All good things...

The Upper West Side from the Riverside park piers

Time has come to say goodbye - to this city, our apartment, our old and new New Yorker and international friends, but also to a way of leading our daily life that we have cultivated and also cherished over these past four months. In many ways, it has been an enthralling way of life, an intense and exceptional one, which we are surely going to miss, but which may also be somewhat particular to the length and depth of a stay like ours.

At Columbia, I have had the unique chance to advance my thesis in an environment in which people partake in the questions, challenges and problems inherent to my research project. Achille and I have spent many hours brainstorming on his black board, brooding over such things as proving theorems about convexity from our axioms for segments, but also testing and re-enacting spatial scenarios to find out which four-place relations correspond to natural language uses of front, behind and left and right. When I was not in Achille's office or at one of my classes, I read, wrote and kept thinking in the Neo-Renaissance libraries of Columbia's main campus. Although I did miss my personal office in Lausanne, these spaces didn't fall short of inspiring awe.

The ever changing city with constructions on the High Line

New York City, for her part, is one of those places that can fascinate one more after a stay of four months than after a short first visit. It's an extreme place in many respects: extremely generous in its outstanding offer of cultural, personal and intellectual opportunities, extremely merciless when it comes to economic failure and success, and extremely diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, social habits, and styles of life. It is also, somewhat less obviously perhaps, a spot of an extremely rich and instructive history. Learning more about it has allowed us to start seeing connections hitherto invisible to us. For instance, architectural language, inner-city migration and public infrastructure have all played together in creating today's social and economic outlines of the city - sometimes successfully and at others less fortunately (think for instance of the idea of public housing and the segregated sometimes ghetto-like isles it created all over the city). Maybe it is because things have always been changing at high speed in this city that so many neighbourhoods have witnessed diverse groups of inhabitants and various construction plans in their two or three hundred years young existence.

Another realisation that New York presses upon me more than any other place is the contingency of the fact to have been born at a particular place, as part of a particular socioeconomic group. Perhaps this impression is stronger here simply because I tend to interact mostly with peers when I'm in Switzerland, where I do not share twenty minutes of my daily routine with all those other city dwellers in Uptown Subway train N°1. Be this as it may, I do quite like this impression and it strengthens my idea of how much freedom we actually have to determine our existence once we abstract from expectations or role models particular to our usual environment.

Well. This to say that our stay in New York has been enjoyable and that we're fond of the idea of coming back in due course. For the time being, however, we are ready and happy to go home.

The Manhattan skyline from the northbound amtrak train

The sum of all good things

We're now arriving to the end of our stay, with less than a hundred hours to spend here until our flight. It seems like a good time to take stock of our experiences in these past four months in the big apple. What have we accomplished in our time here? For my part, I've learned that working from a distance has its perks and its downfalls, but, while I don't plan on imposing this on my teammates again anytime soon, it is definitely a workable condition. Marion has achieved what she had set out to do, namely developing the content of her thesis to the point where she now has, more or less, to just put it on paper (a process that will likely take a couple of months more, but that will not require the intense collaboration she had with Achille during our stay).

The books that have accompanied us in
our discovery of the urban development
 and architectural heritage of the city  

And in the meantime we have discovered the city and its boroughs (most of them at least) in architectural walks, guided tours, pedestrian exploration, and books and films that have given us the impression of understanding a bit of the socio-geo-economic dynamics that make up this very complex city. We have learned to appreciate the artworks and performances that are available (the former spectacular in their scope and presentation, the latter influenced by an american approach to entertainment that mars either the performance or their public), as well as the architectural wealth that can be found in the heart of midtown as in the outskirts of the Bronx.

Our grocery shopping for one week (for 2 people)

Food, much as other worldly needs, was something that occupied our minds at the beginning of our stay. But with time we have learned to navigate our way through the stores, their offers, and their prices, finding a balance of variety, quality and budget (we will have to revise our price estimations of a couple of months ago). To get an inkling of our victuals consumption, here is an image of our average grocery shopping for a week, which comprises a short stop to Zabars and Citarella for specific products (bread, bananas), with a longer one at Westside Market for the bulk of our provisions.

Now we're left with the task of closing shop, disposing of excess material (we've managed to solve the problem of our portable washing machine), getting rid of the things we won't be able to carry home, and finally packing our 3 big suitcases with everything we will bring with us back to Switzerland.

And maybe after all that we'll still have some time to pretend we're tourists who just arrived for a couple of days in New York.

Panem et circenses (the 21st century edition)

Skyrim running on a Mac via a Windows Not-Emulator

I used to play a lot of computer games. I grew up with computers, and from Zaxxon onward, up until I started my PhD, video games were something I looked for, played and enjoyed. (I had a short stint with multi-player games up until my younger brother started piling on humiliating defeats on all of his siblings in basically any FPS game.)

Nowadays it is something that I allow myself in periods of quiet or to relieve some stress when I'm overworked. Marion sometimes sees me disappearing for the evening in the medieval lands of Skyrim, or driving a truck in the surprisingly successful Eurotruck Simulator, or impersonating a coloured rectangle leading a revolution in Thomas Was Alone.

Assassin's Creed IV plastered all over Times Square

While not as up to date with every single new game, I am usually quite aware when a big Triple-A title is coming out. However I did not imagine that the rest of the people around (most of whom do not know what Triple-A denotes in this context) would have to be as well. I realised that at the very least here in New York, these games are treated much the same way as blockbuster movies and new technological gadgets. Advertisements for upcoming games take up entire street corners, or decorate the rooftops or invade the subway stations. All this elicits an eerie feeling of connection between the images I encounter while browsing the net, and the ones I see when walking outside.

COD:Ghosts all around the Times Square subway stations

Grand Theft Auto V ads in NoHo

It seems obvious in truth that it should be so. As the saying goes "If you can sell it you should market it", and it seems a notion that is put to work with gusto in a place like Times Square. And it is also true that, with budgets of several hundreds of millions of dollars for these games, years of preparation and thousands of people involved, there is a definite parallel between video games and big hollywood titles. And as with all situations where a niche starts becomes mainstream, a rift starts appearing between games that are made like movies and other, more independently made video games, that are still in the spirit of "a couple of guys working from their living room". These games, following the destiny of indie films and music, will likely remain obscure to most people, much as most video games were ten years ago.

I happen to find myself attracted more and more by these games, with their pixel-art graphics, 8-bit music, one very brilliant idea and hours of unfettered fun. I will probably keep on trying out the big names every now and then (Bioshock Infinite is one such title which was not only very enjoyable, but has also garnered attention from established media but I will likely not have their soundtrack on my iPod

Backlogs - Learning at MoMA

In-Gallery lecture on American Modernism

Last monday I attended the last lecture in my MoMA class: Modern Art and Ideas 1915-1945 (courtesy of Marion as a birthday gift). The class was a series of 4 In-Gallery lectures given by the curators of different stylistic schools (Dadaism, Surrealism, etc.), followed by a more intimate workshop with about 8 other people, roaming room to room through artists, artistic periods and continents.

The lectures were in and of themselves an interesting sociological experience, allowing to observe people with an interest in art discover, learn, ask and discuss aesthetic, philosophical and political points, in what is undoubtedly an international elite of learned people (I saw notes being taken in Hebrew, Greek, Korean and Japanese, by people sitting next to each other, while I was frantically scribbling my roman characters in the first such endeavour since my early years at university). The workshops were something to cherish for the spoiled participants that we were: wandering for hours around one of the largest collections of modern art in the world, with no other public than our handful of classmates (…and the security guard doggedly following us around).

Blissfully empty galleries, and Umberto Boccioni's
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)

During this time, I realised that the path of artistic discovery that Marion has had me threading upon these past 8 years has actually begun to bear its fruits. Not only were I able to follow most of the references made in the lectures about preceding and following periods of artistic development, but I also had the feeling I could fit what I was learning in an understanding that was, to some extent, there already. My knowledge remains sketchy at best, with gaping holes here and there and with a tendency to forget the names of half the artists the minute you hear them. And yet I am now able to gleam why a shovel hanging in the air and a white square on a white background should be in the same room in a museum.

Theo van Doesburg study (left) and painting (right) for Composition VIII (The Cow) (1918)

In addition to making me acquainted with the layout of the MoMA (which I was able to boastfully display to Marion today) the class became a routine excursion into midtown, where I now feel less of a tourist and more of an occasional visitor. And I can now leave the city with the feeling that I know at least one of its several wells of aesthetic wealth, and with a renewed and enhanced understanding of why people have been doing, watching and discussing art for such a long time.

