Halloween – Cheescake

Photograph by Dirk Olbertz.

After nearly 30 years of ambivalence towards Halloween I’m finally starting to like it.

Imagine stores decorated in orange and black, bursting with pumpkins and masks; brownstones covered with fake cobwebs, their windows populated by ghosts and grinning jack-o’-lanterns; Saturday night—the city full of teens, twenty and thirty somethings in fancy dress; and this evening, no doubt, the streets full of little trick or treaters.

I mean, come on. Who couldn’t like that? It’s pure, unadulterated fun. It’s Mardi Gras. It’s carnival.

It’s also, funnily enough, two years to the day since I arrived in New York.

Halloween Links:
Halloween prank spooks reporter in Frankenstein’s castle (via Sofie).
Links to background on the prank here and here.

“I’m quite well in myself,” she says. “Nothing wrong with me. I can’t see very well, I can’t hear very well, and I can’t walk very well, but I’m perfectly well.”

With words like that, it’s no surprise that Valentine Vester, the owner of one of Jeruslaem’s most beautiful hotels, the American Colony, was born in Yorkshire, England. (Alan Bennet would have had a field day.)

Mrs Vester, profiled in yesterday’s New York Times, has a very interesting angle on Jerusalem, having lived there under the Jordanians and the Israelis, having relatives who lived there under the Ottomans and the British, and coming from a background sprinkled with famous archaeologists and vehement anti-Zionists.

There’s enough in there to shame Israel’s supporters:

The Colony is on the border of East Jerusalem, a few hundred yards from the walls of the Old City and near the ultra-Orthodox Jewish district of Mea Sharim. Mrs. Vester remembers just after the [1967] war, walking through the grounds, when she saw some Jews from Mea Sharim picking flowers. She remembers saying, “Please don’t do that, this is our private garden.”

“They just said, ‘But it’s all ours now.’ ” she said.

[...]During the first gulf war, in 1991, she says, the Israelis, under the threat of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons and Scud missiles, handed out gas masks – but only to the guests, not to the Palestinian staff of the hotel.

“But we diddled them,” Mrs. Vester said with pride. “We made an imaginary list of hotel guests. I mean two can play at that game. It was shocking, really.”

And the Palestinians:

She understands the Israeli need for security, she said, but also thinks the Palestinians don’t accept enough responsibility. “The Arabs are inclined to blame everything on the occupation – ‘What we can do?’ – and they shouldn’t,” she said. “They ought to do something about it.”

Sadly, her hopes for the future are not high:

Mrs. Vester sees no easy peace. “It’s going to take a long, long time, whatever it is,” she said. “I don’t think I shall see the solution, and you may not, either.”

Remember Mimi, the British freelancer I wrote about who was earning a living as a lap dancer in New York? It seems that she has had a minor epiphany.

I am who I am, I’ve done what I’ve done because I could do it. Not everyone can become a stripper, Not everyone has the tits-and-ass SAT’s, the requisite GPA (34-24-34) and the much needed ability to switch off whilst you’re engaged in the most intimate of acts. But me, I do. I kick ass. I’m clever enough to be a good stripper, But not quite clever enough to be able to separate that from this, my blog, which sad as it may seem, means all the world to me.

I want to write in the way I wrote before, vicious, caustic – like me, not Mimi. I want back what I lost, that time when I was watching, observing, writing furiously, with complete and utter abandon, unnerving precision. I’ve adopted this shell of the stripper now and I flaunt it. I’m sorry for that. I’m grateful you’ve endured this far, ladies and gentlemen, through the tiredness, the disgust, the loneliness, the exhaustion, the sick pleasures of hedonism, the break-ups, the disappointments, the money worries and the bleaching effect this has had upon my only defence against the world – my words. Stick around, accept my apologies, and believe me when I say that I’m getting my voice back. Link . Link here.

Tonight on Newsnight, reporter Stephanie Flanders adopted the standard BBC/Guardian default position used as a stock explanation for virtally anything that happens on the political right in the US…it’s all the work of the religious right.

