The World of Smith…
Travel, media, life etcDive, dive, dive – exploring the bars of Manhattan’s drinking class
The night Elvis introduced himself in Rudy’s, he’d just ordered another free fat hot dawg slapped with ketchup and mustard, served near instantly over the bar on a limp paper plate.
“Did you put this song on the jukebox?” quizzed the crumpled up stranger, crowding into me on the next stool.
“….yes?”
I’d hesitated because Rudy’s didn’t seem a bar that’d embrace a little Burning Love.
“Cool. I love Elvis. My name’s Elvis, too. My mom was watching his movie when I was born, made her cry.”
“The birth did, or the film?”
Elvis the parking attendant chewed up his final hot dog and decided it was the former that made mom weep (Presley wasn’t a great actor, after all) before taking off onto Ninth Avenue. The King had left the building, and another of Rudy’s equally colourful regulars took his place and eyeballed me.
If you’re a stickler for uber-slick lounges selling naught but Corona and Pinot Grigio, best to stay clear of Manhattan’s dive bars. If you’re keen for real life amongst the fizzy skyscraping lights of New York, this is as real as it gets; in a city where people live on every corner, these are the bars they choose for chugging down beers and chewing the fat.
They’re a godawful mess of black ceilings, untreated brickwork and bulging red neon, with washrooms that rarely figure in the refurbishment budgets. But they charm you with the cheapest drinks in town, some provide free scoobies and most have jukeboxes that take you on a magic carpet ride.
Rudy’s (9th Ave, between 44th and 45th St) is typical of the dive bar experience; it’s not a place you’d cross the threshold of in daylight. Or while sober.A man-sized statue of a happy pig eyes you up outside, while inside Christmas lights and sodium bulbs cast shadows over the clientele; rock beards crowded in the tight booths, clocked-out office kids giggling over vanilla stolis and off-duty taxi drivers putting the world right at the far end of the bar.
Uniting them all, pitchers of Budweiser for $9 and pints of McSorley’s real ale for just $3. And of course the free hot dogs, too.
Abi and Carole – two of NYPD’s finest – stopped off for a quick off-duty bourbon and sprite and suggested the Subway bar (60th St, between Lexington and 3rd Ave).
Whereas Rudy’s could be described as cosy, the Subway bar was a bloody raw nerve. Choosing to strike out from the darkness, the bar screams out from behind Bloomingdales with neon so ferocious it near burns the eyes out of it’s patron’s skulls.
The naked white glare of the vodka cabinet means you can take in the full splendour of the stained chequered linoleum, once-leather bound booths now re-upholstered in duct tape and washrooms that have been kicked down a hill and left in a ditch.
Still, I couldn’t help but warm to the roguish Subway, especially after a rousing chorus of Gwen Stefani followed by 11 minutes of Freebird failed to get me thrown out.
My friend Kara recommended a few new bars, the first been Niagra in the East Village (corner of 7th and Ave A) . Niagra is what happens when rich kids want to build an authentic dive bar from scratch.
It was a little too shiny for my liking, full of East Village hipsters who, like, so loved the concept of dive bar drinking, as long as it served Merlot. That said, this long thin slip of bar looking across Tompkins Square Park was perfect to begin a trawl of East Side drinking dens.
Miladys (corner of Princer and Thompson) was the recommendation of Doctor Shannon O’Kelly, a local practitioner of wellness and self-being I met in the West village.
“Last night, Natalie Portman was in there,” the loose lipped doctor imparted, “but on any night you’ll find local alcoholics in one corner and Prada models in the other”
An A-List endorsed dive was too good to miss.
I had issues with Miladys from the start – the ceiling was white, not inky black. The two rooms were well-lit (you can read the drinks board without the aid of carrots) and Alix – whom the good doctor had promised would “look after me” – was not on shift.
The A-listers has made other plans, too. Still, the crowd – a college fraternity and well-off locals – were in high spirits, and a pint of Budweiser for $4 in a SoHo bar meant I was too.
The lesson learnt was to under-expect, because these rough-and-tumble bars always over-deliver.
They won’t compete with the multi-million dollar boutique bars and the rich and rarely-famous, but you’ll find a very honest snapshot of New York living, they’re a lot sweeter on the pocket and you might just stumble across Elvis.
Who are you? And what was that?
How many bands from the past five years will still be gigging in 40 years time?
I gave this some consideration while watching The Who last night at Newcastle’s Telewest Arena (yes, I know what it’s called).
