One, two, three strikes, you're out

Dan is going to do some illustrations for One Two Three, I think. I'm delighted about this.

I wrote a new chapter about a cat called Rover.

I went to see the Yankees on Friday night because I got free tickets. It was fun, I guess. I still can't work out what happens in a baseball game. Next time I should go with someone who understands, and who isn't enforcing a 'one beer per innings' rule. Thanks, Mel. I was unnecessarily rude to some guys who tried to hit on us on the subway back and I'm still feeling bad about it. I've been in a black mood this week and am doing my best to not be. We rode in a hybrid taxi. We discovered it costs $500,000 for a taxi license. We went to Nu Blue. I love it there. Mel drew a picture of me.










I Got Stuff Done this weekend, like painting things and hanging things on the wall. I brunched and shopped with Andrew, who made me stroke a mannequin's crotch. I am going to buy some fish - live ones. They shall swim in a bowl and bring me happiness.

Convention thoughts

I have friends who will do this better, and as soon as their blogs go up, I'll link to them. My disorganized first impressions from this evening:

The core problem with Obama’s 'brand' is it’s very difficult to talk about change and hope unless you’re in a situation that requires total revolution. There’s trouble in America, no doubt about it, but I’m a little uneasy with the 'isn't it all just dreadful’ stuff we keep hearing. Anyway, it’s the campaign they've built. It does sound doom-monger-ish sometimes, though.

The Martin Luther King reference was inspired. By skirting round the subject of race until near the end, then bringing up that cathartic moment as part of the American story, not his, he made it about the common dream.

He underscored John McCain’s age with references to his long tenure in government and his attachment to outdated policies and thinking, questioned his judgment and temperament, then wriggled his way onto the moral high ground by asking for a debate about ideas, not personal assaults. Nicely done.

Peppering it with the stories of real people was the right thing to do, and while a few strayed into hokey, most – his mother dying of cancer, war veterans living on the streets – were moving and relevant.

Columns and fireworks – a bit embarrassing. And why do American politicians insist on playing ‘Born in the USA’ at events like this? Does no one listen to the lyrics?

Every time they cut to someone in the audience, the person looked like a nut.

Empty city

New York is deserted in August, much like Paris and other continental European cities. Everyone seemed to be away this weekend. Marcus and Frank at the convention in Denver (updates from them here), Tom in Buffalo, Davide in Chicago, Andrew I don't know where, and a disparate group of people in California.

McCarren Park on Saturday was full of solitary people with notebooks. I'd love to do a notebook amnesty there one day and see what everyone is scribbling. The other day, I watched a guy on the train write, "People are uglier than they realize." And more adept at reading upside-down scrawly handwriting than he realized, presumably.

I lay in Central Park all afternoon yesterday.

The Verve's new album came out today. I'll probably buy it tomorrow. This is the first single, if the concept of a single makes sense any more. Granted, I'm difficult to disappoint when it comes to The Verve, but it's pretty good, if a bit dad-rock, the sort of track the BBC uses for compilations of the best bits at the end of a sporting event (and the video's a wankfest - why all the shots of snow-capped mountains and angsty teenagers?). Ashcroft has one of the best voices in the industry, and I much prefer it on a rock song than on the acoustic stuff he released as solo artist.

Anniversary sentimentalism

I've lived in NYC for one year this weekend. My last days in London, the leaving parties and frantic packing, are a very distant blur. The whole thing - my decision to act on the impulse to live here, the job offer and visa application - happened so quickly that I was carried along by the momentum of it. So much so that the reality of what I'd done only struck me when I was in a cab from the airport coming over the Queensboro Bridge, the city twinkled into view and I realized that I had not only moved to a new country, on the other side of the Atlantic from everyone I loved, but to a city where I knew two people, one of whom I'd never met. And that I was absolutely thrilled about it. On Desert Island Discs, a long-running BBC Radio 4 show, William Hague named his desert island luxury as the view of the Manhattan skyline. It's a city that awes you not just the first time you see it, but every day. And it's different to other cities, and inspires such fierce affection in its residents, because more than any other place I've lived or visited, its charm is grounded not in its architecture, parks, history, or cultural hotspots, but in the fact that it belongs to its people. Everyone who lives here is a New Yorker. Since then I've managed to trick a few more folks into being pals with me, I've seen more of America, and I started writing a book. I've had a lot of bad days this year, but I haven't once wanted to be anywhere but here. I heart NY.

