An impromptu Japanese fashion shoot takes place on Times Square.

Socrates prepares to drink his hemlock. I’ve always liked this painting because I want to go like Socrates: surrounded by my weeping fans, sticking one last finger up at society.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses (Oil on canvas, 1889)

I got a train up to 74th Street and wandered over to Central Park, where eventually I located the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Spent a pleasant two and a quarter hours taking in Roman sculptures and European masterpieces, including the requisite van Goghs, Manets, Monets, and Seurats (including a study for La Grande Jette, which I will hopefully be seeing tomorrow).

I left with an hour to spare, which I thought would be plenty of time, but surprisingly I only just got to the South Street Seaport in time for my entrance to the Bodies exhibition. South Street Seaport is a rather hip collection of bars and boutiques leading down to the riverside, which would probably be a lot more fun to visit if I was over 21 and wasn’t by myself.

Anyway, Bodies was in an upstairs series of galleries, and was an illuminating, if rather disturbing, experience. Facing these dead bodies, preserved in all their finery, is not immediately repulsive. In fact, it’s more beautiful than anything. But occasionally, when you’re up close and you see the whites of their eyes, or their teeth, or the other side of their face, one is reminded of that old They Might Be Giants ditty:

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part
that wonders what the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking of
Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you,
Or is it worse because it’s always waiting
Where your eyes don’t go?

Be very, very pleased that you will hopefully never come across a teratoma, incidentally. Skin. Hair. Teeth. Growing in a hairy, teeth-covered lump inside you. Eeuch. Finally, perhaps the most harrowing section contains a number of preserved foetuses, a section which carries a warning and can be bypassed. Seeing a tiny infant, the size of your hand, curled up in a ball with its eyes closed, eternally paused at 24 weeks…

On a lighter note, I unexpectedly bought $17 of Chinese food, and unsurprisingly don’t feel too good now.

So, farewell, New York. Although I’ll see you in a week or so. You were very rude and obnoxious. I think my initial wish to live here was a little hasty. Still, you are undeniably the most exciting city on Earth.

From the top of that cinema I went to:

Joey “Fat One” Fatone welcomes you to New York!

Roosevelt Island:

MoMA:

Warhol’s soup cans:

Eva Hesse:

Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) by Alberto Giacometti (Bronze, 1955), or Invisible Cheeseburger

René Magritte, The Menaced Assassin (1928, Oil on canvas) (close-up)

Claude Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, (1920, Oil on canvas)

“Meet James Ensor
Belgium’s famous painter
Dig him up and shake his hand
Understand the man” 

So I went to MoMA and IT MADE ME ANGRY in an artistic way. I came across the room with Lichtenstein and Warhol’s soup cans and there were masses of people just standing in front of them and taking photos from directly in front. And it just made me think: these people rarely have any time for art, they’ve just come here because these are the famous works that they’ve seen on TV and now they stand in front of it for a minute, take a photo of themselves standing in front of it to prove they were there, and then they move on. It seems extra ludicrous to use your expensive Nikon SLR to take a photo from directly in front. If you want to see it from the front, why not get a print or look it up on Wikipedia? You are here with the real thing. Look at it from the side. Or up close. Or from across the room. Look, look at these brushstrokes: Claude Monet actually stood here, a hundred years ago, with his brush and palette and put this paint on himself. Isn’t that incredible? And now you’re standing in front of it! Look at it! Don’t just take a photo on your cellphone and move on!

Perhaps, I mused, it’s like meta-art. With his much reproduced pop(ular) art, Warhol was, like, making a statement about how society takes art and strips out the content and repackages it as a kind of celebrity or tourist attraction.

And it seems to me that if you can afford an expensive digital SLR you probably don’t know how to use it. Also, I do hate to make fun of the morbidly obese, but watching two extremely large women in mobility scooters try to navigate around the van Gogh is quite a sight.

