A few of you have asked what I'm actually DOING. So here's a story I wrote:

Frank Ianno, president of DesignCore, a Brooklyn-based construction company, is having lunch. But there is no pause.

Ianno is sitting at his desk, which curves around from a window hatch on his right to the rest of the room where there are two chairs and a conference table. The telephone on his desk doesn’t stop ringing and a non-stop procession of faces appears at the hatch, a stream of questions which only he can answer.

Ianno’s lunch is a heap of French fries and a succession of burgers which he pulls from their foil wrappings. He pecks at the fries and nibbles on the burgers between phone calls and exclamations.

“Thank you, almighty one!” Ianno yells through the window to one of his employees, blowing a kiss. “I’m having a hard time in Bay Ridge, I’ve got to get Archie over there,” he says into the phone. “Randy is that you? What is your exact location?” he asks into a two-way radio that he pulls from a drawer.

“That is one pain-in-the-neck-phone,” Ianno says, as things settle down for a moment.

DesignCore is one of the two halves of Janton Industries, a family-owned company that specialises in building interiors for banks and stores. Ianno manages DesignCore, which makes the fixtures, and Salvatore Trento, his brother-in-law, runs Janton, the construction and maintenance end of the operation.

Ianno’s office occupies a corner of the second floor of Janton’s 300 000 square foot headquarters on the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park. Light pours in through the huge windows of the city-owned building that was derelict and dilapidated when Ianno and Trento agreed a 30-year lease for the property in 1994.

Now, after a refit that cost more than $2m, the two floors occupied by Janton are full of whirring machines and the air is full of sawdust as the company’s 60 employees turn out the hundreds of desks, signs, teller stations and bullet-proof partitions that fill the New York branches of such banks as Banco Popular, Carver Federal and Citibank.

But despite such blue-chip clients and the durability of Janton (Ianno’s father, Joseph Ianno set up the company in 1958), there is no assured flow of contracts in the retail construction business where companies bid competitively for almost every fitting job, however small.

“There’s plenty of competition,” says Ianno, who is 43 and from Staten Island. “There’s a lot of guys out there who want to do the same jobs as us… You don’t just open the door and it all starts happening.”

But, even then, Ianno’s job does not finish with the constant task of winning bids and securing work. Just as the phone rings from the outside world and the window hatch brings him internal problems from DesignCore’s mechanics and carpenters, Ianno must look in two directions at once. Ianno must be Janus-faced.

“There’s a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of responsibility. You have to think of everyone all the time, everyone down to the guy that drives the truck and cleans the floor,” he says.

For Ianno, his responsibilities to his workforce are a vital part of the wider fabric of informal relationships that make factory work possible. No one at DesignCore has a full time contract. It is loyalty on both sides which holds together the workforce.

Ianno does his part. “Even when you’re not making money, you have to be loyal to the people who work here year round. Otherwise you risk them getting a job elsewhere and then you never see them again,” says Ianno, who has had some employees for 18 years.

And the employees do theirs. When the workload is high, Jedie Sacko, who has done finishing at DesignCore for 8 years, works from six in the morning to eight at night. “As long as you’re busy, you shouldn’t complain,” says Sacko, 35, a face mask around his neck.

But Ianno believes the relationships and skills that sustain his workplace are under threat. Unlike many businesses in 2003, Ianno has jobs to offer, but he can’t find people with enough skills to fill them. A problem he sees getting worse, not better.

“There’s not that many people working with their hands these days,” says Ianno, “People actually take factories for granted. Everyone wants their children to be professionals but there is a need for craftsmanship.”

But for now Ianno’s problems are more immediate. The phone is yapping again. The air conditioning has broken down at a Citibank branch on the Lower East Side and Ianno must despatch a team, armed with fans, to fix it.

As Ianno has been talking, a relative called “Cousin” walked into the office. Ianno rose and gave him a kiss. Cousin is older and has sat quietly, his stick leaning against his chair.

Finally, the phones fall silent again. Ianno’s fries are cold. Above his head a plastic poster shows Daffy Duck, his feet pedalling furiously in a cloud of flying papers.

“How you doing Couz? Hanging in there?” Asks Ianno, loudly.

Cousin wakes up. “Yeah?”

