Done. After 4 months, the IIB experience, for me at least is over. We had our graduation last Thursday night and it was great way to finish off the semester. I wish I had a bad thing to say about the last four months but, seriously, I don’t. Oh, the surf sucked. That’s about it.

The graduation was a great night. The coordinators were there, representatives from SUNY New Paltz, the ambassador of State University of New York, as well as all 20 students. I was pretty shocked when I got chosen to deliver a speech in front of everyone. I would think I’d be the last person the class would want to represent them, but we live in strange times.

I could try and wax lyrically as to why the last four months were so good, but it still wouldn’t do it justice. The only way I’d describe the experience is: amazing. Before I started the program, I wanted to be a real part of this place. To not just be a tourist, but to be on the other side of the window, not on the outside looking in. I did that, and I’ve the IIB program to thank. Living here and working here and being thrown into a completely new environment where I knew noone seemed kind of daunting at first, but it taught me a lot about myself and the world. New York City, this country, its people and also the program, showed me that anything really is possible. Your only competition is you. To borrow from Hilltop Hoods, my favourite Aussie Hip-hop (Skip-hop) crew… “The only competition you’ll find is in the mirror”. NYC is living proof. if you want something, anything, you go get it.

I’ve come up to Calgary, Canada to do some snowblading with a mate for a week and then I fly to LA with another mate to do our road trip, The Hard Road 07/08. We’re hiring some old bomb and driving from LA through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, New Orleans and a few other places and the only thing is, we have to be back in NY Jan 13 for my flight back to Melbs. We’ll be armed with nothing but a few dollars, a camera, a maglite and a ukelele. Really all you need.

If you’re considering doing the IIB thing, do it. I’m the last person to peddle anything for anyone but it’s an amazing experience, all round. I didn’t manage to get deported to Mexico yet, which kind of sucks, but I can work on that when I get home.

Excuse me now as I just get the last few things done on my trip and then hit the surf back in the Burn, every day for like 12 hours, for at least 2 months. Hell-yeah!

Peace and love.

Dave

So I read in The Onion recently that this joint’s called “The city that never sleeps” because it has to work through the night to afford the rent. That’s pretty much spot on. But I guess you get what you pay for. This city’s full of so much interesting stuff, day and night, it’s kind of all worth it.

Everything’s sort of winding down for me here now. If that’s possible in this mad-crazy city. I feel like I’m kind of ready to go home though –New Paltz was amazing and my internships have been everything I had hoped for. But on the other hand, I feel like there’s a lot that could easily keep me here. It’s going to be good to get out of this freezing weather (I lost 2 fingers and a toe today) and I’d love to be back already for the awesome surf, sand and beach cricket of the Melbourne summer. It’s just that I’ve met so many amazing people here, and I’m just getting to know some more, that a part of me really doesn’t want to leave.

My internships are going along real well. The thing I’ll take most from working at VICE and First30Days will have been working closely with, and getting to know, writers and editors who’ve had such amazing experiences in life and in the industry. It’s been great being able to not only get their feedback but also hear (or read) some of the stories they have to tell, what they hope to achieve and their dreams for the future. New York is the most competitive place in the world in so many ways (including publishing), so to make it here you’ve got to have at least some idea of what you’re doing.

I went to see the Rangers play the NY Islanders at Madison Square Garden last week with a friend from the IIB program and the Rangers won 4-2 in front of a sell-out crowd. Heaps good. Even though I love my basketball and have been playing since I was a kid, the hockey had such a better atmosphere than the bball. But that probably has a bit to do with the fact that the Rangers are doin’ well and a lot to do with the Knicks absolutely sucking, having a clueless coach and a useless point guard who hasn’t passed the ball once in his entire 12 year NBA career. (Oh, and the same night, the Knicks lost in Boston to the Celtics by a record margin, 104-59. You beauty.)

The other night I went to see a friend I met in New Orleans last year battle at a hip-hop club in downtown Manhattan. I met him when we were both working with the volunteer Hurricane Relief Crew Common Ground in August 2006, helping in the cleanup and restoration of the city after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. He’s got an album comin’ out next week, but he didn’t do too well this night. He got torn apart when a guy he was up against spotted that he had writing all over his hands (it’s got to be completely freestyle). I spoke to him after to see what he had written. It was directions on how to get to the club.

I also went with a few friends to a “gay and gay-friendly” Hillary Clinton ‘08 fundraiser a couple nights ago and that was kind of funny. Free drinks, which was good, but Hillary Clinton, who is bad. To be fair, maybe she’s the lesser of all the evils, but anyway, whatever, she wasn’t going to get any of my money……… Just thinkin’ though, I do however remember dropping a penny on the floor just before we left the bar. I just hope, I pray, her campaign flunkies didn’t pick it up and add it to the pile. Damn. That kind of sucks though. I’ll never be sure.

