But It’s by Julie Andrews / not by John Coltrane

Ok, 2009 was a shitty year financially. The whole world went bust. Or if you were sitting in Iowa or London, that’s what you’d believe if you spent much time looking at the televised media. But, that’s not true: China, India and Indonesia had a pretty good year (and it’s bemusing to look back on the American China doomsayers in late 2008..hopeful thinking indeed) and other parts of the so called third world did as well.

I get some pleasure out of that realignment, even if the Chinese government perhaps are not the most worthy beneficiaries of that, and show few signs of being so in the very near future. The Chinese people are, though, and I’m hopeful given how far they’ve come in 25 years, that the future is positive.

Obama disappointed many. But take a moment to reflect on how much worse McPalin would have been.

Dubai crashed, but ten minutes in the desert state would surely have led most people with their eyes open to the conclusion that it was inevitable. It is / was absolutely vacuous. It quite glaringly has no reason to exist and I rather tend, perhaps irrationally but I think not, to believe that nations only thrive because they are derived from something else tangible that exists before the banks and speculators move in.

The only thing Dubai seems to be derived from is a growing bubble of greed. It looks like the Gold Coast on bad acid.

Being financial seers, both Brigid and I said to each other in January, as we wandered the endless overstocked malls and Porsche filled boulevards of Dubai, and looked up at the ugly, and badly built Atlantis (whilst sipping our $10 coffees), the key building in the equally shoddy Palm, that it would not have a happy ending.

Next door, also in the UAE, Abu Dhabi exists as it does because of it’s natural wealth, which bubbles out of the ground. Dubai had almost none of this and to try and create substance in a vacuum simply doesn’t work. No matter how much water and sand you ship in (yes, even the sand they build from is imported..the desert stuff is no good for construction). So, yes, it was always going to go, and I continue to wonder, after centuries of bust and boom financial crises led on by our financial wunder-wizards, why we continue to buy into their nonsense. Pure avarice, I guess. Want some shares in a Nigerian bank?

And after we buy into the greed, it seems we hungrily buy into the doom, as was obvious when we were in the US in January and the cable news channels were running nightly shows entitled Voices Of Recession, (whilst we continued to be fed mountains of unnecessary food in every diner or cafe and watch the hummers straddle the gridlocked streets of Manhattan).

However, I’m aware that it’s been a very shitty year for some and I’m thoroughly grateful that mostly I’m not one of them.

One of my high points was the survival of my best buddy Tom Sampson, who was hit by a bus at the end of 2008. Not only did he survive after a few rather bad months, but it was a renewal and he thrived.

We didn’t have the best year financially, primarily because the people we derive much of our work from simply stopped. But it was ok. We were cushioned and 2010 has picked up already.

However, on reflection, that aside, we did have a hell of a year. We had a wonderful year.

We moved towns, for the reasons I blogged a few weeks back (and I got thoroughly abused by a sad old expat whose fantasy world was collapsing into a well of denial..I deleted most of it but for the first time ever turned on comment moderation, something that upset me some. It’s a shame some folks are unable to have a rational discourse, but that’s yer webs for you, and underlines the nutter-fest I was trying to get away from by leaving Bali).

But before moving town, we travelled lots, as we did the year before and are likely to do again this year. My eyes are on Vietnam sometime soon, and we already have Hong Kong lined up again this month..wheeee…

Close friends moving from Bali to Guangzhou means that the $200 tickets there may be a go within the next few months, but I’m still drawn to travelling further inland in China. I re-read Peter Hessler’s River Town this year, yes I know it’s mostly (all?) gone, but it’s a lure I’m having troubling getting past.

The defining trip in 2009, though, was the few weeks we spent in NYC almost a year back. I’ve been to the city a lot over the decades and love it almost without reservation, despite its huge flaws and the grime (hell, I’m in Bangkok..the grime in NYC is nothing), but this trip, with Brigid for the first time, was easily supreme. It was the best of times, for us at least. We walked, we laughed, we were upgraded to glorious suites in every hotel we stayed at - apart from the little hole in the wall in Nolita, but, damn, we were in Nolita (and only visited the room to sleep), just around the corner from Habana with it’s overflowing margaritas.

We literally, and physically bumped into an old friend in Broadway we’d not scene for two decades.

