Location 2:

Columbia University, on the steps. Thursday. 4 o’clock.

After the crossroads and the shooting I took a day to do laundry and wake up slowly. I went to Columbia in the afternoon and I saw a thin crowd lining the big steps of the Lowe library, the large domed building that isn’t a library any more. I walked down past them and onto the steps. I walked across and was heading out of the gates which lead to the subway when I heard the wup-wup of sirens coming closer. I stopped under a tree and saw two police motorcycles pull into the Columbia, along its tiled pathway. After the cycles came two long dark blue Mercedes, one with a flag on the bonnet, then two or three huge black jeeps with lights under the grilles at the front flashing blue and red. As the second one came past I looked in and saw padded black arms and soldier faces bunched up under black helmets. More vehicles, more lights under grilles, a low slung foreign limousine with another flag, more jeeps. It was a motorcade of fifteen dark vehicles, nosing in under the trees at Columbia, pulling up by the big steps of the Lowe library. I walked up and stood on the edge of the steps as the leading mercedeses arrived. Suddenly there was a crowd of secret service men in black suits looking every inch like trained actors, talking into their wrists and touching their ears, looking around, up and down, gathering in a group, a swarm of thirty or fifty and they jogged lightly up the long steps, three further ahead and maybe eight behind, talking into their hands, up the long steps, past the plump security guards and into the building. Gone.

Then I looked back at the motorcade. Some of the drivers were taking pictures of each other. Five of the huge black men had gathered in a group, their long firearms with actionfilm gunsights hanging down and there was a man in a brown suit, standing square in the middle of Columbia’s huge quad. The man in the brown suit was talking into his wrist but he was looking up and making gestures with his other hand. I followed his look and saw along the tops of the faculty buildings that there were men dressed in dark blue with more long guns and huge binoculars scanning the sky and the bright clothes and smiling faces of the hundreds of university students that milled and wheeled in between the darkened windows and shining wheels of the long parked up motorcade. It all looked uncannily like a Hollywood assassination scene. Behind the brown suited man young boys picturesquely dressed in outdated baseball outfits played gently on a tidy lawn with red white and blue banners hanging over the fences. A man walked past holding a bunch of fifty light blue balloons under the bright and puffy clouded sky. A blind woman came by. Ten students with their tops off jogged athletically through the crowd. All the disaster scene extras. And so I stayed for an hour, talking to a friend who is on her way to becoming a Romanian news anchor, waiting for him to come out. Him? Putin. The KGB man Vladimir had been in that pack of secret men who had jogged up the steps and into the building. Putin, movie like, once said there’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man. I’m going to believe him.

The first of what be a long location series.

Location, location, location.

A week of locations and set changes, long cast-lists and improbable set pieces. I’ve felt blurry, not sure about my role. I’ve had moments when I’ve realised that all I have to do is stand there, or follow this group, or get on this subway, and the story will continue. I’m just in a suitcase, bundled along from stop to stop, given a view here or there, a couple of lines to say, and then back on the luggage rack and the rollingrolling carries on.

Location 1:

Kingston Avenue and Fulton Street, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Wednesday. Noon.

I’m doing a crime story. They want us to do it real time. So the ticker comes through from the NYPD, we grab it and then run off to the scene. I come in on Wednesday morning and look at the reports to see what has been broken and smashed the night before.

PERSON SHOT CONFINES 79PCT
ON 09/23/03 AT APPROX 2158 HRS AT C/O KINGSTON AVE AND FULTON ST CONFINES OF THE 79 PCT A M/B/22 WAS SHOT 1X IN THE STOMACH BY A M/B FOR UNK REASONS. THE VICTIM WAS TAKEN TO ST JOHNS HOSPITAL IN STABLE CONDITION. NO ARRESTS. INVESTIGATION ONGOING.

This is what they call a “skel on skel” shooting. Young black man in shoots young man black man in central Brooklyn. Probably drugs. The papers don’t report these crimes. The information is hard to get and when it comes, it’s usually dismal and hopeless, there’s normally no twist, nothing unusual, no “gee whiz” factor that makes it news. New York has 600 murders a year, that’s down a lot since ten years ago, but it’s still almost two a day, and this isn’t even a murder, the kid lived, what’s news? It’s not news because it happens all the time. It’s a funny sort of logic, ignore it because it’s so frequent. It means these crimes are background noise, tuned out, sounds indistinguishable from each other, one fuzzy mess. Leave it a week, the individual clinks and clanks, shots and names will be different but the mess will remain, incomprehensible and depressing. Let’s stick with basketball players and movie stars flashing each other.

