Everybody has cats now! My tenure with Kitty naturally grants me O.G. status. But after years of stubbornly holding out against the yearnings of his apartment-mates for fear of mind-control parasites, Tom caved and Jill adopted Bug, a small, unpredictable black cat with a clipped ear and oddly prominent genitals. Eve and Jon, cohabitating in advance of their marriage in the fall picked up two mostly-white kitten siblings, Sam and Sasha, who promptly doubled in size and now effectively run the apartment. And Ted and Cat took in Lola, a former stray tabby of indeterminate age and fairly inscrutable disposition. Lola died unexpectedly earlier this year after a rapid deterioration in her health caused by kitty lymphoma. But Ted and Cat were undeterred, and they got back on the horse with Prez, a friendly kitten with a penchant for biting fingers and whomping sleeping faces, and whom they named Prez, partly after President St., partly after Jim True-Frost.
When they went on vacation to Italy, they charged Jill with Prez's care and feeding, and assigned me the few days that she wouldn't be able to make it. And so on Thursday I went over to their apartment to administer kibble. Except that I didn't see Prez when I opened the door. And he wasn't in the living room or the bedroom. Didn't respond when I called. He turned out to be in the bathroom, lying puddled on the bathmat under the skylight. He was awake but seemed unwilling to get up, and when I put my hand on him and he turned to look at me, his eyes were rheumy and unfocused. Oh no, I thought. I have strong urges, people, to avoid addressing problems head-on. Have you noticed? If there is a way I can just hang back and let someone else discover and deal with a thing, then that is what I vastly prefer to do. Oh, was that like that? I didn't realize. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Thanks for dealing with it so quickly. --That is the way I like to play it. But Prez was putting out strong vibes of being a Very Sick Animal, so I called Jerry. "Was he, uh, like this the last time you saw him?" I asked. Which was, come to think of it, really just a minor variation on my core strategy. No, she said, and suggested that we car him to the vet right away. So while she brought over the vehicle, I made preparations over the phone with Animal Kind, where I take Kitty but also the only place that I knew would be open at 11 o'clock at night.
We hefted Prez into the fabric cat-carrier Jill brought. That operation is one that I dread when it comes to Kitty -- hissing, feet braced against the edges of the carrier -- but Prez was too sick to make a fuss. Or maybe he's always just that easy. We got him into the car. Hanlon drove. At Animal Kind, the woman at the front desk buzzed us in and summoned Dr. Salas, the vet on duty for the evening. She escorted me and Jill to an exam room in the back, where, with the help of a vet tech, we scooped Prez out of the carrier. They took his temperature in the customary way; this was the only part of the ordeal about which he complained. It turned out he had a high fever and that something was restricting his breathing. They'd have to do an x-ray, Dr. Salas said, before knowing anything further.
So we sat and waited, the four of us, in the bright front room, watching people cross back and forth in front of the big windows -- Thursday-night revelers returning home, maybe, sneaking a wary peek at us as they passed. It was a dynamic one mostly gets to enjoy, so to speak, from that other side, and less often from the one we were on: Skirting a sidewalk assembly in front of a funeral home, for example; the guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt you see walking down the street as you are leaving the funeral home. It's fairly impossible to shake the relief that you feel when, having sampled a stranger's private tragedy for a few seconds, you can go away and leave them with it -- as Jerry Seinfeld used to say, "Good luck with all... that." But being on that other side, we were all pretty bummed out. Tom pointed out all of the funny little plaques on the wall thanking the vets for their kindness and patience with, say, Muffy, some poodle with tear-stained fur and red eyes reflecting a camera flash; and how implicit in their presence was the fact that all the animals were dead. "This isn't a doctor's office," I said in a stage whisper. "It's a tomb!" Nobody laughed. Hanlon brought out his iPhone and dug into his curated gallery of inscrutable New Yorker cartoons, but it didn't cheer us up much.
Eventually Dr. Salas called me and Jerry into the back, into the little hallway that connects all the downstairs exam rooms, where she had an x-ray up on a fancy Apple Studio Display screen. She walked us through the anatomical details, pointing out areas of accumulated fluid in the thoracic cavity, and how the fluid was compressing Prez's right lung and part of his esophagus. And she showed us how there seemed to be a kind of mass, only negatively visible on the x-ray, in some of the connective tissue right around his heart. "Until we do an ultrasound, there's no way to know exactly what that is," she said. "It could be an infection, but it's possible that it's a malignancy, maybe lymphoma, which is common in young cats. Obviously, that's not a great diagnosis."
