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.