Visiting the Bronx

The Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx

There is something special about the Bronx. Not only is it the only New York county bearing a definite article in its name; but it also carries the burden of what has become known as the "Bronx Stigma". Indeed, hardly anyone aware of New York City hasn't heard meaningful rumours about its dreadful and dire north-most borough, where Hip Hop culture originated, Albanian and Latin American Mafias have long been in authority, and no white people live: The legendary Bronx.

Art-deco block on the Grand Concourse

Today we have gone a great deal towards destigmatising the Bronx in our heads. Joining a walking tour organised by the Municipal Art Society, we visited the Grand Concourse and took advantage of the occasion to stop by the Bronx Museum of Art. It has been a day full of revelations about urban economics, the intertwining of public policies and personal decision making and scenarios of a living which, despite happening no more than a 20 minutes subway ride from the current center of gravity of our existence, could not be much further away from our personal realities.

Interior lobbies of art deco residential buildings on the Concourse 

The Grand Concourse, built between 1890 and 1900, is a grand boulevard of 60 metres breadth which was conceived on the model of Paris' Champs-Elysées. Its conception was the product of speculation about upcoming growth and future wealth; by the time of its construction it was nothing but a path through nowhere leading to recreational woods in the Northbronx. It was in the 1920s and 1930s, when privately built subway trains began to assure a fast and secure connection to Downtown Manhattan, that the Grand Concourse became a prosperous residential area, flanked on either side by finest art deco buildings, and inhabited mostly by Jewish immigrants resettling from Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Left: A very well traveled Lorelei sculpture in honor of Heinrich Heine.

Right: Residential Art-deco building on the Concourse

Thanks to recent urban renewal initiatives and a declaration of landmark status in the early 21st century, some of the past glory of the Grand Concourse has again become visible and was tangible to us during today's visit. Yet in between its promising beginnings and recent urban renewal, Grand Concourse went through a story of decline, which seems to have been the poisonous product of false economic incentives, unintelligent slum clearance programs for Manhattan, commercial interest in the relocation of white middle class people to suburban housing areas and strategic disinvestment in the pursuit of political interests. An insight we take home is that much of the racial and income based segregation of New York is not just the inevitable result of too much ethnic diversity in a dense urban environment, but has come about also because serious economic and political mistakes were made.

The 2006 building of the Bronx Art Museum,
on the grounds of the former Synagogue

Today the renewed section of the Grand Concourse is home to lower middle-class hispanic and African American residents, who seem to enjoy and somehow cherish their environment (as a local public initiative for the preservation of the Heinrich Heine Fountain in a Concourse park seems to suggest). And yet, extreme poverty is not far, racial segregation remains almost total, and the future seems somewhat open.

There are encouraging signs, though, not least the successful work or urban renewal activists (such as today's guide), the recent growth of the Bronx Art Museum and, above all, its warm, inviting, caring and enthusiastic staff.

Art installations by Tony Feher at the Bronx Art Museum

Backlogs - Escaping the endless city (Sunday December 1st)

Deserted beach in Cold Spring Harbor 

The fascinating thing about a city this big is that I could take any subway, move a couple of kilometres up or down (one should not entirely forsake a measurement system just because people here prefer pounds and feet), come up to open air and be hard pressed to recognise that something has indeed changed… This is not truly a sentiment that is pervasive: unique landmarks appear everywhere and give different flavours to each metropolitan village, a very nice building here, a peculiar subway station there, the umpteen monument to soldiers or responders somewhere else. And yet the everyday NY street presents a unified front that is at times reassuring and at others begs for more variety in the lay of the land. 

Harbor in the eponymous Cold Spring

It was therefore with some elation that we went, this past weekend, for two consecutive adventures in Long Island and Tarrytown, in the east and in the north of the state, respectively. While not our first foray into un-urbanised land (we went, after all with Marion's family to Dia Beacon), it was the first in which we actively walked through field, beach and sand. We were privy to an insider tour of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (where James Watson discovered the structure of DNA in the early fifties) and a technical and informative elucidation on modern neurophysiological research, followed by a visit of the campus with its small two-storied houses and tranquil beach. We learned about horse-shoe crabs and understood how science-fiction films just have to look at terrestrial biology to get examples of really scary stuff. And we were able to experience first-hand what east-american highways look and feel like (we were, after all, traveling on the weekend after Thanksgiving).

