We went out to Bushwick Open Studios so I could see my friend and former Rebel Monkey colleague Joe Wierenga. He and his friends were showing a series of life drawings, many of which they'd done at 3rd Ward before the owners took the money and ran. Joe's drawings were great, especially the way he renders light and contrast with a watercolor wash. And becase their show was at their apartment building, a very strange, not-quite-condo building affectionately called The Glass Cube; we got to see the apartment he shares with his lady friend and with Elvis The Cat King. Two big rooms, the bedroom illuminated by a fishtank and the lamp over his drafting table. It was lucky that we'd stopped by on Saturday, he said. They were cutting back their participation to just that day because he and his show-mates had gotten wind that their landlord was going to stop by on Sunday, and their art show was strictly unapproved by management. Apparently the landlord was coming by to inspect a small bit of graffiti that had been stencil-sprayed onto the sidewalk outside the building and which read "Build Communities Not Condos." The landlord was very upset about this, Joe said, though it wasn't clear whether it was the medium or the sentiment that was most distressing. Wow, though. They're listening! Streets are saying things.
We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.
The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.
Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.
More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.
I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.
Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.
The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!
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