Tuesday, 22. July 2008

In the mornings I'm normally home alone, so I use them for checking e-mail and other internet related stuff. Peter Ka is at work, his other roommate (not the one in China) usually wanders off somewhere in the late morning and "Ben" is somewhere in Manhattan taking care of business he's here for. He's in the fashion industry so I think he's meeting people in that industry here in New York.

I get a list of record stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn and decide to check them out. Some are OK, some have nothing that catches my interest, so the best so far remains the Academy records I visited yesterday.

My favorite food is Mexican and thanx God this place abounds with Mexican restaurants. I stop by some Mexican place on the corner, near a couple of record stores and get myself a burrito (of course, what else?).

I bike over to the 6th avenue and there's some serious street basketball tournament going on. There are refs, audience, a scoreboard, a huge bin with tons of drinks,... everyone has proper jerseys with numbers,... Must be some kind of tournament they have on this court regularly.

I sit on my bike and watch. Of course, everyone is black except one white guy. Needless to say, they kick some serious ass. I see some moves and shots that only show me how lousy we play over there in Italy. The game ends over 100 points and the team I cheer for wins (despite they were behind for the entire first two quarters). If my guys played against the worst 5 of these guys here, I doubt we'd score more than 30 points while they would probably hit 200. They play so fast it's sometimes hard to see what's going on. The only person I can see playing at par with them is our San Francisco basketball magician Quinn. You can tell he profiled his skills on such street courts. I call him magician because when he plays the ball disappears. It's so fast that you don't understand where the ball is. I hope he's back to play next season.

Anyway, yesterday night on Facebook I discovered my friend Gianluca is in town. He's been living in NYC for 7 months but for some reason I thought he was home for the summer.

He played in this band Brigate Rozze, which is how we first met. I helped with printing the cover of their first CD. Then Brigate Rozze became Threat Of Riot and our ex guitar player PG went to play with them for a few years. They even covered "My Life" which was probably the best known song of my old band This Side Up. And Gianluca actually lives pretty much around the corner from me, although we never really see each other in the neighborhood.


Gianluca, me, Alessandra. Italian HC/Punk in Manhattan, New York City.

So we decide to meet in the evening at Astor Place. Another person I know, Alessandra, is visiting Gianluca right now, so they're both there at 9 pm. Alessandra used to order from Goodwill records and she supports my favorite team Inter, which shows some great taste both in music as well as in football.

We go to a bar, then to some sandwich kinda place and finally decide to kill ourselves with chocolate fudge cake and cheesecake. I have about 10 kilometers to ride on the way home to burn the calories from that cake.

Same evening, different camera.