Oderus & Eve

Wedding season continues. This month, Eve and Jon got married! They did it in Fishkill, up by the Dia:Beacon art space. We took the Metro North train there on Friday night and hopped a cab to what appeared to be the hotel district. Our Days Inn had a sad, unplugged popcorn machine in lobby, but our destination for the evening was across the street at a Ruby Tuesday, where the groom was holding court. We'd just missed Eve, who'd gone to bed early with a high fever, a pretty shitty bit of business though she dealt with it like a champ. We slurped whiskey with Jon and Sean and Kate and tried to be the life of the party. I made a spontaneous joke about a Roman senator combing K-Y out of a horse's tail that made Sean laugh. "Remember that joke I made about the horse?" I asked Nina several times as we were going to bed, still drunk. "I think that was a pretty good one," I said.

The next morning I ate a misshapen waffle in the lobby's breakfast nook with a co-ed soccer team and brought a Danish back up to the room for Nina. A little kid had thrown up in the stairwell. We dressed ourselves and headed out. The buses they'd chartered dropped us off at the Mount Gulian historic site, a sloping green lawn below a handsome stone manor house. It was chilly, but the bride and groom had thoughtfully set out canteens of hot cider (with a bottle of Maker's for those what wanted a spike), which actually made everything feel cozy. They got married by their friend Doug in the middle of the field, looking out over a small pond. After the ceremony, we walked down the hill to the barn for dinner. The rafters were decked out with fairy lights and twigs with small red berries (holly?). There were several great toasts, many of which called out Eve for her bravery. They weren't wrong -- she is brave, a veritable Starbuck of social justice. Some toast-giver mentioned but did not dwell upon the fact that the couple began their relationship as members of a pub trivia team. I guess that's not the weirdest way to go about it. I've heard of weirder things. I knew that something like this would happen when I saw them both taking beer-tasting notes and scatter-plotting the performance of other teams.

Jon being a vegetarian, they'd had the caterers mostly follow suit. It was the easiest wedding food I ever homphed! What wasn't easy was dancing after eating, but we did it anyway, venturing outside at times for hot pie when we needed a break from the now-steamy barn. Eve danced all night despite her ill health. We danced her around the room on a chair. I made Doug carry me around the room in his arms. And then later as I'd promised Sean, I took my tie off and tied it around my forehead, like a "party guy." He did the same thing, but nobody else would do it. After things wound down in the barn, the buses reappeared and took us to a place called Max's On Main in downtown Beacon, a little bar type place that served cheese-based bar foods. The wedding party swamped it. There was a musical act doing their thing at one end of the room, their thing being two-person acoustic covers of heavy metal songs: Run To The Hills, Crazy Train.

And then there was day-after wedding business: Brunch, a friendly car ride back to Brooklyn. I got a nose bleed going over the Brooklyn Bridge.

The following Tuesday we'd bought tickets to see Gwar (!) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. My co-workers Caitlin and Kevin joined us after some prompting, and we assembled after work and met Nina at the venue in time to see the second band on the bill. They were called Devil Driver; the lead singer was this long-haired beardy guy, an old-man-of-metal type dude who kept saying it was "the Halloween season." He was using this custom microphone that looked like one of those soda guns that bartenders use, or like a control pad for a freight elevator, but it was all lit up inside, and it seemed to be causing all sorts of problems with the sound system at the venue -- it was feeding back into the amps and his vocals kept cutting out. He was pretty upset about it ("Can't hear a fuckin' thing!" "Fix the fucking sound, sound man!") but wouldn't switch mics until practically the end of the set, at which point everything cleared up.

"Who am I kidding?" he said. "We're all here tonight in the Halloween season for one thing: To see Gwar!"

A few words about Gwar: I'd known about them since I was in junior high, but didn't think of them as, you know, accessible, until much later. Maybe it was that appearance on Jerry Springer, but I guess I bought the myth that the monster costumes were part of a twisted, deeply underground counter-culture. What kind of perverts would pay money to get jizzed on by naked guys wearing spike armor?! I had a similarly naive view of the Crimson Ghost stencil-sprayed onto the backs of the leather jackets worn by Tower Video cashiers: Was it a Trystero-style indicator that they were members of a dark brotherhood of evil Road Warrior punks? Somehow it didn't occur to me that guys who dress up in rubber suits and play horror movie metal cannot possibly be scary tough guys. In fact, it is my experience that it is the very rare musician who is also a tough guy. Sondheim aside, thugs don't sing. So it was a nice surprise to find out that not only are Gwar dorks themselves, but they make music for dorks, and a lot of it is pretty cool and funny. Oh, and that Gwar isn't an acronym, it's just a funny word. That one took me a while, too.

Their set that night opened with a dark stage and a voice-over from God, who made it clear that he had it in for Gwar and planned to disrupt their operations and give them a hard time. The lights went up as Oderus Urungus took the stage to vow his disobedience, Paradise Lost-style. The next hour and change was a blur of puppets, fake blood, and guitar solos, but here's what I remember: Their puppets are incredibly detailed and in really good condition. When I saw Green Jellÿ a few years ago, they had cool props, but everything was kind of held together with twine and duct tape. Gwar wheeled out an Adolph Hitler puppet that wound up getting laterally bisected by Oderus' axe, revealing a glistening and detailed set of internal organs and a cross-section of a skull with chattering teeth and rolling eyeballs. An outsize Christ got re-crucified and then disemboweled, returned as a cybernetic horror with a glowing red ocular implant and was promptly dismembered by Oderus. I've always liked Balsac The Jaws Of Death, but I never noticed that his costume includes a delicate-looking pair of truck nuts that dangle behind him as he plays. Obviously, Flattus Maximus -- who's departed to the great Butt-Cannon in the sky -- was absent, but Oderus introduced his replacement (and cousin? Unclear on the lineage), Pustulus Maximus, whose distinguishing feature is that he has some kind of foot fungus. At the end of it all, Oderus realizes that he doesn't have to kill God because, you know, God doesn't, uh, exist?

The mosh pit was pretty rough, and most of the elbow-throwing was coming from ladies! The blood goes everywhere; they ramp up the wetness by degrees, I think. The first little squirt happened almost unexpectedly, like, whoops sorry everyone. But before long there are great clouds of it misting out from the weirdly detailed butthole of a puppet priest who'd taken an axe to the head and then been upended. By the end of the show, the band members and crew were actively manipulating the blood hoses embedded in the props to douse the audience with the widest possible spread. There was no way around it -- we all got soaked with the stuff. Nina'd found a blog post on how to deal with "Gwar blood" (Summary: Won't stain! It's just food coloring and a little carageenen) so I was fully prepared to get it in the face. But to be sure, the floor was a lake of red. And when the lights went up, all the white t-shirts were pink, and our jeans were soaked purple. As we went down the stairs to collect our delicates from the coat check, we passed a grumbling bartender wheeling a mop and bucket behind him.