Saturday 3 February 2001 I find the exit from the splendid 1950 Port Authority bus terminal...

...out into warm Eighth Avenue SUN. Actually the sun only lasts a few minutes, and I don't get my camera out in time. So this picture is of downtown Broadway next day, which is a cheat, but gives the right impression of old warm brown stone. New York looks old now, older than the cities of Europe destroyed and rebuilt after its wretched civil wars. I set out in the downtown direction. At Thirty-fourth Street I get the subway to...

Those tiles and mosaics seem so squeaky clean. I emerge on the famous corner of Seventh and Christopher.

Well, it's cleaner than what I saw here in 1979. In those days New York allowed a very much more free way of life than Europe. Now... my friends blame Mayor Giuliani, but I never forget the HIV catastrophe that's dominated the last 20 years. One sign of the times is that Queer as Folk on Showtime TV has followed on from the success of the original Queer as Folk series on mainstream Channel Four in Britain.

I'm staying in Greenwich Village, just off Hudson Street. This is the view from the apartment.

This hasn't changed, anyway. Yet.

I'm just round the corner from West Street where in 1943 Bell Labs was situated and Alan Turing briefly helped set up the Anglo-American relationship. I suspect he also learnt a thing or two about other kinds of brief encounter while he was in New York.

I go into Ty's Bar. The papers are depressingly full of advertisements from therapists. Naked Boys Singing looks very coy and tame compared with (for instance) Love Muscle in London.

Forty-second Street now has the aura of a small town shopping mall, and down below...

Where are the ads for Roach Motel and cures for Jock Itch?
For learning English and getting into debt with loan sharks?
Where does the low life live now?

Sunday 4 February 2001

In a way I am virtually present in the USA all the time, through my website and email traffic; also with my book republished by Walker Books, New York, in 2000. Conversely, the look and feel of American computers has entered into and become part of my mind.

But still, it's great to meet people in meatspace. I call Graham Stalker-Wilde, whom I also met virtually in my early WWW days. He volunteered to write the Java Turing machines on my website.

So I walk into Alphabet City, which I would never have dared do in the olden days. I meet his partner Julie and their kids, then as it's fine and mild, go out walking with them in the Lower East Side.

On Houston Street, even the junk looks clean! We talk about American versus European concepts of public space and planning...

We're in a downtown art gallery showing drawings by a well known artist. All cleaned up since the 1970s! Graham gave a talk on Visualisation at the Mathematics and Art conference in Oxford, June 2000.

We walk through ex-junkie Union Square, then have coffee-and-Danish on East Eighth Street.

	ROTATE	INVERT
	If you CLICK on ROTATE and INVERT with your mouse you should get a visualisation of the dihedral group with 6 elements, the smallest non-commutative group.

Dinner in the East Village; we talk of the Bush takeover, whether it can turn the socio-political clock back. I learn about about the New York school situation for kids. And about the recession hitting the Internet-based economy. Graham tells me of a famous website with a name that doesn't get printed and which no-one is allowed to look at while at work. But I have to run — back to the bus terminal.

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