For the past 9 months, a saccharine war has raged on the billboards, subway adverts, newspapers and televisions in New York. On the one hand stands the office of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and against him stand the temporarily united forces of Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola and Dr. Pepper Snapple, along with various bars, cinemas and other businesses that would stand to lose some profits. Having worked in many such establishments, and seen quite how many pints of cola can be made from a single $50 box of syrup, I can tell you there’s a lot at stake for them.

In the last year, Mike had a dream that no New Yorker would go out and consume any sugary beverage over 16oz. For those of you who don’t measure liquids by the weight they’d have if they were made of pure water (go America), that translates to 473ml, which is exactly one American pint, and is a bit short of a British pint. This doesn’t prevent refills, and still allows for supermarket shoppers to pick up 2L bottles, so it seemed quite bizarre to me that anyone would actually feel a pinch at this rather light legislation. After all, in France, Britain, Japan and Brazil (at least) a ‘large soda’, as defined by McDonalds, is about half the size of their ‘large soda’ in the USA, at around 450ml as opposed to 30oz (887 ml).

This isn’t Bloomberg’s first health kick. NYC was one of the first cities to ban indoor smoking, and in 2011 added most public outdoor spaces to that too. He pushed through the first law requiring fast-food restaurants to display calorie counts, which is now a federal law for any chains, and can be horrifically scary if you venture into say, KFC. He also banned trans-fats in restaurants and is looking at cutting back on sodium too.

Maybe thanks to Bloomberg, maybe thanks to continuous immigration from healthier places, or maybe just because they’re always so busy and don’t have cars, New Yorkers are already a healthy bunch. The average New Yorker, whilst maybe somewhat bigger than an average European or South American, is a generally fit and slim individual by American standards. A walk down the street shows nothing like the ~30% obesity rate that is generally given as the average for an American adult. My Portuguese teacher recently told me that she was surprised people were so thin when she moved here, after growing up seeing American TV and tourists. “Thinner than in Brazil?” I asked. She didn’t stop laughing for a good few minutes.

Bloomberg began with a campaign “Are You Pouring On The Pounds” which showed as graphically as possible just how much sugar is in one bottle of soda, iced tea, or even ‘Vitamin water’ and so on. Some of them were quite sickening, some wonderfully enlightening and none of them really felt too far from the truth. It worked, too, I went from the occasional fizzy drink to drinking nearly nothing but water, tea and fresh fruit juices.

Not generally having access to TV, it was only very recently I saw that campaign at a friend’s house. In the ad I saw, three friends sit at a bar, two ordering a ‘cola’ and the third sitting there eating his way through sixteen packets of sugar. “You wouldn’t do this”, ends the advert, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the IT Crowd’s anti-piracy parody.

One major difference I’ve noticed about American advertising is that it’s very confrontational. Rather than a simple ‘enjoy our product’, advertisers are happy to call out their competitors by name and make hilariously selective point-by-point comparisons in the areas in which they have an advantage. In much the same style, the drinks companies quickly fought back with some very directed adverts of their own, such as the “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what to drink” campaign. This, unfortunately, didn’t quite have the same impact because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty hard case to argue on the actual health merits being called into question.

That’s not to say it’s only rich companies arguing the point though. The papers today are full of quotes from ‘real New Yorkers’ in favour of choice, and in Mississippi, the state with the highest obesity rate of all, they’re going one step further. Not just content with avoiding having hippies like Mike Bloomberg (who is, lest we forget, number 13 on the Forbes Rich List), they’re actually looking to proactively pass laws protecting gluttonous consumption.

There may not be any need though. Today it was ruled that Bloomberg’s latest soda law will not pass because it is overly arbitrary, given the loopholes needed to prevent NYC stepping outside of its jurisdiction. So, it seems that for now, the great state of Mississippi, the obese activists in New York and soft-drinks companies are – per the American Dream – free.

The ruling “serves as a major blow to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s incessant finger-wagging,” said J. Justin Wilson at the Center for Consumer Freedom, created by restaurants and food companies. “The court confirmed what most New Yorkers already know: They don’t need a government regulator to dictate their diet choices. New Yorkers should celebrate this victory by taking a big gulp of freedom.”
~Associated Press

The large Big Gulp sold by 7-11 was recently reduced in size to a mere 50oz (1.5 litres). America, Freedom, Liberty…Fuck Yeah.

