Jiving on the connections between us

There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.

I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.

I was feeling kind of antsy.

Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.

The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.

And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.

Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.

When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..

The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.

I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.

And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.

Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.

I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.

The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.

Music from a farther room

There's a musician living a couple of blocks down my street. I've passed him in his ground floor practice room a couple of times now, once playing percussion in the dark, and just this evening he was practising piano with the light on. I'd love to call out to him to play with me, but he's practising and I don't want to disturb him. But you know, my route to the subway has changed. It's the same distance, but these days I go right down my street to get to it.

Last night at Times square 2 train uptown platform, a dude stood playing a keyboard that was strapped around him like a guitar, and singing his heart out. I was busy dancing with my iPod along the downtown platform, when I saw him. An announcement came that the next downtown 2 train was coming in 10 minutes, so I skipped across to the uptown platform and listened a bit, danced a bit. People were listening and getting all earnest and then dropping in small change. I used to get that in the street in Copenhagen, too. People standing and listening for a full song, then doin the jingle jangle with some loose coppers. This is New York city, folks! Give a dollar at least, for Christ's sake. Keep your quarters for the laundry machine.

I'm singing in a bar in Chinatown on Thursday, just a back-up spot, singing some three part harmonies.. but it should be some good rocknroll fun! The band's called The Mercenaries, and the gig's at 9.30 in Bar 169, at 169 East Broadway. That's the F to East Broadway. See you there!

A different kind of Apple ad

It wasn't until I held my iPod in my own hands for the very first time this evening that I understood. Now I do. I understand the iPod craze. It has reached my fingertips and I am truly grooving with the whole Apple concept of living.

It is a magnificent object. I rarely actually fall in love with inanimate objects. I can get turbo fond of clothes and shoes, and find it difficult to give them away. I have a kind of a serious thing about this pendant I wear around my neck. There's a gold cross my mum gave me, and if I were ever to find that I was parted with it, that would surely hurt. But the arrival of this MacBook and iPod three weeks ago has totally rocked my world.

I am Mac'd.

I have been using Macs for twelve years now. I started out on a lover's dad's Performa, which I typed away at in a cold tunnel-shaped Dublin dive while playing Koji the Frog until 4 or 5 in the morning. My first very own Mac was also a Performa, which was brought to me on the very last day of a very unpleasant gig I had been working on for three months.

The big event of that Mac was a nine month-long daily email courtship with a man who had recently become a father for the first time, in Nashville Tennessee, and led right up to the morning my flight was about to take off for my very first trip to America to meet him. More recently, I got a second hand g4 desktop which was my first introduction to the new apple interface.

You've got to love interfaces. They're our little protecting veils between the technology that is finding increasing intimacy with us, to us, in us, and they can make things smoother, at one with us, or they can really be a pain in the arse and will always make it unpleasant to operate this kiss-close part of the ever-expanding-it-seems human consciousness.

Take Nokia for instance. They made the mobile phone system that just makes sense like your first night on crack makes sense. It just makes sense. I can't explain why. It's not that I like it, not that it's great, it's that it just makes sense.

That's all. And now I can't use anything else without getting tetchy.

I suppose that's what it's all about, creating addicts. Everything shouting and looking shiny and hotlipped and fuckable. Come purchase me. You whip out your wad or your plastic honey c'mon, we'll go places you never dreamed.

Yeah, so this is me tonight, on a saturday night in New York city, sitting in a room with two whippets I didn't know ten days ago and have subsequently fallen a bit in love with, working on my MacBook and listening to Seal on my iPod.

This is my crack.

How's that, Apple?