Nakedness - a Problem We All Need to Solve

What the cool kids are wearing: deck shoes with no socks, fitted shorts (above the knee; half the thigh for the hardcore), fedoras, deliberately vile plastic sunglasses, tatts, hair that's shaved around the sides and long on top, v-neck t-shirts, manbags and jackboots.

And if you're a girl? Denim romper suits.

I've visited a few places that are well known for their clothes shops: Fifth Avenue, the Meatpacking district and Williamsburg (and other hipstery spots). Fifth Ave has Prada, Gucci, Ferragamo, Cavalli, Bulgari and their ilk. It was boring. The Diesel shop had a DJ in the corner. He had decks and Mac but was just fading from track to track. Some of the other shops were elegant, beautiful and spacious, but they're not really what I'm into. I'm convinced that there isn't something special about a $200 jumper that makes it better than a $50 one; you're just paying for the sofa in the shop.

The Meatpacking district was a little more exciting. Historically, factories where meat was packed were there. Then, for some reason competely unknown to me, high-end boutiques decided open up there. There are plenty of names: Diane von Thingyburg, Alexander McQueen and Louboutin are hustling for dollars down there. The more fun shops are ones that put together their stock themselves (not just selling one label). I was in The Jean Shop. They only sell like two cuts, but you can choose the material, wash, colour and distress yourself so you get a unique pair of jeans. Complete tosh, of course, but entertaining tosh nonetheless. Word on the street (ie, a newspaper article I read) is that they give you whiskey if you talk nice to them.

The hipster starving-artist places have fun shops. I was in a smelly thrift store in Bushwick while on an abortive attempt to visit a little art gallery. I think you'd need to have a strong sense of style and plenty of confidence to get dressed out of one of them. Also, patience to put up with having to sort through randomly stacked racks of shoes to find your size. It's really strange that so much of Brooklyn seems to have an incongruous mix of working class people that tend to be from the same background (all Hispanic; all black) and then the rich kids with their iced lattes in the middle of it. Some would label this as diversity, but I don't see much integration going on - the two groups don't mix any more than they have to.

Also, Urban Outfitters is the bee's elbows over here. The staff are soul-hurtingly well dressed. Get your shit together, people who work in Dundrum.

A Dry, Spiritless List of Activities

Through my connections, I've got myself a job. I'm going to be a doorman. This makes me profoundly happy. As far as I understand it, the job requires me to be reasonably polite, open the door for elderly Jewish ladies and take home $15 per hour. Tough stuff, I know. The sole annoying thing is that I've been waiting for weeks to start. I've been here for a month now and I've worked about four days. I want to get started because the combination of being in a really fun place, being in a really expensive place and having not much to do has given me a severe case of diarrhea, but with money instead of shit.

In fairness to me, I have being making an effort to do free and cheap stuff: I'm reading East of Eden and it's borrowed from the library on my homie's library card. I toured FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), MoMA, the Transit Museum, the Met and the Guggenheim (I cheated on that one - I just had a look at the lobby because it's pretty and then left) and spent $10 on admission in total. I also saw Diplo, Switch, A-trak and Drop the Lime for free. And I went kayaking in the Hudson for free. I know that was just a list of activites that didn't give any impression of what I actually thought or felt, but I needed to get that stuff down or it would have been lost forever. Forever! I was also at The Rocky Horror Picture Show and an earlyish screening of Windmill followed by a Q&A with the director.

Pedicabbing and Some Other People-Based Activities

Being a pedicab driver is good because you get money. Not very much though. I figure I was taking home about $30 a day, so when the possibility of getting a job as a doorman in a high-class apartment block came up, I stopped pedicabbing. I don't know if I have the doorman job yet, so it's a bit silly of me to stop already. On the other hand, it's not like I burned any bridges; I can go back to it if I want to.

Another fun aspect of it is talking to passengers. I learned from the first day that going fast is a bad idea for two reasons: It's unnecessary - if people were in a rush, they'd have taken something with a motor. Secondly, it freaks people out that someone is getting wrecked at their command. To be more accurate, I think it freaks people out when it's happening right in front of them. There are people getting wrecked in the Nike factory in Pakistan, but you can't see them, so that's not such a big deal. So while going slowly, I met a guy who works for the Puerto Rican government and came to vist his son for the Puerto Rican parade. The portion I saw of that was ten trucks with posters for Spanish-language pop radio shows on the sides and people (mostly girls) in hotpants on top waving flags energetically. I also met a Jewish massage therapist who bought me an ice cream. Going while eating it was challenging. I got the handlebars sticky but I didn't end up rolling out in front of one of the curiously common fire trucks, so I call that a success. Another time, I met a French lady who thought A&F and its topless chap in the lobby are symptomatic of a more chill attitude to nudity among the Americans. Needless to say, I think that's complete tosh and told her as much. Didn't get a tip that time.

