From Las Vegas

It is 106 degrees and the wind coming off the desert does not cool you down it only makes you hotter. It is after midnight and the sky was expansive and black overhead but not where you are, not anymore, not now and how the fuck can it be this hot? Sweat marks shirtbacks and you have not seen this before, not at night. And then a girl dressed in a black jumpsuit and wearing a black bob wig throws a towel in your car while you drive past her down the Strip and then you notice there are hundreds of that girl. And you pull into your hotel and cannot find check-in because casino hotels in Las Vegas are deliberately disorientating. While you are checking in there are people everywhere plugging quarters into machines that hiss and tap and beep and whirr and the people are glamourous young couples or misanthrope-gamblers or Texan cowboys or Mexican cowboys or girl's-night's-outs or football teams or degenerates who know nothing else (want nothing else). So you dump your belongings in a room lit by the fluoresence of the sign outside which is advertising Dirty Girls and Cold Beers and Cheap Cocktails and you are out onto the Strip where the alerting excess of Vegas is inescapable. The size of the buildings is asphyxiating: the Venetian towers in stories over you and Caesar's must take up 4 city blocks. The Luxor, an obsidisan pyramid, blasts an intense, focused beam of light forever into the night sky: this spectacular but unnecessary measure is Las Vegas manifest. People drink cocktails from diminutive clear statues of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, a Mayan idol or from exaggerated cups. You buy a drink there but you can take it here, or here, or there. Mexican kids thwack cards against their hands and jam them in your face, advertising Actual Girls for $49 an hour. Gold-clad overtanned hedonists cruise by in convertibles and The Deuce constantly unloads passengers on to The Strip. They are thrilled to be in Vegas Vegas Vegas. Some beers cut The Hot but the constant, inevitable, unavoidable, exhausting gambling continues everywhere and the agitation goes from arousing to nauseating. Then you wake up late and you do the same thing and in the morning-the-late-morning you will go to bed maybe after breakfast maybe but sometime because you have to wake up late again. You are staying on the Strip and everything is right-there and right, there. Everything you want, or could want. And you go out and saturate yourself again in the Indulgence, and again it is correct. So by that afternoon you find yourself drinking frozen margaritas in the pool and feeling like it is the least-unhealthy, least-decadent option in this city. Maybe it is. But it does not last long because just through those doors and past the restaurant and past the tables and past the machines and out the door is The Strip and you know this and you know what this promises. And then you drive out some days or weeks or months later, convincing yourself that you are ready to leave, but looking over your shoulder until she disappears, wanting, because you know that that city never stops.

From the Lower East Side

It is gusting and the cold burns your face. It is almost unpleasant enough to ruin your night. Four boys spill out of a restaurant and take the subway downtown, one stop. They disappear into an apartment on Avenue B briefly, only to reemerge and walk north. After roughly a block, they approach a large man sitting on a stool hugging himself through a chunky North Face jacket. He sits outside a closed shop, next to a defaced wooden door. Hands are thrust determinedly into pockets and obscenities are mouthed as the large man halts the boys. He asks if there's a problem. He is told no, it's just fucking cold. He agrees, waves the boys through the small door, and returns to holding himself. He is also probably swearing now.
The staircase inside climbs steeply and has no handrails. Sounds spill out of the door at the top: muffled music and shouting mostly, but also some screams and maybe a couple of smashing glasses. There isn't much light in the staircase. There is enough to see the tags on the walls. The light trickling out of the doorway at the top is reddish and the walls are black. As they reach the doorway and turn into the bar the boys pause briefly because people are so densely packed in. They get to the bar and drinks are bought. This happens numerous times. Meanwhile girls dance on the bar, people dance on the table and one falls off, and people notice there is no DJ. The dancefloor is packed when indie and hip hop plays and subsequently drains when other types of music come on. The place is unremarkable, except for the considered and assertive hedonism in such a small space. The pervasive attitude is fuck tomorrow. In fact, fuck later tonight. Nownownow. It is contagious. It is not the practiced ennui these kids usually display. The boys, along with the others in the bar, are vibrant and lively.
Come morning, they leave. The wind is still blowing and it is still cold. It is still difficult to light a cigarette. The subway is warm and people with no home sleep against its walls, but they are rising now, to avoid the crowds of people who will push and shove through here in the coming hours.
Underneath the bar, the grocery owners raise the corrugated steel guarding their shop and watch the kids roll out onto the footpath and road. Despite the cold, some sit on the ground, and some hold their jackets over their arms. A few wait until they can buy water from the grocery. The rest walk off. The kids wonder how the store owners get up so early and the store owners wonder why the kids still stay up so late.