I call the 79th and they tell me a detective Lozado is running the investigation. 50 minutes later, the subway brings me up right under the corner of Kingston and Fulton in the middle of central Brooklyn. It is one of those typical cheap high street corners you get in Brooklyn. It reminded me a bit of Shepherd’s Bush. Two corner shops, one of them 24 hrs, a couple of beauty salons, fish shop, Chinese takeaway, West Indian bakery and a group of about seven or ten men lounging outside the Family Deli Grocery, just watching the day go by. As for signs of the crime, there’s an empty squad car parked up. The temperature is good. My shoes are comfortable. I’m not too hungry and I don’t seem to be tripping over too much. Best start talking to people. In the fish shop they don’t know anything, the night shift isn’t in yet. I cross over to the group of men outside the Family Deli. Up to a man with the cloudy red eyes that move slowly and just a narrow strip of doo-rag visible under his cap. Does he know anything about a shooting last night, just there, right in front of him? Nope. Do you mind if I ask your tall bald friend, who is also standing there, if anything looking even more vacant, even more stoic, just peering out? Slow motion shrug.

Did you hear about a shooting?

The-re w-a-s a sh-oo—ti-ng?

Inside the shop I queue as if for a phone card and then talk awkwardly through the bulky bashed plastic partition they have in these delis, partly to store batteries and cigarettes and old signs asking for id, and partly, you think, to make a little distance between keeper and customer.

I start my customary blathering away, hello, I’m Sam I’m a student journalist from Columbia yes yes I’m not from around here that’s right, yup, English, yes, London, oh really? Yup, English, long way, yes, I’m writing about Brooklyn actually I’m here doing a story on a shooting that happened last night just right here about ten o’clock at night yup there was did you? young man got shot in the stomach did you, by any chance, did you, were you, I mean, how, what time, what time do you close here were you working then, about ten, hear anything? the shots I mean. Hear any shots?

Ushered back. Ali was here. He’ll talk to you. Ali is in his forties and tall. He leans down from the end of the counter. We’re in among the cereal. An older gentleman comes back and starts poking at the stack of Cheerios. He wants the top one. Ali squeezes past me to help the old man. With a practised jab of his fingers he pokes the lower pack and the top Cheerios falls down, Ali catches it smoothly and gives it to the old man. No, says the old man, he doesn’t want that one after all. There are the three of us bunched around the Cheerios, the old man making up his mind, me with my notepad out, Ali looking around the shop. It’s one of those crowded situations where one of you has to turn around to let someone else through, who has to turn and shift their balance on to their other foot, like cogs or one of those games where you slide the tablets around and into the one empty space to make a map of the world. Ali’s scared but he wants to tell me about the thirteen or fourteen shots he heard, the different types of guns, boom, he heard, boom boom from a little gun and then bababdababdbaba from a bigger gun, big gun, too much bullets, too much. Ali heard the guns and got himself down on the floor by the coffee machine, behind the racks of nuts and chocolate bars and then he heard people running by the door of his Family Grocery. It is very dangerous here, says Ali, pronouncing the g in dangerous like the g in gun, danguerous. We shake hands quickly by the cereal and Ali climbs behind the counter again.

I walk into Unity Beauty Products. It’s empty except for Percy who’s been running it for the last 14 years. It’s one those shops that is all cards and balloons, one dollar earrings and wrapping paper, lots of pink and white, glitter pens and stickers and Percy. Percy shuts at seven pm so he wasn’t here when, but his alarm went off and the company called him and he got here about ten fifteen. His alarm went off? Look up there, and Percy showed me a hole the size of a child’s fist smashed the top of his storefront, six inches below the ceiling. The hole was so finely jagged around the edges and it had a pale blue NYPD sticker just below it with an arrow in pen pointing up, look, said the NYPD sticker, bang. And I looked, turning around, from the hole in the window into the shop and followed the line of the spinning bullet which wracked through the Percy’s metal shutters, ripped his window and set off his alarm. I followed the bullet and saw that it had punched a rude hole through one of Percy’s balloons in his display and then bounced along the ceiling, smashing two long neon bulbs and spreading the glass all over the floor.

