Christmas Season

North America has an unwritten rule: Christmas season does not officially start until the day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday. Europe does not have such a clear starting shot, sometimes you already can smell Christmas even as early as late September.

We were in New York City the day after Thanksgiving last year. Having not really got over the jet-lag yet, we woke up really early and started wandering around the city at a time were really few people were in the streets, what sometimes was kind of spooky.

We went into Kossar's Bialys on Grand Street, in the Lower East Side. There, sipping coffee and eating an excellent bagel in the kind of environment that could not be farther from the magenta armchairs of a well-known coffee franchise but that, honestly, is exactly what makes New York interesting, exciting and worth living in, we watched the city wake up to the sound of the first Christmas song.

Manhattanhenge

Summer solstice sunrise over Stonehenge
(photograph Andrew Dunn, 21 June 2005)

Twice a year the rays of the setting sun align perfectly with the east-west direction of the main street grid in Manhattan. This beautiful phenomenon was aptly called Manhattanhenge, in reference to the alignment of the sun on summer solstice over Stonehenge, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Today the second 2010 Manhattanhenge is due to happen. You can check out some photographs on flickr.

Maybe someday I'll be able to post my own...

Pennsylvania

In November last year we were walking along West 34th Street in Manhattan, minutes after making our second contribution to the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple. It was on Thanksgiving Day and streets and avenues were still closed to traffic because of the Macy's Day Parade. The view was certainly unusual: pedestrians reclaiming the space that belongs exclusively to motorists all year round.



On arriving to 7th Avenue I looked downtown and saw four US flags back-lit by the sun and, not thinking it twice, I decided to shoot the first picture with the new 50mm lens (new for the third time, by the way...). I like this picture because the relatively dark background lets the flags stand out. A similar effect can be seen in the forest, when the sun creates the illusion that tree leaves possess their own light.



As you can see, those four flags belong to the Hotel Pennsylvania. Months after taking the picture I learned that, without knowing it, I took a picture of one of the many anonymous monuments populating New York City.

The Hotel Pennsylvania main dining room, the Café Rouge, witnessed numerous performances of the most famous big bands of the 40s and 50s, like the Dorsey Brothers, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Hotel Pennsylvania also claims to have the phone number in longest continuous use in New York: +1 (212) 736-5000. Dialling from the City it would be just 736-5000, and using the usual North American letter code from rotary dial phones, 7 corresponds to P and 3 to E, so it would be PE-6-5000, for PEnnsylvania-6-5000. Which was exactly where Finegan, Grey and Sigman took their inspiration from for the famous song popularized by the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller.



I recently read that the Hotel Pennsylvania is threatened by demolition: its current owners, real estate company Vornado, want to replace the 22-story hotel with a 67-story office tower. It is clear that in Midtown Manhattan even monuments are not safe from the real estate voracity...

New York Impressions

3rd Ave


J Train on Williamsburg Bridge


Hotel Pennsylvania


Reclaim the streets


Chrysler


Joy


Rock Atlas


Domino sugar


Tim Burton

16th St and 3rd Ave

Sorry for the inactivity, we got a very important appointment... ;)

Christmas Tree

Brenda Lee - Rockin' around the christmas tree

Macy's Day Parade

Green Day - Macy's Day Parade

Chess Autumn (*)

By 1959 New Yorker saxophonist Sonny Rollins, frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations, took what would become the first and most famous of his musical sabbaticals, in order to improve his technique.

During this period Rollins, a resident from Manhattan's Lower East Side, would go to the nearby Williamsburg Bridge, in order to spare a young pregnant neighbour of his the sound of his practice routine.

His comeback album, published three years later, was named "The Bridge". The mythical sight of a lonely saxophone player on a bridge, playing by himself, his dark silhouette over the Moon, is Rollins's.


Sonny Rollins - Without a song, from the album "The Bridge"

Tonight we've been lucky enough to listen to Sonny Rollins live. He has been welcomed by standing ovations even before saying a single word. At 79, the elderly man standing on stage, looking frail and walking with a stoop, has just needed to take his tenor saxophone in his gigantic hands and got two notes from it to make clear that we were in front of a true jazz legend. An experience that will be surely hard to forget.

