In Which I Begin Jumping On The Islanders Bandwagon

A friend took me to the first ever NHL game in Brooklyn last weekend. I was charmed by the sight of an organist in the antiseptic Barclays Center, and so I wrote about him: 

Paul Cartier is an air traffic controller, and monitors flights around the country from an FAA facility at Long Island's MacArthur Airport. The job offers unique stress—a friend of his was manning the radar for the second plane hijacked on September 11, and understood the scale of that disaster before almost anyone else in the country—but it doesn't get to Cartier. In the morning, he is happy to get out of bed. At night, he goes to the Nassau Coliseum, to watch hockey and play the organ.

Paul Cartier has been playing the organ for the New York Islanders off and on since 1979. He was there during the Stanley Cup days, when "it was just the PA and the organ—no rock, no nothing, no DJ." He was there during the lean, leaner and eventually leanest years that followed, when recorded music took over a progressively more zombified coliseum and the organ was pushed to the sidelines. Today, he said, "I don't play a whole lot other than the clap stuff, and the little ditty to get the crowd going.

"I used to play a little bit for warm ups and stuff, but as with everything else, advertising becomes the key. So they kind of lost out on that."

On the second-to-last Saturday in September, in a place where advertising is not just lucrative subtext but something like the entire point, Cartier and his organ made their Brooklyn debut at Barclays Center. The Islanders came, too.

 Read more here, my friend.

For Bieber, The Barc May As Well Be Shea

I live near the Barclays Center, whose opening was maligned by residents who feared that each Brooklyn Nets game would end with a tsunami of boozed-up shouting morons. As it turns out, Nets fans have been incredibly subdued. Not so Beliebers.

Speaking of vomiting in public, Justin Bieber played the Barclays earlier this week. (Can we start calling the Barclays “the Barc”? Is that appropriately lame, or unforgivably lame? Other suggestions, from Internet friends, include The Black House and The Rust Bucket.) The performance was reportedly tepid, but that did not stop the Beliebers from screaming. I assume nothing can.

After the performance, a pack of wild fans waited outside the stage door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star’s tour bus. (Which had just spun around, we assume, on the Rust Bucket’s famous rotating trucks turntable.) Though the bus’s windows were fully blacked out, the kids lost their shit, screaming like our parents’ generation might have while being simultaneously diddled by all four Beatles. As the bus lumbered away—as their dreams lumbered away—the kids broke past the barricades and chased after the bus. It would have gotten away, too, if it hadn’t been for that street light.

Read the rest on Bullett.

And for those of you who want to get the image of Beatles-y group sex out of your head, or just feel like thinking about Shea Stadium for nine minutes:

Uploaded by McCKLENN on 2009-10-18.