The bands we saw in Brooklyn, the nights and days wandering (often without any bearings) the icy and snow filled streets and parks of Manhattan, Greenpoint, Queens and Harlem were something special and the ice just added to the thrill. And then there were the record stores…

And the family who we didn’t know beyond an internet passing, who not only took us to a restaurant, paid for the meal, but also invited us to drink wine at their Upper West Side apartment.

I bought and read Gotham.

In June I co-hosted the biggest family reunion I’ve ever been to when close to a 1,000 former habitués of a couple of smelly rooms came together in Auckland for one night, and, yes, it may have been a massive money loser (you get that when you fly bands and DJs from all over the world, add the best PA in the city, and then offer free drinks to all for the first hour or so) but the joy and the screams, the massed hugging session it became, made it rather worth it.

New Years eve, this week, was a funny one for us.

Young daughter, who is about to head off to boarding school, leaving the nest (which is a huge wrench, not without pain, for me) said she’d rather sit on the internet and hang with her friends in Bali, than wander the streets with us. Ok.

We know virtually nobody in Bangkok, and those we do know were not in-country, so it was our first NYE ever without outside company of some kind. An odd feeling, but I quite like wandering streets.

Despite the fact that it was in the mid thirties, it seemed appropriate. So, yes, we decided to walk. The streets were rather quiet. Odd. We saw that the old lady down the road who lives the street with all the cats had a bottle of beer. Somebody cared, which was cool.

We found our way to a new-ish wine bar down Ekamai, filled with a huge variety of pretty well priced wine, and a very strange collection of faux medieval European art, hung next to some pretty average contemporary portraiture.

We drank a bottle of NZ Sav Blanc, ate some garlic bread, and wandered on, down Ekamai 5, across to Thong Lor. Still quiet. After strolling around the strange bar / restaurant / club complex where you can eat nouveau-Thai in a restaurant that looks down on the floodlit indoor night soccer fields, we bought gelato in a new ice-cream parlour, which Brigid opined would likely have won some design award in Auckland, but here just is.

I had strawberry and chocolate (hardly adventurous, but they had no Chili-Chocolate). They had no cones either and the owner said it was because they’d opened 6 days earlier and were waiting on them. He asked where we were from. Auckland. He said he was a recent arrival from Penang. He’d been working in KL but didn’t like the bustle and chaos of the place so he’d moved to BKK. Really??

We went looking for an Italian eatery we knew of, but turned right instead of left in Thong Lo and lost it. So I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Soi  23. The driver laughed and headed off in the wrong direction. It was NYE so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. He roared down an almost empty Upper Sukhumvit (its never almost empty..I guess the Farang massive was Khao Sahning or had fled the city) and turned into Soi 24. Mai, mai….23.

The Japanese who frequent 24 seemed to be out in some numbers but we wanted 23. He did a couple of illegal turns then drove straight past 23. We decided to walk the difference, a coupe of dozen metres, so we stopped and headed up the soi. We walked past the neon lit opening to Soi Cowboy, the first of the ping-pong alleys, which dates to the influx of half a million sex starved, opiate riddled, GIs inthe 1960s and ‘70s. It’s seen better days and, seems filled with the very ugly remnants of those same GIs, all having their very own Deerhunter moments and an endless flood of fat European and Australian males looking for some sort of pleasure amongst the hard as nails girls, many of whom, if legend is to be believed, are daughters of that first generation of Yankee freedom fighters.

We went into the very famous, amongst those that write about these things, Le Dalat, a French-Vietnamese restaurant in an old house, which, I’m told has been there for a very long time, likely serving those refugees from Saigon, which perhaps explains it’s location.

It was their last night. They were moving. They had no wine. The owner apologised and offered us a glass of bubbly stuff, which, despite having no idea what it was, and thus what it might do to my head, we drank. We went back into Soi 23, up to Minibar Royale, an almost cool, but a little too much suffering from being situated in a hotel, albeit a boutique one, cafe.

The staff told us to go away. It was full of very young, many far too young, Thai kids, and the thought of a couple of aging foreigners crashing their gig didn’t work.

I might write them a letter.

We walked off, it was 10pm. Tempus fugit. Still no food (garlic bread and gelato aside) and nowhere to drink in the NY. We walked a little. We argued a bit. We hugged. We got in a cab and asked to go back to Thong Lo, far away from the SEA war hangovers and the Thai adolescents on dad’s amex.

