Down under, at night

One of my favourite things: the London Underground. Getting worked on.

Tiny man takes the train

More tales from tuesday night

What Carrie Dashow found on the night of November 4th.

A subway serenade

Green on Orange

He's got a red plastic badge on his lapel. It reads, "Drug Free". He's about 75, black, wearing a faded suit. He walks through the subway car with some bright green sheets of A4 paper, placing one carefully beside each seated passenger, like a schoolteacher dispersing handouts through a classroom. No one moves, responds, or says a word.

As he reaches the other end of the car, he turns and returns down the car, picking the sheets up again. He passes me without collecting the sheet beside me, he notices that I'm reading, and so leaves me be until the very end, and mine is the last sheet to be collected. I'm probably the only one who has shown any interest in even glancing at his tale of woe, his interface with the world. There's a handful of sentences written in black biro, badly photocopied. He had probably sat down at his kitchen table with someone who could write and spell good, to work out what he could possibly say to explain himself in words.

In the short letter, he describes how he was "pushed from a high porch" sometime in his childhood, and some years later began to get epileptic fits and blackouts. "From 1952 - 62 I was strong and healthy", it said. "I am also a James Brown imitator. I consider myself to be a good artist. Please help as much as you can. Yours sincerely, --- ----". Underneath, a black thumb-sized smudge that has the silhouette of a passport photo, and a photocopy of some rubberstamped, slightly official looking text that said "James Brown" in heavy typeset, probably some fan club membership letter that he was sent back in the sixties, maybe during that golden period of his life.

Finally, he comes to me. "Are you finished?", he asks me. "Yes", I answer, "thanks very much". "You're welcome", he replies. And he picks up the lime green sheet, replaces it to the pile in his hand, and falls back into the orange bucket seat, with a sigh.

And the train goes across the bridge, and Manhattan's twinkling nightlights get closer, and soon our D train is sucked in, sucked in... The doors open at Grand street. He heaves himself up out of his seat, out of the train, and across the platform.

The midtown shrinkers

Oh it's raining horribly outside, said the man beside me as I left MoMA yesterday, with the rain belting down on 53rd street. Sometimes that's what you get, he sighed. Yes indeed, I said back. And he looked at me. Like I had just entered his apartment without pressing the doorbell. There was a line around his words with a red rope and a large black man in a suit and a headpiece, carrying a list. I hadn't used the VIP entrance. That was what his eyes said. You just don't do this. You just don't respond to a stranger's casual throwaway cliche in midtown Manhattan.

So I went walking. Through it. In the rain. Down 5th avenue to Union Square. Caught a glimpse of one of the Protected Ones, in the back of his chauffeur-driven Very Expensive Blackened Windowed Car, perusing a newspaper. It felt like it might be like a confessional in that little backseat room, kind of airless and costumed and expectant. But expensive, unlike any confessional I've been in (only Irish ones, only Limerick ones, actually).

A thin, mousy girl approaches me in the middle of the traffic at Flatiron. "Hi, I'm Annie", she says at me, laughing like she's just seen some special friend of hers. She juts her hand out stiffly to me, perpendicular to her body, from the elbow. "We save children". I search her face, her jacket, for some ID. Nothing. "Njeah, thanks", I say, and continue to walk across the street before the bus gets me.

Pity. Annie is sure this way of living her life is a failsafe way to get people to feed her cause, to feed her longings, to feed her. She's saving children for Christ's sake: how could anyone say no to Annie? Let me count the ways...

There's a boy on 21st street, sitting on a beer crate, pausing with a pen as he tries to figure out how to explain himself in the medium of cardboard sign in the street. I stop to take out my notebook, and look back at him. He's still hesitant.

There's an interesting quality to midtown. Indifference. Such a big place with so many shrunken people busily shrinking farther, hurrying to get to where they mightn't have to shrink anymore.

And then the N. Sitting opposite a man with bags, in one of those two abreast orange plastic areas. He takes a gulp, a large nip of whiskey, in view of the other apparently indifferent subway riders. He feels the exposure, anyway. Most of them don't actually even see him. I do, though, and that's enough. For what it's worth, if I'm thinking anything, I'm thinking that that's not a bad idea, keeping a flask of hot whiskey about your person for winter subway trips. But he's gone into that defensive face mode, you know it? With the chin up and the eyes and mouth corners that say "not me! I didn't do ANYTHING!".

The sign on the wall hisses, "if you see something, say something", as the train chugs into Pacific street.

