Thursday, November 01, 2012

Come On, Sandy

One thing after another.

The Monday after CMJ finished, Nina and I managed to get tickets to the release party for Titus Andronicus' new album, Local Business, at Shea Stadium. It was one of those things where I saw the announcement for the show on a several days' old blog post somewhere horrible like BrooklynVegan. Limited admission! Already sold out! No tickets at the door! I despaired. But then I saw a "tweet" from the band leader's volatile Twitter feed that gave me hope. So I did as I was told and reloaded the ticket page, and lo! there were more tickets.

Liquor Store, whom I'm liking more and more, opened the show, and finished their set with a raunchy instrumental performance. Dan Friel from Parts and Labor (who opened the very first Titus Andronicus show I ever saw) played a bunch of computer music, and acknowledged his status as one of the local businesses in partnertship with T.A., LLC. Speaking of which, The So So Glos, who run the venue and helped record the album -- and who just seem like all-around nice guys -- were working the bar. Alex, their lead singer was walking the floor with a characteristic look of worry on his face. I saw my friend Anthony from Silicone Sister. The DJ put on If I Should Fall From Grace With God, and I danced a little dance by myself. This is a good sign, I thought.

I had heard a few tracks off the new album already, one in a YouTube video, another couple in an, uh, uneven live performance on The Best Show's marathon special. They were good, but left me wondering if they'd really hit the same resonant frequency as the last album. That's a pretty trite thing to think about a band's new album, right? But The Monitor really shook me the first few times I listened to it. It's a strikingly vulnerable collection of songs, angry and self-deprecating and hopeful and of course very, very pretentious -- a quality balanced by its outsize ambition, which I took as a challenge: You must improve your life. I'm still trying to figure out what this new one's all about. My best guess so far is that it's an attempt to channel the compulsion toward self-scrutiny -- on display in their first two releases -- into a sustainable musical practice. You know, like a business! Or to put it another way, it's a more "mature" album, which means the songs are less sloppy but also less maniacally exhilerating. The new band, which I guess is notable for being the same crew between recording the album and going on tour, is very good, although they have more of a indie rock "dude" vibe about them. Adam Reisch in particular can shred like a motherfucker. They played the album pretty much in its entirety, including the songs that are quickly becoming my favorites, "Ecce Homo" and "Upon Viewing Oregon's Landscape With The Flood Of Detritus;" as well as some of what are probably the "deeper cuts," like "Tried To Quit Smoking" and "(I Am) The Electric Man." Eric Harm's dad came up on stage to play a harmonica solo for "Smoking." He seemed nonplussed by the chaos below the stage; he's probably done this before. And they played pretty much everything you could hope for from their first two albums. And they played a kind of novelty song they'd said they'd been workshopping, a Headliners-esque number called "I've Got A Date Tonight."

They played for two euphoric hours, and the crowd kept pace, dancing around with reciprocal joy. There were beta-male types like yours truly (only, let's be honest, about five years younger on average) doing their fair of pushing and shoving, as well as a big ox of a guy who was tossing people around like The Thing plowing through a bunch of scrawny henchmen. At one point I realized I'd come close to colliding with the venerable Amy Klein. (Hey! I said). They didn't play any encores because they were basically out of songs. I went over and bought the new album as soon as they got off stage. I thought to myself: That was maybe, maybe the best thing I've ever seen.

Now to the hurricane.

Nina had left town for the weekend to celebrate her grandmother's birthday in Scranton, knowing that she might not be able to get back into the city until well into the following week if the storm proved to be severe. But we weren't anticipating anything worse than Hurricane Irene last year, even if the satellite photos of Sandy were pretty disconcerting. And we were in Zone B, whatever that means, only a block or so closer to the "danger zone" of the Gowanus flood plain than in our preious digs. I'd invited a bunch of people over on Sunday for a Hurricane Party I'd hoped would recall the cozy charm of the one Katharine had thrown during Irene last year, but my timing was wrong: It was a windy and cold that night, but it was clear that the real shit wasn't going down yet. There was no risk, you see. Tom and Ted came over and we watched Transmorphers.

