Weekend Culture

It's gotten really cold here! It is literally freezing outside, and the weather reports show that it's started snowing all around New York City, even as close by as Philadelphia. We've apparently had some flurries here (mostly early-morning snowfall that melts before it reaches the ground), but I haven't actually seen any fallen (or, even better, falling) flakes yet. But the temperature's gotten low enough that I've taken to wearing my heavy coat all the time, with scarves and gloves and other knicknacks. If it gets any colder, or if I have to spend any length of time outside, then I'll need to start using my beanie too.

Thankfully, though, it hasn't been very humid. Cold rain is the most miserable thing I can imagine at this point in time. Rather, each day has been splendidly clear; or rather, whatever's left of the day, because the sun's only out from 7am to 5pm now, and even at noontime it feels like late afternoon. What gets you, though, is the wind chill, as the concrete canyons of Manhattan funnel the wind up and down the streets. Depending on the wind direction, some blocks will offer you complete protection from the wind, whereas all it takes is to cross the street to bring you right into the blast path. Each intersection must thus be approached carefully. And I find myself bracing mentally and physically before stepping out of buildings or subway stations, because you never know where a gust will come from and rob you of your built-up cocoon of warmth.

Anyway, before it becomes absolutely too cold to do anything outside, there have been several moments of surreality this week. One was when a drama troupe brought out a bright red casting couch and planted it under a tree that had just turned bright red from the cold, making for a remarkable colour combination, and the strange sight of a couch looking perfectly in place outdoors. Another was of a couple, all dressed up, eating a candlelit dinner in the dining hall, with a white tablecloth and silverware but the incongruous and brightly coloured dining hall dishes. It'll be kind of like guys in tuxedos tucking into canteen wanton mee at home. The thing is, though, that these apparently odd things don't seem so out of place here in New York. They chime with the flavour of the place.

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This weekend, instead of going somewhere else, I decided to devote it to exploring New York instead. Like I said before, it has come to pass that although I've visited 5 states of the union, I haven't finished exploring the six blocks that comprise Columbia's tiny urban campus. Also, that means that while I've been having lots of fun outstate, I have really given a lot of things in New York a miss so far. So, as the weekend drew near, I looked forward to making some progress towards rectifying this oversight.

Yesterday, after a soothing couple of hours of chores (read: laundry and vacuuming - who would have thought that housework could be therapeutic?), went down with WL to join G in the NY Public Library for a couple of hours of studying. The Library is, of course, still as opulent and conducive to intellectual work as ever, and the others were, I think, also impressed with it - enough, I hope, that they will be willing to accompany me there the next time the urge hits. After 5pm, though, we made a quick hop over the the MoMA to join R and C, where we attended a free screening of Wall-E. It was a great film, and it was a pity that we couldn't catch it either in Singapore or here in NY, due to the unfortunate timing of the release dates and our flight dates. But yeah - Pixar and Disney really have hit upon a mother lode with their animation movies. Wall-E is great fun, and absolutely a delight to watch, both as a visual spectacle and as simply a feel-good story. Well, at any rate, I sure won't be able to look at an iPod in quite the same way ever again!

There was something else happening at the MoMA at the same time, though. There were great crowds in the main museum building, and when we entered the main lobby, all the walls on the upper atrium level were writhing with oversized projected videos of someone's face. We theorised that this was the overflow from the Van Gogh exhibit, but we didn't have time to stay to investigate, because the movie ended just in time for us to make a quick hop across the block to the New York City Centre theatre. There, we hooked up with J and YR, and the whole troop of us went to watch a reprisal of an old discontinued musical, On The Town. This, too, was great fun, with the plot set in 1944 New York, which meant that the performance was infused with jazz music and dance. The music loosened the limbs of all the dancers, and raised the voices of the singers magnificently, and I was left enthralled by the spectacle of a big-band musical, and wishing that more of the spirit of that age still existed around us. They definitely don't make musicals like they used to.

After that, we took a slow walk back to the 59th Street subway station, on the way passing by opulent 5th Ave and the apartments and hotels lining Central Park South. As winter deepens, New York is being gift-wrapped for the season. Fairy lights start to entwine the trees, glittering decorations festoon the buildings; one Cartier boutique was literally gift-wrapped, complete with ribbons and bow. And walking through the crowds that evening, everyone huddled in their coats, our breaths misting pleasantly in the air and our faces and ears burning urgently in the cold, it suddenly struck me that this was what I had been writing about, dreaming about, hoping for all this time: such a time of carefree walking down a street in the greatest city in the world, blending into the life there, and feeling as if you're participating in rather than only spectating at the life of the city.

And returning to Columbia, we stopped by a Chinese restaurant opposite the campus for supper, and I had a bowl of fishball and wanton kway teow. While it wasn't the nicest version I've ever had, it certainly was a big portion, and hot, and between the chopsticks, the noodles and the Singlish, the cold, monumental, kaleidoscopic city outside was thrown into even starker contrast. It takes something familiar to act as a yardstick so that you can see more clearly just how far you've come away from home. Such a day, such a night...it certainly cannot happen simply anywhere. We certainly aren't in Singapore anymore.

