Harlem Blues

My window looks out onto the Harlem projects. It is a part of New York that one rarely sees captured in film. It does not lend itself to the glowing sepia hues of steel and sepia that New York is often painted in; though it does not reside outside of Manhattan. Harlem is about as large as the rest of Manhattan is.

Imagine that; the overcrowded streets of the Financial district, the wharves and harbours of the Lower East Side, the Meatpacking district, the East and West Villages full of bankrupt boutiques and french bistros at half-price, the tony Upper East and West sides doused in privilege, neurosis and Jewishness, all hustling, jostling, competing to be heard; this is New York, no, this is New York, no this is the real New York. And yet all of them put together is not as big nor as real as Harlem.

Well, this is the only part of New York I can say that I genuinely like; that feels real and not artificial; not some tourist's Sex and the City dream of what New York should be, not one giant jumble of the best restaurants, museums, clothing boutiques, coffeeshops, taxicabs, stilettos and cowl necks, not some overprocessed white existential nightmare of craving and alienation.

There is a gentle community here, still living the lingering aftereffects of poverty, history, race but also an up and coming black middle class that is proud to call Harlem its home, an everchanging tide of doormen, policewomen, laundryworkers, street cleaners that wash in from the Bronx in the mornings and leave late at night, a chain of jerk restaurants, and steak restaurants, and fried chicken joints and alcohol saloons, where the doors to doorman buildings are locked at nights and the candy is stashed away in stores behind bulletproof glass, and where the stench of alcohol always lingers, and where one tries not to make eye contact much when walking down the street. There is the constant Black-Latino tension too, but an uneasy peace too, a stand against the Man, a genuine pride in being the 'other' and from having spent years in the ghetto. Here, old street cleaners yell after young men "pull up your pants, chile", as if they were their own, and mothers fuss over young women not their own, and almost everybody is ready to spend hours discussing Obama, NYPD and where to go to get your hair done, and who is banging who.

And sometimes, when the sun is late to set, and Central Park at the foot of Harlem begins to glow, out come the deck chairs and the barbecue grills, and the children play basketball late into the night, and the mothers and young men huddle around stone tables, a continuous sea of voices rising, punctuated by stops and starts and exclamations, guffawing, and the rap music and the hip hop continues late into the night, and despite the rising unemployment, and the rising drug and alcohol abuse, and the constant stress of never having enough, the moment is enough, until the next day when you do it all again.

Wherever one may go in Manhattan, stale, rich, declining; Harlem remains unique, defiant and strangely authentic, in this New York at the end of its Gatsby years.

Breaking Loose

As children we start off spontaneous, idealistic, hopeful, young, believing in ourselves and thinking that we will live forever. Then we go to school and meet other children, other parents, teachers, principals, - and the introduction into the world as we know it. I had always thought education and true learning was to teach people to rid themselves of prejudice, liberate themselves from dogma, propel them to take leaps of faith, experiments with life, - to push the envelope in every way, to never accept the status quo.

But it makes everyone else feel better when you turn out just like them, make the same choices, the same compromises, - the same inability to risk, lose, become faithless, and stop really loving other people, humanity as a whole excluding your family and those that you care about in your daily life.

Why do we make these compromises, out of fear or love? Why do we diminish ourselves? Why are we so afraid of our full capacities? To think, feel, really look at ourselves without fear or favour?

Why is the human race only one tenth of what it can be, most of the time?

Because sometimes, it takes only an instant to remember what we can be like; from the small things to the large things; the human capacity to dream, to leap, to fall, for 'the heart to break loose on the wind'.

back to bach

It seems I brought the weather back from Chicago; it is bitterly cold, windy and rainy in New York. Spent the day rushing from puddle to puddle, shoes soaked, jeans soaked and starting to freeze (ahh the feeling of stiff, mud-frozen jeans next to skin), hair - well why go into the hair.

Finally back at home, curled up with green tea and chocolate chip cookies (yes, it has been that kind of a day), listening to Bach in the silence. "Bach thinks in music. Music thinks in Bach. God expresses himself through Bach" said Coetzee.

How can pure sound evoke feeling, memory, sadness and hope? And how can certain human beings be so gifted, so as to create sounds, a series of sounds, rising, falling, loudly, softly, stealthily, surprisingly. A quiet crescendo, in Bach, of the same series of repeating notes can turn such a surprising corner and fall dramatically into an abyss - and the sense of falling is so acute and terrifying and wonderful all at the same time. And 'the shock of recognition' when one does not know what comes next, what corner lies ahead, but when it does, one knows that it was ever meant to be so.

Any world that can produce this is wonderful, even as it maybe simultaneously unexpected, terrible and haunting. Because still, as Nietzsche said, "We have art, so we shall not be destroyed by truth".

Cities and Oceans

I should be working; I really should; after posting the list below of all the things I have to do in an effort to get me motivated; guns blazing with barrels on all fronts.

Rather I would sit in this cafe on this cold Chicago day, with the wind blowing outside; wrapped up and warm, eating a lemon poppy seed muffin, with strong coffee coursing through my veins, reading two books in front of me; Invisible Cities and the Broken Palmyrah, oceans apart and yet, does not the Atlantic meet the Pacific, the Pacific the Indian and the Indian the Atlantic again; and when these oceans meet, does not the wind blow differently, and the land rise spectacularly, and the water throb strangely?

Oceans apart and yet, I read Calvino again and dream of other cities and the city that I carry within me, wherever I go, though it breaks my heart again and again.

"it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."

and earlier

"Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one".

Things I do on the Side

a) Advise (and may eventually work for) a public cord blood bank to be set up in Pondicherry, India

b) Finish editing my short film

c) Work on 2 other scripts as assistant director with Sri Lankan directors (one based in Paris, and one based in Sri Lanka)

d) Act as manager to a leading Sri Lankan actress and represent her to agencies in the U.S. and abroad

e) Advise and fundraise for a Tamil NGO in Sri Lanka (who I might also eventually work for)

f) Organize Sri Lankan events here in NY (a new fundraiser and a new panel coming up)

g) Help set up an NGO in Bombay that's focused on collating documentaries

And in addition to this, there's work, friends, the personal life, the gym and doctors.

Why does it always get this busy?