 monkey times blog A Letter from the Editor
For starters, this place is a 24-hour zoo, and it's hard to walk the streets without having to get down with the sickness. From the first night's spectacle of seeing bikers pulling 40 mph wheelies along the section of Broadway that passes through Harlem, to the resident-hacked fire hydrants that transform sunburned streets into joyous playgrounds of sideways rain, New York City is non-stop cable TV, right outside your door. Documenting this place is both an inner necessity and the process is definitely going to be interesting. One of the reasons I moved to New York City was because it is the largest population center in the United States, with over 8 million people living here. Walking down the streets for 50 feet in downtown Manhattan and you've walked past 30 people speaking 8 different languages. The sheer scale of the city combined with the globally-representative ethnic mix leaves you with the feeling that New York is the capital of the World. When I lived in the Palestinian West Bank from 1994-1998, the longer I stayed in the country I increasingly felt compelled to write about and photograph what I witnessed there. The result, A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was ultimately read by over one million people. The Internet offers a place of power to dump your writing and images and, even if nobody is paying you for doing it, both the communications ramifications of the medium in terms of sharing human experience and the personal delight at this enduring presence of such a vivid and journaled record of part of your life makes it worth it. It's the small details that remind you, years later, of the forces and events that you experienced during periods of your life, and many of the things that stay with me in memory were often the things that made me laugh.
Above: Roo on a string on day two of NYC. During the last leg of the Flying Monkey Airlines Courtesy Bus tour, I lost his leash. When we arrived in NYC late on July 10th in Harlem, there were no pet stores open, so it was a question of getting anything that would work as a pet restraint. The dog on a string situation was resolved the next day. Hey, Harlem might still be a ghetto, but these days it certainly isn't the hood. The dog on a string couldn't stay. To be fair about the string story, Roo didn't care at all. Just as there are nearly 9 million people in New York City, according to Animal Planet's NYC version of Animal Cops, there are 23 million pets here. Walking the little guy in the park across the street for the first few days was like watching him discover crack. It took a couple of days before he started getting back to figuring out what the key human point of going outside was. Not that he crapped inside ever, he just forgot to do it outside for a while because he was so damned busy checking the piss e-mail. Walking around, it is apparent that the force behind the gentification of large parts of the neighbourhood has not been the residents. Apart from sizeable Latino and African American populations, and a small smattering of Asians and Arabs, there are really not many white people living here and they are who own the majority of the property, residents tell me. Contrary to the film stereotypes of Harlem, the area I am temporarily staying in near 145th Street and Broadway is really chilled out, with people yabbering at you in the streets and not a single iota of intimidation or bad feeling. Anytime the kids get hot, the fire hydrants get jacked and the whole place becomes a beach. Very nice. On the weekends, the police or fire department actually shut down the ends of streets with signs that say "Play Street" and jack the fire hydrants on their way out. The family party ensues. You've got to laugh at the scenes on the streets, and I'm going to recount some of the best ones here. Life on earth is an egg dropped off a tall building. There's not that much time to dwell on the things that do not go the way you want them. So, I say to the several friends who wrote asking if I'd carry on the Flying Monkey Airlines journal that New York City is crying for some diary action. Welcome to the Monkey Times. Let's see where it goes... Nigel Parry Saturday 23 July 2005, 2:46AM
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