Well my kind's your kind: I'll stay the same.

Been thinking about geography recently. Specifically my internal maps, the lines that connect things together. Places mainly, though I know there are lines for memories and people and actions and a great many other variables. I just haven’t been thinking about them quite so much. I’ve had a World War Hulk, the new fresh cartons of Mars Milk, and my daily Facebook status updates to think about too. Between now and Saturday I need to strike a balance between cool figures from mythology – Thor, Herne the Hunter – and ones I can plausibly dress up as – Paul Bunyon…that’s it. (Thanks to my gargantuan idleness it is now about a month since I wrote that, and I can tell you I went as John Mclane, complete with green plastic HK MP5. Not so much myth as legend. Though I kept most of my costume under wraps and my journey to Tower Hill, I still quite enjoyed the reaction my bloodied and sooty face earned me in Hotel bars and on the tube. People gave me a wide berth on Brixton High Street. How long I’ve waited for that, I can’t say.)

(Actually recently I’ve been thinking about something else. I’ve been lost in a strange adventure, but we’ll keep the above as an intro.)

Today at work I’ve been training to do my Boss’ job so she on go on holiday. I did it yesterday and tomorrow…well tomorrow she’s on holiday so it had better have sunk in because I’ve got to do run our section until mid-October. (Is it worth me putting in brackets everything that’s changed? A quantum map? It’s November now. This blog still isn’t done. By the time you do get to read this, she’ll have probably retired.)

Thing is a lot of what I covered is an extension of what I already do. It’s the consequence, or the balance. Only I couldn’t grasp it. Not until the last hour of today. I’ve worked to such a routine, for nearly six months or so, that I couldn’t make a shift into any other pattern. Say I have a job to do where I always uncheck a box, today I was doing things where I leave that box checked, but only for certain circumstances. Whenever I got to this choice I’d just freeze up. I must have looked like John Savage in The Deer Hunter. My cursor would impotently hang over the box, while I tried to deal with my instincts like an Alsatian that just got smacked for something he used to get a chocolate biscuit for. All the while my boss picks at a hangnail; a metronome counting in my mental failure.

I got told at the weekend (uh. I got told in September), while I was explaining to someone what this blog was going to be about, that a friend of mine once got the tube from Charing Cross to Embankment. Not out of laziness. She’d gotten the train into Charing Cross and then looked on the tube map for her next destination.

Unless you know, you don’t know.

It took about twelve painful instances of desk-bound mental paralysis (and some curt interaction wherein I got her to give as much patronizing context to everything I’m supposed to do) for it to click. Really embarrassing stuff, stuff I already knew as a reflex in my own inbox, just not what it meant. As soon as I made the connection between my Boss’ job and mine I could do it. I left my cul-de-sac. I walked to Embankment.

I was at a Wedding on the Saturday just gone (nope. They’ve been back from their three-week honeymoon tour of the US for some time now) and got a lift there by my brother and a lift back by a fellow guest. I can’t drive. I mean I could if Tripods started attacking now and I could get to a working Peugeot 206, but the law would frown on me. I certainly couldn’t reverse park my way out of danger. I’d be blasted to ashes trying to line up the angles of the kerb in my wing-mirror.
Coming back I got dropped off in my old manor. I was meeting a friend for lunch and not really understanding the geography of where I grew up I let my ferry take me past his house and onto the next town where I would wait for him for an hour or so. I know the names of the places, but not how they link up. I’ve never had to; I get the train. The stops are called Bickley, Petts Wood, Bromley South, Beckenham Junction and that’s what those places are when I disembark. I can walk around them a little bit, because I like walking, and so I have little maps that stem out from the stations – but I never bother with street names. It may well be one map and another share a street but I’ve not joined them up, so to get to the next place I’d get back on the train. I don’t know where one is in relation to the other. Motorists link everything up. But I sometimes switch off when I’m with them. They become trains. You stop looking at the journey. You look at a showreel of people and buildings through the window.


I’m better with my childhood hometown itself. I did paper-rounds there and I’ve walked my dog over great chunks of it. But I don’t know the names of the streets. It’s quite sad. The West End I can walk pretty well, but today when someone asked me where BT Tower is, I didn’t know the name of any street that would take you there. I could walk there. In fact I could walk there from where I am right now. It would take me about two and a half hours and my iPod might run out (or indeed get nicked) but it can be done.