Woke up pretty late (8:30am!) and wandered down to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, only to find that it didn’t open until 10:30am. So I wandered down to the Roosevelt Island cable car (as seen in Spider-Man) and went there, marking my first official foray out of Manhattan. Unfortunately, Roosevelt Island held my attention for about five minutes (being a very quiet island of highrises and a solitary Starbucks) but it killed enough time for me to return to MoMA shortly after it opened. I skipped the queue, having bought the combo Rockefeller Center ticket on Tuesday, and went in, dropped off my bag in another long queue, and had a poke around a gallery involving books. Modern art is, indeed, rubbish, but there was enough interesting stuff to divert my attention (notable stuff: a video slowly scanning down the copyright page of a book, while a bored-sounding man carries on a conversation with himself: “Say, Bob, I hear that this book is copyrighted under the 1945 Copyright Act by G.C. Allen Co.” “That’s right, Jane. Are you old enough to remember the 1945 Copyright Act?”; and a desktop fan, on the end of a big cable hanging from the ceiling, propelling itself in big arcs. Now that’s modern art at its best).

So I’m using their fast free wifi (thanks MoMA) and eating a delicious chocolate pudding. I figure I’ll wander around the galleries for a bit, head up to Central Park (although it is raining here), visit the Met, and then I’ve got tickets for the Bodies exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum (yep, the ghoulish Gunter Von Hagenssonson one with the preserved dead bodies - it’s gonna be awesome. May include the bodies of deceased Chinese prisoners, warns the website!)

And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond
Across a cash crop car lot,
filled with twilight Coupe Devilles.
Leaving the town in the keeping
Of the one who is sweeping
Up the ghosts of Saturday night.

So I woke up this morning, dodged the crowd watching Good Morning America being filmed on the sidewalk (there was a man in a suit – famous??) and caught a downtown train to Battery Park. It’s a nice park.

That’s is the Sphere, a sculpture recovered from the World Trade Center site.

So I decided to go to the world famous New York Explosives And Weapons Terrorism Screening Experience, otherwise known as the Statue of Liberty. Here’s what happens:

Join queue
Get shouted at by security staff
Empty your pockets into a plastic tub and remove your belt
Hand over your bag
Have your laptop swabbed for explosives
Get your stuff back
Get to island on boat
Join queue to enter queue to enter marquee
In marquee, join queue
Repeat steps 2-5, but with added step of having a machine blow you with air for some reason
Enjoy the Statue of “Liberty”

Hoho, do you see the irony? I certainly did. While I have no problem with unobtrusive searching and scanning for reasons of security, the whole setup was excessive and, what is worse, rudely done.

New York is so incredibly rude. Well, it’s not really: it’s just straight-talking and matter of fact. Whereas in Blighty it’d be “Excuse me sir, please stand to the side so that I might do you the inconvenience of searching your bag” or “Please kindly proceed along at a steady pace, thank you, sorry that I am shouting”, it’s all “Sir, over here. Give me your bag.” Or “Go faster! Keep moving! Don’t slow up!”

Anyway, after the ferry got there, I wandered around the island for a bit:

Before deciding that I might as well visit the pedestal since I’d paid $12 for this. Inside were plenty of annoying kids and annoying adults, but also a reasonably interesting history of the Statue. Being a total nerd, of course, I kept comparing the pedestal to its depiction in Deus Ex (where it is overrun with terrorists who are either anarchists or libertarians, depending on which side of the fence you are on). I swear I found the point where there’s a particularly annoying gas mine set up.

So, Statue done, I returned to the mainland and wandered up Wall Street to the World Trade Center site. And here it is. Here’s where the 21st century started off.

It is, as you might expect… well, nothing. There’s nothing there/ There’s no trace that anything ever happened there, it could just be any building site. I was expecting more of a reaction to it, but really …

Luckily I bought a delicious papaya milkshake, which began the day’s odyssey of trying to find something to quench my thirst. (Snapple from a gruff hot dog cart owner (“Snapple is two dollar.”), milkshakes, smoothies: nothing seems to have done the trick.)

