America!

Summer continues, and with it the procession of predictably awesome shows. To wit: I went to go see Art Brut at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday. I'd been looking forward to seeing them, well, ever since the last time I saw them, a couple of years ago at Brooklyn Bowl, but then I got word that my friend (well, friend-of-a-friend) Doug's band, MiniBoone, was going to be opening! A word about them: I'd seen them live once before, when we opened for them at our very first show, and thought that they were a fun, sloppy, party band. But that show had been marked by electrical outages and audio failures, and so it probably wasn't a good example of what they're like live. Because they should themselves to be crazy tight and hooky on Thursday -- no easy feat when you've got five guys on stage and they're each playing three different instruments. Their drummer in particular impressed me with his extreme precision and effortless cool.

After MiniBoone was Reptar, a kind of electro-clash dance punk band. They were actually very good, despite the fact that they had two drummers and that one of the keyboard players had a whole bunch of twisty, silly braids in his hair and performed their set wearing some kind of house dress. I liked their singer, too. He was a small guy with a high, nasal voice that put me in mind of Leonard Graves Phillips, never a bad thing.

Art Brut's roadie came out amid anticipatory chants of "Art! Brut! Top of the pops!" and tuned several guitars. And then the bass player, drummer, and guitar players came out and took their places on the stage. There's a sort of back stage area at Music Hall of Williamsburg, with a door that opens directly onto the stage. Eddie Argos lingered in the doorway for a moment by himself, framed dramatically in the blue light of the stairwell behind him, before running out to join the band. "The last time we were here, this place was still called Northsix!" he said. "Ready, Art Brut?" They kicked off their set with a song from "Brilliant! Tragic!" called "Clever, Clever Jazz," which I thought was a funny introduction for what's arguably a pretty arty, weird band. And then they played "My Little Brother," updating the age of Eddie's little brother to "only twenty-nine." He's out of control! Traditionally, that song's got a breakdown in which Argos explains that all of the records they're listening to have the same theme -- "Why don't our parents worry about us?" -- and gave that speech this time, too, except he also went on to point out that, given that his brother's getting married and settling down, their parents are more worried about him (Eddie) since he's been playing in a rock band for the past nine years and they seem to have peaked (his words) a few years back. I'll take his word for it, but their set was tight as fuck. The band still seems to be having fun, especially Jasper and Ian, who bopped around the stage and off of each other throughout. Eddie took frequent breaks during songs to address the audience, which seemed to amuse him as much as it did us. During "Modern Art," he began his customary monologue by saying, "This is the part where I'd usually end the song by diving into the crowd, but since I got a bit too heavy for that a few years ago, I'll just climb down here." With a roadie spooling out microphone cable behind him, he hopped down off the stage and waded into the center of the audience, all the while extemporizing about his first experience seeing a Van Gogh up close for the first time. "You know, when I wrote this song, I'd only been two art galleries," he observed, to good-natured laughter. When he got to the center of the room, he stopped. "Alright, everybody," he said. "Now sit down." And, in acknowledgement of his breezy control of his audience, we all sat or crouched down on the floor, and he went on with the story. The band continued to fill in the song's low, bouncy melody, gradually rising in volume as Eddie wrapped things up, and returning to full power as he bounded back up on stage and we all stood up.

There was the obligatory "Art! Brut! Top of the pops!" and "MiniBoone! Top of the pops!" and "Reptar! Top of the pops!" And, as usual, somewhat confusingly, there was also "We Are Scientists! Top of the pops!" They closed with a very satisfying performance of "Alcoholics Unanimous." "We are Art Brut! Thank you! We love you! Be excellent to each other!"

That Saturday we saw our first Celebrate Brooklyn show of the summer -- The Heavy at the Prospect Park bandshell. I accepted Katharine's invitation before giving them a listen, and when I did I was kind of apprehensive. Oh man, I thought, these are the guys that did that car commercial song. But they turned out to be great! I got to the park as their openers, The London Souls, were finishing their set. They weren't that great: A bunch of hipsters wearing fancy collared shirts and playing Blues Hammer-style rock. Towards the end of their set they covered "Folsom Prison Blues," which just seemed unnecessarily risky: That song gets its intensity from its lyrical tone and from its simple dynamics; it's not a good fit for splashy rock-and-roll drumming and distorted guitar. And it's such an iconic song, that you better bring your 'A' game if you cover it -- which they didn't.

Celebrate Brooklyn's gotten a lot fancier since the last time I went there. They've got crazy prominent branding on everything, and they're really pushing their tiered pricing model -- the low end of that being free, of course, but with a premium end that apparently includes special seating areas with table service from the fancy food vendors who've set up outposts in the park: The Farm on Adderley had set up a full-service thatched-wood kitchen to the left of the bandshell. And there were beer tents on either side serving Hoegaarden along with Bud Lite Lime. And yet it wasn't awful. I remember it being an ordeal to see a show there a few years ago: squatting in the dog shit-smelling earth on the hill sloping up to the road, getting chomped by bugs, straining to see the stage. But this time around, it just felt cleaner, clearer, bigger. I munched on a clutch of fried asparagus while I waited for my friends to arrive.

