The Naked City

"There are eight million stories in the naked city." I haven't seen the 1948 film The Naked City, but I have heard that quote before... I was reminded of it when I visited an exhibition in Grand Central exploring representations of New York transportation in films. It covered everything from an early Edison film to Men In Black II. But I have often thought of that quote as I make my way around New York. I love the anonymity of travel, and especially in a large city where I pass thousands of people every day who I will never see again. It's kinda cool. The downside of course is that it does magnify any sense of isolation. This can be nice, nbut sometimes not so nice when I feel I'm lost in a sea of people who know the subway system much better than I. When arriving in New York I was a little scared of the people and the environment. After all, New York has such a bad reputation on both counts. But I have never felt unsafe, and on the most part I have found New Yorkers very easy to deal with. The one exception is when it comes to service from retail staff. Never before have I been in a city where the level of service is directly proportional to the amount of money that is transacted. I've had the very best of service, in even the simplest restaurants, and the very worst of service... usually at chain stores. I know I can't expect much when people are being paid an appalling minimum-wage to work the registers at McDonald's... but I would like them to actually speak in English, and not grunt at me. I've started to become a little more assertive with these people, saying things like "you will have to speak up", and "I can't understand what you are saying". But it's not gonna work. My friend Dan has since told me that New Yorkers like that will respect me if I treat them like assholes. I should try that out with the taxi drivers. Again, for the most part the taxi drivers are fine... but then I'll get these bastards who ignore everything I say after I request the destination. My efforts to make conversation are returned with total silence, as if I'm not there. It's so rude, and really disconcerting. But I wised up to their act real quick, and now when they do that I don't tip. Dan reckons that'll really piss them off. :-) And that brings me to the whole subject of tipping. While I'm now in my fourth week in North America, I accustomed myself to the whole tipping thing real quick with some helpful assistance from Brendan (who similarly was scared by it when arriving in Canada). What annoys me is that "in theory" the tipping system is supposed to encourage good service, but in reality it's customary. Expected. Required, in fact, because people in service jobs don't get paid a proper wage. So why not just increase every price by 15%, and allow people to tip when they truly want to reflect good service... just like back home. And God help you if you forget to tip, as I found out last weekend in New York when, a little worse for wear, I counted out exact dollar notes. The bartender bitched to her co-worker, loudly, before running to the other end of the bar to no doubt locate a scarlett letter to affix to my shirt. I fixed the problem up real quick, tipping extra just to be sure I hadn't forgotten something else, then left real quick, somewhat embarrassed. I have come to realise that the Australian tipping system is spot on. Anyhow, back to the boring list of things I have done. On my first Friday, I went out to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. It's a great museum, documenting the history of the film, television, and computer game industries. There were lots of hands-on exhibits. I got to create a flip-book, a short stop-motion animation sequence, and could have revoiced Judy Garland from the Wizard of Oz, had I been so inclined. The museum has heaps of original equipment so, for example, I finally got to see what a Technicolor camera looks like in real life, and just how much bigger it was than cameras from the same period. Then there were the customary fandom exhibits, with costumes, wigs, merchandisining paraphenalia etc etc. Most of that was crap, but I loved the props section where I got to see a standing Yoda puppet from Empire Strikes Back, a Chewbacca head, and a section of the Tyrell skyscraper from Blade Runner. They also run a cinematheque at the museum. The night after I was there, Gus Van Sant was showing his new film Last Days to a preview audience (only $8 a ticket), and hanging around for Q&A. It's stuff like that that makes big-city museums so cool.

On Friday night I caught up with Geoffrey's brother Richard. He is in publishing, and presently finishing the first issue of a magazine for a client. It's all very fab and very New York. We went to some non-descript, and possibly unnamed gay bar in the Lower East Side, before heading on to a very famous gay bar called The Cock. This is the bar with a neon rooster in its window, and which makes Sydney's Beresford (before it closed that is - a sad, sad day) look glossy and polished in comparison. It was lucky we went there because the lease was up, and the bar was scheduled to close two nights later. Apparently Starbucks are moving in to the old location, and let me tell you, New York definitely needs another one.

Half of Saturday was spent trying to hide from sunlight. The great thing about daylight saving in North America is that I can sleep in until midday and still have 9-10 hours of sunlight to do stuff. I walked from my hotel on W22nd Street across to Broadway, then followed the Bowery down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I crossed the bridge, wandered around the riverfront in Brooklyn, then crossed the Brooklyn Bridge by foot again back to Manhattan. Now that probably doesn't mean much, and if so get a map, because it's a bloody long way. I think it took me six hours. Very cool though, as the view is amazing. The Brooklyn riverfront that I described is where so many movies are filmed. Just like the poster for Woody Allen's Manhattan, if you've seen a photograph with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, and Manhattan in the background, it was probably taken from this park. Brisbane-folk can wander down to New York Slice in Brunswick Street to see exactly what I mean.