“I know the feeling.”

I am now in a quiet moment before a lecture at 7pm. 7PM! I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. This place keeps going late as well as starting early. And it keeps coming.

The way it works is like this: you choose a neighbourhood – we chose them last week – and you stick to it for the next few months, up until Christmas really – and that’s your beat. You get to know the schools and the cops and community board and the waterfont and the old shops and the people with no teeth and the power stations, priests and bowling alleys. Me neighbourhood is called Sunset Park and it’s in Brooklyn. They give you bum neighbourhoods. Not bum exactly but not the Upper East Side or Central Park or Soho or anything. So Sunset Park. Used to be Norwegian and Finnish and Irish and now its Mexican and Puerto Rican and Chinese and still a bit European, with some Russian and some Polish. Fittingly, maybe, it has New York’s biggest cemetery. The monster Greenwood Cemetery and all its old generals and tax collectors. Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York is buried there. Thank God that’s over. I went there on Saturday night and watched the Wizard of Oz in a chapel there. Quite something with the lights out and the boomy chapel and the happyhappy people that run cultural events like these. Oz was NOT bad though. And the bit where it turns from black and white into colour and Oz is quite something. You see those plastic plants and the little water features and the trippy munchkins for the first time and their wiggly little plant hats. Pretty funny. I had a bit of a cough which was bad because little coughs in that chapel were noisy.

So you cover the neighbourhood and you walk up and down the main drag talking to shopkeepers and family action planners and old madpeople who want to talk to the student journalist with his yellow pad. Tomorrow I’m off to visit Janton Industries to profile a local business. They do construction and design and building maintenance. They recently sacked some people but I don’t think they know I know that. I only know that because I heard it off a guy with almost no teeth at all who lived above a stripjoint. He also said he was diabetic, actually he wasn’t sure because he hadn’t been to a doctor to see, so maybe he was something else. Anyway, tomorrow to Janton. It’s good though, the “nabe” as they call it here. You do trudge up and down and if you get on a bad run of, ‘no thank you’, ‘who the fuck are you’ ‘go away I’m praying’ then you can feel suicidal. I spoke to a street’s worth of ‘nope’ ‘uh huh’ ‘not really’ ‘don’t know’ ‘ ’ types the other day as I walked around a power plant trying to make them say something interesting about the powercut and their daily lives next to this great big hawking facility. But they didn’t. Not a squeak. I had to go and mope around the cemetery after that.

So the powercut.

We were, as we often are, in a lecture. This one was about demography in New York City. Not sexysounding but quite interesting – look, all the Chinese people live here, look, people in this area only live there for six months before they move out, look, not everyone is Dominican, etc. So the guy from the city is just starting up when the microphone downs, the aircon dies and the emergency lights flip on. There’s a stir but the men from the city planning department continue. They do finely until a professor walks in looking just like someone with bad / exciting news and whispers into the ear of our attentionloving dean, dean klatell (say it clay-tell). Everyone’s watching, even city demographics are watching. Klatell listens like he’s some kind of all knowing barman and steps forward to grandly interrupt. He may have even reached for the microphone which wasn’t working and leaned forward presidentially, emergencyerially,.

‘This is what we know…’

‘This is not a local blackout – Detroit’s out, Pennsylvania’s out, Boston’s out, parts of Canada are out….’ (‘Oh my god!’ says a girl americanly behind me)

There is a twinkle of mobile phones coming on. Klatell says we can use the phones to check in with ‘loved ones who may be worried’ but then he also says, to those who feel comfortable, ‘go report!’

