More Parries
December 2008
Stop Yesterday
Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.
October 2008
Ebullience, Please
A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.
September 2008
History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama
McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.
Encounter at Wetherspoone’s
As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
August 2008
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1
Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.
July 2008
Suddenly Seymour
Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.
June 2008
Another End of Times
With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.
Dead Till Eilenspiegel
Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.
All So Simple
First, there is a general moode and desire to write.
March 2008
Why AAPL
Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.
Clash of the Midgets
My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.
January 2008
Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach
Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.
Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach
Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.
Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak
The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.
I Do Like Mondays
First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out then putting them in the rubbish before swilling out the remains under the tap. The sound is just the same as baristas make in cafes.
The Small Adventures - Part 2
There in the empty restaurant by the water at Dieppe I had toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. Somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there alone on my travels.
December 2007
The Small Adventures
Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.
Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision
Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy
Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.
October 2007
A Restoration and Return
There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.
September 2007
The Big and Easy
The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.
Flightblogging
With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
August 2007
A Drop in Time
To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.
Sauna Losing Heat
Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.
A Ride to Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.
July 2007
Busy, Busy City
There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.
First Time in this House All Day
One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.
The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels
The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.
June 2007
Only the Rustle in the Trees
We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.
A Rash Appointment
I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?
A Cabaret Old Chum
It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.
Fatahland and Hamastan
Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.
Squelching in a Bath of Me
I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.
Stars, Stripes and Superlatives
Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.
May 2007
Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD
Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.
My City to Your City
A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.
Shite on Brighton
“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”
From DisneyWorld to Watford
I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.
Back in Black
Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.
Daily Yin
For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.
April 2007
Wetherspoones and Raisins
No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.
The Meaning Addiction
I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.
Short Stuff
Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.
n this final day in New York—Tuesday, having arrived late Friday night—the intent was to awaken early and go rollerblading at sunrise in Central Park, but a) we stayed up talking until 5am the night before and I didn’t get up until 10am, and b) for the first time the weather was overcast. So with surprisingly few self-castigations about the late rising—what beats talking ‘till 5 anyway?—Central Park was cut from the plans.
At the local Starbucks the usual bevy of people sat outside on the concrete chairs enjoying the scene. This time I did not sit inside and glare at the computer screen for hours but took my coffee away, heading to the subway station on 59th and Lexington Ave along 61st St, past the attractive brownstone houses and the “Renanim” Jewish day care center, where my idle thought was, hmm, I wonder if Irit could get a job there.
The first stop was a haircut. Sunday evening I’d asked Gilad if he had a barber he could recommend and he told me about Sal at Astor Place Haircutters. Famous place. Yesterday Matt corroborated that for me at lunch, saying it’s just across the road from his house, and since Gilad and Matt don’t know each other, that was good enough for me: a famous haircutters, an attraction even. So I rode the 4 line subway downtown to Union Square and then walked the short way south to Astor Place, the area coming back to me as a place I’d explored, wanting to get to know, in a mostly lonely kind of way, back when I lived in New York in ‘95/’96.
Elegant Mosaics in the Subway for Goodness’ Sake
Sunday, October 7th, 2007; Manhattan, New York City, New York
What a dungeon! You go downstairs to this somewhat vast basement with absolutely no niceties of furnishing, but about 30 ancient hairdressing spots, each covered in a collage of newspaper and magazine cuttings of hair styles. The man at the reception desk had hairplugs. I asked for Sal, had to ask a second time, and the fellow told me he’s not there. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. I was directed over to Jose, a strong-looking middle-aged man with glasses and thick slicked-back hair, and rather quickly the job was done.
Then I walked back up to Union Square in the slight drizzle and took the N train to Brooklyn. It’s quite a long ride and boasts a magnificent crossing of Manhattan Bridge, yet it’s only a couple of stops. I came out the station, chosen because it seemed to be a hub in Brooklyn and therefore central, and there, right next to the station, hallelujah, a Muslim essential oils shop! They’re usually in clusters so I thought to look around a bit first, but I also had more things to do in the day before catching my flight, so didn’t want to rabbit-hole. I bought some and refused others—his frankincense and myrrh smelled like nothing I was familiar with, though a couple of exotic Arabian ones I’ve never smelled took my fancy.
Around the corner there were indeed more such shops, and I rounded out my purchases there. Then I began the plan I’d formulated on the way across: I’d walk back across Manhattan Bridge to Chinatown for my next mission. In the end it was all much closer than it seemed on the subway, the loud clatter and speeding walls making it seem like you’re traveling for miles and miles.
I walked up Flatbush Ave., a name evocative to me from Stan Lee’s references to it in various Marvel comics. It leads straight to Manhattan Bridge. At the foot of the bridge lies a McDonald’s, its surroundings having that wispy urban tumbleweed feel of Black Ghetto, and I headed in there for a fish sandwich. It was chock-full of African-American schoolkids, with a hubbub unlubricated by alcohol, and schoolgirls both very thin and very fat. A girl dropped something and I picked it up for her. She didn’t know what to say. I get the feeling they avoid looking at White people’s faces for fear of the blank desolation they see therein.
I found a spot at the end of the bridge to munch on my delicious hot filet o’ fish—how emblematic of USA trips has that fastfood product has become to me—and then found the pedestrian entrance and began my walk across. Only about half a dozen people crossed me coming the other way. New Yorkers are, after all, Americans, and even if they do walk more than any of their fellow countrymen, they still tend to avoid excessive walking when they can. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the people I crossed on the bridge were Englishmen.
What a lovely spectacle. It’s a much longer walk than crossing the Thames, and the ocean lies beyond that bay, and the fabled Statue of Liberty is quite visible. Men and a woman were working on one spot of the bridge.
New York (Bionic) Eye
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007; Manhattan, New York City, New York
And at the end of the bridge, there we were, right at the beginning of Canal Street, my next destination. I’d been singing the praises to Simon of my new bamboo steamers for cooking vegetables, and decided I’d get him a set as his wee pressie this visit. But first I wanted some lunch. The fishburger was a stopgap—no chips, no drink—because I hadn’t eaten anything yet today and didn’t want any pangs or irritability whilst walking the bridge.
Living on the Island
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007; Manhattan, New York City, New York
I knew what I wanted: now to find it. I walked west along Canal St, very content to have gained the faith to moderate and time my travel ambitions; for when I came by this street in 2004 coming from Long Island then Brooklyn on my cross-country drive, I did not even stop the car and get out onto Manhattan soil before heading on to New Jersey and the continent. I knew I’d be back again to focus on the city, and here I was, indeed for a second time within three months. I passed a supermarket that would probably stock the bamboo steamers, then kept on, looking for some street vendors from which to have a variety of things for lunch. But there were none. It was about 3pm—perhaps too late. I turned back and saw what I was looking for: a cheap functional restaurant with red baked ducks and chicken hanging in the window.
I braved the entrance. To the left was the bakery selling various savoury dumplings. To the right, the counter to order food. Straight ahead, functional tables and chairs. I hesitated at the entrance and they sat me down, regular restaurant style, albeit to share a table with another solitary gentleman, who didn’t even look up from his rice shovelling. I perused the menu, debating whether to take half a duck ($9) or one leg ($3.50). The side of vegetables was $7. That’s all I wanted, but the vegetables seemed expensive. The duck was cheaper because they’ve got them ready made, whereas the veg was from their a la carte menu. I was brought a glass of brown green tea. The waiter was amenable to my request for half a plate of vegetables: $4, he said. Fine. And I took the leg only.
And it came and the duck was just as I had hoped: rich and fabulous. The vegetables were cooked nicely but smothered in a sauce a bit too flavored and MSG’d for my liking—plain would have been just fine. But the duck. I knew it could be this way. And for just £1.70! Gotta love Chinatown. This was the real McCoy and I’d like to think I’ll have the opportunity to return often.
Then it was to the market, #200 Canal St, and there downstairs were the bamboo steamers, $9.95 the set. I also bought some dragon balls green tea, rather expensive but still half the price of England.
And that was it, time to go. No museums, no culture vulturism, no revisit to the Guggenheim, no awe at the Museum of Natural History, no MOMA, no Met, no Whitney. I’d been to a Ravel concert at Carnegie Hall—that was my bit. What I need are some obsessions, some collecting.
I took the subway back up to 59th St and up to the apartment. Yael was there and I packed, we said goodbye, and it was about 5:30pm as I walked in the drizzle to 1st Ave, where a cab stopped and took me to the 51st and Lexington subway. It was a 9pm flight. I had decided to take the E subway to the Airtrain to JFK Airport. First time that.
The subway ride was rough; I was sweating already from the heat in the subway station, and I really don’t like sweating before flying. The train was crowded and I’d imagine it would thin out once we left Manhattan, but it stayed pretty full all the way to the end of the line at Jamaica Station. Then at the Airtrain terminal I felt wooshed up a level from urban to international transport, the grime disappeared, an extra $5 ticket was required, and we were back in airplane land.
∞
Previous
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
Next
Curs to Fate