I heart New York

Can you hear them?
The helicopters?
I'm in New York
No need for words now

Five hours and twenty minutes later and I was sitting on the tarmac at JFK airport with the actual realisation in my head that in 8 days time I would be back home in London. This was my first time in the big apple and I had better make it good! It didn't exactly start smoothly after the airport shuttle bus I got into Manhattan drove us the long and wrong way round to my mid-town accommodation and when I finally arrived there after over 1.5 hours sat in that bus the driver wanted me to pay extra for bringing my guitar in the bus. One heated argument later, me not getting my full change and him not getting his extra (not to mention a tip!) we parted ways. (Don't use Super Shuttle to get from JFK airport into New York City ever! Hopefully Google picks this up too!). One positive was that I only had 8 more nights in hostels and I then NO more! Hopefully forever! That will be sweet. (As I'd left it late I had to get a room in HI-NY which is the largest hostel in the world too, 625 beds all in the same room! Oh god, and it smells bad!)

The first thing I noticed about NY was how much like London it was. Manhattan (central NY) is small and oh, so easy to get around thanks to the subway (identical almost to the tube). But in fact the vast majority you can walk (nothing like LA where I had just come from). My ticket to everywhere was the 7 day subway card (only $24). I felt at home straight away and its only 7 hours across the Atlantic back to London too! I really do heart NY! On my first day I checked out: Times Square (twice, during daytime and at night), applied for audience tickets to the David Letterman show, went to the Chelsea district to see the famous Chelsea Hotel (where Dylan, Richards, Worhol, Morrison, Ryan Adams among many others have all have stayed and where Sid Vicious died. Its also had a number of songs written about it by these artists), went to Chelsea guitars next door and saw a 1948 Gibson acoustic Ryan Adams once owned (he's a regular there), went to a record store near Fifth Avenue, ventured in and around Washington Park in Greenwich Village, took in Ground Zero, Battery Park (overlooking the statue of liberty on the horizon) and topped it off with a cheap chinese dinner in Chinatown. There is no way you could get even three of those things done in a whole day in LA!! If I were to sit here and compare the two (as it begs to be done as they are the two main commercial cities), I will put it this way: In San Francisco I felt creative if not a little overwhelmed, in New York I feel creative but like I am at home and in LA I felt inferior and helpless. I don't hate LA but it doesn't particularly hold anything for me either. Having stayed there for just over 2 weeks in total, LA appears from where I was standing to be full of insincerity and vanity (not to mention smog).

"No liquids, gels or aerosol cans"... "Don't touch the bag sir"

Taking a bunch of musical recording equipment (look, I got a good deal ok!) from LAX to JFK, New York on an American Airlines flight couldn't have been a worse idea. Both ends I had my entire bag turned inside out (wiping down a microphone and its lead with lint cloth then analysing it in a machine), this is all whilst I tried to dodge checked and carry on weight and size limits. When the Americans do a security check, they do it. Shoes and all! I can't imagine what it would be like to have a dark skin and a big beard, a guy roughly fitting that description (he was from Cyprus) in Santa Monica I met was recounting his experience from Heathrow to LAX the previous week. They held him in a room for an hour asking what his purpose of visiting was and why he had chosen Los Angeles, United States of America as his holiday destination. They made him miss his flight, re-scheduling him to another later one. Will he be hurrying back to the USA after that experience, the first of his vacation? There is no quick answer on how to handle this whole messed up situation.

Two days previous and I was sitting in LA's South Broadway Orpheum Theatre to see Ani DiFranco in concert. She was her normal amazing self playing guitar in her distinctive percussive style and a few tunes off the great new album "Reprive". As I stood listening to the last song "Hypnotized" (such a lovely song) it actually physically felt like a long and eventful chapter of my trip was closing and had come to an end. Its amazing what music can do. Ani, the self proclaimed "little folksinger" and her "slam poet" support Buddy Wakefield and friends had much to say on this situation of terrorism. Its everywhere in one form or another. America see's itself as unfairly treated but as they eloquently pointed out, the country (and the UK no different) has been causing the same terror on thousands for many, many more years. 48 hours later on my first day in Manhattan I visited "Ground Zero" otherwise known as the World Trade Center. Its just a large hole in the ground. A construction site. But a collection of photographs depicting tastefully but powerfully the experience NYC went through on that dreaded day sits on one of the fences. The old man with tears flowing from under his dark sunglasses with the reflection of the American flag on the lens. The Army officer stood with his face screwed up to hold back the tears whilst saluting at the remembrance ceremony. A picture really can speak a thousand words. But, most of all what brought the whole, actually emotional and overwhelming, experience into reality was the full, seemingly never ending, list of the thousands that died that day. Full christian name followed by surname. As you ran your eyes down and along the list, you would almost have to look twice because you thought you had spotted a similar name to a family member or friend amongst this mass. Thats when it really bought it home. How anybody, your parent, your sibling, your friend could have been killed in the same or another similar episode. I didn't quite understand what was going through the minds of all the tourists standing taking pictures of one another in different poses with smiles on their faces. Japanese tourists with their obligatory 'peace' hand signals, and the middle aged man from middle america who described the scene as "awesome". Has it just become another entry on the tourist "to-do" list. No one can blame those from all over the world wanting to see with their own eyes what we as humans the world over saw happening on our TV screens on September 11th 2001. Hell, thats why I was there. But if this becomes yet another place just to snap a photo on a whirlwind double decker bus tour, it will be very sad. I didn't want to take any pictures but eventually I tried some black and white arty ones of the wilting flag against the backdrop and the police car watching the site like a hawk. To 99.9% of people around the world, this event never directly affected them. But coming here it almost made me feel a distant part of it. That was my experience anyway.