We found our cohorts and a shady spot from which to squint at the racers and leap out of the way as they sped past. Pretty well-attended, really. And so many people with cameras.

“Wait a minute, why are there so many people with cameras?”

“I don’t know,” said B. B was the lady-love of our racing friend. “But they’re not from around here. Look at their shoes.”

We looked around. It was true. There was definitely something suspicious about their attire. Gleaming walking shoes. Khaki photographer’s vests bulbous with pockets. And those cameras–“Nice lenses,” sneered one of our group, an aspiring photographer herself. They were extraordinary, like a new breed of elephants, trotting up and down the hill, swinging those impossibly long and expensive tusks. And as you looked around it grew easier to pick them out just from their faces–these goofy, beaming grins.

Meanwhile the artkids were doing their best to ignore this. The racers sped down the hill. In an exciting incident, the wheelchair-car blasted apart, the surfboard-car dove into it, the boys tangled for a moment before wheelchair-car guy went whirling towards the curb, mussing his mohawky hair and scraping his tattooed forearm. The photographers were beside themselves, snapping away. They became bolder as the races progressed. One pot-bellied man positioned himself in the center of the road as the cars came hurdling down, leaping away at the last moment.

Finally an orange-haired girl in a vintage dress tapped a photographer’s arm and demanded an explanation. “It’s our Urban Landscapes Photography Seminar!” said the middle-aged woman, nodding her head earnestly, before toiling up the hill under the weight of her enormous tripod. The eye-rollings were almost audible.

Among our little group bemused tolerance quickly moldered into annoyance, ostensibly because these photographers were making it difficult to see. Here were these parent-like people, beside themselves with excitement. In turn, we were sighing at them. “We’re like their little monkeys,” someone muttered. But it was more than that. We–most of us nice suburban kids from New Jersey or the Midwest–were their Urban Landscapes.

It was soon noted that our friend, J, had not raced in a while. As the ironic this-is-my-soapbox-car guy fell off his P.E. class scooter for the third time, skidding his pants into shreds, B. went up the hill to check on J.

The report? “Yeah, they’re posing up there. Leaning on their cars and stuff. For the photographers.”

Then the Urban Landscapes teacher–a balding man in the most complex of all the vests–raised his arm and beckoned his students and led them away, into the night and back to their condos.

The strange thing was the recognizable level of energy depletion in the Urban Landscape. There weren’t so many cheers or outlandish crashes. It was as if a kind of symbiosis had been interrupted. Why had we all gathered here? It was difficult to remember. Soon the crowd started to lazily disperse, long before the races had finished. Maybe it was that the Yoo-Hoo had run dry. Maybe it was the late afternoon heat slanting off the buildings. Or maybe it was that no one, suddenly, seemed to be watching.

Earlier that week, the Madagascar Institute had put out a call to duty promising “havoc, folly, and mayhem, featuring the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, without any of the, you know, killing.” There was to be “fierce fighting, crushing condiment cannons, and nasty weapons of mass disgusting on bikes, in carts, and mano a mano.” It could be really fun or really dorky, except that the Madagascar Institute has a history of delivering: the last time they had invaded DUMBO—the “Drive-By Arting”—was to blast syncopated fireballs off the back of their truck.

Emerging six or so years ago from the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert (which at least one member has subsequently disavowed as the “annual naked hippie on acid festival”), the Madagascar Institute has grown to become one of the city’s most subversive art/event collectives. Their first street event was “flaming soccer,” when a bunch of folks in soccer and cheerleader uniforms spontaneously took over Ludlow St. to kick a flaming ball around. Their Halloween event on the Lower East Side entailed the mass beating of a seal piñata equipped with 100 pounds of candy and an exploding head. Their “Running of the Bulls” event in Gowanus, near their shop on Butler St., simulated the Spanish tradition— with the crowd now running from a flamethrowing bull, bicycle and motorcycle bulls with giant horns attached to their handlebars, remote control bulls, and a hipster-hungry “art bull.” More recently, the Institute kicked off summer by holding a five-minute satirical dance routine on the steps of the New York Public Library. Dancers dressed as giant rats, doughnut-eating cops, fat Midwestern tourists, and Williamsburg hipsters did a synchronized ditty culminating in an illegal fireworks display. The invite promised it would be “the most fan-fucking-tastic three minutes, nineteen seconds of your life so far, guaranteed, or double your money back. Or: Our gayest event ever.”