“That’s a big gun, that ain’t no school kid thing.”

In the Young Apache bakery next door, Richard was pulling down the shutters to the store when the bullets started flying and clacking against the walls and the store fronts, ran into the bakery thinking he’d been shot. He was ok. “I had my back to them and was pulling down the shutters when it started,” said Richard, who was short and jokey and quick with his clichés, “the residential area will always be the residential area” he said a couple of times with a meaningful grin and a singsong ragga accent, residenshall aieria. Richard was missing two teeth in the middle of his lower jaw, ‘you’re the fbi aincha?’ he asked me, ‘you like da fbi to me, ha ha.’

After Richard, Percy and Ali I went and sat in the police station waiting to talk to the detective who was out talking to the victim with the hole in his stomach at the hospital. In the waiting room by the detective squad there was a mound of old filing cabinets, faded dark blue and green next to the tough yellow walls and big, practical rubbish bins. Above and behind my head the wall was pasted with wanted and reward posters, in some places three deep, each one held up with one or two pins and when each time a door opened or closed along the corridor they fluttered silently, revealing for a moment the face and alias and date of birth of some wanted villain from the nineties, the eighties, the seventies. Homicides and assault ones, rapes and informations leading the arrest. Deep amongst them there were the small faces of two cops shot multiple times in 1971, their faces darkened and smudged from the thousands of xeroxes taken from their police graduation photos. Two cops with darkened faces shot mutiple times in the east village in an assassination by the black liberation army thirty years ago. The shooters must be 50 by now, grandfathers?

The detective didn’t come back. Later I spoke to a perky woman detective on the phone. I told her who I was. “Why are you so interested in this shooting?” she asked happily, curiously, as if she’d missed something, as if there was some joke she wasn’t getting, as if I had some plan. I went to McDonalds and ate some old fries and thought I would do one last run around the shops on the corner, see if anyone had seen anything rather than just dramatically heard things and found the routes of old bullets. I heard a rumour that an old woman had seen everything and was talking but I couldn’t find her. And then I heard Richard from the bakery in my head again, “I had my back to them…’ Them. Them. He had an image in his head of something that was “them,” he’d seen something, and was that why he was pulling down the shutters at two or three minutes to ten rather than ten when the bakery shuts?

By this time it was five and the sun was beginning to go down at the western end of the hugely long Fulton street, it was making things hard to see, bouncing off the windows of cars. Richard was outside the bakery, talking to a pretty woman with two tattoos below her neck. “Hello mista journalist, how’s your story coming?’ he asked with a big smile. Not never, he said, they’ll never get the one that did this, not never, and he pulled the pretty woman who half, jokily, protested, into a doorway next to the bakery. The brown door shut and I stood on the pavement, with the light going down and the group of men still gathered around the Family Grocery and Ali inside still scared. I stood there and the sun came down and there was a young boy about nine years old in dark blue trousers and a white shirt just singing and rapping quietly to himself, willowing around on the pavement, snapping out a foot or hand whenever his voice tensed up on the beat, covering and re-covering eight or nine paces around the pavement, singing while the sun came down. Richard came out and the pretty woman left, holding onto her small brown paper bag. I asked Richard about “them”, who’s them Richard? “This is the black area, Mista Journalist, the black area will always be the black area and the white area will always be the white area.” That was his way of not saying anything more. So I wanted to check one last thing and so I pointed across the street, I said, so that’s where the shots came from and I swung my arm around to face the bakery.

“Don’t point your hand,” said Richard, for the first time very serious. “Don’t point your hand because people are watching.” And I brought my hand down. It suddenly felt very big on the end of my arm and I knew Richard was talking about the group of men outside the Family Grocery. They were gathering for this evening and they were there last evening and they saw the young man got shot and Mista Journalist wasn’t going to learn anything more than that.

On the subway home I was rushed and shaky and tired and didn’t feel like I had much to say at all.

A funny day today. Started off in police plaza, hq for New York’s Finest policemen and women. We met a reporter from the Daily News who told us all about how they choose which crimes to cover and how to get the colour, the details, the wedding plans and holiday destination of murder victims and car accidentees. It brought back last summer and attempts to make a tease for Court TV about the reporters who work out of the Shack, the line of news bureaus that run along the back of the second floor in police plaza. We have to write about a crime next week, and hustle out and knock on doors and hear gossip and write it down for you people out there, you concerned citizens who need to know.

