Easy On

Odd, sometimes, where one's musical inspiration comes from:

what started off Wedding Presentish ended up as major silliness...

One of the benefits of returning to live in NYC is regular live footay down the pub. The occassional disadvantage is a 12 noon kick off back home translating into a 7 AM one here stateside (pity the poor buggers sat in west coast time zones). Gawd bless McCormacks on 27th Street for opening up and showing Ldddzz-Mi'a-wawl this morning though. Was the first time for many a year that I've watched the Community nee Charity Shield n'all. Blearly-eyed, but sound way to start a Sundee, innit.

Night before T & I wandered up into Spanish Harlem to visit an ex-neighbour in her new flat on 108th Street. We sat testing and tasting sharks on her excellent rooftop patio. Shots were heard part way through the evening - laffed off by T & our host as fireworks. Walking back south down 1st Ave. at midnight police were swarming over the nearby housing project. A little way further down I looked into a Chinese takeaway on the opposite side of the street: inside and infront of the serving counter was a wall of bullet-proof glass, a massive and heavily locked, steel security door, and a small D-shaped serving hatch cut in the glass. I'd seen this before while living in Long Island City a while back: the local offie to be specific (the proprietor of which, a middle-aged Chinese man, had a viscious-looking scar across his face cut from ear to chin...). Continuing on we passed a fried chicken joint and, indeed, a liquor store. All three in a row had exactly the same bullet-proof glass, door, hatch set-up. There's a reason for it and a reason I'm glad I don't live north of 96th Street. Where serving staff in shops are in real fear of being killed on a daily basis, you know it's grim. But that's New York City isn't it: the neighbourhood vibe often changes within a block. Poverty and violence dwells a stone's throw away from affluence (or in our case a stone's throw away from somewhere not particuarly affluent, but certainly a lot safer). And when you pass through these places and are much more aware of personal safety, it also makes you think about New York's and America's major social mistakes. Destroying communities, reolcating low-income people in the name of gentrification, shoving up badly-designed housing projects to house the dislocated, spacially segregating by economic status which essentially means race. That was one of the most visual culture shocks of moving over to the US (to central Texas in my case, the first time - the segragation is more severe where there's more space available, it seems - and if liberal NYC is like it is, you can imagine what the Bush-states are like...). In New York, there are positives about some of the remaining poorer neighbourhoods: there is still community, sometimes more cohesively than elsewhere. Folk make their own entertainment e.g. sat on the stoops and sidewalks playing cards, shooting the breeze, and treating the city as their livingroom. That aspect's good to see and generally you'll get a friendly response if you're seen around regularly. But, you get the real impression that the likes of Spanish Harlem are very much annexed. In American terms, the lack of major food chains and shops (apart from the likes of White Castle and KFC), lack of local investment (private and public) speaks volumes, at least in the area we skimmed through last night.