I wanna be a part of it

Something about New York sets my heart a-flutter like nowhere else on earth. It could be the sheer number of people, the way that you have to keep moving or get swept under in the torrential pedestrian traffic. It could be the communities of every stripe crammed into every nook and cranny of the city. It could be that allure of raw power - that a handful of skyscrapers in the downtown area can make or break entire economies. It could simply be Central Park, or how art sits hand in glove with ordinary everyday life. It could be a million things. And it probably is.

New York breathes ambition. I’m not talking about the grasping, backstabbing ambition, that ugly kind that comes from greed and fear (although I know that’s here in spades). I’m talking ambition that comes from people wanting to “better themselves”, to follow their dreams, to think big and see it through. And that buzz that comes from putting all these people together.

But I don’t know if that’s just me projecting. New York is so ingrained into my cultural subconscious that I’m not sure where my imagination ends and reality begins.

Manhattan is also a temple of consumerism. Women skitter around in must-have heels made famous by gratuitous references in Sex And The City. Abercrombie and Fitch employ identical baby-faced male models to hold the doors open at their Fifth Avenue store. In this megacity of 12 million consumers, it’s a matter of survival to express your personality through the stuff you have.

I get the feeling that if it were allowed, advertising would expand to cover every spare bit of space. And it isn’t like the Henty Field Day ads on rural Victorian TV, constructed using little more than photos of tractors, a $50 budget and a creative application of Microsoft Powerpoint. It’s the frighteningly clever stuff that’s been focus-grouped to death and hints at a multi-million dollar budget behind the glossy and uncomplicated final product.

It’s designed to hook the professional earners with too little time and too much money. And it gets you down. On one train carriage I counted three ads that used the concept of “happiness” (and your desperate lack of it) to flog nighttime philosophy classes, long-term storage and (of course) whiter teeth.

My cousin, an Australian engineering graduate, has been living and working in New York for a year. During that time he’s swung from loving it to hating it and is now languishing somewhere between apathy and affection. He’s not quite sure how he ended up here - sharing his Greenwich Village apartment complex with celebrities, watching hard-won deals collapse during the financial crisis, working punishing hours week after week. I think he misses Australia’s somewhat slower pace, where the stakes aren’t as high and the games aren’t as crafty.

Last Friday was Grand Final Night, and we did what thousands of expats the world over do – go to a bar with hundreds of other expats, drink excessively, swear filthily and generally get their Aussie on.

Back home the importance of football was lost on me. The strongest allegiance I can claim is a disposition towards Geelong, inherited from my grandma. But Friday night was no night for fence-sitters.

The crowd, mostly St Kilda supporters, erupted at every goal and groaned at every point. The game was streamed over the internet and very poor quality: slow, pixilated and occasionally interrupted by Skype messages (such as “Oh hey boss! I didn’t know you were still up”). The fare was meat pies and slabs of Coopers Pale. The uniform was distinctly Australian: shorts, printed art t-shirts and thongs for men; long straight hair and denim skirts for women; and team colours everywhere.

And after it was all over and final insults exchanged with the screen, we went home and ate vegemite on toast, and then went to sleep just as the sun was rising. It was a surreal cultural experience; a preparatory taste-test three weeks out from my return home.

“Cheap”, or even better, “Free” have been my key words. So I got my jollies from walking a lot. In Brooklyn I saw a free production of The Tempest against the backdrop of decrepit Coney Island theme parks and the beach that European explorers landed on 400 years ago this year. It was Yom Kippur and there were Orthodox Jews reading their prayers out to sea and families dressed going out to dinner to celebrate. We caught the Museum of Modern Art’s Free Friday and jostled for space with the thousands of others.

I watched the Masters of the Universe on their lunch breaks at Wall Street, where things seem noticeably more subdued than they were in 2007. Counted the number of romantic dates underway in the rowboats in the Central Park lakes. Took the Staten Island Ferry to get out on the water and came straight back once I’d got there (I’d made the mistake before of thinking there was something on Staten Island worth knowing about). Caught up with Kate and her family for the third time and third location in a month, and said our final final goodbyes.

Everywhere I went in New York – and throughout the entire States – I saw people’s names attached to things. Private donations seem to make the world go round. The wildlife exhibits in the Natural History Museum are adorned with bronze plaques bearing the name of the patron in a font just as large as the name of the actual animal. The UC Berkeley campus is covered with sentimental, cringeworthy posters designed to get wealthy alumni reaching for their wallets.

Giving is next to godliness, and the virtue of the benefactor is celebrated loudly. It seems to me that this type of thing would never fly in Australia, since a) governments are expected to pay for projects in the public good; b) private donations often signal private interests, with strings attached; and c) this type of recognition would be seen as self-aggrandising ego-stroking and would be torn apart.

