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It’s a close-run thing. The expressway out of Manhattan to Kennedy is clogged think, barely moving: our driver takes us zigzagging through the rainy streets of Brooklyn and Queens, neighbourhoods and names recognisable only from novels. We slip in just under the wire to check our bags, and quickly load up on duty free cigarettes well past the deadline for our flight. Shoes and coats off for security, we tag onto the queue to board just before its tail disappears. For nearly an hour the plane edges slowly forward towards take-off on the tarmac in the rain, in a U-shaped queue of planes of all shapes and sizes, like depressed commuters. When we finally leave the ground, New York is instantly invisible in its shroud of cloud.

I have to switch seats temporarily to man the emergency exit aisle, and I sit next to a talkative woman called Shannon, a storyteller and wine/chocolate tasting organizer with homes in London and Manhattan, who curiously embodies all the reasons I feel I could never live and work in New York. She’s intelligent, well-educated and even kind (she brings chocolate for the cabin crew, cheerful young English women with lives and loves scattered around Virgin’s spider-map of the globe), and yet self-obsessed and utterly devoid of a sense of humour.

Flying against the day, dawn comes before sleep. Ireland appears, then Wales, and finally England. It’s a strange kind of relief to be back in the EU citizens’ passport queue, and when we get to the tube I kiss the underground sign: a symbolic gesture of return rather than passion. Eventually I get to Camberwell, where there is a bed to sleep in, and a much-missed fried to say hello to. In the next week I will find myself on the steps again, in the Albion, watching football, being interviewed for a job, moving Steff’s stuff out of the flat we used to share, and somehow unable to encapsulate in words the totality of the experience of the last four months. It’s two full days before I buy a newspaper or turn on a television.

Coney Island, baby!

Remember that the city is a funny place
Something like a circus or a sewer

All over New York, even in Manhattan, are flyposted photocopies of the obituary of Matt Kennedy, one-time chair of the Coney Island chair of commerce, and lifelong Coney Island booster. Though Kennedy’s gone, Coney Island clings on forever to its own peculiar kind of halflife, so we jump on a Q train to Brighton Beach to pay the place a visit. We get off where the shadow of the elevated rails and the screeching wheels of trains running along them obliterate sound and light from Brighton Beach’s main drag, where half the conversations you overhear and half the shops’ signage are in Russian, and I’ve forgotten the little Cyrillic I once knew enough of  to decode the sounds of the letters.

It’s a bright June morning, but it’s midweek, and the beach front from Brighton to Coney Island is thinly populated. The sand is flat, clean and inviting, but signs along the boardwalk inform us that the whole beach is closed. It’s not far to the beginning of Coney Island proper, and its half-open half-closed amusement parks and arcades. Though the woman on the ticket desk at the entrance to Astroland assures it’s not running today, we soon see the Wonder Wheel stirring into life, and line up for our place in a ‘swinging’ gondola. Installed on a wobbly loop between the wheel’s inner and outer rims, the gondola lurches and swings towards the middle of the wheel at three o’clock and back outwards at nine o’clock, and we look out over the Coney Island Cyclones’ new ground, the horizon bobbing up and down.

Next door to Nathan’s Famous is an empty lot a level below the boardwalk, which some enterprising folks have turned into the ‘Shoot the Freak’ shooting gallery. As a big man down below dons armour, a face mask, and holds up a shield, the barker is broadcasting through a head mic and lines up a row of punters equipped with paintball guns loaded with a dollar-for-five bullets to pepper the freak in orange and red as he dances around behind the random junk accumulated on the lot. My shots hit home, but only on his shield: the Freak is pretty well protected.

We play skee ball, a rudimentary kind of bowling, lobbing well-worn and lopsided wooden balls up a ramp into plastic circles, and are rewarded with a multitude of tickets spewing forth, which turn out to be barely worth a pencil eraser so we keep them as souvenirs. Next to Astroland there’s a museum and arts centre, keeping the memories of Coney Islands past alive, and though it’s closed today, an irregular squad of young people are seated outside in the hot Brooklyn sun, lunching on sushi in front of their open laptops.

It gradually becomes apparent that Bryony has never been on a rollercoaster in her life, so the appeal of the Cyclone becomes irresistible, to me at least. It’s an old school sleepers-and-rails, up-and-down, nailed-together, no stopping kind of a ride, and though the high wire-fenced queuing area is empty, it too is running today and we quickly get locked into our seats and set off. At the top of the first dip I realize it’s nearly four years since I’ve been on a rollercoaster and I begin to wonder whether my love for them has become entirely theoretical. Bryony keeps her eyes shut the entire ride (thus missing the entertaining bits where low-slung supporting props promise decapitation), and calmly gets off before announcing that it’s been the worst experience of her life. Her palms are stained orange with rust from gripping the safety bar.

