The Revenge of Memory...

There are some mornings when rolling into New York on the train is still a pleasure. This morning was one of them.

It's Sunday and the oppressive heat of Summer has lessened to a cool 65 degrees at night and 80 during the day. I get off the train at the big hole in the ground formally known as the World Trade Center and start my amble up to work.

West Broadway is one giant construction site but in this cool clear morning you can see the Empire State Building towering over Manhattan like a giant gnomon on a sundial. The fact that you can see it from this far downtown always makes me think of the album cover of "Bleeker & MacDougal" by Fred Neil.


An obscure record but a great one. No one remembers Fred Neil but everyone remembers his song "Everybody's Talkin" which was one of his and the key song on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack. A quintessential New York City movie if ever there was one.

The Avenues act like great long wind tunnels on some mornings. On the Gulf Coast Hurricane Gustav is about to make landfall, but in New York the gentle breeze is welcome to blow out the leftover humidity from the previous days rain. Everything feels clean.

As I walk away from the hole in the ground and head North I look back and see that the hole itself is gradually disappearing. The concrete foundations are being laid for the Freedom Tower and the walls are just about ready to breach ground level. Pretty soon you will not be able to see into the place where 3000 people lost their lives. In time the building will act like a giant scab and people will heal.

I hope.

I work my way through the slalom course of scaffolding towards my building. Under the scaffold at the corner of West Broadway and Park Place a small community of homeless people is growing. It started with one guy and a shopping cart full of his lfe and now there are about 5 people. Sleeping bags and cardboard boxes filled with their physical possessions are scattered across the sidewalk.

In contrast. This is Tribeca. It's otherwise very affluent and it occurs to me that the residents pay a lot of money to make it feel like Europe. I pass the Bouley Bakery with its delicious croissants and French bread and I pass Petite D'Abrille with it's giant selection of Belgian beers and Tintin books. It reminds you that New York is still a city of immigrants, albeit posh ones in this area.

I grab a cup of coffee and sit in Reade Park. It is only 7am but already there is a lady with an easel painting a portrait of one of the old industrial buildings that have been turned into luxury lofts. I watch her brush strokes for a few minutes and see the brick facade of the building evolve on her canvas. I am listening to Jackie Leven on my headphones and his songs take me back to Fife and remind me that I am, myself, an immigrant.

I find myself thinking about the Ceres Folk Museum. A place in a one street Fife town a few miles west of St Andrews.

The last time I visited this place was probably in the 1980's and even back then I remember thinking it was a bit crap. It was a few crofts and a few rusty old ploughs and tractors. There was a blacksmiths shop but the blacksmith was never there.

My family used to stop there a lot back in the day as it was halfway between St Andrews and our caravan site where we went every weekend in the summer. As a kid I thought it was so we could get out the car and stretch our legs, now that I look back on it, I think it was more so my Grandad could go for a pint. Maybe it was both.

I have no idea why it came back to me, I guess it was something in one of Jackie's songs. Here I am, standing in New York 28 years later, and my mind is in Fife.

I look up at the blue sky between the buildings and ask: "How did I get here?"

Black August

Well it has been a particularly crap month and I am thankful it is coming to an end. Roll on September and the changing of the leaves.

Our house got broken into two weekends ago, no-one got hurt and nothing got taken but it shook everyone up. The thief tripped the alarm system but somehow still managed to get upstairs and turn the place upside down.

According to the police the alarm was tripped at 3.53 (in the afternoon) and they were there at 3.58, 5 minutes later. So either my house was ransacked by Michael Phelps, or it was ransacked by a small army of ninjas, or the police took a lot longer to get there than they claim. My money is on the latter, I guess there was a line at the donut shop.

The strange thing is that he forced open one of my windows and had to climb in right past my laptop computer but he did not take it. I can only guess that he was a junkie with a serious amount of desperation. He emptied every drawer in the house and went through all the jewelry. He even went through the pockets of my laundry, looking for money I suppose.

And he found nothing.

There was no cash in the house beyond the jar of pennies and all the jewelry is cheap costume jewelry, no-one in our house has much time for diamonds and pearls.

Maybe it was karma that he picked the only house on the street with nothing worth stealing.

So that was the first reason it has been a crappy month, hold tight, there’s more!

Two nights ago we were driving home listening to history being made, Barak Obama was on the radio accepting the nomination as the first black man to run for President. The speech was excellent and moving as his speeches always are.

Anyway so, we are listening to this and we get back to the house and are reversing into the driveway when BOOM! The back windshield exploded!

That’s right! BARACK OBAMA DESTROYED OUR CAR WITH THE POWER OF SPEECH.

We had both been so distracted by the speech that we failed to notice that we were running out of room and we reversed right into the underside of the front porch which in turn caused the back windshield to explode.

