Holi

Nina took me to Holi, the Indian festival of colors. But I was in an irritable mood because I hadn't eaten and because I'd wanted to see Nick Cave's (not that Nick Cave) dancing "horses" at Grand Central. It was the last day of the exhibition, and by the time we arrived at the atrium, pounding the echoing floors of the station like we were late to catch a train, they were loading the horses into wooden crates. We walked east, to Dag Hammerskold Plaza, and I was embarrassed to be reminded of The Dark Tower. We found the festival a few blocks north at D.H. Park. A light rain was falling, but nobody seemed to notice. The band was still playing to a mob of revellers, and people were still queueing up for the booth selling little sachets of colored powder. Every so often someone would throw a handful of stuff into the air, and there'd be a little burst of green or purple above everyone's heads. It was very pretty, but I was feeling hungry and cranky, and so when an exuberant young lady passed by and colored both our cheeks with a bright crimson handprint, it just made me sulk harder. Nina fed me, which helped my mood, but the festival soon wrapped things up. We took a rainy stroll around Turtle Bay, up the stairs to Tudor City, gawping at the huge tree growing inside the dark glass of the Ford Foundation building.

With some help from Drew (one of my castmates from Vanderpuss) Bel Argosy managed to book a show at Fort Useless, a DIY venue in Bushwick whose stage I'd begun covet after seeing about a million shows there advertised on Facebook. It'd been a while since we'd played a show that wasn't in a bar or at a proper rock club, and I yearned to return to our origins playing loft shows at places like Cheap Storage. I made the spectacular miscalculation that it would make the most sense for Billy and Sarah and I, in our traditional transportation of gear from the Practice Hole Mark II, should take the L to Jefferson. (In my defense, that is the, uh, second closest L stop. Which would be okay if the L were the right train to take.) So we ended up having to walk for about half an hour to get to the place, laden with guitars, cymbals, and, I think, an amp. Our walk took us through a cross-section of Bushwick, passing art galleries, community centers thowing quinceañera parties, fancy burger joints, rotting dive bars. We passed the new location of Silent Barn, which is so undifferentiated that we would've missed it entirely except for the noise of indie rock coming from behind a rusty door with a piece of notebook paper taped to it winkingly announcing it as the entrance of the Barn's "Champagne Room." We walked on, sweating. Finally we came to Ditmars, the cross street of Fort Useless, and a made a left. The Fort really is just some dude's (Jeremiah's) ground floor apartment, the performance space / gallery is the living room, the small hallway kitchen is where you sort out your gear. There's a hanging sheet that partitions off the part of the house that's, I guess, off limits. I didn't peek behind it. Lest you think it an unofficial operation, though, I tell you there was staff: A dude seated at the door collecting donations, a dude tending bar, a dude doing sound. Jeremiah himself sort of puttered about, taking the occasional picture and sorting out cables and such.

Our openers were Black Salad, a two-piece noise band featuring Max from Quiet Loudly, Clouder, and about a million other groups. We arrived in time to see what was, I think, the second half of their set. Max and his Salad-mate Steve knelt on the floor in front of a tiered array of synthesizers, keyboards, and pedals; intermittently leaning over to generate a sound from an instrument and capture it with their equipment, after which they'd repeat it, alter it, compose it with itself and with other samples they'd trapped. Did they have songs? I don't really know. But all that sound, crashing in waves against your face, kind of forces you to turn inward, and the result is that for all its abrasiveness, their set produces a calm and meditative state of mind. Among other curiosities, they'd lined up an array of glazed ceramic cones at the perimeter of the carpet that marked out the part of the wood floor that was the stage. We showed up too late to see what part they played in the set, and when I asked Steve what they were for, he wouldn't say. "You'll just have to show up earlier next time."

After that, we set up and played. It's always thrilling and feels risky to assemble the drums in front of a crowd. They can see me, I can sort of see them. We all know there's nothing that's gonna stop the train from leaving the station. (Does anyone relate to this?? Write in pls kthx.) At any rate, here we are, in full Instagram-filtered glory.

 

After us was Jane Eyre, Drew's band, a skillful dutty rock three-piece. True to form, Drew wore a yellow sundress for his performance. It was sweltering inside the Fort, so I was in and out for the duration of their set taking gulps of cool spring air mixed with cigarette smoke in the little 8-foot-square courtyard in front of the building formed by a high wrought-iron fence. From the selection of songs that I heard, J. Eyre's a litte bit Creedence, a little bit Pumpkins. Definitely a guitar band, polished but nasty.

After the show a contingent of our friends / fans converged on a Spanish buffet restaurant that had foolishly left its doors open though the steam table trays were all packed away, uprooted from like teeth, leaving just the steaming sockets. Nina and I showed up late and found a dozen people huddled in the back with a flight of Coronas. A radio blared an aggressively-DJ'd Latin station, plenty of air horn and exhortations to "¡Baile, baile, baile!"