Voltage blog entries tagged with: subway

There are a lot of musicians playing in the NYC subways. Most of them are forgettable, some of them painful to listen to, and some pretty good. And then there are the gems you discover. I first heard the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble in Grand Central. You just can't beat a good horn section. And so my latest discovery is Moon Hooch. Two saxaphones and a drummer. They had a pretty big crowd captivated at Atlantic Ave, and a whole heck of a lot of bills in the suitcase they had placed out. The tags on their bandcamp page are drum & bass and house. Cross those two with the saxaphones, and it sounded pretty good. Their playing isn't super-polished, so I'm kinda expecting the recorded tracks to not quite hit me the way they did live. That's ok. I'll just have to see them again...

Now you can experience the randomness of NYC subway passengers and performers (and etc...) from the comfort of your living room. Must be interesting, and just a bit scary, to do this regularly. 

This story happened a couple weeks ago. I was riding the subway uptown from City Hall when a group of four Italians boarded and sat near me. I gathered from their chatter and map reading that they were trying to figure out which stop to get off at. We soon stopped at a station and they belatedly decided to get off the subway. As the Italians quickly passed in front of me, I saw a glove drop on the floor. I leaned over to pick it up and say something to the woman who had dropped it, but when I got up they had made it through the car doors, and the normal small crowd of people was now pressing it?s way in. Being tall, I could see the woman walking away over the entering people, but didn?t know how to yell anything useful in Italian. So I made a quick decision and tossed the glove at her, managing to hit her in the back with just enough force so she would notice. Satisfied that I had helped her out as best I could, I turned to sit down again. When I sat down, a woman who had been standing near me held out the matching glove and said ?she dropped both of them.? So I tried again ? I quickly jumped up with the second glove, turned and looked over the crowd and saw the woman just standing up from having picked up her first glove. I lobbed the second glove at her over the crowd, nearly striking her (lightly) in the face. She managed to catch it, and looked at me with a bewildered look, mouthing what I can only hope was 'grazie' (probably more like WTF??). I sat down again and shared a laugh with the woman who handed me the second glove. I figured the gloves were better off with their owner, even if it required an unorthodox method of return.