Monday, October 27, 2008

WFMCMJ

As recompense to myself for the crunch we just went through at work, I decided I was going to, you know, go out this past weekend. It's actually kind of un-easy to get yourself back in the mode of doing activities after you've acclimated to going straight home from work every night and compounding your tiredness with a cup of herbal tea, but sometimes you just have to launch yourself into the world. Thanks are due to Eve, whom I hadn't seen in, like, forever, for teaming up with me to check out some of the Saturday action at the CMJ marathon, which is this massively concurrent, week-long, pan-city showcase of hundreds of lesser-known rock bands, some of them good, some of them not so good, that I'd always meant to check out but had never gotten around to before. She wanted to go to Cake Shop, but I was keen on checking out The Muslims at Santos' Party House, so we headed there. The place was weirdly empty when we got there around ten (my understanding is CMJ usually packs the house) but they were running their smoke machine at full blast as if to obscure that fact. And it turned out that The Muslims had canceled, which sucked.

...Because the other bands in the show were super shitty. The Vaz were on first. They're a three-piece that look like a total guitar teacher band -- that is to say, the lead singer is a bit older and had this serious, self-important vibe about him that set my teeth on edge. It was the look of a guy who must have figured out over the years that he is one of those destined to teach guitar to rock stars in training or write articles about rock stars but who will not himself be a convincing rock star -- and who nonetheless soldiers on through one experimental, unlistenable project / band after another. The expression of concentration on his face I'm guessing reflected the effort involved in acting like his shit was awesome. It was way not awesome -- muddy, tuneless, and dissonant with too-quiet vocals and about 30% of the energy required to sell something as hook-free and humorless as it was.

When the next band also sucked (Iran, I think they were called. Too many beards and newsboy caps; not enough rock), Eve and I decided to ditch and check out another show. We got to Cake Shop just in time to see the second half of a set by a Norwegian band called Lukestar. Terrible name, and the guys were all sort of visually unappealing (stocky, bug-eyed) but their music was great -- tight, hard-charging punk-rock rock-and-roll music with strong vocals and lead guitar hooks. They were obviously psyched to be playing -- they mentioned several times that they'd never traveled outside of Europe before. We begged them for an encore but Cake Shop (I think) said no.

Next up was The XYZ Affair, an NYU band that Razor opened for a few years ago. I remember not liking them at the time (too twee, I think I thought), but they were agreeable enough this time around. Their lead singer has this annoying habit of smiling while he's singing, which makes him look kind of smug, but their songs are engaging and well-written and their arrangements meet my caveman requirements for simplicity. A good sign: It was, like, two in the morning by the time they finished playing, and I wasn't even tired.

In between sets, Eve directed my attention to this NYU student-type girl in front of us who was furiously typing out a response to somebody on some kind of computer-phone doo-dad:
"Oh, you know, the usual. In NYC. Feeling fucking miserable."
I don't see how.

The next day I headed up to Chelsea for the annual WFMU record fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion. I'm not really into records (hell, I don't even own a turntable), but ever since Tom got me listening to 7SD, I've been really taken with the feeling of oddball community the station cultivates. The on-air talent are all so good-natured and dorky and close-knit that it's easy to start feeling like you're having a rap session with some friends from high school you were too cool to hang out with more but maybe it's not too late to start, etc. -- until you remember that, like, a hundred thousand people listen to FMU and take it super seriously. And that was totally evident at the record fair, which might have been more packed with beardos than the FSF's annual meeting. I was there, though, to fan it up for Ken Freedman and Andy Breckman. Ken was working the front desk (with his wife and daughter, I think?) but Andy was nowhere to be found. I walked around the floor for a while and listened to DMBQ play an incongruously wild set, given that it took place in the corner of a florescently-lit convention showroom, but then my legs started to hurt, so I popped into Rebel Monkey, Inc. to take a load off. Idly checking the record fair schedule, though, I saw that Ken and Andy were slated to begin judging a Halloween costume contest that had started five minutes after I'd left and only just ended! I hurried back to the Pavilion, but there were no Breckmans to be found.