So I went report. I pounded down Broadway. The University is up on 116th street and I’m living on 4th street. So you do the maths. (112 blocks, 5 and one half miles). I thought I’d just walk on down and talk to people as I went and maybe ring the Independent and see if they wanted anything that was juicy. Everyone was drinking really. The lights were out and beer was getting warm in glasses pressed in the hot hands of people talking cheerily. People bought candles and bunched around radios on street corners. It was good. Thousands of people walking home, little smiles on their faces, watching each other and trying to cadge news off other people’s faces, just checking that we’re all ok, this isn’t the end. I talked to tourists from Oregon who were in the MET when it went dark, then it was a couple from Maine who has just paid $41 for two sandwiches and she, the wife, was surprisingly angry about missing the Lion King because they had booked tickets a good long time ago. When I asked her if she thought the scene in front of her – Broadway dulled to grey and filled with thousands of walkers – was more memorable than the Lion King, her husband, who was called Randy or something, said very sensibly, “It’s impossible to know, you see, the Lion King’s been cancelled, we’ll NEVER know…’ Shucks. Then an English family who were very jolly and from Kent but they’d just been locked out of their very electronic hotel to catch their plane to Heathrow when the lights phutted and died and now their shuttlebus didn’t seem to be turning up and it was starting to look a little sticky. Afterwards, a traffic cop who said things were not too good, fucking hectic, and then, walking with a strangely wide step and with a steady look in her eye, Megan. How was Megan? Megan was ok but Megan was getting married the next day. Walking back from the Plaza where her family had flown into to be looked after and thrilled at the wedding. Megan was twitchy. She looked like she was on the edge of something quite bad. The wedding was planned for 3:30 the next afternoon. We got power at about 1:30. I worry that it got called off just when it was probably about to be ok again. Poor old Megan.

After that home and candles and sitting in the darkened rooms and cooking pasta and listening to the street below where more people drank and talked and the sirens that came whizzing by. By 9 in the dark I was tired. It was a good sleep.

And so to a little sketch of the flatmates. Saturday morning was our first outing together. We trotted in a line down the six or seven steps of the four storey brownstone of which we have the first floor and started walking north along sixth avenue to the Chelsea flea markets. Matt Rogers, Mark Wimberley and me, a ragbag of something or rather. We walked up sixth avenue with the Empire State looking very large under the bands of light and dark grey cloud which have sat on top of New York for the last couple of weeks. We talked about nothing in particular. Rogers and Wimberley, as they call each other, have a fine patter of nothingconversation. We walked past a woman running as a Democrat for some school board or other, “I’m running for the Democratic nomination for the District….” “So am I,” said Matt, who is from Texas, immediately. “I like Bush,” said Mark, who is gay, a bit crudely. And so we carried on. We were looking for furniture for the apartment. I don’t know why. It seems like it has about the right amount. “Nothing too dark,” said Matt, as we turned into one of the carparks that get converted into markets on Saturdays. “There it is again,” said Mark, who is black and has dredlocks and a beard which has two little points, “the racial slur.”

I came back from a lecture the other day. It was late and I was hungry and Rogers and Wimberley were sitting in the sitting room talking avidly, using each other’s surnames. During the day, Rogers had chucked out Wimberley’s favoured furnishing, a slim black metallic psychiatrist’s chair. Rogers had put the chair on the patio where it sat in the rain, calling it ‘garden furniture.’ (You get on to the patio, which is really the bottom of the fire escape, by climbing out of the kitchen window, It’s not very difficult. On Friday, bravely, I climbed up the fire escape and up the ladder at the top onto the roof of the building. It wasn’t much. It’s not a big building. But as soon as you get up high in New York and you see the water towers plonked on the roofs and the greys and the reds and the whites it feels exciting. It feels like you can jump from one to other in a chase and then leap over streets and roll around like a stuntman or that Frenchman in the BBC adverts). And I had arrived in the middle of the argument that followed. It seemed funny at first, the use of the surnames, the polite waiting until the other had finished (I was immediately asked what my surname was and then occasionally asked for contributions), the measured tone and nodding heads, but my friends this conversation went on. I had to leave and make myself some food as Rogers talked about the “cohesion” of the design of the sitting room and Wimberley came back arguing strongly for an added dash of pow, something to offset the staidness of the leather and the brown floor…

