The long cab ride into manhattan through what I imagine was rush hour
traffic seemed to go on forever... but we eventually arrived at the Chelsea hotel, and felt at home straight away.

It's not to all tastes, and we've definately stayed in smarter hotels for less in California and been surrounded by rock stars, and Florida as well come to think of it, but the shabbyness of the Chelsea is all part of the deal. If you want the maid to come at a convenient time everyday, need a dvd player, mini-bar, club sandwiches delivered to your room and smart decor, don't go to the Chelsea. There are like-minded souls aplenty however and always someone taking photos on the stairs, tourists hanging out, artists painting pictures in the lobby and long-time hotel residents chatting in the lifts. The room was fine, and very big. The curtains were bust and I don't think it had been painted since 1982. I enjoyed the exchanges with other guests, generally brief and on the way up to the room.

The staff have clearly been there years and enjoy their ramshackle
clientele. The other thing you won't find at the Chelsea is a overly false, sickly sweet welcome. The check-in staff will be friendly, crack a joke to see if you've got a sense of humour, throw you your keys and let you get on with it. We were invited to a party on the roof (by some residents staggering down from there), but as neither of them were the hosts we decided to give it a miss. They said 'don't worry, no-one will know you've not been invited directly', and they were probably right. It's that sort of place.

The lobby is filled with artworks, as are the stairwells. With every passing through Crazy G noticed a new piece in the lobby and was convinced the work was switched around every couple of days. I just think there's so much your eye alights on something fresh each time you breeze through.

We didn't use the bar, strangely. It didn't feel 'part of' the hotel and it's not mentioned or listed anyway. They don't seem to advertise it and the only way to get to it is down the steps off the street. There is a door off another door off the lobby, but it was locked the couple of times we tried. We'd heard a lot about the bar but just never got around to trying it out.

For breakfast we generally used the New Venus (252 9th Ave), Chelsea Square Restaurant (368 West 23rd St) or Murrays Bagels (242 8th Ave) and for early evening beers the Barracuda bar (22nd Street at 8th).

The Barracuda was a convenient staple, a long dark bar with late nite drag contests in a staged room at the back, and a friendly crowd. Lively later and ideal for a couple of pre-dinner bud-lites.

Mid evening we found ourselves mainly repairing to the Phoenix bar, on the recommendations of various London friends (it's at 447 E 13th Street between 1st Ave and Ave A). The jukebox is excellent and the bar is near in spirt to the Retro although with the added welcome of a jukebox that plays current tunes. There's a smoking patio but they close it around 10pm when the place starts to get busy. There's a nice english barman there (from Leicester) who enjoys welcoming english visitors who generally all arrive via word of mouth.

'No-Where' is good too. It's a few minutes walk away on 14th St and is the only bar I've ever been to in my life that has The Glove on the jukebox. I put on 'Mouth to Mouth'. It also has 'Runt nite' for short people and their admirers but don't let that put you off. The second time we went to No-Where it had a DJ and wasn't as good. The Phoenix is probably more dependable.

We went to The Cock, which has an english girl from Leeds on the door (howcome all these brits get to live in NY and I don't???!!!). I enjoyed the lone go-go boy dancing on the bar with a glamorous elvis quiff, but then he was joined by two rubbish ones like you'd see anywhere and the effect was disolved. There was nowhere to stand or sit and the music was generic house anyway so we made our excuses and left.

Hi-Fi was OK, but we went too early and there was not much atmosphere. Also we were scared off by a large bunch of 'bachelorettes' (a sort of American hen-party) looking for two boys to kiss wearing some strange lip-substance that makes them swell-up. They wouldn't leave us alone and kept trying to make us say things as our accents were 'SO CUTE'!...

Actually I think they thought MY accent was cute whereas Crazy G was just plain incomprehensible coming as he does from the north, as did most of New York City. I lost track of the number of times he had to enunciate 'G E R A L D' in the Jambajuice queue as though he was talking to an idiot child. In the end he just gave up and said 'STEPHEN', or got me do to it.

The Museum of Modern Art was a revelation. It has Bacon's 'Painting 1946', and we marvelled at the imagination. What possessed the man to paint a bearded sneering form wearing a business suit and a yellow carnation, flanked by butchered carcasses on all sides, and decorated with garlands of flowers arranged like a mental decoration behind 1930's Eileen Gray chrome railings like a le Corbusier pulpit... and all topped off by an umbrella??!!!

Of course I can track the influences and I've read enough about about Bacon to fathom his sources but the original work still brought me up short. There's even room for a persian rug... or is it the bloodied floor of an abattoir?

I also loved the set of Warhol soup cans. The full suite was originally shown in an obsure gallery in LA in the early '60's and only attracted a couple of buyers for the 20 x 16" canvases which were hand-painted rather than screened. The dealer eventually saw sense and bought back the lone purchases in order to retain the full 32 panels as an entire work.

I enjoyed the 'Russia' show at the Guggenheim, having wanted to visit the place ever since I saw pictures of G&G's retrospective installation there back in the '80s. The steady incline made me dizzy and Crazy G gets vertigo. All made worse by the fact that we were in hangover hell due to a 'buy two get two free' on spirits at the Phoenix the nite before.

Embarrassingly I quite like dinosaurs and loved the big skeletons at the Museum of Natural History. Crazy G did some good Johnny Morris-like voices for the stuffed bears and tree creatures too. The Mayan section is cool and has cabinets full of mysterious little laughing faces and little carved idols. They reminded me of one of my favourite childhood books 'The Witches and the Grinnygog' about a small mysterious statue that brings magic to a quiant english village and reawakens ancient occult forces.

