Memorial Day (New York)

Now I know what the composer Charles Ives meant when he said he loved the clashing sounds of passing Memorial Day bands. At this year's Memorial Day service at the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the New York Pipe Band had just passed us playing 'It's a Grand Old Flag', when the New Orleans Marine Band struck up with the same tune about a third of the pace faster. It was a fantastic effect with the drawling bagpipes disappearing below the acoustic threshold as the marines pumped out their crisper, edgier version back up on the rotunda.

Mayor Bloomberg was at this service apparently, but we only got there in time for the acknowledgement of a guy who was present, the last surviving veteran of Iwo Jima. I also enjoyed the performance of Taps by an African-American musician in a large red T-shirt. Was he a jazz trumpeter? He played it slow and sad and straight.


Earlier in the morning we had wandered up to Grant's Tomb. An impromptu a capella group just ahead of us in the colonnade gave a spontaneous rendition of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Who were these people? Four white people and an African-American wearing a Glass-Steagall T-shirt.

I was struck by by the grandeur of Grant's resting place. He and his wife, Julia, lie inside, inside two giant sarcophagi. Grant himself had been so humble. He received Lee's surrender in a  private's uniform. What would he have made of this form of commemoration? It's probably a pure reflection of the public acclaim. He didn't ask for it, but it's what's given.

As we stood inside the colonnade listening to the choir, a middle-aged man came to the foot of the steps outside. He didn't move forward. He seemingly hadn't been intending to come into the monument; but came over from the street and stopped where he was, took off his suncap and held it over his heart - through all three verses.

Walking back from 168th Street

When you walk the city, you learn more than one thing about the topography

'...so conceived and so dedicated...'

The living closeness of its history is one of the great things about the United States. It is almost as if the nation has a living constitution peopled by the great characters of its history.

On Monday night we came across the following buildings all within a couple of blocks of each other:

1. the building where George and Ira Gershwin lived, 1925-1931, and:

2. the Morris-Jumel Mansion from where Washington conducted his defence of New York in 1776.

But there is more to it than that.

Over on Staten Island yesterday, I came across a street named after General Schuyler.

and, this block of 1960s(?) flats, named after Schuyler's son-in-law, the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was, of course, another of those great geniuses with whose presence the USA was blessed at the time of its founding.

It is so constituted.

Views of and from 'Manhattan'

Crossing the Pulaski Bridge the other day, I glanced over to Manhattan and thought, "Oh no, I'm back in Melbourne. This is a spring day?"

It's true. All those years in Sydney, I seem to have forgotten about weather like this. But then, I had a more serious thought. Perhaps the reason why cities like New York and (in Australia) Melbourne, are such centres of art is because one of the great impulses behind art is the search for sun and colour, whether stained glass windows, chromaticism, or paens. Such art can still provide an observer a glimpse of something 'we have not experienced quite that way before' (to quote Pauline Kael).What changes is the 20th obsession with art which rips holes in the viewer in order to let in the cold blast of 'cutting edge' innovation.

More experiences along Manhattan Ave:

An old Polish man pointed out to us two helicopters circling above Greenpoint. "Boom, boom," he said, and indicated someone injecting into their arm, from which we construed that he was telling us there had been a shootout in relation to a 'narcotics bust'.

There are people here, including young people, who speak Polish in preference to English. I understand that in America if you want to take up citizenship, you need to renounce, repudiate, abjure all other princes, potentates and other heads of state, but it seems you may keep as much of your benign original culture as you like.

Yesterday, in a 99c store, we met a very speedy guy who had been a marine. "You went to Vietnam?" asked Kate. "Yes ma'am - three tours." We told him we'd been there - it is a beautiful country. "But we f#$%%$ it up," he said. Then he said, "If I may venture my own opinion. We have a saying in the marines 'To the victor belongs the spoils'. But what are we getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan?" I said, "We're supposed to be getting democracy." As I said this he was already nearly out the door. But he turned, pounded his fist over his heart and opened his hand in a point towards me (a gesture Kate later told me means 'sympatico'). "I'll leave you now," he said as he raced off.

