I’m thrilled to let you know that I’ve just started working part-time for disability consultant, academic and activist Simi Linton, who published a memoir earlier this year called My Body Politic (see pic). Simi programs a disability studies seminar series at Columbia University, runs workshops for theatre professionals on representations of disability, and has fingers in a variety of other pies.

I will be assisting her to establish an online presence, raise her public profile as well as that of her book, coordinate the seminars and workshops, and also research and write grant proposals for future projects. It’s quite serendipitous because Simi was seeking someone with the eclectic interests and background that I have, and I was looking for part-time work that would give me a challenge as well as insight into both the New York theatre and philanthropic scene – and all within 15 minutes’ walk of my apartment.

 

This long weekend represents the unofficial start of summer in addition to officially commemorating America’s war dead. Today (Sunday) more than three hundred thousand people flocked to beaches on Long Island, the nearest commuter-friendly beach bathing zone. Makes Neilson Park seem deserted. I steered clear of the masses, preferring the breezy delights of the Hudson River with my copy of the New Yorker, my iPod, my hat and my sunscreen. I also took along my camera – the captions should be self-explanatory. It was a perfect day.

 

Okay, time to show what it looks like inside this place, rather than focusing on the wonderful view. Before I arrived here I feared my apartment would be a basement hovel and I would see natural light only in between people’s ankles as they passed by, so I’m lucky to live in a spacious and comfortable apartment.

After Hay Street it takes a bit of adjusting but I’m happy here.

I must relate this anecdote from a fun coffee I enjoyed this afternoon with megastar Jen Fleming’s brother Paul, who lives in Philadelphia and was here to meet up with an old school friend from Sydney who’s working in NYC for a week or so. Paul’s friend works at the Millionaire’s Factory. He related the fact that the Bank has had to develop a “no guns in the office” policy just for their US offices. In their Memphis office there is an official place for checking-in your weapon prior to proceeding to your desk. Apparently there are many Memphis employees of the Bank who have to “unpack” when they arrive at work, and “pack” when they leave. Comforting to know there are so many people wandering around with guns in their pockets.

If there was any doubt about the level of government expenditure on defence and security in this country, it has been erased in the last few days. I emerged from sleep on Thursday morning to the roar of planes that could only be airforce – and looked out my window to spot five jet fighters, in perfect diamond formation, sweeping down the Hudson River. Turns out we were not in an additional war, but simply in training for Memorial Day demonstrations on Long Island on Monday. Later that day, as I walked to my new part-time job (separate post coming) a police helicopter hovered low over Riverside Park. I see at least five police helicopters every day, not counting the inevitable news-and-traffic choppers crowding the air. And then, the unmistakeable NYPD cars, trucks, uniforms, quietly stalking – there is no other word for it – the streets, subway stations, parks … and bleating their sirens at the drop of a baton.

My flatmate Sally took me along to a spectacle that formed part of the International Contemporary Furniture Fair being held over three days in SoHo and the Meatpacking District. As we mortals queued to get in (at least Sally was on the invitation list) the photographer Annie Leibowitz strode out of the venue for which we were lining up and quickly disappeared across the street. She looked to be in a hurry. We, on the other hand, had nothing else to do but look at everybody else and feel relief that our time-wasting efforts were not completely in vain.

Inside the cavernous exhibition space there was a variety of design objects on display, from futuristic Toyota cars to fold-up portable homes (every item of furniture and display is fixed to the floor or wall so as to stay in place when being folded up or folded out). And then there were the dear little transparent water bottles designed like flasks of vodka. I made sure to take one of them home - so much cooler on the tennis court or in my classes than a generic Poland Springs (Mount Franklin) style bottle.

Overheard: A man shouted at a woman who was trying to talk to him: ‘I’ve gotta go, I’m missing a photo op.’

Wearing another of my many hats, I am halfway through an Introduction to Philanthropy and Grantmaking at New York University’s Center for Philanthropy. They have an enormous continuing education program here and as usual plenty of financial backing, which explains the Midtown location and the luxurious classrooms. I think this ‘campus’ is purely for the continuing education crowd and looks more like a modern office than anything else.

My subject is taught by Dr Richard Marker, a former nonprofit CEO, former head of the Bronfman Foundation, and currently a philanthropic adviser to a host of individuals and organisations in the philanthropic sector. He keeps asking me for input from an Australian perspective and all my responses begin with: ‘Well, the scale is very different, but …’. In truth the challenges and frustrations seem to be the same here as in Australia, particularly the impact on the philanthropic sector of public policy decisions and the cumulative effects of socially conservative governments.

