Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

You know you're back in New York when you hop into that yellow taxi. It's not just the yellow taxi itself, or the taciturn Russian cabbie with a fetish for the blues played at ear-splitting volume, but the sign right in front of your nose that reads "Complaints: 212-NYC-TAXI". Not Comments or Compliments, but Complaints. And not a tentative, exploratory "Complaints?" either, just a flat old Complaints. You got 'em, here's where to put 'em.

Hey, not that we had anything to complain about. We were more than grateful to be home at all, after having sat on the runway for half an hour at LAX waiting for clearance to leave. Everything was futzed up because of the wildfires -- the actual control tower is in San Bernardino, where the fires were at their worst, and everyone had been evacuated. Scary stuff.

Then at the New York end we'd had to circle out to sea and come back in under the clouds and fog. I had to switch off the helpful little map on the TV screen in front, since as far as I could tell we were heading out into the Bermuda Triangle and losing altitude. I've never been so relieved to feel tarmac under the wheels since the time when, approaching the airport in Wellington, the passenger behind me started saying the rosary. Out loud.

So it was a looong flight, but miraculously Busytot held it together. Sticking a toddler into an aeroplane is like deploying a cross between the Star Trek transporter and the machine in that movie The Fly: you're never sure if you'll get a gentle emissary of love and peace from another planet or some horrific Babyzilla hybrid creature that somewhat resembles your own child but has tentacles and mandibles, screeches like a banshee, and eats hapless humans from the head down.

We must have won the toss. He was an angel the entire way, and as we all bundled off the plane at JFK more than one fellow traveler made as if to kiss our feet. We'd have kissed them too if we could reach.

Ah, but plunging back into winter – gloomy days, early evenings – is a shock to the system, although I love the way the gingko leaves make a glowing carpet on the street and the odd shaft of sunlight makes everyone look handsome in a romantic, European movie sort of way. Then there's the ritual of digging out last year's winter clothes and seeing if they'll fit. That goes for both my still mammarily enhanced figure and Busytot's steadily lengthening midriff. Alas, his favourite fire engine shirt exposes an unseasonal strip of pot-bellied toddler tummy, a good look perhaps if you're in a boy band but not so practical with temperatures plummeting.

Good excuse to go shopping for tops though, in this case in the discount stores up on 125th St. For the young master, I like to shop in the girls' section where the clothes are allowed to be colours other than khaki, grey and navy (and you can easily chop off the icky labels that say things like Baby Gurlz and Style Dollz). Mission accomplished (tops in fluffy purple, butter yellow, Armani black, to go with his rainbow coloured birthday cardie), and the junior model asleep in his stroller, I zipped back downstairs to check out the ladieswear -- with a quick detour first to reconnoitre the lingerie department.

This particular shop has Swedish origins and is a new arrival here, a bright spot on the otherwise dismal horizon of clothes-shopping in the US. I don't know what it is about shopping here. American clothes, on the whole, are kind of ghastly; you really have to look hard to find something interesting. I remember the sartorial nausea I felt on first visiting the Gap when I arrived (good grief) nearly eight years ago: everything was in deeply Maoist shades of white, black, navy, and khaki, and made of crisp cotton in uniformly depressing designs. I've taken to stocking up on visits back to NZ, where thanks to the exchange rate, my op-shop budget goes a little further and I can buy things that lift the soul to look at.

(Speaking of which: hooray for the girls at Minx, who ferried me over a beautiful pair of shoes in exactly the right size. I'd scoped their delicious range out while at home, but somehow managed to buy the right shoe in the wrong size one day before heading back. Cushla put that right, and now I want a pair in every colour!).

Anyway, there I was in the lingerie department of this particular emporium, fingering the goods, as it were. Lots of saucy boy-cut knickers in various shades and fabrics, reasonably priced, very tempting. Next to me, a couple dallied over frilly diamante-studded thongs in a range of colours ("Babydoll, you know I'm just gonna tear 'em offa you," noted the boyfriend, helpfully), and one aisle over, two women flicked through the racks of undies with the bored efficiency of teenagers in a CD shop. Said one to the other, "You know, sometimes people wear 'em and then bring 'em back, cos if you've got the receipt they have to give you a refund." "Ewwwww," said the friend, "that cannot be true!"

Back-up came from an unlikely quarter: two shop assistants busily picking up dropped bras and re-hanging them. "Mmm-hmmm," said one. "And some people try them on and then don't buy them. I was you ladies, I'd wash those before you wear them." More choruses of "ewwwww," but that wasn't the end of it. The other shop assistant, aware that she had the undivided attention of everyone in earshot, launched into a dramatic description of something that had allegedly happened in another branch.

