Shrove Tuesday

After waffles with Coco it was lunch with Jake. In between I had made some calls and been to the New York Public Library and ordered some old newspapers under the well-painted domed ceilings and marbled hallways. But now it was three and time for eating.

The spring’s been coming, or well trying to come. Yesterday it was as blue as a darling’s eyes but today winter is having its last sweaty puff. It’s a shame really, the winter was crackly shiny bitter: a terrible monstrous thing that kept me indoors and fearful of not wearing enough trouser. So today’s huffy effort at wet dribbly snow was a little pathetic. The winter should have quit. It should have been bigger. There’ll be winter time again.

We crossed Broadway at the second attempt and went to Amir’s. They do Lebanese food there and you get falafel in collapsing pitas which damp out and sag with bitter yoghurt. There’s always salad which flops onto the paper plates as well. It’s a slippery slappery meal that ends up on your cheeks and among your teeth. It’s a team effort. Jake saw I had a scrap in my teeth and he told me so. I think it has to be that way. You need to trust your fellow luncher.

I trust Jake. He’s Jacob really. The surname’s Goldstein. You’ll find him on the sixth floor normally, if you’re looking. If you’re not, he tends to crop up anyway. He’s younger than he thinks but he has spent some years in the mountains, in Montana, of all places. He must be nearly six feet tall with the sort of functional black hair you might expect. He wears glasses and in that hot snow they were flicked and spatted with dots of water. To cut a story short: Jake has a gab for things. He gives high fives but he talks back.

Jake was joyed because he had nailed a pair of work opportunities – plucked some life out of the cloud that is conjoining above the school these days. Everyone needs the cloud, everyone commiserates with each other in fear and disdain of the cloud but, really, honestly, we’re all looking for a little ladder up into it – and, what’s more, a private ladder that no one else has seen, to skip up alone and unencumbered, to not look down, to disappear away into the thing we want to be in but are afraid of because we are not. Jake paid for Amir’s because he’s found a pair of ladders. I hope they go high enough. Here's his site.

Will Carr left yesterday and returned to the hills. Maybe he’s back now. He came and saw and had to sleep in the very narrow bumply side of my futon. I kneed him a couple of times in the night but I didn’t mean to. I hope he didn’t notice. Will saw it all, the whole NY sham-dram. If you want more, look him up in his district. We saw puppets and bars and subway trains. Will diligently did museums and the glowing lights of midtown. By the end of the week he was giving directions to lost Americans like the millions of wise-punks that live in this town. Maybe it’s contagious. I hope so.

Nearly there, nearly there, but then this

I think I'm nearly at the end of the sewer road -- the last staggering climb over the next few days. It's Mordor out here. But on a wandering I found this competition from last year. Click on the view all entries bit and get sucked in. They're bloody good. I give you the 2003 Embrace the Decay Design Contest

Unlikely I know, but if you haven't checked this week's piracy report, do so now. It's a dinger. With missing boat pictures and everything. Those high seas.

Those Monster Trucks

My first day back after Christmas I’d been sitting quietly when I came across Linda Rodriguez, a Texan, and we decided to see some monster trucks. The Hot Rod tour was coming to Uniondale, Long Island, on February 7th for a weekend of high roaring big wheeled madness and by the heavens we would be there too.

Numbers plummeted but there were six of us buying crisps and beer in the supermarket at the back end of Friday afternoon. We went down to Penn Station and then trotted to the Long Island Rail Road through crowds of commuters with our plastic bags and awful intentions. The train had red and blue seats and people with their scarves, newspapers and half closed eyes. But we were a little giddy, sipping our beer which we held swaddled in plastic bags, trying to abide by some law or other. The train lights kept blinking on and off and the emergency posters glimmered green in the darknesses.

But then it was Hempstead – a brown and yellow foggy place where streetlights and carparks seemed to extend out to the ends of the earth. An obliging tax driver with little regard for anything agreed to squeeze us all into his cab and we bumped along in the thick night to the stadium.

The Uniondale Coliseum rose above the gloom and its truck-filled carpark and stretched round on either side. Inside we heard the middling yodelling bars of the national anthem and the first death roars of the trucks. Buying the tickets I looked along to the queue of guys at the next booth – leather jackets over fleshy twenty-somethings, big shoulders and little beards.

The seats were in the upper level but my god we saw it all. Just in front was a family of three, him, her and the son. Dad in a red racing sweatshirt, son big-eyed and mummified in merchandise – t-shirt, cap and flag.

The action happened in a sand filled oval. The show had three elements: stunted eighteen year olds flinging themselves on trail bikes high into the coliseum air, dramatic and largely staged team racing on quad bikes, and the noisy armageddon of monster truck racing.

The whole bonanza – which altogether felt like the last night at a Sodom-at-the-end-of-the-highway – was presided over by a plump man in red and his dwarf clown called Spike or Clutch or something. Spike would make appearances between shows on various belittled machines and yell “Whose your daddy?” to the family crowd. In the prizes section of the evening, the crowd – which was a few thousand – was asked to scrabble under their seats and see if they were the lucky ones who had won an all free oil check at Jiffy Lube, the perky name of some Kwik Fit or other. The other prize was a bar-stool.

