No more the fool

It was a short ride, but now driven by a catatonic fear of the United States Immigration Service, Homeland Security and Ryan Seacrest I shan’t be posting anything more.Until that is, I am reborn as an American.  

Streets of Philadelphia

Before I’d been to Philadelphia (which we shall now call Philly in order to save my keyboard) I only knew three things about the town. First was that a quite fancy cheese spread came from there.

In fact when my student grant came in – shortly before I blew it on Merrydown Silver, drugs, cigarette papers to make rollups from the butts in the ashtray, and those leggings you wear under your jeans to enable them to have holes in but not expose your knees to the cold whilst at the same time saying “arsehole” to the rest of the world, I’d get a warm crusty bloomer and a tub of Philadelphia. That was living it up. Possibly the greatest cheese spread known to mankind, lording it over Boursin and all those other pretenders. To me then, Philly then was a town in which people all worked long tough days in the cream cheese industry but all went home happy knowing the world was a better place for it.

The second thing I knew about Philly came from the movie Philadelphia, which I never saw but from what I could gather from the trailers, and that Springsteen song was that the town was eternally overcast, everyone had AIDS (and was presumably gay), and that the population enjoyed entirely tuneless dirges and setting fire to bins.

The last prejudice I’d built up was based on Rocky. Rocky came from Philly. Rocky was great, Mickey was great, Apollo was great. It made it seem possible that anyone with a dream, enough spirit, their own soundtrack and a montage could become anything. I loved those films (well, 1 & 2 anyway), and we’d just seen 6 which wasn’t half bad either. I wanted to run up those steps.

Turns out we have friends who live in Philly and they’d invited us down for the weekend so I stuffed all my preconceptions in my bag and went looking to validate them.

Actually I’d been there before. Twice in fact. The first time was during a slightly hungover extremely humid day a couple of years back. That time I did the historical tourist side of things and so here’s the facts:

Philly is a smallish city and it is Very Historical. It is home to the Liberty Bell, a bell as famous as bells get. This was rung to call everyone to the signing of the declaration of independance, amongst other things and is seen as a symbol of freedom etc. It was cast in London, and as something of a testament to English engineering it split the first time they rang it. Philly is also home to Independance Hall which looks a little bit like those ‘how they used to live’ museums you find in Littlehampton. This was the place the declaration was signed and we had a little look. Independance Hall was built by the English and designed by Edmund Woolley, an Englishman. So here the first 13 states got together and started to the US of A, and just down the road a woman named Betty knocked up the flag we all know (which still has space for one more UK shaped star), and lo! there were burgers, and the world was changed.

The second time in Philly was spend with Aunt Marie, learning to cook curry and look masculine in an apron.

This time we stayed in the city centre at Megan and Matt’s place and got to do the important things. The Rocky steps and a Cheesesteak.

The Rocky steps belong to the Art Museum and somewhat stuffily they refused to host a statue of the great man at the top of the steps, preferring instead to plonk it somewhere off to the side. There are many great and imposing statues in Philly, mostly of the founding fathers or depicting the revolutionary war, but from what I could see they were all ignored for the master. Admire us faithfully recreating a scene from the movie under His eyes:

Round the corner from the statue is the Art Museum. Which has far too many steps to actually run up, but we all made something of an effort at the top (note my new All American Gut, and how proud Meg is to be friends with us, standing a good 10 feet to the left).

We weren’t the only ones. Far from it. In fact here comes a photo of the other direction which I took since the view is quite impressive but you can clearly see devotees running their own pilgrimage.

In the evening it was off to South Street for a Philly Cheesesteak, famous local food. Outside the more well known Cheeseteak places people queue for 45 minutes to get one. So we queued for 45 minutes to get one, heading to Jims. So what’s a Cheesesteak ? Well you get a bread roll, you put cheese in it, then you add steak. Done. Not entirely impossible to recreate this at home I’d imagine, still people must queue for a reason. Here is the queue once we got in the shop, and a photo of the one man who makes them:

I’m sure Jim knows the Cheesesteak business pretty well, but if I might offer some advice – having more than one person making the food will increase the number of people you can sell them to at once and make the queue shorter. Your options when it comes to the Cheesesteak is which cheese to have with it, and whether you want onions or not. No special blend of 12 herbs and spices here. If you look closely at the photo of the man making the food you can see what appear to be paint tins containing yellow paint in front of him. This was the discovery of the weekend, it is known as Cheese Whiz and is, as far as I know the only Cheese that comes in liquid form from a paint can. It tastes fantastic, like if you melted babybells with the casing still on, and like the cream cheese it is also made by Kraft who seem to own this town. Having invented liquid cheese Kraft then did the decent thing and put it in an aerosol called Easy Cheese, I will investigate this as a priority, as well as using Cheese Whiz in a variety of experiments soon.

So once we’d scored the food we headed home for fine wine, conversation, cheese whizz more wine and then around midnight something happened to the Americans in the room: (please excuse blurriness, it looked fine to me at the time)

They got a large tub of Ice Cream each and got stuck right in, behaviour I’d not seen before outside of a chick flick.

The next day was a late breakfast and the trip home. I like Philadelphia. No, its better than that, I love Philadelphia. It’s not your typical big American city, built for cars. Nor is it a bunch of strip malls on an Interstate. Its a nice sized town with gorgeous buildings, completely walkable, tons of non chain shops, nice bars & restaurants and a very English feel. I think that was the weird thing, I loved this town because it reminded me of the nice parts of Reading. I think I’m getting homesick.

Living In A Box

I was at the shops the other day picking up a copy of Dance Dance Revolution. For those of who haven’t experienced this, you get a large mat you put on the floor, stick a disc in to your Xbox and try to dance along with some europop, whilst the Xbox gives you a grade on how much of an idiot you look. I apparently look quite the idiot as you can see.. (outfit supplied by my new in-laws)

Anyway, whilst I was picking it up the girl at the till asked for my date of birth. Possibly just to have a bit of a laugh after I’d left at what a 33 year old man was going to do with a dance pad, or possibly to inform the sex offenders register of a new ‘at risk’ (thanks to Jon sending me a link you can visit this website and enter 07087 as our zip code to see all the 516 sex offenders in our area, and the two living on our street, as well as their addresses and convictions). Either way, I gave it as the second of the twelfth seventy three, which translates (wrongly) in to American as the 12th of February.

I’ve worked with computers on occasion in my past. Computers are for the most part American Citizens. Whilst you can tell them that they live in the UK, they may continue with their bad ways and sneakily keep dates in the US format. So everytime you want to show or save a date you have to ensure that it is correctly translated. I may not have actually gone to the effort of doing this properly everywhere, but I did have to at least think about it and that was annoying. So why do the US keep up with this silliness, maybe because 9/11 sounds better than 11/9 ? Or perhaps its just the British who persist with the entirely sensible day/month/year. A little research..

Well the US is in good company. These are the other countries that use the same format they do:

Phillipines
Federated States of Micronesia
Palau

And the rest of the world uses either ours or a few countries use the new Year, Month, Day standard that the Chinese like, which is ours but backward and so easy to understand without mistakes. I know I’ve moaned about going metric in the past, but just as an example these are the countries apart from the US that haven’t changed to metric yet:

Liberia
Myanmar

And then there’s paper sizes. A1 is twice the size of A2 is twice the size of A3 etc. In the US we have Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Elephant (seriously), Government-Letter which have absolutely no relation to each other. This paper standard is used by these countries:

Phillipines

And these are the countries that still use Farenheit:

None

I know all that is quite dull, but it sort of emphasises the point that this country appears to have absolutely no interest in what the rest of the world is up to. Its not just that those examples are out of kilter with everyone else, but that there are no plans whatsoever to change. I can’t seem to find any reasons why. Nor can I think of any way to bring this all back to my dancing prowess so I’ll just sort of stop.

Hey Joe

I’d bought something in the corner shop the other day because the packaging made me double take. Here is a picture of said can:

There’s so much wrong with that I shouldn’t have to write anything, but a manwich with sloppy joe’s sauce in it ? Nice imagary too.

PS I’ve since eaten a couple of sloppy joes – you have it in a roll with some mince (appropriately enough), but it does taste great.

Fatherland

So I popped to Good Times Liquor to get the weekly shop in, and this time whilst making sure I came back with booze that had booze in it, I stumbled accross this little lager:

Aside from getting horribly homesick for sloppy kebabs, trampy women and the chino’d men who fight for them, I got curious about what a US take on Southampton would be like, and what was so secret about this most secret of ales. So having discovered the town was in New York by reading in the back of the bottle (incidentally, they don’t print ABV on the beer over here so you can’t properly plan your evening around the levels appropriate for the chick who winked at you from the other side of the bar), I then found that the secret of the beer is that it tastes like special brew strained through a vagrant’s pyjamas. The next step was to get to Southampton.

After a little reading it turns out that Southampton was on Long Island and a part of a group of towns known as The Hamptons. This includes Easthampton, Westhampton and Southampton, though understandably they saw fit not to try and recreate Northampton. I’d heard of the Hamptons, I think from watching the odd episode of Sex and the City on the off chance that Charlotte might get her kit off. The times I saw that show there was plenty of promise that something was going to happen, but much like my plan for a Kylie & Beyonce hokey cokey it never happened. What put me completely off of it though was that it was based on the premise that Sarah Jessica Parker could get laid, and frequently. I believe she looks something like a foot, to demonstrate this I have the following ‘Seperated at Birth: SJP and my right foot with a face drawn on it’

What the show did establish though, was that the Hamptons were a place for rich people from New York to go in the summer and have parties with other rich people so that they could at least wake up with someone who could afford to leave in a taxi. So I headed out to Southampton via the Long Island Railroad, catching the train about 11am. Arriving at 2pm and having massively miscalculated how far it was I was greeted with absoultely no people, no cabs and no sign of (or to) a town.

Taking a chance and heading down one of many deserted nondescript roads (but still getting the feeling I was being watched) I arrived in the town centre about 15 minutes later and immediately got the impression that this Southampton was distancing itself as far as possible from Old Southampton. I will write something about the obsesion with the Stars & Stripes that the Americans have later, but this town had them absolutely everywhere.

There is apparently a great beach here so I made that my goal and kept on walking. The place is something like the Lanes in Brighton, full of shops that sell absolutely nothing that anybody wants such as galleries of local artists, a fine wine boutique and a Saks of Fifth Avenue. Rich people lived here in their large piles with lawns perfectly manicured by Jose, and security systems monitored ‘24/7′.

Nowhere to buy fags, or frozen chickens then, and strikingly no bars. After a call to Steph to check train times it was apparent that if I didn’t catch the 3:30pm back to New York I would become resident in Southampton, condemned to a life of conversations about property prices and how that Mr Bush is such a nice young man albeit over a good glass of merlot. So I wandered back in vague direction of the station, noting surprisingly that in a place that up till now had more ducks than people there were a few similarities to actual Southampton. Notably an HSBC, a crap train service and fat kids in ill-fitting clothes smoking tabs on the street.

And then I saw the sign.

So I was in there quicker than Ryan Seacrest says yes to a TV show, and surprised to find it full of geezers all at the bar perfectly well oiled at 3 in the afternoon. It was like 3pm in any pub in Kilburn, full of working men getting away from everything, though this lot were all sipping fruity drinks. There’s something odd about men with hands like shovels and steel capped boots drinking a Mohito through a straw. A couple of beers (and thankfully no advances) later I made my way to the station, where even the train reminded us that we were definitely still in America for the three hours of toilet and buffet-car free travel that is the Long Island Railroad. I can tick the Hamptons off my list, but on reflection 6 hours of travel for 90 minutes in Hampstead On Sea probably wasn’t worth it.

By the way, my foot also does a reasonable impression of Luke Perry.

Daysleeper

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch much TV. I think I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t like any of it. US TV definitely has its moments; Family Guy, The Daily Show, Heroes, and anything on the Mexican channels are works of genius.

