Last night I played at the Mercury Lounge, NYC. It was good. Two guys drove four hours from Boston to see the show, which is both touching and bewildering. I drank my regulation straight double tequila before playing, but unwisely took someone up on another after the show, forgetting the liberal measures served in US bars. We sold about ten CDs. I talked very loudly and with unwarranted conviction about nothing in particular for a few hours then got in a taxi, ate a Danish pastry and ended up in bed somehow.

This morning I woke with a very bad headache and a mood as black as John Ashcroft's soul. After braving the car crash tourism horrorshow that is Canal Street (it's like Oxford Street, Carnaby Street, Portabello and Camden High Street all rolled into one, but about 10 miles long and more intense). One comforting thing about NYC is that people are as nonchalant and unfriendly as they are in London, so there is no real danger of culture shock. My hotel room is tiny with an enormous television filling the room like Magritte's apple. I broke the window trying to open it far enough to get my head out so I could smoke a joint without setting off the smoke alarm, and broke the 'safety-catch'- (presumably to prevent people throwing themselves to their deaths, which the hotel would no doubt be sued for), so I couldn't shut it again. Thus the first night was spent with ear plugs in.

I renewed myself on a brunch of corn beef hash and two eggs at a superb diner on 6th Avenue. I bewildered the staff with repeated requests for mugs of hot water, to which I added my middle-class tea bags from England.

On the plane I chose the 'Yes, I am feeling horny' option from the in-flight entertainments, that filthy old goat Bertolucci's latest mid-brow skin-flick 'The Dreamers'. Two very beautiful Parisian intellectual boho kids initiate a cautious, bi-curious wide-eyed american boy into their incestuous menage-a-trois. They all get naked and fuck each other. Presented against a vacuous backdrop of student protests, the film is utterly meaningless but boy is she fucking hot.