2 posts tagged “nyc”
Today, May 22nd (Morrissey's Birthday...coincidence?)
Voxtrot's full-length LP is available!
You can get it on iTunes
or Other Music (my preferred digital download until Apple drops DRM)
Or you can do what I'm doing, and go pick it up on vinyl, because it comes with a free coupon for the digital copy anyway!
It's been a long week. Treat yourselves.
(photo by Mary Sledd except, er, Morrissey)
I have to admit it, I've had a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this year.
Maybe it's lack of routine, or it being the first Xmas in a strange city. Maybe it's the fact that I rarely venture anywhere besides work and my apartment. Whatever the reason, the press of merriment has yet to penetrate my emotional matrix.
Or had, I should say. Yesterday, in spite of my resistance, NYC delivered. I spent the day at the office, a lone illuminated desk in a dark loft on Broadway in SoHo. In between drawing Candy in Space (don't ask, I won't elaborate), I was working on a super secret holiday project. As I worked, I noticed a faint saxaphone being played, out on the street. I turned off my requisite sad bastard music and listened, and the player was running through some rudimentary Xmas classics. The light had shifted, that 4pm gloaming when it turns all milky pink, not the warm light of a summer sunset, but the pastel, nordic type.
Accompanying the sax player was the din of horns, buses, crowds bustling by 2 stories below, and I started to feel it, then. The feeling of walking through a department store with your mom's hand in yours, catching glimpses of twinkling lights in evergreen, red satin, gold. The smell of chestnuts, roasting on the proverbial open fire of a street cart.
I left work around 10pm to go meet a friend for some much needed karaoke. The place was up on 35th, and as I exited the train I found myself in the thick of holiday crowds. I accidentally walked an avenue (those are the long ones, for all you non-new yorkers) in the wrong direction.
As I walked, Sufjan's "Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!" came on the iPod. I joined the crowd, slowing my typical pace to a tourist-rate crawl. I looked at the amazing windows at Macy's. I felt the cold wind on my cheeks.
I turned down 35th (which is a dark alley by comparison), and Mogwai's "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong" came on. If ever there was a song written to make one feel like It's All Going To Be Alright, that's the one. As I emerged into Herald Sq., as the song crescendoed, I was struck by the main Macy's windows, kids laughing, the Empire State Building right before me, lit up in red and green. The platonic Xmas. The archetype.
I smiled as I walked past, towards the new year.