As she told it, a woman came up to the checkout, whipped out her receipt, said "I bought these here but they don't fit right," and proceeded to step out of her thong undies and slap them on the counter. "Ain't nothing my friend could do but give her a refund and hang 'em back up on the rack" said the assistant with a cheerful shudder. Oddly, her listeners melted away and the lingerie department was suddenly quite empty. Perhaps I've been here too long: all I could think was blimey, I hope this happened in summer -- she'd have been in for a hellishly nasty draft up her wotsit on the way home, especially if the wind happened to be blowing off the chilly Hudson River...

--

Meanwhile, a spot of interesting reading for the maternal demographic: Lisa Belkin's oddly Stepfordian article in the New York Times magazine (registration required) on women who've "opted out" of top jobs to raise children, and an impressively quick smackdown by Joan Walsh in Salon (click through the necessary advertisement), followed by a bunch of stroppy letters from readers.

I was as flummoxed as the letter-writers were by the article's failure to interview a single solitary dad who had opted to stay home, let alone those invisible men who were cranking away fulltime in order that the women in the article could tend their hearths. Nor, as far as I could tell, did Belkin speak to any single parents, nor any parents who didn't happen to be white, even within her self-defined circle of "successful" folk. Nor even a single gay couple who'd made similarly complementary choices, unfettered by (but not unsusceptible to the effects of) traditional gender roles. Belkin writes good stuff, but this was a bit of a once-over-lightly. With any luck though, it will open up a new line of conversation, rather than confirm all the stereotypes about the relationship between mothering and work.

While I'm on the topic, Hilton Als' remarkably unquestioning profile of the amazing Toni Morrison in last week's New Yorker (not, alas, available online) details her evolution from single mum of toddlers to Nobel laureate without answering the question that instantly sprang to my mind: what did she do for child-care when she landed that crucial editing job at Random House? Inquiring minds want to know...not to be nosy, but just because it's part of the big picture.

And speaking of child-care, check out this alarming new report on just how much TV or video the average US tot watches. From the article: "The median time [per day] they spend watching some form of media or another on the screen is slightly more than two hours." So that means someone out there is watching more than two hours a day on behalf of our luddite household. Scary! Dodgy! Even if we're talking about "educational" videos like the creepily successful series Baby Einstein, that's a heck of a long time to sit on your bottom and zone out to purely visual stimulation. By the way, isn't it just the teensiest bit fishy that the original baby Einstein managed just fine without watching Baby Einstein?

This week I found myself in a lovely place. Such a lovely place. The physics gravy train was making a whistle stop in Santa Barbara, so Busytot and I hitched a ride on the caboose. Woo woo! It being birthday week and all, and with autumn already well settled in back East, a furtive week of extra summer was too alluring to pass up. We dug out the T-shirts and sandals and hopped on a plane to Arnie-land.

What a curious place – talk about through the looking-glass. I’ve been through Los Angeles several times en route to New Zealand, but never further afield on this coast. As we exited the forcefield of greater LA and hit the coast road, the glittering Pacific to our left, the hills to the right, all I could think was: it’s so empty. And oddly, so Australian: scrubby foliage, dry hills, and a palette of eucalyptus colours, blue-grey, khaki, olive, dust.

Santa Barbara is indisputably a lovely place. Steep hills behind a vast beach with sand like brown sugar: imagine the Rimutakas with Mission Bay at their feet, and a climate like the far north in February. No wonder everyone wants to live here: it’s spectacular. But it took exactly a day to detect the darker sides of paradise. There was the first evening, when we ventured down to the beach (Goleta Beach, west of the town) and discovered a couple of bulldozers busily bulldozing the sand that was being pumped noisily up onto the beach from a barge just offshore. Shock horror! The beach isn’t real! Then we had to find a supermarket that wasn’t being picketed – grocery workers all over California are out on strike this week, over a proposed new employment contract that would diminish their health insurance and make it easier to hire cheap labour.

In a town where one-bedroom apartments can cost a thousand dollars a month, and tiny two bedroom cottages sell for well over half a million (my Mission Bay analogy was more apt than I realized), you have to support the workers who are clinging to what minimal benefits they currently have. When Busytot and I ventured out to a playground the next morning in search of kids to play with and grown-ups to talk to, we found ourselves hanging out with some accidental casualties of the crappy economy: a young mother and daughter who are currently living in a homeless shelter, while she tries to gather enough money to catch the bus back to where her mother and her younger child live.