"Fuck," said Tom, when we returned to the waiting room. "I really don't want Ted to have another cancer cat." I didn't, either. And while, having done my part and delivered Prez to the doctor, I didn't feel anxiety over his care, there is something awfully metaphorical about an absent friend's pet. Because the pet is a proxy for the friend, isn't it? Or a proxy for something about the friend; I don't know what. But there was nothing else for us to do, and so we piled back into the car and drove home. I ate one of the cookies that Jill had bought us for dinner.
A bright spot, lest you think this blog-thing a downer: I found a voicemail from Dr. Salas on my phone after getting home. She'd drawn some of the fluid out of Prez's chest, and it seemed like it was the product of an infection ("yucky," she said) rather than a tumor. Accordingly, she had started him on antibiotics. He's not out of the woods yet, by any means, but things are perhaps less dire than they seemed.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Millenarian Maths
My annual LibrePlanet re-cap, 2012 edition:
I spent two days in Boston this year, as the FSF had promised a bigger, more organized conference, with more speakers than would fit a one-day meeting like last year's. I'm a lousy trip-planner -- Nina knows it, you all know it. The process makes me anxious, and so I defer it, which means that when I do get down to the business of, say, figuring out where to stay over a weekend, there are fewer options and they're more expensive. So it was that I neglected to discover that good ol' Greg had returned from China and was living back near the vicinity of MIT again until it was too late to ask him to couch-surf, gift of whiskey or no. Instead I booked myself a room at the Hampton Inn and shelled out for Amtrak tickets there and back. I woke up at 5:00 AM in order to make my 7:00 AM train, attempting to reach Penn Station via the F train, then falling back to trusty old Carecibo when the F hadn't come after 25 minutes. To get to the actual Acela platform at Penn Station you have to go down this escalator tube from the waiting area. Even though the first time I went to Boston for the conference I went via Chinatown bus, looking that tube hole always reminds me of that time, when I didn't really know where I was going or what it would be like when I got there. We stopped at Roy Rogers. I think I had french fries for breakfast.
The conference has moved around a bit over the years. The first few years I went to it, it was at MIT, which was neat, 'cuz that was probably the only way I was ever going to see MIT. And then they moved it to Harvard after MIT stopped cutting them a good enough deal on space and catering, and that was neat, too, because I'd been curious about Harvard. Last year they moved to Bunker Hill Community College, which was somewhat less neat, because small and drab and out in the sticks (oh god the Orange line) with only strip mall amenities. This year they moved yet again, to the UMass Boston campus, which was not super convenient to get to (T to a 20 minute ride on a shuttle bus) but which is right on the harbor, and so the high windows in its great big meeting rooms provide a wide-angle view of Dorchester Bay, cold and still, like a gray mirror. It's very New England, you see.
David Sugar was wrapping up his talk on the GNU Telephony project as I arrived. He fielded some questions about SIP support and various types of audio codecs, and then yielded the stage to Michael Flickinger from GNU Savannah. Michael gave a run-down of the services offered by Savannah and how they distinguish it from other established software forges like SourceForge as well as some of the flavor-of-the-month ones like gitorious. In particular, every project submission on Savannah is human-reviewed to ensure license consistency and avoid tricky legal situations further on down the line. (This is also a resource squeeze for them, as the process can be time-consuming.) He also explained some of the current plans for improving -- or rather, rewriting from scratch -- the software that drives Savannah, Savane. The audience was nonplussed, and he seemed nervous, so I raised my hand and gave a little sales pitch for Savannah, which I genuinely love, despite its warts. I don't know if it worked.
We broke for lunch after that. They'd arranged for these little bag lunches to be delivered, and I found an empty table in the adjacent room. Some people travel to these events with friends, but I'm kind of a unicorn among my local peer group when it comes to this particular interest, and so I'm always there alone. Not knowing anybody used to make me really uncomfortable, but over the years I've gotten used to doing this stuff on my own, gotten used to being and feeling weird. So while I was prepared to eat by myself, it was nice to be joined by people who introduced themselves Alison Chaiken and Tom Marble. We talked about data serialization frameworks (something that's been a focus of mine recently) and swapped FSF gossip.