So we were back where we started from, two taxi rides (but only 100B [$3], I love the price of public transport here) and there was another wine bar. Three people inside, but hundreds of bottles and inviting wine, a menu and Italian-American gangster movie tunes, but not the obvious ones.

Yes.

We sat in big comfortable chairs and ordered a glass or two of an Italian white, the grape I know not, but it was dry and quite lovely. We ordered Grilled Chicken with Peanut Sauce salad, Pork Chips with Sticky Rice, and a Soft Shelled Crab with Wasabi dressing.

And then two more wines.

Across the room, four women sat down and ordered something with bubbles. At midnight, or just before to be accurate, the staff, who outnumbered the guests (and were sitting outside with a guitar singing Beatles songs) handed out those exploding things with a string and we pulled them. The women grabbed us and we formed a circle as they sang what seemed to be an endless loop of the first four lines of Auld Lang Syne.

It sounds odd, but it was rather neat.

We sat with them. They were sisters, four of nine, from Hong Kong. Three live in Bangkok, where one is, so the others said, a famous pianist.

One lives in Rome, and, they said, one lives in New Zealand. Oh? Where? Auckland in a place called St Heliers. Cliff Road.

My parents live, and my family home was 100 metres from this sister. Heh. So we talked of Auckland’s waterfront, of beers and mussels in Mission Bay and Vulcan Lane, of Takapuna Beach, of Piha and it was rather groovy.

And then the piano teacher’s son arrived. He too talked of Auckland, having been staying in Albany and studying at the school of Audio Engineering in Parnell, tutored by people I know rather well.

One sister said, if you need any help at immigration, I know people and we smiled but demurred.

We shared numbers but I guess we may never see them again.

The older Vietnamese woman who owned Le Dadat, had also taken our number, to invite us to the opening of her new restaurant. On it goes..

I enjoy the connections we make on this journey.

Beautiful dreamer / wake unto me

If you look in a Philadelphia telephone book from 1968 you’ll find an entry for Ra, Sun. If dialled, a voice at 5626 Morton Street- a communal home in Germantown where the former Herman Poole Blount and members of his Arkestra lived- would answer: “You have reached outer space”.

So says Wax Poetics in it’s February issue, which grandly features Philly not only on its front cover but also on every page of the issue. You get a Teddy Pendergrast story (in which he humorously nails the interviewer on a couple of points of naivety), one on the legendary vibes-meister, Vince Montana, and a multi page interview with Gamble and Huff, who, as I’ve been known to say before repeatedly, are the owners and musical masterminds behind Philadelphia International Records, perhaps the most important post Motown label globally, bar none, and much more. It’s obsessive.

And that obsession was one of the more wonderful things that I came face to face with in NYC over the past weeks. I’d forgotten, or rather I’d found myself a little detached from such minutiae breathing musical obsession in recent years, mostly because I’m in a nation where if such a thing exists it’s in a language I don’t speak well and because the history of this nation has meant little exposure to the edgier, more interesting genres that exist beyond it’s shores.

Across much of Asia, excluding of course Japan where they obsess about everything, little steps musically outside what we would call painfully mainstream in the west. There are no record shops, that I’ve found at least, of any real worth in Indonesia (although I found myself talking myself into believing Aksara in Jakarta is, but the reality is the shelves are rarely thrilling when put next to even a below average indie record shop in NYC), Malaysia, Thailand or Singapore. There is, however, a killer in Hong Kong, if you can actually find it, but it’s the exception.

But NY more that gave me hope, it thrilled me day and day again. The record stores (and the vinyl!) were better than I remember and, mostly, very busy and thoroughly inspiring.

As an aside, there are two different worlds in music retail in NY (and pretty much everywhere else outside Asia) and with the closure of the last old school superstore it’s pretty clear that’s not who I mean. I actually went to both the Virgin Stores in Manhattan, a couple of times (partially because the one in Times Square has the only clean toilets that I could find in the area!). Neither shop deserved to be open as they had shitty stock, mostly uncaring and useless staff and seemed topped up , randomly and desperately, with tack being passed off as merchandising and quirky novelty items – although I did buy a Snoop Dog bone for our dogs, who love it BTW – like the dirty playing cards in there for Valentines Day. You have to ask what that sort of thing is doing in a so called record shop.