They introduced us to two nice fellows, one young, one in his fifties, who are living in the park while looking for work (in this climate, you can live in the park year round). The young guy had just found a job at the local hospital, and his relief was palpable. It would be patronizing to deploy terms like “good honest people” but that’s what they were: good honest people with rotten luck, and in the case of the child, dreadfully rotten teeth. Which is exactly why supermarket checkers, for example, need decent health insurance. I slipped some dosh into her stroller and honked extra hard at the picketers all week.

After a week, most of the culture shock has subsided. I stopped distrusting the spookily perfect weather and got used to romping in the hotel pool with the increasingly aquatic Busytot (I keep expecting to find a blowhole somewhere under his mop of blond hair). He learned some good new words: palm tree, hummingbird, jacuzzi, bougainvillea, jasmine. We explored the local attractions, starting with the zoo, where much to a certain two year old's delight the elephants had been temporarily replaced by diggers and bulldozers (only the best zoos have construction equipment in captivity, don't you know).

We also checked out the Old Mission, which is a very haphazardly curated place for all its historical importance. Out front are the remains of a laundry where, we are told, the local Chumash took to washing linen for the early fathers. Very kind of them. A wall panel inside the Mission offers a potted history of the place that ends with this ominous non sequitur: “Secularization of the Mission took place in 1834. The remaining Chumash have been integrated into the American way of life.”

Then Busytot and I managed to get ourselves kicked out of the Art Gallery downtown, because he was appreciating the art slightly too vocally. He can't help it if one particularly well-formed statue reminded him of his father. I tended to agree, especially since the handsome marble man in question had a small plump marble boy on his lap. How can you shush a child for enthusing "Datsa Daddy and me!"? Visiting galleries with kids can be a dicey proposition, but in this case it was just that Busytot knows what he likes and isn't afraid to say so. He also admired a voluptuous nude, but wondered aloud where her baby was -- it was true, she did have the exhausted, depleted look of one who had just survived a marathon nursing session.

One afternoon we drove inland. We passed through Buelltown -- “Home of Split Pea Soup” in case you were wondering -- and past fields of pumpkins, a corn maze, alpacas, and Ostrich Land (where a sign advertised Big Eggs). We zipped through Solvang – an ersatz Danish town complete with windmills and a replica of the Little Mermaid, it reminded me of similarly “authentic” towns in Japan – and ended up in Los Olivos, a tiny dusty little frontier place turned spa retreat, full of art galleries, and with a stretch limo parked outside the one fancy restaurant. It was very Central Otago: say, Naseby in ten years.

Meanwhile, the conference chugged along. The university (UCSB) is literally on the beach, and all week long, the physicists talked physics with the sound of the ocean in their ears and the smell of the sea in their nostrils. (Physicists are famous for their otherworldly powers of concentration). At lunchtime, the hardier specimens would head out for a swim, ducking across the bike path that winds around the periphery of campus. You have to watch out for the many undergrads weaving along on their bikes one-handed, a surfboard under their other arm. In fact, all over campus, everyone was on wheels of one sort or another: blades, boards, bikes, shoes with wheels on. Seems that at UCSB, not skateboarding is a crime. The multitude of wheelchair ramps suddenly appeared in a completely different light.

Speaking of which, among the physicists was Stephen Hawking (it was that kind of physics), and I spent about five shameless seconds wondering if I could snap a picture of Busytot with the legendary cosmologist in the background. But he was eating dinner, and Busytot was fizzing and popping and generally spinning out on account of having missed his nap, so it wouldn’t have been kind to either of them.

Actually, napping was a hit-or-miss proposition this week, as was bedtime. Accustomed to sleeping within the confines of his cot, the little lad was not impressed by either the small rickety crib or the rollaway “big boy bed” the motel supplied, so by default he slept in the kingsize bed. Every evening, he would settle down, close his eyes, and then commence rolling around like a bowling ball in an attempt to find a corner. He covered every inch of the bed, and occasionally slid down onto the floor and wiggled his way around the room. Poor thing; he was like a fish liberated from a fishbowl and spooked by the absence of walls.

Even if none of us slept very well, we got to mellow out in the sun while Busytot worked out his wiggles on one of the best playgrounds I’ve ever seen. In Alameda Park, in downtown Santa Barbara on the corner of Solas and Micheltorena streets, in the shade of a massive Moreton Bay fig tree, is a huge castle-like adventure playground called Kids’ World. It was designed by legendary playground architect Bob Leathers, an Ithaca-based chap who must have one of the happiest jobs in the world. He comes to town, consults with the kids to see what they want, explains the building constraints so they can rule various thrilling features in and out (five different slides, certainly; treehouse, very possible; working submarine, slightly tricky), and then comes up with a collaborative plan that the community builds with donated material and labour. The result, in this case, is very very cool indeed, and we spent many hours discovering every little corner.

