Harlem Globe Trotter

Ten years ago I stayed in Harlem for the first time. Actually, it was right on the edge, at Amsterdam and 103^rd, in the worst (only?) youth hostel in New York. That particular experience is one I would have been happy to forget, but it is seared into my mind for a variety of reasons: being ripped off by a ‘taxi driver’ on the way; being aggressively propositioned in the communal bathroom; navigating the shelfless glass-doored refrigerator that served 1,500 people, etc. And at no point when leaving the building did I have any desire to head farther north. The neighbourhood was bad enough where I was, and promised worse.

A lot can change in ten years. I’m certainly no longer a ragged backpacker, for one. Experienced eyes would have looked on that neighbourhood differently even then, but now they do not recognise it as the same place. Doings at Columbia took me back to Harlem, and I hereby recommend it as your destination, the next time you choose to trot the globe.

This time Mrs. VB and I stayed in a proper brownstone house on 118^th and Malcolm X. The post-Giuliani neighbourhood is a charming place, full of relaxed yet busy people. The welcome is the warmest in New York. The community is vibrant, mixed, young, and (to judge by the food on offer) demanding of high standards. Ten years ago, I doubt I’d have been consuming home-made and authentic Italian food in a restaurant street terrace at 120^th Street. I might have been welcomed into the bosom of Sylvia’s soul food restaurant (it’s been there for decades), but I somehow think it unlikely that the waiter would have been able to try out his German on me back then. I also suspect I wouldn’t have wandered home calmly at a saunter at around midnight. Friends, the cosmopolitan dream is alive. In these streets America is doing quite nicely, thank you.

The 100ft climb through Morningside Park to reach Columbia on the Upper West Side no longer represents an ascent to civilisation in the stark manner of yesteryear. Ivy League cosmopolitanism is its own peculiar brand of soul-sapping homogeneity. After lengthy days in the rarefied air-conditioning of the Ivory Tower, it felt good to descend again and return to what I happily thought of, for a few sultry days, as home.

Apparition in Birdland

There’s only one way to improve a martini, and that is to have a commodious throat breathe a saxophone over it. Now, there are saxophone players and there are others for whom the horn is an extension of their souls. Most of these people are dead.

One such dead man is John Coltrane, whose ghost I half expected to see mooching around Birdland. Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for a living, breathing, reincarnation of the man, his essence, and his tone. Ravi Coltrane embodies the very posture of his father, forcing one to shake one’s head in disbelief. In a set that navigated between the energetic and the melancholic, Coltrane’s muse was explicitly his mother. His four-piece ensemble played music by her, for her, and to her. If this wasn’t a direct line to the ‘60s, I don’t know what could be.

Too often in great cities with great pasts, historic venues have become merely tourist traps. If I’m honest, I expected Birdland to be just such a hokey hole. I am happily disabused.

The Adirondack

Jolting and jogging and shunting and stop.

Crawling and tilting and sprinting and stop.

The gilded-age rails are fixing to rot

And to judge by the rolling, so is the stock.

The train whistles progress, but the points are all shot:

Two hours at the border, and stop, stop, stop, stop.

Lake Champlain glistens for hundreds of miles,

To the West Adirondacks; to the east just a mire.

There is beauty here of Arcadian kind,

But the route is industrial, brutal, and wild.

A river, a bridge, a ubiquitous flag.

Eleven hours of sidings, and freight trains and drag.

We yawn through New York, creeping or stalled

In a chariot of steel, obesity withal.

Past Plattsburgh, Westport, Fort Edward-Glen Falls.

Through Schenectady, Hudson, Poughkeepsie we trawl.

A river, a bridge, a vertiginous sight.

We pull into Penn and escape with the night.

Why Men Riot

Immediately before Pompeii was covered in lava people were making love. How do we know? They were forever preserved in the act, turned to stone in the heat of passion. Danger does funny things to human beings, reducing us to the rush of chemistry in our blood and brains. There’s no accounting for it.

Rich Lam’s brilliant photograph (below) has everything but the requisite tide of lava. Caught up in a melee, men find themselves doing the strangest things. A fire becomes a primal occasion to beat one’s chest. Glass becomes an outrage to form that must be smashed. Alcohol in the blood turns to heat, and men become defiant. For an indescribable moment, men succumb to the animal inside.

Or so goes the apology. I rather think that last night’s laying waste to Vancouver was rather more organised and wilful than it was primal and forgivable. The men in hockey shirts – from Boston as well as from Vancouver – likely had no interest in the game, but came with the intent of kicking off. The instigators, I will bet my life’s savings, were not swept along by an animal impulse, but were organised, determined, and acting under their own sober (if idiotic) volition. A hockey loss does not cause men to loot Sears (below). A hockey loss does not cause men to attack the CBC or the police. A hockey loss does not lead men to cover their faces, lest they are identified, before casting the first stone.

The British police have known now for several decades that the presence of a crowd will always attract an element that wishes to degenerate it to violence and anarchy, and they have become the best in the world at preventing it at sporting events. (At political events they have recently taken too many leaves from the book of Italian policing). I do not know what the security arrangements were like in downtown Vancouver  last night, but it stands to reason that if 100,000 people gather to watch a game, someone should be watching for the usual suspects. Quite simply, this should not have happened.

Let’s be clear: men don’t riot because they are disappointed. Men don’t riot because they are hockey fans. Men riot because they are easily led by other men who adore violence and chaos. The easily led are weak, pathetic animals, and (I should imagine) soon remorseful. The others are dangerously rational, but lost to civilisation. Something is deeply wrong with them. Let’s not call them hockey fans. Let’s find out who they are, and determine how, through profound failure, our society has produced these sorry excuses for men.

City (E)scape

I’m catching up with myself. I’ve ditched Berlin for the month of June, and come to you from Montreal. New York next week. Montreal is the city I call home – a place I adopted five or six years ago – and, as with all homecomings, one begins by exhaling. The psychological comfort zone is welcome. I’m steeling myself for a busy time, as I attempt to reconcile my purpose to my future. July is likely going to be a mare, but I’ve broken worse.

A couple of points of order:

I must cordially acknowledge Lily Lemontree for giving me a hearing on her elegant blog. It’s a strange experience to answer direct questions about oneself, but the result I think is pleasing, and possibly an insightful backdrop to the pages before you. In the coming weeks I shall appear there again, detailing five elegant places not to miss in Berlin. I’ll let you know when it appears.

On arrival here I was pleased finally to take possession of my Timothy Everest signature tie, which I consider myself very lucky to have received. Tim’s Spring into Summer ready-to-wear is out, and as per usual it’s right on point. I hasten you there. Here are his images, stolen in the nicest possible way: