New York (with it's slow sleazy jazz nighttime soundtrack)

So, what to say about my first week in New York?

I'll go backwards.

It's Saturday night, 11.30 and I'm back at home in the flat feeling very very grateful for RXP, the rock music radio station which has saved me from US pop radio, which I was enjoying even less than in the UK. But now I have Led Zep, Audioslave, Nirvana, Steely Dan...and sounds from my festival summer - Neil Young helping me rock (in the free world indeed) David Byrne burning down this hot hot house.

1 hr ago, walking up 9th Ave, the top of the empire state building lighting up the clouds into a luminous smokey ceiling. I wonder if the sky ever looks like that in cities that aren't New York.

Before that, West 4th - all leafy, redbricked, warm yellow, - would the streetlights do the same thing if it wasn't still this hot at 10pm? Not hungry but had an ice cream because it gave me a reason to sit on a white wooden bench outside a wholesome-look expensive restaurant. I chickened out of having a drink in a bar by myself. Maybe Sunday, Sunday is a better day for being by yourself than Saturday night. But with food you can sit by yourself.

This is a city to be Carrie Bradshaw in. If I had a group of girly friends and a loaded credit card, or a rich beautiful man, and the boots I fell in love with earlier ($1300 - but Italian hand made) and could stay out all night knowing I only have to get up to go to brunch and chat about the night before in my column.... well,... I'm not saying I want all this (that much) just that THAT is the way to be in New York. Well this New York I've found myself wandering through alone anyway.

And before..
I nearly went to a jazz night. As I found myself wandering away using the feeble excuse that I'd already missed the first 10 mins of the show so it wasn't worth the cover charge, I wondered what happened to the me that always interjects at those moments and says, well, what do you have to lose? Going home is the safe option, - but when did I ever ever regret doing the thing I was scared of. But, .. I'm tired. I've been working around the clock all week, sometimes one has to give in.

I spent an hour and a half eating pasta and drinking Viennese Coffee (dark coffee with whipped cream on top - a winner) at Cafe Reggio's. A traditional Italian coffee shop in the most touristy busy bit of Greenwich village that I remember from last time I was here (but there are locals at this one and you can sit, and watch, and sip your coffee quietly). Had a book but ended up people watching. Everyone is totally 'beautiful' (as in beautiful people, not as in radiantly beautiful) and skinny and in stunning dresses and killer heels, or they're in shorts and sweaty vest tops with pony tails. There must be people in the middle, but you really have to look to notice them.

Given that I'm somewhere in the middle, I then realise why I feel so unnoticed. Or at least one reason. Last time I was here, I felt it was a city of possibilities - where you could walk into any bar and end up talking to people. So far here, I've felt people have been very closed off. Maybe the change is circumstantial - I haven't even been into a bar yet because I'm by myself. But since last time I was here, I've become a London girl - made it my home. Walking through London, the streets feel like mine. I enjoy the street banter, the shop counter chat, - despite living in a village, and then a much smaller city, London is the only place I've felt part of a community. Not necessarily neighbourhood style community, but some sort of community - a common connection with the people there who go to the same markets, pubs, shops - or cycle the same canal route every day to work. I've got used to interacting with the fabric of a city. But then I don't live here, and I'm in Manhattan. The people I've met who do live here live above Central Park, or in Brooklyn, not in the central and cramped craziness that is this.

Nonetheless, I miss the interaction on and around the streets that I haven't seen happen here.

Before the cafe, I stumbled into the 'Music Inn'. An amazing ramshackle place full of African, Asian and Western instruments. Thumb guitars and glockenspiels hanging from the ceiling and piled high, - a wannabe Dylan strumming away on his guitar in the back, too cool to acknowledge me. (Later he turns out to be the friendliest one in the place and is probably too stoned rather than too cool). I spend a long time downstairs where a group of old guys are repairing crazy instruments. It sounds like a buddist meditation room (if they have music anyway) with whale song. There are lots of old books. But then the fast becoming familiar realisation that something I expect to be cheap is a ridiculous price. Two books - one for kids about making your own instruments and one about the power of myth - I expect them to be a couple of dollars each, not the $30 he tells me. I haggle the myth book down, am told to go upstairs and find Oliver. Oliver appears very reluctantly and groggily from under a table. All in all, I wish I was an amazing thumbpiano player and could wow these guys into bothering to notice my presence or even just let me buy something. Très cool, très cool. Little bit too cool maybe, like a lot of stuff in this city.

The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell) begins:

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Walking up 9th Ave (I'm at the end of my night again), I'm looking at the luminous smokey clouds and watching the yellow taxis stream by, and I'm thinking about the myth of New York. If I turn on a sleazy slow jazz soundtrack in my head, the whole fabric of the place is suddenly different. The vague feeling that I've been walking through this city without really interacting with it (the opposite of having a butterfly wing effect) suddenly feels like one of those movie scenes where a character is transported into the future, or the past, or just somewhere else, and can see everything but no one can see them and they can't affect anything.

Thought of as a film, it's much easier to engage with New York city, even by myself - perhaps because I'm by myself, - as a spectator.

But then a monstrously big car pulls alongside, - it's playing heavy heavy dance music with elements of psytrance. I'm instantly transported to 2 weeks ago, to a festival in rolling English countryside, where the moon, the music, the people I was with, - all combined into one perfect experience of Campbell's 'rapture of being alive'. (at risk of being very cheesey but that's just what some moments are - I think everyone there would agree with me about this one). I lose myself in a memory for a brief moment.

One evening of walking these streets alone isn't gonna get me down, there'll be some life to be lived in New York before I'm done with it.

Then back to the flat. To a few work emails (yes, yes) well that's why I'm here. It's a scarily big and foreign place to be attempting to achieve anything, but it's great to actually be doing something here. It is afterall a place where great things happen, - it's not just about late nights in bars, or Carrie Bradshaw's world that I don't have the wallet or friends to inhabit. And thank god, - I wouldn't swap the reasons I'm here for those. But I might try and get to the MOMA tomorrow (half an hour before closing time last time round was only just long enough to realise how many amazing paintings were there). I think I need to try to get to Central Park again - to breathe a bit. (I'm missing London's parks and have only just realised how close one always is - I'm feeling more claustrophobic here than I ever do in London - unless I'm in Oxford St that is). And then it'll be back head first into another working week of having more urgent jobs to do than I can hope to finish, and never feeling it's okay to stop, - but also loving what I'm doing and the feeling of working towards something, with other people all intent on the same things.

That was just one night's worth of thought. I don't like writing about work here (the lines of what I can and can't write are too complicated and I don't want to end up just towing a line), if I did write about it all, I'd write the same amount again at least.

It's been an interesting week. Being busy has meant there's been very few moments in which I've realised I know no-one in this city. And that'll change soon. I miss friends, family, and more surprisingly - London, but I'm ready to see what the next few weeks has to offer. It'll be a lot of whatever it is, that's for sure.