And today – as I type in fact – Busytot is exactly two years old. A little party awaits him after we return to New York tomorrow, but for today we will celebrate by hopping in the car and heading back to LA, where his daddy has found a cheapish hotel with the best feature of all: a pool that will permit one last use of the magical froggy water-wings before we head east to winterland and turn the clocks back for the season.

With a teetering pile of unread and half-read books by the bed, and the nearly-completed dissertation lurking hungrily on my desk like a tiger that seemed so cute when I got it as a cub, I needed a break from words this weekend. Time to treat the old optic nerves to something a tad less alphabet-shaped. The universe obliged me, and served up a baby shower in an art-filled apartment with Hudson River views, a magical greenhouse, a museum date, and a fab new TV show.

The greenhouse was one that I've yearned to visit: it sits atop one of the buildings at Barnard College, just up the road. It was open to the public on Saturday as part of the excellent Open House New York, which flung open the doors of all sorts of places all over the city to curious peepers and inveterate apartment pervers like me. I'd love to have raced through the five boroughs checking out the apartments, lighthouses, cemeteries, water towers, and temples both Hindu and Masonic. But visiting the greenhouse was a treat. I could have spent hours ogling the fine subtropical specimens, especially the passionfruit, a much lustier specimen than the seedling on my windowsill, the ginger – who knew you could just plant ginger root? -- and the vanilla, a spectacular twisty vine that I might try to grow from a seed.

Then we snagged babysitting just in time to catch "The American Effect", a show that just finished at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and featured, somewhat paradoxically, only foreign artists. The idea was to see America from the outside and trace the shadow that "America" casts on the world mind. Naturally, all the pieces on show were warmly positive. My favourites: the soft-focus paintings of apple pies, the three-dimensional versions of Norman Rockwell's greatest hits, and the mixed media tributes to the mother of us all, Oprah Winfrey.

Not! Or as my viewing companion noted, "If you thought America was just dandy, why would you bother making art about it?" Besides, the ad biz takes care of all our needs in the glowing depiction department.

So the work on display at the Whitney was biting, sometimes trite, occasionally brilliant, and often hilariously funny – but always critical. Take the first thing that greets you as you walk in: a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming set of waxworks, depicting a room full of comic superheroes: Catwoman, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Mr Fantastic, and Wonder Woman. With a difference: Gilles Barbier's "Nursing Home (2002)" shows them all as they would be now, had they aged in real time. (For the moment, you can see a pic here.)

So a slumbering Catwoman, one slipper off, snoozes in an armchair while next to her the Hulk gazes vacantly at an old John Wayne movie on the TV. Captain America, grey-haired and bulkier around the middle than in his heyday, lies on a stretcher; a saggy Wonder Woman, salt and pepper streaking her once-lovely mane, checks his intravenous drip. Alone at a table, Mr Fantastic looks up from the Jackie Collins novel he's not really reading (Lethal Seduction). His rubbery arms and legs have lost their elasticity and dangle off the edge of his table. The whole tableau is a one-note joke, but a goodie; a neat reversal of the obsession with youth and power. Very funny, until you remember how many of Bush I's old guard are back in the throne room advising the new young king. To view age through pathos-coloured glasses, as Barbier's piece invites us to, might just be to underestimate the staying power of old codgers.

I haven't laughed as much in ages as I did at Bjorn Melhus's video piece "America Sells." A piece of accidental art captured on the fly and re-edited after the event, the seven minute video is a gloriously cruel record of a concert in Berlin Alexanderplatz by a bunch of spotty youths and braless girls in matching T-shirts that read "America Sings." These are really low-flying targets: the teenagers sing and dance their hearts out to inane lyrics ("America hopes, America dreams…") with expressions ranging from merely goofy to demonically possessed. "What the hell are they on?" you think to yourself, ducking instinctively as one of them nearly takes another's eye out with some truly frightening windmill-inspired choreography. The scariest answer of all is "Maybe nothing."

It helps to know that the concert took place on July 1, 1990, the day of German monetary reunification. With evangelical fervour, the leader of the group urges Germans to feel free to buy T-shirts, enunciating carefully "Cheap! They are cheap. Do you understand cheap?" while his words flash up on the screen. Feel Free. Cheap. Buy T-Shirts! Feel Free. The video itself is a cheap shot, of course; these kids no more represent America than, say, Paul Holmes represents New Zealand. Which is to say, enough that it matters. Melhus zooms in on one particularly ecstatic participant who flings herself around and literally screams herself silly singing the praises of America, while nonplussed East Germans look on in horror. Where is that big-haired girl now, and has she found a more supportive bra?

