That's The Crip Side

This year's Northside Festival is wrapping up. Here's what I did:

Bel Argosy played a show at Legion Bar on Thursday, which is owned by the same people (and has sort of the same checkered-tile floor aesthetic) as K & M. That same Monday we played our final Otto's residency show, to an audience that just barely outnumbered the band. There would've been slightly more people in attendance but the newly-installed door guy booted my sister and her friend, whose fake IDs couldn't pass muster with his hand-held scanner. He also had a decidedly non-casual approach to the night's lineup -- "Where's 'Princess Robot?'" he asked, as we were loading in. "No idea," said Beau -- so maybe it's best that we're winding that down.

The Legion show was the opposite. Initially there was some confusion over whether the show was going to be part of the Festival proper; it ended up not being, but we still got a huge draw, thanks in no small part to my South Brooklyn friends who all came out, traveling one stop further on the L than I am sure they are comfortable with. I think we sounded pretty great! Plus we made friends with our opener, a guitar-drums deal called Silicone Sister, who played with virtuosic abandon reminiscent of Ken South Rock. What is it with these two-pieces? Apparently no combo is better. Like Ken from KSR, I think the guitar player in Silicone Sister plugged himself into a bass amp, which gave him a really deep, rich guitar tone, and he could fucking sing like Ozzy. We're looking to play another show with them soon.

On Friday, Nina and I went to Shea Stadium for the Practical Alchemy show. Lucky Dragons were headlining, and I'd liked the lo-fi edge on some of their weird, experimental songs enough to brave an entire evening of "electronic music," which is not, you know, my favorite.

Before I get to that, though, I've got an important behavioral edict: All adults, stop playing video games on your phones. Seriously, at best you look like an idiot when you do this. The adult baby we were sitting across from on the G on the way to Shea was worse, because he was playing some kind of phone game while riding the train with his girlfriend. Really, guy? You can't hold off on the fucking Angry Birds for the thirty minutes it takes you to get to wherever you're going? His girlfriend kept trying to show him stuff from the magazine she was reading. "Uh huh," he said, not looking up from his toy. "Uh huh."

We arrived at Shea Stadium towards the end of a set by a duo called duYun -- or maybe that was just the name of the girl who was singing? From what I read about her afterwards, she's a classical composer who also does a lot of experimental electronic stuff, and she's clearly got the vocal chops for the former. She sang in a strong falsetto over a clattery, lo-fi electronic beat her co-performer laid down. After she finished, we took some time to walk around and have a booze. The Stadium has gone through a bit of remodeling since the last time I was there: It's gotten a colorful new paint job (the drawing of the naughty kitty's been replaced with a kind of mandala with the Shea Stadium logo) and they're now selling fancy liquor at their bar, but I think it's still got a kind of cool, scuzzy appeal.

Next up was Ryat, another duo with a lady singer and dude on keyboards. The lady had a sweet, warbly voice, and a very endearing lisp. Her compatriot (DJ? I don't know how this works) seemed like he was sampling her voice during the song and letting it feed back as she sang, so that at times it wasn't clear which part was actually live. Their set was accompanied by some beautiful geometric visualizations projected on the wall behind them. There was another girl kind of hiding in the background with a laptop whose job I think it was to coordinate these with the music.

After them was Wires Under Tension, another two-piece. This time it was one dude on drums and another guy playing violin. The drummer was undeniably talented -- a real Keith Moon type who was playing a whole lot of complex, never-ending fills -- but for some reason I just wasn't feeling their songs. Maybe it was the showboating on the drums; maybe it was the super-serious attitude of the violin player, which gave them a strong "guitar teacher band" vibe. They just didn't rock.

