Monday, October 27, 2014

A Cemetery In The Year 3030

Thursday was when the MSF guy checked himself into Bellevue and turned out to have Ebola. The announcement came around 7 PM, as I was preparing to leave work to meet Nina at Pianos for some CMJ acts. I watched the mentions of #EbolaNYC on Twitter begin to shoot up. 45 unread tweets. 180 unread tweets. It was strange to think that just ten blocks away from my office, there was a dude having a real bad time. (Or about to.) Oh no, I thought. People are gonna go nuts. I headed to Pianos anyway, the lineup mostly unevaluated except that I listened to some songs by Spookyland and thought they were pretty good. But by the time I got down there, he? they? had come and gone, and we were waiting for the next band.

Which turned out to be Ages And Ages, one of those ragtag folk music collectives with so many members that they were able to support two people playing rhythm guitar and one woman who had an assortment of musical props, like maracas and a cabasa. The main dude was having a hard time with his monitor and kept summoning the beleaguered sound lady over to fix it. In spite of all this, they were very good, I thought. They sounded a bit like Alan Price and The Animals: Strong vocals with pop sensibilities; rich arrangements. We stood up front, near a kid with a big backpack on, who before the band started had been standing up straight and holding a book about an inch away from his face. Now he was filming the set on his smartphone with the same posture and slack expression. A nerd out on the town. Part-way through the band's set, during a tuning between songs, a little South Asian guy pushed his way through the crowd carrying a bag full of tiny, light-up tambourines; clearly having taken advantage of the general chaos of CMJ. He was shaking them and offering them for purchase. The band started their next song, but the guy kept shaking the tambourines, out of time with the music and seemingly oblivious to the spectacle he was interrupting. He was like one of the toilet beer hawkers in Barcelona. One of the guitar players looked at him like what? I made eye contact with her. I know, right? I mimed.

When the set was over, we ducked downstairs to see what was happening on the ground floor stage. It was a trio of scruffy dudes making sad dude music. We didn't stay long. Nina established that Dr. Spencer had been hanging out at The Gutter, not Brooklyn Bowl. Thank god ?uestlove is safe, we said.

Instead, we went on the prowl for other new things. The lineup at Cake Shop didn't look promising, and Leftfield cost cash money to get in, so we cut over to Rivington and walked into Fat Baby, passing straight through the always-empty upstairs and down into the almost-empty performance space below. The band setting up was called Prom Body, and they were visiting New York for the first time from Arizona. The guys in the band had a sort of bar rock dirtbag look, and they were loud, so loud that you could feel it in your legs and the band's playing lost all articulation. But their songs were actually kind of okay indie rock type songs, and the main dude's voice was high and interesting, not what you'd expect after hearing his speaking voice. If they'd only turned down a bit they would'a been kind of okay. We stayed for their entire set, though, then caught the subway at East Broadway, passing a piece of graffiti around the corner from 169 Bar, a broken wine bottle in the style of Basquiat, underneath which: Fuck 169 Bar.

On Friday night I found myself at 169 Bar for Caitlin's going-away party. That place is true hell-on-earth bar, an explosion of tchotchkes and camp doo-dads, packed with Oxford-shirted douchebags, almost all male. There were drag queens dancing in cages. A 15 minute wait for the bathroom. Eventually the party became mobile and moved across town to an all-night dumpling place near the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. I veered off and headed for Canal St. to train home. I spent no less than 45 minutes on the platform waiting for a train, foolishly wearing my messenger bag overloaded with two laptops and a bunch of cables and other unnecessary junk. When the train finally arrived, I lurched forward from my lean against the wall, and found that my vision was getting fogged with a kind of yellow geometric static, the kind I used to self-induce as a kid by pressing on my eyeballs. It occupied more and more of my field of vision as the train pulled in, and by the time the doors were opening, I could barely see. This seems kind of dangerous, I thought, but I don't know when the next one's gonna come. I managed to board the train blind and get to a squatting position at the doors opposite the entrance, and my vision promptly returned. But I was all sweaty and felt weird. "Oh yeah," said Nina when I got home and described the experience. "That's what it feels like right before you faint."

Nina went to Pennsylvania on Saturday to visit her grandma, and I spent most of the day feeling hung over and run down. I managed to rally in the evening and flung myself back to Hell Square for the evening's festival offerings. I'd been aiming to catch pow wow! at Leftfield to say hi to Sal, my co-star from Vanderpuss, but they were off stage by the time I got there and I was unable to pick out any familiar faces in the red darkness of the basement. (I think the band might've been packing up outside when I left the bar, but I felt a pang of shyness and crossed to the other side of the street.) Next, I returned to Pianos, where Native America were wrapping up their set. They were good: punky, unpredictable garage pop; a lot of texture to their sound despite having only three dudes on stage. In particular, their bass player delivered a well-articulated, energetic performance, which somewhat justified how high he was turned up. A warm-blooded bass player; you don't see that every day.

But I'd come to see Future Punx, who were up next. I'd discovered them in the some concert listings as a result of some momentary, and, I think, justified confusion with Punks On Mars. Both bands share a highly affected art-school aesthetic, and produce cheeky pop arrangements; but where Punks On Mars is twisting Telephone Hour sock hop Americana, Future Punx imagines something more akin to Deltron 3030: A band like Television or Blondie or another of the prickly, proto-punk 70s acts battles for the human race in some kind of future dystopia. Or at least that's what I think it was all about. It was all very serious. The lead singer wore dark glasses. They set up a projector. An intense young woman played a keytar and managed to make it look cool. "This is post-wave," they chanted. The music was tight, somewhat dissonant electro-pop. A bald guy in a mink stole gyrated next to me. It was a great show.

No comments: