King Adz in the L.E.S – Part seven
More like this...
Last night the sky opened up and blew the shit out of NY.
A massive electrical storm erupted and banged away for at least an hour and I had to get up and close the windows after it began to come in the room. When I went to bed it was sweltering. Then I fell back to sleep and got a promotional text from the crap phone provider I use, which woke me up and it was still pissing down.
The weather here is as mad as the people: fucking crazy, and maybe that has something to do with it. From this...
to this...
in the blink of an eye is gonna make you freak out a little.
I jump in a cab and rattle over to TriBeCa to check out the fashion crew known as House of Diehl who turn out to be a amazing couple who are trying to make fashion exciting and fashionable with their Style Wars fashion battles. I'm keeping sctumn right now as I'm gonna drop more science about them in the near future.
I then travel uptown to the low 100s, which is the furthest above 14th I've been in a long time. People in NY pride themselves on staying below this line, but sometimes a change is better than a rest. I go out for a burger with legendary photographer Martha Cooper and on the way she takes me to Riverside Park, to show me the remnants of the original 'Wild Style' wall burner. Not much is left, just four inches of the top of the blue outline, but I shoot it anyway, and it's rather sad that such a small part of an important piece of hip-hop history remains. But that is part of the impermanence of the culture.
After we eat Martha takes me to her studio and shows me her immense body of work. She is one of the most underrated documentary photographers, as she is mostly know for her graffiti work, yet she has shot so much more diverse work.
The last thing I do on my last night is to sit on the steps up to the apartment (right next to the horrorshow know as Jules Jazz) with a bottle of Becks Alcohol-free beer and watch the steady stream of people walking past. This is the city I've visited most in the world and I'm still amazed at the cross-section of the globe that has ended up threr. The 'successful' (guys in suits and girls in little dresses), the drunk (one girl rolling her man out of the car, so pissed he can hardly stand up), the gangs of Asian girls (with one lone guy), the tattooed (his face covered in 'black eye' tats), the skaters (yay!), the street dwellers with obligatory dog on string (they still rock that look over here, Swampy would be proud), the trendy (say no more) and the awkward (even trendier over here).
The last thing I scored? You guessed it; a mickey mouse Omega Seamaster Watch. Cheers Canal Street, you saved me a few grand!
As I sit in EWR airport waiting for my flight I eat one last meal before I fly (a Nathan's 2-hot dog meal, in my opinion the most American meal you can have) and inbetween bites I look out over the distant skyline of Manhattan and pledge my allegiance to the king of cities:
New York, you are one helluvah town...
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
King Adz in the L.E.S – Part seven (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Add Your Comment...
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.