend saying goodbye to friends at a farewell dinner, and hanging out with Alyssa in a day of flyering (old printer, anyone?), brunching with St.Ace, Christmas shopping, movie going (Milk - see it!) and a final late-night visit to the amazing jazz and pot atmosphere of St. Nick's Pub which is just around the corner from me on 149th Street, and I left me wishing I'd discovered it sooner.

I spent my last week in a crazy fast-rotate cycle of packing, working on my research project and trying to enjoy the city. Shipped my stuff out of New York on Friday.

At the moment, New York is feeling like one of those relationships where you wake up to the fact of how important it has been when its pretty much over. Actually, I've never had one of those relationships with a person, but I'm sure they exist. But it seems at least I'm having one with a city. So, New York, I'll publish it on the Internet: although I've vilified you constantly, I will 'fess up and say you are an amazing city, harbour some of the best people I've met, and been the scene from one of the happiest and fullest times of my life. It has been an amazing experience. I think I have been in love with you without really knowing it.

Now its time for me to go.

10 Things

... I will miss about New York

1. great people
2. winter sunshine
   
3. shopping for groceries at midnight
4. the subway
5. water water everywhere
6. gothamist architecture
7. ethnic neighbourhoods
   
8. endless variety
   
9. dogs dressed in T-shirts
10. not really being in america
    

And for good balance, here are 10 things I will not miss about New York

1. Duane Reade, and its suppository aisle
2. the subway
3. obese cars
4. times square
5. hipsters in fake glasses
   
6. fast food nation
7. consume consume consume/trash trash trash
   
8. rats
9. tvs in bars, laundromats and taxi cabs
10. really being in america
    

Broadway, Second Act

Made it onto Broadway tonight for my second show, in the company of a tibetan princess. The show was August: Osage County by Tracy Letts. It is the story of a family in Oklahoma which implodes. And no, its not a musical.

Winter Hiking: Sleet Sleet Sleet

I've been a driver for the hiking club for two years, but I have never lead a hike. I wanted to lead at least one before leaving New York, so today I lead a small group (6 others) onto Schunnemunk Ridge, close to Westpont Academy about 60 miles north of New York. As my luck would have it, this was the worse weather I have ever hiked in: rain, then sleet, then mist, then rain. Actually, it was not only a cold and slippery hike, but it was also a pretty intense one which I am glad I did. I was also very happy that everyone who put their name down actually came along. And even more glad that I had a thermos of hot tea with me.








(Photo: Brian Bulthuis)

Microbrewery Kitchen

Today I joined friends (Heide, Melinda, Louisa) brewing beer in Heidi's kitchen. We brewed one batch, bottled a second and drank a third. Not only did this stink nothing like the Holsten brewery I lived next to in Hamburg (it was a pleasant smell which reminded me a bit of bread) , it was also huge fun to do - and the product was amazing!

Mugabe as an Anti-Gentrification Symbol in New York

Sickening as it might sound, I saw Robert Mugabe used for the second time as a symbol in New York today. This photo of 2008 election photos and the "fist of empowerment" (sic) is from the window of the "African Peoples Farmers Market" on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I walked past it on my way to thanksgiving with friends. The older photo was taken on Sep 16 2007 at the African American Day Parade in Harlem.













The organization behind this is called "Friends of Zimbabwe" and is based in Brooklyn. Among other things, they are protesting gentrification (the "colonisation of the black areas in New York by real estate companies to extract maximum profit" as Kai put it). Here is an article on the movement in the Workers World, and this media advisory from the group from 2004 talks about Mugabe's 'strong leadership example'. This would almost be funny if it wasn't so nauseating and misguided. Can these people really ignore the catastrophe Mugabe has boxed his country and people into because they want to use him as a symbol for their local issues?

Thanksgiving's Seitan Turkey

Thanksgiving weekend is like Christmas for vegetarians: it kind of puts them on the spot, especially when, like for me this year, you eat in a mixed crowd of vegetarians and meat eaters. I cooked up a Seitan 'Turkey' from scratch (kind of like a meatless meat loaf). It was made from soy flour, tofu, wheat gluten and lots of other good things. I celebrated with Kai and Jed and Farrel and a bunch of other people I met for the first time in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.