Partly because Daltry and Townsend attacked their setlist with a ferocious and unwavering passion, as if still in possession of all that teenage angst and fury that powered them into existance in 1964.
Partly because I was employing a method similar to preventing premature ejaculation (not that I need to, obviously), in that I was trying to think of anything other than the four pints of Amstel sloshing around my bloated guts while I sat squeezed into a scrum of fat fifty-somethings.
And partly because about half the show was complete toss, and short of updating my status on Facebook again I needed something to pass the time.
It’s always tricky. You did your best stuff 30 years ago, but you haven’t all died yet and you still like writing music. That doesn’t mean, however, you should a) make an album of it or b) subject me to it by sandwiching it between the classics, in the hope I somehow don’t notice. I did.
So Roger, Pete, here are some options for future gigs from someone who doesn’t care about anything you’ve recorded since 1978:
- only play the great songs everyone knows. That includes I Can See For Miles and Squeezebox. Favouring any of the material from later albums like Endless Wire over classics like these is a crime against music.
- don’t worry about playing the medocrity from your last three albums to pad out the set. If you’re worried about short-changing the crowd, play the good stuff twice. Nobody will feel cheated.
- as a rule of thumb, if it hasn’t been used as a theme tune for CSI, leave it out.
Moans about mediocre set lists aside, if you ever write a list of stuff to do before you die, seeing Pete Townsend performing the windmill in the flesh should be near the top. It made my heart explode with adrenalin and joy.
But you’ve probably only got another 20 years or so left to do it, so best get cracking, eh?
Next – what happens?
When Dallas tried explaining away a season’s worth of continuity and character development as Pam Ewing’s gorgonzola-induced dream, most could only admire the sheer size of the producer’s bollocks for trying to pull off such a ludicrous stunt.
When flimsy Nicholas Cage action yawn Next attempts a similar sleight of hand, you instead feel compelled to peel somebody’s eyes out and scream bile into their sockets.
Cage is doe-eyed bewigged Vegas magician Cris Johnson. Except it’s not magic, it’s a genuine paranormal gift, which allows Johnson to see the future. But only his future. And only two minutes into his future. And if he looks, his future changes. Unless he sees Jessica Biel in his future, in which case he can see for longer than two minutes. But then he can’t change it. Or maybe he can.
He can also see through survelliance cameras. And televisions. Nobody’s quite sure how.
There’s a Russian nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, and instead of getting Bauer on the case, FBI agent Callie Ferris (phoned in by Julianne Moore who really, really doesn’t want to be in the film, and does all but bare her arse to prove it) wants Johnson, because he can use his ability to prevent said device killing eight million people.
The Terrorists with Unplacable European Accents TM want Johnson too, for precisely the same reason.
And that’s it.
Apart from the deus ex machina. Sweet muscular jesus. There’s a scene about halfway through Next, where Cage (having used his powers not to stop the enormous bomb obliterating the West coast of America, but to get laid) appears to have an epiphany. You humour the moment and dare to wonder why. Shame on you.
Instead, consider Patrick Duffy enjoying a long shower, and with any luck you won’t feel like setting fire to your own hands in frustration when the twist arrives.
Only Jessica Biel seems concerned that money has exchanged hands in return for acting, and is the highlight of the film, mostly because she wears a towel for long stretches of it. That, and she’s strapped to a wheelchair and blown up repeatedly.
Oh, and there’s no ending. Really, the film just stops. You sit in the darkness, waiting for the rest of it to appear, and the credits come up instead. You want your money back. You can’t have it.
It’s difficult to know what else to say. The bastard child of The Matrix and every action role Cage has ever played, any film billed as an action thriller which then spends on hour in a motel room where nothing happens is taking the piss out of both the genre and the audience.
Next is not only a rubbish title for a film, it’s a rubbish film. If you possess any pre-cognitive abilities, then know how bad this is without losing an hour and a half of your life by watching it, and go to the pub instead.
Eurovision 2007: Ten of the best from Terry
It’s a sad day indeed when Wogan himself can’t be bothered to knock back a bottle of Merlot before the voting begins, and criticise Eastern European countries to the point of racism.
As always however, there were some gems amongst Terry’s commentary which made three hours of arse-aching television just about palatable. Just about.
“They’re going to hurl themselves in the icy waters. They do a lot of this in Finland. And there’s a lot of deaths.”
“There is a Cossack accompaniment. And there will be sword fighting later. Hurrah.”
“We’ve managed to get some sustenance here, so I think you’ll probably find the commentary will go downhill after this.”