From there, then, I continued to J&R, an independent electronics shop which was pretty disappointing in terms of selection, but then I guess nothing can compete with the internet these days. To Macy’s, which also disappointed. A floor of perfume counters does nothing for me. I don’t really know what happened after that. I got two seasons apiece of Venture Bros and Sealab 2021 for $70 in Virgin, found an NHL store where I nearly bought a Red Wings jersey but then I felt that maybe I should go for Calgary instead but it was $99 and I’m not really into hockey any more and furthermore the greeter scared me off (what a strange concept these greeters are: you’re like “uh, are they talking to me? What do I say back?”), wandered around looking for something to drink, bought a double quarter pounder (what a country!) and felt sick from it, and now I’m hitting travel fatigue, because I can’t really be bothered to do anything. It’s a tough business, travelling, and I just want to lie down and relax, not go traipsing off to find Bloomingdales and navigate the damn subway some more. Who knew going on holiday would be this difficult?

With a spare evening, I decided I might as well go to the cinema. Saw the new Hulk film at a glitzy place slightly off Broadway called AMC Empire or something. Verdict: a big resounding meh. It was enlightening to see a film in an American cinema though: a lot more hooting, laughing, clapping, etc. Also, it was very odd to watch a film set in New York, what with New York being just outside.

Wandered back through the sweltering hot streets around Times Square and it occurred to me that New York is like a giant movie set, only with no director or scriptwriter. Rather, you have a million actors, each with an ego the size of Staten Island, and you’ve dropped them into Manhattan and told them to do improv everywhere, and so as you stroll down Broadway you come across a series of increasingly strange vignettes: a pair of Jewish guys kvetching about schlock, a man shouting into his phone: “Fuck Tony, I don’t need Tony!”, a couple of cops joking about how one of them apparently got beaten up by a drunk… That’s New York.

So, I set out to hit the streets of New York City. Figured, why stand in the queue for the Empire State Building for two hours when I could go to the Rockefeller Center’s observation deck with no wait and have the obvious bonus of being able to actually see the most famous skyscraper in the world?

At the top, I got a weird feeling that … I’d seen it all before. Not in a bad way, you understand: more like this is exactly how it should look. Plus, the lift has a glass ceiling.

Walked the streets. Passed tons of those Orthodox Jews in the black with beards. Also passed some of New York’s finest in the NYPD. Somehow their presence fills me with much more confidence than British police.

I wandered the streets in the setting sun, which created some fantastic interplays of light and shadow.

Went to Times Square. These photos barely do it justice.

I was going to be all sneery and say “it’s not as good as Shibuya station” but… it’s huge. The screens are everywhere, they tower into the sky, and perhaps most crucially due to the intersection of Broadway and Fifth you get an island in the middle, which makes it totally unlike anywhere else. It makes Piccadilly Circus look like a cheap set of Christmas lights.

I intended to visit this indie electronics store but it was closed, so I wound up at Borders instead. Having left, I decided to return to the hostel, but unknowingly I went south again and didn’t realise until I’d reached 18th Street. (Incidentally, I’d like to compliment New York on its excellent navigatability, which is not a word but should be. Take heed, Tokyo.)

“Never mind,” I thought, “I can catch the subway to save the walk!” I bounded down the stairs, bought a $2 ticket, went merrily through the turnstile, and then realised that I was on the Southbound platform, and I wanted the other one. Wouldn’t be a problem, except that – and I don’t know if it’s a design flaw or me being stupid – to get to the other platform you have to leave, cross the road, and come back in again. And buy a new ticket.

$4 later, I got the train and disembarked at Times Square Station, where some young people were b-boying, or whatever it’s called.

In summary, then: New York is completely insane. Sadly, not in the soapbox mumbling to yourself kind of way, more the way that everybody in the city is constantly grinding against everyone else and their job and their family and the city itself and eventually you fear that a stray spark will ignite someone and they’ll run up to you and bite your ears off, but through some miracle this doesn’t happen.

As always, forgive the intermittent nature of these snippets…

…

After an uneventful hour-long trip to Heathrow (I swear I saw Ken Livingstone getting off at King’s Cross: he looked in a huff) I’m here now in the departure lounge of Terminal 4, feeling excited. A young lady asked me a bunch of confusing questions which I apparently passed (the other day an Oxfam fundraiser on the street asked me if I was over 21, and I instinctively said “Yes. No. I’m 19.”, so you can imagine my worry that I would unexpectedly blurt out something suspicious at customs), I got some interesting customs forms to fill in (what’s the dollar value of custard creams? And have I ever been convicted of a war crime, or associated with the Nazi regime, and furthermore what is “moral turpitude”?), checked in my bag without hassle, got frisked at the gate (ooh!) and then spent half-an-hour just wandering up and down the departure lounge.