Thankfully it mostly exploded out the way and the glass flew in that direction and not at us and thank god the wean was not in the car.

And there is more…

In between these two incidents we had my Brother-in-laws wedding. All in all a really nice day but slightly tempered by the fact that our little one, who was a flower girl in the ceremony, managed to come down with a tummy virus.

We were running late and had no sooner left the house and out of nowhere she unleashes a waterfall of puke all over herself.

This led to a mad dash back to the house and a quick bath and we made the church with minutes to spare. Later that day she puked again, this time on her pretty flower girl dress, but in the evening she seemed to recover and a good time was had by all.

The problems really began the next day when I started feeling a bit queasy. By 10pm that night I was praising the god of porcelin, and for the first time in many years, puking up something other than alcohol.

It hurts when you are sober and there is actual food in there.

A night of cold sweats and more puking followed. Around 2am I was joined by my lovely wife and we started synchronized puking and shivering. The next morning we had zero energy but the baby was FEELING GREAT. She was a ball of energy.

Roll on September....

Bob Dylan in Brooklyn

This week I chalked another artist off my "People to see before they die" list when I dragged my arse over to Brooklyn to see Bob Dylan play in Prospect Park.

I am a huge Dylan fan and I have no real excuse for never having seen him before other than laziness and I'd heard his live shows are awful these days. Well, it wasn't awful... but it wasn't exactly great either. It was eh... interesting.

The day started good as I got off the train in the West Village and walked down 4th Street over towards Washington Square Park. The cover of "The Freewheelin Bob Dylan" was shot on the corner of 4th and Jones Street so I played that to get myself in the mood. It sounded good.



By the time I had hiked over to Brooklyn I had work my way through Freewheelin, some Rolling Thunder bootlegs from 1975 and Blood on the Tracks. I was well in the mood for Mr Zimmerman.

About 45 minutes after my friend and I got into the park, this little guy in a black suit and a grey hat shuffled on stage with his band, sat behind the keyboard and started belting out "Rainy Day Woman 12 & 35" with it's chorus of "Everybody let's get stoned" and the crowd sang along. It was an exciting and spine chilling moment. Unfortunately that was as good as it got.

After that he proceeded to perform EVERY song in the same boogie tempo in his staccato singing voice that today resembles a man with throat cancer, a mouthful of marbles and a punctured lung. Classic songs like "Girl from the North Country" and "Blowing in the Wind" become unrecognizable until you suddenly catch a familiar line 3/4 of the way through and realize "HOLY SHIT! THAT'S MY FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME!".

Which is exactly what happened to me with "Masters of War".

Now, I wasn't expecting Dylan to come out with an acoustic guitar and perform the song the same way he did in the 60's, I'm not Pete Seeger with an axe or a Manchunian with a desire to shout "Judas" (although I did consider doing this for a laugh). I also admire artists who re-interpret their work so it sounds different - Neil Young has done this brilliantly many times, most recently last year when I saw him in concert and he played a solo version of "Mellow my Mind" on the banjo - I would just like the songs to be at least intelligible.

My friend, who has seen a few recent Dylan shows, was able to call out some of the song titles to me within the first few lines but for all the good it did me I might well have been listening someone singing underwater in Yiddish.

But hell, it's Bob Dylan, I give him a little bit of a free pass. The fact that I can't bring myself to hate the performance tells me he struck some kind of nerve with me, I'm just not sure what. I find myself thinking I want to see the show again to see if I understand it better the second time. Unfortunately I don't think I would.

The Olympics

The Olympics start next Friday in Beijing and the slew of stories about Human Rights abuses in China has been relentless this week. It seems like having the Olympics in China is the sporting equivalent of taking a vegetarian to a steakhouse. It is just wrong.

The symbol if the 5 interlocking Olympic Rings are supposed to symbolize the unity of 5 continents. The games are supposed to be about goodwill and sportsmanship. It appears that these games will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

It's a shame because when I was a kid I always looked forward to the Olympics, some of my fondest memories are the battles between Daley Thompson and Jurgen Hingsen in the decathlon and watching Ed Moses win the 400 meter hurdles. I still remember the outcry in the UK after Thompson won the gold medal and whistled his way through the national anthem.

It was two weeks when there was always something decent to watch on TV, it was summer and you were on the school holidays. What could be better?

Well, maybe it is just because I am getting old and jaded, but the Olympics just aren't the same. Firstly, there is the continuing drug issues, but besides that it seems that the personalities have all gone from the sports too. All the athletes are walking billboards for Nike or Adidas, I miss the old days when the news stories leading up to the games would be all about the bank manager who is going to be competing in the high dive competition, or the estate agent who qualified for the javelin. It gave you a much stronger connection t0 the athletes, made you feel like they were real people and not drug-addled supermen with swoosh logos on their chest.