And try this. The runaway train and the leaping frog games are good soft-lit addiction.

Too early

The story was this: trendy somethings with off-beat shoes go to a Brooklyn bar with their design-icon ipods, plug them in and enjoy 30 minutes of dj glory, sweeping the crowd with their taste and hipness.

Last night class finished and I went for a drink and a burger, then with doze closing around my eyes, I bravely went to Park Slope to find this bar. I was reading a magazine and missed all sorts of stops on the subway and took a varied route there, but at 10:15 I was sliding around in the snow, finding my way to the Royale and the ipod-people.

A Spanish looking couple were hugging in the street and the dirty snow. There was a dump the night before: the city had bristled with anxiety from news reports… Clink-clink-beep-beep “Winter Storm! Right after this…” “Prepare-for-the-worst-you-can-think-of----then worse!” “Break about your emergency blankets!” “Leave the elderly!” But in fact after the snow fell, it got a bit warmer and the snow clotted into soot-grey lumps, like dough or something.

The Spanish couple were hugging and then I saw the Royale sign. I elbowed in, the light was red and the surface of the bar was rich and brown. Empty. Not quite, but really not full. This was no shaking itune meltdown. No queues of people called Zed and Henry and Deidra waiting to plug in and listen as their top Polish-post-punk bands gripped and shook their peers. I’d called ahead, I was in the right place, I was so on top of this breaking trend that it hadn’t even happened yet. I was at the birthing of a movement, or maybe the stillbirth… It was the reporter’s Grolsch ad – schtop…

Fairly speaking, Paul the mellow-toned Irish fella who was running the night was a little more sheepish than I was. He pulled me a drink and I sat at the bar next to a moany musician type who told me how much he loved Amsterdam and his new apartment just a couple of streets away. Oh yeah, I said, got an ipod? No. Bit expensive, said honky musician type. He doesn’t need music like other people do. When he was in his thirties (I blinked, I thought he was still in his thirties), he found stereos important, now music is different to him. He doesn’t need it on the subway: on public transport he meditates or prays.

Prays?

For what – slow, wallowy general prayers, or specific ones: express train please, seat please, tasty muffin please, twenty dollar bill inside a new pair of shoes my size and colour left on the train please…

Paul, the Irish behind the bar, has got the right idea for the ipod night. He was playing his own collection from his own computer as we sat there, and cognoscenti types would occasionally ask him what was playing – “oh, just an early Nick Cave song, do you know his Berlin-50 stuff,” that kind of chat. The hunger, the lust for expression was there, just no one had turned up yet.

So I’ll go back next week, like a butterfly catcher, and net the first ipod hopeful to come out of their bedroom and start flapping their sounds. I took the subway back, more directly this time. In that part of Brooklyn the F train runs on elevated tracks, with appealing views. At the 9th street station there were puddles in the ticket hall and looking from the platform, the snow was still thick, smooth wedges of white between the black rails, with a cargo train quietly hissing between the subway tracks.

Just couldn't help putting a big shout out for Movin and A Groovin at the Castle, bottom of the page. Sounds like a big night. And what's this? An ambitious play, good and evil?

NASA ETC

In the school today I was taken by space and things high up. See this, Cheryl Stearns, the greatest parachutist in the world today – count them, 15 000 parachute jumps she’s done, more sandwiches than you’ve ever eaten. In March 2005, Cheryl will throw herself, a woman alone, from 20 miles above Utah and try and break the record for the highest parachute jump. She will go at Mach 1.3, she will be able to see for 500 miles, the curvature of our earth. She’s trying to break the 40 year old record of American hero Col Joe Kittinger, who was on the front cover of Life magazine in 1960, tumbling, his right hand useless because his pressurized glove broke, like a meteor in a duvet. It’s worth nosing around the site, looking at the frequently asked questions (will Cheryl burn up?) and reading the mission goals. You couldn't make up Objective Two. I think the big idea is that when they build the next shuttle, they want to be able to jump out of it if it breaks up like the last one.

And then some Mars pictures. NASA the movie. Go into the main site and look at the pictures -- link is on the right hand side, half way down. Love number one.

