Sunday, June 21, 2009

Furlough Tuesday

Okay, this rain shit has got to stop. It's making me moody and sluggish. It's been raining non-stop for like three fucking weeks! More, probably. I brought my lemon tree outside a couple of weeks ago, thinking it wasn't getting enough light / moisture, but now I'm worried it's gonna be washed away.

Spinnerette played Bowery Ballroom on Monday. Committed readers will know that I've been a fan of The Distillers since I first saw the video for "Drain The Blood" on MTV of all places while channel surfing at 680 Degraw. At the time I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard of a band as good as that. But I was like, fuck, this is great, I can get really into them and go see them live. And I did, once, right after they released their most commercial-sounding album and right before they broke up forever. That's just the way of things. So I was psyched when I heard Brody Dalle was putting a new band together, somewhat less psyched when I heard it was going to be a techno grime dance rock band, but then a little psyched again once I heard a couple of their singles last summer. An eponymous album has since come out. The Onion A.V. Club describes their sound as having "rubbery hooks," which, although it sounds like oblique music criticism jibberish, is oddly accurate -- the beats throb instead of, you know, beat; and the melodies have these eerie harmonies that defy being prized apart.

So I figured that when I saw them live, it'd be Brody and a bunch of keyboards. Not so -- they managed to produce a sound pretty comparable to the album using three guitars (Tony Bevilacqua, Brody, and some other dude), a bass, and a whole fuck of a lot of flange pedal. The real draw, of course, was Brody's voice, which was frighteningly good as usual, despite her claim that she'd been stricken with laryngitis. "They gave me a shot in the ass," she said. "So I could sing for you guys." ("With a cock?" someone in the audience hollered. "I wish," she said.) Also present were the hordes of tween girls (sans Courtney Love this time), hollering, pogo-ing, and doing that annoying dance where you kind of press your arms together above your head and just kind of sway, eyes closed -- the dance that, according to Dave Chappelle, all white people do when they hear guitar music. But, man. That voice. Whatever shot she got must've been a doozy, 'cuz she sounded pretty much perfect -- there's something in the sonic middle of that hoarse, ragged sound that hits the resonant frequency of your skull. They mostly played stuff off their album, including plenty of songs I hadn't heard before and which sounded a little rougher than their singles -- some of them kind of unfinished, even. Perhaps as a consequence of her illness, they didn't play any encores. I confess to a guilty desire to hear "Dismantle Me," but it was not to be.

Free summer rock and roll music continues apace. Startlingly, Jay Reatard played a set at this free concert series called Music On The Oval being sponsored by the idiots who bought Stuy Town. For those of you who didn't know (like me), the park in the center of the maze that is Stuy Town is called the oval, and, in an attempt to dampen the financial tailspin that they're in, Tishman Speyer has been setting up little pay-to-play premium areas, which they call "amenities," all kind of branded, uninspiringly, with the word "oval." There's OvalKids (a playpen for little Max Fishers, I guess), OvalLounge, OvalStudy, etc. So the powers that be booking Jay Reatard is entirely consistent with their history of making poor choices. Land grab? Billion-dollar boondoggle. Family music festival? Awkward performance by sweaty hair-punks.

It had rained the night before, and although it was a beautiful day the oval was pretty swampy: Nina lost a flip-flop to a sucking mud hole. There were toddlers and non-plussed-looking oldsters everywhere. An events coordinator with the demeanor of a kindergarten teacher introduced the band as "Jay Ree-a-tard," and the band played a short, tight set. I don't really know what to say about it -- those guys are great, and they played energetically, spinning their hair as they thrashed out their songs. Jay's between-song commentary (when there was any) showed he was not unaware of the contradictions inherent in the situation, and his set list included "Greed, Money, Useless Children." But it felt wrong, kind of like that scene in Spinal Tap where the 'Tap plays the Air Force base. Eve and Nina and I sat towards the back of the park and ate bagels and drank beer, which Eve loudly referred to as "soda" so as to thwart detection by Stuy Town security personnel on the prowl for open containers. You know, culture-jamming.

On the Bad News front, my employer has run into some cash flow issues -- the cash ain't flowing, and I'm on an enforced, unpaid two-week vacation. We're going to re-evaluate at the end of it. Things might clear up, or they might not. So, you know, I don't want to be premature here, but if you think you might need someone to engineer some software for you, I encourage you to look at my resume. To paraphrase Katt Williams, I love engineering software; engineering software is my shit. That's my shit.

Of course, all this free time has left me with plenty of time to hang out with friendos. KT threw an impressive dinner party at her new apartment on Saturday on the Upper West Side, which is more or less a studio but has an impressive view and a wonderful, maze-like entryway -- the building houses both commercial and residential units, and to get to the apartments, you have to go up several staircases and through a bunch of doors that don't look like you should be opening them. It reminds me of dreams I've had. And then Ted and Cat had a cook-out in the back yard of the ground floor unit in their posh Park Slope apartment (they're house-sitting). I showed up a little early and helped Ted whip up some Mexican-inflected Rick Bayless recipes: A tomatillo salsa type concoction (which caused a minor explosion in the food processor) and a spicy, quivering pork loin that we slow-cooked in the grill. Cat made these little individual strawberry shortcakes, which were crazy good.