The Restaurants we most enjoyed were Morans (146 10th Ave) where we had New York Strip Steaks; The Old Homestead steakhouse (56 9th Ave) where I had clams and oysters, G had crabcakes then we both shared an enormous porterhouse steak with creamed spinach and garlic mashed potato (quite a grand restaurant, if it was in london you'd have to wear a jacket).

Talking of oysters the Oyster bar at Grand Central Station is also worth going to; my clams were the size of a fist and I had ten different American oysters arranged in size from a 50p piece to just plain massive. We also had the best Oysters Rockefeller ever. My recommendation would be to have the Rockefeller then a platter, with or without lobster, and the Napa Sauvigon Blanc. YUM.

The best Japanese restaurant was Sharakii (14 Stuyvesant St). We had the best seaweed salad ever, prawn and pork dumplings, and a complicated beef dish cooked at our table while we got drunk on Saki.

The worst place was, amazingly, the Empire Diner. The service was lously and the steak was rubbish by American standards (and i'm allowing for the fact that this was a diner - albeit an upscale diner - rather than a chi chi steakhouse), the drinks order and the timings were all wrong and the waiter couldn't have cared less less about us. I'd say go to look at the chrome exterior, and eat somewhere else (...I do hope all this doesn't make me sound like a sort of gay Michael Winner). This was probably the only disappointment in eleven days.

One of our best nites out was when we met up with my chum Jambo's sister who lives in NYC. We met at Puck Fair, an irish bar opposite Bowie's apartment building by Lafeyette Street, followed by Fanelli's Cafe at 94 Prince Street. Bob the barman kept our glasses filled, we never had to ask for a single round, and we met various personalities including Jess from the New Yorker who spotted my Psychic TV badge and once ran into Genesis P-Orridge in a supermarket in Brooklyn. We went on to Swift's on East 4th Street for a quick cleansing one before hitting CBGB's in order to try our luck. The cute boy on the door explained almost apologetically that the act was 'Dead Men Walking', a sort of touring early-80's 'supergroup' led by Captain Sensible. Well, that seemed perfectly fine to us after about 16 pints of lager especially as the captain was joined by Slim Jim Phantom, who was very cool, Mike Peters of The Alarm and Kirk Brandon. Mike Peters was good, but Kirk Brandon seemed embarrassed to be there and couldn't quite get the notes on his own songs. They played all their hits and some pistols stuff. Most of the crowd weren't even born when these guys were big in the uk and seemed a bit nonplussed; needless to say it was the brits who were pogoing away to all the old tunes. I loved CBGG's but we were losing the will to live after too much boozing and had to call it a nite, despite doing our best to stagger up the Bowery looking for the next place.

We enjoyed Central park, especially on a sunday afternoon. It's full of locals unlike Hyde Park. God, our parks just look rubbish now. Our only other refuge from the seemingly endless city streets was Coney Island. Not quite worth an hour on the subway but then it was out of season and everything was shut, the fairground deserted. The beach is nice, there's a Russian supermarket (seems a predominantly Russian district), and a 'Nathan's' hot-dog restaurant. I wouldn't go on that wooden roller-coaster though, even for ready money. We took some photos and took the train back to civilisation. I enjoyed the 'Shoot the Freak' stall.

Oh god, I almost forgot the baseball. Well, given that Crazy G is a 'sport-obsessed helmet' I'm generally dragged to baseball games. This holiday was no exception and we went to see the Yankees play... somebody. Anyway, I quite enjoyed it. For one thing we had good seats. When you don't understand sport, like me, it helps if you can at least see what you're supposed to be understanding (unlike in San Fran when for the SF Giants we were about 10-miles away)... for another I was knackered and hungover so I was quite happy to sit down for three and a half hours drinking diet-cokes and daydreaming watching sexy men in tight white trousers after days of tramping the streets. I did enjoy it though, and lord knows I've dragged him through enough galleries in our time, but I wasn't quite prepared for how camp this game was. I was amazed at the interval, or half-time or whatever it is, they play 'YMCA' and a large group of 'sand-sweepers' come out and sweep the sand in a perfectly synchronised dance routine breaking off to do the YMCA dance during the chorus as do most of the crowd. Oh, and Judy Garland sings at the end. And it's just like rounders anyway.

Now... Bookshops. Ah... the Bookshops. When I die I want to go to Strand Books (828 Broadway at 12th st), but only if we can throw in the 'Drinking Smoking and Screwing' section from Shakespear & Co. (716 Broadway and other branches). I spent a massive amount as ever... more than I've ever spent at City Lights in San Francisco and that's saying something. My bags were jammed full of hard-to-find Burroughs, Basquiat monographs, Warhol catalogues, Henry Miller, John Rechy, the last Pound to complete my collection and god knows what else.

Anyway to sum up, we had a great holiday. And i've rather fallen in love with the place. There's probably loads I've forgotten... (Oh god, one of my favourite moments was Crazy G loudly slagging off Royksopp's recent album with one half of said band standing 2 feet away... I kid you not. I said 'Well, you can tell him yourself, he's right here!'... prior to practically pissing myself laughing)... There were other dinners, bars, walks, places... but the aforementioned seem to stick in my mind the most, and might be of use if you ever find yourself at the Chelsea or indeed in Chelsea.

As regards our return visit I'm currently battling for Christmas at the earliest and it looks like I may be winning... HA!