I think, at least according to our cable people, that we have around 130 channels – it might be slightly more or less it doesn’t really matter. As anyone with Freeview will know, the more channels you get, the more choice you get. And choice is always a good thing driving standards ever upwards. Particularly daytime TV. For example, of a weekday afternoon I can sit down to enjoy any one of these:

Judge Judy
Judge Jo Brown
Judge Mills Lane
Judge Hatchett
Judge Mathis
The People’s Court
Divorce Court
Moral Court
Texas Justice (a personal favourite)

Of course it is possible that come 3pm whilst you settle down to high tea and thirty minutes with the gogglebox you mightn’t want to indulge in watching deserately poor uneducated people suing each other for a snowblower and arguing that little Cletus Jr (CJ) “don’t be needing no books, no books what done got me where I be”. For those people – and I don’t count myself in that group as paternity tests are always compelling viewing – there’s your stories. Soap operas with so much drama it makes Coronation Street seem like a dull road in a dull part of England with a cast of fuglies. Ah.. oh. Anyway, here, I can select from some of the following as I pass another gin soaked afternoon of housework:

The Young and The Restless
The Bold and The Beautiful
All My Children
Passions
General Hospital
One Life To Live
As The World Turns
Guiding Light
Days Of Our Lives

That’s just the main three network’s daytime offerings. They are all on for about an hour every day, and in that hour they will pack in something like one or two scenes, which helps them keep the story from progressing and enables nothing to take an extraordinary amount of time. For example there is a man in Days Of Our Lives who is wrapped in bandages, can’t speak and can’t move. As far as I can tell from Google, he’s an unknown character who’s been that way in the show for at least two years. So thats a actor who has lots of onscreen time over the past couple of years, but turns up to work every day to have his entire body covered, has said not one word and moved nothing but his eyes. They also have soundtracks (imagine Eastenders with a soundtrack), mostly performed by someone with a ‘Fill In’ button on their Casio Keyboard. Not only that but flashbacks, dream sequences, and angrily-staring-at-the-telephone-after-using-it style of acting are all prominent features. It is compulsive stuff.

Unfortunately the drama is too often punctuated by adverts (or, as they call them here – commericals – those crazy yanks), and whilst Carol Vorderman continually rubbing my bad debt and high cholesterol in my face is like having your eyes sandpapered, they get worse over here. There’s the adverts for drugs, which I’ll post a bunch of examples of sometime (including one where a bloke picks and eats peas from his mash potato in order to demonstrate prostate disease), 1970’s style adverts for Local things (again, more later) but nine out of 10 adverts are for cars. On and on and on and on with bloody car adverts, there’s nothing I couldn’t tell you about which trucks will bring 10,000lbs to a dead stop quickest, or which mid-range hatchback SUV does 28mpg on the highway etc. However, like any mountain of shit, there’s always the odd bit of sweetcorn and US advertising is saved by these fine messages..

The diarrhea song – we’re all singing it.
Little Richard, and mashed potatoes
Or look here on youtube for anything with the Geico Gecko in it, a sort of cockenehey lizard, which is the first thing you’d use to sell insurance..

Monty Got A Raw Deal

March is coming to an end, and with it the ‘St Patrick’s Day Season’ (as it is known here). Personally I’ve had enough of the green shit being omnipresent.: Martha Stewart and her entire audience wore green for a week; In Chicago they really did dye the river green (have a look at the website); Otherwise sane Americans feigned Oirish accents; Daytime TV was obsessed with Corned Beef and Cabbage (which sounds like a euphamism for someone you’d rather not wake up with to me, and anyway isn’t it bacon and cabbage ?); And the 3,433,225th St Patrick’s Day Parade got underway.

I spent the morning watching some of it on the TV, and after establishing that its a bunch of pipe and drum bands walking down the street and with around 2 million extra people in Manhattan for the day, decided to go to the local. Which was full of green shirts. Although to be fair the Rugby was on and though England got beaten by West England (nee Wales), I took some sense of satisfaction in Ireland losing the 6 Nations through laziness.

I’m as plastic a paddy as the next person though, so the Thursday before the 17th took Steph to see The Pogues at the Roseland Ballroom in town. Having talked up the Pogues as one of the best bands ever in the world, I guess I forgot that someone who’s never heard of them probably wouldn’t understand Shane MacGowan’s unique appeal. Trying to describe how a man who can’t really sing, stand or speak is worth $100 and an evening out is hard, but Steph played ball and off we went. Shane had not let me down. Two days before in Boston he fell of the stage and broke his legs. We were therefore treated to Shane being wheeled on and off stage as the music dictated.

Look ! Shane in a wheelchair.