Bloody hell

*Very* exciting. My good friend, who shall be identified as John in line with his pseudonym, has written a book about gangs in the U.K. and it is getting a lot of very, very good press.

The Times calls it "exceptional."

Deborah Orr (Will Self's wife) wrote a similarly glowing review in The Independent.

Shaun Bailey in the London Evening Standard says, "The question is, is this a good book? No, it's a brilliant book."

Sink the ink

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to get a tattoo.

I can't wait for Autumn. Or "Fall" as I suppose I should call it now. Autumn is a prettier word. I like hats.

I have cooked three nights in a row, which is more than I've cooked for the last three months. I need to be healthier, which means cereal doesn't count as dinner. Those Italian boys are rubbing off on me. Spaghetti with parsley, pine nuts and truffle oil, fettuccine with zucchini, and - my death-row meal - risotto with peas and lemon. Relatedly, my friend Christie, an excellent cook, started a food blog.

One Two Three has been much neglected for a week while I was out having fun, although I did decide to have Ned grow up in Nebraska. I need the flatness and the isolation and the freight trains. The trouble with writing a poem is every decision I make about names, places, or other key words with recurrence potential has to be informed by their syllable count and rhyming potential as well as their general merit/appeal. I've begun writing childhood chapters for Ned. First extract, likely to be changed:

Ned’s dad was a train line inspector
For a freight company near Ainsworth
In rural Nebraska, so the specter

Of escape hung in the yellow air
Though the lines galloping abreast at
The horizon took people nowhere;

It was maize and cattle and lumber.

COME ON

Man United held as Newcastle impress.


On Friday, I went back to Supper for a late, long and languorous lunch with Marcus and Frank. We decided to put it to the test by ordering all the classics: Panzanella, Mozzarella di Bufala, Bagna Caoda, Spaghetti al Pesto Genovese, Spaghetti al Limone and Risotto al Pescatore. Everything, but everything, was perfect.

Later, I went to a friend's birthday at Hotel Delmano. I can't say whose, because I wish to relay the fact that she arrived and dreamily announced that she'd just eaten a morphine lollypop.


Then yesterday it was a different friend's birthday. We went on a scavenger hunt around the West Village. I don't think I have ever laughed so much in my life. We were supposed to be solving some sort of mystery involving actors in different locations, but as anyone can tell you, trying to spot someone who looks a little weird/suspicious anywhere in NYC, and particularly in that area, offers an embarrassment of riches. It was when we got to Washington Square Park that things got really out of hand. We ended up playing a chess game with some homeless people, chasing a man for several blocks demanding to know who he was talking to on his cellphone, and eyeing a dude covered in pigeons. It says everything you need to know about that park that we took 45 minutes to find the man we needed, and he was dressed in denim dungarees, had his head bandaged, a red handkerchief on one otherwise bare foot, and was chatting to his ventriloquist monkey dummy. One of the actors was obviously a bit confused by the fact that most of the group were either laughing hysterically or staring appreciatively at the sky, until someone whispered, "Dude, we're on acid." Just when we though things had really reached a weirdness peak, a dwarf leapt out at us in a restaurant as part of the finale. Later, there were drinks in a 30th-floor apartment where we watched Phelps and Bolt in the Olympics, dinner at some point, a bar, more drinks. Who knows. Excellent day.


Today I went to P.S.1. There was a wonderful installation outside with plant pots reaching up towards the Citibank building, and a pool in the centre you can plodge in:





Inside there was a wall full of photographs called 'My Weather Diary' by Jari Silomaki. Each photo had a brief inscription on it. Example: "I dreamt that I slept in the arms of a strange woman. We held each other tight, as if being afraid that the other would disappear during sleep. In the morning I woke up alone. It was raining. The U.K. said they'd pardon Mozambique's debts. I didn't hold her tight enough."

There is a huge room upstairs with a giant circular rotating mirror on the ceiling. You lie down and stare at yourself. Any art installation that allows you to indulge both sloth and vanity is onto a good thing, but it really is interesting and weird to see your reflection like that:

Then the G train had replaced the F so I stayed on it and went all the way down to Coney Island. On the way, I got out to look at a Jewish graveyard I've passed a few times. It's in my book so I thought I should familiarize myself with it. It's rammed with graves, spooky but lovely:

The beach was very busy. I prefer it in the winter. Still, it was a beautiful day:

I am home and tired.

