This post will be amended at a future date and photographs will be added – so for New York views, this space is the one to watch. In the meantime…

Reality in contemporary times, as attested by life in New York city, is more representation than presentation – reality has morphed into Baudrillard’s dream (or nightmare) of ads, symbols and signs, thrown at each individual at every street corner including, enthrallingly, the interior of taxis, where taxi television network barrages your senses and presents you with Regis & Kelly, ABC news and Cynthia Nixon, all there for your mid-voyage delectation.

But New York is the most unusual of representative truths in that you may never have visited, but you’ve definitely seen it – in Sleepless in Seattle, in the back of a taxi with Miranda and Steve on Sex and the City or in the glossy confines of the lives of Manhattan’s elite in a scene from [my new obsession] Gossip Girl. Times Square seems as familiar to me as the streets of Dublin; Central Park, although I still have not entered within the confines of its walls, is, to me, Carrie and Aidan breaking up, and Serena and Aaron running through flowered fields on an afternoon slip-as-a-dress date. 

The truth, however, is stranger than fiction: the cars honk incessantly, there are garbage trucks that have never been presented on celluloid and, the most drastic difference, beyond all others – the one thing that puts the “new” in New York and makes the city shocking is the black community. Because New York has one – not that you’d know from GG, SATC or any of Hollywood’s blockbusters.

But if the election is anything to go by, the tides are turning. And the United States of America is no longer represented by the white elite. Now it’s the black elite; but it’s the colour that matters, not the class. Nobody is arguing that the underclasses are under-represented, because they’re not. The lower-class girl gets the guy; she succeeds in the upper-class school; she goes from welder to upper-class girlfriend in the blink of a silver-screen eyelid. 

On taxi television, there is an ad for a US news network. The questions they pose, in a booming, voiceover monotone, are these: What changes will he make? What promises must he keep?

It’s probably not on Obama’s immediate list of priorities, but how long can Hollywood ignore the “other” Americans? And does one black person in a sea of milky white epidermis “count”? Jennifer Hudson was the black girl in the movie version of Sex and the City; Vanessa might count as “it” in Gossip Girl - but she’s Latina, so she doesn’t really. What about Ugly Betty? The one genre in which skin colour seems less significant is crime – Law and Order, for example, represents successful black people working in what is, undoubtedly, a cut-throat industry. But why should it be okay to show black cops, when it’s not cool to show fashionable black people? Or rich black people? Or spoiled black people? (Because I’ve seen My Super Sweet 16 and I know they exist!)

It’s just the tip of the iceberg, because we all know that tv is not reality, and neither is film. And New York has an entire thesis-worth of contradictions contained therein, or at least contained in the reality we are presented, versus the reality that is so much more real than that. 

Oh, and big up Obama. I bought three buttons! New York is crazy about him, and he deserves it. Let’s hope he lives up to the justified hype.