A few things I noticed about the record fair:
  • Literally all the vendors had Who records for sale / trade
  • The Who are a startlingly ugly bunch of dudes -- besides Daltrey, the band is like 85% schnoz and beard -- and yet the majority of their album covers feature them striking unironic heartthrob poses in front of shit like shipping containers and public toilets
  • Bands that put out albums during the seventies all have at least one record with some weird-ass surrealist art on the cover. Like, think Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, but more out there: I could swear I saw a weeping Trosper giving birth to the World Tree on the cover of a Hall & Oates LP.
  • Are "comedy albums" cool or lame? Because there sure were a fuck of a lot of them up for sale, and some of you have birthdays coming up


I was beat, but that night it was back up to the Party House with Nina to see Vivian Girls opening for Jay Reatard. The 'Girls apologized for their exhaustion after playing four CMJ shows in 24 hours, but I thought they were pretty good. It's hard for me to tell when off-key singing is part of a band's premise or if they just can't hear themselves, but Vivian Girls do some of that. It doesn't not suit them. I don't know.

As the curtains on the stage parted for his set, Jay Reatard stepped forward and said, "Man, you guys ready for a fucking puppet show?" We all kind of looked at each other trying to figure out what that meant. "This curtain fucking sucks," he clarified. "Who else here hates these stupid curtains?" Only a smattering of hands went up. "Huh," he said. "Looks like we got some curtain fans in the house."

His set was fucking awesome, though -- incredibly high-energy and aggressive. I'd never seen him live before and had only heard an apparently non-representative selection of his stuff online; he actually sounds a lot like Screeching Weasel, in a good way -- the songs are short and catchy, the vocals are just the right amount of adenoidal. And, in a move that totally needs to make a comeback from when I used to see bands in high school, there was no talking between songs. He'd just call out the name of the next song and go. Efficient. A guy standing next to me leaned in at one point and said, "He doesn't sound the way he looks." Indeed -- Jay and his bass player both have enormous curly hairdos (think Roger Daltrey and Macy Gray, respectively) that they can sort headbang around, although Jay mostly kept his head down, the hair covering his face completely, delivering his lyrics Mitch Hedberg-style.

Monday, October 06, 2008

I Am Kind Of A Filthy Dude

I was remarking to Ted a few nights ago (over blueberry kuchen and red wine in his lovely Park Slope apartment) that sometimes you look around you, at how dirty your clothes are, say, or how grimy the coffee table in your apartment has gotten, and you think to yourself, "man, I am a filthy dude."

Case in point: I am a slobby programmer-type guy who needs to be eating junk food all goddamn day long while I am programming the computer at work. So if you come over to my desk, you will see a whole bunch of plastic kegs of pretzels and "party mix" and maybe a couple of bags of M&Ms or Starbursts or shit like that. Well, the office has a bit of a pest problem, and I left my snack foods a little bit too exposed, I guess, and now there is a mouse that comes and eats things off the desk and leaves mouse poops everywhere. It's gross.

So after a few frown-inducing incidents of noticing a poop on my desk a foot or so away from an in-progress lunch, I decided to kick some mouse ass. I picked up a bunch of wooden snap-traps at a deli on 7th Ave. and baited them with the semi-unappealing organic peanut butter from the office fridge. And then I waited. And several weeks went by and I didn't catch any mice and there were four armed mousetraps sitting on my desk -- mouse pad; floor; between monitors; behind tower -- waiting to snap an unobservant co-worker. I started to feel like... well, like a guy hunting a mouse that no one else can see and who's got cocked mousetraps all over his desk. The week before, though, I'd been at Tom and Colleen's house and they'd shown off a device they'd picked up for dealing with an apparently highly-visible infestation: An electric cul-de-sac in a box that Tom was eager to explain: There's peanut butter at one end and two metal plates on the bottom. The mouse winds up with his front legs on one plate and his hind legs on the other and he gets electrocuted. He said they'd killed two the first night they turned it on and nine in total since getting the thing. I went to a bunch of hardware stores looking for it but to no avail (the guy at Kove Bros. tried to sell me a $50 dealie he said the staff themselves had used to kill a cat-sized rat; he had Polaroid evidence), so I gave up and ordered it online. It is now baited and batteried and switched on, waiting in the storage closet in the kitchen, near where Tim and Libby'd seen a particularly brazen daylight mouse expedition sallying forth.