But it was the little stores, the passionate ones who understand why people buy music, who ask if they can help and then rave interminably about that lost B side or Japanese mix, who were doing well. The other stores are just the retail front for the bean counters who increasingly took over the music industry in recent decades and who now are mumbling on about piracy…forgetting that the music industry was built by pirates and rogues and without people like that there is no industry.

You can fight passion with lawsuits all you like but you kill the passion, you kill the industry.

I spent days wandering stores, buying some, but mostly just taking in places like Rebel Rebel in the West Village (do you know where everything is? I asked, looking at the boxes and piles. Yes, everything..) to Other Music just off Broadway (who extracted a bit of cash from me for a bunch of indie NY bands), to Turntable Lab, hip hop heaven in the East Village, to Halcyon with al the techy and dub-step bits (more cash spent) over in Brooklyn, to the all vinyl Sound Library in NolIta (a copy of It's Yours , which I had to have), to the basement of a junk store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the owner had, in no order at all, stored some 200,000 12” bits of vinyl, all, if you have the time, for $2 each.

But the ultimate goldmine was across in Myrtle Ave, once again in Brooklyn, where Dope Jams, behind an almost anonymous façade, had a copy of every 12” I’ve ever wanted to own..well almost, all beautifully filed, by label and genre, from disco to funk to house to techno, under the biggest muthafuckin’ pair of bass heavy speaker stacks I’ve ever seen in a store.

It was, of course, far too much. I can’t carry vinyl across borders, it weighs far too much and I’m in the tropics without a turntable. Instead I looked, touched softly and cried a little inside.

Some nights I have trouble sleeping. Or at least I dream a lot.

What a cruel thing to pretend / What a cunning way to condescend

This is the 24hr Apple shop in 5th Ave:

This is the local Bali Apple store's delivery vehicle. I'm not sure whether to laugh or sob uncontrollably (note the rust around the badge...it was worse around the front):

We were the children, now we've overgrown

Just as an aside, and not really relevant to anything, but one thing that caught my eye in 2 ½ weeks in New York was the almost complete absence of the the much touted iPhone.

Sure I know the figures, nationwide, for iPhone penetration, but the device was notably absent in the US’s fulcrum, where the Blackberry is not just dominant, but almost universal.

I felt almost inadequate with my Sony Ericsson K850.

Even down the stairs at the 24 hour Apple store on 5^th Ave (where I spent much of the time that I didn’t spend at the 14^th Street store or the SoHo store) RIM’s devices were utterly pervasive.

City residents told us of a gap…you buy your kid a jesus phone which, when they reach an age of any responsibility, you trade up from, to something a tad more adult.

And yes, I'm a bit of a slapper, but I do want a storm.....

Flame away acolytes….

Civil liberty / I can't see to pay a fee

I wandered quite happily around the Intrepid Air Museum, killing an hour or two and indulging my closet fixation for old military aircraft. It was, as it always has been, quite a buzz to be surrounded by these design wonders, especially when the folks who pick the aircraft clearly seem to go for the quirky and unusual over the obvious.

I even managed to smile and mentally cast aside the three older Texan women who were saying to each other, quite loudly, that this would all come to an end soon, as Obama was gonna shut'em down and pal around with terrorists or words of that ilk.

But I wondered why the funny looks, from more than a few, especially those guys with the be-badged veterans hats that you alway see at these sorts of establishments. The guys who put USMC (Ret) on their title and keep on saluting each other, rather sadly, for decades after they were honourably discharged.

Then I went into the washroom and saw my hat in the mirror. Communist Chinese headwear, complete with a big embroidered red star, is probably fairly rare in an American cold war and military museum.

Still, I finally made it into a Concorde

White youth, black youth / Better find another solution

A guy on CNN’s Voices Of Recession (yes that’s what they named it) emailed in to say that he knows things are bad in the nation as he can no longer afford to supersize his value meals anymore.

Yes I know that things are bad, but the USA is positively revelling in its economic malaise. Aside from the women who had 8 kids (which is all the talk on the street, in the tabloids and on the radio), that’s about all you hear from the 5000 TV channels in our hotels.