Lookin’ forward to going to see one of my favourite rappers, Matisyahu at the Polish Club in Brooklyn this weekend, as part of the Jewish Festival of Light. Hell yes.

And now I got to go, I’m meeting this dude in the alleyway behind our building who runs his own “travel assistance” business. Like I said, I want to try to stay in the US and this guy’s hooking me up with what he says is a perfectly legitimate VISA. He seems nice. His business hours are only 2.45am-2.55am every night, his office is his black van that has no plates and he tends to scurry into the dumpster every time he hears sirens off in the distance, but that’s cool. Dude seems legit.

Big Love,

Dave

4 day weekend… over. Damn. Kinda sucks, but kinda good. Now that Thanksgiving’s over, there’s only 3 solid weeks left of our internships before we all go our separate ways (I mean, I’m going to Canada and then comin’ back to do a coast-to-coast road trip across the USA, and most of the others are also stayin’ on and doin’ all sorts of other stuff in the States, but you know what I mean…)

Both my internships are cruising along nicely… There’s always something happening at VICE and the people I work with all have their own crazy stories. My Boss Shane Smith (one of the 3 founders of VICE), did a story for VBS (VICE’s online tv network) on the nuclear arms trade and actually managed to buy a dirty bomb (kind of a mix between a nuclear warhead and a conventional explosive) in Bulgaria. Scary how easy it was. Another one of the founders (Suroosh Alvi) travelled to Pakistan to do a story on the largest illegal arms market in the world, and they also travelled to Beirut to uncover a boy scout group which doubles as a breeding ground for the PLO and Hezbollah. My supervisor recently did a story about war resistors from the US military, men and women soldiers who have sought asylum in Canada after refusing to fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And on a more random note, he also recently wrote a blog on the VICEland site about spending three days homeless in New York City. This came about after VICE bet him he couldn’t go three days without spending even a single penny. He won the bet.

My internship at First30Days is also goin’ along pretty sweet. We’re getting closer to launching and everyone’s kind of getting a bit more nervous and anxious by the week. Last week, my boss and company CEO invited one of her friends to come talk to us about creating a better work environment and just generally living better. He travels the world giving talks and lectures to organizations, universities and different groups. He talks about how there’s no such thing as a white lie; that every lie told has a consequence and restricts us from truly opening up to others… Everyone’s been working pretty hard recently so we’re having a late thanksgiving dinner thrown for us at a New York restaurant tomorrow night. Sweet.

It was my first Thanksgiving ever over the weekend and it absolutely owned. I spent Thanksgiving night out on Long Island with a friend who I met at SUNY New Paltz and her family. Sensational. Turkey, good times and heaps of Apple and Blueberry pie. That stuff’ll save the world. Then last night, I got invited out to another friend’s joint from New Paltz. She went home to her family in Yorktown, NY for the weekend and invited a few people out there for a party. It was kickin’, we partied like it was 2009.

In the last couple weeks I saw Aussie singer/songwriter/clown, Ben Lee, in Manhattan, I voted in the Aussie election (And we’re no longer under the thumb of a right wing regime! Rock!) and also went with another dude from the IIB program to see my team, the N’Orleans Hornets, play New Jersey in an NBA game out in dirty Jersey. The Hornets fought back from being down 8 with 2 minutes to go and then won it with 2.4 ticks left. Awesomeness.

Well I’m gonna get back to it. My fridge in my room is making mad crazy noises. I overloaded the motor last night after I tried cramming way too much into it, so now I’m gonna try and fix it with my heaps mad refrigeration repair skills… Next time you hear from me it’ll most likely be completely f****d.

Peace.

Dave

I’ve realized it’s absolutely impossible to have an early night in this crazy city.

I’ve been trying to have early nights for the past week (mainly cos I’ve had this killer toothache that’s felt like there’s a party in my mouth and everyone’s trashin’ the **** outta the place…) but any time you want to chill out and do nothing, you can’t. There’s literally like, 40 million things happening in this town every second– you feel like you should be doing at least one of them. I went to see this Aussie band, John Butler Trio last night and feeling the way I was (plus I just lost my ATM card so I now officially have no cash until a new one gets here. If it gets here. Awesome!), I thought to myself, ‘I really should go home as soon as the show finishes’…. 7 hours, 8 bars and heaps of cab rides up-and-down town later, I was just getting on the subway home.

My internships are goin’ really well and last Thursday, through work, I got to go to an MTV awards show. MTV needed seatfillers for the MTVu Awards in Manhattan and I managed to score a ticket. The deal was, MTV don’t want any empty seats to be seen on camera, so anytime celebrities down the front got up to do ‘number ones’, we were supposed to fill their seats. It kind of didn’t work out that way because my friend and I immediately strayed from where we were supposed to be and went into the moshpit (and/or the bar). We didn’t really care either way about seeing celebrities, we were just there for somethin’ to do, and the MTV awards aren’t such a bad thing to go to on the way home from work.

