The Last Hope

I'm 27! The day of (a Tuesday) I brought some cupcakes into work, and then later went to go see The Virgin Suicides in McCarren Park Pool (suck). Nothing to report, except that apparently there was a corpse in the pool? Didn't know. My parents took me out for Boyd Thai on Wednesday and gave me a very trendy-looking laptop bag.

You guys may remember that in years past, Sophie and I did a thing in the park where we grilled (sometimes FDA-recalled) hamburgers, and, you know, that was fun, but it was a hard thing to organize and Sophie doesn't live here any more. So this year we still did a joint thing, but we just went out to dinner Saturday at Acme with a bunch of people and then got drinks at Blue & Gold, which was somehow not totally packed, even though tons of people showed up. But man, it was exhausting, because all that day I'd been tabling at HOPE for the FSF, and had to really bust ass to get downtown in time to be feted.

Loyal readers will remember the last time I went to HOPE. It's kind a lot of cash to shell out, given that I'm not, you know, a hacker, but Jeanne needed people to sit at a table and sell merch, and because the HOPE people weren't comping the FSF (drama!), it was looking like they might be shorthanded. Turns out it was fine -- the table was already in the competent hands of Thomas (whom I'd met at an Associate Members meeting a few years back), Matthew (who lives like five blocks away from me in Sunset Park), and this kid Ringo who took a bus all the way to NYC from Denver just for HOPE. And business was booming! We ended up raising a huge amount of cash for the FSF -- orders of magnitude more than the admissions fees we'd paid. I didn't even have a chance to go to any of the talks, although I did get to see the keynote address (delivered by a chubby guy who looked like a car parts salesman from Scranton -- and who turned out to be Jello fucking Biafra) from the vendor floor. Our table was right next to 2600's swag booth where they were selling bottles of this German energy drink called Club-Mate that Emmanuel Goldstein really likes and had had shipped in for the occasion. Like most energy drinks, it tasted fundamentally vile -- kind of a mix of prune juice and Budweiser -- but, as the organizers acknowledged during the closing ceremony, "One gets used to it." There'd been a lot of speculation to the effect that the Pennsylvania Hotel was gonna get torn down -- that's why this year's was "The Last HOPE" -- but at the end of the day on Sunday, Emmanuel revealed that the building's been granted a (temporary) reprieve, and that by "last," he really just meant "most recent." After things finished up that night, Thomas, Matthew, Ringo and I hit up the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker St. for an after-party pub crawl that we tried (unsuccessfully) to coax assorted hackers into joining, and ate bar nachos and talked campaign strategy until well past 11. It was a hoot!

Family news: My dad's got kidney stones -- well, one motherfucker of a stone in particular that's stuck somewhere up in his business and ain't budging on its own. I was maybe four years old the last time this happened to him. That time he passed the thing on his own; this time they've determined that he'll need some minor surgery to get it out. Unfortunately, an hour before they were going to put him under, he developed an infection from having the stone blocking his vital processes for so long, so he's gotta finish a course of antibiotics first. Nobody is thrilled about this.

So I went over to my parents' place on Tuesday to help him get some stuff out of the crawlspace above my sister's room -- they need to run some electrical cables for a new washer-dryer -- and discovered some delightful old junk: A turntable, a photo enlarger, old coloring books, an unfinished oil painting, a "portable" black-and-white television. I came back to work covered in dust and mouse poops but carrying an awesome, laminated map of the world from 1984 that my mom used to have above her desk and which features fantastical place names like Burma and Bombay.

On Thursday night I hoofed it over to Pier 54 to check out Flogging Molly. The last time I'd heard them, my friend Dave Krypel was playing them for me on our hall freshman year of college at Wesleyan. Back then I dismissed them as being a gimmick band, but I've since developed a shameful fondness for so-called "celtic punk," so if I'm going to keep dismissing them, I guess it should be for a better reason? I don't know... naturally, it's pretty hard not to compare them to The Pogues, but the resemblance is only riff-deep. Dave King's lyrics are very literal and very broad -- when Wikipedia says, "Lyrics typically touch on subjects such as Ireland and its history, drinking, politics, love, and include several references to the Roman Catholic Church," they're not generalizing. That's... the actual verbal content of the songs. It takes subtlety, and, you know, intellectual confidence to write songs about "an old hurly ball" instead of how much you hate Oliver Cromwell. Or maybe it doesn't. Not sure.

But it was nice to sit down by the water and watch the sun set and read about CSS 2.1 anonymous box generation on countyhell while listening to an enthusiastic band do their thing. There were some belligerent teenage gutterpunks hanging around near where I was sitting, begging for change to get home from Manhattan -- first they were trying to get back to Jersey, then it was somewhere in Pennsylvania, then it was Baltimore. At one point, they were scrounging bus fare back to Iowa. To their credit, they were able to exploit the crowd pretty successfully; when their initial appeal was rebuffed, a follow-up "please?!" usually did the trick.