The following day saw us forsake a guided tour in the Lower East Side, to give us some time to recover and prepare four our next excursion to Tarrytown, where Marion's host of past times welcomed us for an aperitif, a walk through town, enjoyable discussions on city vs. countryside life, photography, society and politics, and finally a feast in a picturesque italian restaurant where quality, quantity and choice strive to outdo one another. All this in a place that seems pulled straight out of a Edward Hopper painting, with winter afternoon lights illuminating wooden planked buildings as characteristic as they are charming.

A Hopperesque house being built on the CSHL campus

Two things struck us during these expeditions, one on an architectural level, the other on an urbanisation one. The first realisation was that while the places we visited were home to a very wealthy american population, the constructions consisted without exception of traditional american abodes, with opulence expressed by the usual mixture of wooden patios, mediterranean pillared entrances with round windows, and other architectural gimmicks. Not a single example of modern architecture, as one is want to see traveling around the european equivalent. Even in Ticino, with its ghastly disregard for aesthetic cohesion when it comes to building houses, there are always a couple of testimonials of a taste for modern spaces and forms that decorate the otherwise eye-jarring landscape.

President Teddy Roosevelt's house in Long Island

The second epiphany was that we are not used to the type of clustered colonisation that seem to be the standard here. Travel 1-2h in any direction outside a swiss city, and at no time will you see a place that is empty of the occasional farm, factory, church or residential building. The land is interspersed regularly and continuously with a density that raises when nearing a village or town, and lowers again as soon as we move on. Here the separation between land and village is clearly defined, and no buildings can be seen, gleamed or glimpsed from the stretch of road between cities, and it is hard to understand why a village was placed here instead of 2 or 3 miles down. (I suspect that a study of the lay of the land and the history of the 18-19th century would much better explain why each population centre resides on its actual location).

Industrial bridge on the Hudson river in Tarrytown

Our return to the city marked a stark contrast with the imagery we had been experiencing for the past two days, and plunged us back to another landscape, another density of inhabitants and another rhythm of existence. But for a while, we felt how the less frenzied and more laid back atmosphere of the countryside can attract people to these places just outside the City.

Back to New York on the 25A highway

Backlogs

Runners and cyclists on a wintery Riverside Park

There comes a time, in the rhythm of yearly existence, where everything comes to the surface at the same time. Projects, deadlines, administrative chores and other obligations contend to make your life miserably busy with the feeling that no time can be spared. The first half of December was one such time for Marion and me, and we are only now finding the time to resume our depiction of our daily lives and adventures. We will therefore pretend that each of the coming articles was written at the time of the experiences that accompany them, while scrounging our memories for the details, impressions and discoveries that date back to a couple of weeks.

Homelessness

St. Nicholas Housing Projects in Central Harlem

If there's one thing that one cannot avoid stumbling upon in New York, it's the presence of homeless people. They sit on the edge of sidewalks to ask for money, sleep in cardboard houses at church entrances at night and dig for food in garbage bins. Most of the time the homeless we see are men, black and range from middle age to old. To some extent, these are images we are accustomed to from other cities - just think of the homeless man that slept in front of our building in Lausanne throughout summer or of the Romanian groups that always ask for food, if not for money, at the entrance of Coop Grancy and Migros Closelet.

Nonetheless, things are different in New York, where homelessness has a dimension we would never have been capable to think of had we stopped our attention at the somewhat obvious signs of poverty one finds in every big city. The staggering truth about New York is that most of its homeless are invisible most of the time.

Fact is that almost 1% of New Yorkers are homeless. Each night some 60000 people, including many children, experience homelessness. Homelessness is not a phenomenon that concerns only social misfits, but families and kids just as well. During the day, homeless kids go to school, their parents search for jobs or work for salaries far from what a living wage would look like . During the night, these kids and their families often sleep in one of the many municipal or private shelters scattered over the city, which offer food and basic accommodation to people in need.