I’ve been getting to do some pretty interesting work at both my internships. I interviewed a couple bands for VICE’s blogsite last week and also got to profile a few others. At my other internship (First30Days.com) I’m getting to do a lot of editorial work as well as spearheading the Facebook strategy the company wants to use, to help create the biggest worldwide community possible. It’s a great place to work. And the boss I work for is really interesting. The other day she had lunch with Evander Holyfield and through her contacts, she’s going on Oprah and the Today Show soon to promote the relaunch of the website. We got a new staff member the other day and she took us all out for lunch at this amazing restaurant downtown to welcome her.

The people are great and they’re all really passionate about it. It’s really exciting to be part of a start-up; an organization that isn’t established yet and could go either way. I can’t wait till we launch.

On a completely unrelated matter, it was halloween a couple weeks ago and that was another night that kind of got out-of-hand, heaps huge and real weird, real quick. Check out the photos.

That’s it for now.

Peace.

Dave

OK, here’s what’s up. So, I (along with all the IIB class) just moved out of my dorm on campus at SUNY New Paltz and into the I House on the upper west side of Manhattan. The last two months on campus were, in one word: hell-sick-dope-mad-righteous-sick-nasty-unbelievable and incredibly-extremely-extraordinary.

I loved New Paltz. So much so I’ve already been back. I went back last weekend. I’ll probably be going back a few more times before my time’s up in the States. New Paltz is this one horse hippie town, only an hour-and-a-half from NYC (and like 30mins from Woodstock!) where anything goes. There’s a main street with like, 4 or 5 pubs, and where what seems like 90-110% of the town are college students. US college is just like every good, bad, awesome, crazy, college movie you’ve ever seen. And then some. It’s kind of surreal at times. I can’t recommend it enough.

The IIB class is great. In the group we have 6 Mexicans, 8 Swedes, 5 Germans and me– the only Aussie. We all got along, some better with others obviously, but I made some great friends. And after making friends with the amazing Mexican girls in the class, if I accidently outstay my VISA here, Mexico is definitely where I’ll choose to get deported.

Here’s some of the stuff that happened in the last 2 months on campus:
• We had a welcoming pool party at the house of one of our professors, Dr. Miraldi. It was good to sit back and have a few beers with him as well as Jeff (The coordinator– A top bloke).
• A few of us from the class went up to Lake Minnewaska for a day, which is this picturesque lake up in the mountains, about 30mins drive from New Paltz. You’re not supposed to swim up there, but I’ll be damned if I’m catchin’ a $20 taxi in like 40˚C heat and not being able to go into the water. Afterwards, it started raining like it was the Rapture or something, we had noone to pick us up, our phones had no reception and we had to hitchhike back to campus.
• I trained with the College Basketball team, and in the end the coach cut all the dudes who tried out (He just stuck with last year’s entire team). Drag.
• I was either known as Australia or ‘Dife’ (apparently that’s what Dave sounds like with an Aussie accent). I met so many people (in the end you can’t walk through town without half the people recognise you) and I also made some really close friends too.
• There’s like 30 or something frats and sororities on campus and each weekend they throw these crazy house parties. These parties are nuts, mainly because they invite about 60 times the amount of people that their house can fit.
• The cheerleaders, soccer players and rugby players are like celebrities in College. I never got this. A few weeks ago, one of the soccer players tried picking up a friend of mine. He came up to her and goes “I’m the captain of the soccer team.” And she goes “So? I dont care…” He was speechless. He had no idea what just happened.
• You get heaps of spare time so students either pass their time at the gym, goin’ up to the mountains and lakes, or just on campus chillin’ out, listening or playing music, playing beerpong (or more conventional sports like basketball or football), or chasing the skunks at night. They really stink. At night when they come out, the whole campus stinks. The challenge is how close you can get to them without gettin’ sprayed. That sucks. Because then you have to bathe in tomato juice.
• I had the best time in my last week in New Paltz. Every night there was a different going away party with different groups of friends. It took me about 8 days to recover.

I started my internship last week. I’m actually doing two. I’m spending half the time with a new online magazine called First30days.com in lower Manhattan– which aims to help people through major life changes– and the other half with VICE magazine in Brooklyn. I really believe in what First30days want to do, and ever since I started working in magazines years ago it’s been my dream to work for VICE, so I’m way over the moon. I’ve gotten opportunities here that I would never have dreamed of back home.

Well I gotta go, this’ll be my first weekend in NYC. I’ll try to enjoy it. It ain’t no New Paltz, but still…

Big love.
Dave