Kelvin Swaby took the stage flanked by a black-suited horn section on his right and a trio of backup singers wearing cocktail dresses on his left. The band's got a hip, classy, neo-soul aesthetic, and he's got an amazing voice, alternately raspy and smooth, with an attitude to match: Between racing up and down the stage and bearing down on the mic, Swaby mock-chided the audience for making him sweat. "Y'all going to make me get naked!" he said. Sure enough, as the stage got hotter, he stripped down from a suit jacket and tie to his undershirt, but his voice held up. And to their credit they held off on playing their car commercial song until the encore.

Afterwards we killed two waterbugs and then got drinks at The Gate. I ordered a pizza, the Ippolito special: Pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives. It is delicious.

The inexorable march of days: July 4th. I set my alarm for 10 AM in preparation for heading down to Coney Island for the Hot Dog Barfing Contest, failing to take into account the repercussions of my meal the previous night. We'd been having a night out with Winnie and Evan, and sat down for fried things at The Commodore, where I did battle with a scaldingly spicy sandwich which left me sweating embarrassingly about the face parts but ultimately victorious. Tasting it, Evan wagged his finger at me: "That's going to be trouble later on," he said. It wasn't, that night -- we continued on to the Bushwick Country Club, where I ran into Joe, a friend of mine from a previous job, and where I took advantage of the PBR-and-Old Crow special.

But it was trouble later on. And so it was after some stinging discomfort in the bathroom that I dragged myself, groggy and dyspeptic, down to Coney Island for the contest. Knowing I'd been standing in the hot sun, cheek-to-jowl with a pushing, shoving, inconsiderate mass of humanity, I applied sunblock and iced tea to myself in generous quantities, and I brought with me the copy of David Peace's Nineteen Eighty I was reading, which gave the proceedings a bleak and corporeal cast. Conspicuously missing from the event was, obviously, Takeru Kobayashi, whose public feud with the International Federation of Competitive Eating continues (he staged a parallel feat of endurance at a bar in Manhattan); but so was Eric "Badlands" Booker and "Crazy Legs" Conti, two of the more recognizable faces from previous years. In their places were a bunch of chubby white also-rans, as well as, notably, a contingent of Chinese competitive eaters decked out in (tongue-in-cheek, perhaps) matching red jumpsuits. But two of my favorite perennial runners-up, Eater X and Patrick Bertoletti, the Chi-town hipster who looks like Tony Clifton with a mohawk, and whose technique, in a rare deviation from the ubiquitous Solomon Method, involves mashing the hot dogs into a revolting pink paste with both hands and then cramming the resulting fistfuls into his mouth. Not surprisingly, Joey Chestnut claimed victory, but Bertoletti was a reasonably close second. Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas took the prize in the new, separate, women's category. Which I guess they created because there were so many eager female competitors? Ick.

Chris had led me to believe he'd be up for a trip to Brighton Beach, but when the early part of the day turned out to be kind of overcast, he bailed. I'd bought a pair of swim trunks from Target in preparation, though, and was determined to use them, and so Nina (who'd done likewise) and I ventured forth in search of a public pool. The one at Degraw and 3rd Ave. was supposed to re-open after a routine bit of maintenance at four o'clock, but when we got there at 4:15 we found the gates closed and groups of would-be splashers crowded outside the chain-link fence watching a team of lifeguards who were huddled together at one end of the pool. One of the lifeguards came over to explain things.

"We've got a minor sanitation issue with the pool," she said. "It'll be open again at 4:30." Nina wanted to know, if nobody minded, what was the actual problem? "Take a guess," said the lifeguard. Oh no, we thought. Nina had to be sure: "Is it a poop?" she asked. "Is there a poop in the pool?" The lifeguard nodded. "They're drawing straws to see who has to fish it out. That's why I came over here," she said. "I don't even want to be in the running for that." After some soul-searching, we decided we probably weren't cool with swimming in a pooped-in pool even after the turd in question had been removed (despite the fact that we've almost certainly done so unwittingly in the past), and so we slung our towels over our shoulders and trudged southwest to Red Hook Park to have a look at the pool there. (We ran into Mike, another former co-worker, in Gowanus.) But that pool was overflowing with kids and their families, and we made excuses to each other about the oozy blisters on our feet not passing mster with the ill-tempered Parks Department attendants in order to punk out.

"Let me show you something," Nina said, back at our apartment, with both of us wedged head-to-foot into our bathroom tub, the sun long since set. "Tilt your head back. Lie back until your ears are under the water." I obeyed, the lukewarm water muffling the sound of her voice. "It feels like your whole body's floating, doesn't it?"

It did!