alvin ailey american dance theatre...

...was fabulous! Saw three pieces, The River, Flowers and Revelations, and they were incredibly diverse performances showcasing Ailey's choreographic talent and the versatility of the company.

I thought my usual musings when I watch professional dancers, "Why didn't I become a dancer? I love to dance. Oh my, their bodies are incredible. Surely that hurts. How do they balance for so long like that? Are they doing that barefoot?" and so on. So much admiration for what they make their bodies do.

You shell out for good seats and this was one of those times when it was worth every penny. Utterly thrilling. Goosebumps material. Standing ovation at the end.

email sign offs

A colleague mentioned this was one blog he visited regularly. I loved this post about email closing lines and what it all means.

She ends "But once in a while, it would be delightful if people applied the same sincerity to the last impressions that we do to first ones. "

I wonder where she would put my oft-used 'Toodles' ?

Winter weekend

This weekend was a powerhouse of activity. We roused ourselves from the tempting rut of eat/sleep/work/couch-based distractions, and got out into the city.

Saturday we went to the National Museum of the American Indian, which had an exhibition on the tribes from the Pacific North West. This was disappointing because we were expecting there to be a permanent exhibition that would give details about the people who lived in Manahatta, as it was called before the Dutch and English moved in. No permanent exhibits however, but an interesting way to kill an hour.


Then we hopped on the free ferry to Staten Island, which skirts the Statue of Liberty and is a pleasant 30 minute cruise. At Staten Island we were hoping to find a pub or some cosy-looking place for a cheap & cheerful lunch before getting back on the ferry, but there was nothing. I was shocked, because thousands of tourists make this ferry trip every week, and when you get off at the other end there is absolutely no lure to explore the place further. Someone needs to open a fish & chip joint, or a gourmet pizza place, a pub, anything, and the hordes would descend for the chance to dine while looking back at the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan and Lady Liberty. So we did one lap of the crummy foreshore, dominated by a carpark, and returned to Manhattan. Two more boroughs to go then I've atleast been to all of New York City. Staten Island, tick.


Saturday night we stayed in and witnessed another parade stream past our window. This was a Hannukah parade, with cars with lit menorah on their rooves and camper vans blaring music, to celebrate the Festival of Lights. It was loud and short and seemed to be mostly teenagers waving and shouting out the wvan windows as their parents drove along. ("Menorah Mobiles" I've since heard them called.)

All the decorations across town have Xmas trees paired with menorah, and like Halloween, no place is undecorated. Even groovy Webster Hall, a nightclub and band venue where we saw Jose Gonzalez play last night, was decorated with wreaths, holly and stars. (Jose was awesome, BTW. He did a cover of Massive Attack's Teardrops, and Kylie's Put Your Hand on Your Heart, among all his hits. There seemed to be lots of Australians at the gig. Must have been that TV ad. Beautiful stage lighting with just him on a stool.)

Anyway, yesterday we went ice skating in Central Park. I hadn't skated for atleast 15 years and I was feeling quite hesitant about it all. But Jus pressured me onto the ice, and within a few clumsy rounds I felt quite confident that I wasn't going to slice off a finger or crack my coccyx, and all those weekends with dad & Jamie at Mirrabooka ice rink paid off. Its a divine thing to do on a cold day and it was so refreshing to be doing some sport out of doors. I think this could become a regular thing.
















The lakes in Central Park have started to freeze over and ice rescue ladders have been put up near each of them.


Apparently this is the time of year when the most tourists come to New York, which I find mind boggling, because in summer it was out of control. We walked the entire length of the park on Sunday (about 50 blocks) and it was full of tourists, and I didn't feel like a dweeb out on the ice because there were plenty of adult tourists giving it a try too.

The dip situation

Weird, but the US, or NYC atleast, is not having the love affair with dips that Australia is. Walk into Coles at home and there is a whole dip section, with every colour of the rainbow represented in a reliable Black Swan or Chris's Dips or Yumi's selection (I can't believe I can recall all those brands).