Think I have a small excuse in that street signs aren’t on every street corner. They aren’t always easily found. That said, I know plenty of folk who haven’t been coming to London all their life, who can walk a better route to a place than me, and know what the name of the street we take to get there. I still have trouble saying which one is Soho Square which one is Golden. When I used to hit London as a kid and find record shops, I learned only a fixed number of routes. How to get from Charing Cross to Tower Records to Selectadisc. There was one record shop that had a massive pair of legs on the outside. Even now my map of the West End has opened up so that I could, if I wanted to, get from the Hummingbird Bakery to CyberCandy, I can’t fucking remember where that leg-shop is.

Where am I going with this?

I guess I’m just reflecting. Ultimately everything connects. But everyone (perhaps not as bad as me, though some worse) experiences only fractures of that whole. And often the bits are made to exist in isolation because we aren’t privileged enough to discover what connects them.

I now have a map in my head of Manhattan. It’s an incomplete map, and memory is going to shift some of those details about and put sandwich shops much nearer to Central Park than they physically are. But it exists where only an abstract stood before.

I flew Delta from Gatwick (not Heathrow, which is where I would have gone had my flatmate not looked at our tickets and corrected me). They have lemongrass and wasabi scented handsoap on the plane. I ignore the Spider-Man and Shrek threequels inflight and enjoy watching the strange mountain-ranges and faultlines clouds make. I go with the Bourne Ultimatum score, my co-traveller selects Death From Above 1979 . They flash a map of our flight in between the movies and HBO Behind the Scenes. I would have liked to have seen it the full journey as the bits between movies were normally the bits over nothing but ocean. So I flew over St. John’s, not knowing what it was.

Coming in I got stopped by Homeland Security and shut in a waiting room for about 45 minutes without being told why or what for. I have a terrible passport photo – one which every person who had looked at from London to JFK had commented on. “I have never seen such a beard.” “This is photoshop, right?” So I’m guessing I got flagged because of that. Or at random. Who knows? Eventually I was summoned for a short interview. I won’t divulge what I got asked or how I answered because I agree with the principle of that level of security, despite it being an unnerving introduction to the U.S.

The Taxi in from the Brooklyn Coast begins my map of New York, but it’s fuzzy. I just can’t build the same route unless I walk it. You aren’t interacting. You can divorce your eyes totally from your motion and look at distant sights. Still, because our dimwit cabbie gets our destination wrong and we’re both fed up with being in a hot car I get to start on my map soon enough, albeit dragging a giant wheelie suitcase and shouting a bit about how it’s not my fault.

My hotel is not the apartment building from Ghostbusters. But I had to look that up to be sure. It is annexed to a splendid old-school diner called Tick Tock which was one of the few places I went that felt like movie NYC. Cops come in and tuck their hats under their arms and sit down for toasted sandwiches with cole-slaw and a pickle. A party of highschool kids meet up there for a shake and a sundae before going on to a bigger bash, a city boy and his smart casual buddy argue over the film they just saw. On my first day I had a breakfast called the 34th Street Traffic Jam; a feast of 2 potato pancakes, 2 eggs, 2 sausage patties, melted swiss, sour cream and applesauce. I didn’t eat another thing that day, despite walking for roughly 8 of the 10 hours I was out. In the week I was there I enjoyed Tollhouse Cookie pancakes, a mean Rueben, a Monte Cristo, Eggs Benedict and many a tall glass of Egg Cream just at the Tick Tock. It’s on 34th and 8th if you’re ever in town and curious.

I did the Empire State Building my first day there, but strangely being above things isn’t all that good for my internal map. I could see my hotel, and the tops of buildings. Vintage GTA views of taxi taking corners. But my bearings are built at ground level. The fantastic views are still an abstract impression of the city. That’s not to say it isn’t impressive to see a world like that. My balls don’t like heights. Me, I’m unsteady but curious, I have compulsive urges about jumping which I don’t like – yet I still have a look and enjoy the vista. My nads really don’t cope well. They become like fizzing cockers. Defensive bollocks, fortress pant.

