Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines, the faulty map (11/2/14)

The house is very quiet at the moment. Just me and Matty rattling round from mid afternoon onwards, earlier than that it's just me.

J and Tom are both away. J is in Reading until Thursday evening. I'm not in any way jealous of J, I have no real desire to visit Reading, I'm sure it's nice enough and all that but...y'know...

Tom though. Tom is in New York.
17 years old and in New York. I am ridiculously jealous of Tom.

I'm a music geek. I'm a comic geek. New York is everything when that's your world view.

The New York that I grew up imagining was the New York that gave home to Spider-Man, the home of the Brooklyn Bridge -  site of Gwen Stacy's death in Spider-Man #121 (whoops, have I given away a major spoiler for the next spidey film?) home to the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, all the Marvel heroes that lived in real world cities as opposed to DC's Gotham and Metropolis fictionalisations.

I always worried that if I visited New York I would be marginally disappointed not to see the skies crammed with the superheroes of my childhood despite being (obviously) aware that they're not actually, y'know, real or anything.

That's not why I've never been, it's just never happened; the timing was wrong or the money wasn't there or...a million little reasons really. Nearly happened last October but it was costing 4k before we even touched down. You can't justify that for four days.

Which is a shame because it's also everything I love in music. It's Dylan's Greenwich Village folk clubs and cafés, the dirt and grit of the Velvets' Warhol days and nights, the punk scene that birthed the Ramones and Talking Heads and Television and Blondie. It's Lennon's last days.

Bleaker Bobs record shop, the Times Square that features in thirties black and white films, the subway system of On The Town, Kong's original stop motion ascent of the Empire State Building and, to return to Brooklyn's legendary Bridge it's the iconic early morning scene from Woody Allen's Manhattan.

I am, in fairness, utterly desperate to see all the above. And I will. But for now Tom is getting to see it before I do. It's an incredible thing to do at 17, a New York winter, streets filled with snow, a bitter chill and all that humanity.

I'm ever so slightly envious of my son. That's a new experience.

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