Hallowe'en

I've been watching AMC's monster movie marathon. It's pretty great. I love cable TV!

What am I gonna do for Halloween, though? I feel like this past weekend was pretty much it for the grown-up Halloween festivities, except for kind of institutional things like the parade. I'm not dressing up, I think. The time for that is passed. But I did buy this perfectly hideous pirate skull dealie to hang on our front door, and Randy bought some candy. I'm hoping we can hand some out to trick-or-treaters, but I really don't know for sure whether there'll be in our building (although there are plenty of kids). Este hogar es Catolico and that.

I did go to a rock show last weekend, though, over at Otto's Shrunken Head. I was there to see the delightful Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, who were playing there because it the place was doing some kind of rockabilly night? They're not really a rockabilly band, though. Not sure. Anyhow, all the bands' MySpace pages gave different times for the start of the show, and the venue's site listed them at the bottom of the list of bands, which typically means they go on first, but I couldn't believe they'd be opening for all these bands I'd never heard of, so I decided to arrive squarely in the middle of the show and just trust to providence. I get there just as this band called The Deadneks is going on, and they've got this big merch table set up, and I start doing these panicky mental calculations about how many bands could've gone on since I showed up. Plus I'd seen the frontman for DFHC, Dave, wandering around the crowd in full makeup, which was weird, because they usually do a whole intro where he gets into costume and then comes out from behind something, like a speaker cabinet or a door or something. You know, pageantry.

There was a guy standing in front of me, a sort of hulking, bald, impassive, baby-faced lump, wearing one of those glossy jackets that skinheads wear; I've found that this type is, oddly enough, a fixture at small punk shows. Maybe he was a skinhead. But he was talking to this girl whose boyfriend, I think, had temporarily abandoned her, and I overheard the following snippet of conversation:

"Yeah, so the body was on the tracks, but they found the head up in the engine."

"The engine! Do you get a lot of suicides on the LIRR?"

"Well, Metro North, but, yeah."

A little while later, this man and two women were standing behind me, and I overheard them complaining about how they couldn't see because of how tall I was. I turned around and sort of mumbled an apology and stepped to one side. They were a little embarrassed, and the guy said, "Oh, hey, that's the same guy who was fixing the mousetrap!" What? I said. "You were over there earlier," he said, pointing at one of the couches, "fixing this box" -- "It was an effects pedal," said one of the women. That wasn't me, I said. "Really?" he said. "Maybe you're wearing a disguise now." Yeah, I said. That's my costume. I'm a tall guy who goes to a show.

Anyway, The Deadneks weren't very good, although their lead singer had a kind of cool Chelsea smile and their bass player was playing an awesome, shiny white electric upright bass with a wireless transmitter, and he'd kind of walk it out of the room and up and down the hall by the bathrooms. But they were a bit too screamy and the songs weren't very clever and the guitar and bass weren't tight enough. After them came the Memphis Morticians, who were actually pretty okay although none of their songs had any really catchy hooks.

DFHC did come on after that, thank the fuck Christ, and they were incredible. As usual, inexplicably, the crowd thinned out by about half as they were going on, but the band was impeccable -- ungodly energetic, given the hour, and just really precise and tight. It might have been the best performance of theirs that I've seen so far. Dr. Fangs pogoed into the audience as soon as they started, and everybody was dancing around vigorously -- one lanky, preternaturally tall dude in a leather jacket (not me, believe it or not), jumped on Dr. Fangs' back and rode him around (he's a pretty big guy) for several numbers. People crashed into the instruments, prompting facetious admonition from the band members, who were themselves tossing and kicking their guitars around on the beer-slopped floor. As an encore, they covered Psycho by The Sonics, which is a pretty great song for them, I think. There was even some crowd surfing, though the venue hardly had the room for it -- this shrimpy bespectacled kid in a blazer got boosted up and thrown around for a bit. After the band quit the stage, he somehow wound up with the mic and explained that although it was his birthday that night, "it's all about the music."

Lucretia Secretions was absent, no explanation given.

On my way out, I saw Dave pooped out on a stool near the bar. He looked exhausted, understably. "You guys were amazing," I said. He muttered something appreciative. These guys might be the spiritual heirs to The Dickies. And it's just as well, 'cuz I don't think those guys are going on tour or putting out any records any time soon.