New York in July

[EIM]

What's it like? Unbearably hot? Swampy to the extreme? A beautiful dry warmth that kisses your face? Rain like Manchester in November? Come on people, what's the skinny?

[Crusoe]

How on earth are you getting all these trips to cool places? Am v jealous. I might be going to Suffolk this year.

[WOM]

How on earth are you getting all these trips to cool places?

Drug mule.

[ursus arctos]

It can be very unpleasantly hot and humid, especially towards the end of the month.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Lucrative hand modelling contracts.

[EIM]

I'm probably not going, Crusoe my man.

[Crusoe]

Well there's always Suffolk.

[EIM]

I'm a Suffolk hater

[Toby Gymshorts]

As opposed to a country member?

[Crusoe]

No? Nobody else going to tap that one in?

[EIM]

Drug mule.

I was once used as a pyro mule to smuggle a flare into football. The stress was unbelievable. I couldn't deal with drug muling.

How unpleasantly hot are we talking, Ursus?

[ursus arctos]

90s in old money

Here's a long term forecast

[jason voorhees]

If you can sleep all day, the nights are quite awesome.

Ask me my greatest memory, it's July 4 1994. I'm standing on the roof of my apartment on Rivington St between Clinton and Suffolk.

I look left, and there's 5 blasts of fireworks over the Twin Towers.

I look right, and there's 5 blasts of fireworks over the Empire State Building.

Kids are setting off M-80s in the streets, setting off explosions like Bosnia and car alarms are going off on every block.

Kids across the street are shooting bottle rockets at us. At us. Like I see them come out of a bottle, trail across the street, and miss us by a few feet.

A helicopter is circling the city. It parks. We hear tanks.

Squatters have taken over a building around 12th-14th street in Alphabet City. Tanks and Helicopters have moved in.

We'll have the internet a few months later, where I'll hear on this amazing World Wide Web search engine called Webcrawler, where I'll spend $10 for an hour of internet time at a cafe, and a half hour of that will be loading a save that Kasey Keller made for Millwall.

My roomate will have a party where Mike D and Lenny Kravitz will be in our apartment.

RZA's Liquid Sword posters will cover Raekwon's Cuban Linx posters on every abandone lot and subway entrance.

My roomate will get Melody Maker and NME and I'll read about this ridiculous war between two bands called Blur and Oasis and this Britpop thing.

I'll get magazines from England, World Soccer and Four Four Two, and instead of dreaming I could just see a game from England on the tv I'll be able to read about all of them from a magazine stand a few feet from my block.

Summer nights in New York.

Carlos Alberto talked about them.

[EIM]

I'm sold.

[jwdd27]

Both my visits to New York have been in July. Very hot by British standards, but everywhere has air con and you get used to the noise it makes.
Second visit I got a tour of my online friend's Upper West Side neighbo(u)rhood, and kids were playing with the fire hydrant just like in the movies.
And it feels very safe, I went for a few midnight walks near my hotel and the streets are busy but no hint of the sort aggro you can expect if walking around a British city, like Manchester for example. A couple of years ago we managed to get lost on foot late at night in Salford, and my wife made me ask for directions. Fucking hell.
Anyway, yes go to New York, any month.

[Femme Folle]

I don't enjoy NYC in July or August. Yes, most places have air con, but there's no practical way to get from point A to point B without being outside at least for a little while. And if you use the subway, those platforms are the most miserable places to be. I have so much sympathy for the people who have to work in the newsstands down there. It's literally like being in hell.

NYC is most wonderful in May and late September. And anytime in October.

[jason voorhees]

So it's 99º F (32º C) with 98% humidity in the day and you're wide awake.

Walk in the ways of the masters. Get to Washington Square Park with a St. Ides from the fridge of a corner store. No, a St. Ides does not care about IBUs or Cascade Hops...it cares about late 80s hip hop rhymes. It's giant, and you wipe it on your forehead and spend the day in the park. Hopefully with a someone you are attracted to who's cool and fun to be with and who will be a ton of fun to be with at night. Or not. (In which case, you meet someone who's cool and fun to be with and who would have been fun to be with at night.)

What makes NYC so miserable in winter, those huge 8,000,000 foot buildings that blow wind in your face like an Arctic Hurricane, become an air conditioner in summer. You'll catch a breeze at some point off the Hudson River, off the Raritan Bay, off the Atlantic Ocean, and you'll savor it like you ran a marathon and there's a canned beer with condensation dripping down the side. You survived that heat. Now you celebrate with a cool breeze.

New York isn't the same. The suburbs have taken over, there's too many people who made 45 possible. But remember Rakim and KRS and Coltrane and the Village Vanguard and the Village Voice and Wild Style (you can still visit the East River Amphitheater where the final concert was) and pay your damn respects.

And pay your respects to the English directors who had covered Brixton soundclashes in the 70s, who had covered the reggae explosion in the 70s, who came to New York to film Afrika Bambaataa (whom I spoke with in the 90s, bragging that they were there when it was first created.)

Hip Hop is July. Hip Hop is the coldest dead of winter.