Here, there is hummus, and there might be 8 different varieties of hummus, but that's about it. And its expensive. $6 for 250g. And its tucked in a random fridge, usually next to the pasta sauces. Confusion.

This lack of dips is really putting a dint in our evening drinks & nibbles.

The hair

So several weeks ago I trooped off to a hair salon, Devachan, that a woman at work had recommended to me because they specialise in curly hair. Music to my ears.

I prepped by taking in pics of Halle Berry and Rihanna (!!!!), with various hair styles in mind. I thought perhaps I would entertain a straight look, just for the hell of it, because I was incredibly bored with having the same hair style since...forever.

I left the salon with the best hair cut I've ever had. In fact it was the happiest hairdressing experience I have ever had. I was thrilled with how my hair looked. And how does it look? Well pretty much the same as it ever did. But for the right reasons.

So my 'consultant', Richard, quickly dispelled any notion of straightening. I have fine hair,thin hair and basically if it wasn't curly I'd be one of those people constantly trying to create volume and body. My fine hair would come out of the straightening process in bad shape, and probably change colour, get split ends, break or fall out, Richard informed me. I pointed to a gorgeous woman on the other side of the salon with tumbling loose curls down her back, "Can I have hair like that?" Richard pursed his lips, "She has a lot more hair than you honey." "What about that?" "Honey you should just buy a wig and do that on weekends."

Ok, so no straight hair, and maybe, if I treat my hair properly for about a year, then maybe I can relax the curl somewhat and have a looser, longer style, a la Ms Berry. No promises from Richard. By this stage of the appointment I didn't care because I was just enjoying being in a hair salon full of women with curls and waves: Jewish princesses, blondes with kinky manes, afros, Meg Ryan waves, ringlets, spiral curls and everything in between. And all the women were walking around in their robes looking blissed out.

For the first time the hairdresser didn't attempt to comb out or brush my hair. They use their fingers, when your hair is wet and loaded with conditioner, to gently detangle. Hooray! That's how I do it at home, (except with a comb). They suggested I never use a comb again: far less hair comes out or breaks if you avoid the comb. They also skipped the shampoo and suggested I never use shampoo again because its ridiculously stripping and drying, and the conditioner does all the cleaning that your scalp needs. My head was spinning. They smothered my saturated hair in gel - heavy, clear, non-sticky gel specially made for curly styles- and plonked me under the diffusion dryer.

While sitting there I read a book that the salon owner had published, called Curly Girl - The Handbook. The book laments the pressure some women feel to blow dry their waves and curls out of existence, feeling that their curls are unprofessional and unsophisticated and living in a constant state of frizz fear. It goes on to explain how to properly cut and care for curly and wavy hair so that they look their best, and not out of control. Finally, someone who understands! Empowerment of curly/wavy-headed people everywhere! I was elated.

So, I haven't shampooed my hair for weeks, and no I am not plagued with dandruff or stinky. I have tossed out all my shine serums and fibre gums and parked my comb in the back of the cupboard. Now I just detangle with my fingers, add the gel while its still dripping wet and heavy, and the hair is loving it!

I can't recommend the salon enough, or the book. The salon was packed, and I imagine opening a curly hair specialist salon in Melbourne would be solid business proposition. Maybe when I get back...

then Noushy got in on the action

Are you getting the picture, my peeps? Skype is awesome. 12 month olds can use it, its so easy.

And doesn't Anoushka look superb in the beads?

You too can have your face plastered here.

Thanks Cbeecio! You made my day :)

Yay, CC gots the Skype

Get Skype and enjoy chatting with yours truly and the better half, a la CC. Hours of family fun. The hilarity will ensue.
The decision is ultimately with you.

Japanese, snow, prank

but those Japanese game shows really know how to mess with people. Funnnnyyy.