It seems to have replaced the WOT (no longer governmentably copyrightable as a phrase as Obama has tossed it aside) as the calamity of obsession here. The channels are full of folks who have lost their jobs; folks who might lose their jobs; folks who know someone who lost their jobs; folks who own a business that relies on folks who might or have lost their jobs; folks who have lost their homes; folks who might lose their homes; folks who are providing support for all these folks and everything else in between. And the more the chatter chatters on, the more self-fulfilling it all seems to become as a nation staggers into the media proclaimed disaster.

But for all that you can feel the anger at the bonuses and the banks and the years of Enrons and Halliburtons and AIGs. A taxi driver last night (I love talking to taxi drivers and listening to their often impenetrable reasoning) wondered how long it would be before the nation took to the streets, which, as unlikely as such a thing might appear to a lad from a placid muted democracy like NZ, where we’ve just elected a formless amoeba as a PM, there is a history of across the centuries here in the US.

And in between the talk It's quite fascinating, and more than a little unpleasant to watch the vultures shamelessly swoop..there are bizarre glossy fast talking extended advertorials on daytime TV from people offering to sell lists of tax foreclosure properties and turn, what is increasingly being gleefully called a depression where there are only two sorts of people: the rich parasites and those decent real people who work for them, other's misery into your profit.

Maybe, they should start though, by reducing the size of the servings….

Will you stay in our Lovers' Story / If you stay you won't be sorry

I guess even anthropologists have a sense of humour.

My, my my, we're treating each other just like strangers /I can't ignore the significance of these changes

Last night we wandered down East Houston at about 10.45 pm. All was pretty much as you’d expect. 45 minutes later we walked back and came across this:

In the three quarters of an hour this car had, a few metres from our hotel, caught fire, and been gutted in a fairly dramatic way. There was no-one, either police or private, seemingly in charge of the charred wreck, which was pulling in fair number of camera phone toting late night wanderers.

An hour later we walked past and it was gone, with hardly a trace, apart from the remains of the back seat on the sidewalk. That too was gone this morning…not a marker as to what happened last night, in a fairly dramatic way, left.

I guess it makes a change from battling the incessant cold, or trying to work a way out of the Heavy Metal bar we found ourselves in, in Williamsburg, earlier in the evening, which was a very Pee Wee Herman moment.

Here's to the home of the brave / Here's to the life that is saved

Yesterday we went to 125th and Lexington, famous. of course, for the line in Lou's "Waiting For My Man". We walked from there westwards towards the Apollo.

In Harlem the two most famous streets, which cross in the centre of the district are the aforementioned 125^th and Lenox. As a reverential nod to some of the nation’s most illustrious Black names, 125^th also carries the name Martin Luther Boulevard , whilst Lenox is Malcolm X Boulevard . Other local streets are named after Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell.

But it’s the meeting of the first two which has the most resonance and it’s quite something to stand at the intersection of the two names. You really do feel humbled.

But even more so when you walk down 125^th and see Obama. Not the man himself of course, but the face, the words, the images and everything else. This place is thoroughly Obama-ized and, as much as we understand how big this thing was / is, you really need to wander through a place like Harlem to feel just how much resonance and empowerment the election of a black man, and a proudly black family has to these folks and the history and momentum signified in the names attached to these few streets...some of which still draw the ire and terrify some elements of the traditional power structure. You simply don’t understand it from TV and the media, either online or written. It’s fucking huge and I simply don’t know the words to express it so I’ll leave these two images to speak instead, as they say more than I ever really could.

The first is just a very small part of a huge wall in Harlem where folks can write their hopes for the man's first 100 days..this part from one school class:

The other thing that’s struck me is that the old white men seem to have turned already, though, and with quite a vengeance. The DC establishment is fighting back and McCain and Cheney, and the Murdoch media are firmly on the attack. They have to be I guess, as they don’t have much else left right now, but seeing McCain mumbling on, on CNN domestic or Rush on Fox, then putting that against the tone you see and the words you her everywhere on the street, at least in NYC, either these guys still don’t quite get it or are in complete denial. Or, most likely, a mix of both.

There is, naturally, regardless of that, a small but tangible (and inevitiable) drop off in the Obama sheen, mostly because of his missteps on confirmations and some public unease on parts of the stimulus bill before Congress. You hear folks talking about these things if you let your ears wander in the diners, as I’m apt to. I’m not trying to be nosy, I just wanna know what’s being said out there on the street, or at least the very small part of it I’m in.