Hiking the Croton Aquaduct

Today I hiked the last part of the Old Croton Aquaduct, which was completed in 1837 as New York's first major water supply. The hike was lead by Arcadia, who is doing an independent project on the aquaduct. We walked through Yonkers (north of New York) into the Bronx, and the hike ranged from pretty countryside to gritty urban landscapes.

Extreme Metting

I'm doing my best to catch up on two years of not taking full advantage of the many discounts which a Columbia ID gives you in New York. Today I went for a packed hour into the Metropolitan Museum and got Byzantine piled on Papa New Guinea, Renaissance Italy, Ancient Egypt and 18th Century France. Whew!

Ice Skating in Central Park

Thursday night we went ice skating in Central Park - the rink is down by the South East corner of the park, and is one of serveral open-air rinks in the city (including Byrant Park, which is small but free). The location is amazing: there is something about a ring of skyscrapers which puts me in a buoyant mood. Jules, my friend from Canada, proved once more what an awesome teacher she is by taking Jackie, from Kenya, for her very first time on ice, and teaching me the fundamentals of skating backwards.

The rink is owned by Donald Trump, and his name is everywhere. It adds to the smooth slitheriness of the ice...

Aftewards we had gluhwein with extra kick in it and toblerone-chocolate fondue. Yeah!

Mini Cooper Extreme

Hired a Mini-Cooper convertable and went out with Kinneret and Julia to the Dia:Beacon Art Gallery north of New York. Great fun, although I have to say that I like the Mini's more to look at than to drive.

Anti Prop-8 Protest

The bitter side of the recent election was the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which banned the gay marriage law passed by the state supreme court there. Today, I went to a protest outside city hall in New York (one of many across the US). Huge crowd and a great feeling of solidarity. The photo shows Erica Beckmann, Anna and a group of their friends.

Winter Kayaking

One last kayak trip down the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts in cool temperatures. Made it through the Zoar Gap without getting wet.

Good Cheer

We left the bar where we were watching the election results just too early ... I got home, jetlagged from the trip to Germany, and suddenly the streets around erupted in hooting, whistling, cheers and the explosions of fire-crackers. Barack Obama has just been declared by the TV networks to be the next US president.

Germany

Visited friends in Germany over the first week of November in Hamburg and Cologne. I'd missed three weddings there since my time in the US; so I had a lot of celebrating to do.

Economics Debates (and Economist Namesdropping)

New York is amazing because of the people you get the opportunity to hear. Today, I got to hear George Soros, Nouriel Roubini from NYU and Jeffrey Sachs as they shared a stage talking about the current economic crisis, the "bubble on a much larger bubble" as Soros described it.

Shortly afterwards, the chief economic advisor to Barack Obama, Austan Goolsbee, held an hour-long debate with his McCain counterpart, Doug Holtz-Eakin, on campus. Part of the panel from Columbia's side was Joseph Stiglitz. This was more about politics than economics, but it was interesting to hear the two of them debate issues such as health care or the cost of the war in Iraq.

Looking for New Jersey's Sweet Spot

Over the weekend, I visited Alyssa in Princeton where she is working at ETS. She and I went on a search. We wanted to find New Jersey, not just any old New Jersey, but the essence of New Jersey at its most scenic. This blog post is the story of that search.

At first we thought we'd found it in in Princeton. How can you not love a town which has a fake gothic university, fake tudor houses and looks so much like a gingerbread fairytale you just want to rip a piece off the pavement and wolf it down? When Alyssa pointed out that, despite a large student population, Princeton has only two bars in it, we came to the realization that we did not in fact love this town much, and it was not the scenic New Jersey we were looking for. But it had to be close. The scenic I heart New Jersey moment we wanted was out there. We knew it. We just had to find it, amongst the rolling hillsides around the town. So we set off on our bikes, searching.

We rode and rode, the sun came up, the leaves flamed yellow and gold. Then, suddenly there was a sign. Scenic Outlook, it said. Autumn Hill.

This had to be it.