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So yesterday was the longest outing I've had with the Columbia Singaporeans since coming here. It has taken all of four months for me to encounter what I had encountered in UPenn, Boston and UVa earlier. But I think this is really not a problem; the delay, after all, is partly because I haven't really been in NY much on the weekends to begin with. And it does make a difference that the Singaprean community here is smaller. It means that our little Singaporean group cannot sustain itself as a viable social group, and that everyone must be part of other social circles besides. And who's to say that such an arrangement is not optimal? I would venture to say that it's healthier to mix with more people, but to always have a core of friends that you can always rely on to fall back upon in times of need. And I hope that what I see forming now is in fact a situation like this.

Today was, in contrast, dominated by CUE people. Woke up early this morning to go with K to Union Square, where the weekly farmer's market has been turned into a weekly Christmas market. There were the usual food stalls and flower stalls, but beyond the familiar booths were new ones set up selling Christmas decorations and trinkets. I had not seen anything like it since the Marche Noel in Lyon seven years ago, and I had not expected to ever see anything like it again. And so, it was with especial delight that I discovered this warren of Christmas stalls, replete with fake snow and Christmas music. It definitely warrants another visit!

So anyway, K and I were walking through the market, with cups of hot apple cider in our hands to ward off the cold. There is a special sort of comtentment that you get when you drink something hot on a cold day. Your insides feel extremely pleasant with warmth, and one blows especially large clouds of misted breath that are somehow deeply satisfying. And as we walked down the aisles, she introduced me to the most wonderful sweet I've ever tasted: maple syrup candy. From what I can tell, it's hardened and dried maple syrup. It's as close to pure sweetness that I've ever come, and it comes in hard little blocks like ding1 dang1 tang2, with a powdery coating of extra maple syrup flakes. When you bite into it, it crumbles like a good cookie, with a fine consistency. And the sweetness - it explodes on your tongue. My first bite of it stopped me right in my tracks, so that I could better savour the flavour spreading throughout my mouth. It is definitely something that I recommend to everyone! If you ever come across it, buy some and try it. Then buy more. You won't regret it.

Came back to campus after a bit of shopping (K got more maple syrup in a cute log-cabin-shaped bottle, apparently a historical allusion to how maple syrup is traditionally made in log cabins, as well as some flowers for her aunt), and A dropped by for a bit of a chat. Showed her some photos and videos of Singapore (since she's from Trinidad, and I thought she'd appreciate the tropical scenery). Then took out lunch from the dining hall. Ran into T at the doors of Furnald, and had lunch in her room instead, because we don't meet up often enough, and it's been a long time since we've had the time to talk at length. So, as I tucked into passable lo mein (what a strange transliteration), we chatted about courses for the next semester, teacher-student relationships in the US, future job plans and writing for Lonely Planet.

After a bout of work in the afternoon that took up the rest of the daylight hours (I don't know - it feels wrong to squander sunset for homework, and if it were not so cold out, I think I'd spend every sunset at Riverside Park watching the sun go down slowly), J suddenly called to offer me a ticket to go watch an adaptation of The Canterbury Tales at nearby Riverside Theatre. The last time I'd gone with him to watch a play at Riverside, it was a staging of Brecht's Ball, and I'd thoroughly enjoyed the thought-provoking performance, so I quickly agreed. Hooked up with A again, as well as AW, and we all went to watch the play.

I have only read one page of Chaucer before, and I've certainly never seen any of his work staged before. Joel's mentioned The Canterbury Tales to me before, but I'd never really known what the play was about. Until I watched it tonight. It's basically a play about a group of misfit pilgrims, who tell each other stories to make their journey pass more easily. It is an intriguing premise, really; it reminds me of Tokyo Cancelled, which was a series of stories that a group of travellers stranded at an airport tell each other to pass the time till the next outbound flight. In Chaucer's play, the stories range from the moralistic to the salacious, from the religiously extremist to the downright vulgar. Each story was good fun, though, as aspects of the tale got amplified to absurd proportions in the retelling. What was especially intriguing was their use of props to reconfigure the set for each story. The pilgrims' carts turned into outhouses, tables, beds, trees, walls, prisons and anything else that was contingent to the stories. All it took was overturning the carts, setting them up on their ends, propping them against each other or joining them together. The audience's imagination, too, was pressed into service, just as the listeners of each tale in the pilgrimage would doubtlessly need to use their imaginations in the listening. The way that the travellers used whatever they could find on their own bodies or in their carts for props and scenery was also authentic, I think: on the road, you don't have the luxury of unlimited resources, and you draw on whatever's available and you make do as best you can.

At the end, a character playing Chaucer himself (ironically, it was a black girl - yet another example of the proud tradition of actor-character contradiction that started when Greek men played female parts in the days of Sophocles et al) broke the fourth wall to ask the audience: "Do we tell stories to ease our travels? Or do we travel for an occasion in which to tell stories?" It is an intriguing question. I would say that I do the latter more than the former. I would even go further to say that I travel to find stories to tell - some of which end up here. And as we move into winter (the first winter ever that I actually have to live through), I find, to my delight, that things are happening around me and to me that are actually worth retelling. That is the happy consequence of being in the right place at the right time.