The Condiment War was similarly a gamble. My 19-year-old cousin was in town from Chile and I wasn’t sure whether it was the best way to “show him New York,” as my parents had instructed. But he seemed into it: when I told him the event would require white clothing and a yellow arm band, he eagerly stole some Caution tape from a construction site. So we combed my refrigerator for condiments, coming up only with some rancid mayo and some jelly that had congealed into a gooey blob while sitting in my fridge for over a year. The cabinets yielded vinegar, which was discouraged, but the 6:30-sharp meeting time was upon us and we were desperate. Finally we broke down and bought four squeeze bottles of ketchup from a bewildered store clerk. On this humid Sunday afternoon, I was dressed ridiculously in a pair of white pants two sizes too big and an oversized white dress shirt that reeked from having been stuffed in a suitcase too long. My cousin was similarly outfitted. In the subway, the smell of leaking vinegar raised still more eyebrows.

We had just a few minutes to get to the rendez-vous on Jay and York and it was becoming obvious that the G train wasn’t going to cut the mustard. I suggested we call a car service and we bolted from the subway with our condiment canisters clinking in their plastic bags. A straight shot down Flushing Avenue and we’d be there in no time. Except that halfway through the ride, the driver’s salsa music was interrupted by the crunch of metal on metal as a car slammed into our side. I looked back to see an angry punk girl with facial piercings and dyed hair emerging from her battered car. The cabbie and the woman exchanged some words. Even as my ears rang, all I could think was, “How am I going to get to the condiment war on time?” I wished the two luck, secretly grateful for a free ride, and my cousin and I bolted for the staging area.

We arrived late. No one was around. Suddenly we heard a chorus of cheers and we raced down the street just in time to see the tail-end of the hot dog eating contest. Perhaps a couple hundred people milled around, all of them in white. And then the opening salvos. From atop a coffee cart procured especially for the occasion, the Madagascar Institute, uniformed in shirts that declared “We rule, You suck,” catapulted some lettuce onto one of their rivals the Toy Shop Collective— a Brooklyn-based group of 15 to 20 artists who, like Madagascar, often mounts their unconventional displays in the city streets.

There were supposed to be four armies: Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Greenpoint-based art collective WAMP, and “the bloodthirsty public, banded together in an Irregular Militia.” (Several civilians also posed as pacifists, meditating in the Lotus position even as they were pelted.) The teams were demarked by the color of their armbands (civies in yellow) and stationed in opposite corners, but as soon as the schnitzel hit the fan, all was chaos. Noise makers and blow horns filled the air, as did a dizzying plethora of condiments. Suddenly I felt like I was in Saving Private Ryan. Men and women in plastic coveralls ran around spraying each other, or throwing chunks of hot dog, dough, pretty much anything edible. A woman wheeled an ice cream cart into the center of the staging area and pulled a hose out of it, spraying everyone around her. Another combatant hid her condiments in a baby carriage disguised as an elephant. Someone with a Super Soaker pumped vinegar into my eye. From the rooftop of an adjacent 10-story building, people threw balloons full of god-knows-what onto the street below. At one point I looked up to see an operative rappelling off the side of the building. The figure stopped halfway down to drop a cluster of condiment bombs. All the while I ran around squeezing my wimpy squirt bottle of ketchup, feeding off the thrill of soiling total strangers while trying not to slip on a lava bed of spent ammo. I looked over to see my cousin soiled from head to toe. He looked like he had just lost an ugly round of Double Dare.

Meanwhile a friend of mine who had been wearing a George Bush mask upside-down had fashioned quite the weapon—he was using a mop to lap up puddles of slime and whipping it at people indiscriminately. I was amused by this until he decided to turn the weapon on me and I was forced to wrench it from his hands and give him a taste of his own mop juice. At some point there was a ceasefire and a winner was declared. I couldn’t tell who it was and I have no idea how it was decided, since everyone (save the hundred or so bystanders) was layered in slop. It may have been Toyshop, since they started chanting, “Whoseshop? Toyshop.” Madagascar started loading their weapons into their pick-up. Someone called out, “Let’s go, move it, we’re not here to wait around and see what happens,” and sure enough a couple of police cars finally pulled up. An officer asked into his loudspeaker, “What are you doing here today, people? Who’s in charge here?” and I told my cousin, who was across the way getting hosed off, that we had better go. Fire trucks were racing to the scene with sirens blaring, presumably because Madagascar had crowned the event with one of their homegrown fireworks displays— or maybe to hose off the parked cars that had suffered collateral damage. The Institute was eventually stopped for questioning (with the coffee cart hitched to the back of their truck, they were the obvious suspects), but they managed to get back to their shop in time for the after-party. My friend the mop-slinger was stopped as he was about to drive away. A police officer asked him whether he was involved in the fight. Dressed only in his underwear, he responded, “You’re the detective, you figure it out.”

