RIPJFK

I don’t remember the Kennedy assassination well, I just remember that it affected my mother, as had Marilyn Monroe’s death the year before. Somehow it confirmed something in her that I, as a small child, felt rather than understood. The thing I remember about Kennedy’s death was Robert Patrick’s play, Kennedy’s Children, which played at Glasgow Citizens Theatre in its extraordinary heyday, when I was at school in the early 1970s, and which gave him an award for the play. A play like no other, radical in form: a series of monologues in a cafe when six or seven people tell how it was for them on the day Kennedy died, and since. Patrick didn’t do anything else quite as successful, nothing else that caught the rhythm and sensibility of an age, but that was enough. Kennedy’s Children taught me so much about what could happen on stage, how things could be remembered, the stage as a dream space, private and yet revealing. Today I realized that the wonderful Shirley Knight was in the film version, as she had been in the 1967 film of Dutchman, a bad version of which I saw this autumn in Performa at the Russian and Turkish baths on East 10 Street. Tonight these streets are teeming, bars and restaurants pouring onto the streets where homeless people now lie spread out next to one another, as if cosily relaxing in bed, and yet and yet. Lats night a long long line in the dark Tompkins Square Park, waiting for food.

7.xi.13

The story so far: I have been in New York a month -- this time living on the Lower East Side-- and walking home tonight from the Upper East Side, and the New York Society Library, I stopped here, at Cafe Pick Me Up on Tompkins Square Park, for a glass of wine and thought about York. The traffic between the two cities where I have spent so much time in the past few years, the ocean between them, the spaces I inhabit as I pass across the lives I live there and here. This is the third time I have been in New York for a month, or two, or three in the past two years, and it feels as if this may be the last for a while, and so here it is, the prompt for 2York: overheard fragments, things I notice, the grime and the crush, the unexpected beauty, the connections, the music, the deaths, the friends, the books, the food, the Russian and Turkish baths, the retreat I am going to on the north of Long Island on Saturday. I have spent so much of my life in the USA in the past fifteen years, much less in York, where I have lived for eight. The passage between York and New York has not gone unmarked -- I curated York New York with my friend Claire Hind, commissioning writing and sound artists to make  short sound pieces, more than five years ago now. So this has been a long time coming. Listen, the table next to me has three young guys making a project on lap tops, in front of me two women converse, heads close, over wine. Beside me two guys chat about work. Out there the last leaves are yellow in the street lamplight. It's fall, and winter is almost here. Around the corner in the Russian and Turkish baths they are getting ready for the show I saw there last night, sitting in the hot rooms in my bathing suit. My husband Bill is on the road from DC. A siren passes by. The streets are quiet and dark. I think of my garden in York. I imagine it full of leaves, extremely dark under the sycamore and the lime tree, stretching away from the house, full of leaves. Here we are. I have six more weeks here.