These homeless remain invisible if one doesn't try to look hard enough. Once grown sensitive, however, one often encounters mothers with tired kids carrying lots of strange bags in the subway at dusk, or people in worn out training pants fast asleep on subway seats in the early morning. What is more, I have recently discovered the coalition for the homeless van that serves food to homeless people every night at seven just one street north from where we live (which is to say in a neighbourhood inhabited for its most part by upper middle class people). 

Probably it would be easier to look away were it not for the strange feeling that this city's logic somehow builds on the availability of ridiculously cheap labour - a logic which becomes blatant in shop opening hours, cleaning service costs, prices for fast food products, and so on. It translates into the existence of vast neighbourhoods with median wages per household below 35'000$/year (Bronx) or 25'000$/year (Spanish Harlem) and into extreme feelings of foreignness whenever we happen to come across neighbourhoods of this kind (although we have never actually been to either the Bronx nor Spanish Harlem in particular).

Poverty and inequality of chance have long engaged me on a theoretical level.The unease I feel about it, however, has never been as concrete before coming here.

Ginkgo Trees

Ginkgo trees on Riverside Drive

If there is one plant (sic) particularly associated with our stay in New York, it's the Ginkgo tree. Not only had we never really taken notice of Ginkgo trees before coming to New York this fall. But by now we also have stories to tell about this family of flamboyant trees.

It all starts with our favourite New Yorkers Virginia and Fred. For a couple of months they have now been cohabiting with a new room mate: a Ginkgo tree that they found some day on the street. The tree had been cut somewhere at its trunk and still bore its beautiful fan-shaped leaves. In a spirit of wonder and curiosity, they took home the tree which has ever since stood in their apartment as some sort of unusual contemporary sculpture. Its leaves have since turned from saffron yellow to brown and folded in, but (as dropping leaves - Virginia and Fred gathered - is apparently an active process), they continue to hang on the tree.  

In the shape of a sculpture at Virginia's and Fred's, we have thus come to know Ginkgo trees (well, a Ginkgo tree in particular to be precise). Yet since then we have noticed that New York is virtually full of these plants. Stately Riverside Drive is flanked by dozens of Ginkgo trees, whose warm and bright yellow leaves bring beautiful colour spots into the greyish brown urban tissue of New York City's Upper West Side. And wherever else we go, Ginkgo trees turn out not to be far.

Ironically, we have gotten accustomed today to another particularity of Ginkgo trees. Female Ginkgoes not only bear fruit, but can also be distinguished by their distinctive, pungent and hardly pleasant smell. Since we inattentively walked across the Ginkgo fruits that heavy wind had torn off this morning, Ginkgoes have accompanied us not only visually, but also olfactorily through our day.

Be this as it may, Ginkgo trees have become an unmistakable feature of this city (from our perspective at the very least).

A day at the MET

Say one thing about Americans, say they are thorough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a gigantic compendium of the arts of the human species. It combines within one building the most disparate testimonies of human creativity, from early craft tools of the nomadic Egypt of six millennia ago, to 20th century totems from living oceanic tribes, from greek and roman pottery and sculpture, to middle age european artwork, from pre-columbian american jewellery, to contemporary and modern art from all corners of the globe.

The MET plays a role of teacher, providing you with the tools to understanding how civilisations evolved their way of expressing themselves and narrating their everyday life, how they established a contact with the divine throughout the eras, and how this all gave birth, in a relatively small part of the world, to an entirely new way of understanding and creating art. 

The Queen Mother Iyoba pendant mask
(16th century)

But at the end of the day, the MET is a museum, and when you have gone through its educational process, the MET is an incredible archive of human artistic creation. Of the 26 paintings that Vermeer created in his whole life, 5 are in a single room on the second floor of the MET, accompanied by Rembrandt and other masters of the chiaroscuro. Gigantic canvasses by Pollock, Rothko or Ellsworth Kelly take ownership of entire walls, while El Greco, da Messina o Tiziano fill rooms with colours, shapes and light.