Alison's talk was directly after lunch. She's working on establishing a foothold for Free software in cars, as part of her involvement in the more general "right to repair" movement. She pointed out that since the first software systems embedded in cars was for purposes of "info-tainment" -- DVD players and video games for the back seat -- there's an established tendency towards complacency around the next generation of car "apps," which will likely focus on safety and driver informatics. Some manufacturers have even begun to release SDKs of a sort, such as the Cadillac User Experience framework, which is built on top of X11. But without unrestricted access to source code, users will just have to trust manufacturers and their partners to deliver secure, bug-free software, which is by no means a safe bet: She referenced a study done by researchers at UCSD and the University of Washington that produced an exploit capable of disabling the brakes and steering console of a moving car by hijacking a wireless tire pressure sensor. Wowza! And then there is also, of course, the perennial motivation of being able to inspect and modify the operations of a device that you've, you know, bought.
Brett Smith gave an update on the work he's been doing in the licensing lab. He works on two fronts towards a single goal: The lab strives to help Free software developers do their work without excessive interference from the law; and it helps legislators understand what Free software developers do so that they don't interfere. Toward the first half of that agenda, he presented some new licensing resources for developers. The FSF's guide How to choose a Free software license for your own work aims to provide a criteria-based approach to license selection. There's a new paper about what he referred to as "Javascript labels," a technique for providing formal descriptions of license characteristics for Javascript source files, reflecting the current trend toward client-side processing for interactions with web applications. (He noted that the current proposal was unlikely to "take over the world," but said the FSF was very interested in feedback.) And the new version of the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0, features compatibility by default with the GPL; the MPL 2.0 process, in fact, was inspired by the highly interactive one that produced GPLv3.
"So that's our friends," he said. "Now let's talk about our enemies." The FSF has apparently been sending him around the world to participate in panel discussions for international trade agreements and bits of legislation. In the U.S., the Library of Congress is about to go through an every-three-years mandated review of the "chilling effects" of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The last time around, they resolved that "jailbreaking" devices like cell phones ought to be permitted. Brett said that this time the Software Freedom Law Center is going to be pushing for a provision to allow people to install their own software on any computing device that they own. And he's going to sit in on the negotations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, actually at the request of the treaty authors, who are hoping to avoid a post-ratification debacle of the scale of the one resulting from ACTA, which left even some of the representatives who voted for it wishing that they hadn't.
ginger coons (she spells it lower-case) is the E.I.C. of LibreGraphics Magazine, a paper-and-ink publication whose aim is to promote the use of Free graphics tools, with a focus on creators and how they use software tools. She repeated a question that she's often asked about Free graphics software: It's good, but is it print good? As proof she explained how the sausage gets made. The whole magazine is produced in Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP, among other applications, and using Free fonts (Univers Else, Prop Courier Sans). They print on recycled paper with soy inks, and license the whole thing CC-BY-SA. She had several issues for demonstration and sale. They looked good! The print design straddles the line between trade publication and art magazine, kind of the same way that SEED, the magazine Nina used to work for, did. I wanted to buy her a copy of issue 1.3, which featured a striking pattern of opening and closing eyes -- ginger claimed they'd figured out a way to randomize the colors on a per-physical issue basis -- but it sold out quickly.
The "keynote" of Day 1 was Evan Prodromou's presentation on freedom for the social web. Since the launch of StatusNet a few years ago and with his commitment to engaging with its users for the purposes of technical support and philosophical debate, I feel like he's developed a pretty high profile in the Free world. So his talk was a celebrity appearance of sorts. It didn't hurt that he's a very engaging speaker, equal parts nerdy intensity and practiced charm. He opened with some historical perspective on social networking, detailing how providers have evolved from an application-per-media-type model to social platforms like Facebook -- a model he refers to as the "imperial network." These platforms have the primary benefit of mapping independent streams of shared social data onto the same unified social graph. This has provides the benefit of one-stop shopping for marketers, but doesn't do much for users -- in addition to the fact that it's, you know, evil and non-Free, it doesn't accomodate users' disparate interests very well, unless those interests are confined to finding one's friends on Facebook.
Evan proposes / predicts what he calls the federated social network, which is really a network of social networks with interoperability at the borders. He cited some examples of work in this direction: OStatus; activitystrea.ms; pubsubhubbub; Webfinger; salmon. The question always gets asked: Why aren't we there yet? Where's my Free Facebook? These things take time, he said, and people often focus on distractions like novel architectures and cryptotopian fantasy.