Random imagery

Crocs have been made into boots, so the ugly shoes can continue to be worn in winter!
In Hoboken.
George = double dipping.
The Treats Truck. yummy things, different every day, roaming the city. yay!

It's snowing!

Slept late this Sunday morning and tentatively reached for the iPhone to check the time and weather when I woke up. 10am. -5c.

Crikey! I remembered that it was forecast to snow and so got just enough of my body out of bed to open the venetian blinds to reveal... a sky full of swirling white snow.

Jus was awake and up so fast that the neighbours got an eye full of something spectacular.

Porridge with cinnamon and maple syrup for brekky this morning, then wrapping up in coat, scarf, gloves and hat to do our Christmas shopping.

Celebrity sighting #23

Cameron Diaz, in The Bowery Hotel lobby having a drinkie poo & bite to eat with someone. Jus and I were in there having Friday knock off drinks and spied her as we were leaving. She looked all big eyes and smiles - lovely.

The latest instalment

Click the comic to see a bigger version.

Say cheese

DSC_0028.jpg
Originally uploaded by ongaarf

A guy at work took this photo at our day at the races yesterday. The whole Ford client team went to Aquedeuct, a horse racing track in Queens, as a bit of end of year fun and appreciation.

I thought it was a flattering shot. Gotta love black & white.

And yes, horse track in Queens was exactly like it sounds.

Going to the gym, Greenwich Village style

I have to stifle a giggle or a roll of the eyes when I'm at the Y because every second person is reading while they are working out.

I'm not talking about people flipping through trashy mags while they're on the stepper. I'm talking about people on leg press machines, people doing squats, people on cross-trainers making their way through the Sunday New York Times, or The Economist, or Time.

People will do their set of chest presses, their paper at their feet, then stop to read. Or they'll have the machine on some setting that's evidently too low and their adductors are on auto-pilot as they sit back and leisurely read.

I feel like yelling "Come on, people. Let's crack a sweat and get the heart pumping. You're here to work out, not read!"

What nerds.

Celebrity sighting # 22

Billy Connolly strolled on past me into our local bodega (milk bar) this morning, as I was on my way to work. Looked like he had not a care in the world. His beard is very white these days but he looked quite dashing.

Curacao

I do love the tropics. I love the way its so humid that your skin changes. It goes softly plump, like ripe fruit. I love that you know you will never need a jumper. I love that you can step out of a warm shower, or into the sea, and there's no temperature change.

Four days in Curacao was enough to unwind, feel a million miles from the noise and intensity of a city, and fall back in love with scuba diving. The country is tiny - you can drive from one end to the other in just over an hour - and the guest house we stayed at included a car rental, so we explored the whole place. Curacao is a mishmash of Dutch people, Venezuelans, Indonesians, Chinese, Indians, African West Indians, people from other Caribbean islands and the locals, who are a mishmash of the above. I don't think I've ever been anywhere that had signage in so many different languages, or where people were nearly every colour in the rainbow.

Curacao felt incredibly old in parts - crumbling buildings from the 1600s form the old town - and is evidently going through a lucrative period because there was construction everywhere. Not just big resorts, although they were increasingly creeping along the coastline, but also housing and office buildings. They have massive oil refineries quite near the capital, Willemstad, and tourism is growing.

Each day we did pretty much the same thing:

1. crawl out from under the mozzie net and chug down a bowl of cereal
2. leap in the car and nearly melt until the aircon kicked in
3. drive to a beach
4. do a shore dive
5. laze in the sun
6. eat goat stew and rice/ fried fish and rice / chips & mayo / drink fruit punch with unidentifiable fruit flavours
7. drive back home and crack a Polar Beer and play Scrabble
8. find somewhere for dinner and marvel at the lack of herbs used in Dutch cuisine
9. fall asleep by 10pm

Highlights:

