Cee Em Jay

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one. The College Music Journal 2011 Marathon just finished, and I saw a bunch of cool shows! This year I used the strategy that worked well for me last year: Wait a frustratingly long time for the CMJ web site to publish the official schedule; ignore the silly music industry panel events; find bands that sound cool within the bounds of my after-work schedule and at venues that are reasonably adjacent, geographically; run.

My first stop was at Brooklyn Bowl for the Live4ever showcase. I got there in time to see Le Blorr finishing up their set. They're a two-piece (guitar and drums) with a high-voiced lead singer whose hair falls in front of his face, Kurt Cobain-style, while he's singing. They were pretty good; but it was early and the crowd was thin. The band seemed relieved to get off stage -- understandably: It's got to be tough to play a cavernous space like the Bowl when you've got a spot in the line-up that's guaranteed to be under-attended.

1,2,3 was up next. They're a four-piece with a lead singer with Lyle Lovett hair and a nasal voice, weird but good. Their arrangements had strong, distinguished lead guitar lines and satisfyingly rubbery drum beats, by which (I think) I mean you could really hear the kick drum go "thwump." They sounded good! Catchy rock songs with an alt-country twang to them.

Fifth Nation was up next. They're a two piece with a lady on Stratocaster and a dude with an elaborate mohawk (Johnny Napalm from Guitar Hero-style) playing the drums. She looked like Debbie Harry as an extra in Easy Rider: She was wearing white and face paint and a dress with a long white fringe, but she could really shred and had a great voice. She wore a tuning fork around her neck. Their songs didn't stick to a fixed genre; they seemed like kind of a mix of college road-trip music: Jane's Addiction, Sublime, Manu Chao. I wasn't crazy about their sound, but there were definitely people in the audience who enjoyed it: Several of them moved up towards the stage and started doing that dance that white people do when Dave Chappelle has John Mayer play guitar for them, including one very straight-laced guy near me -- sweater, khakis, trench coat he'd folded up and placed in a corner -- doing a pretty decent Elaine.

I bailed about half of the way through their set so as not to be late for Bad Movie Night (not a band) at Tom's. This week we watched a long-awaited classic called Mutant Hunt, which is about some cyborgs (who are actually just plain old robots, I think) who get mutated by being injected with narcotics. And this makes them want to rape people, or maybe just do murders. The movie doesn't really make that clear. Although, to be fair, Tom and I were preoccupied with trying to choke down an airplane bottle of wormwood-flavored Swedish aquavit -- you may have heard of it by the name Malört, or Bäska Droppar. Whatever you call it, this stuff is icky, like chewing up a bitter mouthful of Tylenol, and the taste is difficult to dispel. Jeppson, the company that bottled the brand we drank, brags:

Most first-time drinkers of Jeppson Malört reject our liquor. Its strong, sharp taste is not for everyone. Our liquor is rugged and unrelenting (even brutal) to the palate. During almost 60 years of American distribution, we found only 1 out of 49 men will drink Jeppson Malört.

I think I'm probably a 98%-er on that front, but I'll let you know if I change my mind. Yeah, though, Mutant Hunt's a real stinker: Horrible leads, incomprehensible story, indifferent characterization and cinematography. Other things that make it an excellent Tuesday night choice: The line "Inteltrax has a government contract. It can hold anyone for 72 hours since the federation act of [...] two years ago, ever since the space shuttle sex murders," and the fact that its director, Tim Kincaid, also directed the (non-sci fi-themed) title Gale Force: Mens Room II and acted in the movie Cop Blowers. That list bit I learned from the excellent Destroy All Movies!!!, which Emma got me for my birthday; truly a gift that keeps on giving.

