Shoot the Poets

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Got to NYC yesterday at about 1 in the afternoon, following a pretty rough journey featuring a small amount of snow and a lot of rain. The rain continued when I got to New York, meaning I couldn't really go out and do anything I had planned.

The hostel I'm in is OK, 6 of us to the dorm but we have a private bathroom, which is good. Since I couldn't do a great deal, I spent most of the afternoon in a coffee house over the road. Went to the cinema in the evening to see No Country for Old Men, the new Coen brothers film. It was no Big Lebowski, but watchable.

Met up with my friends Alex and Rupert today who are in town for a few days, so we grabbed some breakfast then headed to Battery Park to get the Staten Island ferry because it's free and quite a good way to see the Statue of Liberty. En route however, I got accosted by a gangsta in Times Square who offered me a copy of his CD, which he'd nicely signed for me. I accepted, thinking it was a free promo or something, then the next second I had another 8 CDs thrust into my hands by this guy's homies. At which point I was told to make a donation. My generous offer of a dollar wasn't good enough apparently, and things threatened to get ugly so I just said I didn't want any of them and pretty much threw the CDs back at the small time rappers. Rupert wasn't so lucky however and ended up paying $10 for a dodgy looking album featuring such tracks as Lobster Sauce.

After getting back to Manhattan, we walked up past Ground Zero, which has become a bit of a sick tourist attraction, and into Soho, for a bit of shopping in the boutiques there. It was in Soho we also saw the birdman, a guy who walked along squawking like a seagull before flapping his arms several time, then baa-ing like a sheep for some reason.

Resisting the urge to spend all the rest of my money in Diesel, we went back to our respective hotels for a nap before meeting up with Rupert's friend Gary and his wife Mel, who live in the city. They took us to a cool tapas place in the East Village for dinner followed by a kind of sepakeasy bar where they serve drinks in tea cups as they would have done in prohibition.

To cap off the night, we went to see Mel's friend in a poetry slam, which is a bit like the hip hop slams you see in 8 Mile, only a bit more intellectual. Just as potty mouthed though.

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[Winky McGonad]

Tell me more
about this baa-ing bird man. Did you feel you'd met a kindred spirit?