Monday, June 08, 2009

The Sexton's Mouse

Summer, I think? It's been inordinately rainy in June so far. Lightning wakes me up around 3:00 AM.

Otherwise, Sunset Park has been a dream. The barber shop on our block up towards 5th Ave. was gutted last year and turned into a mini-warehouse for Coco Helado guys to store their carts. And a month or so ago, somebody parked an ice cream truck in front of it with a "For Sale" sign on the back. I think it may be damaged goods since I've never seen it drive anywhere, but somebody's run an orange power line from the warehouse, draping it over some branches of a nearby tree (which the rainy weather has made green and leafy as fuck), and into one of the windows, where, presumably, it runs the freezer when its owners are operating it in stationary mode in the afternoons. The jingle the thing plays is La Cucaracha.

The second floor landing of our apartment building has had a nice, musky spice smell to it for several weeks now, like chili powder or curry or something. I thought it was great until Nina pointed out that bedbugs, in a population that's reached horrifyingly critical mass produce a smell that's ironically pleasant to humans. But then I looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out that smell is "raspberry," and this is definitely not raspberries, so now I think the second floor is great again.

Nina and I came home from helping her mom clean her apartment (in extended preparation for accommodating relatives visiting from Puglia) the other night to find the house in mild disarray (waste baskets knocked over, bedclothes tossed around) and no sign of Kitty to be found. After looking in the closets and under and behind everything we could think of, we finally found her in the bathroom curled up behind the toilet, in the nook behind the bowl under the the toilet, a torn plastic bag sealed firmly around her midsection. She likes to eat the fucking things, see, but one must have gotten the better of her.

Ever since Steve Merchant wrapped up The Steve Show a couple of months ago, I've been trying to be more active in my search for, as Smerch would call it, "new music." (This pretty much means I read the descriptions of bands on Oh My Rockness and then visit their Myspaces.) I recently became aware of a group called Kittens Ablaze that met my current criteria for contemporary indie rock music: Not folk, not techno. I hit up a show they played the last weekend of May at a venue I'd never heard of called The Flytrap -- which ended up being a two-story private house on Court St. right across the Gowanus Expressway. I almost didn't find it, but the sounds of rock music got me zeroed in. They'd set up a little ticket counter by the entryway, and then you walked down a long hallway to get to the back yard where the actual show was happening. It was a beautiful spot: The house was and yard were flanked by warehouses, so the yard made a kind of concrete box that somebody'd gone to the trouble of furnishing with hedges. There was what I guess you could call a shed towards the back where the bands were setting up, except it was sized and decorated like a miniature house. The most impressive feature, though, was the cascade of roses and what I think were climbing hydrangeas pouring over the northern wall and wrapping themselves around the wrought-iron staircase going up to the second floor, creating a flowery canopy over the stage.

The bands (and there were hours of 'em) were mostly of a single disposition: Jangly, earnest. Nonexistent production. A band called Turbotronics (whose members apparently contained tenants of the building) was releasing an album -- this was their release party -- but they ended up switching up the list so that they were opening for Kittens Ablaze. I'd never heard of them, but I was pleasantly surprised by their sound: Kind of synth-y, nasty guitar rock, with a snotty, "fuck it" attitude in the lyrics that reminded me of the Dickies or the Dead Kennedys. Their songs had names like "Taco Bell (Taco Hell)" and "Let's Do Some Yoga."

By the time Kittens Ablaze went on, I was almost too beat to dance -- I have to stop dragging my stupid laptop to shows just so I have something to do on the subway. They played a vigorous, orchestral set (didn't realize they've got both cello and violin players). Their songs are long but have a sustained urgency to them that got me dancing around. Someone kept firing these little champagne party poppers over the heads of the band, the sparks and confetti mixing with the flowers. Long songs but not very many of them (four, five, maybe?) -- after they finished, there were calls for an encore. "I don't think we have any other ones," said the cello player.

The following week, I went to Mercury Lounge to catch Art Brut for the fourth night of their week-long residency. They were great! I remember being fairly skeptical about them when Katharine played their first album for me a few years ago, but I've come around. Despite Eddie Argos' admonitions to the contrary, I did think his talk-singing was ironic -- or musically prickly enough that I was put off. But over the years I've been won over by his clever writing and the band's obvious enthusiasm (although I still don't know if the songs are, you know, hummable). Argos' flustered delivery combines amusingly with how tight the band is and how confidently he directs them. He's a mix of authoritarian and self-effacing -- it's like Martin Prince grew up and started fronting a punk rock band.

The opening act, Cymbals Eat Guitars, was awful: yet another lead singer without any charisma. And a hippie playing a keyboard. How does this keep happening?