New York Visit
new york is a drug and the come down is hard. it took me 16 hours for my body to get back cape town and at least 3 weeks for my head. I guess for a boy who grew up in a south coast surfing village it was a shock to the vision. a smashed windscreen in an accident. a whirlwind of mind blown via 8 day sleepless carousel of crazy. the new custom bike brand and purveyors of cool, the house of machines, were looking for a new york location and I was invited along to document the adventure. I don’t think I could have asked for better guides on a first time visit to the capital of everything possible than the bike, fashion and culture aficionados brad armitage, drew madecci and paul van der spuy. each unconsciously (or consciously) trying to outdo each other in local knowledge and puns. as you could imagine, a guy trip for 8 days. living together in a small chinatown apartment. burning that candle both ends every night. burning it with motor-oil and craft beer. yes. there were a lot of puns.
a week before we fly I take the green mamba (our beloved south african passport) south to a shiny grey bomb shelter in constantia called the US embassy. this is my first direct interaction with AAAAMEERICAAAA besides clicking renew on the new york times iPad subscription. 3 hours waiting outside the gate with very long queues of families who’s flown in from P.E. and afrikaans farm boys from struisbaai in velt hats laughing through drunken crop-sprayer stories in arizona. there’s no shortage of security checking, double checking, rechecking. you remember america is still in a war and you get the impression you’re in a very long queue of people waiting to get in worldwide, from cairo to pakistan, and we should all just practise getting bored and look at posters of americana. the last interview with the actual american is a disappointing 30 seconds wrapped up with ‘looks like everything is in order.’
my mamba arrives back 2 hours before our flight. and there’s a 10 year visa included. whew. there’s something embarrassingly exciting about seeing your name next to the letters JNB-JFK on a boarding pass. as the inflight screen’s pixelated plane crosses the atlantic in a slow yellow line you start to wonder what new york is going to be like. I can only imagine it as a collage of movie moments with opening scenes in black and white. of course woody allen voice-overs something like ‘new york was his town, and it always would be’. we cut to some bar scenes from how I met your mother with barney stinson delivering pickup lines over pizza slices. cut to limitless with bradley cooper pushing robert de niro with an index finger somewhere on the upper east side before pan left to natalie portman anxious on a railway overhanging. somewhere between that is B-roll NYPD cops jumping over rooftops. I imagine my first moments in new york walking out of a midtown subway. there’s steam rising from the streets. the self-deprecating woody allen voice-over is still with us as you climb up the stairway out into an electrified times square. our reality was different but equally romantic. a bust of rain as we arrive in our lower east side apartment. chinatown. as we haul our luggage up 4 storeys of narrow wooden stairs, an overture of bass guitar noodling through the drizzle and thick echoes of train tracks across the manhattan bridge. on the sleeper couch of torture I think about the neighbours within a hand shake. maybe they can see me in my boxers. and then I think about the neighbours next to them. and then there are even more neighbours next to them. and that’s not even a block. and manhattan is 250 of these blocks. so many fucking people.
the new few days I spent a witness of the culture and curation of 13 million educated, free and confident new yorkers. masses of unexpectantly friendly, look-you-in-the-eye, open and engaging people. it’s not what I had expected. new york is a city that doesn’t sleep and doesn’t let you sleep. I was happy to even get 2 hours of half dreams on the sleeper couch of torture. while our 3-bedroom shook to paul van der spy’s snoring (he needs a licence for that machine he calls a throat) I googled guinness book of records to see how long I could last. some nut had been rocking a chair for 17 days straight so I should be okay. so remembering my first time in new york is very much about flashbacks and photographs and according to wikipedia, possible hallucinations.
we hit the ground running with drew setting an intense pace. coffee shop after coffee shop. bar after bar. awesome followed by amazing followed by mind @#(!. at times you feel like walking out and kicking the side curb out of frustration. please. stop. too much. for capetonians it would be like having a power & glory on every corner, 4 jasonS bakeries on ever side street, 12 &unions in walkable distance and a bree street to the power of 250 blocks. dudleys. dresden. saturdays. balthazars. mighty quinns. lost NYC. saxon + parole. ralph lauren store vintage. aaaarrrggggg! williamsburg market is like a biscuit mill on steroids and people sit on the grass looking at the manhattan skyline over the bay. you eat your chicken and waffle and think about street casting almost everybody. tons of sideboob. brooklyn has surf shops and coffee shops and fashion shops and furniture shops and in the evenings whole neighbourhoods closed for streets parties. mobs of cool. sound sculptures. street art. temper trap or equivalent spilling tunes all over hot crowds and cold beer and parks. there were a lot of triumph bikes around and we spent some time hanging out with a few of new york’s oldest custom bike shop owners downtown and in brooklyn. guys who’ve been fixing triumphs in the same small speed shop for 22 years.
people watching is the sport of choice when walking through different new york neighbourhoods. some parts of the city feel strangely friendly. a 3rd year university campus comfort. 2 minutes later you’re in a park with chinese woman kicking, wrist waving and shakra shaking and then a few minutes later you’re downtown with spreadsheets jockeys in their high waist greys. in soho everybody looks so young. in the meatpacking district and chelsea there’s an expensive polish hanging around the carefully curated decay and you notice google and apple really making an effort to be associated with this part of town. celebs spin past in chrome-wrapped supercars. the highline gardens is urban design on steroids with jazz and signature architecture. outside the standard hotel smooth modern warping red sculptures thriving in a centre of $$$ and TECH. we scout a few more possible soho and meatpacking locations for the house of machines new york store before pierre ter blanche, the legendary designer behind moto guizzi, ducati and now confederate whips me at table tennis at the standard beer garden. the light was dark. I swear. in a bar next door corporate girls are dancing on table. G6 something about my G6. I’m still having flashbacks about a burger place in the directors guild of america.
manhattan’s streets are an overload of design. even the guy digging up the road has a cool logo. street art hides in every centimetre of the city’s posts, doors, beer halls and bus signs. the street constantly talks to you. hey! check this! hey! hey! here! the city sticks it’s fingers in your eyes. americans love putting stars and stripes on it and I saw a couple of cement trucks delivering concrete in a whirling american blue and red. after a while I had to put the 5D and the phone down. you don’t want a lens or an instagram filter to interrupt the experience of a hot new york summer’s evening on a midtown bar with a sun setting over the hudson and the empire state building, 3 blocks away, slowly lighting up. just sit here and be a sponge.
visiting new york feels like a rite of passage. to become one of the new york club you have to return with photographs, stories, cards, badges and slices of design languages you still don’t quite understand. pieces of the proof that you’ve sipped brooklyn’s best, mingled with manhattan maddest (bats, bats, the bats!) and burnt both sides of the candle and served it on a $3 hot dog. climbing up the 4 story’s fire-escape at 3 in the morning to get an hour of sleep before our flight home was probably the most suitable ending to the most incredible week.
The Photo Journal