You know it's gonna be alright

I woke up in Denmark this morning. In a little loft in Valby, København.

She was a daytripper
one way ticket, yeah
it took me so long to find out
and I found out

I came to Denmark in December 2003 on a one way ticket, and left with another one, three and a half years later. The first thing I noticed about Denmark was actually in Sweden, where I flew into. There were photographs everywhere of Naomi Campbell in her knickers, looking Christmassy, faking happy-in-her-knickers bliss. She was everywhere in København too, when I got there. I stopped noticing her after a day or so.

My first impression of new york this July, after a three and a half year absence, was the train, as it roared into Howard Beach station. It took my breath away, every bit of it. It got me right in the centre. And in the midst of that gorgeous chaos, I had the strong thought, that within a few days, even this was going to be absolutely familiar to me. I knew it. I was wrong about that. It never got familiar. It got more breathtaking.

I was in love with the subway the way I am in love with Dean street now, when I lived in Manhattan in 2003. I've never slipped out of that love; it's just evolved, the way it evolved from a room of maroon paintings in a London gallery into the new york city subway, from a grand old velvet curtained theatre into a room of maroon paintings... The lover changes form.

If this post is a little avant garde for you, hold your horses. Rocknroll is never far from the surface.

So I'm here again, in København. Just arrived yesterday. It feels good to get into Danish again, and to find myself jivin' in Danish feels GOOD indeed. But this ain't no one way ticket, yeah.

This time I've got a ticket to ride back to Brooklyn.

Stranger seen, unmet

I had a new york moment on the F train. I recognised a bloke sitting on the train and I had no idea where from, or what country, or context. Could have been anywhere. I just have a strong feeling that I've met and talked with him before. Young, college-looking, with wiry red hair and a wiry red beard, very American looking in a thin, malnourished kind of way, baseball cap.

And he got up to exit the train at Carroll Gardens. I wasn't in the mood to go and find out the scoop. And so he disappeared back into the new york ocean, teeming with every kind of sealife in its 300 square miles.

They have sealife in Freddy's, also. Underwater swimming toads in a water tank, with human arses. I freaked one out. He saw me and jumped. Underwater.

In the background, ladies sang arias and men sat at the bar, chugging whiskey.

But why, though?

Little boy and his grandmother, on the train.
Where we going?
We're going to see mommy and auntie Jinny.
But why, though?
We're going to get out here at the next stop.
But WHY, though?
Because mommy is at Auntie Jinny's, and we're going to see them now.
But WHY, THOUGH? Huh?
Silence.
Huh? HUH?

Kiss-chase

A man in sunglasses is sitting upstairs in the foyer of the 7th avenue Q station, waiting to feel the wind blow, to hear the chug of the approaching train before he dives down into the heat, the humidity, the hot dirt sauna of the subway platform. Outside, the street is actually quite cool tonight. He's humming a tune. I try to catch it. He hums softly. It's so quiet in this station, even this sound has space. Cryin, by Roy Orbison. I catch it and now it's in me and my hum dives down into the platform and the hot dirt and the sweaty people waiting waiting waiting for the train.

I've been playing kiss-chase with the sounds of the city for a while now. It's a game of sonic tag, all over the city. She is so gentle sometimes. The voice of the lady announcing delays on the line can be unusually gentle and mild though her message is anti-New York. Time delays are anti-New York. Time is the most precious commodity here. Time and Money chase each other off the top spot in the precious New York commodities league like Celtic and Rangers.

I caught a beautiful tune yesterday on the air at Prospect Heights, just down my block, where I found myself sitting for an unexpected 20 minutes on a stoop, listening to a solitary drummer playing Arabic and Indian rhythms in his dark ac-free ground floor room. I sat and listened and when I passed later, he was still there, and that time, I caught a tune on the air, and sang it, grooved it, all the way to 2nd st.

The sounds and energy can be so hard in New York city, so you appreciate the gentle stuff when it comes.

I fell over in the street when my scooter hit a jutting footpath slab. Scooter did a 360 and caught my flipflop clad ankle full on. Scooter hit the deck and I had to sit down with the pain. Only thing available to rub on it was some beeswax lip balm. Sat there and soothed it until it was okay enough to get up again. Maybe five minutes. People passed, wordlessly. One guy looked back, giggly, like it was entertainment. A young couple passed, and the man said 'weird'. I sat there, with my scooter at my feet, soothing my ankle until it didn't hurt so much.

I got back on my scooter and rode into Chinatown, stinking of fish carcasses, spit and blood and filth and people paying $3000 for a studio.