“It’s the bit we like the best; the voting. You get a chance to shriek abuse at the sheer partiality of it all. And I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”
On the French entry: “God bless them, but this was chronic. A futile attempt to be funnier than the Eurovision Song Contest.”
“Hard to know what to say. I mean, without bursting into tears.”
“Whose idea was this? I want somebody to name the man guilty for this utter rubbish.”
“You’ll notice there isn’t a single Western country within an ass’s roar of the leaders.”
“Are those your own teeth, my dear?”
“It’s been a wonderful, wonderful evening. Not musically, of course.”
The Hard Sell
According to AQA (and yes, I did ask), the most savage form of torture imaginable is a sustained round of bollock whipping ala Casino Royale (ladies, try to imagine a pain ten times more excruciating than childbirth, then being told there are no shoes left in the world).
Anybody who’s visited an Odeon cinema recently will know AQA have got it wrong. Of course, AQA stands for Any Question Answered - which while suggesting a correct answer, doesn’t guarantee it - so it’s difficult to argue the point with them.
Nobody is suggesting Odeon are beating the balls clean off their customer’s crotches. They’re cleverer than that. See, they wait until you’re emotionally vulnerable. They bide their time as you squirm in your seat at being told anything less than a full month’s wage for a diamond wedding ring (which by strange coincidence, is the price of a medium nachos meal deal and a bag of Revels in the foyer) marks you as a heartless bastard of a man.
Once the suppressed memories of jewellery shopping at Elizabeth Duke well up to the surface, Odeon unleash their campaign of psychological warfare; the in-house commercial, the current version of which is a sinister and disturbing case study of abandonment, racism and rejection.
We see a woman discover the infants in her nursery have been snatched; a man coming round in a deserted art gallery; a black child rejected by his white class mates; a frail old lady left to die alone and afraid.
What could possibly connect these four forgotten souls? A global pandemic that has savaged mankind? A complex and character driven back story? Nah, everyone has just fucked off to Odeon to see a film. Films for babies, films for kids, films for old people, films for people who… erm… like films.
The producers then decide to go one step further and practically beg the audience to relinquish any love they once have felt for the cinematic experience.
See the fan of the of indie movies, he’s wearing a beret! He’s got a funny beard too, and media glasses! What they’re suggesting is that if you liked Donnie Darko, you look like Tim Burton. That’s a call to the solicitor, right there. But wait, there’s more stereotypical fun to come, as all over-65s are all white haired, cardigan wearing treasures drinking pots of tea from white china! Just like real life, innit?
What they hope to achieve is anybody’s guess. Perhaps the Ministry of Defense are interested in developing it as a weapon. Maybe repeated viewing can make a viewer’s head explode like in Scanners, or melt like a Nazi in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Regardless of future psychological weapon applications, in the here and now it’s shite. It’s a shite ad for some shite offers, before Nicholas Cage inevitably phones in another shite role in a shite film wearing the shitest hairpiece you’ve ever seen in all your born days.
Given the choice of having my eyes taped open and been subjected to an endless loop of this cockended nonsense, or having my gonads whipped with a rope until I’m a woman, consider my trousers already dropped.
Was commercial radio really robbed at the Sonys?
In today’s Media Guardian, Paul Robinson comments on last week’s Sony Awards under the headline Why commercial radio lost the gong show.
If you’re expecting an answer to the question, hoping to glean an insight to how you can have your name etched on a £400 rectangular block of plastic, don’t bother.
Robinson never gets round to it, except to suggest the production values of commercial radio entries are below-par compared to those of the BBC. Otherwise, it’s a case of counting how many times you can ask the same question using the same words in a slightly different order.
This year’s Sonys were a miserable affair for commercial radio, points out Robinson, with the BBC winning 24 of the 33 gold awards,“missing out completely in programme categories that comprise the core of their output, notably news and music.”
But how many commercial radio stations have news as the core of their output, beyond three minutes an hour, compared to the number of BBC stations have either news or music as the core to their output?
The categories that Robinson argues are bias towards commercial radio are just as attractive to the BBC. Meanwhile a dozen categories place the emphasis squarely on speech and specialist music – very much the realm of the beeb.
“Awards such as the best Breakfast Show… should be bread and butter to commercial radio.”
Yes they should be, and in fact they are. Mike Toolan (who won a bronze in the category this year) puts on a cracking breakfast spread, as does Simon Hirst on Galaxy Yorkshire, and plenty of other presenters for that matter. Regardless, first place went to the Today programme on Radio 4 and Silver went to Five Live Breakfast.