After the Puzzle Palace I went to see the Dalai Lama. I know, simple as that. I was feeling down, confused, in need of succour from the man the world calls peace and I thought I’d drop in on His Holiness (HH), Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th DL. I went to a press conference at the Guggenheim museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as Temple of Spirit. Spirit is right when you’ve got Richard Gere, silvery, tufty, waving to you, ‘Hello Everybody’ he said in the blaze of flashbulbs as he introduced HH on the stage of the basement auditorium.

I turned up early, cautious, nervous, the Rookie, and took a nondescript sort of a seat near the back. The beige auditorium and its comfortable seats and soft lighting filled up steadily with welldressed reporters. Covering HH when he drops into New York is clearly a job for the better heeled, the more settled newswriters. Lots of linen, red cotton shirts for the ladies, floppy hair for some of the men (one of whom looked particularly familiar and established, kept nervously putting his fingers in his mouth and clutching his face) a few summer tans, lots of chat and gossip, and when the action started, not too much note taking, this was a relaxing afternoon show, oozing sympathy for the HH.

We were hushed to waiting silence by an organizer of some sort and in the quiet we could hear the approaching sirens of the holy cavalcade. Sirens on new york police cars and big black vans are very noisy and unrhythmic, they leap around, jerking, breaking off into new syncopated, eirgh eirghhs, just when you’re getting the swing. Neenawneenaw – eigrh eirgh – eee ee e e e e eee – whuip whuip whuip – eirhgh eighrh – bupbup whuip --- those are the sounds we could hear approaching us in our beige welldressed liberal party. The sirens stopped but still HH did not appear and just when one of the organizers was briefing the photographers (who were crouched in a big bunch in front of the lectern, just crouching like a big spring with fifty heads, ready to pop up and set off their lights), just when the organizer was telling them to stay out of his aisles the curtain behind the stage whished open, fast as a gust of wind and…..

Pish-pash-pish a few cameras went off but it was a false alarm, it was only rush of Buddhist monks, the HH’s entourage, who had come filing out from the curtain. They did, admittedly, look a lot like HH, in their red robes with saffron inners and their hairless heads, one or two of them knew it and laughed at the photographers. They were very relaxed. I don’t know what the collective noun for Buddhist monks is. I was thinking about this in the nice auditorium looking at the photographers as well. People say PACK for photographers but I think of that as having more to do with the microphones and jabbing nudges of the writers and their notepads, photographers and their cameras and telezooms and flashes deserve a name for themselves. See the excellent. A quiver of cobras, a disturbance of photographers? Monks deserve better, a meditation of monks, came through the curtain making no disturbance whatsoever and just as they were quietly taking their seats, slip, in he came, HH, round from the other side, there was a pause as everyone checked he wasn’t just another Lama and then the disturbance hit flash and razzle-dazzle, the HH was lit up like an electric shock. He waved his arms and laughed – and I have to say this because it’s true, but once in a while you meet people who put on the smile and take in the room and make you feel like it’s all fine, the HH has got that.

Gere looked like a college society president next to the 14th Lama. He came to the front of the stage and after his introduction (when Gere said the Lama was here to do many ‘quite extraordinary things… I went to Washington with the DL, said Gere, and it was quite extraordinary, we had a meeting with the President and the heads of the two parties, I don’t anybody who can unite people as much as HH, quite extraordinary, then we went to Boston, quite extraordinary, I remember the last time the HH was here in Central Park and the whole world came to see what was going on, quite, um, extraordinary, I think this visit is going to be quite extra……… we have a series of Buddhist teaching sessions which, now I think of it, are going to be q.e, a music festival that is going to be full of QE musicians, QE HH, that’s what Gere said, all tufty). So the HH comes to the front of the stage in the cracklelights and bades them to stop for a second. They stop and he looks down, at each of them, and says Hello, Hello, and he walks along and has a good look, this disturbance of photogs is not used to being looked at by Nobel Laureates and they quiver. Then there’s a pause and the 14th raises his left hand and brings in down again, saying, “OK, flash.” And they do, pishpishpish.