We leave with the feeling that indeed, someone should take on the challenge of cataloguing the greatest achievements of culture and creativity. The MET promises to do just that, and delivers with vigour. Maybe it is a task that only a country founded on the idea of cultures meeting and joining, carrying over oceans their baggages of ideas, aesthetic vocabulary and traditions, can accomplish successfully. And maybe they're the only ones with the guts to rebuild an Egyptian temple OUTSIDE the walls of your museum in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world…

The greatest european museums, while in their own right great repositories of art, don't come even close to achieving something similar, be it because they only focus on a subset of artistic history (Italian museums and their utter refusal to consider anything younger than a couple of centuries as art come to mind), or because they believe that empty space is a bad thing (the Louvre is the best example of what a museum should NOT look like in this respect), or simply by lack of space and money compared to this american giant.

The Temple of Dendur, in the MET greenhouse directed towards Central Park

The result is something that gives me hope for humankind. This museum, which is a physical embodiment of the encyclopaedia of arts, proves that there exists an effort to explain, demonstrate, maintain and exemplify our achievements, and does it on a "pay what you want" basis. Because beauty belongs to everybody, and everybody should be able to afford a visit through its history.

Gold figure pendant from northern Colombia (10th-16th century) 

A step back to the Middle Ages

The Cloisters from its entrance

As Europeans, we tend to think of the Americans as slightly eccentric and somewhat megalomaniac. Nothing is impossible in America after all, and so we often find ourselves confirmed in our preconception of Uncle Sam and his people. Moreover, as the wisdom of the crowd has it, despite their political and economic proeminence, Americans silently begrudge the Europeans their centuries old cultural and religious heritage.

Today we have been witness to what could be seen as the best possible outcome of these two commonplaces (should they then be true). After a thirty minutes subway ride up north, we found ourselves at the entrance of Fort Tryon Park at the northwest tip of Manhattan, a hill so remote and solitary that one could imagine it to hoist a genuine European cloister.  

And so it does, somehow. On the top of the hill of Fort Tryon Park thrones the Cloisters, the uptown branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the only museum in the United States entirely dedicated to medieval European art. Yet the Cloisters not only exhibits medieval art, it also incorporates it in the most literal possible meaning of that expression. The Cloisters was built after the plans of different European monasteries, in such a way that it could incorporate in its architecture several pillars, archways, cloisters and chapels that had been shipped from Europe to be reassembled on site. As a result, some of the most beautiful masterpieces of medieval European sculpture, interior architecture and pieces of art have found a new home on this side of the Atlantic.

Late gothic alabaster sculpture

Romanesque crucifix from the 13th century

As both Basilio and I have a decidedly contemporary mind-set, we decided to go for the audio guide to get the background knowledge that we deemed necessary for a full appreciation of the masterpieces that lay ahead. And our choice was well suited. Following the director's tour, we saw early romanesque sculpture, beautiful cloisters from three different European monasteries, magnificent embroidered tapestry, gothic arches and stained glass as well as a medieval herb garden on a terrasse on a patio with unique vista on the Hudson River and wooden land in New Jersey (apparently the young Rockefeller who gifted the Metropolitan Museum with the land of its current northern location bought the land on the opposite Hudson shore to make sure that it would never be overbuilt by mediocre settlements that could destroy the pleasant view from the Cloisters).

Sunset light seeping in from the patio

Today's afternoon has therefore been an uplifting lesson in medieval art history, guided by some very fine examples of European art. Ironically, our visit was framed by a contemporary piece of art that we last saw at MoMA PS1 (the contemporary branch of the MoMA) when we came to New York some two years ago: Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, an installation of forty high-fidelity speakers each of which embodies the voice of an individual singer, performing a sacred chorale. Installed in the formerly Spanish romanesque Fuentidueña Chapel, this work almost looses its contemporary character and becomes a genuine part of the surrounding architecture and its time. One may regret that some playful aspects of the space and sound experience intended by Cardiff go awry in this context. At the same time, context and sound melt into a unique stunning experience - which was especially beautiful shortly before the doors closed as most people had by then already left.

It will be interesting to rediscover a new eye for old art when we get back to the other side of the pond.

Medieval herb garden

Price comparisons at the halfway mark

PDF for those with bad eyes

This weekend has marked the halfway point of our current stay in the United States. The concurrency of this event with the first weekend at home on our own since a while back, has given us the time to rest, and take stock of our experiences (and resume our electronic narrations as seen in the posts below), and to do some sums about our life in New York in the few months we have been here.