After Flogging Molly was done, I hoofed it across town to Mercury Lounge, in a somewhat ill-advised attempt to catch The Airborne Toxic Event show. Two shows in one night! How old am I -- 26? Turned out the late show hasdstarted late, though, and the opener, a band called Blacklist were on when I got there, playing this kind of earnest, synth-y goth rock, and somehow doing it without keyboards. It wasn't bad. I drank a pee-tasting Blue Point. The 'Event themselves came on at 11:00 as promised, but, similar to Cut Off Your Hands, they turned out to be better on the Internet than live. They sound a bit like a less... "cool" Titus Andronicus. That is to say, their music's got this jangly edge to it, but they're not self-aware enough to avoid embarrassing themselves lyrically. Case in point, their lead singer has a speaking voice like Bobcat Goldthwait's, and he introduced the first song by saying, "This song's about all those black kids dying in Iraq." And there was a patch of that song that went:

...But what's reality?
What's reality?
What's reality?

...It's a fucking bullet!!!

Yeesh. So, you know, I'm kind of oh-for-two on discovering new music.

Sewage

I went with Nina to the airport on July 4th to send her off to Brazil. It was sad, saying goodbye under the gray, arched roof of an empty Newark Airport. She'll have fun, though. (Fuck, I know she's already having fun on account of the video reports she's already wired back.)

I watched the fireworks from far, far away while waiting for the AirTrain back to Penn Station, and then hit up Katharine's 4th of July party in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were thronged and a light rain was falling. I kind of stumbled around, dazed from loneliness and low blood sugar, making a low and dolorous sound to anyone who'd listen. After I got some food in me, though, I felt a lot better. The party lasted until after 3:00 AM, and instead of cleaning the place up, we all piled into a Carecibo van and headed to our respective homes, Katharine making drunken pleas to Tom H. for a pizza bagel.

The next day, to console myself, I stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Takashi Murakami show. The paintings were wonderful, if a little overwhelming, but the curation was a disaster. I guess I'm really talking about those placards of "helpful analysis" they put up next to all of the paintings in their featured shows. So Murakami's got this little guy he likes to put in his paintings, a Mickey-Mouse-with-teeth thing called D.O.B. The sense I get is that he's Murakami's trademark doodle, like Razor's "guy" or Neck Face's little bat thing. He's usually got a 'D' on one ear and a 'B' on the other. On a card next to one of the portraits of D.O.B., a museum staffer had helpfully explained that you could view the white oval of D.O.B.'s face as the 'O' in his name. "What other parts of D.O.B. could form the 'O'?" the placard asked. (I don't know, his butthole?) Maybe there's too much cultural overhead to get across when you're trying to guide a mainstream audience through a show like this, but I'm beginning to think the 'Museum doesn't understand modern art. Or maybe it's just that they don't understand irony: Right after a roomful of cheeky, inscrutable Louis Vuitton promotional-but-maybe-not artwork, they'd set up -- I shit you not -- a kiosk where you could actually buy fucking purses from genuine, stone-faced Louis Vuitton staff assholes. It was on a par with the ridiculous, missing-the-point postcards they were pushing in the gift shop during the feminist art show earlier this year. Eve knows what I'm talking about.

A week of summer music:

The night before Nina left we went to Hiro to see the Prefuse 73 / Anti-Pop Consortium show at the Hiro Ballroom. Devoted readers will know that I'm not super into techno music, but I was happy to put that aside since it was her first and only opportunity to do fun summer stuff. Unfortunately, the club was awful, packed with goateed techno douchebags, and the music bordered on unlistenable -- Prefuse 73 was doing this really cacophonous, arhythmic set that put my teeth on edge. He was working with another DJ, a lanky nerd who turned out to be a real dickshit: At one point, a member of the audience, presumably finding the performance as tedious as I was, typed something on his Blackberry and leaned into the adjunct DJ's line of sight, holding it out for him to read. The DJ snatched the Blackberry out of the guy's hand and kind of played keep-away with it for a second before tossing it back into the crowd, hard. "Go home, get out of here," he said. "Seriously." He kept doing DJ stuff for a while and then turned back to the mic. "Or go to a strip club. If you want 'music to get the girls to dance.'" Right, because if you want to hear your guy play his hit songs -- the ones that sound good, say -- you're some kind of philistine. Not like, say, some pretentious creep who "plays" music by twiddling knobs on a computer with a faux-serious look on his face.

