Brooklyn's Underground Music Scene

I'd heard a lot about it from my roommate Nate, but I waited until it was my last weekend in Brooklyn to go and explore it for myself. Brooklyn is where the bleeding edge of the music scene in New York is, and in contrast to the hugely regulated scene on Manhattan, Brooklyn has a flourishing underground scene in old factories and warehouses.

On Saturday, after my last shift at the Park Slope Coop, I went to the ironically named Silent Barn on Wyckoff Avenue, in Bushwick deep in the east of Brooklyn. The Silent Barn is an innocuously bland looking building which enjoys the camouflage of a large latino discoteca next door, which masks much of the sound it makes. Inside, hipsters thronged, taking photographs of each other; the air was thick with tobacco and marijuana smoke. A father with his two year old daughter on his shoulders, a cat, the kitchen complete with pots and fly strips, and old sofas on which people were reading beneath lamps all gave the place a homely feeling. It was under-ventilated and grafittied to the hilt. Beer was available downstairs, at prices which were way too legal for my liking (I always feel ripped off buying a beer in a bar in America). The bands played in the middle of a large open space; the concert was organized the the legendary event promoter Todd P. I saw These Are Powers (wall of electronic sound and guitars, fistycuffs between guitarist and someone moshing) and Marnie Stern (playing alone with her IPod).

Sunday I joined my now-ex roommate Nate (who photographs and blogs prolifically on this scene) at Death by Audio in Williamsburg. Here he is caught behind his own camera lens.

Kayaking the Lehigh

Spent both days this weekend kayaking the Lehigh river in Pennsylvania, about 2 hours west of New York. I was with a group of 5 others, mostly from Columbia. There was a release on the river (an upstream dam shedding water) and it was crowded with other kayakers and rafters.

Had a shaky start (I hadn't been in white water for almost a year) but then got my muscle memory back and it was fine .... more then fine: the first trip I didn't swim (i.e. flip and have to get out of the boat under water), and I did the eskimo roll in running water ... and learnt to surf (poke your kayak's nose on a wave and find the neutral spot where you don't have to paddle much to stay where you are, despite the strongly running water).

We also did a couple of adventurous stunts, like sliding the kayaks down sloping rock faces, or even crazier: launching ourselves into the water from a sheer 5m rock face.

An Evening with John and Barack

"Its crazy", Sampada said to me on hearing the news, "that you, most un-american person I know, are also the only one I know to have gotten a ticket". Yesterday, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, both John McCain and Barack Obama were in New York at a commemorative service at Ground Zero, and then in the evening both came to Columbia's Campus to give a talk on civil service at the Service Nation Summit. There were about 100 tickets given out to Columbia students; thousands applied to a lottery - and I got one. Even I, the most un-american person Sampada knows, was excited.

The event wasn't a debate; each candidate was to speak in turn. There was heavy security on campus, with streets being closed off and access control at the gates, and a fleet of white media vans from people like Fox News which lined Broadway with their antennas and satellite dishes. The university had set up a giant screen in the central plaza, and thousands of students who didn't get tickets watched from the Low Library steps; the university had a festive air.

I expected the event to be fairly heavily regulated, and did as requested - didn't bring a camera or other electronic stuff, came two hours early to get through the metal detectors and queues. As it turned out, it was surprisingly relaxed, I could have come much later and still gotten my seat, and almost everyone else there had brought cameras and moved around at will, going as close to the stage as they wanted to take a picture. There was little heavy-handed security visible once we were past the security checks. The MC had difficulty getting people to sit down and stop talking; it verged on chaotic.

Before the candidates, there were a series of other speakers, including David Patterson, the governor of New York, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger, James Gaines, Editor-in-Chief of Time Magazine and Toby Maguire (Spiderman actor). There were also two relatives of 9/11 victims who had set up volunteer organizations, both of them spoke really well in a movingly non-sentimental way about what they had done as a response to their family loss.

And then, we were told by the MC that on the count of five seconds to live television, we should applaud (I thought they had machines to do this?). The countdown came ... the journalists (from NPR and Time) introduced themselves, and then with little fanfare, John McCain bounded onto the stage, and held forth for an hour on civic service, fielding some fairly tough questsions from the journalists along the way. What would you have done differently if you were president on 11 September 2001, was one question (gotten more people to join the army, his reponse). America will no longer be majority caucasian in the near future. Mixed societies exhibit less civil duty. How could you counter this? and so on.

I haven't seen McCain much on television (I spend much more time reading a newspaper than watching TV) but the impression he has repeatedly made from the media is of a fairly irritable old man. The impression he made on me live was much more positive: he was witty in a dry way, he was courteous and he gave clear answers, sometimes simple yes/no ones, to the questions that were put to him.

One of the oddest things about the experience last night was that every 15 minutes, the speeches of the candidates were interrupted so the media could go into an advertising break. So suddenly, one of the journalists would say "You have only one minute left to answer!" and then McCain would finish speaking, the microphones were switched off and the whole proceeding was suspended as the viewing public was bombarded with adverts on cars, food and toilet paper. And the candidate sat there on the stage and made small talk with the journalists. I've always assumed the adverts were inserted into a mixed version of a recorded speech, but the speeches of some of the most important men in America are actually interrupted by advertising. It was so strange.

After McCain had spoken for an hour, it was announced his time was up ... and then Barack Obama bounded onto the stage. The two men gave each other a brief embrace, then McCain left and Obama took the stage to whistles and cheers which were much more enthusiastic than those that greeted McCain. He has a great voice, deep and powerful. In some of the advertising breaks, he also stood up and came to the edge of the stage to speak to the crowd. I got to about 20 meters away from him.

Back in New York

I'm back in New York. It was a hectic summer. I need to add a lot of blog posts still, I will do them retroactively. My summer was not blank, it was very very full.

It was bittersweet to come back to New York. I was missing San Francisco as we touched down (something special in the air at JFK airport); it didn't feel like coming home, it was muggy and unpleasant, and the flat was a mess. But it was really good to see friends again, and the people I know at Columbia. The photos are from Alissa Tan's birthday, celebrated at an Italian trattoria in the West Village. Alissa demonstrates here what it is to be bound at the ear with a yak sock to everyone's favourite PhD candidate in Tibetan Studies, and shopper of exotic goods, St. Ace.