Meanwhile my cousin and I used an alley to change into clean clothes. We went into Pedro’s to get a beer and wash up in the bathroom. By the time we got on the train to head for the party, we looked perfectly normal. Strangely enough, we were sharing a subway car with a group of 18-year-old girls in bikini tops, caked head to toe in dirt. One of them caught my eye and carped proudly, “I bet you don’t know where we came from!”

Turns out they had been mud wrestling. I turned to my cousin and smiled. This was summer in New York.

Skaters have been taking their obsession inside to escape inclement weather ever since someone broke the handle off of a scooter and rode it as a board sometime in the nineteen-fifties. In cooler climates, ramps and other skating environments have been built in barns, houses, nightclubs, gyms and apartments. In all shapes and sizes, these ramps conform to and use interior architecture to provide a place to skate even if a blizzard is raging outside. In New York this can be difficult because of the compression of multitudes into spaces that would be considered closets anywhere else. Larger spaces are monetarily out of reach for most skaters and wooden structures the size of a dump truck just do not fit into the average Lilliputian New York studio.

But New York does have lofts, and they afford the chance to build on a fairly grand scale. If the tenant has the desire (along with the collusion of a lax landlord) a mini-skatepark can be born. So under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, along the Brooklyn waterfront on cold nights, with the wind off the East River funneling between turn-of-the-century warehouse buildings, an unmistakable sound can be heard. Spinning wheels rolling on Masonite, a moment of silence, the slap of wood against metal, then the rolling sound again. A rhythmic, booming noise coming from high above.

A skater can roll down Jay Street with the Manhattan skyline in the distance, under the intersecting lines of trucks rumbling to the Brooklyn Bridge below D trains clanking ominously across the Manhattan Bridge; go up an elevator and find themselves at what is arguably the world’s highest ramp – in the sense that it is situated ten floors above the ground. Down long gray hallways and past institutional sinks is a steel door that opens to Evan Becker’s loft. In a raw studio with fifteen foot high ceilings and no bathroom, between the wall and a large supporting column, lies Evan’s creation and playground: a ramp seven feet high that uses the concrete floor between its two curving walls as flat bottom.

Evan explains his motivation succinctly. “I wanted a place to skate and to work.” The smell of paint and dust permeates the air. Evan’s monumental cement and oil paintings lean up against the wall, the room is bare except for an old sofa, a vintage green bicycle, and a plastic trashcan filled with old skate sneakers. When he isn’t painting, Evan skates with a select group who are in on his secret spot. A Slayer or Melvins CD plays, the large windows are angled open to compensate for the building’s uncompromising heating system and a session commences.

Evan drops in from the top, riding over the metal where the ramp meets the floor with a loud slapping sound. His moves include grinds, ollies, fakie ollie disasters, 50-50s and pivots to fakie. Riding to the top he pops the tail of the board and launches four feet above the ramp before grabbing the board and floating vertically back down – his ollies to fakie grabs are the highest. He grinds frontside (the back truck of the board scraping the metal bar at the top of the ramp) and then quickly and smoothly reverses direction, sliding around and continuing his run backwards. He knows the ramp’s kinks and bumps by heart, his mastery of the ramp translates into speed and self-assurance.

The moment Evan finishes a run or falls the next skater drops in. There is an uninterrupted flow of skaters riding and doing tricks, either falling during their attempts or riding out of the ramp after a successful half-minute or so. The wall is barely missed, the column is narrowly avoided, boards fly off the ramp coming close to exiting out the window into the night air. Increasingly baroque maneuvers are tried, like Evan’s kickflip to backside disasters, in which he ollies out of the ramp and spins the board three hundred and sixty degrees with his feet before landing half in and half out on the coping, instantaneously weighting the nose of the board, and riding back down the transition. Perspiration flows, the music plays, verbal utterances are reduced to yells of affirmation or groans when a trick is missed. Laughter and music intermingle with the hanger deck decibel level of the ramp being skated.