Evan wrapped up, and was quickly mobbed by inquisitve software developers. Matt got the room under control and dispersed everyone with instructions to reconvene at JJ Foley's on Berkeley St. I rode the shuttle back to JFK/UMass chatting with Deb Nicholson about Occupy Wall Street. At JJ Foley's I found myself at a table with Tom and two guys having a heated debate about the right business model to use for running a Free hardware mail-order business. Josh Gay stopped by and gave a engaging if somewhat manic explanation of his "theory of change." I can't claim to have understood him fully. I was looking for a way to engineer an outcome; he seemed to take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive view of things: When we're successful the associated circumstances will be such and such. But maybe that's the a more sophisticated way to think about it. Have any of you read Anathem? The senior FSF strategists remind me of the monks that live in the center of the monastery and only come out once every thousand years. The hipster monks might find them frustratingly impractical, but they've got powers, babies.
I was exhausted when I checked into my hotel. The room was clean, featured a fancy writing desk (who uses those?), and the huge bed had an embarrassment of pillows, big and hard like breast implants. I showered, shat, and flipped through a few local channels on the TV before calling it a night. Some people were having a party in another room on my floor. I could hear it but it didn't keep me up. I started the next morning with a breakfast of eggs and hastily-scarfed spicy potato cubes in the hotel lobby, CNN Headline News playing on a flat-screen TV levitating above some ficuses, and then struck out for the university.
Eben Moglen was in the middle of his yearly update on the legal battlegrounds for Free software. As ever, much of his focus was on software patents. The patent wars continue, and his most recent conclusions were more pessimistic than in years past: Organizations have found that software patents have become more worthwhile to trade than they are to hold, which has turned the legal brinksmanship over software patents into a multi-billion dollar game and thus prolonged the existence of patents themselves. "We can't stop the patent war," he said, "and even if we were participants we couldn't stop it." And he said that the Free software movement would not be able to achieve its social and political goals until the war is over.
Mike Linksvayer and Chris Webber from Creative Commons were up next, with a somewhat sunnier presentation on the progress of CCv4. There were a couple of pleasant diversions from the charted course of their talk in the form of plugs for MediaGoblin and the Liberated Pixel Cup (relevant to my interests!) both of which are side projects of Chris'. But they managed to get across the important data about the license revision process; to wit, its goals:
Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, gave a charming autobiographical talk about how Emacs changed his life, beginning with his interest in hobby programming (the Ruby compiler) during the economic depression in Japan in the 1990s and how that led him to using Emacs, and then, as this type of thing often leads, to wanting to extend Emacs in the direction of better support for Ruby syntax (i.e., `ruby-mode'). And it was this activity that really got him deep into languages and software development. His argument, as best as I could transcribe it, in list form:
Matthew Garrett, now at Red Hat, talked about some hardware concerns for Free software developers, specfically the various implementations of "secure boot" and how they interact with non-vendor-approved (i.e., Free) software. Summary, from what I could understand: It's all bullshit predicated on some flimsy separation of hardware and software near the BIOS.
Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Joanmarie Diggs, who does accessibility development gave a talk on the status and importance of accessibility support in Free software, using the GNOME 3.0 development lifecycle as a miniature case study of sorts. One point they made stuck with me in an uncomfty way (I assume this was the desired effect): We're all going to need accessibility technologies to continue to use software systems as we get older. We are merely "temporarily able-bodied." Jonathan Nadeau, an FSF campaigns intern who also happens to be a blind GNU/Linux user followed up with a first-hand account of the state of accessibility software. He's a big fan of Orca, a screen reader that's part of the GNOME project. In fact, he was using it to read some of the slides in his presentation back to him during his talk. I'd never seen a system like that in action before; it was impressive.