A few days later I did come to the conclusion that Americans are relaxed about their bodies when I went to a nightclub playing hiphop.

OMG!!!1!1

There was like a dozen couples basically dry humping on the dancefloor. And it's made all the more crazy by the fact that they didn't know eachother. Guys just walk up to girls and get stuck in. And I don't get the impression they even need to really fancy one another; they just give it a chance and see what happen. Maybe it's going on in Ireland too but I don't pick up on it because I don't go to hiphop clubs there, but I think it's not happening in Ireland because I was at a show with house, hiphop, rock n roll and dubstep the next night in Philly and there they were, hammering away at eachother again.

Enjobbified - sort of Part II

Things did look up after that, but the post was getting way too long, so I'll do it at some point in the future. Woo!

Enjobbified - sort of

It seems that it's easier to get jobs that don't require your employer to pay you. Obvious, I suppose. So first I got a job selling comedy tickets. I found this on craigslist, where it was advertised in a misleading way: it said that the job involved promoting award-winning restaurants. There's no mention of selling tickets for shit middle-of-nowhere unimportant comedy clubs. This job involves standing in the street stopping susceptible-looking people and trying to persuade them to buy tickets. It's horrid. So I gave up after about four hours.

Then I got a job selling cutlery, and it had a better pay structure: each time you do a demo, you get $17.25 plus commission - as opposed to the 50%-of-sales commisson with no basic pay with the comedy tickets. I decided against that because you're supposed to sell to your parents' friends and acquaintances and I don't know any grown-ups on this continent, so it wouldn't have worked well.

Thirdly, I saw an ad on the street that was looking for flyer distributors. Easy work, bad pay, I thought, so I decided to give it a go. I like bad pay, me. So I went, clean shirt and shiny shoes on, resume in hand, chin up. When I got to the address, I stopped dead. There were thirty people in a queue out the door and down the street from the address. It's just handing out flyers! It'll pay like $7 an hour! What are all these people doing? That was discouraging: if there's this much competition for a rubbish job, what chance have I of getting a proper job?

Anyway, I queued up and got in eventually. 150 had showed up, but they seemed prepared for us: they had a hall full of chairs set up. So this guy gets up and starts telling us about motivation and energy and sales. What relevance does this have to flyer-distributing? Then, they show us a video. It says things like "Never before have market forces combined to create the perfect storm of economic conditions to allow such an opportunity. It may never happen again." Having done two years of economics in college, I could confidently state that it was complete cock. At the end it said "copyright 2004", and that got alarm bells ringing for even the less-well-educated (most people there). If it was "never again" five years ago, what is it now?

Turns out that a shady company called Prepaid Legal was hiring sellers and had fabricated the flyer distribution job to get people in the room. I waited until someone was in the middle of one of their little speeches and then I walked out.

Loftstel

Now, normally I'm not one for sitting on me arse at home - and especially not when I'm in a ginormous 8-million-person magical playground of excitement like I am now, but recently I've come around to seeing the merits or aforementioned arse-sitting. Iin Dublin, I tend to be on the look-out for obscure sources of jollity in the back pages of The Ticket. And I don't do that here either.

Why? Have I became a morbidly obese floral-print-mumu-wearing hick? Am I paying back for all those years of LSD abuse with severe paranoid schizophrenia and agoraphobia? Well, no.

It's just the Loftstel is the best place ever in the world ever ever ever i love it aaargh.

The people here have such exciting, interesting, creative, adventurous lives - and are so willing to share them - there's no need for me contribute anything to the gallons of hot, sticky fun being pumped all over my face at every waking moment. That image was a bit graphic, and not particularly pertinent. Ho hum.