On Wednesday I hoofed it down to Fontana's on Eldridge St. to check out this huge twelve-band showcase show. I'd never been to Fontana's before, and I liked it alright -- it's like a nicer, bigger version of Fat Baby, I guess? I'd timed things right, because The Threads were just setting up in the low-ceilinged basement when I got there. I'd liked their Soundcloud offering, but got worried when I saw them wearing black silk shirts and fancy hats. Were they gonna be a super-serious bridge-and-tunnel ska band? Imagine my relief when they turned out to be an awesome, sleazy punk band whose performance hearkened way back to the rip-off shows I used to go to when I was in high school: A six dollar ticket'd get you into a bill that promised, say, UK Subs, but was stacked with four or five hours of unlisted openers you had to endure in the too-close company of (much older) strangers while you smoked yourself sick to your stomach. As frustrating as the experience was when I was 15, the curfew-less adult me wishes those shows weren't a relic of the 90's. The Threads' lead guy came out in a brown suit and a fedora (and sporting what I'm hoping were violet aviator shades), drink in hand, and lay down on the stage. He had the effeminate and dissipated air of a late-period Dee Dee Ramone, and he sang with the mush-mouthed half-articulation of Tim Armstrong (who does that in turn, I have heard, to sound more like Joe Strummer). Their songs had the same gloom-and-doom thematic touchstones as I Love Living In The City and Wart Hog. I ate it up. It didn't hurt that the guy also spent every non-singing moment fucking around with the other guys on stage, whacking the drummer's cymbals, putting the soloing guitar players in headlocks. Take note, rock and roll singers: That is a top five stage move.

After them was a band called Spirit Animal, which was a kind of synth pop group. Their lead singer was an enormous dude with a sort of half-bowl cut, wearing a European-looking multicolored leather jacket; kind of like Win Butler Meets The Wolfman. They were alright, but the whiskey I'd bought myself to keep my courage up had kicked in pretty hard and I was fading. I decided to bail. When I got home, I googled The Threads and realized why they tickled my memory the way that they did: Mick Brown, the lead singer, is a former member of the L.E.S. Stitches, a great Saint Marks throwback punk band that was a staple of my teenage show-trotting at The Continental and Coney Island High.

Thursday was the busiest night of the marathon for me. I started the evening at The Delancey, where I was looking to catch a set by Haim on the basement stage. "I don't know how to pronounce it," I told the girl stamping my wrist. "I'm pretty sure it's 'hi-m,'" she said, "but how cool would a Corey Haim-themed indie rock band be?" While I waited for it to be showtime, I lingered by the upstairs bar listening to the band that was playing on the miniature stage -- it's really just some elevated seating they'd cleared the chairs away from. I missed their introduction, but based on some cursory calendar-checking I'm pretty sure it was Lisa Jaeggi and her band (dude on acoustic guitar, dude on bongos). She's got really great voice, very high and sweet like Feist, and she wore feathers in her hair and face paint, like the lady from Fifth Nation. They played some very catchy, textured pop songs.

When they were done, I went downstairs to check out Haim, who were just getting started. They're a five piece band fronted three women who also cover bass, lead, and rhythm guitar; and who each sported variations on the same aesthetic. They were all cool big-sister types -- as near as I can place it, not having had one myself -- confident, casually authoritative, with long hair and black heavy metal t-shirts. At the beginning of their set, the girl on bass explained that they were all from L.A., and that this was their first unsupervised trip to NYC. "I don't know if it's the New York vibe or what," she said, "but I feel like buying condoms." They played 90s-inflected pop rock, trading off on the vocals, although there was a commonality to their voices as well. At the time, I thought they sounded a little like Lisa Loeb, but I don't know if that's right. They finished their set with a crazy drum-off, all three of the girls dueling the drummer. "Come make out with me, I'll be in the back," said the bass player.