Three days of Modern

It's been just over a year and a half since MOMA reopened its doors in midtown and still huge red posters on 54th Street declare that 'Manhattan is Modern Again'. The new MOMA is certainly big, and it has two very nice cinemas, where Bryony and I somehow end up spending three nights in a row. Ever since I've been back in America I feel that I should enjoy proper cinematic delights now they're available, after New Zealand's exclusive fare of seemingly inexhaustible lame British comedies and the third continuing month of The World's Fastest Indian).

Bryony is not in New York to watch films but to show old films of course, as part of MOMA's annual Festival of Preservation. Tonight it's highlights from the Joye Collection. The films were collected by a German-Swiss Jesuit for educational use, and comprise over 1,200 pre-feature shorts running the gamut from ethnographic studies to comedies. Now that some have been restored onto colour stock, the original stencil-colour work can be seen, and the show starts with some gorgeous footage of Walloons on a river (for some reason, water always seems to look beautiful in stencil-coloured films). All the intertitles are in German. There's a panoply of British seabirds and some Japanese footage of the Ainu people. There are phantom rides in New York and Damascus, and a sparklingly golden trick-film in which a clown performs all sorts of magic with dice and people. Best of all, though, is The Rubes go to Atlantic City, in which an undercranked camera and some very slow walking combine to make the modern world whiz around two doltish peasants at large in the big city. The ending is lost.

While the films have been playing, an electrical storm and torrential rain have unleashed themselves over Manhattan, and as the rain falls, so do the cabs disappear, and so we walk a few damp blocks with the lovely Josh from the museum, who takes us out to eat at a Greek restaurant.

The next night we're back at MOMA to see Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss, an unnarrated, unsubtitled film structured around a day of life and death on Varanasi's burning ghats. Dogs tear each other to bits, men bathe in the early morning Ganges, wood is collected, people engage in the process of dying, and finally bodies are burned. The post-sync sound is manipulated to emphasise the clanging of bells, the plucking of flowers, the chanting of prayers and the woody creak of oarlocks. It's a deliberately selective portrait, not exactly ethnographic, but steering to the better side of both exoticism and aestheticism (though apparently it was one of Brakhage's favourites). It really does remind me of Varanasi, where after a visit to the government bhang shop, a very stoned Rob was suddenly charged at by a deceptively innocent-looking cow.

Robert Gardner himself has turned up answer some totally bonkers questions from the audience, including whether there's a relationship between the temple monkeys and Gibraltar's Barbary apes because they're both from the Commonwealth, and whether a dying woman being ministered to was actually being killed. There's the archetypal student-who's-just-read-a-book and wants to tell the filmmaker all about it, and I wonder why so many people at Q&A sessions are incapable of simply rephrasing their thoughts as questions. It wouldn't take much effort, they wouldn't sound much less clever, and it's only polite to the guy at the front. Perhaps it's a hangover from trying to get noticed in college seminars; perhaps people have a need to share what the film has made them think.

Afterwards I surf Bryony's coattails to join Gardner, Josh and entourage for dinner at a rather nice restaurant called Il Gattopardo. The owner also has a restaurant called Sciuscià and Josh jokes that if he opens another he'd better not call it Salò. The food is delicious, and very light on carbs. Also eating are Robert, who's making a film about Gardner, following us along 54th Street with a camera, 'Nightswimming'/Benjamin Smoke director Jem Cohen, and Anthology Archives' Jonas Mekas himself. I'm sitting right down the other end of the table and don't get to talk to any of them.

On the third day we find ourselves back at MOMA yet again, to check out the art proper. The permanent collection is divided into two floors. The upper half is basically pre-WWII, and 90% European; the lower floor is post-war and about 75% American. The actual collection of works is a pretty fantastic bunch of pictures, but the arrangement is as savagely reductive and movementist conception of modern art as I've ever seen, enough to make me long for the Tate Modern. You wander the galleries, each instantly recognisable work and artist like a series of visual blows: Picasso-bang-Magritte-bang-Matisse-bang …  Pollock-bang-Newman-bang-Rothko-bang, ohlookherecomesminimalism, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, bang-bang.

Such a success is MOMA as an art destination in itself that not only do people crowd round the really famous works taking photos (it's a kind of ongoing people's choice poll of modern art favourites), but visitors also come, I kid you not (I had to edge my way around these people in front of a Hopper), to have their picture taken next to their favourite paintings. There's aura for you. After Modern there's a contemporary gallery, but my favourite thing in the museum after Jasper Johns' Map is two big rooms of great late Philip Guston canvases: shoe soles, the Guston-cyclops smoking in bed, and nervy-looking little Klansmen with cigarettes.