Through the knotted woods we rode, over gnarled roots and exposed loam, so fast the foliage blurred around us. Past the rusting hulk of a bus. Paths twisted in all directions, we thought we'd lost our way. But then a second sign: Scenic Outlook.









Before us lay a calm glade with slabs of rock and a curtain of vegetation on its far side, through which the scenery opened: rows of prim town houses, fanning out like the wings of a dove towards the horizon. Green and beige corduroy bands of luxurious lawn undulating in soft swell to where, far off in the distance, the low purple crest of hills.



New Jersey. A feast for all senses, but especially the sense of irony.

Autumn Colour

The countryside around New York is ablaze with colour at the moment ... the photo is from the Stokes National Park, in the north west corner of New Jersey, where I went hiking on Sunday.

True Story of How a New York Waterfall became an Icecream

Saturday night we (Stacey, Abhishek, Alyssa and Kay) went looking for the New York waterfalls ... didn't know the city has waterfalls? It had three, done by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (an icelandic artist sounds like someone who would be able to create waterfalls, right?). Okay, they weren't quite real (but then again, nothing in New York is). One of them was under the Brooklyn Bridge. We went to see it on its last day, but it wasn't there. Ack! Switched off early? Switched off in respect of the plunge of Wall Street (not too far away)? I am still not sure, but there was no waterfall.

To console ourselves, we did the obvious: went into Chinatown, and gave the evening a happy ending with vegetarian dim sum and delicious ice cream to celebrate the Indian Summer.

Home is where the Harlem is

I fought the subway, and the subway won. After 6 months of hour long commutes and too many late-night waiting for the train which never comes sessions and many other adventures, I threw the towel in at the Manhattan Transport Authority (and wished it had been something heavier). My living situation in Brooklyn was also never really something I was happy with. I will miss the burrough, though, and my cool roommates Nate and Jessica, and the neighbourhood of bars and restaurants, and Prospect Park, and the fabulous Park Slope Co-op.

I am really glad I had the experience of living there at all.

For the end of my stay in New York, I am living on 142nd Street, in an area of Harlem known as Hamilton Heights. Its two subway stops north of Columbia on the 1-Train, and only three subway stops from Times Square on the express A-Train around the corner. Most days, I ride my bike to Columbia. Here is my neighbourhood on Google Maps. I have a room with a lot of light on the top floor of an older (pre WWII) building on a quiet street. My flat mate, Kay, is from Texas and has a Texan's laidbackness and generosity.

The area here is completely different to Park Slope, which can be characterized (or caricatured) as where you go when you're earning very well and have, or are about to have, spawn, none of which is true of me. Hamilton Heights has a strong Dominican and other Latino population; there is a lot of life on the streets. Gentrification is happening here too, but more slowly than in the part of Harlem with which I am familiar (south of 125th Street).

Brooklyn's Underground Music Scene

I'd heard a lot about it from my roommate Nate, but I waited until it was my last weekend in Brooklyn to go and explore it for myself. Brooklyn is where the bleeding edge of the music scene in New York is, and in contrast to the hugely regulated scene on Manhattan, Brooklyn has a flourishing underground scene in old factories and warehouses.

On Saturday, after my last shift at the Park Slope Coop, I went to the ironically named Silent Barn on Wyckoff Avenue, in Bushwick deep in the east of Brooklyn. The Silent Barn is an innocuously bland looking building which enjoys the camouflage of a large latino discoteca next door, which masks much of the sound it makes. Inside, hipsters thronged, taking photographs of each other; the air was thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke. A father with his two year old daughter on his shoulders, a cat, the kitchen complete with pots and fly strips, and old sofas on which people were reading beneath lamps all gave the place a homely feeling. It was under-ventilated and grafittied to the hilt. Beer was available downstairs, at prices which were way too legal for my liking (I always feel ripped off buying a beer in a bar in America). The bands played in the middle of a large open space; the concert was organized the the legendary event promoter Todd P. I saw These Are Powers (wall of electronic sound and guitars, fistycuffs between guitarist and someone moshing) and Marnie Stern (playing alone with her IPod).