• seeing a flock of beautiful bright pink flamingos
• hearing a Jamaican tell the girls behind a bar that they were too slow. Hilarious given Jamaicans aren't known for their sense of urgency.
• coming up with our own hand signals for effective communication underwater
• renting dive gear & tanks on the beach for about US$30 and just swimming out to the coral reef. saw scary moray eels and a spotted eagle ray!
• getting horribly sunburned and smearing aloe vera plant leaves all over myself and watching the sunburn disappear. what a miraculous plant. no peeling! no heat, no pain. i had no idea it was so effective. i am now an aloe believer.
• walking on a floating pedestrian bridge in the city that simply slides to one side when a ship needs to pass down the river.
• finding out that Curacao is of course the home of the bitter orange-flavoured blue curacao, and it is indeed their national liqueur and only one distillery is officially allowed to make it. Mr Cointreau first came up with it, after Valencia oranges originally planted by the Spanish on the island failed as a crop, went wild, and changed flavour, and suggested to him another opportunity to make something alcoholic. I sampled a Bon Bini ('welcome' in the local patois) cocktail that featured blue curacao, and it was actually delish. I shall no longer scoff. (thanks Fi for the reminder!)

While away 2 more minutes and take a look at our photos on Flickr.

The big city

This is a pile of trash on the street around the corner from my office. It was as tall as me.

These heaps are de rigeur in the evening: pretty much every restaurant, cafe, apartment building and office block has bags and bags of garbage dumped in the street. Even the recycling is bagged up.The green wheelie bins don't get a look in.

Incredibly gross. And you can imagine what this smells like in summer.

People go through the rubbish a lot here. Homeless people pick through the trash for food and cigarette butts, for cans to recycle, for cardboard and paper to make beds. There are trash collectors in all the Midtown and Downtown districts whose job it is to clean up after litterers and empty garbage bins. They have to reach into the bins, sort through stuff and take out the bulky items and put them in bags, instead of changing over the bin liners. Such a degrading job.

Now that its below 5c at night, the subway stations have become bedrooms, living rooms and toilets for thousands of folks, mostly men, who don't fit into the shelters. They toss sleeping bags down on cardboard and tie their battered luggage to a leg. They hunch over themselves on benches with hoods pulled over their faces. Sometimes they sleep on the sidewalk on top of the hot subway air vents, their heads inches away from hurtling traffic. I've seen people sprawled, passed out, straight on the cement, in the middle of a platform or on the street, their pants full of shit and their mouths gagging open, lips dry. Pedestrians step around them. 10 year old kids walk past without batting an eye. It's truly distressing.

There are a few homeless people I have come to recognise because they're in the same spot each day. There's a young woman who lives under a window of the NY public library on 5th Ave, who draws incessantly and today told me I had spiders and snakes crawling all over me. There's an old man with severely swollen feet in podiatry slippers who lives on the uptown platform of our subway, and another older guy who is usually strung out and strings out all his stuff too across the downtown concourse. There's a big young guy who opens the door for people at the local McDonald's for spare change, and lives a few doors down in a deserted storefront.

There are supposedly about 35,000 homeless people in NY who stay in shelters, and about 14,000 of them are children. On my walk to and from the subway - 1 block in both directions- I must pass at least 5 people either begging or sitting with all their worldy possessions clustered around them.

I don't think I'll ever get used to it.

If you want me to stay, I'll be around today...

I witnessed a little bit of music history last night as Sly & The Family Stone performed in NY for the first time in 20 years. You may have seen Sly's much anticipated performance at the 2006 Grammy's. Nobody had seen him for decades and he came out after a medley tribute and gave a shaky rendition of 'I Want To Take You Higher', before wandering off stage after a few minutes.

Last night I had the option of seeing an 8pm or 10pm show, and apart from being a school night, I wondered whether there would even be a 10pm show given the guy is ancient and drug addled.

So I got there at 8.15pm for the 8pm show and the crowd waited patiently til 8.50pm when Sly finally wandered out, sporting a black mohawk and wraparound sunglasses. His daughter, a few second cousins and two original band members were eventually introduced after some waffling.

