In August, 1996, Julie and I went to New York. It was our first big trip together–10 days and across the continent–and my first big trip without my parents. We stayed with my aunt, a fashion designer (you should become a fan of the Facebook page I made for her) with a quirky railroad apartment in Nolita in lower Manhattan.
Never have I felt more like a country bumpkin. The city was an intimidating place for a naive 22-year-old Canadian. A lifetime of film and television had taught me that New York was home to serial killers, crazy homeless dudes and acerbic, mean New Yorkers.
Though I was a bit uneasy about the Big Apple, we had a great time. We took the subway at all hours of the day and night, rambled through the darkest corners of Central Park and managed not to be murdered, in serial or parallel. Amid a garbage strike and the August heat, it was an exhausting, exhilarating trip. It nurtured the sapling that was my growing love of travel and living abroad.
For no particular reason, it took me twelve years to get back to New York. What a difference 1.2 decades make. Manhattan now seems friendly, clean and of an entirely manageable shape and size. I found the people to be unilaterally friendly, and was only intimidated by the frigid temperatures on New Year’s Eve.
The difference is mostly me, in that I’m twelve years older, have traveled a lot more and lived in a bunch of different places. Still, the city is famously safer and cleaner than it was 15 or 20 years ago. And I wonder how much 9/11 changed the mood of the place? I really don’t know what long term impact a catastrophic event has on an entire city, if any.
It’s easy to imagine living in New York for six months or a year. My only real concern would be how difficult it must be to get some place where you are truly alone. That’s something I’ve loved about the west coast (and didn’t like about Dublin): quiet solitude is only an hour away. Still, I could easily live without that for a year. Do you live in New York? Have you ever lived there?
Every street and avenue in Manhattan is mentioned in a song. Okay, that’s technically not true. Well, it might be true, but I don’t have time to prove it. Still, in my time wandering around lower Manhattan, every street seemed to remind me of song lyrics. A few examples:
Lafayette Street - “Well, I’m standing on the corner of Lafayette” - “That Was Your Mother” by Paul Simon (though, admittedly, this may refer to a street elsewhere in the country).
Mulberry Street - “I’m a big man on Mulberry street, I play the whole part, I leave a big tip with every receipt” - “Big Man on Mulberry Street” by Billy Joel (also references a bunch of other Manhattan streets, for example, “Houston to Canal street”).
Wikipedia lists a (Circle Line) boat load of such songs. That would be a fun crowd-sourced Google Maps mash-up. Get people to identify songs, mark them on a shared Google map and link them to an audio file on the web. You’d end up with this groovy musical collage of the city. Then, of course, you could expand it to the whole planet. Somebody get on that, would you?
Combine three months in Morocco with a very busy year back in Victoria, and it hasn’t been a banner year for movie watching. I’m going to try to make an immediate improvement, though, as the year’s fourth quarter is always the best for quality movies. As you probably know, studios tend to hold the Oscar contenders until the winter months. Academy members have a notoriously short memory.
Here in New York, we caught “Slumdog Millionaire”, the new film by Danny Boyle, at the Angelika Film Center yesterday. The last time I was in New York, twelve years ago, we were here in August. The Angelika was an air conditioned refuge from the blistering summer heat. Yesterday we escaped to the Angelika from a bitter December cold front.
In any case, it’s a terrific movie. It’s kind of a one-stop-shop for Western ideas about India–slums, child beggars, call centres, new money and Bollywood–but Boyle skillfully sews these threads together. He uses a clever format to tell most of the film’s story–a boy from the slum gets a chance at big money, gameshow glory and his long lost love–in flashbacks. Here’s the trailer:
I’ve really enjoyed Boyle’s work over the year. He’s been a pretty diverse filmmaker–from Trainspotting to The Beach to 28 Days Later. I’ve often felt that he struggles with the third acts and endings of his films (see, for example, Sunshine), but those issues weren’t evident in “Slumdog”. I’ve admired Boyle’s inventive cinematography as well, whether it’s that classic bit of Trainspotting where a drugged-out Ewan McGregor drowns in the floor, or when Leonardo Dicaprio’s world is transformed into a video game in The Beach.
Today this story is getting a lot of attention. It’s titled “‘Euros Accepted’ signs pop up in New York City”. Here’s the lead:
In the latest example that the U.S. dollar just ain’t what it used to be, some shops in New York City have begun accepting euros and other foreign currency as payment for merchandise.
This is just lazy journalism. Why?
Sum total of stores referenced in article: two.
Sum total of people interviewed in article: two (both shopkeepers).
Sum total of actual signs referenced in the article: none.
The media loves a big, controversial, easy-to-articulate idea. And they love a trend story. Does two stores make a trend? Absolutely not. Did the journalists bother to interview anybody else–a European tourist, a finance expert, a chamber of commerce rep? Nope.
I appreciate that the media industry is struggling with shrinking staffs and increasing demands, but this shouldn’t have been published by a reputable agency like Reuters.
Plus, the final quote has the distinctive scent of a PR professional:
“I’m happy if I take in 200 euros, because what I do is keep them,” he said. “So when I go back to Paris, I don’t have to go through the nightmare of going to an exchange place.”
That feels like it’s right out of a press release. The fact is that most travelers–especially those going to Europe–don’t exchange money anymore. It’s much easier, and often cheaper, to use the ubiquitous bank machine. Plus, European currency exchanges have never been nightmarish. They’re usually quite efficient, especially now with the marked decline in business.