It fascinates.

Do you doubt the shade of vanilla? / Cos I'll play Elvis and you play Priscilla

I’ve been to New York quite a few times over the past decades, but I’d never (JFK aside), been to Queens before. I’ve even found myself in Staten Island some years back (don’t ask), but never in Queens, so when Harry suggested we meet him in a bar called Leery’s, I happily said OK. It’s easy, he said…. it’s one stop from Grand Central at Vernon-Jackson Ave on the 7 Train, and the bar is just outside the exit.

Except the station was closed. And of course they didn’t tell us until we got on the train, where a garbled bit of photocopied paper taped to a wall said ‘Changes to 7 Train’. They took us instead to 59^th Street where we were transferred to Queensboro Plaza on the V Train, where, we managed to work out, we were to be transferred to a bus back to Vernon-Jackson.

The girl next to us on the bus asked us where it was going, before we got to Jackson Ave and were ejected from the bus into the ice, fortuitously right outside the bar, which was a happy ending as neither Brigid or I had fancied wandering lost around Queens in the dark.

I’ve seen Goodfellas.

A couple of Stellas and then to an Italian place which Harry swore was mob owned. The host was called Vito, so I guess it wasn’t out of the question, but as much as I waited for some guy to rush in, grab a gun taped in the john, and waste the big fat be-suited Chianti drinking guy at the next table with a busty big haired girl half his age, it didn’t happen. Damn those stereotypes.

After dinner, all Sicilian sauces and uber-tomato heavy, we were given a lift in a very big black Chevy with blacked out windows, and some guy with too much oil in his hair, across the bridge into Brooklyn and dropped outside a bar in Williamsburg. A local bar, with a chubby girl spinning post punk and indie noise rather well, and Belgian beers on tap. Down the dead end of Manhattan Ave before you get to the East River.

Harry had taken us to his place.

Like most locals the world over folks come and go all night, and everyone knows everyone. We were greeted as Harry’s much anticipated old friends. And folks wandered in and all said “Hello Harry, are these your friends? He was worried you might find it too cold.” And folks stroll in and out all night and, even if they’ve never heard of you, they lean on the bar next to you and break into conversation. And unlike the sort of barfly you might find in most Australasian cities, people are open, interested and interesting and, in a particularly NY way, intelligent. This is an intelligent city. Unlike much of the rest of this nation, people here seem to have read, and actually know there is a world beyond it’s expansive borders.

Apart from the graphic designer from Reading, the one near London, not NSW, who moved to Brooklyn 19 years back and never went back, there was John, who may well be the only Rugby fanatic in Brooklyn, so much so that he’d taken a trip to Sydney a few years back to watch the world cup.

So John and I talked Eric B & Rakim and rugby and he told me how upsetting the trip to Sydney had been, because, as an African-American, he’d been treated appallingly from the moment he’d arrived. Bars wouldn’t serve him; cabs asked to see his money before they’d move; he’d been watched like a potential shoplifter every time he went into a shop; and Australian Immigration had harassed him heavily on entry. He wasn’t going back and had a pretty dark opinion of the nation that just said ‘Sorry’. I guess it’s easy to utter two syllables.

But that aside, in a totally NY way, we were treated to the Stumblebum Brass Band, an incredible little trio that sounded like mutant merging of Richard Hell and Louis Armstrong with a Yiddish tint. Does that make sense? No, I guess not, but Josh Malone’s loud growl through a megaphone, and Jonny Ballz stand-up rattling snare were hypnotising. But, most of all, I loved they way it umped along punctuated and driven by Jesse Wildcards’ tuba which he played like a rhythm guitar. Incredible stuff.

Only in NY.

It inspired me to buy a biography of Gershwin and the great Jewish immigrant NY songwriters who were tougher muthas than most would assume, because you simply had to be.

2am, back into the snow, which was falling rather more heavily than when we walked in, past the bar smokers, who, and you wonder how bloody dedicated you have to be to the addiction to stand outside in the sub zero pre-dawn hours, were puffing and shivering, and into another black windowed Chevy and across back to Manhattan.

I’ve been to Queens.