During a quick visit to the bogs, I returned to find Steph had picked up another fellar. Not a problem I thought, so having done my part by flexing and posturing he wandered off. However, Joseph as we shall call him (since that was his name) wasn’t done yet. He came back having bribed security for us to get to the VIP area, so given the option of possible trouble and having to give my girlfriend up versus plush seats and a bar you could get to, we followed. We (I) stayed for the booze till the band arrived then made our excuses and went to back to the crowd – Joseph actually seemed like a reasonably nice, somewhat lonely bloke but there was a band on. The Pogues came on and were as good as they get (curiously not playing Fairytale of New York, but managing to go for about 2 hours), they got around the ban on smoking in public places by smoking in public places. Afterward, Jospeh found us again and gave us a couple of pint glasses he’d bough for us, we responded by being slightly weirded out, bought him a drink and left.

Talking of plastic paddy’s, this was the week that Marty became a dad. Just want to wish the three of them all the luck (especially little Monty Murrihy who has the best name I’ve ever heard).

Who’s the Daddy ?

Tower Of Strength

There’s a train you can take from Hoboken terminal called the PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) train. If you’re out and about in town and it’s past 1am then this is the way to get home.

The other day, I was out and about in town (sans Stephanie, avec three ladies – one make-up girl, one creative director cousin and one talent agent) and took it upon myself to drink plenty of Stella. Despite my preconceptions that US booze is for girls by about 1 o’clock I was several sheets to the wind, having managed to start a row with the women and pour beer on my crotch. Again. I wandered through the cold empty streets, walking straight as an arrow, singing beautifully and thinking clearly about my transport options. I knew that somewhere on 26th Street was the PATH train and that it would take me nearer home. Having tried and failed to call Steph a couple of times to clear up which Avenue (the only number I could remember was my own, which I rang but kept getting voicemail) I’d walked the entire width of Manhattan before I gave up and got a taxi (I gave the driver directions, which after a while he ignored or we’d still be sharing a coffee in Albany about now).

Back to the PATH train, and aside from somewhere on 26th Street, it also goes to the World Trade Center (sic). I’d been here once in 2004 and I visited again this past week. Nothing has happened in those two years and the place still has something strange about it. On the face it just looks like a building site, but with the surrounding tall buildings still covered in scaffolding and the displays around the place you do get a sense of the scale of what occured there. Here’s a couple of photos of the fence:

That last photo is the PATH station entrance which they have recently reconstructed and which, by the way has about a dozen fully working (at the same time!) escalators put together in only a couple of years. London Underground might want to find out who built them. Anyway, I was here as it’d just been on the telly that they had started laying the foundations for the replacement buildings.

Personally if I was in charge of this multi-billion dollar construction (and no I’m not, despite recent successes hanging pictures) I would have stuck two fingers up to the terrorists and rebuilt them exactly as they were. Instead we have the Freedom Tower. I actually don’t mind the architecture, imagine a glass skyscraper with a pointy bit on top and you’ve got it. None of the character of the Empire State or Chrysler buildings or any of the London Gherkin silliness just a quite tall building (at 1776 – sheesh – feet it should come in around number 3 in the world). It’s the name I mind. The Freedom Tower ? Come on, that is just gay. The country is 200 years old, not 12. Somewhat ironically the attacks on the World Trade Center which now allow for the contruction of the Freedom Tower, also led to the introduction of the Patriot Act which allows the government to look at your medical records, search your house, listen to your phone calls and most importantly find out which videos you’ve rented, all without a warrant, or even telling you. Fortunately my recent rental of “My Brown Eye: Not The Winker, The Stinker” was under Steph’s name.

Island Of Lost Souls

Ellis Island is tiny. Not as tiny as it used to be, since most of it was created from landfill got from digging the New York Subway. Like all the good bits of the USA it was originally English, and in contrast to the way the Americans saw it – a humanitarian base epitomising hope and liberty for new immigrants – we saw it as a strip of mud in a river, and chose to hang people on it. We called it Gibbet Island.

