Summer things continue apace. It is very hot, babies. We just had the hottest July 6th on record, apparently, although I don't think I was paying attention. Don't get me wrong. It was definitely hot.
Last Wednesday I met Bill at Bruar Falls for a CD release party some of his friends were doing. I was feeling weak and hungry beforehand, so I went on a hike down Grand St. looking for grub and found myself at Foodswings, which I'd never been to before. I got some macaroni and "cheese," which was, like most vegan cooking, obviously carefully thought-out but, you know, merely okay. At the 'Falls, Bill and I drank beers with Gabi and Patrice, my aisle-walking partner from Bill's wedding. The bands were pleasant and energetic. One of them had an awesome, slovenly-looking drummer -- a cross, visually, between Murray Hill and Bernie (from Weekend At...). The lead singer sang, "I don't know what to do with my life." I can do this, I thought. I should be doing this.
On Saturday, it was back to Bedford Ave. for a Peelander-Z show at Death By Audio, a venue whose name I'd often seen in show listings but which I'd never visited. What was it like, I wondered. It had a too-cute name, like a record store. Was it part of a record store? It turns out, no (although it is a record label), it is a weird little warehouse down by the water on the west side of Williamsburg. You go in through an unmarked door and wend your way around some exposed pipes and off-limits rooms, entrances draped with bedsheets. The public part of the venue is two rooms, more or less, with low, asbestos-tile ceilings, seemingly too small to hold the crowd they accommodated that night. The stage room was stiflingly hot, cooled only by a rickety fan hung swayingly from a rope in one corner. The merch tables, bathrooms, and rudimentary bar were in the other room, which sported a mural that looked like it belonged on the wall of a high school prop closet. Sweaty, hunchbacked nerds milled about, high-fiving each other.
Anamanaguchi was winding up their set when we got there. They've got an appealing, energetic sound: High volume guitar riffs over video-game synthesizer noises. Stuck in the back as we were, I couldn't tell how much of their performance was "organic" and how much was canned, but they certainly seemed committed to it. A lot of people crowd-surfed, which was good to see. (Am I supposed to hate that? I've always thought it was cool.)
Next up was Math The Band, who I'd been curious about for a long time. They were also really enthusiastic and fun, and there was no question about where their sound was coming from: There's only two of them, and the drummer doubles as their keyboard player, sometimes playing both instruments at the same time. The resulting rhythmic, noisy pop sounded something like the songs Andrew W.K. used to write. There was even more crowd surfing, and towards the end of the set, the band solicited yelled requests from the audience.
Between sets, we walked down to the boarded up Domino Sugar plant and up to one of the new condo buildings going up across the street, where we screwed and unscrewed some shittily-assembled exterior fixtures. At one point, we realized we were standing next to a pigeon that was perched on a step, being very still. Its eyes were open, but it was clearly not well: it was pooping where it was standing.
Nina and I had seen Peelander Red walking urgently down S 2nd street earlier, away from the venue. "Shit," we thought. "We missed them." And then we thought, "Uh oh, is Peelander-Z no longer headlining the shows they play?" And Nina wondered out loud whether Peelander Red was getting understandably sick of having to don the mantle of the "bass squid" in 90-degree heat. "He looks stressed out," she said. But we were wrong about their set. And if they're getting tired of their own schtick, it sure doesn't show. Peelander Yellow ended the sound check with a faux "thank you, good night!" (Nina and I managed to get everyone to chant "One more song!") And then they came out in full costume (bass squid included) and launched into "Mad Tiger." Red jumped out onto the eager hands of the crowd almost as soon as the song started.
It's hard to write about Peelander-Z without making them sound like a parody of punk rock and how deliberately oblique its lyrics can be -- which they absolutely are. For example, Peelander Yellow explains, "When people ask-u me, what kind of food is the best food, I say 'Mexican food!'" They launch into a their song "Taco Taco Tacos," which is heavy on the shouting, light on melody, and features Peelander Pink standing at the edge of the stage like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, banging a saucepan with a spoon and hollering out the chorus. But they've got a lot of album songs that aren't part of their choreographed stage act but which sneak onto their set lists and reveal that they're capable of putting out a fairly conventional, polished sound. Don't get me wrong -- I love those guys. Nina and I participated in every "bit" they did, including an extremely sweaty, abortive conga line and limbo competition. Evidence: See if you can find us in these photos.