Then there's the roach situation in my kitchen at home. I'm not particularly squeamish about cockroaches (though boy am I not crazy about waterbugs) but things have gotten sort of out of hand. I've got a row of appliances (toaster oven, coffee maker, blender) between the stove and the sink, and an extended family of roaches has apparently set up a homestead behind them. It'd gotten to the point where I'd dislodge the carafe for my wonderful timer-automatic coffee maker from the heating element in the morning and there'd be two of the fuckers waiting behind it, waving their gross feelers at me. And the problem with these little-to-midsize roaches is that Kitty can't be bothered to chomp them up the way she does with the big scary ones (I guess they don't taste as good? Ick). So I took the nuclear option at home, too -- I created a four-block wall of roach motels next to the counter's power strip and deployed a couple of these weird sterilizing-gas-spewing devices that come with the motels under the sink. A couple weeks later and I've just swept, like, a couple dozen roach carcasses off the counter.

For the trifecta, I made vodka sauce the other night, using some stuff from a jar. (Didn't have vodka in it, but it did have cream cheese. Guh?) "Don't let her eat that," Nina admonished as I set my plate down on the floor for the cat to lick clean. "It's fine," I insisted. "Look how cute." Sure enough, Kitty ate all the vodka sauce off the plate. And then she got diarrhea. And she managed to get the diarrhea in her fur, dipping her tail in it like a calligraphy brush. It got on my hand.

Changing the subject.

I've done some important work on playing video games lately. First off, I finished Final Fantasy XII. It's sort of hard to have something to say about it -- it's just too big and too complicated of an experience. I think it's probably the best-looking Playstation 2 game I've seen, and also has the most content -- more than all those the two-disc games out there, even. The thing took me 160+ hours before I was satisfied that I'd done all I wanted to do. On the other hand, I found the story a lot dryer and less coherent than I'd liked, although it doesn't come close to the level of mindfuckery featured in Final Fantasy X. And the main narrative thread kind of peters out around the time you level 50, which was about halfway through, hours-wise for me. After that you're just doing shit like playing Simon Says against "The River Lord" and helping bunny girls fight ice dragons.

I also managed to battle through the two obstacles standing between me and "Freebird" in Guitar Hero II Hard mode: "Carry Me Home" and "Psychobilly Freakout." Man, those songs are difficult! My fingers and left wrist were aching for days afterwards. Promptly after I embarked on Expert, the game started locking up while loading songs, leaving me at least temporarily stuck behind Nina in the race to championship of the universe.

Nick's lent me a copy of Shadow of the Colossus; he'd brought it in to do some research for a paper / talk he's working on. It's a bit of an odd duck in that it's got all the mise-en-scene of a game like... I don't know, Morrowind, in which there's just so much to do, but in Shadow, there's really just a single mechanic, which is killing colossi. It's so pared-down it's actually kind of austere. And in between your battles, in the bits where you're riding around the countryside on Agro, you start to feel like, man, this game's kind of dull; it doesn't look that great; the controls're sort of frustrating. But five minutes later you're clinging to the back of a giant demonic clockwork bird-thing that's swooping through the air, and you can actually see your little guy holding onto its fur (which is rendered such that it is gorgeous and also distinct from other surfaces, like, say, feathers, which are also gorgeous) while you hack it to death with a sword, and you're like, oh, they skimped a little on that other part so they could do this.