No time for that -- I had to hop the F up to Broadway Lafayette to get to Dominion to see Street Chant. I'd always thought of Dominion NY (are there other locations?), what with its pretentious signage and convenient adjacency to the Blue Man Group theater, as being a bit of a douchebag preserve. And upon viewing their interior first-hand, I don't think I was wrong about that, but I didn't know that they've got a reasonably okay performance space in the back. Street Chant is a kiwi three piece, two girls with guitars, plus a guy on drums. Sonically, they were a mix of Bleach-era Nirvana punk and good, dissonant 00's indie rock (say, Sleater-Kinney). Their lead singer sang with a mumbly, punky snarl. I thought they sounded great, but it seemed like Dominion's monitors left something to be desired. "I can't even hear myself," the lead singer complained. Consequently, perhaps, they cut their set off a song early.

The amount of equipment stashed behind a velvet rope to the left of stage promised more bands, but I bailed to make sure I got to Webster Hall in time to see We Are Scientists. When I got there, there was a not-great frat metal band on stage with a lead singer who looked like the guy who plays Anders on Workaholics, and for a second I was worried that I'd forgotten what We Are Scientists sounded like, but in due time they announced themselves as being Recover, from Austin. We Are Scientists took the stage next, and they looked and sounded exactly like I remembered: Airtight arrangements, bright vocals and guitar lines, not-quite-pop hooks. And warning, dear reader, this is gonna sound lame, but: What impressed me the most about them was their easy stage presence and the way they handled a myriad of technical problems with grace and humor -- they broke strings, their mics and patch cables went on the fritz, but they kept the songs going without letting on how ticked off they must have been. "I've been playing with you for ten years," said Chris Cain to Keith Murray, "and every year it gets worse."

I took Friday off. There were a few show that looked like they could be interesting, but after the requisite Bel Argosy rehearsal I was just so beat that it was all I could do to stay awake on the subway and plonk myself into bed.

On Saturday I went to the best show of this year's festival -- ours! That's right: Bel Argosy played CMJ this year, at Legion, thanks to the good will and connections of Cenk and The Cardinal Agency. We were joined by Majuscules, with whom we've performed several times before; and Porches, with whom we've been booked a couple of times before but who've never managed to make it for logistical reasons (and who turned out to be pretty awesome). We'd played Legion a few weeks previous, and the setting was mostly the same -- noisy little back room; fussy, manic sound guy -- but the somebody'd shelled out for a little drum kit, which saved us from lugging portions of our own, and there were real, honest-to-god monitors in front of the stage. What a difference! Mind you, I still turned in a characteristically sloppy and frantic performance, the weird little house hi-hat periodically tipping over and off of the stage; but I could hear everything that was happening this time.

No, it was fine -- a real treat, actually. I've been going to CMJ for years and never once dreamed I'd get to play a showcase show, as part of a band with less than a year of shows under its belt. And we made 50 bucks! Indie scene prestige; Benjamins: It's the Bel Argosy way.

Occupy Everywhere

Babies, it seems like everyone (well, okay, no one) wants to know what I think about the protests underway in Zuccotti Park.

I've been (and am still) involved with projects and activism that seemed to me to be unambiguously and unequivocally The Right Thing, and getting anyone to pay attention to them has been a downright Sisyphean task. So at this stage of my political development ("Phase III: Exasperation"), I'm automatically impressed by any political movement, however inchoate -- or even incoherent -- that's capable of embodying the zeitgeist or getting call-outs from government or the press. And if the moral position of a movement like that is even within some threshold value of my own, then I feel compelled to help them, uh, capitalize on whatever traction they've magically acquired. Because if you wait around for a successful political movement that matches your beliefs and aesthetic to a T, you're gonna be waiting forever.

...By which I mean to say, of course the people at Occupy Wall Street are gross and often inarticulate, and if you're asking them (less than a month in) to deliver practical solutions to the problems they're shouting about, you're gonna be disappointed. But they've got some smart people doing media strategy for them, and they're fascinatingly well-organized. And most importantly, maybe, they're all really brave.

I don't agree with everything I've heard from the people there -- some of it doesn't even really make sense, like when someone shot down a plan to use donated money to buy sleeping bags, because we're supposed to be getting away from "buying" things from "companies." But there are a couple of things that I'm pretty sure are true, and about which I think I'm on the same page as everyone I've met at the park: First, what Elizabeth Warren said back in August: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody." Second (and more verbose), something that Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1969:

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times.

