I spent my last day out and about in New York today, as I'm going to be spending tomorrow shopping around for stuff for the Cuban leg of my journey. Walking around the city, I realised just how much New York is the iPod nation. I think I regret not keeping count of the number of people wearing white earbuds. The iPod has reached saturation here, I can get on a subway train and see four people sitting next to each other, each carrying their own portable reality distortion field generator.
I've spent the past week running around various bits of New York and Boston. I spent a large part of Monday floating around the Museum of Modern Art, affectionately known as MOMA to the locals. This building has just finished up a four year renovation process, under the guiding hand of a Japanese architect - and you can see his influence in the design. It's tastefully minimalistic, with lots of nice nooks and crannies which just look plain cool. During the renovation process, a camera was set up across the road from the site, and a picture was taken over a 4 year period. This picture was very cool, and it was insanely complex. I'll have to get a copy of that picture at some point of time. I was very impressed by the museum all up, and it quite easily fills up a day. The line outside for getting into MOMA was also helpful for filling up my day, as many people obviously had the same idea to get out of the rain.
Tuesday was spent indoors as much as possible, although I did head out to have a sushi dinner with Amie. The name of the place was Sushi Park, and I was a little disappointed at it's inability to live up to nominative determinism. There were no amusement rides there, and there certainly was not a troupe of 4 foul-mouthed pre-schoolers finding new and inventive ways to "take one for the team". Instead, there was quite a nice sushi restaurant, located in my favourite part of the city - midtown Manhattan. Whilst watching TV here (as one must do), I stumbled across "Search for America's Next Top Model", a variation on the standard rags to glam rags reality television fare. I was quite amused with one particular part of the show where a model-to-be was complaining about New York being all dirty and unclean as she walked through midtown, and not being like the New York she thought it would be. It was diametrically opposite to my experiences in New York, where I wasn't too impressed by 5th Avenue and Times Square.
My next four days in the US were spent in the Boston area. I was flown up to Boston by PSL to attend some meetings with two companies and MIT. The PSL offices are in Woburn, just outside of Boston, and much like the Sydney offices, are slap bang in the middle of nowhere. It's about a $50US cab ride to the airport from Woburn to the airport, and about the same to the city I'd think. So apart from being a little bored up in Woburn, the meetings were pretty productive. It was interesting to walk around the MIT campus, and finding the offices of the person I was meant to have a meeting with was an interesting challenge. Especially since I only remembered his name, and not his office number, or the building that it was in. The actual facilities in MIT aren't all that flash however. For the one building that I actually spent any time in, it was actually a lot like the Electrical engineering building from UNSW (from when I went there). I did walk past the Bill Gates building, however, which looked very wonky.
So back to today - after coming down with a case of the sniffles earlier today, I figured I should take it a bit easy, so I headed out to NOHO (in Midtown Manhattan - where else?!) to check out Satellite Records, at the suggestion of Dr B (aka DJ Simo). I managed to leave the little scrap of paper with the address written on it at home, so I got down to Bowery St (which is where this record store is located), and started walking down an extremely long road in an attempt to find it. I kept walking for a while, before I realised that the store probably wasn't going to magically appear if I kept walking in that direction. Like so many times when I am trying to find stuff, instead of trying another approach, I gave up, since I thought I had no chance to actually find the damn place. As usual however, whilst making my way back to the subway station, I ran across the store. Expecting a funky bustling shop, full of DJs doing their stuff, I burst through the door - and was confronted with an almost deserted shop. I floated around the store for a little while, pretending that I had some kind of qualification for actually being there (such as actually needing some new vinyl, or wanting to possibly engage in commerce), and I eventually talked to one of the shop-monkeys working there. I enquire about how business is like in the store, and it turns out that business has been going down in New York since late 2001. This has also coincided with a downturn in the general dance music scene in New York. The predominant sounds there are Tribal and Deep house - both of which aren't really my cup of tea (at the current point of time at least). This was kind of exemplified by the few Paul van Dyk posters plastered up around New York, the only ones that I saw for any kind of dance music event. Is that really the best they can do? As random record store guy said - the best way to describe the New York scene is "disappointing".
