A.D.Z. in the L.E.S. – Part five

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Easy, breezy afternoon with an art legend...

Another blinding day, even hotter than yesterday and after eating a Ukrainian breakfast in Cafe Vasulka in 1st Park on 1st & 1st (an old haunt of mine) I drive out to Greenpoint, Brooklyn to pick up my boy Tristan Eaton and head off to Ron English's house in upstate NY. Another city, another Jeep - a pattern is forming here.

Okay so we've got GPS, SatNav and iPhone and still we get a little lost. The iPhone tries to send us through Manhattan and as it's Puerto Rican Day (complete with mental parade) we wing it and go off the radar via the Bronx. We get stuck in a queue for the George Washington Bridge and I look over and see we're right next to Sedgewick Avenue - the birthplace of hip hop. We cross the bridge and then get lost and end up in the boonies of NJ.

Eventually we get on the parkway and the ride becomes epic. Definitely stoked to take the scenic route as we bowl along at a steady 80 watching for the rozzers hiding in the bushes. Upstate New York is a mixture of suburban hell and outstanding natural beauty. This is the latter.

After a coupla hours bombing along the shitty concrete roads we stop off in a tiny town and Tristan goes looking for beer and comes back with two ice-creams. This is the opposite to Manhattan: smaller-than-small town settlement where everyone knows everyone else and there we are, two reprobates cruising through their manor looking dodgy and one even asking for booze.

We get to Ron's house a little late. His birthday BBQ stated at 2 and it's now 5ish, and most of the guests have gone. But Morgan Spurlock, Stash, Carlo McCormick and Jonathan Levine are still hanging and after we've done the rounds, Ron sorts us out with a lekker burger.

Ron is one of America's greatest modern artists who creates serious work on and off the street. His billboards are killer and as I mooch about his studio I spot a 3-foot high sculpture of his take on Charlie Brown. I corner Ron and grill him about his life and work and soon he's in my new book and we're both happy.

We drive back the short way and before we know it we're sat in a themed restaurant (surf, judging by the sand on the floor) eating fish and chips. On the way back to the car I spot an Os Gemeos street piece that has been defaced by the NY Splasher. "I wish someone had caught them doing it," Tristan tells me, "then there would have been a real splash!"

Over and out...

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A.D.Z. in the L.E.S. – Part five (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.