It’s not even a case of comparing apples and oranges, more apples and open-heart surgery procedures. Honestly, how can you fairly score one against the other? The Sony judges managed somehow, but would they be able to explain their decision?
Robinson goes on to pick and choose examples to portray commercial radio in an poor light, missing out success stories along the way; Chris Evans may well have won the Entertainment Award, but Jamie Theakston on Heart 106.2 and George Bowie on Clyde 1 bagged Silver and Bronze respectively. Moyles received a nomination behind them both.
Key to this is a fundamental aspect of the BBC’s remit – to provide high quality programming that is not viable through commercially funded output. In other words, BBC radio generates high quality output that commercial radio can’t begin to because it is funded for exactly that reason.
Ultimately, Robinson’s point of view in the piece is off-centre; comparing world famous brands like Radio 1 with local stations like Radio Aire is hardly a level playing field for more reasons than I can count. Hold ILR up against BBC local radio for example, and commercial radio out-performed the BBC and their higher budgets.
I’m not saying the results last Monday weren’t disappointing; of course they were. But the Sony awards have never been a fair fight and they never will be; that’s not a criticism, just a fact.
Commercial radio shouldn’t expect to walk away with the lion’s share of the spoils, but nor should it be kicked by the industry for failing to do so.
Get Closer To The Boro
Like a small child with ADD after too much Sunny Delight, I spend far too much time doing lots of things I shouldn’t. Devising marketing campaigns for radio stations while driving down the A1, for example.
This is a concept I came up with for marketing BBC Radio Cleveland’s commentary of Middlesbrough FC while I was Programmes Editor. Below are examples of the bus side designs, but the concept was also used for banners and beer mats.
Station sound producer Will Banks and I created on-air campaign that complimented the visuals, which won bronze at the Sony Awards in 2005.
Don’t let the angry man in the hat scare you.
FOETAL FINGERPRINT PLAN CONSIDERED
The Daily Daily is a semi-occasional project which I may get around to making a semi-full time project at some point before I die. You can read more nonsense on the MySpace page, but I’ll also sprinkle some of my favourite stories here from time to time.
FOETAL FINGERPRINT PLAN CONSIDERED
Proposals to fingerprint unborn children as part of ID card plans are being considered.
Immigration minister Liam Byrne exclusively told The Daily Daily the proposals were being “looked at”.
The government has expressed concerns that as the average age of children committing crime in the UK decreases, police authorities face the real prospect of smack addicted toddlers pimping out Eastern European girls, before they can even crawl.
“This problem is very real, in as far as we’ve imagined it could be real,” stated Byrne.
“I find nothing more terrifying right now, than a judge of this land issuing a near full-term womb with an ASBO.”
Shadow home secretary David Davis said the proposal “borders on the sinister” and added it showed the government was trying to end the presumption of innocence.
“A child, a baby, an embryo, even a handful of warm sperm – all these stages of society must remain innocent until found guilty.”
“The determination to build a surveillance state behind the backs of the British people with a woman’s legs raised high in stirrups is becoming increasingly sinister,” said Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg.
“Nobody is questioning that kids are little bastards.”
FIT TO BURST
A rant about the foolishness of fitness. From the point of view of a very unfit gentleman. Not me, obviously. A friend.
FIT TO BURST
My blood would have boiled out my ears if I wasn’t up past my shoulders in cold water.
Children under six, women twice my weight and octogenarians – every single one of them was a more accomplished swimmer than me. Up and down the bloody pool, never needing to feign an old rugby injury by furtively rubbing their knee after the third length.
Not that I needed to, obviously.
Let’s be clear – it’s not as if I’m dramatically unfit. Actually I am, but being a good few inches past six feet I carry the fat well, and a stocky build means everyone assumes I go to a gym. Which I do – Jim’s a friend who works in PR and I go to meet him in the pub most Tuesdays.
I used to jog a couple of years ago. I told everyone (and still do) that I used to run every day until I hurt my knee – yes, even imaginary injuries are recurring. The sad truth is that I took up jogging for a month until the hangovers got in the way. While undertaking this near super-human trial worthy of a modern day Hercules, I’d regularly brag how that very morning I’d jogged for over 15 minutes without stopping once.
I’m not entirely sure why, now I’m in my early thirties I’m so anti-exercise. I certainly felt better for a sub-quarter hour slog through the local dog-shit stained park for those few weeks. There were even moments when I considered running a marathon, although these were only when I was in a pub, drunk.