Other pieces that caught my eye: Makoto Aida's scandalously hostile "Picture of an Air Raid on New York City" won't win him a key to the city any time soon, but it is a perversely thrilling piece to look at. It's a re-imagined Muromachi-era screen, showing exactly what the title suggests: Japanese zeros bombing Manhattan, in a sort of visual tit-for-tat for the firebombings that killed more people in Tokyo than were killed in Hiroshima. Instead of the mother of pearl accents you'd find on a traditional screen, the planes are made of holographic paper, and they weave their way across the folded screen in traditionally sinuous waves, like the migrating geese that are on their way through New York this week. It's a formally lovely piece, but nasty. It predates September 11, but has drawn most of the flak directed at the exhibition (see comments on the Whitney website).

"Why it's time for Imperial, again" by Gerard Byrne has a great title, but works better in print than it did in person: Byrne's video dramatizes a dialogue between Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca that appeared in National Geographic in 1980, in which they ponderously discuss the merits of a particular car. Shrug. I'd have bought it on a T-shirt, though.

I liked Muhammad Imran Qureshi's miniatures, especially "God of Small Things," in which he had painted a camouflage-patterned sewing machine on top of an old paper pattern for an American-style overcoat, with instructions in Urdu. Also working on a small scale, Miguel Angel Rojas, a Colombian artist, created absolutely gorgeous and delicate collages composed entirely of tiny circles cut out of dollar bills and coca leaves. Given the materials, the colour palette of these little pictures was several shades of khaki – sense a theme yet?

Ousmane Sow, from Senegal, offered a life-size tableau showing the death of Custer. As remarkable as the figures themselves, which were constructed of pretty much everything (wire, wood, burlap), was the artist's biography. A physical therapist turned artist at the age of fifty, Sow works from the skeleton up, endowing his figures with organs and muscles before covering the lot with skin. This would account for the fabulous dynamism of the characters, especially a truly spectacular horse. The museum guide who was busy explaining the exhibits to a herd of sheepish Friday night cultural pilgrims made sure to draw the expected connection between Little Big Horn and Baghdad, but I'd have liked to hear more about the artist. Fascinating guy.

Wandering back downstairs through the museum's standard collection of American works, I found myself questioning the curatorial decision to show only overseas artists. It's a pretty meaningless distinction, given that a number of the artists upstairs had lived, worked, or exhibited in the States at some time. Besides, there are pieces in the permanent collection that would have fit right in, evoking self-consciously American effects of their own. Jasper Johns' thickly painted triple American flag, all creamy icing and overstatement. Marisol's strangely charming ensemble Three Women and a Dog, with the multi-faced women made of wooden blocks and the dog – a taxidermized terrier head on a wooden body -- looking a lot perkier than it had any right to. Lisa Yuskavage's luridly cartoonish T&A paintings, evoking a nation of women indistinguishable from double-dipped ice-cream cones. Whitfield Lowell's piece Shine, a charcoal drawing on boards of shoeshine "boys" in their best clothes, hats on at a rakish angle: fixed to boxes in front of them, iron shoe stands, momentarily unrecognizable. Tools? Instruments? Shackles? And Elsworth Kelly's famous "Red Green Blue" paintings – formal colour fields, yes, but also the primary colours of the cathode ray tube. You know, TV.

Speaking of TV, I have to beg to differ with the Herald reviewer who hated Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I caught my first episode over the weekend and I loved it. (It's been on cable over here till now; lucky old New Zealand is getting these shows free to air). But then I'm a sucker for makeover shows anyway, even the ghastly Stepford-style plastic surgery ones in which people appear to have had their brains suctioned as well as their waistlines (what the heck, while you're unconscious anyway...).

All makeovers are emotionally manipulative fantasies of instant salvation. But this one was genuinely affecting in a new way -- watching a repressed, depressed, hide-bound sad-sack of a straight chap softening and melting under the avalanche of brotherly love was a revelation. Under that muscled, inarticulate exterior was a little boy who just wanted to be loved and fussed over by someone other than his overly invested mother or a demanding lady friend. If you're not yourself a homosexual, or you lack a gay best friend, you'll feel awfully lonely after watching this show, which in a roundabout way can only be a good thing for gay rights in America.

It's like a hidden camera on a slumber party but with all the girls played by boys. The lads tumble into their subject's life like puppies, do their magic, and repair to the sidelines to watch their newly coiffed and freshly dressed Cinderfeller entertain friends in his newly gorgeous pad. Lest you think the fab five have had all of their claws removed, they then go on to deliver a tart but loving commentary on the poor wee lad's fledgling attempts to be fabulous all by himself.