On Saturday night I headed out to two nightclubs. The first was called Spirit, which is basically the old Twilo club renamed and maybe somewhat renovated. On the night I was there Peter Rauhofer was playing, but it was still mostly pots and pans to me. I later found out that Spirit is an after-place... not an early-night place, so I headed to the Roxy. Looking somewhat like Matt Groening's representation of a gay nightclub, the Roxy is easily the RHI Pavillion at Mardi Gras... every Saturday night. Out of control, and lots of fun. I would have loved to stay, but I was out by myself, and boring myself to tears with all the same-old jokes.

Knowing that my Sunday might be a little slow, I had planned (on Saturday) to only have one goal for Sunday. Just one goal. To go to the Empire State Building. I got there in the mid-afternoon and if I didn't know better, I could be excused for thinking half of NY was there. To say that there are horrendous queues is a gross understatement. The building is huge, cavernous in fact. So when half a floor is allocated to queuing, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that there were 150 people queuing just to get a ticket. It was at this point that I decided to buy an Express Ticket which means I pay straight away, and bypass every queue to go straight to the top. Normal tickets cost USD$14, while express tickets cost $30. Of the difference in price, let me say that every penny was worth it. I bypassed that ticketing queue, then walked straight past the elevator queue (with about 300 people in it), then bypassed another queue on the 80th floor (with about 150 people in it). I was up the top taking photos within 8 minutes of arriving... it's no wonder everyone is so pushy and pissed off by the time they get to the top. The view from the top is quite fantastic. I must have spent an hour taking photographs, not just of the landscape but also zoomed-in details like rooftop gardens and building ornaments etc. From up high, it almost looks like another city.

On Monday I tried to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but decided against it when I got to the ticket window. Since reopening after S11, only a limited number of tickets are issued each day allowing tourists to go inside the Statue. I couldn't see the point of queueing for two hours in the hot sun to walk around the base. So instead I took the Staten Island Ferry (to Staten Island, of course), which offers very good views of Manhattan, the harbour, and the Statue. Yes, Geoffrey, I did think of Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. And once I got to the island I had a chance to try and locate an apartment block used in Brian De Palma's 1973 cult film Sisters, all the time wondering if anyone else adds film locations to their travel itinerary.

On Tuesday I went to the Intrepid Air Sea Space Museum. The Intrepid is an aircraft carrier that saw action in WW2 and Vietname, before being mothballed to the Hudson River where it is now home to a pretty interesting museum. I'm not keen on war museums, which exactly describes some of the exhibits, but there was a variety of vehicles on display that were very cool to see up-close. I got to live a childhood dream and board a Concorde, and also saw a SR-71A Blackbird up close. I also took a tour through a submarine. While not as claustrophobic as I thought it might be, the tour had an added attraction in that I spent most of it trying to decipher what our guide was saying from her very thick Queens accent.

After the Intrepid I headed to B&H Photo Video. This is a huge camera shop that I purchased goods from, by mail order, in Australia. It's probably not quite as fabulous as Yodobashi Camera, which I visited in Japan and have written about already, but still B&H was amazing. I have never seen so much specialty (and by that I include professional camera equipment) on the floor, hooked up, ready to play with. Every few seconds I'd hear this whizzing noise above my head. The store is only a small portion of their actual operation. The warehouse is upstairs or out back somewhere. And there is this fantastic goods transport system suspended from the roof, whizzing around cartons that customers have requested to purchase. The really cool thing is that the network has brances, using barcodes or something to direct the goods to the right destination.

On Tuesday evening I saw the new Broadway musical of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with John Lithgow in the Michael Caine film role. I read a review in March, which was scathing of the production. If it weren't from a tip off at another show last week I'd have missed DRS... which would have been a shame because it was truly spectacular. Unlike Rent, I found the original songs in this musical to be very accessible, and very very funny. (But that also may have a lot to do with the fact that I'm a big fan of the film.)

I spent most of yesterday morning, ie Wednesday, on the phone to Fujitsu Siemens. My PDA screen cracked sometime earlier in the week. The annoying thing is that I haven't dropped it, or walked into a wall, or had someone crash into me. In fact, I have treated it like a newborn. So you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found out that cracked screens are excluded from the warranty. I'm trying to not worry about it, and will deal with it when I get to London, but it could cost as much as the original purchase price just to fix the screen. It's outrageous. In the meantime, I'm actually missing it because it's been so handy in so many different ways. There is this program called Metro, which has the rail networks for practically every city in the world. It's been a dream here in New York because I dial in where I am, and where I want to go, and it gives me clear directions on how to get there.

Anyhow, later on Wednesday I headed out to the Guggenheim which presently is showing a fantastic exhibition called Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition. The aim of the exhibit was to present Mapplethorpe's classical insipirations for his very racy photographs. It seems that the Guggenheim actually holds a lot of Mapplethorpes work in its collection. I think his work is exceptionally good. Not just those photos of the human form, but also his flower subjects (which make even flowers look sexy). Who would have thought there could be a Mapplethorpe exhibition where all bull whips are fully visible?

On Wednesday afternoon I saw the Broadway revival of Steel Magnolias, with Delta Burke in the Dolly Parton role, alongside a lot of big Broadway names like Christine Ebersole, Marsha Mason, and Francis Sternhagen. The dialogue is so good. And it was very, very interesting to see what was added to the story when making the film, because the whole play is set in the beauty parlour.