Happy

Look at this. Is it a hoax? If not, it is the best thing ever and I am going to do it.

"He's thrown a kettle over a pub. What have you ever done?"

This morning I had to be at a client meeting in New Jersey at 8. I was there until 8 this evening. The office is The Office. It's silent, there are signs up everywhere featuring horrid little Clipart images of energetically-angry-looking stick men telling you to shut up, everyone goes for lunch at exactly the same time for precisely one hour, it's on a business park, I'll underscore that it's in New Jersey, websites like facebook are blocked so your cocking-about options are limited, and the air con is set to sub-zero temperatures so it's impossible to drift into a comfortable lethargy.

Charlie with his grandma and grandad. Stating the obvious, but he is delightfully tiny:

My mother is beautiful.

Spotter's Badge

A friend of a friend just emailed her to say he saw me on the big screens at the Radiohead concert. I didn't even realize they were showing the crowd on the screens. Pretty cool. Also I've only met the friend of friend once, very briefly, months ago, so spotter's badge for him.

(That is a turn of phrase stolen from Ron Atkinson, who was a football (soccer) commentator until he made some hideous, I think racist, career-ending on-air gaff. The website dedicated to his own little language, dubbed Ronglish, is still extraordinarily amusing. I say "danger here" all the time.)

My outgoing boss set up Google Analytics for this site yesterday so I can see how many hits it gets and what have you. It's surprising detailed, with return visits, country of origin (hello, Canada...) bounce rates and length of visit. And yes, it's narcissistic. And highly addictive.

Waffle waffle

I was just in the elevator with a well-dressed young guy whose iPod was turned up very loud, so I could hear that he was listening to the sax solo from Baker Street. I'd have found that funny anyway, but the song reminds me of a night in London (subsequently known as "the unhappy meal night") a few years ago when some friends and I turned up horribly, horribly drunk to some poor man's small 30th birthday party in his apartment on the Isle of Dogs. Only one of us had ever met him before, and it wasn't me. One friend was naked under her coat because she'd managed to fall onto a Happy Meal box containing the vomit of another friend who'd taken ill in the taxi. Another began hammering on neighbours' doors down the hallway asking if they had drugs (it was about 1 a.m.). While the birthday man was making his speech, we noticed what turned out to be his incredibly expensive saxophone in the corner of his living room. We began heckling him, "Play Baker Street! PLAY BAKER STREET!" One of my friends stumbled over to the saxophone and picked it up by its mouthpiece. The rest of the instrument kind of detached itself and smashed onto the floor.

I used to live on Baker Street.


I'm finding that I can't just wait to be in the mood to write (I'm talking about One Two Three here, not silly blog posts). Sometimes it's good to sit down and start and see what happens. Last night I got something, another chapter on the subway. An inordinate amount of this book seems to be set on trains.

I need to get a better handle on basic admin bollocks, like finance and debt and taxes and stuff. Finally sorted out my Social Security number this morning and am thinking about applying for a green card. It's downright alarming to remember I'm a guest here, and if I lose my job or have an accident or need to go home for an extended period, I'd have to leave the country altogether. Knowing I could move jobs or take time off if I felt like it would be a huge comfort.

My favorite In Rainbows track changes weekly. Currently, it's Reckoner.

An exquisite weekend

This will probably be a low-interest-value post for other people but I have to record the weekend’s perfection for myself. On Friday I had the day off work. I went to see Radiohead. I’ve been scared of going to see them because they’ve been my favorite band since I was 12 and I couldn’t imagine that they'd match up to my level of obsession with them, but they did. I could have written the set list. There was nothing missing, and nothing I didn’t really, really want to hear. They played two 4-song encores. Thom Yorke’s voice was so astonishing that I turned round at one point and saw my four friends, along with the rest of the crowd, standing in slack-jawed silence. When they played ‘All I Need’ and he sang the “It’s all...it's all...it's all...it’s alright,” part at the end, I almost cried. And they’re proper rock stars, which surprised me. They were funny, they danced, they actually seemed to enjoy it. They were super-human. Here’s a clip from ‘You And Whose Army.’ I cannot believe they played it. So happy:



Afterwards we walked back to the car in quiet awe, broken only by one of us saying, “Fuck. That was amazing,” every minute or so. We drove back to Manhattan and ate biryani at Biryani and sat in Tarun and Sukh’s apartment playing cards and listening to music and talking addled nonsense until dawn.