Fortunately, Anti-Pop Consortium was great; those guys are full of energy! As M. Sayyid kept reminding everyone (in between exhorting "New York" to "make some noise"), it was Beans' birthday. Beans didn't say too much himself, but he got his rap on, with a strange and delightful gurgled delivery, like a toddler with a sinus infection flipping you shit.

On Wednesday it was the birthday of Nina's brother's friend Adam, who's a swell guy. He'd been planning to have a traditional kind of birthday party at his house, but then he found out that Green Jellÿ (nee Jellö) was playing the Gramercy that night, so he canceled his party and told everyone to hit up the show. I hadn't heard them since a brief infatuation with them when I was 13, and even then I'd been kind of puzzled by their aesthetic: The singing was really gruff and rife with cuss words, but the lyrics also seemed to also have a fairly earnest preoccupation with nursery rhymes and children's television, kind of like Ricky Gervais telling all those jokes about Humpty Dumpty. But they had a reputation for putting on an exciting show, and it was for a good cause (birfday), so I swung by after work.

The thing was, the show was practically empty! Well, not empty, but there were maybe, like 100 people there, tops. Green Jellÿ was on stage when I got there, doing their thing, stomping around on stage in a motley assortment of papier-mache and foam costumes, most of which had floppy, oversized heads. Pretty much all of the songs they performed included an aspect of pageantry, although for the most part it had this tame, patchwork quality to it, as if they were kids choreographing a Disney-on-ice show using spare materials they found in the prop closet, and then wrote the songs around the assemblages they'd come up with. And the costumes seemed to be pretty well-traveled, the foam wrinkled and sweat-stained, the googly-eyes hanging on by a few threads; in fact, a lot of the "dancing" involved the dancer's hands up by the costume's head or in its mouth, presumably a clandestine strategy to keep the head from detaching.

Because of all the dressing-up and -down, it was sort of hard to tell who the actual, you know, principals were, but as near as I can figure, they were: Bill Manspeaker, the lead singer / growler, an enormous baldoon with a Neanderthal brow and incongruously long eyelashes, pink and hairless, kind of like a version of G.G. Allin you'd let babysit your kids; and... well, that's it, really. I can't figure out whether any of the other dudes on stage were actually real members of the band and not touring musicians. A guy from a bad called Rosemary's Billygoat was doing backup vocals, and the bassist, guitar player, and drummer all reeked of being second-string players. It was at least partly a family act: During a pause towards the end of the show, Bill suddenly roared, "Where's my son?!"

A waifish tween boy appeared from backstage and boosted himself up onto one of the amps. I hadn't seen him without a giant foam mask on yet and had assumed he was just a short lady performer.

"I took my son to see GWAR last summer for his birthday," explained Bill, panting. "He said, 'Dad, next summer for my birthday, can we go on tour?' ...It's all for you, Damien! This is all for you!"

This is not to say that it wasn't a good show -- in fact, it was pretty darn good. At one point, Bill, complaining about the barricade in front of the stage, climbed over it and onto one of the merch tables, which he repurposed as a miniature stage in the middle of the pit. As they played through what was arguably their most popular song, "The Three Little Pigs," the crowd lifted the table with Bill standing on top of it, into the air. He maintained his balance throughout. Hell, he didn't even sound nervous as he snarled his way through six or seven choruses of "huffin'-and-a'puffin'-and-I'll-blow-your-house-in."

And when the band discovered it was Adam's birthday (we were wearing party hats and beads), he became the belle of the ball -- and the de facto nominee for all of their audience participation bits. In particular, he was selected to wear the "Shitman" costume on stage for the performance of the song "The Misadventures Of Shitman." The thing was like a mountainous accretion of brown fun foam, leaving Adam little to do but rock on his heels and flap his arms as the band played around him. "That costume smells like shit," he confided to me after they let him offstage.

In total they played for more than two hours, literally until the staff at the Gramercy shut them down. As they exited the stage, they started hawking this exclusive 4-disc video collection that apparently contained every piece of media ever created by or about the band. Mike and I got together and bought it for Adam; Mike went around and managed to get it signed by everyone in the band -- even Damien!

Summer is proceeding apace: Libby and Kojo and I hit up Summerscreen to see Wet Hot American Summer on Tuesday. The place was packed, more crowded than I've ever seen it -- the only way we could see the screen was by scrunching ourselves up against the railing on the upper level. I've still got a crick in my neck.

Missed Brazilian Girls at the Prospect Park bandshell on Friday because I was in the basement of Cake Shop checking out a British band called Cut Off Your Hands. The stuff on their MySpace sounded pretty good to me, and their lead singer was appealing enough, in a George-McFly-meets-Julian-Casablancas kind of way, but for some reason their live set failed to pop. The audience seemed to agree; the band ditched out on a finale after someone hollered, "The Smiths called -- they want that last song back!" He wasn't far off the mark.