If you don't suffer in the heat because it's beautiful, suffer because it was once beautiful.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

This is a must-listen for all potential visitors to, or lovers of, New-York (metro system anoraks should also take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts - 29 days left to listen):

You Must Take the A Train

New Yorker columnist and author Adam Gopnik confesses to 'a perverse love' of his city's subway system. In particular, he likes the two hour run of the A train from the tip of Manhattan to the Atlantic Ocean in the outer borough of Queens.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Very pleasant Duke Ellington earworm.

[Gerontophile]

Anyone near Dallas airport? EIM's connection has been cancelled.

[EIM]

Ended up in Denver. Then Idaho. My luggage was in neither place.

Airport monorails are cool.

[Incandenza]

Sorry about the luggage. Did you get to see the scary Denver Airport murals?

[Hot Pepsi]

Were you trying to go to Idaho? My cousin lives in Boise.

[San Bernardhinault]

Denver airport also has a demon blue horse with glowing red eyes, which always freaks me out if I leave the airport to go into the city.

Idaho is a good place to be. I approve of the choice. Assuming it was choice and not accident.

[EIM]

Brief notes on the USofA

New York:

Probably the best city in the world, isn't it? Amazing how rapidly it's grown considering how young it is. I love the feel, the people, the aesthetic. How different each area is, yet they all manage to be distinctively NY. The adverts in the cab that denounced Trump's anti-Muslim agenda were marvellous, and there's a real sense that people are New Yorkers first, Americans second. Or Americans not at all given that it's one of the great immigrant cities. Walking through the parks in Chinatown while men played chess and women cards was just brilliant. Seeing steam coming from the manholes was equally thrilling. I couldn't get over how familiar a place I'd never been to before could feel. I wish I could have spent more time there poking about and having a look. Loved it.

Teton National Park:

Mountains, rivers, trees and that. Saw a bald eagle and some bison. Got very excited in a supermarket in Jackson. The salad bar was fucking incredible. Became very fond of ground squirrels, an excellent zero fucking giving animal. Would adopt.

Yellowstone National Park:

It's daft beautiful, but hotels with no wifi or TV? Come on, guys, it's 2017. Saw a black bear padding about by the side of the road. I was still getting over that when I saw another bear mooching up a hill. Scarcely believing my luck at the bear bonanza a third fucker ran out in front of the car, narrowly avoiding getting hit. He didn't give a fuck. Three bears though! There's a story in that somewhere. All the geography stuff was mad good, except the sulphur smell, which was worse than when SuperDry Chris ate an egg butty behind me on the coach to football, the sick fuck. Bison are smart, eh? Noble, top-heavy looking bastards. They don't give a fuck about vehicles. Could easy take a car one on one.

Las Vegas:

What. The. Fuck.

Bryce Canyon & Zion National Parks:

Who knew rocks could be so fucking sexy. Burnt a hole in my shoulder from driving through the desert without sun cream. It badly blistered and orange puss was seeping out of it. Now it's just a massive strip of scarred flesh. Pretty cool. Good way to impress the ladies imho.

San Francisco:

What a fucking shithole. Smarmy yuppy fuckers queuing to get in a twatty diner, surrounding and ignoring a guy sleeping rough. The levels of homelessness were shocking. The amount of human shit all over the place was shocking. Not to mention the all pervasive stench of stale piss. Still, this is preferable to Haight-Ashbury, or Shite-Ashbury as I hilariously dubbed it. A Camden-like Hippy theme park even less authentic than Vegas. There was one tie-die mother fucker walking a white rabbit around on a leash. WHITE RABBIT! GET IT?! Fucking Jefferson Airplane, man. Fuck that cunt. Saw some pelicans flying over Alcatraz. Looked like pterodactyls. Pterrifying. The airport has a yoga room. The sign for this was one of the first things I saw in SF, and coloured my opinion greatly. I perhaps didn't give it a fair crack, as when I went to Mission I warmed to the place. Had a conversation with a Mexican lad about Hernandez, why I refused to call him Chicharito, and why Berbaslug is wrong about Rooney.

The Pacific Coast road to Big Sur:

But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... Or at least it would be if you weren't stuck in fucking traffic next to a shitty factory. Still, nice bridges, and when the whole thing reopens after the landslide I'm sure it'll be charming.

Vancouver:

Weird little spacious, clean city full of healthy-looking folk being healthy. Excellent Lebanese restaurant. My first experience of Canadian folk being so polite I thought it was sarcasm. Saw the coolest drummer in the world in a bar that played live music. He was probably in his mid-70s and was an excellent show-off. Went to a food market and had tacos while a gull watched enviously. I'd have shared with him but the Canadians aren't alright with it. Spoil sports.

Vancouver Island:

Whale watching. Saw 20 orcas and a couple of humpback whales. Got a bit emotional. Managed to wear my daft yellow rain coat on a boat, thus ticking off a bucket list item. Pretended to be Chief Brody for a bit. Smile you son of a bitch!

Seattle:

Was only there for a few hours. Still preferred it to San Francisco.