Xx

Last week, on the second anniversary of my coming to America, we had a hurricane. Last year’s encounter with Hurricane Irene – whilst destructive elsewhere – was largely, for me and those I knew, a spectacle to watch online and a day or two of enforced domesticity. Hurricane Sandy, however, is still being acutely felt today, both by those directly affected the damage and those citizens of New York who were able to escape unscathed.

By good fortune, I fall in that latter category, losing only my internet connection and local amenities for a day or two, and my subway service for the foreseeable future — 10 days later, the tunnels are still flooded and electric signals likely ruined. But I have heat, I have water, I have power, my building and belongings are safe and I’m unharmed, so I shan’t complain about any smaller inconveniences when I have the luxury of working from home and a bike to get anywhere else I need in the city.

What’s really struck me about this hurricane is not the damage it caused, but the response it has provoked from normally-cynical New Yorkers. Requests for volunteers were swamped within minutes of being posted: I was turned away from three stations before finding a just-set-up soup kitchen in Coney Island where I could exercise the desire to physically help some of those worst-affected.

Donations still continue to flood in (and, alas, are still needed) and masses of stories continue to surface about individuals and local businesses giving power, generators, hot meals and everything else they can to those affected. Those with power ran extension cables outside for those without to charge appliances, those with generators drove hours to give them to those without power and those businesses with the ability to cook food gave it all out for free to the communities that have supported them throughout the year.

There were cases of price-gouging too though. Hotel rates went up to $1,000 a night, though this was somewhat assuaged by Race to Recovery in which runners in the cancelled New York Marathon gave up their pre-booked hotel rooms to storm refugees. New York Sports Club charged $35 for non-members to shower, and lost a good amount of members when that came to light. There are many more similar stories coming to light, and the Attorney General has vowed to prosecute each one, as in New York it’s

Illegal for merchants to sell products at unconscionably excessive prices during an abnormal disruption of the market.

What wonderful phrasing.

Overall though, there’s been a real sense of coming together in this oft-segregated and anonymous city. I used to love New York as an entity to be interacted with, but now, I’m starting to love it as a community to be a part of.

Xx

In a perfect catastrophe of sympathetic fallacy, I recently stepped out of a yellow cab with I Left My Wallet in El Segundo on my iPod and, well, you can guess what I left lying on the back seat.

After the incident in New Jersey wherein some charming gentlemen requested I hand over my wallet and I chose to refuse their kind offer, I stopped and considered what the loss of my wallet would have meant to me. And so, when I got home, I removed from there the handful of pictures and sentimental notes that I’ve stored in wallets since around age 15, adding and subtracting over the years as my affections varied; and I also removed a few backup cards too. As such, I’ve spent the last year without the ability to open my wallet on a whim and see the imperative “smile” scrawled on a scrap of paper or pictures of loved ones, but losing my wallet was really no great loss or hassle.

After my calls to 311‘s Lost Property Line proved fruitless (happy hint kids: remember to get the medallion number of your cabs), I wondered how realistic my hopes of getting my wallet back really were, and it turns out I’m not the first person to come up with this question.

The Reader’s Digest performed a worldwide study, dropping 1,100 wallets in the interest of science. Inexplicably they failed to include New York in their target set of cities, but the US fared well at 67% of wallets returned. Cardiff’s performance, 4 out of 10 wallets returned, puts Wales near the bottom of the map, but in defence of those 6 lucky souls who profited from science, they probably thought the wallets belonged to an Englishman.

Students at Barnard tried a similar experiment dropping wallets in every neighbourhood of New York City. They were somewhat foiled by the population density of the city, often having people chase them down to return the wallets immediately, and claim that only 2% of wallets were clearly stolen (although 13% were left unnoticed). Heartwarming, but I do slightly wonder if their choice of neighbourhoods was as diverse as they imply. That said, a separate ‘sting’ study by ABC News, hoping to generate a juicy story, wherein wallets were handed to LAPD and NYC cops to see if they’d be turned in untouched showed a 100% integrity rate too, so maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on the Barnard students’ results.

Back in the UK, CPP ranks Cardiff a little higher in their experiment with over 200 dropped wallets, with their study placing my University city of Birmingham bottom of the barrel. They dampened my hopes even further though, suggesting that locale played a significant impact in the matter, with no wallets whatsoever being returned from public transport, compared to a whopping 47% coming back from museums and 33% from shopping centres.