Speaking of sums, the prices for a number of things were somewhat unexpected upon arrival in the big apple, and we have therefore decided to make a comparison chart, on the somewhat sketchy statistical observations we have made these past two months, of the cost of life in New York compared to life in Lausanne. The result might not be what you'd expect coming from a country that is supposed to be very expensive...

A few things should be mentioned regarding nourishment: we have elected to maintain a dietary habit that is hardly different from what we had in Switzerland. One could argue that we could have adapted to the local customs (when in Rome...). That is a valid point, but we could argue back that the standards for health around here are less successful than back home. If we were actually in Rome, we'd probably gain from the dietary lifestyle (and the olive oil) of the locals. Here to eat healthy you'd have to look for asian or european cuisine anyway, which would seem redundant. (Although we will probably want to give Sushi a chance before we leave.)

The other things, such as phone contracts, clothes and museums, need to be evaluated with the understanding that we are here for a limited amount of time, so several things that are available on a yearly basis were not an option for us. (For instance, we ended up getting prepaid sim card, which are potentially less optimal than other contracts.) It is quite possible that a number of expenditures could be shaved off if one were to take the yearly options.

This was mostly a chance to play around with graphics and numbers on a sunday afternoon, as some people are happy to do every now and then. 

Family time

Brownstone buildings in the Brooklyn residential streets

If we have been more silent than usual during the last two weeks, it is for the most part due to a very pleasant special occasion which we could enjoy until Thursday: my family's visit to New York.

Downtown from Dumbo

Having the family closely around (very concretely in the case of my brother and his girlfriend, who slept in our living room for one week, and slightly more commonly in the case of my parents, who stayed at a nearby hotel) had at least two very appreciable effects. On the one hand, Basilio and I had a wonderful excuse to escape the daily work routine and plunge into the city's history and cultural offer at an unprecedented pace and depth; and on the other, we finally left the relative social isolation in which we had spent the first part of our stay to enjoy intense contact and exchange with the people we (or I) feel closest to. (A great aftereffect I should not miss to mention is the fact that we are now living from a kitchen full of exquisite cheese and fruit, as both my parents and Silvan and Fabienne gifted us with delicious and somewhat unaffordable gourmet products when they left.)

Midtown from the Top of the Rock

In terms of activities, these two family weeks have been a pure delight. To mention but a few: Together with fabulous tour guide Norman Oder we discovered Brownstone Brooklyn in a five hours walk through Park Slope, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo, where we learned about the tight links between city growth and transportation systems, Brooklyn's past as an independent city, remainders of both the independence and the civil war, and the many positive and negative effects of gentrification (positive especially where it is well done as in Dumbo); American Promise, which we saw at the Lincoln Film Society, taught us about the challenging American school system and the difficulties (and chances) it brings about for children belonging to minorities (in whatever possible sense); From the 'Top of the Rock' we got a better grasp of the city's geography and its dimensions - which, although more manageable from a vantage point such as the top of Rockefeller Center, still go beyond our actual imagination; At the MET we saw 'Two Boys' and thus a dizzying masterpiece of a new music opera, which delves deeply into the realms and possibilities of the world wide web to tell a story about identity, masquerade and the danger of unfulfilled longing and loneliness.

The Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts

Together with our friends Virginia and Fred we went out of town to Dia:Beacon - a first class contemporary art museum in a former factory building close to Hudson River in Upstate new York which is dedicated to American Minimalism (a current in the new art that deeply satisfies our need for content-less and pure aesthetics); And finally we enjoyed a Harlem Heritage tour (with a somewhat peculiar Gospel mass at Abyssinian Baptist Church) and dinner at the scenic and way too loud (but NZZ recommended) Red Rooster Harlem.

The first exhibition hall at Dia:Beacon

As Basilio and I also had to work at least sometimes, we also missed out on some activities (such as a huge history lesson in the shape of an afternoon long stroll through the Metropolitan Museum) and have therefore put together a list of things we shall try not to miss before going back home.

The (in)famous Red Rooster in Harlem

Despite all the memorable and fulfilling activities, most important has been the presence of my family and the mutual exchange, discussions and common experiences it made possible. Their presence was a balm for the feeling of Heimweh (for which none of the languages we're familiar with provides a satisfactory counterpart) that we had been becoming victims of after two months on our own.