From Spanish Harlem

Down three flights of stairs, across the road, and down the block, at 104th and 2nd, is La Isla. It is open twentyfourseven and was the spot for late night rellenos de papas and rolitos picantes. At 75c they served up a mean little coffee, too.
Just past this was the 103rd St/Lexington Ave stop on the 6 line. Inexplicably, but suggestively, this station always had an NYPD officer in or near it. For a stop that predominantly saw families, or more precisely, young mothers with young children, the sight of jacked-up fuzz seemed almost provocative.
The projects sit between 102nd and 103rd. Across the road is a mural remembering Big Pun. On the opposite side of the street is a liquor store that is completely glassed in. There are always two guys working it and you can see a gun behind the counter. They don't sell 40's, but they do sell Hennessy.
Dotted along 2nd Ave around 110th, there is a collection of various branches of various churches. Although each one is only a small, cheaply carpeted room at ground level, filled with white plastic outdoor chairs, at 5:30pm on Sunday the local population filters along the street towards them dressed in their best, regardless of the weather conditions.
The store advertises itself as a grocery. True to the title, there are fresh fruits and vegetables outside. Inside, men sit at two fold-up tables drinking Pacifico, Bud, and Modelo. American football is on a small screen mounted above the window. A fridge is stocked with beers: some are purchased and opened by people wanting to watch the game, some are purchased and taken away. It is not quite a bar, not quite a bottleshop, and not quite a grocery. Yet, it makes perfect sense.

From the South

US Highway 60, between Richmond and Appomattox, Virginia.

Slight, compared to the gargantuan avenues that are the major interstates, US Highway 60 runs approximately East-West through eastern Virginia. Constricted mostly to two lanes, it has the feel of a suburban road, and at times does cut through small towns, or finds pretty wooden homes along its length. Sporadically, small shops appear, offering groceries and crafts, or liquor and ammo. As American roads go, it is humble. A small, bifurcated black line disappearing into the horizon.
At varying intervals, the landscape either side will be fields, mainly for horses, or will be the luscious forests that characterise the states in this latitude: Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, as far south as Alabama and north into Pennsylvania and New York. With very little groundcover to obscure them, the stark black-mould trunks of the trees contrast against the autumn palette of their foliage. The colours are turning for Fall. It is a sea of ambers, reds, yellows, with some determined evergreens accenting the spread of warm colours. As the car passes along this road it stirs up fallen leaves, creating a brief golden snowfall. Roadkill is common, and is jarring against the organic beauty of the landscape that unfolds in front. The crisp Fall morning lends a clarity to the light of the day. Aesthetically, everything is exactly as it should be. It is hard to reconcile the bloodshed of 150 years ago.

From Rosarito, Mexico

Skatepark in Rosarito, Mexico.

The building itself stands just back from the road, shaped in a flattened semicircle, without the straight edge. A commercial reproduction of traditional Spanish-mission style, the concrete is blemished by graffiti and neglect. It was perhaps intended as a local version of the mammoth American strip malls, but it seems as though it never served this purpose. Indeed, it seems as though it has never served any commercially-inspired purpose. It is, functionally, abandoned.
An arched colonnade runs around the inside of the semicircle, paralleled above by the oscillating brown terracotta tiles of the roof. The parking lot, which was to fill the space between the arms of the building, is incomplete, and is covered mostly by the fine, yellow-grey sand, blown in off the beach, and that covers most of the ground in this town. The only complete surface runs underneath the colonnade, following the building, raised slightly.
At the left foot of the semicircle this covered walkway is extended out somewhat, creating a protected almost-square. Necessity being the mother of invention, and geography excluding other possibilities, it is here that local kids have constructed a skatepark. Quarterpipes buttress the columns of the colonnade, ledges run along the wall, and a small funbox owns the centre. It is less the detail of the park that is significant, more the context. It is clearly a labour of love, paid for in both time and money by a people who can ill-afford either.
The day he saw the park, it was dusk on a late summer’s day. Standing across the road, he caught the dappled grey of the building struck by the low, rose sunset. In the shadows created by the colonnade, the park provided a break from the heat. A small group was there. Curving out to the right was the rest of the building, standing forgotten, emphasising this small achievement of design. He watched for a little while, then continued his walk back to the hostel.