Why do we have no fur?

We have had a Scientific Discussion over on Clusterflock, to debate the issue of why it might be, that humans evolved to a state of furlessness.

Stoop sale scoop, or, All along the watchtower

And it happened right on my very own stoop, also. At least the stoop that is my very own until monday. There's a multi-block stoop sale happening today in Prospect Heights, and much of the proceeds are going toward the Develop, Don't Destroy Brooklyn fund, which is a VERY GOOD CAUSE INDEED, and is fighting off a major megadevelopment in this neighbourhood, which would threaten to change the living face of Brooklyn forever.

So.. the scoop. Well, right outside my current abode up here on Prospect place, amongst the second hand clothes, books and broken electronics, was a sign that read:

Tiffany
From Plaza Hotel Lobby ------->

Hurrah! Somebody in my house stole a bunch of Tiffany from the Plaza Hotel, stashed it in their one bedroom flat for a number of years, and finally purged it for ten bucks in a stoop sale! Fight billionaire development with nicked objets d'art! Hurrah!

Lets hurl Tiffany wares at the Atlantic Yards' "community liaison" building! This revolution has more options than two.

Further down the block, Emily was delighted at having found a wardrobe (a little miracle, she said) because she's been longing for a wardrobe for AGES now! Over the other side of Vanderbilt, Gloria from Jamaica is having a good day, selling her stuff for a dollar or two apiece, though she has to keep moving her chair to stay in the shade, because it is HOT today in new york city, folks. HOT! We sing the song of global warming as we celebrate our ability to streetjive in the heat this late in the season..

And further down Prospect again, by Flatbush, there are some dudes with a 78's record player, playing some Memphis Minnie records, and on the other side of the street there's a family man with a rare copy of the Peyote Awareness Journal, the inaugural edition. This little slender volume came out of a group based in Arizona back in '96, and they've got a Letter From The President and everything in there.. bankers on acid, clearly. Lets take minutes on our psychedelic journeys of revelation and grief! Have bi-monthly AGMs and conference tables and whiteboards as the tears of love flow down our cheeks and we vibrate to the beat of our internal atm machine..

I'm spreading the word, person by person, that I'm looking for a new place to live in this neighbourhood. And so far, each conversation is another reminder of why I want to live here. A weekend of jivin, dancin, rollerskatin, talkin and light aperitifs on the lawn, beckons.

Out of the dirt springs a miracle

I remember when I first lived in new york four years ago, I heard all these stories about where the new downtown was. In one version, the new downtown was some town out in the middle of Jersey, but I couldn't really fly with that. The point of it all was where the artist-scenes were happening, and how. I was looking for something, you know, something specific, and it was that kind of scene/community thing I blog and talk about sometimes, where something gorgeous rises up from the dirt and dances.

In this town you can take your pick of historical scenes that have fostered everything in the avant garde and popular culture of the past hundred years or more, ever since Walt Whitman sat on a stoop in Fulton street, jiving about leaves of grass and calling to human beings to get off their arses and FEEL.

But that's all just a bunch of stories, and you can so easily miss the incredible fucking beauty of the moment in the search for something else. The moment itself IS the edge. The moment is also all there is, and everything is jiving in it.

Way back in 2001, when I came to this city for the very first time, on a six day fly-through, I found myself sitting at a gig in the Zinc bar with about a dozen other people in the house including the band, and Alex Blake, the shamanic upright bass player, was getting down with piano, drums and a saxophone. It was a beautiful gig, a holy and dirty gig. I was sitting right in front, a bashful spit away from him.

And they came to the last song and he began to play an African circle song. It sounded like a sing-song to me, I grew up on sing-songs in Ireland, where everybody sang the songs they had in common, and then somebody got up, usually a man actually, and sang some ballad with a tender tenor voice and everyone went quiet and listened and then roared at the end and off we went again on another song.

Everybody knows a good chorus when they hear one. And Alex was encouraging people to sing, at least that's how I heard it, so I found a place and filled out a three part harmony with the bass and the saxophone. And we sang the chorus, over and over, until it was done. Until it was done.

My eyes were tight tight shut, but I remember his voice, hissing at me, "feel it! feel it!", making my heart soar for the next round. It felt so intimate in there, all I heard were the three voices and this flying free.

I was at another three part gig last night, in the Delacorte in Central Park, where I last went to see Shakespeare in the Park. Right in the middle of it was this shining vision of a woman singing her songs of beauty and hip, of sexy and sacred, speaking my tongue and the sound she made doing it felt like the most gorgeous vibration I have ever heard come out of a human being this side of Christy Moore. It's easy to get hyperbolic in new york city, but this gig felt like a homecoming. And there was singing-along, sugar. There was a sing-song in Central Park last night.

I love where I live. I have a strong desire to continue to live here and explore. I love the work I'm doing. I have a strong desire to keep exploring that, too. I am so utterly humbled by all this jivin' good stuff.

I'm feeling it, Alex. I'm feeling it, Walt. It's going on.

Toll the bell

I met Bob last weekend on avenue A, it was a nice surprise to see someone from the old days there. I haven't seen Greywolf since I got here.

Greywolf is an old Cherokee man, mixed with New York city blood and filth and piss and liquor. He lived in Alphabet city around Tompkins Square park for years, he was there back in the eighties, when everything was different around the neighbourhood.

