I’ve been here now a bit over two weeks and thus far it has been a bit of a blast. My fellow interns are generally a fairly sociable bunch so I have been kept occupied by late night trips to the lower east side, karaoke in the Upper East Side and various jaunts around midtown Manhattan. Previously, I was living in a bizarre German catholic male guest house, but I have now moved to an apartment on East 37th street in an area coincidentally called Murray Hill. That’s right; I’m king of the hill.
I’m going to miss the two old guys that used to dish out the meals at the German guesthouse. Despite their somewhat sour demeanor, they were quite amusing. I have no idea what their names were, but fellow resident Ben and myself dubbed them Basil and Manuel after the characters from Fawlty Towers.
“What’s the matter? You no eat eggs, eggs are your balls, they make you grow big balls, you don’t eat eggs, you no have balls!” – Words allegedly spoken by Basil Fawlty to a guest.
However, I can now walk to work without the bother of the subway, which is super handy. That’s pretty radical.
Bob Dylan and the Kids
On the weekend I visited the Brooklyn museum to check out the excellent “Who Shot Rock and Roll” exhibition. It was an exhibition which celebrated over 50 years of music photography and it was pretty darn good. Highlights include an awesome black and white shot of Pavement playing at the Reading festival in the 90s, a great Bob Dylan shot (shown above), a great shot of Paul McCartney in a car looking back through the rear view mirror (taken by Linda McCartney), as well as the classic Paul Simonon bass-smashing photo taken by Pennie Smith, often judged the greatest rock’n’roll photo of all time. Australia was even represented there, with a video installation of the Vines clip “Outtathaway” playing on loop (surely, they could have picked a better song/clip though!).
Arlene’s Grocery
Last night, I took up the opportunity of heading to Arlene’s Grocery – a bar on the lower east side famous for its live music. From the outside, it looks just like the name suggests – a grocery shop. Monday night means rock’n’roll karaoke, with punters getting up from the crowd and playing songs with a live band. The place was absolutely jammed and some crazy characters got up to sing some songs rarely heard at traditional karaoke. There was people doing Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and AC/DC. The best of the night was some dude getting up to sing thrash metal classic “Seek and Destroy” by Metallica. The band ripped this version out even including Hammett’s epic solo. I never expected to see that one played!
Anyway, I’m in my third week here and it is going pretty well. More to come.
By the way, I was saddened to hear that god-damned phony J.D Salinger died last week. I haven’t really being paying attention to the news, so this managed to pass me by.
The UN Security Council and Holocaust Memorial
The UN Security Council
I visited the UN Security Council about two weeks ago. Here is an article I wrote on the experience for the intern newsletter.
I couldn’t stay for the entire debate, but you could see that Israel was in for a bad day. Apart from the US, all other nations condoned Israel’s behaviour. While I don’t condone violence of any kind including the Hamas rocket attacks, but what Israel are doing – namely the expansion of settlements – is not constructive. The rest of the world can see that but not many seem interested in helping the Palestinians people.
The UN issued a press release that includes information concerning the entire breadth of the debate which you can read by clicking here.
I also attended the UN’s Holocaust Memorial Ceremony held in the General Assembly that same night. I have to say, I was disappointed. While the music was quite good, the speeches were sloppy. The keynote speaker seemed a charming old lady and had some interesting stories, but rambled on a bit more than was necessary.
One speech by the Israeli minister for Information Yuli Edelstein could only be described as outright propaganda. He did not really talk on the Holocaust at all, instead gave a demagogic lecture about the right of Israel to exist and the threat of Iran’s (conveniently forgetting Israel’s own alleged nuclear arsenal), glossing over anything that actually had anything to do with ‘remembering the holocaust’. You can tell by his previous press statements, that there wasn’t much hope for the exercise of rationalism.
While I don’t disagree with Israel’s right to exist, nor disagree with their right to be suspicious of Iran, the whole manner in which Edelstein preached to the crowd, taken in context with the current plight of Palestinian, left a bad taste in my mouth. I cannot support the utilisation of human tragedy as contemporary political currency. Simply put, it wasn’t the time or place to talk about such subjects.
There was what seemed like a moving speech from a Sinti representative who talked the 20,000 deaths of the Sinti people during the holocaust, but the sound was so awful that it was really hard to hear.
Still an impressive day – getting to hang in both the Security Council and the General Assembly was pretty special.