Finally, Prof. Richard Wiseman (who has a fantastically interesting set of publications) dropped 240 wallets – albeit, cashless ones – as part of a more focused experiment into how the contents of wallets affect the likelihood they’ll be returned. For the record, the best headline on this popular-in-2009 story was “Scientist Finally Discovers A Use For Babies”.

Maybe I should have left those sentimental photos in there after all.

Xx

We need to change the way we’re thinking. We can’t just accept gun crime as a normal way of life. We can’t just walk on by when we see folks in the streets waving guns around…

When I say ‘Peace Up’ you say ‘Guns Down’
Peace Up!
GUNS DOWN
Peace Up!
GUNS DOWN
Peace Up!
GUNS DOWN

[man fuck this po-lice propaganda]

Welcome to Brownsville.

Back in early 2000, I was at the tender age of 14 years old, and living in the smaller bedroom back home, desperately waiting for my brother to head off to university later that year so that I could move on up to the big room which the windows that opened out onto the extension roof, where I could get up to all sorts of trouble with friends and girlfriends. Before he left, however, my brother was helping to develop my tastes in music, and my teenage feelings of rebellion, by introducing me to gangsta rap: Dr. Dre, N.W.A., Public Enemy and, fresh off the presses, M.O.P. with their new album Warriorz, featuring the chart hit Ante Up.

I probably missed a few of the less overt sexual references in the lyrics, and only had vague ideas about the drug & gang culture being glorified, but I knew all the words to pretty much every track on that album, and it featured pretty strongly in the soundtrack to my teenage daydreams. Particularly memorable was the ultimately catchy start of this verse:

Brownsville, home of the brave
Put in work in the street like a slave
Keep rugged dress code
Always in this stress mode
(That shit will send you to your grave) So?
You think I don’t know that? (BLOW!)
Nigga hold that! (BLOW!) Nigga hold that! (BLOW!) Nigga hold that!
From the street cousin, you know the drill
I’m 900 and 99 thou short of a mill

Chorus:
Ante Up! Yap that fool!
Ante Up! Kidnap that fool!
…

Back then, I had absolutely no idea where Brownsville was, and didn’t really think about it too hard. Last week, however, when I heard about a free Public Enemy and Salt ‘n’ Pepa concert being held in a New York City park, I came across the name once again. Public Enemy, of course, aren’t exactly suited to Central Park’s Summer Series, where the likes of Jason Mraz serenade picnickers, and their concert was in a less gentrified neighbourhood, between Crown Heights and Brownsville. I hadn’t had cause to visit the neighbourhood before, but I wasn’t going to led a less-than-perfect reputation and my colleagues’ protests based on the NYC Murder Map get in the way of my seeing Chuck D, Flava Flav et. al.

Since the end of the crack epidemic, and the zero-tolerance measures set in place by Mayor Giuliani, NYC is a hell of a lot safer than it used to be. This wasn’t popular with M.O.P., but it means I was pretty surprised to hear five separate speeches like the one that started this post, throughout the course of the night, by community activists encouraging the crowd to stop gun crime. The recent shootings mentioned were indeed true, and most of the crowd seemed behind the speakers, but there was a decent portion that seemed to think of these messages as NYPD-inspired propaganda designed to legitimise the stop-and-frisk trend they riled against.

Fuck fam,
With the army I got behind me,
I’ll fuck up a whole city just like Rudy Giuliani
~ Mark Ronson feat. Mos Def & M.O.P. – On The Run
(Commercial flop, amazing album)

Public Enemy were amazing. The hood was, whilst a bit run-down and rough looking, perfectly safe, even at night when I walked back from the show. I wasn’t the only white person there (I saw at least 20) and I wasn’t even the whitest person there – that award goes to the girl to my left who was so full of enthusiasm she had no room left for any sense of rhythm. My knowledge of old-school hip-hop, gained when I started looking into the infinitely better music that inspired and developed alongside the music of the gansgta rap my 14-year-old self loved so much, was more than enough to understand and enjoy the entire show, and I’m probably going back for more shows down here later on.

In the meantime, M.O.P. and N.W.A. are back onto my iPod and whilst they’re on, I’ve ceased smiling at tourists as I walk on by.