Jeremy Allison delivered the keynote for the second day. Like Evan Prodromou, he's become sort of a household name in the Free software world, and he also turned out to be a fun guy to listen to. His talk was less structured than Evan's; he presented the history of the relationship between his project, Samba, and the GPL. He'd chosen it initially as a way to "clear the air" within the community of developers reverse engineering the SMB protocol, who had adopted a policy of secrecy to prevent their improvement from being co-opted by their competitors. At the time, using the GPL helped Samba become the SMB implementation of note -- to the extent that he had to stop accepting corporate copyrights on contributions, because contributors were attempting to use their patches to entrap their non-GPL-compliant competitors. (The GPLv3 has eliminated this technique via compliance grace periods and additional flexibility for source code delivery.) He also shared some amusing anecdotes he'd acquired from his years in Free software development: How the benefits of Free software were made manifest whenever he collaborated with Microsoft ("Oh, you have to write all your own software? That must take forever!"); how the initial jailbreaking of the TiVo was done in Australia by Andrew Tridgell, who wanted to help his friends at the U.S. embassy watch TV shows from back home.
RMS made an appearance right at the end to present the Free Software Awards (to matz and to GNU Health) and to briefly promote the use of LibreJS, which (finally) addresses the issues he brought up several years ago in his essay The JavaScript Trap. The "Stump Stallman" portion of the meeting -- the part where the members line up at the mics to ask RMS pointless questions about the GPL, or try to praise his ideas in ways that confuse and annoy him -- was mercifully absent. Hopefully the organizers finally grokked that this process was doing more harm than good.
By the time the talks were completely wrapped up and all the immediate chatting had subsided, the last free UMass shuttle of the day had already left. The group I was stranded were friendly and interesting (Evan, Mike, Deb), though, and I was glad to walk with them the mile or so to the JFK stop, even though it was a little unclear whether I was going to make my Amtrak connection. Deb and I talked about The Ada Initiative and OpenHatch and how she once booked Peelander-Z at a house party in Somerville. We made it to the T stop, and I said goodbye to everyone and ultimately did end up making my train with a few minutes to spare. I bought a beer on the train and tried to program, but the hops gave me a headache -- or more likely I was just worn out -- and so I just ended up closing my eyes. Jerry and Hanlon texted me in response to a celebratory Tweet I tweeted, and informed me that they happened to be driving back from the Cape at that very moment and would I like to catch a ride back with them. It would have been like the wild west! But I was feeling too depleted to want to be around people and so I said no thanks.
Amtrak to Penn Station; C train to Jay St. When the subway pulled into Fulton St., this hipster dude rushing to make the train took a header down the stairs. He got up, clearly dazed, and scrambled on board. He'd taken damage, though -- blood began to flow insistently down his face from a gash near his hairline. "Oh, dude," said his friend. A well-meaning passenger produced a wet-wipe. I took a step back and watched.
I spent two days in Boston this year, as the FSF had promised a bigger, more organized conference, with more speakers than would fit a one-day meeting like last year's. I'm a lousy trip-planner -- Nina knows it, you all know it. The process makes me anxious, and so I defer it, which means that when I do get down to the business of, say, figuring out where to stay over a weekend, there are fewer options and they're more expensive. So it was that I neglected to discover that good ol' Greg had returned from China and was living back near the vicinity of MIT again until it was too late to ask him to couch-surf, gift of whiskey or no. Instead I booked myself a room at the Hampton Inn and shelled out for Amtrak tickets there and back. I woke up at 5:00 AM in order to make my 7:00 AM train, attempting to reach Penn Station via the F train, then falling back to trusty old Carecibo when the F hadn't come after 25 minutes. To get to the actual Acela platform at Penn Station you have to go down this escalator tube from the waiting area. Even though the first time I went to Boston for the conference I went via Chinatown bus, looking that tube hole always reminds me of that time, when I didn't really know where I was going or what it would be like when I got there. We stopped at Roy Rogers. I think I had french fries for breakfast.
The conference has moved around a bit over the years. The first few years I went to it, it was at MIT, which was neat, 'cuz that was probably the only way I was ever going to see MIT. And then they moved it to Harvard after MIT stopped cutting them a good enough deal on space and catering, and that was neat, too, because I'd been curious about Harvard. Last year they moved to Bunker Hill Community College, which was somewhat less neat, because small and drab and out in the sticks (oh god the Orange line) with only strip mall amenities. This year they moved yet again, to the UMass Boston campus, which was not super convenient to get to (T to a 20 minute ride on a shuttle bus) but which is right on the harbor, and so the high windows in its great big meeting rooms provide a wide-angle view of Dorchester Bay, cold and still, like a gray mirror. It's very New England, you see.
