Alright, so this is exceedingly cheesy: I've been off the tour for a week now and when I wasn't being a lazy asshole I was letting this cold I got in NYC fester into some crazy flu-metastasis that's given me a new and profound appreciation for those all-in-one nighttime pills you take before curling into your gross and drooly bedsheets. The result's that I never got around to finishing, much less starting really, the gargantuan New York City slash mega tour retrospective slash immense bullshitting on the meaning of rock and roll and its relationship to youth blog entry that I've had in emaciated outline form in this textfile on my desktop that's titled nothing more than "BLOG". But I'll deliver eventually. Photos have been up for a while, and I'll give you what I've got so far, which doesn't quite scratch the surface, but really I need to get to bed and soon.

A day or two before we left Austin I was reassuring everyone that New York would be warm and that they wouldn't have to supplement their wardrobes with new coats and shoes. What I didn't know was that a snowstorm had descended upon New England, one that would eventually result in massive airline delays and some pretty unsavory temperatures. When my plane started to land, I was peering out the window and thinking that we were surely still flying over Michigan: as far as the eye could see (which, from the vantage point of a jet, was pretty damn far), the whole of New York was exactly the same shade of white.

Up close it was a different story. By the time I'd gotten to Brooklyn, the snow was already a few days old, and with the temperature hovering a few points above and below Celsius zero (I guess depending on the position of the sun), it'd been subjected to a process of repeated melting and freezing that left it not so much snow as this persistently disgusting and slippery hardened sludge, peppered generously with chunks of rock salt (not really doing its job so well), street trash, the feces of various animals, and other miscellaneous off-colored urban detritus of undetermined composition and source. As it happens it was also garbage collection day for most of South Williamsburg, so the mounds of grimy ice on the sidewalks were also crowned with an unbelievable number of plastic garbage bags, some half-opened and very gradually evacuating their contents into the street. To my relief the same cold that kept the ice from melting also kept the trash from decomposing too quickly. As such Brooklyn didn't smell like shit; it just looked like shit.

Lemme say that I used to or perhaps still sorta have this complex regarding New York City that actually has more to do with my notions of social hierarchy and my own self-worth than it does with the objective features of the city itself. That's to say that I've always thought that NYC was a little too cool for me, which idea is really just a corollary to my deep suspicions toward people in my age group who speak ravingly about moving to NYC and subsequently having The Time Of Their Lives. In the past these people have included older and more experienced peers, the well-dressed friends of friends, graduate students that not so much carry their single-strapped sidebags as wear them, and very prominently certain girls on whom I'd had naive and yet shatteringly dramatic crushes; i.e., such self-consciously sophisticated, intellectual, and blatantly privileged people that I simultaneously loathe and wish to gain the respect of, or even secretly wish to become. Wanting to move to NYC always seemed to me like a kind of posturing that was both lame and somehow disloyal to one's roots; there is probably some overlap between this and the way townies and rural folk (or in my personal case, suburbanites) canonically despise the natty rich city kids. Anyways this is all complicated shit in my head, tied up with my sometimes puritanical and wholly abstract desire to remain "true to myself", alongside deep-seated fears of failure and being left alone.

The point's that none of this has to do with New York per se. I actually find New York to be pretty awesome and impressive on any number of levels (in fact I was pretty much ready to move out to NYC about a year ago when I was considering an grad school offer from Columbia), like how you can get the best bagel-and-cream-cheese you've ever had for two bucks, how there's folk of all classes and colors wherever you look, how it feels like you have direct access to cutting-edge creative work in every imaginable form (despite the potential obnoxiousness of such a claim), and how people actually seem to be doing things in public, and at all hours--this last bit is not to be underestimated, since to me it's what makes NYC the only true City in the US, with Los Angeles and Boston and San Francisco all having varying degrees of almost-but-not-quite, quasi-cityish bustle and density that never really reach what I experienced in many big Cities across Asia (NB: I haven't been to Chicago, but I suspect my hypothesis still holds). I think New York's the only place in America that compares.

So So Modern as a decision-making unit is both pretty inert and a little scattered, and stuff tends to get arranged and resolved at the very last minute, in "true So So Modern style" according to Grayson. I'd position myself on the lower half of the General Shit-Togetherness scale, but next to the band I'd rank like momishly high-strung. Probably every day during SXSW I would very gently nag the band about living arrangements in New York, offering that my friend Chelsea was willing to put us up for a while, and each time we had this conversation we'd arrive at this weird, non-committal consensus that 1) the band had several options for NYC, and 2) that Somehow Something Would Work Itself Out, but 3) in any case we never quite got around to confirming our accommodations with our hosts. And so by the time I got to New York, I knew only that I was supposed to drop by Mark's friend Tash's place to drop gear off. Where we were all going to sleep was still up in the air. SSM's plane got delayed for three or four hours thanks to the fallout from the weekend's snowstorm, and by the time they got into Williamsburg it was something like midnight; when Mark called I asked him where he was planning on staying, he said that they thought, uh, well, they had hoped to stay at Chelsea's, if that was cool. And it was cool, but only because A) Chelsea and her roommates are themselves extremely cool and easy-going and B) Chelsea happens to be vampirically nocturnal and was awake to let us into her place. We'd had all of these opportunities to give Chelsea & co. the word ahead of time, but we waited until literally the night-of to let them know, and all of this made me a little bit uncomfortable. Bands at SSM's level--i.e., those that aren't floated on corporate money--are in essence parasitic and sustain themselves largely on the good will and hospitality of strangers, and I have to think that it's only good metaphysical form not to take any of that for granted. And here I hope I'm not overstating my case: the band are charming houseguests and are effusively polite, but they have a habit of dropping by unannounced.

So anyways, on that first night Chelsea took us out for a very-early morning trek around the snowy trash-hills of Williamsburg, and eventually we found ourselves dancing to a vaguely faggy mix of Euro-ish beats in a dive bar in the Lower East Side, where (in the bar) according to Chelsea there was a couple of unspecific gender in the women's restroom asking fellow restroom-occupants if it was okay for them to "do it right here" and then (presumably) making good on their intentions.

I would evaluate our first few days in NYC as pretty Fucking Cold; as I mentioned before we weren't really expecting low temperatures, let alone snow, so we resorted to such tactics as plundering Chelsea's extensive scarf collection to keep warm. Above, Grayson's doing an impression of an Eastern European peasant, and I think he rather perfectly approximates the odd and ambiguously strained appearance of your average wind-worn continental herdsman or tiller-of-the-soil of any of the last three or so centuries, the kind of look that could either be rustically cheerful or just abjectly stricken and miserable, but you can never quite decide which it is.

Chelsea shares her apartment with two friends, Karin and Beth, and Beth's affectionately ingratiating cat, Wolf. Wolf apparently has a thing for males and was by all indications completely in love with me, but I was completely allergic to her. As in biologically at first, but then later metaphorically as well. I would wake up in the morning with swollen and crusted-over eyes and grossly irritated sinuses and a tingly full-body itch, and so in spite of her advances I eventually took to nudging Wolf away and turning away from her when she walked in my direction. Sometimes I thought she'd taken the hint, but then like a day later she'd be back, rubbing the side of her body against my leg, which left me like simultaneously revolted and terrified and also a little sad that I couldn't pet her.