Still somehow unable to find anything useful to do in midtown on a Saturday evening, and with a jointly unerring sense of direction that leads us right back to exactly the same place outside the Rockefeller Plaza that we couldn't find anywhere to eat the previous day, by eight o'clock we're back in Titus Theater 2 for the third night in a row, to watch an intriguing programme of films made at CalArts in the seventies. It begins with Jack Goldstein's object-concentrating colour films, some as simple as a dog barking or a knife changing colour. Chris Langdon & Fred Worden's Venusville substitutes a conversation about a palm tree for anything interesting happening to a palm tree. But the absolute standout is Fred Worden's Throbs, in which found footage of circuses, fairgrounds and car crashes are repeated, distorted and layered, brought to the point of destruction and then back again, recoalescing to a hypnotic, looping and crescending soundtrack.

Like seeing Baldwin's gang's stuff in San Francisco, it amazes me how many different schools of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking there are in the US. And yet even MOMA can't programme a cinema entirely with experimental/avant-garde/artists' moving image: a good chunk of the programme looks like traditional arthouse. Still, I could easily spend another three days wrapped up in Modern.

My my metrocard

New York's a muggy city (though I haven't actually been mugged yet). It's hard to feel very energetic when the heat and dampness press down on you. When a solitary drop of cold liquid falls from above it's not rain, just fluid from a malfunctioning airconditioner twenty stories up. Going down into the subway it gets worse as you add stifling airlessness, but the magic bit is that the subway cars themselves are airconditioned: you step in and it's wonderfully chilly.

Each subway car carries an American flag on its side, as does every public bus. It feels a bit odd for New York, even a little bit scary. I try to imagine seeing union flags like that on the buses and tubes in London anywhere outside the fantasy of a rightwing distatorship, and I can't. Americans have always been a bit crazier about their flag: even liberal dissent here is carefully packaged in the language of 'reasonable' patriotism. Outside the Rockefeller Plaza the weekly 'grannies against the war' demonstrators hand out leaflets reprinting NY Times editorials and declaring themselves to be the only ongoing anti-war protest in New York.

Even in a city as large and changing as New York, you're bound to retrace your steps when you're sightseeing, and setting out at random I find myself on Broadway, trying to find Yellow Rat Bastard, and walking towards the Hole. I even repeat thoughts I've had before, standing on the corner of Canal Street and wondering what it must have been like to see a tsunami of rubble and dust from the towers racing north. The Hole itself hasn't changed much, but the messages tied to the railings of the church are long gone, and the hawkers have been seen off with fussy little signs requesting that we all 'help us to keep this a very special place' next to huge display boards bigging up the Port Authority's ever-more-delayed plans for the site.

The best view of the Hole is from the World Financial Center to the west, from the balcony of the Winter Garden (which is apparently modelled on the Crystal Palace), but it's not till I'm on the roof of the Met looking across its famous view of trees framing Central Park West that I become convinced that the best solution for the problem of the Hole is to leave it as a hole in the fabric of New York, perhaps just the iron sheds above the PATH station, a Piano/Rogers view of the commuter hub, or even better a Losaida-style community garden: just a space, a space to look across and see the buildings on the other side.

Bryony's staying at the very posh Warwick right opposite the MOMA where she's come to do a show, and there's much wailing and gnashing of teeth that she has to move out and stay downtown after three nights. I'm as happy with my little box on thirty first street as I have been with all the other little boxes I've stayed in, especially as there are two chinese laundries right across the road. I whore myself to the Starbucks two blocks down South Park for their wifi, and join the laptop multitude. At first I've forgotten why Starbucks sucks and tell myself avoiding it has always just been some kind of anti-capitalist shibboleth, but after the third morning in a row of Stepford how-are-yas, sickly oversweet chai latte, stupid beverage names, and a will-to-live-sapping acoustic singer-songwriter soundtrack, I'm ready to either kill myself or punch a student in the face.

We walk around the back of Chelsea, and discover why New York hardly recycles: they have the homeless to do it for them. Men and women are bagging cans and repacking bottles into cardboard boxes on a backstreet. We take the three-hour Circle Line cruise, which circumnavigates Manhattan with a little loop around the Statue of Liberty, still not fully open to the public. Seeing Manahattan from every angle in 360 degrees is always great. The Empire State Building stands alone above midtown like a sentinal; the canyon of Wall Street opens up for just a second, allowing you to glimpse the Trinity Church; water towers look like a flotilla of little spaceships ready to take off from the rooftops. But the heavy clouds which have been chasing us all morning finally catch up, raining fat, fat splashes on us and making a beautiful waterfall of the runoff spouts under the George Washington Bridge.

It doesn't let up all evening, and after an ill-judged succession of attempts to find somewhere in midtown to eat, we end up soggy and bedraggled, eating off paper plates in a Sbarro. My four-dollar umbrella doesn't survive being opened and closed more than once so I splash out on an eight-dollar cab home. The deli on the corner is still open, still serving coffee, cigarettes and food at one in the morning and doesn't look like it's closing any time soon. I love this city.