But perhaps this culture is worth cultivating. The USA has some incredibly cool shit because of it. Readers? Instead of celebrating great people by naming freeways after them, should we be celebrating the millionaires whose generosity got it made?

So I am leaving North America behind after nine hectic weeks. It’s been epic and amazing, rocky and blissfully calm, like it is now. Thanks to the generosity of family, friends and complete strangers, I’ve only paid for about a week’s worth of accommodation. I’ve got a glimpse at the trends Australia will be infatuated with in a year’s time, such as FREE wireless everywhere - in cafes, laundromats and chinese restaurants. And the rise to fame of the space-age Kindle, the electronic book from Amazon.

My love and hate relationship with the USA continues, but despite our differences our partings are always sad.

Next stop – Greece. Then Berlin. Then home. Two weeks left of Eliza Goes To Germany. Requests, faithful followers?

West coast dreaming

I was certainly lucky to land in Berkeley. It’s one of those towns that revolve around the university. The radical edge that made it famous worldwide in the 60’s is still around. There are hundreds of students shamelessly wearing the blue-and-gold merchandise and there are spooky restricted-access buildings high up on the hills where the secret experiments are carried out. But there is something young and electric and slightly wild in the air. I’ve spent the last two weeks of lovely Californian weather with no plans and time in plentiful supply.

Leah is currently living at the Cloyne Court co-op. Co-operatives are a type of student accommodation that sit shoulder-to-shoulder to the Berkeley fraternities and sororities in the hills behind the campus. But that’s where the similarities end. Co-ops are student run and student owned and there are as few rules as possible. Through buying food in bulk, sharing rooms and weekly work shift for cooking, cleaning and other essentials, they’re hands-down the most affordable way of living. They’re not exclusive and will take anyone without demanding initiation rituals or family connections. But they end up attracting easygoing, open-minded kids who are as fiercely dedicated to partying as they are to studying.

The freedom that co-op living brings can be seen everywhere. There are giant art murals and literate graffiti on every wall. The open kitchen is buzzing at every hour of day and night. When dinner is served, there is no such thing as queuing, only a survival-of-the-fittest type rush with 150 kids elbowing to get a serve.

There are band nights, hula-hooping in the courtyard, drinking and dancing on the tables and bongs made from plastic flamingos and didgeridoos. There are also naked pizza parties, watching sunsets from the roof, flea outbreaks, broken crockery in the bathrooms and lots of happy hooking up. Leah reckons co-op living is the answer to Australia’s student housing situation. I think she’s right.

The other half of my time in California I spent on Frances’ couch in Oakland. I met Frances when I was a fresh-faced exchange student in Sweden in 2006. Only days after returning to Australia, I’d bought a ticket out of there, this time to the States. Exactly two years ago, my friend Nikki and myself spent three glorious weeks on the Cali coast.  2009 was the sequel.

And it was a blockbuster. We spent our time together raiding Berkeley’s thrift stores, eating Nikki’s baked goods, scoring free coffees from Frances’ work and drinking at student-discount prices. We occasionally took the train across to San Francisco for photo shoots, glitzy late-night museum visits and high-octane tourizm at Alcatraz. But all good things must come to an end. Nikki left for a conference in Niagara Falls and Frances has flown to Las Vegas to see Britney Spears with a hand-made “Toxic” costume in her carry-on.

And I have left the East Coast with a thwarted vegetarian burrito addiction, a worrying dependence on Mad Men and my heart in my mouth. I’m writing on the downward descent into La Guardia Airport, New York. My goodbye hangover has finally slithered off and I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. 

I’ve waited two sweaty-palmed years to get back to New York. It’s a cliché, but it feels like the centre of the world – like everything is happening here all the time and anything is possible. I can’t wait to get outside and see what will slap me upside the head today.

Afterglow

Now that I’m here, let’s get down to business...

Myself and my travel companions drove from Vancouver to Nevada in Betsy, a massive van masquerading as a colourful moving mural. Betsy looks like she’s straight from Woodstock and, we were convinced, a moving target for the US Border Security, especially when driven by Yossi, its dreadlocked owner. Yossi spent the last few hours before our departure Spray-And-Wiping the interior clean after hearing news that the border guards had sent another Burner packing after discovering smoke residue on her vehicle’s windows.

Despite being completely clean and technically having nothing to worry about, we’d heard about the border guard’s capriciousness and so it was a tense crawl up to the boom gates. Marti had told us that they had high-tech surveillance that could pick up conversations from miles away, so we stayed suspiciously quiet. The border guard asked the driver whether he’d ever smoked weed, and after he was answered in the negative asked sarcastically whether the driver knew what weed was. But within moments our passports were back in our sweaty hands, the guard had bid us farewell and we were free and clear into the USA.