Indeed, these past two weeks of emotional refuelling have made us ready for the official second half of our stay.

Shoes and a teddy bear in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Gospel and Community

Riverside Church, between W 120th and 122nd Street 

Last week we went to Harlem for a tour around its historical heart, led by an energetic octogenarian "swedish black dude from Minneapolis" who despite his venerable age left most of the group behind in his brisk new-yorker gait. The tour guided us through the richer parts of Harlem, which comprise several beautiful brownstone buildings streets and seem to be inhabited by a higher socio-economic class than other places in Harlem we visited in the past.

The last and main gemstone of the tour was the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where we attended a 1h30 long gospel mass in honest to god american style. The valets wear white gloves and tidy uniforms, and guide a mass of people to their seats on the main floor or on the upper balconies. On sundays, they tell us, well off african-american personages strive to come and be seen at the Abyssinian and the community is alive and strong.

Stained windows of the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street

We arrived some 20 minutes before the beginning of the Mass proper, and during that time, while the church was filling to the brink, a couple of new members of the community introduced themselves (the pastor had them come in front of the crowd and tell their names), an old man talked briefly about his joy at coming regularly to church, and a lady volunteered to sing the solo voice of a couple of psalms, the psalms were sung in gospel style, with the crowd joining in with energy and cheer. While all this was going on a score of people arrived to the altar, and when the last song ended all hell broke loose.

The latest arrivals were, as it happens, the choir and the lead… performer? Who sang and directed the crowd with boisterous, loud and infectious laughter and charisma. The better part of an hour of songs ensued, at earsplitting volume and accompanied by the public clapping and singing along, dancing in place, in standing ovations or exhausted on the benches. Young and old, affluent and destitute, all were caught up in the atmosphere. The words "communal" and "united" are quite apt at describing the oneness that this type of experience seemed to provide.

At moments I was thinking about what our equivalent in Europe looks like, where a group of well-intentioned amateurs manage to make even the most tone-deaf klutz cringe from the bleating cacophony they produce. As my dad often remarks, the proof that god is merciful is that he doesn't smite all his faithful into muted oblivion. Not in gospel-America though. Here the stuff sounds good and the effect on the people attending is tangibly positive (for extended exposure you might want to sit a bit further in the back or bring some earplugs).

Religious center in Manhattanville on 126th Street

The sermon was given by a two meters tall former NBA player, reforged into a junior pastor, who spurted out a garbled bunch of platitudes strung together in a grammatically and syntactically nefarious verbiage that managed to pull off some one-liners that somehow resonated with the public, who voiced its approval with yeas and amens, or raising hands and waving them in rapt meditation on what seemed to be pre-digested food for the soul. Here I had to give it to european priests: their rhetoric and the discourse is far better structured, and seems to be aimed at a public that, at the very least, is willing to follow more than one sentence at a time. The average sermon back home usually provides a number of points that relate to the human condition or to the challenges of living and sharing a world with others. The degree to which these points are banal or instead touch on interesting questions then depends on the priest, the place, the audience, but a minimum level of sequentiality in the discourse can be found even in Capriasca. Here, instead, the most pertinent phrase I can remember was "I discovered that I loved the game, but the game didn't love me back…".

Nevertheless, while the sermon might not be the pinnacle of intellectual discourse (mind you, it never is in Europe either), it undoubtedly combines well with the feeling of unity and community that we could feel throughout the mass. After the sermon, all people who wanted to ask god for any favours could join the pastor, the choir, the other pastor, the lead signer, and the dozen other people already at the altar for a final prayer, before the white-gloved ushers ushered us back outside, smiling, greeting and cheering the other people around us.

The feeling of belonging, welcome and openness that one feels here is something definitely american in nature. I can hardly picture a stranger entering into a church in Ticino and immediately being embraced by the old-timers and crones there. Here, however, it is a palpable feeling, and despite my entrenched opinion that we should be rid of religion as a matter of intellectual honesty, I understand the positive force that this type of experience exerts. In a place where 1 in 20 people in New York are or were homeless and where 20% of the population lives in poverty (and we are not talking about the swiss definition of poverty), a warm embrace, an hour of singing in unity and a dignified welcome are something that can provide an anchor and resonate with many.