On Saturday evening

we are invited to a home in Harlem. We have very good fish for dinner and a discussion about immigrants’ lives in the US afterwards. We agree that Americans are very different from Europeans. It seems hard to connect to them and even harder to make friends among the natives. Usually you flock together with other immigrants as you share a similar fate.
As the Orthodox people celebrate Easter on this weekend (1 week after the Catholics) we attend a mass outside a Romanian church at midnight. That’s a strange and interesting experience. While it is raining cats and dogs we stand in the street among a Romanian community. We get an umbrella from somebody and buy a candle which gets lit on the spot. The people bring the Easter light home. That means that you have to transport a lit candle which I want to do instantly. Our friends advises us that we won’t be able to do that on the subway.
We get down to the subway stop with 2 lit candles. As I have run out of subway tickets I instantly have the great idea of sneaking through the turnstile with my friend who invited us for dinner. My girlfriend does the same with his girlfriend.
Once through the turnstile we get a look from a policeman who happens to stand on the platform. He calls us immediately and wants to fine us. „You know that u can be imprisoned for this?“ I did not know. He just deals with us boys and forgets about the girls who stand in the background with the lit candles.
We have to show an ID and he gets our names. My friend has no ID on him and shows a business card to the policeman with his name Adelheid. The policeman writes the names down. We can come up with a hotel in a street of the same name but cannot produce the detailed address nor the telephone number upon several requests. Finally the policeman lets us go and advises me to call MTA upon departure from the US. After that we split. Me and my girlfriend bring the Easter light home.

Happy Days

Astoria, Queens

Friends take us out to dinner in Astoria, which is an area in Queens. We get picked up by car and are driven to a Greek restaurant which is said to have good fish. On our arrival we are a bit disappointed about how basic the place looks like. While we are waiting for a table I have the opportunity to see big grilled fish on the guests’ plates. Yummi!
Our friends who have celebrated their marriage here order grilled calamari and sardines as appetizers and Peter’s fish (as I recall) as main course. I have the best food which I had in NYC so far.
After dinner we are taken to a riverside park in Queens. While we have a smoke we get a glimpse of the Manhattan Skyline in the dark. It looks great how the lights in the buildings make up an irregular pattern. I imagine that this pattern changes every day, as peoples’ lives variate (at least a little) from day to day.
We stand next to the beautiful Triboro Bridge which connects Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx.

Spring

has sprung, as one advertisement lets us know. On Easter Saturday the temperatures reach at least 20° Celcius. The trees are blossoming and everybody is out in the streets. New York is very colourful in many ways, even more so right now. There is a great variety of people and cultures, even the population of dogs is much more diverse than in Vienna. Very often I see people walking 3 dogs and they are all different. That’s fun to watch.

Primorski

is a Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach which offers live music, too. We have dinner in the hall and then swing on the dance floor. On stage is a 50 year old live entertainer who sings old songs in Russian, English and Italian. He is accompanied by a blond bombshell and a Chinese looking woman who also sing songs. The Chinese woman has a very dark voice.

Most of the songs are melancholic love songs. On entering the place we immediately feel like in Eastern Europe. There is a heavy 70ies touch to the place. My girlfriend feels like home in Romania.

Fe-Males?

There are a lot of stages of womanhood of gay men in the West Village. There are the young, skinny and good looking boys, the fortyish bodybuilder-types who put the emphasis on a manly appearance. There are the elderly couples and there are a lot of she-males. Many of them dress like women, quite a few probably have had a sex change.

Yesterday two black Wo-Men passed. They were both quite big and they had very big breasts. From their faces and voices though I can tell that they are men or very probably transsexuals. They are the most stunning transsexuals/transvestites I have met so far.

Celebrity Spin

So far I met: Michael Stipe (seems more sympathetic in reality than on pictures or with REM), Hugh Grant (seems to be the same jerk as in films) and Elijah Wood. We see him in a street between SoHo and Little Italy. He wears jeans and a jeans jacket. He has cool shoes. He is rather small (as can be noticed in Lord of the Rings) and has those incredibly blue eyes. He seems sympathetic to me.
Yesterday Helena Christensen comes around the corner of my house. She then enters a neighbouring house in the West Village where she probably lives.

Roosevelt Island

lies in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It can be reached by subway or by aerial tram. The buildings on the island consist mainly of 70ies social housing complexes in a brutalist style. Nowadays luxury condominiums are being built too, like on many places in the city.




The island is a calm place with little traffic. It makes me feel as if I was on some strange kind of holidays (from Manhattan). You see people spending their day in an idle way, a lot of kids doing sports and also quite a few handicapped people in wheelchairs. One disabled man is on a wheelbed, he moves arond lying on his belly.

The place has a strange athmosphere which probably made it suitable for a film shooting. Roosevelt Island served as location for Walter Salles’ mystery film „Dark Water“, which is a remake of the Japanese original of Hideo Takata, who also made „The Ring“.

Exodus?

Movement of Jah People? I have not spotted any cockroaches for 3 days. I wonder what happenend to them or where they went. Last week I met 2 of them on the stairway. They were moving idly around as if they were on holidays. When my left foot came down on them they began to run faster. But that was already too late. Doomed to die on the stairs, so to say...

Coney Island Atrocities

Coney Island is a rather bizarre place. It is strangely unplanned and seems undecided. Seen from a city-planning perspective it looks destroyed, as if it was bombed 40 years ago, then scattered with tower blocks and then left behind.

The beach strip is long. Adjacent to it is a big pedestrian walk made of wooden planks, which is nice. Behind the walk are a number of tower blocks. The amusement park is small and run down. You can feel atracted to its sadness, though.

Zentralpark

Tourist 1

New Films/New Directors

The MOMA runs a series of films by young and upcoming film directors (feature films and documentaries). I go to see „First On The Moon“ a mockumentary by Russian filmmaker A. Fedorchenko about the Soviets first try to fly to the moon in 1938. It’s a beautiful and very witty film shot in black and white, giving the almost perfect impression of vintage film footage. Some archival footage is cut between.
Among the highlights of the film is a piglet which gets shot into the sky in a little test rocket . The piggy gets back to earth in a little capsule with a parachute. As it is released from the capsule it runs around on the ground squeaking. As it gets fed with milk from a baby’s bottle it is all well again.
In a laboratory scientists try to put a funny looking astronaut’s helmet on a test dog’s head and they get bitten by the little bastard.

Walk

10 days ago I started walking again. That’s a small step for mankind but a huge one for doggy, who used to limp for 2,5 weeks. I feel like Kevin Spacey in the final sequence of „The Usual Suspects“, only that i have not killed anybody and don’t star in a movie, but in my own life.

Full Knee Suspension