I’ve said it before, but I think I love the Terminal 4 departure lounge. People with bags wander through bookstores and electronics shops and fashion boutiques buying things they don’t really need as a recreational activity. Chain restaurants serve haggard travellers. Men like myself sit around typing ambigiously on laptops and talking to people on mobile phones. Shiny Ferraris and Lamborghinis hunker in the middle of the floor, asking to be won. In stark constrast to the dim interior, outside huge white jetways emblazoned with the logo of the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation dazzle you and baggage trucks dart to and fro.

I think I might treat myself to a nice new pair of duty-free headphones.

 …

Flight is pretty dull, watching House, reading up on New York, inadvertently pouring orange juice in my bag… you know, the usual. There was a ton of cloud obscuring the ground after we got over Wales, but then it cleared suddenly halfway over the Atlantic and I realised that I was seeing this ocean for the first ever time. Strange.

As we neared Canada, I spied a number of weird white blobs in the water below. I couldn’t work out if they were islands or ships or oil rigs. Then I took a photo and realised: Iceburgs!

So I caught my first site of North American soil, and as we came in from the North over NY state I was fascinated by … how American it was. I mean, for starters, there was a lot more forest (in the UK, it would have been cut down for farmland). The roads stretched out and formed themselves into strange cloverleaf patterns. They also marked out the towns and villages in orderly grids. And it looked expensive: big suburban houses, surrounded by woodland. Then we came over New Jersey, and the houses got smaller and closer together. Places to park, by the factories and buildings. Baseball diamonds; nice weather down there. Ooh, sorry, I’m channelling David Byrne again.

So we came down at Newark Liberty International Airport. Through customs, as hair-raising as ever. I bunched together with some other Britons, and we were calmly heading towards the desk when - I hate to stereotype, but she was a big black woman with that sass in her voice who made us jump out of our skin with that unique New York greeting, a greeting that demands “Just how stupid are you?”, so condescending, patronising, and insulting all at the same time: “HEL-LOW! This way, please??!”

To the desk, where my customs form was inspected. ”You were in Japan? What for?” “Uh uh um I was was I was teaching English!” “You know Japanese?” “A little!” But then we talked about how expensive Tokyo was and how  good the low dollar was for me, so I learned that even customs officers are human.

I managed to avoid cavity searches and two lines of customs to get to the transportation desk where I ordered a SuperShuttle (basically a cheap shared taxi) to my hostel. I sat and watched the airport go by, not really feeling as if I was in the US - but then you know, airports are the same anywhere. Spent my first $2.70 on an iced  latte.

The driver appeared ten minutes late, surly and talking on his phone. He led me outside, where it was raining a little, and I got my first taste of New Jersey, America proper. And you know what I thought?

“Wow, it’s just like GTA!”

Well, it is. Kudos to Rockstar for capturing the feel of New York, even if it was New Jersey. The driver loaded me into a van with the other passengers and switched the radio on. It took me a few seconds to realise that this was New York radio. Traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. “Shit, I’m actually here,” I thought.

And so we drove.

I finally get why New Jersey is the butt of so many jokes: the place is a tip.

Fry: OK, I give up. What’s the catch?

Salesman: Oh. No catch. Although we are technically in New Jersey…

[Later, back at Planet Express]

Fry: Not even one place remotely livable.

And then: ohmygod that’s the Empire State Building.

I was happy to take the train to Manhattan, but my sister recommended the shuttle, and I’m glad I took it. You get such a good entry into the city: through the Holland Tunnel, into the (surprisingly rundown) areas of Lower Manhattan, and driving through, it hits me just how mindblowing this is. I’m stunned. It’s all true. All of it. Taxi cabs. Drains venting steam “like the whole damn city’s ready to blow”, to quote Tom Waits. News box thingies. Skyscrapers. Surly men in vests. Signs saying “FINE $250″ and “ONE WAY” and pro-life billboards. Baseball. Madison Square Garden. 35th St. 5th Avenue. The Village. Barnes and Noble. Brooklyn. Subway. It’s all here.