David Sugar was wrapping up his talk on the GNU Telephony project as I arrived. He fielded some questions about SIP support and various types of audio codecs, and then yielded the stage to Michael Flickinger from GNU Savannah. Michael gave a run-down of the services offered by Savannah and how they distinguish it from other established software forges like SourceForge as well as some of the flavor-of-the-month ones like gitorious. In particular, every project submission on Savannah is human-reviewed to ensure license consistency and avoid tricky legal situations further on down the line. (This is also a resource squeeze for them, as the process can be time-consuming.) He also explained some of the current plans for improving -- or rather, rewriting from scratch -- the software that drives Savannah, Savane. The audience was nonplussed, and he seemed nervous, so I raised my hand and gave a little sales pitch for Savannah, which I genuinely love, despite its warts. I don't know if it worked.
We broke for lunch after that. They'd arranged for these little bag lunches to be delivered, and I found an empty table in the adjacent room. Some people travel to these events with friends, but I'm kind of a unicorn among my local peer group when it comes to this particular interest, and so I'm always there alone. Not knowing anybody used to make me really uncomfortable, but over the years I've gotten used to doing this stuff on my own, gotten used to being and feeling weird. So while I was prepared to eat by myself, it was nice to be joined by people who introduced themselves Alison Chaiken and Tom Marble. We talked about data serialization frameworks (something that's been a focus of mine recently) and swapped FSF gossip.
Alison's talk was directly after lunch. She's working on establishing a foothold for Free software in cars, as part of her involvement in the more general "right to repair" movement. She pointed out that since the first software systems embedded in cars was for purposes of "info-tainment" -- DVD players and video games for the back seat -- there's an established tendency towards complacency around the next generation of car "apps," which will likely focus on safety and driver informatics. Some manufacturers have even begun to release SDKs of a sort, such as the Cadillac User Experience framework, which is built on top of X11. But without unrestricted access to source code, users will just have to trust manufacturers and their partners to deliver secure, bug-free software, which is by no means a safe bet: She referenced a study done by researchers at UCSD and the University of Washington that produced an exploit capable of disabling the brakes and steering console of a moving car by hijacking a wireless tire pressure sensor. Wowza! And then there is also, of course, the perennial motivation of being able to inspect and modify the operations of a device that you've, you know, bought.
Brett Smith gave an update on the work he's been doing in the licensing lab. He works on two fronts towards a single goal: The lab strives to help Free software developers do their work without excessive interference from the law; and it helps legislators understand what Free software developers do so that they don't interfere. Toward the first half of that agenda, he presented some new licensing resources for developers. The FSF's guide How to choose a Free software license for your own work aims to provide a criteria-based approach to license selection. There's a new paper about what he referred to as "Javascript labels," a technique for providing formal descriptions of license characteristics for Javascript source files, reflecting the current trend toward client-side processing for interactions with web applications. (He noted that the current proposal was unlikely to "take over the world," but said the FSF was very interested in feedback.) And the new version of the Mozilla Public License, MPL 2.0, features compatibility by default with the GPL; the MPL 2.0 process, in fact, was inspired by the highly interactive one that produced GPLv3.
"So that's our friends," he said. "Now let's talk about our enemies." The FSF has apparently been sending him around the world to participate in panel discussions for international trade agreements and bits of legislation. In the U.S., the Library of Congress is about to go through an every-three-years mandated review of the "chilling effects" of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The last time around, they resolved that "jailbreaking" devices like cell phones ought to be permitted. Brett said that this time the Software Freedom Law Center is going to be pushing for a provision to allow people to install their own software on any computing device that they own. And he's going to sit in on the negotations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, actually at the request of the treaty authors, who are hoping to avoid a post-ratification debacle of the scale of the one resulting from ACTA, which left even some of the representatives who voted for it wishing that they hadn't.
ginger coons (she spells it lower-case) is the E.I.C. of LibreGraphics Magazine, a paper-and-ink publication whose aim is to promote the use of Free graphics tools, with a focus on creators and how they use software tools. She repeated a question that she's often asked about Free graphics software: It's good, but is it print good? As proof she explained how the sausage gets made. The whole magazine is produced in Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP, among other applications, and using Free fonts (Univers Else, Prop Courier Sans). They print on recycled paper with soy inks, and license the whole thing CC-BY-SA. She had several issues for demonstration and sale. They looked good! The print design straddles the line between trade publication and art magazine, kind of the same way that SEED, the magazine Nina used to work for, did. I wanted to buy her a copy of issue 1.3, which featured a striking pattern of opening and closing eyes -- ginger claimed they'd figured out a way to randomize the colors on a per-physical issue basis -- but it sold out quickly.