Saturday I pretty much drank and bought a nice dress. The daytime was spent in bars in Williamsburg and watching kids dance under the rainbows of burst fire hydrants:

Ate supper at Supper. Amarone risotto = happiness. Champagne. Impressive rooftop party held by someone from Sunderland who made me talk in my Geordie accent. Then Cielo. Several cab rides around the city at the expense of my friend’s ex. Note to cheats: do not forget to reclaim the credit card from your furious ex-girlfriend.

Sunday was one of those days that stretches on and on blissfully. I sat on my sofa and in two hours I wrote a whole new chapter for Ned (the ‘One’ of One Two Three). It was rainy and cooler.

I dealt with two cockroaches with considerable poise. I saw someone I have missed.

Good.

I went to see Radiohead last night

I would write more but I have friends waiting for me in a bar and I'm still in bed, and I'll need to write an essay on it. More, later.

Necessary reading

This article in the NYT today is fucking brilliant. It's very long, but worth the time. It deals with the resentment that sometimes arises when something that's been dreamed of for so long finally comes to fruition:

“Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through,” [Charles] Rangel says, “and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.”

For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next— those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after — have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” In any community shadowed by oppression, pride and bitterness can be hard to untangle.

One of the small handful of times I've seen my dad cry was when I got into Oxford. I also remember, on a different occasion, him reciting a passage from something he'd read that went along the lines of, "I am often troubled by the image of myself as a middle-aged man, haunted by the things I might have been." Now, clearly, I don't for a minute think my family's background is comparable to the Civil Rights movement. I guess I was struck by the equivalency - the ruination of personal ambition followed by the realization of parental ambition - and how difficult that must be to come to terms with.

For a whole week, I haven't written at all. I haven't even tried. My focus has been on behaving normally. When I put food into my body and get some sleep, I'm a different person and my writing is no good. It's an unpleasant dilemma.

My very dear friend Marcus has just started what promises to be an excellent blog.

Other things are happening but I either can't or won't write about them on here. So here's a song I've loved since I was 14. A Storm In Heaven is by far - by far - the best of The Verve's albums. Richard Ashcroft: I really thought we were meant to be. Looking increasingly unlikely.

I wonder if an 'I heart NY' babygrow is distasteful. For Charlie.

Cheeky Charlie

My new nephew was born this morning. Every time I think one of the junior Newbys has maxed out the cuteness scale, a new one comes along and throws his or her tiny hat into the ring. A whole month until I get a cuddle.

Just for the record, though, I'm Donatello

I like filling in surveys. Especially ones that do a little calculation at the end and tell you what kind of person you are (and I don't mean 'What kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle are you?'). The ones here are pretty interesting and challenging - i.e. you're asked how strongly you agree that the fact someone felt they were acting for the good of their country should be held in account when judging whether their actions were right or wrong. The results are seldom what you're expecting, or so I found. According to the ones I did, I have a preference for Forward over Backward (yes), Protest over Accept (yes), Certainty over Mystery (huh?), Clear over Ambiguous (really?), and Group over Individual (really?).

Thanks, as ever, to Marbury. As has been said by Kings and Queens, he is not a lesser observer.

On Ahab

"The chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."

Also, if I'd had this Lego when I was little, I may never have turned to Barbie:

Feel human

Took a few days off from writing. Ate. Slept. Very busy at work. Distracting, but probably a good thing. About to book a flight home for September. Planning a vacation in the Autumn. Looking forward to the arrival of a new little Newby on Monday. Probably related to this, I had a pregnancy dream last night and it was so palpable that I keep pressing my stomach tentatively. Also had one where someone I care about deeply called me and sobbed, "Why do we do this to one another?" then hung up before I could comfort them. Woke feeling exhausted by all this physical and emotional turmoil.

Moby Dick is brilliant; pure pleasure. It's the first book in ages I want to curl up with instead of writing or going out to do the things young people do.

Half-considering a move to India in a year or so. Probably madness.