Not since the time I watched an all-day Ground Force marathon on BBCAmerica have I seen someone so humble be so elevated by nothing more than elbow grease, gentle attention to detail, and a smattering of homoerotic banter. The subject of the episode I watched was visibly relaxed and encouraged by his crash course in suaveness; he stood a little straighter and looked people in the eye.

Yep, what the world needs now is love, sweet love, an unlimited budget and a decent haircut. Much better than plastic surgery. And I'm thinking of spin-offs already... say, Rich Democratic Eye for the Poor Oppressed Country? It might work. If it was done properly.

Summoned by an unearthly bellowing from the end of the street, we went out to see what was going on. It was St Francis of Assisi Day, when the animals come to the Cathedral for the spectacular annual blessing of the beasts. From the outside, this annual ritual seems less about ensuring the spiritual advancement of iguanas and pomeranians than about providing eager city-dwellers with glimpses of creatures more exotic than rats or pigeons. Or, as Busytot put it, "Big cow go MOOOOOO!"

Among the flower-bedecked animals on parade were a camel, a horse, a pony, two llamas, a penguin, and a dog with wheels where its back legs used to be, the latter hoping perhaps for a miracle cure. Also spotted: a duck, an eagle, a goat, a snake, a sheep, a donkey, a large steer, and a cow. Urban animal-spotters thought the cow was a bull because she had large horns (never mind her prominent udder), and they thought the steer was a cow because he was gentle and black and white (never mind his lack of udder). There was no elephant this year; they've been on the banned list for some time after an unfortunate altercation with the camel. Another notable no-show: the urban tiger.

What Busytot knows about tigers would fill a book. Specifically, that would be the book du jour -- the Judith Kerr classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea -- in which an exceptionally well-mannered tiger knocks on the door, says "Excuse me," and invites himself to tea with a little girl called Sophie and her mummy. Imposing but not intimidating, the massive felid eats everything in the house -- except for Sophie and her mummy, fortunately. He then drinks his fill, making sure to scull "all Daddy's beer" (that's Busytot's favourite line, even though his Daddy doesn't much go in for beer). When the tiger is finished, he says "thank you" and politely takes his leave. What he doesn't do is move in upstairs, wee copiously on the floor, and get through half a dozen raw chickens per afternoon with his alligator pal, Al.

I'm referring to Antoine Yates and the 400 lb tiger who didn't just come to tea, but moved in and stayed for two years, outlasting the other tenants of the small apartment (Yates's mother and a series of foster children, as well as a lion cub and sundry other animals). This story has legs, as they say. Big stripey ones. Days after the news first broke (coinciding with poor old Siegfried and Roy's encounter with some fearful symmetry of their own) and everyone checked the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st, follow-up articles are still bulking out the pages of the respectable NY Times and the tabloids.

Gothamist has a nice summary. There are a couple of classic photos, including one of an armed policeman rappelling down the outside of the apartment building to peek in the window. Also some priceless quotes from neighbours, who flooded out of the woodwork to aver for the record that the tiger-keeper was a gentle fellow, good with animals, and that he had merely wanted to create his own little Garden of Eden.

What was Yates thinking? Perhaps he'd read too many of those technicolour pamphlets you get from the door-knocking evangelists, with their vivid images of the lion lying down with the lamb, the panda, assorted medium-sized carnivores, and a couple of rosy-cheeked children. A cramped apartment several floors up seems like an unlikely spot for such a neo-Paradise, but you can't fault the idealism. Maybe he's an animal-fan equivalent of Darius McCollum, the train fanatic whose passion for trains led him to become not just a spotter but a driver. Poor old Darius is doing time now, despite a presumptive diagnosis of train-fixated Asperger's syndrome. I think the punishment should fit the crime: a job at the Transit Museum for Darius, and an internship at the Bronx Zoo for Antoine.

The tiger tale is being billed as one of those "only in New York" stories, but I dunno -- it seems to me more a case of "only in certain parts of New York." It's been noted that there's a direct correlation between average income of a neighbourhood and the frequency of "quality of life" calls to the cops; the well-off Upper East Sider is apparently much quicker to register a complaint than the denizens of Harlem or Washington Heights. I don't know what the calculus is -- some combination of sense of entitlement and whether you see the cops as friend or foe -- but it's clear that in certain parts of the city you wouldn't get away with harbouring wildlife for nearly as long as Yates managed. If Cindy Crawford can be forced to put down carpets to insulate her downstairs neighbours from the "intimate sounds of daily life," then a quick call to the super should fix the problem of jungle beasts upstairs. "Hello, super? Tiger urine coming through the ceiling! I don't think so!"