The Lama spoke about 9/11 and his three tenets of being the Lama which are about human value and respecting each other and the inner potential of people as people, and his second tenet which is about learning from other faiths and his third tenet which put unBuddhistly reads something like: GET THOSE SWINE CHINESE OUT OF MY TIBET.

The Lama has a way of talking, it’s broken with pauses… “after 9/11… New Yorkers… have shown… an affinity… for each… other… and brought good… out of harm… that is…a Buddhist… teaching.” He has a gentle Indian accent mixed with something more Oriental. Sometimes he rushes through phrases he has said 10 million times since he was entrusted to lead his country at the age of 14 in 1959 when he went on his first diplomatic mission to Beijing to ask for Tibet back. The HH rushes through phrases like “the tibetanautonomousregion” and “mutuallyacceptablesettlement” and “sinceredialogue” but will pause at simpler ones. My favourite bits came when he switched into Tibetan in mid sentence, just swapped from his steady, halting-but-clear English into the singsong jibjabber of Tibetan, and his voice went much higher and became full of life. When this happened, his interpreter (a nice looking man who mopped his brow under the lights a few times and then looked quite inquisitively at what he had managed to wipe from his brow, squinting into his handkerchief) would pick up the baton. One sentence went along the lines of “when my plane landed today I noticed the towers had disappeared. I was extremely sad and would like to take this opportunity to….’ And his voice rose up into Tibetan and he raised his hands a couple of times and spoke for about a minute before his interpreter carried on, “in this public appearance to offer my prayers to all the victims of the 9/11 tragedy and to their families.”

The HH talked about how he had hopes of the new Chinese leaders – Hu Jintao etc – and that China should be welcomed to the world and not isolated but educated and given compassion so she will learn about human rights and the freedom of speech. I know everyone loves the HH and so they should, but this was the first time I’ve really seen him or heard what he has to say and it’s powerful hearing someone so peaceful so truly opposed to fighting back. It was a big fresh wash not to hear American / British military can-do-ism, let’s-go-in-there-and-sort-this-out-all-it-takes-is-a-gunship, to hear instead, “I think the twentieth century is over, I think people want peace now, there is a thirst for peace.” It’s powerful hearing it and I wondered whether Gandhi sounded like that. But I’m also a bit worried because China is filling up Tibet with Chinese people. There are now more Chinese immigrants in Tibet than Tibetans, apparently it’s part of a cunning demographic plan to make Tibet indivisible from China. See this, if you can read the NYTimes online.

(After the HH it was the Guggenheim, blitzing show Picasso to Pollock, just had them all in their on the slopey floor – Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Luka, Mondrian, Malevich).

Today I went to visit a priest to talk about his congregation and all the problems they have in this downbeat part of Brooklyn. We sat in a large quiet dining room. The table had a plastic tablecloth and a bottle of A-1 steak sauce. I felt like I was in Father Brown investigates a runaway horse or something. Father Lou Maynard was very tall and kind but said that really when they started telling him all their problems he found it a little difficult because you see he was a manic depressive too. Very jolly. It was a Catholic church and we were in the rectory which I guess is where all the Catholic priests live together because they don’t have wives or anything. There was a piano with a book of music called the “Big Band Songbook,” I could imagine Father Lou and the other boys just kicking back for an evening and a big singsong.

Then I went to a tricky city public high school – just another way of saying of chaos or long corridors or cops or teenagers with long looks in their eyes. I wanted to see the principal and waited in the general office. While I was there it was quiet at first with Greg unpacking all the post and a bit of conversation among the secretaries. Then a pack of sixteen year old girls sort of kickslouch in, whipping over the floor with their braided hair and my god they look you straight up and down. I saw one lean right forward into the face of one of the teachers that was passing through, just leaned right forward as the teacher came past, HI!, just made the teacher jump it was direct. “Yo, where’s my metrocard? It’s not here why not! The third floor? She gone home? Whacha!” Another girl grabbed a pile of rubber bands, “put them down,” said Greg meekly, she looked at him with one of those looks and then put them down. Then Michael, a fat older guy comes in with a young girl who’s crying softly with an ice pack on her head. Michael puts her in a chair, “See you later, I’m going home!” He yells happily. Through the far door I can hear the principal’s enormous voice. She’s making a conference call. “What’s that, what? Yup, yup, okaaaay… Yeah we need to talk to them to…. Sure…. I’ll get him on the line… no wait that’s my direct line… hold on one second how do I… how do I…. Uh… I did it…. Yup…. I have to go and speak to my sixth grade now…. Yup….. Bye….” The crying girl starts to stamp her feet. A cop comes in and tries to pick her up. She falls over. She says she’s dizzy. I get to talk to the Principal, who is very charming, one of those gravelly, smoking powerful women, who says she got stung the last time she spoke to a journalist. Then just as we’re talking and the whimpers from the stamping child go up a knotch she breaks off, “CAN SOMEONE GET A WHEELCHAIR AND TAKE THAT CHILD BACK TO HER SCHOOL!” There are three schools in the same building you see.

