Bought this amazing album on my first big boy trip to NYC all alone in 1994. I discovered Stereolab while looking at clothes at Agnes b. in Soho. Asked somebody who worked there what the song, band, and album were and went straight to Kim's afterwards and bought the CD. (How was I that cool and didn't even know it? Did I know it? Maybe. I also discovered Yo La Tengo on the same trip and bought one of their albums while shopping at What Goes Around Comes Around on West Broadway before it was as expensive as Hermes and Gucci.)
Downtown was sooooooo alive and sexy. Great sounds, great looking people. There was a very European and generally international edge to Soho, the Village, and Tribeca that's gone now. In particular, a cafe on Seventh Ave in the Village called Raphael's that had a loft-like spread, gauze curtains billowing in the wind, a Moroccan vibe that was an actual vibe and not a self-consciously branded attempt at evoking the unevokable, and a gorgeous waiter that looked like a mixture of every ethnicity in the world before that was a thing. He was just beautiful, tall, sample sized, and otherworldly. The kind of model that only existed in the 80s and 90s...I went there every day just to see him.
All those magazines I'd grown up reading. This is where it all came to life.Strangely, it would take me another year to get into the nightlife scene. So every night after eating at mostly Italian restaurants (my favorite food), walking until I got myself lost, shopping at bookstores, record stores, and thrift stores, browsing art galleries and high-end boutiques, and cafe-ing my way through all the edgy south of 14th neighborhoods, I would go back to my hotel just off Washington Square park and...just go to bed. I remember the lady at the front desk would say, "Aren't you going to go paint the town red?" And I just laughed at her. I was 21 but I was kind of afraid of clubs. I drank but I didn't *drink* drink then. I had just left my frat boy life and was segueing into the world of clubland with no GPS or BFF. So for a year I just kind of lived inside myself.
But by my next trip, only a year later in the summer of '95, this boy was at Twilo, Sound Factory, Tunnel, Bowery Bar, working out at David Barton, and staying at the Hotel Chelsea! And while I still loved my alt and indie rock, house music had taken over the soundtrack of my life and would continue to for a good decade. Electronic music like Sterolab made it only a bridge across the way.
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