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.