Yes - I've been a little MIA - so missing in action in fact my friend Kim put out a missing person's bulletin on her blog for me....
What has happened is that I got a some PAID work on an independent feature film - what started as 2 days led to over a week. I'm talking 12 hour days starting at 7 am in New Jersey, including a night shoot, and then this has led to other paid gigs, and I've been coming home and collapsing, and then getting up and going off to work again the next day. Any days off have been filled with doing laundry (a very different concept when you have to go to the laundromat, and can't just wash it in your apartment and hang it out late at night), buying groceries and attempting to unpack, as I stupidly moved to my new apartment on my first day off from the shoot!
My new place is great - I've moved to Harlem / Hamilton Heights. My neighbourhood is really diverse, and not as gentrified as further down the subway line where my bro lives (which in turn is no where near as gentrified as a few stops futher down again). At the end of my street near Broadway is a big mural with Brother Malcolm X - just up from
El Mundo - the Spanish discount department store. When you get off the subway in the evenings, you can hear people calling out "Tamales, tamales". When the weather was a little hotter, they were selling ices on the corner, with flavours like guayaba (guava). And the deli on the corner near the subway station does amazing breakfast sandwiches for $1.50
Neighbourhoods here change literally block by block. When I was looking at apartments, I looked at a place on 148th st. I walked up from my bro's all the way up there to get a sense of the neighbourhood, and when I turned off broadway to go to the apartment, I passed 2 or 3 crack hoes and some very dodgy guys sitting on stoops near them. So i decided there was no way I was moving in there and gave it a miss. However a few days later I had the opportunity to see the place itself and did the same walk. This time, once I'd passed Amsterdam, suddenly I was in front of amazing architecture, wide streets and trees - the apartment was in Sugar Hill in Harlem - long renowned for its desireability.
The guy was nice too, but ultimately (after seeing some other places that were so bad each flatmate had a big padlock on their bedroom door or the carpet didn't actually fit in the flourescent blue room) I decided to move in with the two girls I'd met first. They are great flatmates, and we also have 2 cats - which is great.
And every neighbourhood can have an off day. The day I came to get the keys before I moved in, I brought a friend who'd volunteered to come walk around my new neighbourhood with me, and all the crazies were out.. didn't make for such a great intro..
My room is still small, but hey, this is new york, and it's big enough for a bed and it also has a large-ish built-in wardrobe, parquet floors, and if you stand near the window, you can see sunset through a gap between 2 buildings. There's also roof access (or
tar beach as my Dad calls it), and that's great just to go and get some air, or to do a morning weather check. You can see the Hudson River, and the elevated subway between 125th and 137th. In summer hopefully we can have a party!
So aside from
El Mundo the neighbourhood also has a really large Fairway - the gourmet food store / market. It's unbelieveable!! I went to buy food, and it took me 3 hours, and I still didn't make it into the cold room where they give you jackets to put on! The cheese section is amazing - and you can taste everything before you buy. The fruit and vegetables alone took me over an hour, and I still didn't even finish going around the whole store.
My new flatmates and I got dressed up and went out for Halloween. The whole city was out in costume. I went as Kali, the goddess of destruction, a reprisal of a costume I wore to Sandi's housewarming party, and a vital ingredient of which was the wig that everyone laughed at me when I said I was thinking of taking it, and so I gave it to someone or to Vinnie's - I can't remember which. This meant I had to buy a wig - and they didn't have the same kind here, so I ended up having to buy a "rasta / braided" wig, cos it looked kind of similar, and could pass as Indian goddess hair, but which was a bit odd wearing down the street in my neighbourhood! It was even weirder when I wore the same costume to the decompression party at Third Ward out in Brooklyn last Sat night, and so was coming home at 5 am on my own in the costume and wig when no one else was in costume... When I got out of the cab on my corner, suddenly every car passing by decided to honk at me - more so than just the car service (aka gypsy cabs) guys looking for fares.
I've been making some of my own friends - I hung out with one of the girls from the film the other night, and we went to one of her friend's birthday drinks at a very trendy bar in the meatpacking district called Five Ninths. It was very
Sex and the City. Afterwards we hung out at her place and it was one of the biggest apartments I've ever seen - it had a hallway with columns!
Putting some more pictures up - so
check them out!I also promise to respond to emails - tomorrow is a rare day off as a job got cancelled, so hoping to get back to all of my very patient friends... ;^)
Lots of love,
Ness xxx