Clearly most people’s voyage accross the Atlantic was much as depicted in the historical masterpiece “Titanic”. Spending weeks in squalid cramped steerage conditions with bubbly dwarf Leonardo DiCaprio dancing like he’s fitting would send me potty. Consequently the largest building on Ellis Island is a nut house. The second largest building is a regular hospital, but the only building you can visit is the hall where the immigrants were processed. They’ve really only started renovating the place as you can see, if you take a wander to the bits you’re not supposed to see:

Nice Bit

Oh Dear

Somehwat obviously inside there’s an exhibition of immigration which is actually very good and worth a gander, lots of pictures of stick people coming from Ireland, Italy, Greece, Germany and Poland, as well as details of the breakdown of the proportion of black vs white coming in. I’m not convinced the majority of blacks were technically immigrants, and whilst they might’ve avoided the DiCaprio effect, I doubt it was a pleasant voyage that ended with a check up at a nice hospital, a free Twinkie and a ‘have a nice day’.

There was a bunch of human interest stories – interviews with the people that made the trip. It would seem from reading these that upon arrival, shortly after you were hosed down, you were given your own restaurant, a hat (to be worn at a jaunty angle) and your teeth were knocked out to give you an earthy smile. But there was a special exhibition of the cultural impact of the immigration on America’s theatre and music. I took some photos of the billboard posters, as you can see for there to be a melting pot, you have to put it on a fire.

In the main hall where the immigrants queued for their papers, I got this eerie sense of what went on before in that room, hairs on the back of your neck stuff and wotnot. After checking that I wasn’t just hungover, coming down with the pox or that I’d turned in to Paula Abdul I put it down to just having a moment. There’s nothing in this hall, its just a big room, the decor is a tiler’s wet dream and when the other tourists had left there wasn’t even any noise. Spooky, thats what it was.

Upon arrival the starving immigrants must have stared in wonder at the food court. It’s a masterpiece in culinary efficiency (that means Not Good), offering ‘Foods of the World’ including pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, coffee and root beer. So for those that missed their homeland, the food would make them feel comfortable. For at least 24 hours which is when mine repeated.

Of all the places I’ve been in New York this is my favourite. I have no idea why really, just that it is. I think it’s the first place I’ve been where I’ve had the sense of the past all around me without it being cheapened by tourist crap. Oh wait, then the boat docked back in Manhattan:

Maybe I’ll go check my oestrogen levels after all.

Fat Bottomed Girls

A little while ago, and after having been here for about five months I decided to go and see the Statue Of Liberty properly. I’d seen it before on the trip to the Staten Island dump, and on every trip to south Jersey, but never really up close. So as usual, did no research and headed to Manhattan.

Taking the ferry across I realised I had no idea where to go to get the boat to the Statue, somewhat naively thinking there was only one ferry terminal in New York. There isn’t, there’s lots. A forty minute walk down the quite pleasant embankment I arrived at the ticket booth, but not before I found the British Navy clearly planning a retake of the colonies cleverly disguised as taking slightly gay all fellars together photos:

You buy the tickets for the tour, which includes Ellis Island, near the ferry port at a place called Castle Clinton the name of which for some reason reminded me of a west London massage parlour, but anyway there’s no dogs and no guns allowed in the ticket booths and they felt the need to put signs up telling you.

After that it was on to the boat via a metal detector, shoe and belt removal tent which did not go down well with the elderly male tourists whose belts had actual practical value. There was this bloke who just annoyed me. Somewhere there’s a sports shop missing its entire Boston Celtics 2006 winter line, he is wearing it. And his face was weird. Here:

Shortly after I took this a bird shat on him (don’t ask why I was following him, I don’t know).

So we arrive at the Statue of Liberty. Since it was pissing with rain, freezing cold and you can’t actually go in the statue unless you arrive at 8am I decided not to get off. I did notice though, that Lady Liberty is all woman. In the sense that East German female weight lifters are all women. She’s got arms like a bricklayer and an arse you could camp in. I don’t mean just physically but proportionately this woman is huge, and her belly sticks out further than her chest. Evidence:

Apparently the woman is the mother of the man who designed the statue (Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi). I’m not saying his mother is ugly but..

Despite all that, the Statue is incredibly impressive, and you get a phenomenal postcard type view of New York as a backdrop to it. Just less so in the pouring rain. By now I was freezing cold and soaked, though to be fair I could have stayed inside the boat but thats where Sports Boy was. Staying on the boat I decided to spend my time on Ellis Island instead where millions people were processed for immigration back in the early 20th century. And I was next.

Would you let him in your country ?