Xx

High on the my list of reasons for moving to New York, back when I was pretending to make a logical and well-reasoned choice between here and Singapore for my brief 6-month trip away from the UK, was that New York has a fantastic music scene and, being a musician (of sorts), that was somewhere I wanted to be. I haven’t actually seriously played music since moving here, although I’ve improved a lot on the piano and, more recently, the berimbau, but I have experienced a whole range of eclectic and brilliant music, nearly always unexpectedly or at the last minute.

In this vein, I got a message one morning asking if I’d like to join some friends to go and see Kishi Bashi. I only vaguely recognised the name, but a quick trip to the Internet reminded me that this was the solo project of Jupiter One, Of Montreal and Regina Spektor violinist, K Ishibashi. I’m never going to miss the opportunity to see a virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist on their first solo tour so along I went.

It was perfect. There was the obligatory brief theme from a Bach piece that no serious musician could do without. He alternated between violin, beatboxing, singing and the occasional collaboration with a banjo-playing friend. Together they took shoegaze to a new level by, at one point, actually both putting their instruments down and kneeling to play with the fantastic array of pedals lining the stage to produce an out-of-this-world soundscape.

I often neglect to report back on the music I see in NYC nowadays, forgetting how special it is that I can see artists of this quality on a whim, and offering no more than a mention in casual conversation or a tweet. Sometimes what was once novel and thrilling becomes everyday, but that’s not to say it loses its appeal, or that my enjoyment is lessened in any way by this. Some people say that you can’t truly appreciate something until it’s gone: to that I disagree, it just takes some active thought to be grateful for what you actually have.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go buy a loop pedal and get my fretless bass out of the corner where it’s rested untouched for a few months.

Xx

In 1908, Israel Zangwill popularised yet another new nickname for the greatest city on Earth, adapting Romeo & Juliet to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wherein an immigrant Russian Jew hopelessly falls in love with an immigrant Russian Christian. His play was The Melting Pot and the description is just as true today as it was back then.

Whilst nearly all of America is, to take my usual antagonistically imperialist approach, a fairly recent immigrant community, the majority of the USA has settled on a national identity, but with 60% of the population of New York composed of immigrants and children thereof, it’s only natural that New York is constantly evolving and changing its identity.

The neighbourhoods are still, to a degree, segregated here (the academic term, I have learned, is ethnic enclaves), which helps to preserve immigrants’ national identities. Sometimes, this can be stifling and prevent any mixing, such as the large areas within Queens where up to 20% of the populace speaks either very little, or no English whatsoever, and so mixes with few very people outside of its enclave. Often, however, these areas become destinations where other New Yorkers come to enjoy the culture, the food (oh the food) and everything else that there is to offer. The real smelting, however, comes at work and at play, where all segregation can be dropped and internationalisation reigns supreme.

Of my friends in New York, I count people born in over 24 different countries (just like me), from El Salvador and Columbia, to New Zealand and South Africa, a number of Russians and Eastern Europeans and more than a handful of Asian and African nations too. Of the rest, a disproportionately large percentage were born in New Jersey, but there’s still about 20 other states represented. If we take this one step further, counting parents’ nationalities as opposed to just birth locations, I can probably populate a fairly comprehensive map of the world with people I’ve met in the last two years. A census of New York in 2000 stated that over 36% of New Yorkers were foreign born, but illegal immigration and a disinclination to answer censuses in poor communities probably tips this number even higher again.

As the above shows, this segregation can often lead to localised homogeneity in ethnicity, and so a casual observer walking through any single neighbourhood may not quite appreciate New York’s ethnic diversity. They might, instead, be forgiven for thinking that The Melting Pot is simply a description of summer in New York, where we’ve had weeks of temperatures getting close to, or over, 100°F (37.78°C, 310.93K) and where walking for more than 15 minutes at a time without a towel and change of clothes is deemed extremely unwise.

It was at a traditional Independence Day party with a BBQ and party on my Spanish (sorry, Basque) friend’s rooftop, that these two definitions came together for me recently. I sat, with people from all over the world, drinking American beer, and sharing with them one of my culture’s most treasured traditions: complaining about the weather.

Honestly though? I love it. I’d rather be wet from excessive heat than endless drizzle any time of year.

Xx