Then on Sunday it was the 4th of July. Returning from Williamsburg at 2:30 AM, we ran into our upstairs neighbor Martin on the stairs. "Yo, you guys gotta come to my brother's party," he said. "You suck if you don't come. You suck." But, we protested, what about the hot-dog eating contest? "Oh yeah," he said. "Yeah, wake me up for that. I'll come with you. Pound on my door real loud." In the morning, puffy-eyed and hot, I trudged upstairs and knocked as loudly as I thought reasonable, three groups of three knocks each. But no one answered. So I turned and went downstairs and left the building and got on the train alone (Nina opted to sleep in).
It was the hottest day of the year so far, but people were crammed into the Surf and Stillwell Ave. intersection. I'm wowed every year by the audacity of the jerks who come down there and expect to be able to cut through the crowd instead of accumulating around the edges. "I gotta get by! Can't these people see I've gotta get by?" this one guy kept saying. The contest itself was less than memorable, presumably because of the heat; the contestants had a sluggish cast and failed to keep pace with their previous records. George Shea seemed to acknowledge the effect the heat was having on the contest. "Look at him -- he can barely lift his head," he said of Eric "Badlands" Booker, who failed to place at all. The final tally had Joey Chestnut leading (naturally) followed by Eater X, who experienced what looked like a partial, nasal reversal-of-fortune; and Patrick Bertoletti, whose squeeze-the-hot-dogs-to-paste technique was no less revolting the second time I've seen it. None of them came close to hitting the HDBs they'd managed last year. Chestnut gave a typically grimace-y post-eat interview, opening and taking a swig from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol (a prominent sponsor) upon prompting from a handler.
As predicted, Takeru Kobayashi did not compete, although the roving Nathan's camera caught his angry face in the crowd. And we all know what happened afterwards. I didn't stay long enough to see that, though. Queasy and heat-exhausted, I hopped back on the N and headed back to Sunset Park, where I picked up some groceries and made a white hominy salad (with tomatillo dressing) for Ted's 4th-of-July BBQ. That was easy, and I trained it over to Park Slope, arriving, accidentally, an hour early; which meant there was time to help Ted and Cat carry supplies down from their roof apartment to the ground floor, where they were house-sitting for neighbors with a back yard. Except that the neighbors came home a day early, about five minutes after we'd gotten everything set up. There were a few awkward moments (permission had been asked for prior uses of the yard but not for this one), but we got everything sorted out amicably.
I caught and re-caught a firefly in the weeds.
And then it was time for Martin's 4th of July party at his brother's house, down on the south side of Sunset Park. Martin's brother, Freddy, has a back yard, and he'd come up with the genius idea of projecting YouTube videos onto the back wall of a neighboring building (actually, onto a shower curtain tacked to said wall -- it worked surprisingly well). Arriving late, we missed the backyard fireworks (and we'd missed the official display over the inconvenient Hudson river again), but stuffed as we were, Freddy's wife plied us with sausages and salad and rice with gandules; it was difficult to say no.
Their young daughter gave us a detailed explanation of these things called "silly bandz," which are rubber bands that are "shaped" like things and which you can wear like bracelets. You can stretch them like normal rubber bands to make use of their tensile strength, which kind of distorts them -- but if you jiggle one loose, it'll kind of pop back to being whatever it is, the outline of a shark or a flower or a bird. There are even ones in the shapes of letters or short words. She claimed to have thousands of them, in various shapes and colors. Generously, she gave us a few: Nina received a giraffe, and I got a musical note.
We indulged her in some little-kid mythology: there were, she said, some rare, scary silly bandz to be found. A friend of hers, she said, saw one in the park that said "CHILD ABUSE" in blood red letters. Yikes! That would scare me. That would scare anyone! More like "chilling bandz." Am I right?