Ostensibly, but falsely, explaining the demise of the Miers nomination, Flanders gives us a clip of a group of people kneeling, holding hands, and praying, as she serves up this:

But by far the harshest opposition has come from right wing faith groups…

As I’ve pointed out previously, this is complete and utter rubbish, and the fact that Flanders was able to track down a Christian who denounced Miers doesn’t make it smell any better. The most immediate, powerful, and heated objections came from the likes of George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and the entire staff of National Review. These people are not voices of the Christian right. They are voices of intellectual, ideological, principled conservatism, and contrary to the BBC’s warped reporting, these are the voices that influence and drive conservative policy in Washington, not Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition. Link here.

The Beeb getting a good telling off by the excellent American Expatriate. I anticipate that I may be linking to him a lot more in the future.

It’s EiNY’s first anniversary.

The past year has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience in so many ways. I’ve made new friends, had new ideas, been introduced to many different points of view and discovered great writers who I would never have found in any other medium.

When I began I hardly new what a blog was and neither did most of my friends. Now some of them have launched blogs of their own. To celebrate I thought it would be fitting to round up those blogs launched by my friends from the offline world and hopefully inspired, in part, by this blog.

Simon’s Brain is the musings of a talented writer trapped inside the body of a dry, self-effacing Lancastrian.

Simon lives only a few blocks from me in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He has a great voice and an entertaining way of charting his exploits as a first-time father. He’s also passionate about music and has just started posting audio files.

If you live in or near the neighborhood, invite him out for a beer.

Lowercase L. Only William Levin could come up with the idea for a weblog based on the misuse of lowercase L’s in otherwise uppercase signage. But he did. And he’s making it work.

It’s a great idea for a weblog because it encourages people to contribute outside of the comments box. He’s already had a few submissions from people outside New York and it’s only a matter of time until submissions increase as William’s pet peeve seeps into the minds of others. (I’ve had my eye out for one for months and yet somehow failed miserably.)

Look out for lowercase L’s and send them to William.

Broke in Berlin. Dezik is a good friend of mine from university (the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London) who I may never have reconnected with if it wasn’t for our respective blogs.

He is one of the most talented linguists and passionate Slavophiles I know. His weblog is not only entertaining and eclectic, but it is the only one I know of that monitors Belorussian media and politics in Russian and in English. Lately, his writing has been prolific.

The Diary of Disenfranchised Booksellers. Liukchik is another friend of mine from university. I don’t think any description would do this co-authored blog much justice, so I will leave you with one of Luke’s latest posts, entitled My Top Five Things At The Moment. It sums him up perfectly:

1. Moondog: Viking of Sixth Avenue, a CD by a homeless NYC percussionist who dressed as Viking and was friends with John Coltrane
2. Dostoevskii’s Notes From The Underground – I have read this more times than I care to remember, and it never ceases to amaze me
3. The Central Line – 25 minutes from Ealing to work (and back again) and much more reliable than the Northern Line
4. The list of delightfully expressive Spanish swearing left for me by our guests last weekend (Gracias, Pablito, Susanna & Vanessa)
5. Our stained glass window, through which car lights cast the outlines of angels onto the wall behind me.

The Old Brain Pan. Launched by my friend Nick only a few weeks ago and already getting into scrapes in the blogosphere. Nick is a well-read, articulate and passionate thinker and writer. Judging by conversations we have had over the past few months there will be many more.

Of course there are new friends I have made who turned out to be bloggers like Jen of Nonsense Verse and Brendan of Quixotic Optimism. There are also bloggers from around the world who I hope to meet one day for discussions in the coffee shops and bars of New York.

My only regret is that some of you with passion and opinions are still reading this thing when you should be writing a blog of your own. You know who you are. Just go to blogger.com and give it a try. It takes less than a minute to set up a blog. It may be the best thing you do this week.

So farewell then dear friends who braved the wind and rain and beer and food and wine and music these last few days. It has been a lot of fun and you are welcome back anytime.

Pictured top (from left to right): Dave, Me, Adam; below (from left to right): Dave, Simon (of Simon’s Brain), me, Rod, Adam).

Photos courtesy of Rocking Rod Rhino and Simon’s Brain.

My apologies for the lack of posts recently. EiNY has been interrupted by the aforementioned guests (pics to follow shortly) and I am juggling a few stories/assignments at the moment. Normal service should resume shortly.

This week I have mostly been listening to Raiding the 20th Century. It’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes but it is fascinating if you’re interested in sampling and mixing. Plus, there’s some great music on there too.