The "keynote" of Day 1 was Evan Prodromou's presentation on freedom for the social web. Since the launch of StatusNet a few years ago and with his commitment to engaging with its users for the purposes of technical support and philosophical debate, I feel like he's developed a pretty high profile in the Free world. So his talk was a celebrity appearance of sorts. It didn't hurt that he's a very engaging speaker, equal parts nerdy intensity and practiced charm. He opened with some historical perspective on social networking, detailing how providers have evolved from an application-per-media-type model to social platforms like Facebook -- a model he refers to as the "imperial network." These platforms have the primary benefit of mapping independent streams of shared social data onto the same unified social graph. This has provides the benefit of one-stop shopping for marketers, but doesn't do much for users -- in addition to the fact that it's, you know, evil and non-Free, it doesn't accomodate users' disparate interests very well, unless those interests are confined to finding one's friends on Facebook.
Evan proposes / predicts what he calls the federated social network, which is really a network of social networks with interoperability at the borders. He cited some examples of work in this direction: OStatus; activitystrea.ms; pubsubhubbub; Webfinger; salmon. The question always gets asked: Why aren't we there yet? Where's my Free Facebook? These things take time, he said, and people often focus on distractions like novel architectures and cryptotopian fantasy.
Evan wrapped up, and was quickly mobbed by inquisitve software developers. Matt got the room under control and dispersed everyone with instructions to reconvene at JJ Foley's on Berkeley St. I rode the shuttle back to JFK/UMass chatting with Deb Nicholson about Occupy Wall Street. At JJ Foley's I found myself at a table with Tom and two guys having a heated debate about the right business model to use for running a Free hardware mail-order business. Josh Gay stopped by and gave a engaging if somewhat manic explanation of his "theory of change." I can't claim to have understood him fully. I was looking for a way to engineer an outcome; he seemed to take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive view of things: When we're successful the associated circumstances will be such and such. But maybe that's the a more sophisticated way to think about it. Have any of you read Anathem? The senior FSF strategists remind me of the monks that live in the center of the monastery and only come out once every thousand years. The hipster monks might find them frustratingly impractical, but they've got powers, babies.
I was exhausted when I checked into my hotel. The room was clean, featured a fancy writing desk (who uses those?), and the huge bed had an embarrassment of pillows, big and hard like breast implants. I showered, shat, and flipped through a few local channels on the TV before calling it a night. Some people were having a party in another room on my floor. I could hear it but it didn't keep me up. I started the next morning with a breakfast of eggs and hastily-scarfed spicy potato cubes in the hotel lobby, CNN Headline News playing on a flat-screen TV levitating above some ficuses, and then struck out for the university.
Eben Moglen was in the middle of his yearly update on the legal battlegrounds for Free software. As ever, much of his focus was on software patents. The patent wars continue, and his most recent conclusions were more pessimistic than in years past: Organizations have found that software patents have become more worthwhile to trade than they are to hold, which has turned the legal brinksmanship over software patents into a multi-billion dollar game and thus prolonged the existence of patents themselves. "We can't stop the patent war," he said, "and even if we were participants we couldn't stop it." And he said that the Free software movement would not be able to achieve its social and political goals until the war is over.