Matt Rogers is from Dallas where he didn’t just used to have a car, oh no, he had trucks: red ones, yellow ones, grey ones which he bought and patched up and sold on and loved to tinker with. Matt cut his hair the other day. Just stood in front of the mirror in the kitchen with some clippers and mauled off all his hair. I was dutifully reading something about journalism in my room, which really isn’t far away from the kitchen (I’m in the kitchen now), and he called me in to help cut off the little neck hairs which he couldn’t reach. Matt went to college in Texas but dropped out of his bum tourism and marketing course and headed for the lights of NY to see what happened. Now he works as a decorator and construction-type in upmarket apartments on the upper easts and upper wests. He has a picture perfect girlfriend called Lauren who occasionally comes over. She is from Texas and has a part in a reality tv show about a restaurant that’s on. She arrives in episode 5, next week, we’re waiting tonight to see if she made it into the ‘coming soon’ section at the end of the programme. Matt has recently got all the tv channels so I normally come back and find him there on the strangely clubby / library furniture that causes so many arguments, flicking through the hundreds of channels until he settles on a movie that he’s already seen, or some very dangerous looking wrestling we watched this morning or car racing. He drinks protein drinks and gave me a Stanley knife this evening as a present, ‘you’ll never know when you’ll need one…’ Also, quietly, very quietly, he is a born again Christian. Mark, the other one, told me that on the way back from the flea markets as it was starting to rain. I don’t know why or if he is really ‘born again,’ he is not very old. I don’t think he ever fell or died (?) or suffered anything needing rebirth but there it is. He hasn’t said anything yet, but he did invite me to a church in Brooklyn one Sunday to hear the choir.

Mark is more complicated. He is older, maybe around 40 or something. Do you become more complicated just because you get older? Then simpler? He is a photographer but he’s done other things under the vague word of designer. It’s a bit like producer. “I’m a producer.” Mark is from Queens and when he was young and he got ill his mum would heat up some orange juice on the stove and make him and his brothers and sisters drink it and then climb under the covers and not come out. How they sweated! But they got better. Mark eats eggs and whipped up vegedrinks of spinach and watermelon and other virtuous, gritty things. Next to Matt’s mixed diet of protein drinks and extraordinary powermeals – breakfast this morning was scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and cinnamon toast – enough to make your eyes disappear into your head with the rush of it – my food looks quiet in the fridge. Maybe Mark’s food and drink is why he looks so young and lithe. More questionable are his clothes. I’ve only seen him in one outfit: brown boots, white vest and black pinstripe trousers which fan out at the bottom as the seams split before safety pins keep them in check. I like to think Mark has several copies of this outfit but really I fear that he doesn’t. He seems very clean though – he insists on a scrubbed kitchen to prepare his scrupulous diet – the habits must extend. Mark has lived in Paris and Japan and spent time in Russia. “I’ve got to get out of this country,” he said the other day. He has worked for Donna Karan and designed knitwear and now he takes photos (good ones I’ve seen them) of models who occasionally come round to the apartment, handily situated as it is in the west village and above a sex shop called Tic Tac Toe which has a big pink sign. Next door is Birthday Suit and across the road are some tattoo parlours. Today I'm on a bus trip around some ugly neighbourhoods in Brooklyn. Yesterday I had a wierd conversation with a pastor from the Pentecostal Church of Chile.

And yesterday a very polite rejection of Charlie Wade from pfd.

What a time to be so silent when here there’s been nothing but noise. Sorry to be have been out of touch but myword it has been something. Everything is new: new apartment, new phone, new university, new bank, new people, new city, new weather, new padlock for new locker in new building with new swipe cards and new currency and new way of talking. It feels so new I sometimes look down and see my old shoes or catch a glimpse of a reflection showing my English face and my English clothes and wonder what the hell they can be doing here where I’m starting over on this different subway with this different food. It can be so tiring. I’m so tired now. Funny things are tired. My mouth is tired from talking and saying words like London and Cambridge and the UK and all my life and yes.

But it’s good.

We had a barbecue last week in a park outside new york and us international types (25orso) all stood up and talked about where we were from etc. It took about 3 hours. Up until then, just in the morning, I had met most people and they seemed polite and interesting and nervous or whatever. They did not seem like press officers from the British embassy in Addis Abba, or like Colombians who had fled Colombia and broadcast radio shows twice a day from their home in florida, or like Argentinians who had set up tv stations or Germans who had written about concentration camps in Chile, Chinese journalists with journalism prizes, Indians from the Calcutta courts, New Zealanders from Vietnam, Koreans from Chile, Pakistanis from Citibank, Sicilian movie writers, Glaswegian Glaswegians. Just a knockout. And, grandfatherly looking on, was our professor, Josh Friedman, who picked up his Pulitzer for his coverage of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s and other coverage of ‘complex-humanitarian-emergencies.’ They told us most people feel a rush of inferiority in their first few weeks / months. My friends that’s where I am right now, juddering around, locking myself out of my apartment, walking too far and forgetting things, desperately trying to stay alive, falling asleep whenever I can and knowing that oh so soon it’s going to change and I’ll be doing all that and trying to write and keep up.

