Mayhem and Murder

If you're not familiar with the Star Wars Lego games, you should remedy that as soon as possible - they're brilliant. You're in control of one or more characters from the films, passing through familiar Star Wars situations, charmingly Lego-ised. When you are travelling with, say, Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca, you have control of only one of them at a time, while the others follow you as best they can. As you jump from platform to platform, stumble, fall, turn around, they dutifully do the same, bumping and jostling, leaping and falling trying to keep up.

So it has been in New York for the past few days; Eva and Donna, both New Yorkers (present and past), knowing where they're going and how to get there, followed by Diego and I, bumping into pedestrians and building corners and scaffolding and fire hydrants and each other, doing our best to keep up, letting out Chewie-type howls of frustration.


We went to the MOMA, where we enjoyed the abstract pieces and scoffed at the pretentious installations (an empty room where the lights turn on and off every five seconds!), but our best sighting was Coco from the TV show Fame. No wonder I recognised her, more recently she was a recurring character in one of my favourite shows, Veronica Mars.

We squeezed into a beyond-crowded cinema to watch Casino Royale. It was excellent, although it left two in our party (the least film/Bond-attentive) confused as to the chronology of the depicted story, despite the opening prologue's assertion that this Bond was 'not yet a double-oh' and had 'no kills on his record'. In fact this only confused them more as this seemed patently false - Bond had been killing people on screen for forty years, how could he suddenly have a clean record? I had to concede that if you had not read anything about the film, it was not obvious that this film was a return to the beginning, Bond Redux/Remake/Redo, despite Daniel Craig's new, messy, scuffed and buffed-up Bond.

Tapping Diego's network of friends in high places, we had dinner at Boqueria, a popular new restaurant belonging to his friend Yann de Rochefort (that's his real name). We met him a couple of years ago when we had a blow out evening at his first restaurant, the Lower East Side's Suba. Despite having opened only a few months ago, Boqueria was packed and loud. The food was good if not great. "This is a quiet night," stated Yann, in his suave, carefully unshaven manner. Our table was large and I drifted between conversations. As the night drew on and the restaurant emptied, I watched the waitresses finish their shifts, tidying themselves in the large mirror, in new clothes and personas, before leaving quickly. Yann discussed business with the chef, and I started to feel sick. I hadn't eaten enough to warrant feeling this sick, but for some reason the food was sitting in my throat, not going up or down. It looked like the night was winding down, then Yann had an idea. "Come back to my place for a drink," he said to the table. "And then we will make love." He didn't really say that last bit, I made that up. I stated that I needed to return home and Donna offered to return with me, rubbing my back, but that threatened to push the food the wrong way. I didn't want to spoil her night, so I insisted that she go on without me. The last I saw before falling into a cab was Donna disappearing down the sidewalk in her beautiful orange coat with Yann, Diego and their friend Patricia, to zoom off through Manhattan in Yann's Audi TT.

Back at the apartment I paced around, unable to sleep or rest, hoping something in my body would figure itself out. Something moved inside, and I eyed the route to the bathroom.
A burp. Emerged.
It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes, a weight from my shoulders, a lump from my stomach, all at once.

Later Donna would tell me of Yann's bachelor pad, front door unlocked and primed for late-night visitors. Music emerged from the walls with the wave of his hands. He tried to impress the crowd with his projector, which Donna shot down with the simple observation that you couldn't use it to watch TV during the daytime. "Then you only watch it at night," he said, unamused. Go Donna.

Donna, Diego and I squeezed in a couple of runs in New York. One four mile loop around the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, another six miles around the circumference of Central Park, joining every other person with a pulse.

Our last morning in New York we headed south out of Eva's apartment in glorious warm weather, past City Hall, sirens, police and press. I stopped a camera operator, "what's the story?". In an impeccable local accent, he said, laughing, "oh, the usual. Mayhem and murder. Murder and mayhem."

We turned left towards the water, but not before Donna pointed out that we were next to the World Trade Center. I hadn't realised we'd come so far south, and looking over at the big hole, my stomach flipped.

Soon we arrived at the South Street Seaport, and Bodies: The Exhibition, our last destination. This is an astonishing feat and worth seeing if you have the opportunity. To see real bodies preserved, posed, revealed, is a revelation, even if my stomach continued to flip as I stared closely at the gristly reality beneath our skins.

My physical body was brought into clear focus on the flight back to San Francisco, when I was sandwiched into a seat so narrow and tight that if I were a prisoner being transported, an ACLU laywer would have that airlined (mentioning no names [cough]Continental[cough]) sued for inhumane conditions.

Home again, and cold. Since when was New York the place you went to be warm over the Holidays?

New York | MOMA | Thanksgiving | Casino Royale | Star Wars Lego | Bodies: The Exhibition