The Contest Winners

Sam had been hyping All City Hour, his new public access show, on Facebook for quite some time. We resolved to watch, setting our DVR to record it since it airs on BCAT at 3:00 AM. The first episode we watched was mostly cell phone footage of Sam and a guy with a lot of face tattoos wandering around at SXSW. I was initially confused, and then a bit disappointed -- the show seemed to be mostly an extended promotion for Adam's movie, Gimme The Loot, which, as it turned out, featured both Sam and the tattoo'd guy, who goes by the name Meeko Gattuso. But then I watched a few more episodes, and the show started to grow on me. The first one I'd seen turned out to be an anomaly. Most of the episodes have a kind of variety show format, with a number of different segments, each of which is quite charming: Sam and Meeko interview a local celebrity on a sofa in someone's fancy apartment in what loos like Long Island City; Meeko teaches Cooking In Jail (toilet coffee, some kind of ramen burrito log); Sam delivers an improvised but flawless monologue on some aspect of New York City history ("Aqueducts, aqueducts, aqueducts!"). They give advice to people who write in. There are musical guests. They talk about nutcrackers! In one particularly thrilling show, the crew visits an illegal "street dentist" somewhere in the Bronx so that Meeko can get a missing tooth worked on. Meeko is very funny, and Sam's odd, shaggy confidence really sells the show as a cheerful introduction to the underworld. Questions of authenticity and exploitation aside, that idea is pure catnip for me. Access! Experience! R-U-1... Judo?

And it serves All City Hour's primary function very well: We were very excited to see Gimme The Loot, and so when Adam announced that they were having the premiere on Friday, we made plans to go. On the day, I jogged across town from my office to the IFC Center in time to make the 6:30 screening. I loved it! Like The Warriors, Adam's movie has a fantastical narrative premise -- two unknown taggers try to make a name for themselves by bombing the home run apple at Citi Field -- and also like that movie, the plot in Gimme The Loot is way less important than the setting the film evokes. ...That being, in The Warriors, a thrilling but wildly inaccurate Heathcliff-the-Cat version of New York City at permanent midnight, all fishbones and garbage can lids. In GtL, it's a lush and endless city summer day, a million locked doors and a few open ones, less racist but certainly not post-racial. Among my favorite parts: A geography-bending chase that impossibly criss-crosses lower Manhattan and Midtown in about five minutes of screen time. And everyone in it -- Sam and Meeko included -- is wonderful, especially Tashiana Washington, who plays Sofia (who writes "Sofia"). It's definitely one of those bits of art that's so effective at realizing an idea you thought you had to make or write a thing that it's actually a bit disheartening to watch. No point in me doing that, now. So.

Bel Argosy's second EP, Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, is in the can! We're thinking about releasing this one on cassette tape. "So that it's more accessible," I tell bloggers, jokingly, than our vinyl 7". But the real reason we're doing it (at least, that I'm doing it) is so that we can work our way through every form of physical media that preceded the founding of the band. MP3 may be the currency of the realm, but we're out there planting fossils in the desert like we were actually there in 1990. (We also have MP3s.)

WFMU had their annual fund-raising marathon last week. I've said it before: I love the marathon, and in fact have come to regard it as one of the milestones that breaks up the year for me. Although the station is pure joy year round -- I've actually stepped up my consumption this past yeay, by listening to it at home in stereo as if I were within radio broadcast range (and owned a real radio). I use a UPnP media server called PS3 Media Server, which I run on my work MacBook and then use the control point built into the Xbox 360 to pull the stream from WFMU's servers and play it on our big TV speakers. It works really well! But, marathon: Everyone is talking about Tom Scharpling's marathon show, which as usual broke some kind of fund-raising record, and in which John Hodgman went head to head with Cory Booker in a Star Trek trivia battle; but my favorite parts were from Seven Second Delay: First, The Lickathon, which featured Station Manager Ken licking the handle of a toilet; then, obviously, the Wheel of Fate, which ended up forcing Andy to drink a shot of soda out of Ken's belly button ("Ken, I'm 58 years old!"), but which failed to produce hot noodles poured into anyone's underwear. The whole thing wrapped up with a multi-hour performance by the Hoof 'n' Mouth Sinfonia. I'd had a fun time watching that live last year, but that wasn't on the table this time around. The 2013 Hoof 'n' Mouth was a test flight of the new basement performance space the station is almost done building out. It's not a venue and not a bar, Ken was careful to point out, and thus the show wasn't open to the listening public. So I stayed home and watched the DJs do their karaoke thing on Ustream, which only made me feel a little bit creepy.

But here's the crazy part: The morning after, I got an email from Asst. General Manager Liz Berg congratulating me for winning the Primavera Festival raffle! (I'd entered because I was eligible and because, you know, why not.) "Not sure if you were tuned in last night," she wrote. And the thing is, I was tuned in, but I stepped away from the Ustream for a few minutes, maybe, to go to the bathroom or something. I guess that's when they announced the results. But, yeah, Nina and I are going to be flying to Barcelona in May to go to this crazy Spanish rock festival! The whole thing is a bit much to take in, not least of all the idea of myself as a contest winner. Although I've certainly been plenty lucky in my life so far. So it's really just an unfair heaping-on of good fortune. But I've learned, over the years, not to interrogate the significance of stuff like this too much. And for some reason, the title "The Contest Winners" occurred to me as a good fit for, say, a particularly prosaic short story in the style of Vonnegut or Salinger. So we are doing things like renewing our passports, sifting through the list of a hundred and seventy-odd bands that'll be appearing at the Festival, and leafing through some guidebooks graciously lent to us by Jay. We'll be staying in El Raval, which seemed like the place that, you know, the kids go.

¡Qué extraño!