Tom has been marching in some of the protests they've organized, including the really huge one that kind of shut down lower Manhattan on October 5th. His "Paul Krugman's Blog For President" protest sign was popular enough to make the front page of Salon.com. (Although apparently one lady he spoke to at the march accused Krugman of being "part of the system." "I didn't really have anything to say back to that weird old lady," Tom said.)

He and I went to a Sunday evening General Assembly a couple of weeks ago. In case you haven't gotten a clear picture from the news: The Occupation is centered in Zuccotti Park, which is a kind of gray stone corporate park, a rhomboid wedge between a bunch of big office buildings and sort of catty-corner to a construction site that's part of Ground Zero. There are narrow strips of flower beds around its edges and there are some little groves of flowers and skinny trees dotted down the middle. It's a place you might go to smoke cigarettes during lunch if you worked for J.P. Morgan Chase. The Occupiers have set up several tables in the park, some of which correspond to "working groups" that exist within the movement: There's a kitchen; an information desk; a medical tent; a media center with generator-powered laptops; and a comfort station, which hands out sleeping bags and blankets. The rest of the biomass takes the form of people with sleeping bags, tents, and tarps, who array themselves wherever they can. There's a scattered contingent of food and tchotchke vendors on the eastern edge of the park. They have the tentative air of dogs by a dinner table, like they're wondering if they'll be indulged or shooed away.

The General Assembly, from what I can tell, is both an alternate name for the Occupation itself, as well as a name for the style of all-hands meetings the Occupiers hold twice a day. Because they're not aloud to use to electronic amplification, they use a technique called "The Human Microphone" to make sure everyone can hear: The speaker speaks a few words, and some designated people near the speaker repeat what the speaker said, and then a second tier of repeaters repeats what they said. In person it's slow but effective, not least of all because it requires that the speakers edit themselves for brevity. The General Assembly doesn't include political topics except insofar as they're related to planning actions, so there aren't a whole lot of shrill or crazy people getting up to talk. The order of speakers is determined by what they refer to as a "progressive stack," which is a kind of FIFO queue with dynamic re-prioritization for underrepresented groups.

Most of the speakers were making announcements about the needs of various working groups or the services they provide. The medical working group wanted people to come see them to learn the symptoms of hypothermia. Comfort wanted to make it known that they'd appreciate donations of boots and sleeping bags. At some point in the stack, someone from the "safer spaces" working group read their notes. People occupying the park should come to them, they said, if they were feeling unsafe for any reason. In particular, they said, there was someone currently in the park who was considered particularly unsafe and who was to be avoided: "His name is Thaddeus. He's wearing an orange shirt and he's got a menorah on his head." Tom and I spent several amused minutes looking for a guy matching Thaddeus' description.

There are a whole lot of police down there, both in terms of boots on the ground and in terms of vehicles -- they've got a half dozen vans and a tower of fun. For the most part they seemed respectful if not friendly. I've seen footage of them being really shitty at some of the off-site events, but down at the Plaza they seem to be doing what they should be doing, which is making sure everybody's safe.

As we were on our way out, we saw a young, pretty blond woman get into a confrontation with the police. She'd locked her bicycle to part of her clothing and was attempting to sit down on the sidewalk at the north end of the park, presumably as an act of civil disobedience -- although she didn't say anything or even seem to be affiliated with the other Occupiers. The cops made a move to grab her bike lock key from her, but she tossed it to someone in the crowd who scurried away with it. Everyone had smart phones out and was filming the interaction, which culminated with the police cutting through the bit of her the bike was attached to and carrying her and the bike to a waiting paddy wagon. Everyone was chanting, "This is what a police state looks like!"

I don't think that's what a police state looks like, but then again I've never lived in a place that definitively was -- or was not -- a police state.