NYC: Fancy Food and Art Nerds
Got into JFK a half hour behind our scheduled 7 a.m. arrival. Make it throught immigration and customs pretty quickly. Bid goodbye to Alex who is about to embark on a eleven hour layover before returning to San Francisco. I am glad not to have to cool my heels in the airport for that long. I head over to the subway and am on my way into NYC. I get to Peter Shapiro’s about 9 a.m. He was up until 5 a.m. and is not very alert when I arrive. I head out to get some victuals from the health food store at Integral Yoga around the corner.
Peter in his natural habitat.
I eat and show Peter my photos. He is mightily impressed. Spend the next couple of hours arranging my flight back to LA and getting my itinerary for New York sorted out. Josh has informed me that Freezepop is supposed to play this evening pretty close by here in Chelsea. Later I find out the show is cancelled. I had been looking forward to meeting with the band, as I had made some video clips for Josh to use with them at some of their shows in Boston.
I start to flag around 2 p.m. and have a nap for a couple of hours. Peter is awake at this point and we head over to Chinatown to visit Zakka. Pick up a couple of Japanese produced magazines and DVDs.
Can’t make a trip to NYC without a stop at Zakka to see what is going on in the international design field.
We then make our way up to the Apple store to get my power adapter replaced. The adapter had died, fortuitously on the last day in Dar es Salaam. The Apple store is a fancy affair occupying an old Post Office. Next stop is Kim’s Video over on St. Marks.
At Kim’s we run into John Morton, a friend of Peter’s from the Pseudo days. He joins us at Caravan of Dreams for some delicious vegan and raw dining. For the first time out of my many pilgramiges to the restaurant, the service stinks. John is brought the wrong drink and his Shitake Stir-Fry comes out minus the Shitakes. Otherwise the food is delicious all the way from the Seitan Stroganoff throught to live Carrot Cake.
John is the manager of a club called Remote Lounge. We head over with him to check it out. Peter had run into another friend earlier who is playing there tonight, so we were planning to go anyway. Tonight’s entertainment is stricktly 8-bit. The downstairs is crawling with C64 and Amiga enthusiasts. The upstairs is for tourists and bridge and tunnel yokels.
One of the attractions at the club are 50 cameras and remote control consoles. You can sit down at a console and with a joystick, control any of the cameras in the club. You have a monitor and a phone in addition to some other buttons to do things like take a snapshot that is put up on the web, send a message to a remote user, and talk with a remote user. It is pretty fun.
We watch the show for a while. It has been arranged by Repellent, a local zine and Micromusic, a user group based in Germany. The video content is being generated by two Amiga computers and run through a Edirol V4 mixer. We get John to give us a behind the scenes tour. The video cameras are all run into separate receiving units that are akin to channels at a Cable TV provider. They have 96 “channels,” which can be accessed with a VCR or similar device. A server is running the software to control the consoles, so it is fairly easy to update the whole system. They also have some custom systems to control various sets of monitors throughout the club.
Remote Lounge exterior.
The bar with cameras over head.
One of 50 cameras that you can control remotely.
The control units for the 96 channels at Remote Lounge.
The VJ hard at work slaving over two Amigas. Also available are four PCs, four VCRs and four DVD players.
Well, duh!
Peter and I make our back to his place on foot. We stop for a bit at Union Square to watch some breakdancing and BMX bike stunts. I put in some work on Peter’s G4 when we get back. Finally tuck in at 3:30 a.m.