It’s actually mad how many names of locations here in london are the same as the ones I’ve familiarized myself with in new york.
It was mad when I walked from the hotel to the venue back in Sydney and there was a Hyde Park
I knew there was another hyde park, in the uk, in England, in London
The one I’m moving to tomorrow, a hostel right by hyde park, a “grim but central” area I’ve been told
The hyde park I’ve booked a swim session in for Tuesday, morning session 10-1:30, it’s hotter in London that I thought it would be and the booking was cheaper than I’d feared
It was mad when a friend of mine, older and wiser but dumber and more reckless, said to me when we arrived in Manchester a while ago, “these houses remind me of new york. But of course they are actually English. I never thought of that” and I had not even thought to think of that, and he was right, and then I went to new york for a long while and thought for the first week how the town houses looked British until they became American again, until they were the peak new york town houses I’d seen in Girls and Sex and the City, the ones that to me had always been new york and new york only until my grown up companion made that casual remark in a cab in Manchester
And now we’re all here, we’ve moved to New York
We’ve found a nice little rental near a sweet little school
Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors
And you’ve found us a brownstone, said, -‘
A brownstone, that’s the word
The houses here are houses with two or three or four floors, the stones that are them are brown
And I’m in London now, here to walk the brownstone streets and to see the west end theatres,
Im a west end girl now
Confused as fuck by architecture and colonialism
It’s staring me in the face, from every corner of every building here in the residential area of hackney or Clapton or whichever it is,
And the names of the street
Are titles to songs
And the names of the areas
are titles to albums
And the names of neighborhoods
are also the names of neighborhoods in new york
I didn’t know there was another Greenwich
But I’ve always known about the international date line, it cuts through Greenwich, ive always been really proud to remember that fact because it gave me a sense of absolution,
this is where somebody decided for time to begin
And though, bitterly obvious now, it was made to start in a british territory, in the artificially established geographical point to where Japan would become
“the far east”,
I guess I never linked the two,
the Greenwich and the Greenwich Village in west Manhattan,
and I don’t think I even knew the date-greenwich was IN London,
I thought;
surely,
a small town somewhere,
in the English countryside, a sort of geological wonder, maybe a magnetic pole with any, just any sort of natural force to justify why this is where time would begin and end,
But it’s in London,
Its in a planetarium, made by people hired by people who dared to establish such a thing in the middle of their office which im sure must be similar to the oval one across the sea, their cousins of violence in another white house, contaminated by whatever name the virus must be called.
I’ll be going there today,
to Greenwich, not the one by the rehearsal space for the opera I used to work on, not the Greenwich village with rosetta pizza and the whitney museum with free admittance some fridays,
but Greenwich, the London area, following my fathers recommendation, im sure its really nice, im sure my father clocked these connections decades ago,
Im actually now sure that’s the reason the new yorkers don’t call it Greenwich village but “the village” and “east village”,
I assume theyre removing themselves from everything Britain,
Just like everything Britain is removing itself from everyone else,
Soon they’ll be islands lost in connections but securely fixed in time and geography, because once upon a time, their mutual ancestors decided that everything would begin 6,8 miles from the café im sat in on Chatsworth road, London, England, uk, Europe, central Europe, central, central, central.