Sunday I joined my now-ex roommate Nate (who photographs and blogs prolifically on this scene) at Death by Audio in Williamsburg. Here he is caught behind his own camera lens.

Kayaking the Lehigh

Spent both days this weekend kayaking the Lehigh river in Pennsylvania, about 2 hours west of New York. I was with a group of 5 others, mostly from Columbia. There was a release on the river (an upstream dam shedding water) and it was crowded with other kayakers and rafters.

Had a shaky start (I hadn't been in white water for almost a year) but then got my muscle memory back and it was fine .... more then fine: the first trip I didn't swim (i.e. flip and have to get out of the boat under water), and I did the eskimo roll in running water ... and learnt to surf (poke your kayak's nose on a wave and find the neutral spot where you don't have to paddle much to stay where you are, despite the strongly running water).

We also did a couple of adventurous stunts, like sliding the kayaks down sloping rock faces, or even crazier: launching ourselves into the water from a sheer 5m rock face.

An Evening with John and Barack

"Its crazy", Sampada said to me on hearing the news, "that you, most un-american person I know, are also the only one I know to have gotten a ticket". Yesterday, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, both John McCain and Barack Obama were in New York at a commemorative service at Ground Zero, and then in the evening both came to Columbia's Campus to give a talk on civil service at the Service Nation Summit. There were about 100 tickets given out to Columbia students; thousands applied to a lottery - and I got one. Even I, the most un-american person Sampada knows, was excited.

The event wasn't a debate; each candidate was to speak in turn. There was heavy security on campus, with streets being closed off and access control at the gates, and a fleet of white media vans from people like Fox News which lined Broadway with their antennas and satellite dishes. The university had set up a giant screen in the central plaza, and thousands of students who didn't get tickets watched from the Low Library steps; the university had a festive air.

I expected the event to be fairly heavily regulated, and did as requested - didn't bring a camera or other electronic stuff, came two hours early to get through the metal detectors and queues. As it turned out, it was surprisingly relaxed, I could have come much later and still gotten my seat, and almost everyone else there had brought cameras and moved around at will, going as close to the stage as they wanted to take a picture. There was little heavy-handed security visible once we were past the security checks. The MC had difficulty getting people to sit down and stop talking; it verged on chaotic.

Before the candidates, there were a series of other speakers, including David Patterson, the governor of New York, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, James Gaines, Editor-in-Chief of Time Magazine and Toby Maguire (Spiderman actor). There were also two relatives of 9/11 victims who had set up volunteer organizations, both of them spoke really well in a movingly non-sentimental way about what they had done as a response to their family loss.

And then, we were told by the MC that on the count of five seconds to live television, we should applaud (I thought they had machines to do this?). The countdown came ... the journalists (from NPR and Time) introduced themselves, and then with little fanfare, John McCain bounded onto the stage, and held forth for an hour on civic service, fielding some fairly tough questsions from the journalists along the way. What would you have done differently if you were president on 11 September 2001, was one question (gotten more people to join the army, his reponse). America will no longer be majority caucasian in the near future. Mixed societies exhibit less civil duty. How could you counter this? and so on.

I haven't seen McCain much on television (I spend much more time reading a newspaper than watching TV) but the impression he has repeatedly made from the media is of a fairly irritable old man. The impression he made on me live was much more positive: he was witty in a dry way, he was courteous and he gave clear answers, sometimes simple yes/no ones, to the questions that were put to him.

One of the oddest things about the experience last night was that every 15 minutes, the speeches of the candidates were interrupted so the media could go into an advertising break. So suddenly, one of the journalists would say "You have only one minute left to answer!" and then McCain would finish speaking, the microphones were switched off and the whole proceeding was suspended as the viewing public was bombarded with adverts on cars, food and toilet paper. And the candidate sat there on the stage and made small talk with the journalists. I've always assumed the adverts were inserted into a mixed version of a recorded speech, but the speeches of some of the most important men in America are actually interrupted by advertising. It was so strange.