The crowd got antsy as Sly mentioned he hadn't made it to rehearsals, or the sound check, and wasn't sure how to work 'this new toy' (his electric piano). He tapped out a few notes and consulted with his daughter and a guitarist, a manager came out on stage, and it was... messy. It seemed as if he had stage fright, and was out of it, and I watched nervously as his daughter was making 'come on dad, you can do it' faces'. The whole band held their breath in anticipation.

The crowd was cranky. Some people were yelling and booing, some were trying to shush the rabblerousers to coax Sly into singing something or playing anything. Eventually the band just started playing. And that set the tone for the 1 hour set.

Sly would join in for a bit and then leave the stage, he'd sing and then disappear, he'd turn away from the crowd and the keyboard and just nod at the drummer. There were signs everywhere saying no photos, no videos, and several announcements, but half way through Sly yelled 'you can take as many photos as you want. i already been to jail, I don't care'. And the dance floor lit up with the glow of camera phones, capturing the mayhem.

The poor bandmembers covered his vocals (you could tell they had a plan B) and just kept the show going, pumping through the hits one after the other, trying to make up for his erratic behaviour. At one stage Sky leaned into a microphone and said "I'm an old man, I have to go pee" and left for ten minutes. His daughter and one of the guitarists followed him off stage after excusing themselves. By this stage everyone in the audience was chatting to their neighbour about what the hell was going on.

It was kinda sad: when he hit it they sounded fantastic - all those nights in the red velvet rooms of Saratoga dancing to funk were not a waste - but he wasn't having much fun up there . I wasn't really expecting someone notoriously addicted to PCP and cocaine, and who missed his own shows in the height of his career, to be totally together. Glad I got to hear them anyway.

I wonder what the 10pm show was like. I'm sure some unflattering reviews will emerge in the press today.

Freerice.com

If you fancy yourself as a confident speller and a charitable person, then www.freerice.com is somewhere you'll want to spend 20 minutes.

Play the vocabulary game and for every word you define correctly, grains of rice are donated. If you get a word right you get a harder word. I got to level 44.

Tell me how you go :)

The big wind down

Well I recall that the Spring Carnival heralds the arrival of the Silly Season in Melbourne and then everything at work begins to wind down, except for things that have end of year deadlines and still have budget.

It seems the catalyst here was Halloween, and now with a short week for Thanksgiving (2 day hol + early closing), people's attention spans are shot. Add in Columbus Day and a holiday for the start of the hunting season in some states, and then parties for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I don't imagine this month will be the most productive.

The iPhone weather icon this morning showed a new graphic: sleety snow. It's already as cold as it ever gets in Melbourne during winter (today's high is 6c, with a low of 3c.) and it has started raining. Short heavy bursts or spitting. The streets are finally empty of tourists and the city smells crisp and fresh. It's now actually pleasant to stand on a subway vent and get a rush of warm air, and those over-sized hot pretzels are finally looking appealing.

On Thursday Jus and I head to Curacao for our last blast of sun and sea before we embrace the winter wonderland. We've decided to go to Vermont for Christmas to stay in an old inn, which a colleague suggested. It's supposed to be a snowbound, sleepy, hot choc and Falls Creek skiing kinda place. We'll hire a car or catch the train and make our way up there on Christmas Eve.

(Vermont is home to Ben & Jerry's Icecream, maple syrup, cider and cheese. You can see why east coasters thinks Californians are strange, with their sushi and juice bar and egg white omelette obsessions. Most states' specialities are a homage to fat & cholesterol.)

Jus is researching a ski trip for February in the Rockies (yep, we're milking this US experience to the fullest). There are great flight/accomm/lift ticket packages available if you book by the end of November. If you're interested get in touch.

And if you haven't set yourself up on Skype yet, now is the time. Jus and I love the sentimental, sunk-a-bottle-of-wine, late night, long distance call. It's free. And we have a web cam so you can see our smiling faces :)