Big in so many ways (Brooklyn and Upper and Lower Manhattan)

Not only can you buy Mexican kosher ice-cream in Reseda, or donuts and Chinese food in Oakland (we saw such a place), you can buy empanadas at the laundromat in Brooklyn.

Of course, you used to be able eat at a Swiss-Indian restaurant in Alice Springs. Is it still there?

Today was another of those days when you stumble over the unexpected revelation. After going up to Columbia where Kate met the team she'll be doing research with, we decided to go up to the top of Manhattan. This is the place that room advertisements on 'airbnb' say tourists don't know about. In fact, many tourist maps of Manhattan stop short of here. But this is where I fully got a sense of how big Manhattan really is. Pounding up the streets, I could see how Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries could have had country homes up here, on the same island.

We decided to walk in off Broadway and there found a park which marked the highest natural spot on the island.

Not only that, but the paving told us that this was where the colonists tried to fend off a British attack in October 1776. You look back to your right (south), and imagine the defeated colonists fleeing up the island, having rowed across from the Brooklyn side. Here they will try to hold their ground, but retreat across to the Bronx and back around the top of the British. You get a sense of the brilliant cut-and-run campaign Washington waged.

...And a sense of the 18th century. Up at Inwood Park at the very tip, we enjoyed the original topography and flora remaining on the island.

Didn't see any middens (as we would call them) of the Wiechquaesgeck Indians, but emerging from this onto shabby Broadway was quite a shock.

Back in Williamsburg we took shelter from a sudden storm in a cafe. The proprietor asked us if we were 'out-of-towners'. Kate told her how we'd been over to Columbia, to the Department of Psychiatry. Within five exchanges she asked if Kate was a psychologist., I was astonished - "How?" But Kate said it might have been her use of the word 'engagement'. This cafe owner turned out to have been an academic counsellor at Long Island University. I asked her where she had come from. Turkey. Is there a nationality (or flavour) not represented in New York?

Barely contained (Manhattan, Sunday 15th)

Had another of those experiences of Americans who round out conversations today. We got lost looking for the Lorimar Street L, the train into the city, and finally I asked for help from a minister (preacher), who peered at our map trying to find the Queens Expressway. He eventually realised that what we had was a transport map and it didn't show the Expressway, but nevertheless, there was something wrong with the connection we were trying to make.

He then asked, "Where are you from?" When we told him Sydney, he told us it was one of his favourite places in the world. As an engineer he built three power plants out there in the early 1970s. The Opera House hadn't been built then.

I mentioned that Utzon, the Opera House's architect, had been contacted before he died to provide his design principles, all these decades after the New South Wales had sacked him and replaced him with an architectural committee. The preacher, who was holding our map, and had been an engineer, said that the problem with the Opera House was that the design was for something that engineering hadn't caught up with. "As I was going to say with this," he said, tapping our paper, "You can't get there from here."

We did, though, get into Manhattan, and later to a recital of the complete Duparc songs, with some excellent young singers and accompanists. The venue was the Renee Weiler concert hall in Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, a lovely hall in an old brownstone, backed by picture windows of a green American garden. It was great to hear song this close, where you can feel the physicality of the singing, and find yourself leaning forward on a harmonic suspension (as you're probably supposed to) and really notice the perfection of each number. The program booklet provided English-only versions of the songs and what really struck me was that all languages must have certain words that work better in their language than in another. "Rest, o Phidyle!" said the translation, but 'reposez' was a better word for 'rest' at that moment.

This was the second songwriting experience of the week. Last Tuesday we went to a venue in the East Village where folksingers perform. A Scottish singer, Fraser Anderson, made great use of the room and variety in his guitar, but the song that struck me was one by a Florida duo called The Winterlings. 'Jenny Hodges' was the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man and joined the Army of the Tennessee. She remained a man all her life, getting to vote before other women, and asked to be buried in her 'union blues' (the Army of the Tennessee being a union army). But what was so great about the song? Simple words, repeating phrases (both text-wise and musically; the technical term would be isorhythm) and concrete concepts. Great, simple, disciplined storytelling. I once read that concrete imagery and the definiteness of metre was what made Goethe attractive to all those 19th century German composers. It's something I still think about.