And what would a day in New York be without looking up some film related locations. Mr Knap will be very jealous, I'm sure, that I located Joan Crawford's apartment building at 5th Avenue and 70th Street. Don't worry John, I have photos. This is the apartment which she bought with her Pepsi chairman husband, and famously demanded he "tear down that bitch of a bearing wall, and put a window where it ought to be". Not sure if that really happened, because all the building's windows already look exactly where they ought to be. Further down this street is the brownstone where Michael Caine listened to Angie Dickinson's psychiatric problems in Dressed To Kill.

Last night I caught up with Dan, a friend from my days at Bond. We had a great ol' time chatting about films and stuff, and hopefully we'll get to catch up again before I leave.

Today, Thursday, I visited the United Nations. It may not sound exciting, but this was an unexpected highlight of my trip. The guided tour lasted about 45 minutes with just the right amount of time spent discussing a variety of topics, and showing every room. I got to see the Security Council chamber, General Assembly hall and two other meeting rooms. That's a good run for a weekday visit because there's usually something on in at least one of the rooms. Afterwards, I took the Roosevelt Island skytram... to Roosevelt Island. The view from the tram was pretty good, but I have to admit I was probably drawn to it because it featured in a 1982 Sylvester Stallone film called Nighthawks, in which it was hijacked.

And that's all the news that's fit to print. I'm holding back a cold, but I've decided to stay in New York a few days more, if only to be able to go out this weekend. More soon... ;-)

Biting into the Big Apple

There is so much to see and do in NYC that I have been overwhelmed each morning with the decision of what to do. Two of my work colleagues from QR, Kerry and Craig, visited the States last year, and pre-planned what to do each day in a huge spreadsheet. I am in awe of that, because it would have come in handy.

So on my first Wednesday in the city, I headed to Grand Central Terminal for the tour. Having seen the train station in countless films, and many of my favourites like Carlito's Way, North by Northwest, and Superman, I was still very impressed with seeing it in real life. The building's southern facing exterior is presently wrapped in scaffolding for a spit and polish. After passing through a very unimpressive entrance, one walks down some marble-clad ramps through the Vanderbilt Hall, and then onto the main concourse which is a magnificient open space. The building's interior was renovated in the late 90s, adding shops and a food hall, but also revealing a celestial fresco on the concourse ceiling. I actually did not do the Wednesday tour as it would have prevented me from attending an afternoon matinee show. But when I came back for the Friday tour I learned quite a bit about Grand Central. Firstly, it has never in its history been called Grand Central Station. There is a post office and a subway station with that name, just nearby, but the rail station is called Grand Central Terminal as it was the terminus of Vanderbilt's rail network. Shinjuku may be the busiest station in the world, but no station has more operating platforms than the 66 found at Grand Central. All the rail lines used to be above ground. And the station proper extends over a huge part of the neighbouring area. The city forced the rail companies to electrify and bury the lines, which the rail company's happily did at great expense... but had the windfall of suddenly owning a hell of a lot expensive New York City real estate to sell or lease.

I attended an afternoon matinee of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Kathleen Turner in the Elizabeth Taylor role, and a guy called Bill Irwin playing her husband (in a role for which he won the Tony this year). It was a great production, and Kathleen Turner easily rivals Elizabeth Taylor's film performance.

On Wednesday evening I headed out to a nearby gay bar called Barracuda. It's a small bar, with friendly clientele and bartenders. I planned to stay for a drink or two, but ended up watching a fabulous drag show unlike any other I had seen before. That's because the drag artiste, Sherry Vine, actually sings, rather than miming. And she was pretty good too.

The next morning I felt a little worse for wear. I fired up my PDA from my bedroom and signed onto MSN Messenger. Paul Jones was on-line and asked me where I was, and if I was okay. This all seemed strange to me, but I soon found out he was checking if I was in London. The bombs had gone off not long before, and the event was getting a lot of coverage on NY television.

I went out to Brooklyn to visit the transit authority's Transit Museum. It's located in the disused Court St subway station, with exhibits, photographs, and actual rollingstock. The station also has a long history as a filming location, appearing in The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. Sadly, I felt the museum lacked detail. I didn't even know by the end of my visit which lines were built first, and felt that I had learned more about the system from the internet in my pre-trip reading. There were some pretty spectacular photos of the subway's construction. Most of it was done using the cut-and-cover method, as the lines typically run north-south on the avenues. Generally speaking, the subway is pretty spectacular. The trains run almost as frequently as they do in Tokyo, while not as clean of course! But it's just amazing how easy it is to get around a very big city in such a short space of time. I'm staying right near the 8Ave and 23rd St station, and it takes me about 12 minutes to get to the Financial District, or Grand Central. Both places are at least 20 blocks away.

On Thursday night I went to see Rent. It was alright, but I found it very hard to get into. The sound in the theatre was terrible, and I didn't find the songs all that accessible... although I really liked two or three. I think I find it hard to enjoy a musical when I'm not too familiar with the songs. I can see how it will make a great movie, though.