And we didn't stick around for Lucky Dragons because by that time my eyes were closing and I'd resorted to crouching on one of contagious-looking couches lined up against the wall. Nina graciously helped me down the stairs and westwards to Bushwick Ave., where she called Bushwick Car Service. Within two minutes, a livery car pulled up. "Bushwick?" the driver asked. But he wasn't from Bushwick. He was from "State," which, we came to learn, is far inferior. The driver, who looked every bit the part of Oscar de Leon -- slack, chubby face; Coke-bottle glasses -- insisted on punching our address into his cruddy GPS and couldn't be convinced that its directions weren't gospel. And then we had to explain that he'd put in our address wrong and that we didn't want to go to 4th Pl. in Carroll Gardens. When it finally seemed like we were on track to get home, he switched on a Christian "rock" radio station and turned it way up. Babies, that is some weak sauce. I remember (possibly incorrectly) that you used to be able to tell a Christian band by the absence of, you know, fun, in their lyrics. But the shit they were playing on this shitty station was literally all about the same fucking thing. I swear I heard the line "You are the only one / Who makes the moon reflect the sun" at least twice in different songs. Do Christians really need to hear about Christ twenty-four hours a day? Or, as I quipped to Nina, shouldn't there be topic-specific rock radio for every subject? If I'm sick of hearing about Christ, shouldn't I be able to spin the dial a little bit to the left and get to hear twenty songs in a row about bananas? Finally delivered to our corner, we stepped off the curb and a waterbug almost crawled right up Nina's leg. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

On Saturday, Tom and I hopped the yellow down to Coney Island for the Mermaid Parade. I'm not going to lie: My interest in the event was largely prurient. And why not? As (I think) William Murderface has argued, isn't a mermaid just a fish... with tits (tittyfish)? In fact, I don't know if there's a good way to be a dude in the parade as opposed to being on the sidelines ogling. Certainly it's not what I saw one Tim Robbins-lookalike doing, strutting paunchy and hairless down Surf Ave., naked save for a sea green thong and a fanny pack. And I don't think the Mermaid Parade really needs a mile long section of guys inching their cruddy muscle cars down the street, one arm out the window wobbling a big garish trophy they won who cares where, pausing every few hundred feet to scream and slap at their kids in the back seat. Maybe the best you can do is be like the guy Tom and I dubbed "Seaweed Dude," a laid-back beardo in a green poncho with a bunch of fabric strips attached to it: Get high, don't be creepy, don't try too hard, maybe hand out some beads. Our fellow spectators included a horny little gnome who was (ugh) videotaping everything, a drunk old lady who was pinching the bottoms of any mermaids who approached the barricades, and a trio of guys who looked like high school soccer coaches -- buzz cuts, sun glasses, missing bicuspids -- who had an enormous German Shepherd with them and kept yelling out their opinions of the ladies and the gay guys in the Parade.

That evening, after sharing a plate of "Irish nachos" with assembled Park Slope types at Dram Shop, I heaved myself back to North Brooklyn to see a show at The Trash Bar. I'd thought to take advantage of my proximity to the G train -- it's been running down here for two years, but I still think of it as a trick that I can hop it direct to Metropolitan Ave. instead of taking the yellow lines up to Union Sq. Not tonight, though. I waited for an hour before the conductor of an F train yelled to me and the other stragglers that we'd have to take his F to Jay St. and then hoof it to Hoyt-Schermerhorn. I began to do this, but, performing a back-of-the-napkin calculation on my way up the stairs from the Jay St. station, realized I'd never make it before the end of the show. I turned towards Flatbush and started on a long, disconsolate trudge home, when a yellow cab pulled up alongside me on the abandoned Downtown Brooklyn alley. Huzzah! I zipped to Trash and got there just in time for the beginning of a set from SHAPES, who were the only band I really wanted to see anyway.

They're a four-piece of young dudes who look like they ride skateboards with a lead singer with a face like Bill Fichtner and who wore black shorts short enough that they bordered on indecent. Their first song was a bit worrisome; it went something like, "Indie rock is just this game we play, and we all think it's really important, but it's not actually that important." (I'm paraphrasing.) I was like, oh no. But then I settled into it -- I bought a whiskey to make sure I felt enough like someone's weird dad -- and it turned out that the guy could carry a tune. His voice had this hoarse, melodic intensity, and the band sounded pretty great, too. They're described on their web site as being "glam punk," but I thought they had more of a Jersey beer hall singalong quality to their music. In fact, to their credit, I could have sworn they borrowed a small piece of guitar pyrotechnics from Titus Andronicus' "A More Perfect Union." The crowd was great, too, lots of exuberant kids. One guy took his shirt off -- the better to mosh, I guess -- and a bemused-looking girl strode up and took his hand for a fast, jittery waltz.