In the two classes so far I’ve learnt about the history of philanthropy in the US, the types of grantmaking institutions, interesting bits and pieces about tax and legislation and so forth. So far the information has been quite general but the course has satisfied my need to grab a toehold on this enormous sector (apparently 15-20% of GDP here and an enormous employer) and to meet people currently working in it.

One telling difference in culture and vocabulary: here ‘public’ signifies collective volunteer effort, rather than ownership by government or quasi-government entities. So the New York Public Library, for example, is not owned by the State but rather is supported financially by a collective of interested groups and individuals.

New York, as with many states of the USA, imposes a sales tax. I’m not sure of the details but it’s about 8.75% and similarly to our GST seems not to apply to fresh food. There are two things that are irritating about how it’s applied – first, it’s not included in the price so I’m forever out in my calculations; second, there’s no such things as ’rounding up’ or ’rounding down’ to the nearest number. The first is really my own mathematical problem. The second, however, should be a matter of practicality: get rid of those dang pennies! “That’ll be one seventy-nine,” the cashier says as I try to purchase a quart (what the feck is a quart?) of milk. At that moment so many questions run through my head: is there much of a line behind me? Do I have enough time to count out nine pennies? How many pennies will I end up with from handing over my dollar bill? I still can’t tell my five cent pieces from the tens (the nickel is larger than the dime), so I hold up the line trying to figure out how to make nine cents from the mess of coins in my purse.

And I heard on National Public Radio last week that it now costs more than one cent to make a penny. You do the math.

Last night I shouted myself to the theater for $15. Well, I’m a cheap date. And I didn’t have to walk far – five minutes, in fact, to the Arclight Theater on 71st between Broadway and Columbus. I hadn’t ventured down that block before so I never knew the theater was even there.

The production was the David Ives Six-Pack, which consisted of six one-act plays presented in one act. Each play lasted about 15 minutes and each was completely different from the others. David Ives is on my reading list for Playschool (see previous post) so it was a great opportunity to see how his words leap into action on stage.

In ‘The Sure Thing’, two strangers in a cafe attempt to have a conversation. Each time one of them ‘says the wrong thing’, a bell offstage rings and the conversation resumes just prior to where one of them had said the offending line. If only real life worked like that. In ‘The Philadelphia’, two friends are having respectively the best and worst days of their life. It turns out that the chap for whom nothing is going right is ‘in a Philadelphia’, while the lucky chap ‘woke up in a Los Angeles’. LA coaches Philly on how to cope with his plight by asking for the opposite of what he wants, which proves highly successful. So successful, in fact, that he transfers his ‘Philadelphia’ to the former ‘Los Angeles’, sending the formerly happy chap into a tailspin. Such a simple idea but hugely effective on stage. And for pure absurdity, my favourite was ‘Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread’, in which four characters use several lines of dialogue in the same way Philip Glass does with his compositions, splitting words into syllables, repeating words, layering voices with repeated motifs and overlapping phrases. Using this method, a simple and clear story emerges. Wonderful.

Maybe I need to throw logic to the wind and trust more in the bizarre connections that often occur to me but which I so far have failed to translate into words.

 

He might have just departed, but John Hicks is dear and near to New York musicians’ hearts this week. Last night at the Village Vanguard the Renee Rosnes quartet opened their first set with a beautiful interpretation of one of Hicks’s loveliest compositions, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise. Then later at Sweet Rythm (a very sad ghost of its former existence as Sweet Basil’s), Cho the iconic bartender had placed a brandy glass of Remy, Hicks’s favourite, on the counter in memory of him.

Yes. Well. Last night my playwriting class (or as my friend, client, and soon-to-be-published novelist David Kowalski dubbed it, Playschool) critiqued my ham-fisted efforts with writing my play, currently called Present Tense. The classes are workshop-based weekly meetings in which we discuss progress or lack thereof, analyse a play on our reading list, then provide constructive criticism to three budding playwrights who each submitted up to 20 pages to their classmates the previous week.

Apparently I can make people laugh, which I was delighted to hear from more than one respondent. Curiously for me, the central character (a book editor, can you believe it?) was deemed a bit cold and distant and her ‘problem’ needs to be clarified. The instructor felt the audience had nowhere to go with the character, as most plays follow the arc of one character’s journey from X to Y. Happily all the feedback was specific and positive, so I’m encouraged rather than feeling put out. What was very interesting to me was that the characters I’d made up – both male – were considered compelling and complex, while the character based on me in my mid-20s was the least accessible to the readers.

It’s good to have the shoe on the other foot for a change. I have to hand in another 20 pages in a couple of weeks, so I’ll let you know what they think of Catherine Duffy then.

 

New Yorkers don’t have backyards. They have two parks – Central Park and Riverside Park. Central is, well, in the centre of Manhattan, while Riverside Park, as its name suggests, runs along the western side of the island and looks across to New Jersey. While much smaller and narrower than Central Park, Riverside has two advantages for me: its proximity to my apartment, and the fact it is by the water.