Sharing a building with noisy strangers and their non-human companion animals, whether feline, canine, avian, or reptilian, is a New York given. You rub along, and what doesn't actually kill you makes you stronger, in an impatient, neurotic, twitchy sort of way. But last week some anonymous residents of our building posted a funny little letter under all the doors, inviting us to be a little quieter and more considerate of our neighbours, as noise tends to echo in the large courtyard at the heart of the building. Poor lambs; they might as well bark at the moon. I'd guess they're newly arrived in the city and are still in shock at the level of quotidian noise pollution.

The letter singled out a couple of "easily remedied" examples, including "the small dog with the annoying bark that announces its discontent to the whole building." I know the one they mean, he lives next door and yaps all the live-long day, but -- "easily remedied"? If I were that little dog I'd watch out for poisoned blow-darts across the courtyard. Thank god the letter-writers left off their list "the demon banshee toddler given to random blood-curdling shrieks that turn your brain to jelly. Sits by the kitchen window at 8, noon, 4 and 6 alternately torturing his parents and then kissing their ears better."

Ah, the joys of urban life. Not ours for much longer, alas. We ventured up to New Haven over the weekend to check out a promising lead on an apartment, and will be moving there at the end of January. It's a perfectly lovely ground-floor flat in a listed Victorian house, not large by New Haven standards, but positively agoraphobia-inducing for the city-dweller. The kitchen is big enough to keep livestock in (probably chickens rather than tigers) and there's a front porch and a back yard and a small deck shaded by a fine-looking wisteria. Also, to my delight, a tiny office, wood-panelled on ceiling and walls, with a crazily tilted floor. It feels like the cabin of a sailing ship.

After shaking hands with the landlady, we walked around the neighbourhood. Big old triple-decker wooden houses, lots of trees. In one direction, a little shopping street that reminded me of Old Papatoetoe. One block in the other direction is a wee cafe called Lulu's, as well as a wine shop and a little family-run grocery. It was Sunday, so the shops were mostly closed. We walked to the pizza parlour to pick up a pizza that was, by New York standards, huge, tasty, and cheap. The streets were quite spookily empty. Where was everybody?

As we walked back to the house to eat our dinner, Busytot voiced the same thought. "People," he said plaintively, "want see people." I can see there's going to be a bit of culture-shock when we leave the city, but on the bright side, we won't have to sing quite as many verses of that old bedtime favourite, "Who Are the People in Your Neighbourhood?" I'm thinking we can skip the verses about the dean of the Cathedral, the super, the handyman, and the doorman over the road, not to mention the yapping dog next door and probably the tiger.

...just as soon as I get to the bottom of the page," as Oscar Wilde is rumoured to have quipped. I always vow I'm going to get out more, but I didn't make it to a single event at either "New York Is Book Country" or the New Yorker Festival last weekend, although after reading this excellent version of the latter, I feel like I was there.

And I'm sort of glad that, even though it was just around the corner, I didn't go to Chuck Palahniuk's allegedly gruesome reading at the Columbia University Bookstore (follow the link and scroll down to get the guts, as it were). I get enough projectile vomiting with Busytot on the premises. (How much is enough, you ask? You'd be surprised how quickly it gets old; once every three months or so is about enough for me).

Also in the neighbourhood in the next couple of months: Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Walker. It's a literary buffet out there and I keep forgetting to go up again with my plate. The thing is, there's always someone else to look forward to, and everyone comes through again anyway, although with only three more months in the city I'm vowing henceforth to stuff myself full.

Literary readings are a funny business: there are the standing-room-only celebrity gigs, and then the strangely underattended ones. I was one of barely a dozen people listening to Helen Simpson read at the lovely Housing Works Used Book Cafe last summer. She wore a stealthy Jean Paul Gaultier sundress that didn't look like a Gaultier sundress, and was acerbic, kind, and stunningly beautiful. Just like her fiction.

The last author I saw live (not counting Debra and Chad last month) was Alexander McCall Smith at the mega bookshop down in the 80s (that's eighties as in streets, not decade). Before an appreciative audience made up almost entirely of older ladies also in their 80s, he read excerpts from The Kalahari Typing School for Men and The Full Cupboard of Life, the latest instalments in his series of Botswana novels. I like them for their eulogistic tone. Warm with an undercurrent of mournfulness; nostalgia avant-la-lettre. Like James Herriot's books, or the Little World of Don Camillo, they pay tribute to a way of life that is evaporating even as it is captured on the page. You chortle and sympathise and read bits out loud to whoever else is in the room, and then realize you're reading the literary equivalent of an obituary.