Return to the USA

Sorry about the quietness of the blog but somehow there’s less to say when I can say it to your faces. Yesterday I touched back down onto the cold grey streets. I watched Willy Wonka on the plane and felt duly unsettled. Then the captain said he had good news and bad news about the weather in the city. I forget the good news. I was gasping and reaching for jumpers with the rest of the passengers, repeating the words minus nine and minus twelve and many miles of winds and feeling much colder than that. Out of the window, there was the flat orange light of another winter sunset and a grey sheen of sky with darker splotches, but nothing too menacing. There were those little stubby trucks racing over the tarmacs and boarding corridors suddenly stopped with nowhere to go, in order words, no crisis.

In the airport I heard the first twangs, the first New York noises and got shuffled along in line with the rest of the visitors. On the TV screen above our heads, CNN quietly screamed that there were only 3 days to go before the Iowa caucus, The First Democratic Primary! And that they, oh my friends would they, be there, behind the scenes, in the scenes, on the scenes, making scenes, ten five four three two one, cue…. White House…. 2004! It’s set to run this one, only 10 months of campaign to go. Then the same woman as last time, tall, scraggy, long legged and sharp eyed, directing her lines of tourists to be checked and stamped, showed me to my customs agent. The Customs woman cracked a big smile which stayed for a second before disappearing. Then she took my fingerprints – the prints of my two innocent, terror free index fingers (for some reason I thought she was going to ask for thumbs) and a little digital snap, which she took with a pod-like camera.

After her and my welcome home I helped myself to some luggage and got into a taxi driven by a Mr Konstantinou and shared with a young woman from Peru who was going to Soho as well. She worked in a studio in East London helping Rachel Whiteread do her Trafalgar plinth of all things and she was taking some sort of Tang / Tung Dynasty ceramic horse to her father in Peru where she wanted to make comic book of the life of Dina Paucar, mountain runaway turned Lima folk popstar. Outside it was dark but I could see there was a nip. It wasn’t until I helped the Peruvian with her luggage that I stumbled into a frozen heap of snow and heard the squeaks and whistles of the freezing streets that I started to realize.

My god. I slid on the steps of my building and got a guy to throw some grit onto it. He was chirpy with a leather pilot’s hat yanked down over his ears. He was doing the same for Birthday Suit, our next door, though not most local, sex shop. He said I had to give him something, so I gave him a couple of dollars and he skipped up the steps yelling: “I don’t do things for nothing you got to pay me something then I’m doing it I’m working you see I’m a working man that’s right you see this I’m a working man,” and he smashed the snow off the marble-looking steps and generally screamed his condition to the street and I yanked my bags upstairs. Giving that guy some money, getting the steps swept off – an everyday transaction that I can’t picture happening in London, it’s too urban, it’s too quick and loose somehow – made me feel like I was back.

In the flat, Mark was in bed. “Oh” he said, when I popped my head round the door, “It’s Knight.” And so I was welcomed. “Anything happened while I was gone?” “Not much.” I ran out into the cold again to see Sue and have some food and the walk was a death march. I couldn’t help thinking that people were dying in this. The wind and the pure-breed cold climbed up inside my trousers. My legs were divided into bands of pain – my boxer shorts were giving me a precious layer, my knees were begging, my calves were forsaken, trying to die. Elsewhere the wind kept backing round corners and slicing its way across my face. No one told me about this, no one told me that your eyelids can get cold, that you can feel like you’ve dipped your forehead into ice cream, that your ears are in icy bull dog clips. Maybe this is was Scott felt with the Husky Dogs, or what Hillary went through, or what Bullimore felt under his boat, but not in a big city. Somehow I thought they would have solved it by now. Or moved.

On the way back I slid out, my left foot went and I landed with a slapcrack on the pavement on my hip. If I was an old man with a family waiting, it would have been a cracked something. Old man junkie on a lonely street? No Olympics on the telly for me. So I staggered home, hiding in the tube station, pretending to be lost for a minute to get some underground shelter, then out, rushing, legs a-jingle, breath rising around me like a smoke stack.

Then home. And we have a fire. I know. A log burning fire. Matt was sat there in the dark, worshipping this thing, burning some old futon, shoes off, Frank Sinatra on the stereo, wearing a Hawaii T-shirt in some kind of paean, some sort of Spring seance. It was a lovely scene and we had some tea. He had been for an audition as a TV carpenter.