Northwave

It takes so long to write in my Internet diary! Did I really used to write three of these a week? I will try to be briefer.

Here is what I did at Northside this year: I met Beau on Friday to see Clouder at The Charleston. Beau's friends with Max, the bass player, who is also a member of a band called Quiet Loudly, which has Sal -- with whom I became friends during the filming of Vanderpuss -- playing drums. Clouder's not my 100% cup of tea musically, what with their being, like, a psychedelic garage quintent, but I'd seen them play a show at Death By Audio earlier this year, and they'd brought the house down. There was bottle-throwing, stage diving, gang vocals, and they weren't even the headliners. It made an impression on me. I hadn't been to the Charleston since I saw, uh, Baby Erection there last year. Bel Argosy had been meaning to reach out, but then someone told us not to bother booking a show there since the owners were gonna renovate and re-open it as a gay bar. I don't think that happened, although I'm not totally sure I could tell the difference? That basement performance area is still hell of scuzzy. I got dripped on by a leak in the ceiling that had accumulated a little white mineral stalactite like some particularly neglected bit of subway infrastructure. Clouder were great, though, their spooky lead singer Eric in top form, wailing and vamping like Robert Smith with better hair. I sang along to Telepathic Lines, my favorite song off their new record, but the room wasn't, you know, packed, so I kept it tentative. In particular I wanted to not be like this gross dude at the front who kept making a nuisance of himself. He was an Uncle Fester-looking guy wearing surgical scrubs and doing some complicated multimedia shit with a smartphone the whole time, leaning in and taking videos and close-up pictures of the band. Chris and his friend Clint showed up and we all bailed to go drink beers at The Bedford on North 11th St., a place I'd only ever gone inside for to piss. It's got a nice little back yard, but the tables were packed with smirking yuppies wearing laminated Northside Festival lanyards, so we sat on the ground in a corner by some garbage. Chris left with Clint on the promise of a birthday party with 22-year-old girls in attendance; Nina showed up and she and Beau and I walked down Bedford Ave. eating ice cream.

Oh, so I've already hit one of my marks for the summer: Last weekend, Nina and Tom and I went down to Coney Island to take in a sideshow and some rides. That wasn't the line item -- it's more specific than that. First, the freaks: They rotate the cast out, so while there was a familiar face or two (notably Serpentina, doing exactly the same shit as the last time we saw her), I didn't see Heather Holliday or The Black Scorpion. Ray Valenz, who talks and juggles, did a very convincing oh-no-I'm-juggling-too-many-knives routine even as he took 11 (!) bites out of an apple. A nice lady named Insectavora did some pretty bad-ass fire-breathing but no voring of insecta. Then, rides. Context: When Nina and I went down to Brighton Beach late last summer, I was too squeamish (and full of Uzbek food) to enter The Ghost Hole, but I'd resolved that I would conquer it next time. Which was now! I've described for you the, uh, display they have out in front of the Hole. That was still there, and some poor carny'd gotten stuck with the job of catching the effluvial run-off from the display in a bucket. The diarrhea box is not, as it turns out, a fully "closed system."

But yeah, I plumbed the depths of The Ghost Hole. That Wikipedia page (as of this writing) is more or less accurate on the experience of the ride itself. Your little cart wobbles along through the darkness, occasionally swiveling to one side or the other, and you are presented with a series of somewhat animated dioramas. Strangely, there's not a lot of supernatural content -- the stuff you see is largely concerned with punishments of the flesh. There's a mannequin in an electric chair; a mannequin throwing up endlessly into a barrel; a mannequin wrapped in blood-spattered plastic sheeting and hung upside-down. Is the Ghost Hole a moral fable for the American Panopticon? Analyze it, Klosterman. Unfortunately, the carts only seat two, so Tom had to wait for our cart to get far enough ahead so that he could board, and then he had to go solo. There's a section of the ride where the cart emerges briefly onto a balcony overlooking the ticker-holders line, and I wonder if he could see me cringingly gripping Nina's upper arm -- the Hole is not without its shocks.

And I did love it, from its this-way-to-the-egress hokiness to the bored, sardonic mien of the carnies running it, so much so that I dragged Tom and Nina into Dino's Wonder Wheel so that we could ride Coney Island's other haunted house ride, the Spook-a-Rama. Tom demurred this time, but Nina, trouper that she is, got into the tea cup with me and off we went again into the darkness. The Spook-a-Rama is a step up from the Ghost Hole in almost every way: It's more thematically consistent and more focused on, you know, spooks and the spooky, and it's more polished, with little bits of flair like lenticular prints that have old-timey portraits from one angle that turn ghost-y as you pass by. True, you could actually smell the latex that the floppy monster masks were made of, but there was also more shit in there that actually moved around. Or lunged at you, even -- several components of the ride involved gusts of air to the face or stuff grazing the top of your head. And Nina felt sure that the one of the scares at the beginning of the ride was actually just a dude in the dark bellowing in our faces.

After that we dicked around with some of the shitty arcade machines around the entrance to the Wonder Wheel itself. Tom was hell-bent on us getting pictures taken in this little photo booth machine that lets you experiment with different virtual hair-styles (read: floating, superimposed hair GIFs), but the machine wouldn't take our money, and so we conspired with a gang of kids to cheat at the arm-wrestling machine. Later, we tried to make it to Totonno's Pizza for dinner, but they were closing right when we showed up, so sure enough we wound up on Brighton 4th at Elza. In a bit of weird coincedence, our old Pacific Standard trivia-mates Mark and Lisa entered the restaurant. I wish I could say that we branched out more on the menu, but we stuck with some known-to-be-delicious fare like plov and manti and eggplant hye. Tom ordered stuffed cabbage. We got some seaweed salad to go. It was all so very good.

On Tuesday I went out to Bushwick to see The So So Glos play a free show at Shea Stadium, which might be the city's last punk venue. (Which classification I'm bestowing on it in part because of its lack of A/C and the grossness of the bathrooms.) I'd been wanting to see them play since becoming dimly aware of them as, you know, genre-buddies with Titus Andronicus; and then really intensely wanting it after seeing the video for My Block. The band that was on when I got there was called Darlings and despite their name -- seriously, is there, like, a really short list of un-Googleable names that mopey young bands have to choose from? -- they were great. Their lead singer has a snotty, Julian Casablancas affect to him, and the band plays punchy garage rock, catchy lo-fi hooks over a hard, urgent beat. "Stick around for The So So Glos," their frontman said, pronouncing it SOH-suh-glos. (I'd been wondering how to say it.) The 'Glos were just... phenomenal, and so was the crowd. The band sounds exactly like something I'd given up looking for years ago: Tightly orchestrated, literate punk rock with a sneering, mush-mouthed lead singer. Despite the considerable heat, they were all wearing jeans and long-sleeve shirts. That's Clash-level commitment. The audience reciprocated. Everybody was dancing and pogo-ing around, which made Shea Stadium's creaky wood floor flop up and down like a trampoline.