They tried to give me a room that was deathly. I optimistically went to look at it the first day I arrived in the Promised Land and swanked up Riverside Drive, a great wide road on the Side of the River on the Upper West Side, to number 362. 362 does not cover it I can tell you that. This was a monster block, a huge ministry of housing, a termite mountain of graduatesandundergraduates teeming around and wriggling into their damp holes, eyes useless in the dark, feeling their way with noses and cheeks pressed against the bodies around them crawling all feral for gobs of gloop. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. But after sitting trying to be positive on one of those grey mothmunched sofas that sit in the halls of these places and on which no one has ever sat, I was shown upstairs by a big woman who slid around jangling her keys like a jailer. (I’m not going to get on the proverbial wagon / ass of United States O-BESITY but sometimes you do catch a rude full sight of one of the larger creatures they keep here and it can stop you, well it can stop me straight in the street, because you have to watch them make their way like overloaded caravans, swaying and tipping down the street or up some stairs under the hot sun with the wetness of their sweatness reaching out across the bottom of their backs and showing on their chests. We saw some at the zoo, young ones with white chubby ankles squeezed into shoes that they just seemed to burst upwards and outwards from, just packing it in, gobbling their curly fries and heaving on their pepsi familysuperdrinks which had plastic animal heads slapped garishly on top). The jailer showed me up to what I thought was a sort of apple-pie room: deliberately, comically shortened and topped off with a heavily grilled window which looked suddenly out on to a brick wall. She turned on the light (it was about 1:30 on bright July afternoon) to reveal the bed and cupboard and the dust and wires sticking out of the walls and the relics of some suicided international student from last year – a new york transit map forlornly on the regulation pinboard and an old lava lamp, disconnected, dusty and stagnant on the windowsill of despair. The choice was reflex. I’m not even sure it went through my head. Maybe it was one of those decisions that your body takes when it needs to survive or when the doctor knocks you on the knee – zipzip nerves rush to your spine and don’t even bother to ask before they breathe / run / jump / close your eyes / raise your knee – it was like that. She showed the big communal bathroom with its rotting undersized doors and more wires as a kind of knockout blow but I was already running.

Running to flathunting in Manhattan, a gory task which, if you’re feeling fresh and inquisitive and not desperate about finding a place to live, can be a rich way to spend a few days. I was feeling ok, sort of anxious but not bench in the park anxious, so I enjoyed my fifteen or twenty house calls and the faces that popped round the doors and the places they invited me to see. I saw a basement in Harlem and the living hell of a life with Randy the catering entrepreneur and his pugdog who slid around wetly on the floor. I saw Owen the quiet and camp older man and his red apartment full of deathly dusty objects near the park and where he doesn’t have so many visitors maybe once or twice a month but does smoke a bit of pot and by the way what’s your star sign? There was the cardplaying couple from Idaho who encouraged their roommates to stay in their room and watch their tvs and sit basking by their air conditioning, Bart the thoroughly thoroughly normal real estate man who slept in the small living room of his one bedroom apartment but was quite happy for me to move into the bedroom bedroom, dinosaur museum workers from LA looking for their new best friend, Larry who was extremely busy with his divorce and who sat their in his pajamas taking notes on his knee in his grey living room shuttered from the light and surrounded by symptoms of his lost wealth / job / family: great big 1980s tvs, the first computers, dying plants and family snaps with the colours turning wild in the gloom of his dustwrapped flat. Etetetectc.

And then the place I moved into with a guy called Matt who is 23 and does construction / decorating and is full of moneymaking schemes. He’s from Texas. And then there’s Mark who is (unbelievably) about 40 and a photographer, he’s a gay black guy from Queens. But they’re normal and they eat normal food and it has white wooden floors and a good shower and windows and it’s in the West Village so I feel fine. Nervous and not quite relaxed there yet. But fine.

Maybe more soon. Things are happening fast here.