My fellow road-trippers were a group of Kate’s friends – a friendly bunch of self-proclaimed hippies. Despite their easygoingness and positive vibe, for the first half of our road trip I was squirming in my seat as the conversation flowed from personal contact with extra-terrestrials to shared consciousness to the benefits of crystals to theta meditation (which, I scoffed to myself, was a trumped-up version of Socratic questioning at $50 a session). But as the hours ticked by and as I bit my tongue on another logical debunkment, I started to question why I was so stand-offish to these ideas I’d never heard of and why I was refusing point-blank to understand them.

I hate to use my formal education as my whipping boy, but more and more I’m seeing how it’s shaped me. Studying law makes you a sceptic. You crave logic, demand proof, destroy arguments and dismiss concepts that you think don’t stand up to criticism as half-baked fuzzy thinking. It makes you a finely-tuned adversarial machine, but it also closes your mind and can make you a righteous little shit. I realised that if I was going to get to Burning Man and get through Burning Man, I would have to leave my prejudices behind. So I did. And it was so easy.

Burning Man is impossible to explain without using a mass of seemingly contradictory and hopelessly inadequate descriptions. It’s a hedonistic visual and aural extravaganza in one of the harshest environments on earth. It’s radical self-reliance within a generous and selfless community. It’s both art expo and orgy, yoga summit and dance festival.

It’s summed up by the experience of standing alone in the centre of the city in the hours before dawn, in the middle of a kilometre-wide empty space called the playa. In the distance there is wall after wall of sound and light and humanity, but where you are is the quietest, darkest and most solitary place on earth. If you go looking for something at Burning Man, you’ll find it.

The physical side of Burning Man is what most people baulk at. Every day is a battle against dehydration – you have to drink at least a gallon to keep the hallucinations at bay. While portaloos are plentiful, there are no showers – you either bring your own or, like myself, you do without for a week (beating all personal records, thank you, thank you). Dust storms strike frequently and fiercely, gritting up your eyes and ears and depositing a fine layer of dust throughout your respiratory system. The alkali ground causes a condition called “playa foot” where the feet get painful cracks and can only be prevented through daily bathings in vinegar and liberal use of moisturiser. But within a couple of days it becomes normal, and you get down to the more important business of living.

The beauty of Burning Man is that it’s user-produced, a kind of Life 2.0. The residents are also the artists, the performers and the gurus. Integral to this is the idea of a gift culture - that everyone comes to Burning Man with something to contribute. Apart from ice and coffee, nothing can be bought or sold. Despite this, there’s hundreds of bars, restaurants, clothing depots, massage therapists and bicycle repair shops operating out of tents, running on nothing but generosity. When you head out to party at night, all you need is a warm jacket and a cup.

But my favourite part of the festival was the people I met and the connections I made with them. Recently, the process of meeting people has made me weary. I’m sick of small talk, of having shallow, seemingly pointless conversations with people who will leave my life for good tomorrow. But, as Leah pointed out to me during a particularly eye-opening night, the content is up to me. So I started asking questions that I really wanted answers to. And I got answers I’d never dreamed of. People were so open, so willing to discuss deeper issues, so generous with their views and so accepting of mine. I think it’s ruined me for the world of employment-based networking, but I don’t really care.

Nakedness has featured prominently and exponentially since my last post. The first thing Kate and I did in Vancouver was go to Wreck Beach to drink beer, catch up and get naked together for the first time in our six-year friendship. At Burning Man clothing is optional and in the desert heat, honestly a bit of a burden. No-one stares and no-one cares. One of my favourite parts of the week was CRITICAL TITS, a 3,000-women strong topless bike rally through the festival in celebration of empowerment and beauty, ending in an all-female dance party with women hugging each other, laughing and screaming “WE LOVE OUR BODIES!”

On the way home we took the joys of skinny-dipping to blissful new heights at the Harbin Hot Springs, spending an entire day hopping in and out of hot and cold pools, lolling around in the sun, making friends with the regulars and enjoying having dust-free skin for the first time in a week.

I know there’s a time and a place but, you know, I reckon there should be more times and places. It’s not just how free it feels, it’s also the education you get from realising that nudity is separate from sexuality, seeing that everyone looks different, hardly anyone looks like a porn star or underwear model, and that everyone is beautiful.

The Burning Man ole timers (“Lifers”) nod sagely when you explain that you’re a “virgin”, and inform you that your life will never be the same. People have moved cities, quit jobs, ended relationships and changed their beliefs after their first time. It was definitely an epic experience for me and probably the best decision I’ve made all year. I hope that I can hold onto this feeling as I adjust to the “default world” which is significantly less colourful. But I’ve landed Berkeley, California, one of my favourite places in the States, and I think my chances are pretty good.