ryanbros

July 21, 2008

Leo

Leo

Originally uploaded by Oliver Ryan.

image/jpeg

Posted by oliver at 07:13 PM

July 16, 2008

Clubland

I wrote this story in 2004 while still in journalism school, but never posted it. Since then, some of the clubs mentioned, including Crobar and Mehanata, have closed, reopened, and closed again. What this means exactly is hard to say, but I think the premise of the story remains interesting, and better to publish late than never!

New York City
Spring 2004

Among the electronic dance music “heads” in New York, Paul McKinley is known as “The Professor.” It’s an endearment he picked up during the years he was a regular at Twilo, the last undisputed champion of New York City nightclubs. McKinley now lives in Salt Lake City, but he flew back on March 12th to see Sasha and John Digweed play on March 12th at Crobar, the new nightclub in West Chelsea. It had been nearly three years since the Giuliani administration closed Twilo and thus ended the renowned British DJs legendary dance sets at the club. For McKinley, as for the rest of the Twilo Diaspora, the return of Sasha and Digweed to a big New York club was a portentous event, and he was inside Crobar by 10:00pm in his trademark faded peach tennis visor, a dark t-shirt, and sneakers.

“It’s like a reunion,” he said noting the many faces in the crowd familiar from Twilo nights long past. The old guard was impressed with the new club. Crobar’s owners, Callin Fortis and Ken Smith, spent $18 million to transform the 30,000 square foot space on West 28th street which was once the staging area for the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The club’s dominant motif is polished concrete, and the feel remains industrial, high tech but raw. A tunnel with sunken lights leads unsuspecting first-timers to the cavernous main dance area where exposed steel girders arc cathedral-like over a profusion of spotlights and an enormous disco ball.

“It’s not all glam and Disneyfied,” said McKinley approvingly. “It’s a warehouse.”

Around midnight on Friday, with a capacity crowd of nearly 3,000 jammed into the main dance area, a steady, expectant bass began to build in the massive Phazon sound system. Eight robotic light clusters descended in unison from the ceiling like so many black widow spiders, each spinning freely on two axes and flashing colored beams. Squeezing through the crush of bodies, McKinley smiled as he felt the hair on his arms rise and fall with each beat.

“That’s the feeling of Twilo,” he said, and looking up he noticed that Digweed had just begun his first set.

Continue reading "Clubland"

Posted by oliver at 02:49 PM

July 09, 2008

Cockpit of '6? Porsche Roadster

Went with pal Andrew to this: "Duncan Quinn at the Classic Car Club." Apparently Duncan Quinn makes bespoke suits, and the car club on Hudson at Broome rents vintage sports cars to those in need of an adventure. It was hot, and the mob was predictable but festive: girls in heels, young bankers smoking cigarettes, and various others lost in the fray. The bass was deafening.

Posted by oliver at 10:10 PM

July 08, 2008

Yoga Shorts

Yesterday, 6:15pm. Making a last minute run for 6:30pm yoga class at SoHo Equinox. Need shorts and t-shirt. Shouldn't be a problem on Broadway. Natch. It's cargo and board shorts city down there. Give up at 6:35pm rifling through racks at the store inside the gym. Not going to pay $48 for those beautiful "Prana" brand, organic cotton lovelies. Refuse to do it. Decide to skip yoga, but not the shopping. Welcome to capitalism, or SoHo. Hit the Adidas store, Express, Quicksilver, Pulse, H&M, EMS, even American Apparel: nothing doing. Girl at the Adidas store: "Yoga?"
Then I spot the Old Navy banner behind a scaffolding. Goldilocks moment. White mesh basketball shorts, with red stripes, that would have made my year in 1977 for $19.50. Add a box of three white tanktops for about nine bucks. I'm out with shorts and three shirts for less than $30. In the checkout line, a French family on a Euro-fueled cheap cottons binge. The Old Navy stuff is made in Indonesia and is not organic. The Prana stuff is made in Peru and the tag implies positive karma. At $50 for the pleasure, I feel a bit manipulated.

Posted by oliver at 10:20 AM

July 07, 2008

This Week's Goal: Find Genius Web Designer

Here's the want ad. Feel free to email to all your friends...

Desperately Seeking Web Designer: Must be intimate with CSS, sensitive to fonts, and have experience building media sites. (As in blogs, and/or other journalistic operations.) Drupal savvy a plus. The right aesthetic will be clean, with generous use of white space, and a distaste for excessive images and blinking things. The assignment is a from scratch site design for a New York-based web startup. The designer will work closely with the site's two founders, who collectively have several decades of new media experience.

Oliver Ryan is a co-founder of ApartmentTherapy.com, onetime General Manager of SiliconValley.com, and most recently covered media and technology for Fortune magazine. Ben Samit was lead technologist for Wave Systems Corp (NASDAQ: WAVX), a pioneering e-commerce tools company. Interested, qualified candidates should contact Oliver at: oliver@ryanbros.com.

Posted by oliver at 12:07 PM

June 29, 2008

SuperGeorge, Dad, and Cole

After visiting San Quentin, we saw the bunkers and made echos in the tunnel, and then drove by the lighthouse.
Headlands

Originally uploaded by Oliver Ryan.