I realised on my late-afternoon stroll today that these parks are communal backyards and as such, people often behave as if they were in their own backyard. Today I saw an elderly couple arguing over where their dog should ‘take a pee-pee’; a young man teaching two helmet-clad little boys how to use their skateboards, while their respective mothers watched from afar; volunteer gardeners tending plants in the public gardens of the park, confident in the knowledge they can down tools and find them there again in the morning; a woman discussing business on her ‘cell’ phone while assuming a most uncomfortable-looking position, using a chain-link fence to support her stretching leg; one couple falling in love while giggling knowingly at a group of Little League baseball players swinging and missing; and a few blocks north, another couple breaking up. There’s an exhibition of public art scattered through the park, and frankly features more hits then misses in my opinion; there’s a wonderful cafe open from midday where you can get a beer and a burger; there are clay tennis courts where you wait your turn to play; there are multiple dog runs for the most important residents of this area: the pampered pooches of the Upper West Side (my neighbourhood is gently mocked for its number of dogs and strollers).

Usually I go for a long walk along the river and through the park in the morning, listening to a Philip Adams or Radio National podcast in order to know what’s going on in the world. (Adams fans: I’m now officially a proud ’Poddie’.) This time however I was in the park for a different reason: to check out the tennis hitting wall I had serendipitously discovered last week. As some of you know I used to play quite a bit then didn’t for a long time. I’m getting back into my game through some group lessons and a new pal called Lara whom I met in my tennis class. I headed down to the hitting wall, just two minutes on foot from home, with a tennis ball and a spring in my step. I couldn’t believe my luck when I arrived: no one else was there! The last time I used a hitting wall I think I was about 16 years old. Let’s not count how many years that makes. However in New York you see toddlers with cell phones and old folks running marathons, so I didn’t feel in the least bit silly. Until I hit the ball over the wall, that is. Thinking retrieval was a simple matter of going behind said wall, I confidently strode around the wall and encountered the other side of American life – a man who had evidently made this spot his home. Rubbish, dirt, cold air and loneliness are what struck me when I saw him. I felt I had invaded his privacy, but somehow I also felt responsible for him being there. Needless to say the tennis ball had travelled much further than I’d anticipated – obviously a strong hitting arm, then – and my practice session was over. How long has he lived there? Does he live there in winter as well as summer? I feel the need to find out.

A fabulous way to keep up with the world of noteworthy new books, provocative articles and other items of note from the (Anglo-European) world of ideas – often a fair distance from the world of our daily lives – is to keep an eye on Arts & Letters Daily.

Tip for the unwary – this site is potentially completely overwhelming to the first-time visitor. Do not be afraid.
PS I can’t yet cope with the notion of American spelling in my headlines.

My old friend John Moore took this shot of me in Central Park on a postcard-quality afternoon a couple of weeks ago. What he didn’t tell me was that he was posting it to the section of the http://www.centralpark.com/ website in which photographers can upload images and then – oh joy – the great unwashed can vote on each of them. Apparently I was rated a 3.2 which made this the most popular photo of the week. I’m still unsure as to the criteria on which the ratings are made.

Introducing Ku-Ching, the mistress of the house. (Ku-Ching is an Indonesian word for cat.) AKA She Who Must Be Obeyed. Loves eating, sleeping, gazing out the window, licking cardboard (yes, really), chasing a toy mouse, hiding inside large paper bags, settling on a reader’s lap, and generally keeping a watchful eye on domestic proceedings. Has made Apple Girl’s settling-in to her new digs a lot of fun.

Most of you know I’m not afraid of selecting an Australian wine from a restaurant wine list. Over here I’m completely at sea in the wine stores, drowning in the masses of local and imported wines on offer. I’ve decided to turn my ignorance into a learning opportunity and simply force myself to sample many different wines from France, Italy, California, and even New York (there are vineyards flourishing along the north fork of the island). It’s going to be an uphill battle but this is one marathon I’m prepared to undertake. One unexpected bonus has been the New Zealand wines, which due to the exchange rate are absolute bargains. So if inspiration fails I can usually reach for a lovely crisp Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc for just $11.

I had to let you know that the rescued Tasmanian miners made the major evening news bulletins here last week, and even topped BBC World’s edition. However, the same cannot be said of our illustrious PM, whose latest pilgrimage to Washington failed to register on the US media radar.

