When we arrived at JFK airport just before New Year as a family of five, we were looking for how to get to Manhattan to start our adventure in the centre of all capitalism.
On advice from other people, we took the airport train to Jamaica and then the overground train from Jamaica to Penn station, two streets away from where we were staying.
The overground train goes under the East River and ends up underground at Penn station.
All very exciting.
Before it does that, it passes through the suburbs east of New York, which are, in effect, exactly the same as the suburbs east of anywhere.
There is perhaps a little bit more religion here than there is where I live, perhaps it's just more in your face but there is much less hyper-capitalism and commercialism than you might expect.
Much less main street brands, much less of the world companies that you see all over the magazines and YouTube adverts.
It was little shops, independence, people trying to make it, run down houses made of wood, everybody's car looked the same as ours.
And so, we arrived at Penn Station and walked around the corner to West 37th Street, just down from Times Square.
On our first visit to Times Square, Daniel Craig was all over the digital billboards up high advertising his new Knives Out movie.
I wondered where Daniel Craig was as I was looking at his picture in Times Square, as I know from my friend Carl Dunstan (who treated him through the filming of Spectre) that he lived somewhere posh in New York with his wife.
Each time we passed through Times Square, I kept looking at Daniel Craig, wondering where he was and how he was traveling and how he was getting his food in the evening and how much he was paying and which Range Rover with the blacked-out windows was carrying him around Manhattan and wherever it was he wanted to go.
I knew that he wouldn't get the airport train to Jamaica and the overground underground train to Penn station. I knew he would be driven or even helicoptered to JFK to the posh people’s lounge to the posh people's plane.
It was funny how that feeling took over me as I was in the Apple shop in Soho, convincing myself not to buy an apple watch Ultra, which in that moment made me think that I would probably look a little bit more like Daniel Craig and perhaps elevate me to the world where a black Range Rover would cart me around to the posh restaurants and the posh clubs and the helicopter would take me back to JFK instead of stumbling around at half past three on a freezing cold winter morning with my family to get there myself.
That's what New York does to you, it gives you ‘aspiration’.
It is the most wonderful and fabulous place (if you're rich enough) if you're not, it's a hellhole of a place.
Ask the guys who are lying on the street, ask the people that are producing the constant smell of dope that exists everywhere, ask the guys who are asking you for money at every turn.
It's not Daniel Craig's New York to them, it's their New York.
It was a paradox, a juxtaposition that I struggled with and it's taken me this long to write about it because it's played on my mind for that length of time.
I sound like the miserable bastard who spent all the money to take his family to New York and didn't like it.That's not true.
I'm just able to exist in two different places at the same time.
It's important that we see these things and it's important that we talk about them.
I was one of the richest people in New York by degrees based on the amount of people that were there and where they were staying and what they were spending, and I still felt like one of the poorest.
That's a f@ck*d up system
Blog Post Number - 3333
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