But the monster trucks were the big draw. The red man would say, “The monsters are coming!” and the sound system would slip into some rolling, rising rock. Then the zeeooorrrrrrrr clamour, the grrrrrreeeeeeeoooooooorrrrrrr din and some beast car would come bounding into the arena. The normal format is the body of a farm pick-up perched on top of the wheels of some giant’s toy, the whole thing held together by long bars and springs which help the trucks leap and bounce around. Inside the cars you get a glimpse of the driver, sat right in the middle on his one seat, arms and gloved hands whizzing and hauling on the big simple wheel.

The races started with a great revving as the trucks took their places in opposite corners of the oval track. They pawed up a little ramp before three dead blue cars and the crowd rustled for its earplugs which everyone squashes in – dimming the whole experience to a slight sense of dislocation: everything visible but the monstrous war sounds and thubbing music coming from a next door room.

Then the last wild revs and the trucks leap into the race, flying in seeming slow motion over the busted cars and then bouncing from wheel to wheel as they burn and heave round the corners, sand skidding out at head height, spraying viciously into the hoardings. The air comes a moment after, wumping and flapping the posters around the track as the trucks claw round to the next leap.

The races formed some sort of knock out competition which Grave Digger, the franchise around which the sport is staged, always wins. In between races four young motorcross riders, with cocky walks and names like Jason and Kyle, came out to gun their bikes up a flimsy looking ramp and high into the dome of the stadium.

They zoomed up it, one after the other, and in mid-air flung out their legs and arms in patterns, before grappling back on the handlebars and landing the bikes on a steep sandy hill. Two of them were really good – zipping up, flying and then going all loose, just hanging for a split second with the bike. One of them got off the bike backwards as it flew and was horizontal, then he reached forward with his hands and touched the seat of the bike before pulling it to him and landing. The move is called touching Jesus or something. A blissful, gasping dangerous thing.

The showdown was the freestyle monster truck event. Grave Digger, the perennial favourite, was out last. Monster Mutt was just before. Monster Mutt was brown like a mongrel with sharp little teeth painted around the front and a red tongue. Over the doors were two swoopy brown ears that flapped over the top of the cab just like a real dog’s might. Monster Mutt made the dog walk in the freestyle.

Given the run of the arena, the trucks came out and leaped the cars, stomped all over a doomed van and spun around in circles, making the crowd whoop. The Mutt was full of spring. He wrenched up on his hind legs, the truck vertical as it stumbled over the van and last car, gunning, screaming along its the back wheels. Virtuoso. Then the Mutt came to the middle and chased his tail – how that driver hauled the beast round, tighter and tighter louder and louder, ripping closer and closer until the wheels were leaping and bouncing from tyre to tyre and the sand flew like a halo in the exhaust. It was like Torvill and Dean on a hundred greasy cylinders.

Grave Digger came out all fast and racy and flung the hearse-shaped truck around like an old performer but it was no Mutt. In the spirit of some Hot Rod wisdom, the two were given the same score and it was settled by a shout-off, which Grave Digger, in a Coliseum of moneyed fans, won in a din.

Robbed. The dog was robbed.

Volume

Coco had to wake up early on Sunday so I went to Brooklyn alone to find Steven Chen and a new club.

We’d spent the day looking at pictures and then walking across town in the fading afternoon under the huge buildings of midtown. I took a digital photo for a happy silver double-date who were heading to the Rainbow Rooms, a swanky dance hall where people go in tuxedos to drink gin and be New York.

Later we saw Touching the Void, fighting viciously for seats at an intelligent cinema with sophisticated types with frameless glasses who think nothing of tipping a child out of a move seat with one hand and ordering a decaffeinated herbal tea with the other. It was a fully rad film and we groaned and shook our way through it. Then pizza.

But now it was 1 or 1:30 and I was on my way to Williamsburg, the home of the swoopy hair and warehouse conversion, the crumbly Polish widow and the visionary student. I got off at Bedford Avenue and stepped out into the low street of delis and bars and headed downhill but north to find 13th street and the second night of the newest rawest club that you ever heard mention of: volume.

I’d been missing calls from Steven Chen (see his blog here) and he’d been missing them from me. The long story short is that in the snow, near a school and under a clear and gem-coloured sky, I was waiting in the cold and Steven was still at some hip-edge joint, trying to get a date with a drummer. I stood outside the club which was marked by an open door and a lamp on the broken pavement. It was the club because the only other things on the street were lorries and murals and huge rolldown warehouse doors. A couple stood near me, arguing gently but doggedly about his dancing with someone else.

Finally there was Chen, late and in his night-zone, the new kid, a slider, an unimpeded type who takes from bar to bar, hair all styled like some kind of ipod advert. He had with him a forward leaning young lady with an angular face and rouge on her cheeks. We went in.

A huge hall lit up blue, you could have put a swimming pool in it. There were speakers the size of portaloos and not many people. The music in this overwhelming space was strangely reggae and there were mattresses where people slumped. A few people gawked around and someone was jumping on one of the mattresses. It looked like a place where young-eyed New Yorkers come to die.

Next door and round a corner it was different: packed out strobe lit shaking. The music was blocky. I kept mistaking things for other things at the low down table which served as a bar. In the end I got my hands on a can of Heineken shaped like a barrel. Then we danced and walked around but volume was no discovery, it was a desolate place. It felt big and lost.

The girl left and Steven and I walked in the snow and found a cosy bar to talk in. Then we waited too long for a subway and it was late as I walked down seventh avenue and turned left onto fourth street. It was warm in the flat.