I give you Ben Power on Billy Joel:

"Yes dammit, yes - back catalogue musicals are the FUTURE. I want to write one called Queens! based on Elton John's discography.

Its set in an apartment in, you guessed it, Queens, on the night of Marilyn Monroe's death and tells the story of Daniel and Benny, a gay couple having difficulties....

Its about sex, drugs and friendship. A tale of then and now. Of Saturday nights and honky cats. Of sad songs which seem to say so much. Its about walking the yellow brick road all the way back to the Philadelphia freedom you used to know. They are two men, still standing, tiny dancers in a crazy world. Its about fame and pride, about being stuck in the gutter looking at the stars. And its about the death of the most glamorous woman who ever lived. A true candle in the wind.

Good, no?"

Ben (back row, fifth from the right, Dee did you take this?), it's TRANSFORMATIVE it's so good.

Got me thinking of "Prayer", the Madonna musical. We're in the rain in the parking lot of a Las Vegas motel on the evening of December 31st 1999. The motel sign is neon and white, casting an unearthly gleam into the carpark. The electric letters say 'Bethlehem.' In the car young Donna is giving birth. She couldn't afford a room. "Life is a mystery...' And we cut back to the bright arrival of Donna the showgirl in Vegas, looking for her break and herself. She finds the on-off trailer love of Joe, the sound technician on the set of "Herod," the glammy dance show where Donna is a chorus girl. Sequins, highkicks and late night breakfasts. Joe believes in Donna and she can sing. Then Donna becomes pregrant and the dancing becomes difficult, Joe drops a light on the lead's ankle, breaking it, Donna takes a job in a supermarket and converts to Catholicism. The new century is coming and Joe believes the world is going to end. The chips are down but maybe it's a new beginning...

You’re sitting in a hotel lobby, waiting for someone you want to impress. A song comes on and fills the comfy room where many people sit eating sandwiches and waiting for taxis. A couple of porters squeak by with those trolleys for luggage. You know the song and smile. I like this song. You stop smiling or maybe smile even more and chuckle at yourself because you realize the song is “Just the Way You Are” by king-of-cool Billy Joel. Just then, a couple in pastel coloured tourist clothes get up from their chairs. They like this song. They start dancing. Properly dancing. Little leaps and pulls, jumps and flies, like the lifts in Dirty Dancing. They’re having a great time in the lobby. People stop eating their sandwiches and watch them. They love them too. You don’t. You feel weird. Everyone jumps up and claps in time to the happy dancing couple. You feel unaccountably drawn to joining in. It wouldn’t be worth it not too. Just then, just when you’re clapping too to “Just the Way You Are,” you and the rest, smiling wide, the girl you want to impress walks in. Maybe that’s a long scene for a little thing, but what I’m trying to tell you about is the delirious embarrassment of watching Movin’ Out, the Billy Joel tribute musical I saw on Broadway last week.

It was quite a thing. Now I have a sympathy for Billy. He's sold 100 million records. No fool ever did that. He's got a touch for light rock. He's like Budweiser or something. But two hours of solid Billy, no dialogue, just dancing in that lightweight moderny repititive way, full of smiles and air punching, was like being drowned in bubble bath. Fluffy but ultimately lethal. The peak of wierdness was the Vietnam sequence, a homily to Apocalypse Now, twisting, raged, drugblinded wriggling on the ground with strips of light coming through the blind to the sound of, you guessed it, We Didn't Start The Fire. And then the happy redemptive ending for the identikit heroes, greeted with sighs of ecstasy from the tourist crowd, to River of Dreams.

Religious.