Blowout

One last heat wave, one last end-of-summer show. Nina and I went to go see The So So Glos with Diarrhea Planet at Shea Stadium. The 'Stadium, despite its many charms, is a venue ill-suited to warm-weather punk-rocking, what with its enormous but non-functioning air conditioner, and puny, apartment-grade refridgerator, barely able to chill its cache of sticky PBR cans. So when it actually gets, you know, hot, the place is a fucking sauna. It's hard to describe how hot it gets. Like... very, very hot. They've got industrial-looking standing fans at either side of the stage, but they're not very effective.

Despite their name (which evokes, you know... sludge) Diarrhea Planet is a guitar rock band, the kind with four guitar players who play bright, complex, synchronized solos; angling the headstocks of their guitars over a well of grasping hands. They've got a downright prog-rock sound, and, evidently, a ton of fans: The place was packed. By the middle of their set, the room had gotten so hot that I had to mop my big Scottish forehead with my t-shirt several times a minute, and the parts the shirt I was using to mop were soaked through. It was gross! I felt like I must've been the sweatiest guy in the room, but there were a ton of people dancing in the pit and going up, so there must have been wetter people. A friendly girl who looked a bit like Overly Attached Girlfriend tried to pogo with me. She must not have seen Nina glowering at her, nor realized that I'm basically too old to rock and roll.

When D. Planet finished up, we made a fast break for the stairs. It was warm outside on Meadow St. but chilly in comparison to the sauna upstairs, and you could move around and flap your clothes to cool off. The house manager shooed us away from the door lest the cops take notice of the venue, so we took a few loops around the neighborhood to check out the scene at The Acheron and (for my part) to gaze wistfully at the crumbling loft apartment buildings on Meserole St. Imagine living there! It would be so much easier to forget that you exist. "Warehouse Disneyland," says Nina. The So So Glos had already played a song or two by the time we got back upstairs. Oddly enough, the place had cleared out a bit. (Could 'Planet be a bigger draw than the 'Glos? They were on Letterman!) But they played a great set, stuffed with old (Fred Astaire, from Low Back Chain Shift) and new (Lost Weekend) songs, and closed the night with their single (Son Of An American). They make a funny on-stage assortment: a pair of friendly Bay Ridge meatheads; a quiet virtuoso; smaller guy with a firebrand temper. But their songs and arrangements are personal and fun, and the band is so confident that their shows feel like hanging out with friends. I stuck around after the show to pick up a hard copy of Blowout. Which is a very good album, by the way, articulate and earnest, full of catchy songs and bombastic singing. If there's anything wrong with it, it's that it never feels like the band's not in complete control. The stand-out tracks are the ones where Alex Levine sounds like he's really got something urgent to communicate: Diss Town, Son Of An American, All Of The Time.

What else do I do besides write this journal of not-exactly-cutting-edge rock-and-roll show-going? I work at my job. I try to make a video game. And every Tuesday I go to Bad Movie Night, at Tom's or Emma's or sometimes our house. When it's a home game, I leave work early and Nina and I scramble to clean the house (vacuum the couch, do the dishes, clean the cat litter) and purchase and set out snacks: Almonds, kri kri, maybe some kind of gross Haribo with an oblique German name. Maybe some popcorn. We only buy a single six-pack of beer because everybody else always brings so much. It's a really bright spot in my week. I think I've explained my movie selection process before: I like the ones that express a truly incoherent or alien worldview -- most often that means sexploitation "comedies" or low-budget horror movies. Tom got me a big collection of the former for my birthday, and we've been mining it steadily for the past several weeks. A couple of good ones:

• My Chauffeur: We've been calling this one "Female Chauffeur." An impulsive young woman takes a job as a chauffeur, ruffling the feathers of her male colleagues. In this capacity she meets a volatile executive, gets him hooked on booze, and begins a sexual relationship with him. Later we find out that they are brother ad sister. Penn Jillette performs an eleven minute racist monologue in the back of a limo.
• Cavegirl: A initially sympathetic nerd on a high school archaeology (?) trip gets transported back in time by, uh, crystals to what must be pre-historic Africa, where he meets a hot "cavegirl" (as well as stone-age counterparts of his classmates) and aggressively pressures her into sleeping with him. There is a "B" plot about the government using the crystals to create some kind of weapon. I don't know.

Emma chipped in, too, with a gift of a very early Johnny Depp-Rob Morrow movie called Private Resort (also feauring Hector Elizondo and Andrew Dice Clay), where the two play sex-crazed teenagers slobbering over various women at a resort hotel. Elizondo's character is running some kind of scam, but it's hard to follow and doesn't really matter. The movie is shameful trash, and it's an amusing exercise to point out how creepy its depictions of sexual dynamics are. At the beginning of the movie, a fat little kid pulls off a woman's bikini with a fishhook, then eavesdrops on Depp and Morrow planning a tryst with a married woman. "Boy, I'd pay to see this," he says to the camera, arching an eyebrow.