you pick it up - it's like a virus

One of the great things about entertaining guests in New York is that you can usually let the city do most of the work for you. No matter what your guest is interested in they can usually find it in Manhattan. Tripp interested in multimedia geekdom? Well, damn if NYU grad students aren't showing off their latest toys, I mean thesis projects. Chris Campbell interested in design? Well it just so happens that MOMA has on display most of the pieces from his design textbooks. Got nothing planned for a couple hours? Just walk wherever your going and soak in the scenery and the random shops on the way. You really can't miss.

In most cases this means admiring soaring, majestic archictecture or the lush public spaces of Central Park, but occasionally the treats take more unconventional forms. Uncontested King of the Unconventional Tourists is Chris Campbell. Chris is a Londoner so tall buildings are somewhat blase. What really impresses him are the minute breakdowns of the urban order.

When he takes his camera comes out, it's not to record the elegant lines of the Chrysler building soaring in the distance, but the traffic light lewdly enveloped in pigeon shit. The sweeping arches of Lincoln Center? Boring. The sharpie tags on the mailbox on the corner? Gold. The airy open lobby of 100 W 33rd where Danielle looks? All good and fine. The dented mirror in the elevator of my building? Priceless.

I found myself almost sorry that the city is so much cleaner and safer these days. If he was impressed with the neighborhood now, he would have loved it when we moved my sister into her first apartment in the mid-eighties. Her corner back then, just a few blocks aways from where I live now sported copious amount of graffiti, trash, and a bona fide open air drug market.

The new cleaner, friendlier New York with it's higher quality of life and plunging crime rates offers fewer comparable thrills so we compensated by getting drunk in bars and stumbling home to watch New York centric films documenting the golden era of urban decay.

I hadn't seen Style Wars in a couple years and had forgotten how epic a document of the early hip-hop era that it truly was. I also felt it gained something when viewed in New York with the occasional fire engine blaring by underneath my window. Scratch, which I've watched several times in the last few months was less NY-centric and in comparison less of a masterpiece, but still fun. On Sunday night we watched Wild Style. Whether you know it or not, you're familiar with this movie. It's been sampled in tons of hip-hop and techno songs and the familiarity of the dialogue verges on the spooky. All good fun.

This weekend my buddy Jesse and I will be brewing an India Pale Ale in his apartment. Jesse has done 10 or so home brews before, with what he says were fairly good results so I'm optimistic that we'll get some good beer out of the project. Saturday we go shopping for ingredients, equipment, and draft up a plan of attack. Sunday we brew and in two weeks we bottle. Hopefully we start drinking a month from now.

Watch this space for full documentation of the process complete with pictures. (Tripp, I might need some help with setting up the page/hosting pictures.)