January
FEBRUARY
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
A WEEKLY DIARY EXCLUSIVELY WRITTEN FOR MIRABELLE MAGAZINE
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1975 January FEBRUARY March April May June July August September October November December |
A WEEKLY DIARY EXCLUSIVELY WRITTEN FOR MIRABELLE MAGAZINE
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Kon Chi Fa Tsai! That means Happy New Year in Chinese! You may think my greeting is a bit belated, but it isn't, if you're Chinese that is. In China the year 4673 has only just started. The Chinese measure time from way back over 2000 years B.C. and have special animal names for each year like the year of the ox, tiger, snake, etc. This New Year is the year of the rabbit.Now, you may be wondering why I'm telling you all this! Well, it's because I've just been to a huge Chinese New Year's celebration. You see the Chinese-Americans keep up the tradition and have really big festivals over here in Chinatown every new year. And I was lucky enough to be in Chinatown for one night of the celebration. Chinatown in New York is really interesting all year round. It's got thousands of restaurants and little shops where they sell all sorts of exotic things. Instead of chemist shops they have herbalists who cure all their customers ills with things that seem to me to be magic potions.
Anyway, on Chinese New Year the area becomes really incredible. They have huge noisy parades with people dressed up in colourful and frightening costumes, acrobats and dancers who perform in the middle of the streets - and people come from far and wide to see the celebrations.
My favourite part of the parade was the dragon. They use this enormous paper dragon which is painted very brightly and has fierce look on his face. He's about thirty feet long and about ten men stand under him to make it look like he's walking and charging at people. All this is accompanied by fireworks and the whole thing is quite exciting. The little children whose parents had taken them out for a night of fun weren't having a very good time, though. They were frightened to death and I'm sure they had nightmares about a monster coming after them, so I'm awfully glad that Zows wasn't along to see it! I enjoyed my little taste of Chinese culture, though - and I didn't have any nightmares!
Cherry Vanilla is doing another show and I went to see her again. She's fabulous as usual and she's expanded her act to include more songs, and poems, including one about Yours Truly! I'm very flattered to say the least.
I must go now, I'm late for a show I'm going to tonight. So goodbye until next week...
8th February 1975
I must tell you the most wonderful news! I've bought a new house! It's in a section of New York called Chelsea. The area isn't a chic as Chelsea in London, but it is really comfy. I'm living on a tree-lined street (not easy to find in New York City) and the houses around me are really very quaint and attractive. It seems to be a really friendly area, too. I've already met some of my neighbours and they seem to be quite nice. Of course it helps that my good friend, Cherry Vanilla, just lives a few doors away from me! She knows absolutely everyone - and any friend of Cherry's is a friend of mine - so I've been given the royal treatment!
Anyway, I must tell you about the house! It's enormous! I have six floors - and right now I really don't know how I'm going to take advantage of all this space, but I'm sure Angie has some ideas about how to do it!
My favourite part of the house is the top two floors. The sixth floor is a great big bedroom and this room has a gigantic hole in the centre with a trellis around it and plants streaming all the way down through to the fifth floor - it gives the whole thing a balcony-loft type of effect and it's just great. It's almost like sleeping in a tree-house! The fifth floor is my studio. Finally, I have enough space for all my equipment - video tape machine, cameras, stereos, my piano and guitar and I can go in there and disappear for hours!
I have to say that I'm very satisfied with this new place and I plan to spend many enjoyable hours here!
Let's see, what else have I been doing? Oh yes, I just saw an absolutely charming new stage play. It's called 'Man On The Moon' and it's a musical. The songs were just fabulous - very '40s. In fact, the whole show has a '40ish flavour. It's about an astronaut who lands on this planet that is exactly like earth was about thirty or forty years ago. He meets a girl and they fall in love and everyone lives happily ever after! The show is full of weird space creatures and everyone sings very sweetly and dances very energetically - it's really a perfect show for children, so I think I'll send Zowie off with Marion some afternoon to see it!
The other day I had Zows all to myself - something that very rarely happens. Usually, there's someone around to pick up his toys and to keep him busy while I'm working, but on this occasion I had full responsibility for his activities.It took only a few hours to discover that I wouldn't be able to get any work done with my darling son underfoot, so I decided to take drastic measures. I would take Zowie to the movies! Now, that sounds a lot easier than it really is, you know. First, of all, there are almost no movies around these days for four year olds. And secondly, I almost never venture out into the 'cold, cruel world' by myself - at least not during the day! I'm definitely a night person.
At any rate, Zowie had been cooped up in the house all day long, so like a good father, I bundled him and myself up and started out to see what we could find. Luckily, there was a Disney movie - 'Dumbo' - showing right down the road, so that's where we landed. Well, there I was sitting in one of the first rows, feeling quite silly. I mean, really, what was a grown man doing watching a movie about a flying elephant? Zowie, was enjoying it though, and - I must be honest - by about halfway through the film, you couldn't have dragged me out of the cinema!
After the movie, Zowie and I were both starving, so we went to this place that Angie has taken Zowie to in the past. It's called McDonalds and it's really just about a national institution. I promise I will never go back there again! I've never tasted anything so ghastly in my life! I had a hamburger - at least they call it a hamburger - and it took me about five minutes just to find the meat that they'd squeezed in between all the pickles, mustard, ketchup, lettuce and bread.
Zowie really loved his hamburger, however, and Angie's told me that McDonalds is really the place to be, so I think that in the future I'll let those two have the pleasure of going together!
That's how my son and I spent that day and we'll have to do it more often - daylight isn't so bad, after all!
I went to the wildest party the other night - and gained a bit of culture as well. The party was for the opening of an art gallery and the whole affair was terribly ritzy and totally mad. It took place way across town, so all the people who were invited to this event were picked up and taken there by horsedrawn carriage. That was strange enough as it is. People aren't used to seeing horses trotting along New York City streets, but even stranger was the incredible variety of people riding in the carriages! Yoko Ono was in one, being very quiet and ladylike; David Cassidy shared a carriage with me - it was the first time we'd met and was quite an interesting experience; and various artists, actors, actresses, society people and celebrities took up space in the rest of the carriages.There were sixty artists exhibiting at the art gallery, and the theme of this first show as, "The Condition Of The Tie Today" and the guests were dressed in accordance. In fact, one man there was wearing only a necktie. He was the hit of the party!
I thought the whole thing was very '60s, myself. It was all very pop-artish, you see. There were ties made of every material imaginable. Ties made of oil paint, ties made of metal, ties made of hair - there was even a glass tie, until someone sat on it and crushed it to pieces. But the most spectacular tie of all was a bow-tie made out of beef liver - you could smell it anywhere you went!
The artists were definitely obsessed with ties. Some of them loved them and treated them as objects of beauty and some of them hated them because they said they were symbols of society's repression!
Finally, when everyone was almost falling asleep, the carriages came to take us all home. I did have a fabulous time, but I must tell the truth. If I never see another tie again, it will be too soon! I've seen enough to last me a lifetime!
That's all for now.
| Created: July 1997 © Paul Kinder | Last Updated: 4/5/98 |