McCall Smith -- a strikingly prolific writer -- is not from Botswana, but has spent a great deal of time there. He struck me as a genuine fellow, eccentric in a helplessly self-aware sort of way, who believes in his characters as firmly as his fans do. To warm applause, he graciously answered such incisive questions such as "Who taught Mma Ramotswe to drive her little white van?" ("I don't know") and "What do Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's initials stand for?" ("I didn't know when I first wrote them, but I do now and I'm not going to tell you because Mr Matekoni wouldn't like me to"). His assembled audience nodded sagely and took notes, proving that geekery knows no age limit.

Someone I'll never get to see in person now: Edward Said. A literary lion, good man, and indefatigable and uncompromising defender of Palestinian land rights is dead. I went to see him speak earlier this year, at the festschrift for the 25th anniversary of Orientalism; alas, the session was full to overflowing, and people were being turned away at the door. I'd have liked to put a voice (and an outfit -- the good professor was legendarily dapper) to the name on the books on my shelf. Still, I was gratified to have made it to a panel earlier in the day, at which current president of the MLA (and undersung genius) Mary Louise Pratt proved to be every bit as lucid, generous, and original in person as she is in her writing.

What am I reading these days? After seeing (and mostly liking) the film version of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, I'm re-reading my way through some of her other novels. Mostly written in America, like the works of Smith's fellow exile P.G. Wodehouse they're uniformly anglophilic and serenely backward-looking, casting a benevolent glow over the foibles of a very small class of dotty characters-with-a-capital-C.

Except for the excellent A Hundred and One Dalmatians and its sequel, The Starlight Barking, none are quite as distinctive as I Capture the Castle, which is one of those magical little books that everyone believes to be their own secret discovery. Still, I lapped up The New Moon and the Old, a feisty little potboiler about four siblings forced to make their way in the world after debonair old dad has to make a hurried exit when a business deal goes bad.

There's the requisite grand old house in a state of disrepair, and the siblings are a fine bunch: the would-be actress of barely fourteen who runs away to go on the stage, the haplessly untalented older sister who wants nothing more than to be a king's mistress, and the sensitive writer brother who drops plenty of oblique clues to his own preferences but -- in deference to the times -- is never so bold as to mention them out loud ("I've made rather a study of London back streets" is as close as he comes to flinging open the closet door). Then there's the put-upon older brother who, like poor old Julian in the Famous Five, has to be responsible for everyone else. Here he is, about to fall into the clutches of his father's mistress (a sultry and conniving minx named Violet, who claims to be twenty-seven):

She raised her arms and clasped her hands behind her head – and stopped looking like a little girl. The movement tightened her already tight dress, and the way she now sank back against the cushions constituted an invitation hard to ignore. He ought to have known that this would happen...

He rose and came towards her, wondering how one took hold of woman who had bunched herself into a lump and was protected on three sides by cushions. As if understanding his problem, she instantly shot her feet from under her, reclined full length, and gave him a smile of comprehensive welcome. This offered more than he had bargained for -- anyway, at present. So he said "Sit up like a good girl and I'll kiss you."

She laughed delightedly and somehow managed to lie down even flatter. He turned towards the door, uncertain whether to bolt it or merely bolt.

Lovely stuff, complete nonsense of course, but splendidly diverting after a diet of several grim, morbid, and just plain bad books I've been reviewing for the Listener. The exception: Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, which I loved (and which is also on Chad's reading list this week). Funnily enough, Hustvedt doesn't really do humour, which would usually be enough to knock a book off my bedside table. But she is such an intelligent writer -– particularly about art -- that I didn't really mind. I was inspired to check out her debut novel, The Blindfold, which was a quick and disturbing read, a tad pretentious but nicely written. Much to my delight it is chock-full of references to my neighbourhood (she was a graduate student at Columbia), including Butler Library with its grand reading rooms and gloomy stacks.

Actually, I'm a sucker for books in which people meet and fall in love in a university library. I once read an excellent Mills and Boon that managed to imbue the Auckland University campus – pre-new student union building – with all the erotic shimmer of the Quartier Latin. I think it was by Susan Napier; I wish I could remember the title, something perhaps about love among the ivy? I seem to remember the protagonists grappling wordlessly with each other up against an obliging plane tree on Princes St. There was also, improbably, a loft-style apartment somewhere in the picture. My kind of academia: nobody got a lot of research done, but they seemed happy enough.