The session over, Evan sits on the couch and enjoys a cigarette and a tall can of Budweiser. His female cat Joey comes out from her hiding place among the rafters, nimbly jumps to the top of the ramp (“Her ollies are the highest,” according to Evan) and slides down the Masonite on her paws before casually walking off. Evan looks away from Joey’s antics and says, “This place might be a little crusty, but, it’s me . . . I get a little nervous about bringing a girl here . . . but, whatever.” The ramp and the paintings sum up two years of hard work, they are the fruit of Evan’s impulse to create. Outside the wind blows, the ramp is quiet until the next session.

I’d seen the Clash play twice before, or maybe more appropriately one and a half times before. The first time was when they opened up for The Who at Shea Stadium. A couple of years later, I saw the fake Clash (the band was without their guitarist Mick Jones) at my college. The latter show doesn’t even count, it was like seeing the Stones without Keith Richards, but the Shea Stadium show left a big impression. They kicked The Who’s ass even before they played a note, from the moment they entered the stage with the swagger of a 1950’s street gang I knew I was in for something special. Joe had a mohawk and I remember very distinctly the way Mick Jones tapped his foot with a certain nonchalant coolness. I have to admit I was there to see The Who. I was not a cool kid, and I’m fully aware that Clash shows from earlier tours were far better, and I wish I could tell stories of the legendary Clash shows at the Palladium or Bonds but I can’t. but maybe this shows exactly how powerful a band they were. They emitted a stage presence so strong, 300 feet away from me in centerfield at Shea Stadium that I would never listen to The Who again and I became a Clash fan.

I was hoping to see them at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies this year. I’m a voting member of the Hall but just because you vote doesn’t get you into the ceremony, but as soon as I heard that they had been elected in I started trying to pull some strings. This was going to be a great moment seeing the band on stage and seeing them play together again.

It’s funny how that works, I’ve been thinking them a lot lately. A few years back someone at Sony music gave me a Clash box set of all their albums. And about eighteen months ago I was in the presence of the great Strummer. I’ve worked in the music business for 15 years and I can say I don’t usually get nervous about meeting my heroes, but when Joe Strummer showed up to the show of a band I work with in LA I was kind of awestruck. And I wasn’t alone, my friend Dennis who never gets nervous was apoplectic. It was he who spotted Joe hanging out in a bar at the after show party. He nervously suggested we go meet him. I told him I couldn’t because I didn’t know what to say. Later I saw Dennis who is usually full of bravado, meekly introduce himself and through stutters explained what a huge fan he was. Joe was very cool, he smiled and shook Dennis’ hand as if Dennis were a little child. As Joe left that night he stopped by the drummer while I was talking to him. Joe told him how much he enjoyed the show. The drummer smiled and politely and said, “Thank you.” I could tell that he thought he was just some record company person or something, When I told him that it was Joe Strummer who had just complimented him, he fell on the floor and couldn’t believe that Joe Strummer not only had been to his show, liked it, but that he didn’t recognize him. Of course the drummer had the excuse of being 5 years old when the Clash broke up.

Last spring I had the great fortune to see Joe Strummer playing a show a few blocks away from me in Brooklyn at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The venue is pretty new and is not really near the St. Ann’s Church or school, but very close to the Fulton Landing at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge which is close to where I live. As I walked down to the Warehouse I thought that Joe probably saw my apartment building when he crossed the bridge to go to soundcheck and he probably had dinner at a place I’ve eaten before. These are thoughts that teenagers usually have. I was 37.

The show itself was incredible, there was no seating and I pushed my way up close to the front. His voice was uniquely sweet and hoarse. I was singing along loudly hoping it wouldn’t end, and thinking if it lasted longer I could replicate Strummer’s hoarseness. The next day when someone asked me which Clash songs he played, I couldn’t remember the ones he actually played from the ones which were evoked from seeing him so close. Joe played a second night at the Warehouse and I’m now kicking myself that I didn’t go to that show too.