To illustrate this point, a few examples: we went out to Santos Party House, which is part-owned by Andrew WK, to dub-and-something-else-I've-forgotten-night. My guidebook gives it an entire page because they think it's the deadliness. Then we went (at nigh-on 5am) to a kinda-famous kinda-obscure but mainly just brilliant pizza restaurant called Artichoke. Yesterday, I got brought to hip-hop dance class in the Broadway Dance Center. It's where people who perform on The Actual Real Broadway go to train. Today, I strolled in from my afternoon in Manhattan to find the big old amps in action; a sound card, an external mixer, a macbook (watevah), headphones and mad skills (-z?) were working together to create beautiful music (in both the literal and figurative senses). So I just watched, listened, asked noobish questions and a had a go.

The point is that all this great stuff happens, and I don't need to do anything bar show a bit of enthusiasm to have it happen to me. And it's great!

Abercrombie & Fail

has a big yoke of shop on Fifth Avenue. There was a manboy in the foyer with his shirt off, and people were getting photographs taken with his abdomen. The shop smells of perfume, but in a way-too-much kind of way, like a minibus to Aughagower community hall at ten o'clock on a Friday six years ago. I suppose. There's music on that makes it difficult to talk, because of its loudness. Also like Aughagower community hall at ten o'clock on a Friday six years ago. The music is horrible: the vocalist from Aqua ("Come on Barbie, let's go party") may have been heard. The staff are all gorgeous. Like I-need-to-sit-down-and-catch-my-breath gorgeous. Some of them have to stand at the top of flights of stairs dancing and greeting people. One of them said "Hey, how's it going" to me. It was a terrible moment. She should have said "Hey, how's it going?" (rising intonation at the end), but she didn't. It was flat. She'd been told in the office that she had to say that exact thing to customers, so she did. She wasn't asking me anything.

All the customers were plumper and shorter are worse-dressed than the staff. A&F is selling this unattainable dream in a distasteful, yucky way. I'm aware that most clothes (consumer products?) is about selling an aspiration, but I like to think that some of it is about the product itself. If you buy whatever random shape of jeans Topshop is flogging this month, sure, some of the drive behind your purchase is going to be that you want Kate Moss' life, but I'd like to think that it's also because you're focused on looking a certain way; trying out a style. For A&F's consumers, it's not about the clothes; they're just trying to be the staff of A&F and the people in its ads. And that's why I think it's a sorry, sordid mess.

People, in Glorious Technicolour

Getting my exercise by bouncing up and down on my bed wasn't giving the challenge I needed any more. Besides, the guy on bottom bunk was well pissed off. So, one day, I went for a run. This necessitated going through the neighbourhood surrounding Loftstel. The area is called Bed Stuy. That's short for Bedford Stuyvesant. Almost all the people who live here are black, and probably don't have very much money. Biggie used to live here. He developed his style freestyling on the streets. It's on YouTube.

The other kind of people who live here - and the division is stark - are what are known as hipsters. I'd have called them crushties, but they already had a word for it here, so my suggestion is redundant. They're aspiring artists and musicians and hippies generally who want to live near the action but don't have jobs that make much money, so they live here because it's relatively cheapalicious. In other locations, the encroachment of hipsters and the eventual gentrification of an area that follows has lead to resentment and tension. At first, I didn't really see why anyone would have a problem with new people moving in. I found out that the problem is that rents get pushed up by the increased demand so people who've lived in an area for years end up being unable to afford to continue living there. Worse than that, sometimes people actually get moved somewhere else because the place they live is in the way of a new development. Someone spraypainted "Hipsters Move Out" on the Williamsburg Bridge.

After a little while, my run brought me to a completely different neighbourhood. In Ireland, (certainly in the past, I realise this is less true than it used to be) you'd need to travel tens of miles to observe even a subtle change in accent. It's not like that here. Hella not like that. What happened here was that I crossed an invisible magical line in the street and ended up in a district entirely populated by Hassidic Jews. The men wear black coats, shoes, skullcaps and trousers. They shave all their hair apart from two bits above their temples, which they allow to grow freely. Many of the shop signs were in Hebrew. Even the big yellow school buses had Hebrew writing on the side. Their children are well-behaved and literally no-one is properly fat.

Some twat set up a petrol station called Hess in the middle of the Jewish area.

The Guy Looking Over My Shoulder

Loads of fantastic amazing things have happened - being subject to three attempted scams on craigslist not among them - but you don't get to hear about them yet due to the above reason. But someday!