Anyone in the world with a TV has been raised on the myth of New York. We’ve seen the photos and the films and read the books and played the video games. We’ve built up a picture of what it’s like, and actually going there is like stepping into that picture. It’s insane. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a Harry Potter fan discovering that Hogwarts exists and that you can go there by bus. It’s like a Christian actually getting the chance to meet God. It’s all true.

So I get to my hostel, which has an unassuming entrance but inside is clean and pleasant. I was worried about security and jerk roommates, but my roommate has left his iPod Touch out on his bed, which means I could steal more from him than he could steal from me, and he’s also reading Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, so he must be a nice guy.

View from the window:

So: shit. I could live here, it’s that awesome. Now to hit Times Square and Fifth!

All together now:

Start spreading the news
I’m leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York

And so on. Yup, I’m up waay too early, off to catch a plane in four and a half hours. Dunno when I’ll have internet again.

I meandered down to the Palace at about a half-past seven, quickly scouted out the place (am I the only person who always feels slightly uncomfortable in a building unless I’ve explored the whole floorplan? Perhaps it’s a compulsion from playing too many FPSes) and bought a hideously expensive gin and tonic at the bar, which I drank, silently, alone, unconsciously mirroring Bob Harris in Lost in Translation, again. (That film follows me everywhere.)

To my seat, then. The theatre seemed very small and cosy, not quite as big as I was expecting. On my left was a Hamburger who, as he informed me during an idle chat during the interval, was on business in London and enjoyed the opportunity to go out in the evenings. Behind me were Americans. In fact, there seemed to be Americans everywhere, being endearingly American with their “We’re here for Wimbleton” and “So, what part of the States are you from?” and “Oh, Victoria, BC” and “Ah, so not actually the States!” and “You know, the Canadians say we sound like Americans, and the Americans say people from Seattle sound like Canadians, eh” (I will always remember my excitement the day I discovered that Canadians really do say “eh” all the time) and saying “Thank you, sir!” as I got up to let them get to their seats. Before I went to Japan and met my colonial cousins for the first time, I assumed the Yanks and the Limeys were essentially the same, just with different accents and different sporting/hot beverage preferences. But they are different, very different, in a wonderful way. I don’t know if it’s being more extroverted and sociable, or the accent, or calling random strangers “sir”, but the fact that they are different brings out that the British actually do have a distinct culture. Clearly, this will be something to look into over the next two weeks.

So, Spamalot. I was hoping to see Charles Widmore Alan Dale as King Arthur, but in an intriguing twist it turns out that Sanjeev Bhaskar, of Goodness Gracious Me fame, took over the role, and I was privileged enough to see his very first performance tonight. He’s pretty good: hardly the best singer, but carries the role well (so well that clearly I didn’t realise that this was his first night). There are a handful of knowing references thrown in, too (”Kiss my royal chuddies!”).

Being of Python descent, it naturally features some neat breaking of the fourth wall (especially in the surprising finale) and meta-theatrical tricks. At the very start, a lone trumpeter begins playing the Monty Python theme: the conductor, in the pit, draws a gun and shoots him.

Overall? Well, if you loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail, You’ll Love Spamalot! Which is the problem, really. It’s a show of two halves. The original portions, the new musical numbers and diverging plotline in Act II are funny, and there’s plenty of hilarity and fun songs and clever writing, but then on the other hand you have the scenes lifted almost word-for-word from the movie, and the trouble with that is that it just becomes a case of delivering the punchlines and catchphrases to the waiting audience. “Here’s the bit with the French castle! Ooh, in a few seconds he’s going to say “We need a shrubbery!”"

That’s not the point of Monty Python! It’s something I noticed with the League of Gentlemen live DVD, or whenever Matt Lucas or David Walliams turn up on charity events: the audience aren’t wanting anything new or original, they just want their favourite characters to say the catchphrases and leave.

But, hey, it’s a fun spectacle for the most part.