^(*) At least, that's what I understood on my first Autumn living in Salzburg. Someone told me about this great "Chess Herbst" festival, which should be worth attending to. At first I imagined people playing chess all over town. It took me some minutes to realise I was being confronted with the native pronunciation for the word jazz. German speakers tend to close a too much (they don't know about the schwa and the very subtle nuances of neutral vowels) and do not seem to be able to distinguish between the sounds /dʒ/ (as in job or jazz) and /tʃ/ (as in chop or chess).

Mannahatta

On 11th September 1609, British explorer Henry Hudson, under patronage of the Dutch East India Company, set off the Atlantic coast of North America on board of the Halve Maen (half moon) to explore a promising estuary, thinking it might lead to the much desired Northwest Passage to India. Crossing The Narrows, he soon reached the southern tip of an island that was called to become the center of the world. It was called Mannahatta, "land of many hills", by the Lenape people who lived there.



Now, 400 years later, we have the opportunity to see this island through the eyes of Henry Hudson. The Mannahatta Project makes it possible.

Missing you...

Since I went away I have been missing you. Strange, isn't it? Before meeting you I expected I would like you a lot, but I could not advance that I would be attracted to you so bad that I would want for you from the distance.

Lately the wish that has been there all these months is changing to a biting yearning to which I do not seem to find a remedy.



Damn you, dumb American TV series!

Gotham impressions

It is said that as in New York it is 3 in the afternoon in Europe it is 9 PM of ten years before.

In spite of its relatively short history as a city (the Dutch founded New Amsterdam on Manhattan's southernmost tip in 1624), you get the feeling you find yourself right in the middle of a place where big things happened and continue to happen. As if the History, to compensate for a late start, raced by at vertiginous speeds.



That's maybe the reason why New Yorkers live fast: people talk fast, people eat fast, cabs drive fast, pedestrians walk fast, people laugh fast and, I guess, they dream fast. Or maybe it is the other way around, and it is precisely them who accelerate the Big Clock's pace with their uncorrectable crossing in red and their never ending horn symphonies.





New York City has a soul, even though the multiple and surprisingly contradictory identities she possesses, turning one into the other as you walk few steps, even as you cross to the other side of the street. This is nothing new, though. Visitors to the seventeenth century Dutch settlement marveled that eighteen separate languages were spoken on its streets at a time when its total population was below one thousand. But New York City has a young and strong soul. You just need to stand in the middle of the street, in the middle of the roar, to feel its powerful beat below your feet.




New York City conveys a strange feeling of familiarity in all her faces, in all her images. No matter where you look at, a known icon will impress your retina, the frame of that one movie, a picture that maybe never existed, but which was long ago digested by the collective subconscious after decades of audiovisual exports.




As you walk out the door, you face the most difficult decision of the day: should we turn to the left (to the south, downtown) or to the right (to the north, uptown)? But in fact it's the same, because this city is great in all directions.



It is said that comic editors gave instructions to new illustrators and writers to help them with the locations for their stories. Metropolis, Superman's city, is Manhattan's Midtown on a sunny day at noon. Gotham, Batman's city, is Downtown Manhattan on a rainy night. And Harlem is Harlem, of course. We could walk around Metropolis to exhaustion. But unfortunately we did not get the chance to see Gotham. The only time it rained we were in Harlem.

The City (with a capital C)

We've just come back from the City with a capital C, the city that all the other cities wish they were.

In his Historias de Nueva York (New York Stories), Enric González tells that, in order to survive in The Big Apple, you need to have good luck.

As we arrived to the apartment we had this last week, the owner, Chris (who, incidentally, could perfectly appear in a Paul Auster novel) wished us Good luck!

And it was in that same moment that I knew, although I did not dare saying it loud, that everything would be perfect, and that we were going to miss that city as soon as we take the train to the airport. And so it has been.



I have not been able to sleep for 28 hours now. Clearly, sleeping in planes is not my thing. I hope tomorrow I am some more of a person and tell something more. Until then, good luck!