It’s only now as a worldly-wise 31 year old I appreciate the universal truth ahead of my time – exercise is bollocks.
Everyone I know who goes to a gym, hates it. None of them seem to look or feel healthier for it. Most can’t even be bothered to go; as far as I’m concerned, convincing yourself there’s a benefit to circuit training once a month is on a par with Holocaust denial.
So why do people insist on paying a gym membership they barely use? Because in this day and age where preservation of self-image is paramount, there would be nothing else to talk about. They either want to join a gym, they want to change gyms, they don’t go to the gym enough, or they want a personal trainer, they want to change personal trainers, oh and how much do you pay for your personal trainer?
God forbid they’re married to somebody who shares their pseudo-gym fetish. Turn down any invite to their dinner parties immediately.
Of course this sort of thinking contradicts the stark reality that I spent this morning snorting 20 different flavours of piss up my nose at the local baths, pretending I swam to an Olympian standard every morning so I can be in this gang I detest so violently.
“Big night last night?” the toothless and pruned pensioner enquired as he completed his 40th length of the morning, noticing my bloodshot stare and my brow furrowed by the strain of the recurring knee injury.
“No,” I’d lied, “it’s my knee. Hurt it playing rugby.”
Thank god it wasn’t my back. I put that out at Taekwondo last week.
“How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness?”
July 17, 2007 at 8:38 am · Filed under comment, humour
In the technological jizzfest that is 2007, living without broadband for a month is tantamount to paralysis. And not the good paralysis that sees you off to swim with dolphins for a week in Florida. The bad sort.
I had broadband. Then one day – it may have been a Wednesday – I didn’t.
I performed the wifi equivalent of CPR. I turned the router off and back on, unplugged all the cables and plugged them back in again. Screamed. Uninstalled software, reinstalled software. Pointed at a small white plastic box and declared it “a fucking cunt”.
I spent nearly my entire soul talking to both BT and Sky. They contradicted one another, unable to agree on who to blame, only that somebody was, but it wasn’t them.
Then in desperation, I knelt down and prayed to God and little baby Jesus for my shiny copper wire to get better. Admittedly not the best use of a prayer, and God acknowledged this by doing nothing about it.
I was left with no option but to admit defeat. And cry.
So instead of spending eight hours a night reading and re-reading Facebook newsfeeds, crushing fellow forum postees with my smugly superior knowledge of Quantum Leap, and downloading as many money shots as my eyes could absorb without exploding all over my hot naked thighs – I was forced to adapt.
I tried talking to people. That is – I tried talking to people without instant messaging or walls or twittering. Rubbish. They always used to laugh out loud at the simplest observation when there were two keyboards and a hundred miles between us. They didn’t find me half as funny in the flesh.
One night I went through every phone number in my mobile – all 189 of them – and rang them one after the other to tell them what I’d had for dinner, what I was watching on tv and whether I was ready to go to bed or not – the kind of minutiae that had entertained many of them for the past six months.
Many seemed distant and uninterested, and asked why I’d only bothered to call after a year or two. One of them pointed out that far from being a friend, he’d never talked to me in his life and who was I again? I explained I used to work at the BBC and pulled his number from the contacts database so I could pretend at parties that I knew him. He told me to fuck off.
The low point was when I attempted to strike up deeply sexual conversation with strangers in bars. Not a single woman would show me their breasts, even after announcing I was 23, female from Doncaster and had lesbian tendencies. I tried whispering it to them, but they didn’t believe me when they heard the words instead of reading them.
Without home broadband, life was meaningless. I was unable to communicate with the world around me. I was a 3D man in a 2D man’s world. A bit like Jeff Bridges in Tron.
And then one day, something magical happened. The fridge was empty and I was at a loss at how to replenish it without tesco.com. As I wasted away and hallucinated from hunger, a preposterous thought crossed my weakened mind.
What if the broadband had somehow magically fixed itself for no very good reason?
I’m not a holy man by any stretch, especially after God knocked me back first time around, but as we’re told the Almighty is always listening, regardless of whether our prayers are answered. Perhaps he’d been busy saving wide-eyed children in Darfur when he should have been sorting out my internet connectivity. But he’d got around to it eventually. It probably cost a few malnutritioned orphans their lives, but at least God slept with a clear conscience that night.
Still, a valuable life lesson learnt. I don’t have one. But not to worry, there’s probably a website that can tell me what to do about that, and if there isn’t, I can create a group about it on Facebook and ask my friends what they think.
Bless you broadband. And thank you.
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