After McCain had spoken for an hour, it was announced his time was up ... and then Barack Obama bounded onto the stage. The two men gave each other a brief embrace, then McCain left and Obama took the stage to whistles and cheers which were much more enthusiastic than those that greeted McCain. He has a great voice, deep and powerful. In some of the advertising breaks, he also stood up and came to the edge of the stage to speak to the crowd. I got to about 20 meters away from him.

Back in New York

I'm back in New York. It was a hectic summer. I need to add a lot of blog posts still, I will do them retroactively. My summer was not blank, it was very very full.

It was bittersweet to come back to New York. I was missing San Francisco as we touched down (something special in the air at JFK airport); it didn't feel like coming home, it was muggy and unpleasant, and the flat was a mess. But it was really good to see friends again, and the people I know at Columbia. The photos are from Alissa Tan's birthday, celebrated at an Italian trattoria in the West Village. Alissa demonstrates here what it is to be bound at the ear with a yak sock to everyone's favourite PhD candidate in Tibetan Studies, and shopper of exotic goods, St. Ace.

Bike Tour in the 'Big South'

A lot of my blog postings are following the pattern "In 2007 this, but 2008 that". This one is no different.

In 2007, after my internship was over, I hired a car and drove a crazy arc of thousands of miles all the way up the West Coast, through 4 states, ending up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada in which huge amounts of flammable anything went up in the air.




In 2008, I just got on my bicycle and rode a 750km loop south of San Francisco, to the Big Sur, on the spectacularly curved coastline hugged by the old Highway 1.

Children of the Vines

Pierre and Nicki, old friends from my undergrad days in South Africa, flew over from Chicago to spend the weekend. We hired a car and drove up to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys where we encountered lots of wine and sweet scenery, but no Russian River (we looked all over the place for it and couldn't find it. Maybe we were drunk at this stage). The photo shows us looking for the river. Fortunately we could eat grapes along the way.

Pierre and Nicki also got to experience San Francisco in all its many-splendoured diversity, including Tenderloin junkies using our car as a shelter to get a fix and a man with a giant cloth snake around his neck stripping naked to sun bathe in the Mission Dolores park as we sat there on Sunday morning munching our fine baked breakfast. Bon Apetit!

Watts Tower, and Sandy in a House on a Hill

As a last bit of tourism before turning my back on LA, I drove a cross-section across the city, from Beverly Hills and the yet-more-luxurious Belaire through south-central LA to the Watts Towers, built from old crockery, bottles and other junk by an Italian immigrant in the first half of the 20th Century.

On my way out of Los Angeles, I had an unplanned but fun stop over to visit my ex-Ihouse-neighbour Sandy at her parents' place in Hidden Hills, a gated community to the North West of the city. The house is high on a hill; as I sat there sipping a strong Lebanese coffee, eagles were circling around. Here's Sandy together with her father:

The Strange and Fascinating Land of SoCal

In California, its common to talk about SoCal (LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara) and NorCal (San Francisco and the entire Bay Area, Sacramento, Santa Cruz). It's also common to turn your nose up on the one from the other. SoCal is all about traffic jams and Hollywood, Butox and silicon, beaches and bimbos. NorCal is about Silicon Valley geeks, hipsters and the great Smug Alert.

Long before I first went to California, I asked my friend Jackie about why NoCal was called NoCal and not MidCal, since there's about as much coast to the North of San Francisco as to the South.
"Honey", she said, "for us, San Francisco is where California ends. North of that, its all one huge dope field".

I'd spent my entire time on the west in 2007 in NoCal (and some weeks of it in the huge dope field too), and the wanderlust for the new and strange was now strong on me. I had to get down to SoCal and see the real California, not perpetually cold and foggy San Francisco, which has about as much beach-and-palm-tree culture as New York. As an added, powerful incentive, the fabulous Stefanie (whose room I stayed in San Francisco) was in LA/Hermosa Beach for the summer, taking care of her ailing grandmother.

So I worked my way through the 4th of July and took a Friday off in early August to drive down the coast on the old Highway 1, through the fire-ravaged Big Sur coast, where I camped the night, and then down further south through the border town of San Luis Obispo, and then I was there in the land of all of our collective dreams: SoCal. And driving into Hollywood was an eerie feeling, like I'd come back to a place that I knew so well, even though I'd never been there before. This was the America as its seen in movies and on TV.