Saw a hilarious one-woman show last night called Los Big Names, written and performed by Marga Gomez. Her show is a carefully and cleverly structured tale of growing up with Puerto Rican parents too busy with their own small-scale celebrity (as a husband and wife cabaret team) to notice her existence. In one hilarious episode she recounts the effort involved in trying to get her mother to take her to Central Park for a picnic. “A picnic? What is that?” she asked. When Marga explained the concept, she said, “What – you want to sit in the dirt, like poor people?” After the mother chose her outfit, a pair of her lowest heels and finished her hair and makeup, it was late afternoon by the time they got there. We were also treated to a howlingly funny impression of the death of Queen Latifah’s character (a scientist, of course!) in the Hollywood bomb ‘Sphere’, in which Marga also played a scientist, spoke four lines (one of which was subsequently cut) and who also died in the film’s first 30 minutes. Such an energetic, mesmerising performance – so inspiring.

Today I learned of John Hicks’s death, two days ago, of a burst ulcer following a long period of ill health. I had only seen him play two weeks ago at the very swanky Dizzy’s Jazz Club in the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle. It’s a little spooky to know that I heard what was probably one of his last public performances. He was looking old and frail, but at the piano he still sounded very much himself.

I have been very kindly taken under the collective wing of Philip and Kate, whom I met at one of Lily Brett and David Rankin’s soirees recently. Having met me once they invited me to a dinner party at their Grand Street apartment, which is on the Lower East Side (one of the few areas without decent public transport in the city). Being new and all, I totally miscalculated how long it would take me to get there and arrived an embarrassing 45 minutes late. Nobody seemed to mind much though. I think that was because they had been drinking Mojitos for at least that long. I felt immediately at home because I was among a group of fantastic single women, all of whom were doing something interesting and creative – one’s a writer who lives in Woodstock (people do live there); another is Director of PR for the New Press; a third is a web guru whose business card describes her as a ‘Knowledge Sorceress’. There were the two hosts, and one poor fellow who seemed a bit intimidated by all the oestrogen in the room. He kept saying ‘Jesus Christ’, mostly as a verbal exclamation point to things us gals came out with, and particularly when two of us were revealed as closet football (aka soccer) fans. Turns out this bloke, who sounds as Brooklyn as they come, was born and raised in Manchester, thus a huge Man U. fan.

Look out for Kate’s novel, which is being published by Penguin Australia later this year. Her surname is Veitch and yes, her brother is Michael Veitch of ‘Fast Forward’ etc.

Two John Malkovich sightings in the past few days. Calm down, Malkovich fans, they were not literal sightings. However I must tip you off to two films which really show the master at his best – and his worst. The best is ‘Colour Me Kubrick’, a wonderful, slightly incredible film (although based on a true story) in which Malkovich portrays a man who actually pretended to be film director Stanley Kubrick for years, manipulating people, abusing their trust, even sending one poor fellow (played by Richard E Grant) bankrupt. I caught it at the Tribeca Film Festival and hope that it will get limited release in Australia. At the other end of the Malkovich spectrum is available for your viewing disbelief at http://www.pirellifilm.com. The only reason I can imagine Malkovich agreed to star in this inadvertently hilarious advertising vehicle is that Steppenwolf Theater Company needed some ‘development funds’. The $10 million film is set in the Vatican, and he plays a priest summoned in the middle of the night to exorcise a demon played by Naomi Campbell (proving that an assertive black woman cavorting naked is our culture’s expression of extreme wickedness), who herself anthropomorphises (as?) a sports car. And the product this film is advertising? Pirelli tyres, silly.

Bethesda Fountain

When I went to collect my dry-cleaning for the first time, I had to a lot to pick up. Most of the clothes I’d brought with me from Sydney had been crushed beyond recognition. I nearly failed to recognise them myself, when they were presented to me. That’s primarily because each item was smothered by a huge triangular piece of paper on which was emblazoned the words: We Love Our Customers! The paper triangle, as I’ve since discovered, comes in a variety of sizes to suit the item you’ve paid to have dry-cleaned and comprehensively packaged. It also serves no discernible purpose whatsoever.

At the grocery store, which is manic no matter which time of day or night I attempt to shop there, the concept of conserving plastic or reducing the number of shoppings bags used per customer is yet to catch on here. On the contrary, at the checkout muster – and muster is the only word for it – there are people whose dedicated role it is to place a large brown paper bag inside of each plastic shopping bag, prior to packing it while the checkout operator rings up my bill. The other day I really screwed with their minds when I brought along my ‘Norton St Grocer’ canvas shopping tote and asked to pack it myself. It made no sense to them at all.

As proprietor of Bridge Literary Services Pty Ltd, I couldn’t believe my luck in finding a light-filled and spacious room for rent in a perfect Upper West Side location from which I had a great view of the George Washington Bridge. The photo shows the view from my room, looking directly over Riverside Park and up the busy Hudson River.