Take in a comic shop, where I hand in my bag at the counter and get given a trading card instead of a ticket. P. Craig Russell. I also visit what was advertised as a comic book museum, but wasn’t much more than a gallery. Aside from a video about Windsor McKay, the only interesting thing there was the curator’s indeterminate gender.

Dean and DeLuca next (oh to live local and pick up produce from those sumptuous counters) and then a walk to Ground Zero.

I watched it happen on TV, switching on when I normally wouldn’t have and finding live reports on all channels and looped videos in-between. I phoned my mum and alerted most people I could think of. The collapse happened while I was getting ready to go to work.
Regardless of seeing all of this, the event has always been an abstract. I can’t quite quantify what happened. The numbers, the loss, the space. So going to the construction site was a way of me filling in some of the blanks. A new map. It goes without saying that the height and full extent of destruction is still lost on me, but the width, the space on ground level is sobering enough. It looks as big as my old campus, it looks like more than the distance from my flat to the nearest Nandos. Trying to multiply that space upwards is as close as I’ll get to comprehending just the physical reality of the Twin Towers.

From there to Battery Park and on to Pier 14, just south of Brooklyn Bridge. I see The Battles perform a small warm up for a festival that night, a neat little coincidence as there aren’t many new albums I’d bought so far this year, but theirs was one of them.

City Hall and the County and NYC Courthouses are no longer old buildings where movies often end up. They’re old buildings a short walk away from Chinatown. Though if you’re Bruce Willis and Mos Def, perhaps not short enough (even though I think most of 15 Blocks was shot in Vancouver).

Even this first day isn’t enough to give me anything like a working map of Manhattan. I do find out what a useful route Broadway is. It’s a good measure of location and distance. It’s long, and when you’ve trod the length of it you respect the North to south of Manhattan. And it’s good in that it cuts a diagonal rather than the parallels of 1st, 5th, Park, Madison and all their brothers. So it’s useful for intersecting, and knowing where to turn off for things. I’m grateful for the easily identifiable compass to the island. Financial District to the South, Central Park to the North, Hudson to the West, and the East River to the right.

Over the next few days we piece together easier routes. I start to work out how to get to and from places without consulting a map – Bryant Park, which might be my favourite spot in NYC, the Strand Bookshop and Dylan’s Candy Bar (Frozen Hot Chocolate, Manhattan MILFs). I still fuck up. Because the maps in my guidebook are spread over several chapters, I sometimes miss how they link up. I end up at the Holland Tunnel because I think I’ve joined Canal Street much further back. I could have just crossed the street into Little Italy and spared myself skin cancer and par-broiling my medulla oblongata on what was a ridiculously hot Die Hard with a Vengeance day in the city.

We get lost in Central Park, which is slightly more understandable. This time I wasn’t navigating, and there aren’t too many landmarks – there are wooded spots where you can’t even see the sky-scrapers. You could be in High Elms were it not for the nice weather and accents. But over three visits we get to see the Reservoir (lapped 3 times by a machine of a man. His back had more rounded stretches of muscle than a Frank Frazetta painting) soft-ball games and a small castle. Plus a wealth of dogs and wealth. You can see Zuul’s apartment from here.

I didn’t actually find as many movie locations as I’d planned. I wanted to find the view of Manhattan Bridge that can be found on the poster for Once Upon a Time in America. Any time I was around the New York Public Library (which was a fair bit as it was adjacent to Bryant Park) it seemed to be shut. So I didn’t get to see where Ghostbusters begins. I didn’t find the Baxter Building or The Avenger’s Tower. I didn’t see Ms Marvel. Luckily, I didn’t see the Hulk either. I might have gone to where Gwen Stacey died, but there’s some confusion between the drawing and the words there. Central Park on the other hand is where it all begins for The Punisher. He didn’t make the news once while I was there. I guess he was out of town. It was all Superhero Registration Act stuff anyway, plus a bit about a bomb going off outside a theatre where Chris from the Sopranos was.

Lombardi’s, in Little Italy, do the greatest pizza in the world. I think it’s the oldest Pizzeria in the U.S. We order a gargantuan Sausage, Pepperoni, Pancetta, extra Mozzarella & Spinach. I can eat four slices. She can eat one. I doggy bag the rest.