Monday night was a different story. The wind and the rain picked up significantly after I got home from work. Nina called from Pennsylvania around eight o'clock to make sure I was okay. "Lower Manhattan is totally blacked out," she said, "and people are losing power all over Brooklyn." I had been curled up on the couch listening to the Titus Andronicus album on repeat, and I told her as much, but almost as soon as I had said it, the lights went out. It's funny (well, not really) the extent to which electricity is the lubricant of modern life. I had to do a quick prioritization: Get off the phone to save battery in case there's an emergency; shut down the laptop to save battery in case I get really bored; figure out which things in the fridge need to get eaten now, real business-like, in the dark. Strangely enough, there was one outlet in the kitchen that still seemed to be "live," and the lights in the hall stayed on throughout. I made the mistake of leaving the front door open to light the kitchen as I checked on various things, and Kitty ventured out into the hall and down the stairs, immediately becoming lost and terrified. When I picked her up to bring her back upstairs, she hooked her claws so deeply into the flesh of my shoulder that I had to sit down in the hall to undo her. At 8:30, I got the following "Extreme alert" on my cell phone:
Take Shelter Now
We'd been reviewing our disaster preparedness the previous week, and Nina'd unpacked a small battery-powered radio, plastic moldings in the shape of a 1950s jukebox. I took it out and plugged a nine-volt battery into it, and with some effort was able to tune it to a station that was still broadcasting in English, the hosts sort of sheepishly apologizing for the lack of content, as a festive pattern of LEDs danced up and down the side. At 9:30, I got another alert:
Go indoors immediately and remain inside.
I took a shit in the dark. My dad called to say his power was out as well. My mom had gone to California to visit her parents, so it was just us dudes, in the dark. Takin' shits.

The wind was strong enough to rattle the windows -- and to make the building actually sway perceptibly, but it didn't seem like a real hazard where I was. I kept craning my neck to get a better view through the window of what I was sure was going to be the Gowanus Canal surging up Union St., but that didn't happen. I could see into the candle-lit front rooms of the houses across the street, and everyone seemed to be doing okay. I gauged the neightborhood's access to power by the red light-up S.J. Fuel Co. sign on Third Ave. and Union. Eventually it went out as well, but not 'til very late.

I woke up the next morning to a cold apartment. I'd resisted Tom's offers the day before to spend the night at his house -- they're well uphill from me and never lost power -- but relented that morning and let him make me a very good omelette (artichoke and cherry tomatoes) at Lincoln Pl., even though being waited on like that made me feel slightly helpless. Business never stops, so I lugged my work laptop over there as well and spent the day examining source code and talking quietly on the phone, which is what I do now. Katharine came over to do the same (well, work), even though she still had electricity. It's not like she or I could have gone into our offices even if they'd been open: At this point, the impact on the sbway system is well publicized, and that morning there were prophets of doom on the radio and TV predicting that it could be upwards of six weeks before people from the outer boroughs would be able to cross the rivers on a train. Obviously, that was nothing compared to what happened to Breezy Point. You've seen the pictures. Tom and I took a walk down Union St. on Wednesday to survey the canal. Though it had flooded points west during the storm, it looked totally unremarkable that afternoon -- which didn't stop a gaggle of out-of-borough photographers from "documenting" it.

Our power stayed off for two more days and required an in-person visit from ConEd to fix -- which is nothing compared to what, for example, people in Red Hook are still enduring -- but the apartment really kind of... came back to life once there was juice again. On a chilly gray Saturday afternoon I took a long bus ride up to 42nd St. to get the 6 to rehearsal at the Practice Hole Mark II. The bus scene outside the Barclays Center was decidedly non-horrific, and the parts of downtown Brooklyn we passed looked very normal. But once I saw the blank weirdness of a dark Manhattan as the bus got onto the bridge, it was difficult to ignore, like a stain on a clean sheet. The bus' route took us up through a blacked-out Chinatown and then up through the East Village and onto Lexington Ave. We passed my parents' apartment, still without power, my mom still on vacation. (My dad said he was reading by candlelight and spending quality time with the cats.) We passed Chris' apartment, which, from the look of it, was still blacked out as well. At around 33rd St. there was a sharp cut-over to lights-back-on territory.

Chris was adamant that the blackout was the best thing that had happened to him in a long while, although his explanation for that assertion centered on not having to go to work. "Maybe you just like being uncomfortable," Billy suggested. But I could see what he meant when he and I took a walk through the "dark zone" later that night, down a section of Lexington Ave. where the intersections were illuminated by road flares diminishing into ashy red piles. The big apartment buildings with their lights out looked like dolmens rising out of an ancient forest. We bought some 22s and drank them on the side streets, tucking them behind our backs whenever a car drove by. Gradually we made our way back down to the twenties, where we found, to Chris' dismay, that the lights were starting to come back on.