I went down down laden with the prejudices all NorCalians have (even the part time NorCalians): it will be an one giant traffic-snarled metropolis and a bunch of superficial air heads working for Hollywood. And LA was a giant traffic-snarled metropolis, but I loved it. It reminded me of Johannesburg: vast, sprawling, in-your-face with bumper-to-bumper traffic across 5-lane freeways at midnight, full of ostentatious wealth. Except it had a giant beach, and lots and lots of palm trees.


It was on the giant beach that Stefanie introduced me to SoCal beach culture in the form of the amazing Hermosa Beach Volleyball Tournament. It went something like this: dress up in (skimpy) costumes to form Beach Volleyball teams. Be pretty good at what you do at the beginning, but drink as much as you can in the course of the day, illicitly, like beer from plastic bike bottles or vodka infused into pineapple, or tiny, innocent-looking bottles of sake, so by the end of the day your team can hardly stand, let alone hit a ball across the net. Spice the event up further by introducing penalties by which your team can make up losses; penalties range from 'bum crack beer' (pour beer down the back of your team mates and drink it from between their legs) through 'mayonnaise madness' (squirt mayonnaise all over your body and roll in the sand) to 'girls making out in the sand', this last one ultimately destroying the neighboring volleyball team because all the male members forget their game and stumbled over, fascinated, to have a look. It was hilarious.

(Stefanie and I just watched)

Alyssa and Me

As a reminder of the good stuff on the East Coast (friends ... and muffins) here is a photo from my next-to-last day in New York, which I spent with Alyssa (or should I say: she spent it with me). It was her birthday-in-anticipation. We went to an exhibition by David Byrne, of The Talking Heads, and saw him, almost on exhibit: there was a flash-crowd-paparazzi effect when he appeared which could only happen in a world in which everyone is carrying cameras.

Sunday 7AM, hard at work with a group of 16 year old school kids

... there I was early Sunday morning, running bright orange cones and caution tape down the length of the Golden Gate Park. I was working as a volunteer for the day on behalf of the San Francisco Aids Walk. I've been volunteering a lot this summer, for the first time in my life. The day was fun (although maybe not everyones idea of it)

Hiking to Alamere Falls, Point Reyes

One of the many great things about working for Google is that you can find people who are interested and enthusiastic about doing any number of different things. On Saturday, I went for a hike at the Point Reyes National Sea Shore north of San Francisco with a group of other Googlers whom I hadn't met before. This is Clara, Greg, me and Alex.

It was a pleasant hike ... along the way we saw this little guy (not sure if he's a fox or a coyote, I suspect the latter) who was really curios and hung around us for a while. Here are some more photos on Flickr.

Kayak Reunion

Since coming to America, my kayak, which I was using regularly in Amsterdam, has been in storage. A stall in New York is (like many other things there) way too expensive for me to afford as a student. I finally got the opportunity to get it out its case and put it together on Sunday - I am storing it at a place in Sausalito, on the bay just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd been there before (night kayak with Laurie last year), and although it takes about an hour by bike to get there, its a much better location than in the city.

I thought it would be less of a novelty here than it was in the Netherlands (its collapsable, and looks really sleek when you put it together) but I got a lot of people coming up and asking me about it as I was putting it together. Which took time - over two hours, in fact. "That will be a pleasure well earned!", said one man. "If you had one of those tupperware boats, you'd be in the water already". I had forgotten the pedals (its been two years) so I had to take it half apart again once it was almost together.


It was a pleasure well earned - I went up the bay to the north, past crowds of plump seals with fur which looked like the cheap leopard-skin blankets which we had as kids, sunning themselves in the late afternoon sun. They are fun to watch; they bark and sometimes have a spat: huge animals slapping feebly at each other with dainty flippers.

Just beyond the seals was another colony: of eclectic boat houses. These are nothing like I'd experienced in the Netherlands. This example was like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale (and yes, it is floating on the water). Some were way out into the bay, floating by themselves, like the new age pyramid below.