The New York attitude I witness is generally a well-mannered and approachable one. It’s less a case of Ratso Rizzo’s “I’m walkin’ here!” And much more like those guys who throw cans at The Green Goblin.
In a bookstore, where I’m buying a copy of The Esther Baxter retirement issue of Smooth, the clerk chats to me about how more people should bring stuff like that to the counter, just to make his day better. ‘I read it for the articles.’ I tell him.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art the girl at the counter tells me Students get in at half price.
“I’m not a student.”
“Maybe you don’t understand. If you tell me you are a student. You get in half price.”
“I’m a student.”
“You guys from London?”
“Yup. Don’t expect anybody there to do that sort of thing for you.”
“I’m going there for the winter.”
“Bring your student card.”

The guy in the souvenir shop even puts money from his pocket in the till so I don’t have to break a note on a Hiroshige postcard book.

Anyone so much as brushes their bag against you and you get a ‘sorry’ or sometimes a ‘pardon me’. None of that teeth kissing bullshit I put up with day to day in these parts because I might want to sit in that empty seat the other side of you.

I didn’t really get a feel for the districts. Some are quite obvious; Little Italy, Times Square, Financial. Others like Greenwich, Garment, Chelsea – it really depends what street you are on, because for a lot of Manhattan Island there’s nothing going on. Guess it’s the same for other cities, but somewhere like Copenhagen is far, far smaller and it’s far harder to walk a distance without being somewhere. For all the iconic landmarks you can think of for NYC, there’s some mighty stretches of anonymity in between.

I’d hoped to come back and start recognising places in the cinema or in front of the digibox. To my minor amusement (barely worth a smile, but hey…what is?) I’ve seen two things recognisably London that I happened to catch the filming of. I worked not far from the restaurant used in Eastern Promises last winter, and walked past them shooting quite often. I’d see Vincent Cassel enough times for him to start glaring at me. I guess he was in character. Y’know. Being gay for me.
I also, having seen the video now dozens of times, realised I watched 50 Cent film his driving sequences for the Ayo Technology promo on a nightbus.





It might be worth remarking that I first saw the foxy little redhead JT flirts with as part of his stage show when his Madison Square garden gig was broadcast live onto HBO, and I watched it from my hotel room across the street with a bag of cheese popcorn and some Arizona Sweet Ice Tea. A clunky sentence, eh? Both my flatmate and I remarked during the performance that he’s probably fucking that one. And then she turns up again in this video. Bet Jessica Biel’s happy about that.

Hup hup.


Ok. There’s been a noticeable drop off in productivity here on BDvsIC. I’ve not really been around much to do a big sit-down-and-write, and I haven’t really felt all that inspired to do a blog when I’ve had the time. In the run up to the New York business and ever since, my after-school scene has opened up and I’ve been going out or recovering a bunch of evenings a week. Computer has just become sorta a big stereo with Facebook on it.

And my attitude about things has changed a bit. I kinda went through something this summer on my own about myself. My Tarot-told incubation. I’m out now. I feel really fucking awesome.

Feeling really fucking awesome doesn’t make for good blog. I don’t want to be on the net bragging. I also feel a bit more tactical about information. The most time this blog has been self-depreciating, and I’ve lessened the extent to which I shit on myself. I’ve started to balance it against a new-found assuredness. So even when I’ve had flickers of low, I’ve not thought to make a song and dance of it. I’ve just got on with getting the other side of it. Things that would have made me anxious or upset when I started this blog don’t have the same effect anymore, which seems to have reduced my comic vitriol somewhat. I’ve done most of my joking in person and it’s not so much about what a dickhead I can be. There always will be some of that. And if things go south again, you can join me on here for more rants and foaming. But for the present it might take a few posts before I can strike the right balance and settle into a voice that suits this third age of Monsterwork.

I do feel so fucking awesome right now.



Yeah. This isn’t all that good is it? I couldn’t synch up the titles properly, and there’s a strange grain effect on the titles that makes it look like shitty home-computer work.


Fuck it. It’s not like you’re paying for it.