I've heard stories of nightly gunshots, drug-gang snipers on the rooves of buildings, ready to pick off any cops who wandered past avenue A. Stories of fires being lit in storefronts, of fire on the streets, of transvestite prostitutes, of colour and of dilapidation. And cheap rent. And artists renting. A different time.

Greywolf had a flute he used to play on Avenue A. It was six hundred years old, he told me, passed down through the generations to him. He also told me of having composed the music for some Disney movie, and of having toured with Santana. I've heard some crazyassed stories on the streets of Manhattan, really nothing is unbelievable here.

Greywolf lived on the street in all weathers. I don't know what he did in the winter, but his home was avenue A, and Tompkins square park. And that's where he sat every night, half naked, and welcoming, and always up for a chat.

Greywolf has disappeared.

I've heard a story he's living in the projects on avenue d, but that was from Francis the Irish cowboy Texan, who may or may not know what the hell he's talking about.

Bob is a neighbourhood alphabet city photographer, been living there for thirty odd years, basically his whole adult life, used to have a storefront and just saw the neighbourhood get chipped away at gradually, over the years. There seem to be some mournful stories in Bob's face, all about gentrification and hard times and the neighbourhood changing.

He stands out there on Avenue A on mild evenings, hanging out and meeting people. It's like an elaborate mourning ritual, marking the passing of this incredibly colourful neighbourhood of New York city, the stomping ground of his youth. Mostly he's just hanging out, talking the talk of avenue A. It was good to see him again. I hope to see him this weekend, if I'm in alphabet city.

It's a popular topic in that part of NYC right now. Huge changes have happened in what is now called the East Village over the past 20 years since the Tompkins square riots, where the homeless derelicts and junkies and hippies and hangabouts on Tompkins square had their Stonewall moment and laid a tent over a part of the park and declared it their home in rebellion against the increased pressure from the police to up sticks and remove their filthy selves from the neighbourhood. There were riots for days. That was 20 years ago.

In the past year, a number of landmark Lower East Side clubs have closed. Sin-e is gone, Tonic is gone, CBGB's is gone, amazingly, a big hoarding all around it and a block of condos on the way up. It's really quite obnoxious what's happening to areas like the LES and Williamsburg/Greenpoint lately. The lower east side has become a kind of hip theme park, and the place the bankers pour into on the weekends, ordering $300 bottles of liquor and drinking until dawn.

The LES is so fucking over and it's a terrible pity. And in that sense, in that sort of Laurie Anderson or Velvet Underground or Blondie-CBGB's or Bowery or Washington Square Park or even MacDougal Street in the fifties and early sixties sort of way, in that downtown sort of way, New York IS over.

New York is brimming over with endless variations of life, and that reality is what I resonate to, what my body rhymes with every minute I'm here and feeling like a reservoir of devotion to her. It's the diversity of life, it's the living strangeness of it all, the endless opportunities, the thousands and thousands of strange strands of life happening and weaving across each other's paths with so little human warmth and kindness and yet a kind of white heat pulsing through it all every minute of every day.

But it's probably not a place to find a community of artists who couldn't be arsed with earning a living and don't have to care much about that, either, but work their arses off on their work, for the sheer love of it. There's a sense here that if you're not making a lot of money, that you're lazy. That if you're not selling what you do, that you're not successful. That's the set-up. It's pernicious. But very interesting.

I can't tell you how important the business of money is, here. Like nowhere else I have ever been or felt. Fortunes and potential fortunes are dealt in every day. Dreams, hopes and expectations are of dollars and fame and prestige and status. Wealth is the Shangri-la, the dance, the game, the hunt and the kill.

So the creative nutters and experimenters have been eased and kicked out, in large part. I mean the people who aren't just trying to create some sort of hip new underground market brand. It's a different place, you know those were different times. It is what it is, and what it is is thrilling and beautiful in its own peculiar condominiumized sort of way. Hail hail nyc, toll the bell for the changing neighbourhoods.

Greywolf is off the streets.

New York Monk

I visited the house of a New York monk the other day. Tambourine player, rhythmic devil. Probably introverted, but gets around a lot. And lives in a tiny little hole in the wall in alphabet city just big enough for his drums and a bed. He's studying, working, constantly. Like so many people here. Difference is he's living in a highly gentrified, highly 'hot' Manhattan neighbourhood for a fifth of the market price. He's taken over the lease of some dancer who has lived there since the seventies. The game is up in December, when the lease runs out. Then he leaves town, probably for Africa.

Anyway, the point about this guy is that this is some kind of a message about New York city that's been chewing at me for a while. Every time I walk along Delancey or Allen St. I've got to think about Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed and the days when there were 45 performance artists of serious mettle writing rock operas in downtown Manhattan. I heard Laurie Anderson talking about this once, in a big room out in IMMA, in Dublin.

So she'd walk down Canal st. from her loft in the the Bowery or SOHO or wherever it was back in the seventies, and she'd meet all her friends along the way.. and the conversation would go like this:

"Hey, howya doin?"
"Great. How's the opera goin'?"
"Great. How bout yours?"
"Great".

There was a time when these monks OWNED downtown Manhattan. At least, they were everywhere. They lived in the lower east side and chinatown and it didn't cost them ten thousand dollars a month. And they worked. And they worked. Because that's what's going on here. People are working in New York City. Still. But the monks don't live around Tompkins Square Park anymore.

Not after December, anyway.