Down at Cortlandt Street, we had one of those great experiences you have when you wander around a city, and stumble over something you didn't know was there. We knew the World Trade Center site was down there.

But what we didn't know was that across the road is the oldest continually operating building in New York City, St. Paul's Chapel.

This was where George Washington attended a prayer service after his inauguration in 1789 and continued to go to Sunday service until the capital moved to Philadelphia. His pew is still there. Across the other side, is the pew Governor George Clinton had built there when he became the first republican governor of New York and wanted to sit separate from the congregation but still be seen.

It's a peaceful place. But photographs in the cemetary show Sep 11, 2001, with computers and filing paper, printouts and other debris bestrewing the grounds. Inside the church is a fireman's coat and boots resting on a pew as if one of the relief workers has just come in for a well-earned break. I didn't find it hard to imagine that day. The church must have been cast in shadow by the buildings not much later than midday most days, so close must they have been. Then suddenly, no more. There is a sad quiet here now, but what must the noise have been like then, as two huge jets smashed into the towers and people who had had nothing more on their mind at 9am than wishing perhaps that they didn't have a dental appointment this afternoon, found themselves ending the day at 9.30 by leaping to their deaths?

If I were a Goethe I could probably say this effectively, more simply. But there are so many things to say here. I'll have to see what happens if I do my best to aim, like most Americans, to rounding stories off.

Moments to sing about (Brooklyn)

We love Brooklyn, that wonderfully varied borough, where one block might be Polish and you wonder what a ksiegarnia literacka is, and the next Hassidic. You talk French to your flatmate.Then you feel sure you will get to practise Spanish somewhere a couple of blocks over. We heard Wolof (a Senegalese language) the other day.

We caught the bus to downtown the other night, past the playing fields where girls were playing softball against the backdrop of a Russian Orthodox Church.

As 'lost' Australians we sat up front, and everyone included us in the lively conversation. An Italian-looking guy got on with a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag and asked the driver a question, and as she answered, tapped her affectionately on the shoulder as he went up to take his seat. I asked Kate if she saw that and she had.

The woman opposite us told us she liked Australians. She had some over to her congregation and they were very polite. I told her I thought Americans were polite and the conversation up front became even more appreciative. An older crankier lady got on and complained when someone stood on her feet.

The woman opposite us told her, "Yo' sitting in the hot seat. I got my foot trodden on there, so I moved." The old lady, crankier, said, "Well yo' feet is ve' impo'tant to you." To which our friend opposite agreed, "Aint nobody standing on them bu' choo."

The Italian-looking guy with the wine in a paper bag came up front to get off and said he would've brought glasses if he'd known there was going to be a party upfront. He affectionately tapped the bus driver on the shoulder again. Then it was our time to get off. I saw that we were meant to leave by the back exit, but the driver said, "Oh, come this way; I want to say goodbye to you." When we got off, our friend opposite said she'd show us where to go, but then when we said we wanted to go to Fulton Mall, she said, "Oh you got off at the wrong Fulton Mall. I'll show you where to go. My daughter lives up there." She came with us to South Oxford Street, pointing out the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other sights, then pointed us in the right direction. We introduced ourselves and Kate kissed her. We're experiencing such immediate rapports with people here.

We spent the evening at American Opera Projects and I was intrigued by some remarks made by Daniel Felsenfeld, the composer of a monodrama: Nora in the Great Outdoors. This work, with a libretto by Will Eno, is based on the moments after Nora has left Torvald's 'doll's house'. The composer said he loved how Ibsen could save revelations until the very last moment - the last line even, but that he, Felsenfeld, was always intrigued by what happened after. I thought there was something really key in this which I'll partially put into my own words; perhaps opera pushes drama past the classic Greek stages of crisis-climax-resolution to another step: reflection. This, said Felsenfeld, is the moment where characters sing.

It was late when we came out of the performance, so we couldn't catch the bus back. But I was amused crossing Java Street back down in Greenpoint, when a car turned behind us, with Chita Rivera singing loudly, "I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe and put that in..."