Mike Linksvayer and Chris Webber from Creative Commons were up next, with a somewhat sunnier presentation on the progress of CCv4. There were a couple of pleasant diversions from the charted course of their talk in the form of plugs for MediaGoblin and the Liberated Pixel Cup (relevant to my interests!) both of which are side projects of Chris'. But they managed to get across the important data about the license revision process; to wit, its goals:
- Internationalization: Beyond translation, the licenses need to be "ported" to the legal jurisdiction of other countries; in contrast with Free software licenses, a lot of this porting has already been done, but they're looking to do more
- Interoperability: ...with older versions of the Creative Commons licenses and with other types of software licenses
- Readability: For the lay public and lawyers alike
- Rights for additional media: Such as databases of indexed content (this is apparently more of a thing in Europe)
Yukihiro "matz" Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, gave a charming autobiographical talk about how Emacs changed his life, beginning with his interest in hobby programming (the Ruby compiler) during the economic depression in Japan in the 1990s and how that led him to using Emacs, and then, as this type of thing often leads, to wanting to extend Emacs in the direction of better support for Ruby syntax (i.e., `ruby-mode'). And it was this activity that really got him deep into languages and software development. His argument, as best as I could transcribe it, in list form:
- Emacs taught me freedom for software
- Emacs taught me how to read code
- Emacs taught me the power of Lisp
- Emacs taught me how to implement a garbage collector
- Emacs helped me to code and debug
- Emacs helped me to write an edit text/email/documents
- Emacs helped me to be an effective programmer
- Emacs made me a hacker
- Emacs has changed my life (forever)
Matthew Garrett, now at Red Hat, talked about some hardware concerns for Free software developers, specfically the various implementations of "secure boot" and how they interact with non-vendor-approved (i.e., Free) software. Summary, from what I could understand: It's all bullshit predicated on some flimsy separation of hardware and software near the BIOS.
Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Joanmarie Diggs, who does accessibility development gave a talk on the status and importance of accessibility support in Free software, using the GNOME 3.0 development lifecycle as a miniature case study of sorts. One point they made stuck with me in an uncomfty way (I assume this was the desired effect): We're all going to need accessibility technologies to continue to use software systems as we get older. We are merely "temporarily able-bodied." Jonathan Nadeau, an FSF campaigns intern who also happens to be a blind GNU/Linux user followed up with a first-hand account of the state of accessibility software. He's a big fan of Orca, a screen reader that's part of the GNOME project. In fact, he was using it to read some of the slides in his presentation back to him during his talk. I'd never seen a system like that in action before; it was impressive.
Jeremy Allison delivered the keynote for the second day. Like Evan Prodromou, he's become sort of a household name in the Free software world, and he also turned out to be a fun guy to listen to. His talk was less structured than Evan's; he presented the history of the relationship between his project, Samba, and the GPL. He'd chosen it initially as a way to "clear the air" within the community of developers reverse engineering the SMB protocol, who had adopted a policy of secrecy to prevent their improvement from being co-opted by their competitors. At the time, using the GPL helped Samba become the SMB implementation of note -- to the extent that he had to stop accepting corporate copyrights on contributions, because contributors were attempting to use their patches to entrap their non-GPL-compliant competitors. (The GPLv3 has eliminated this technique via compliance grace periods and additional flexibility for source code delivery.) He also shared some amusing anecdotes he'd acquired from his years in Free software development: How the benefits of Free software were made manifest whenever he collaborated with Microsoft ("Oh, you have to write all your own software? That must take forever!"); how the initial jailbreaking of the TiVo was done in Australia by Andrew Tridgell, who wanted to help his friends at the U.S. embassy watch TV shows from back home.
RMS made an appearance right at the end to present the Free Software Awards (to matz and to GNU Health) and to briefly promote the use of LibreJS, which (finally) addresses the issues he brought up several years ago in his essay The JavaScript Trap. The "Stump Stallman" portion of the meeting -- the part where the members line up at the mics to ask RMS pointless questions about the GPL, or try to praise his ideas in ways that confuse and annoy him -- was mercifully absent. Hopefully the organizers finally grokked that this process was doing more harm than good.
By the time the talks were completely wrapped up and all the immediate chatting had subsided, the last free UMass shuttle of the day had already left. The group I was stranded were friendly and interesting (Evan, Mike, Deb), though, and I was glad to walk with them the mile or so to the JFK stop, even though it was a little unclear whether I was going to make my Amtrak connection. Deb and I talked about The Ada Initiative and OpenHatch and how she once booked Peelander-Z at a house party in Somerville. We made it to the T stop, and I said goodbye to everyone and ultimately did end up making my train with a few minutes to spare. I bought a beer on the train and tried to program, but the hops gave me a headache -- or more likely I was just worn out -- and so I just ended up closing my eyes. Jerry and Hanlon texted me in response to a celebratory Tweet I tweeted, and informed me that they happened to be driving back from the Cape at that very moment and would I like to catch a ride back with them. It would have been like the wild west! But I was feeling too depleted to want to be around people and so I said no thanks.
Amtrak to Penn Station; C train to Jay St. When the subway pulled into Fulton St., this hipster dude rushing to make the train took a header down the stairs. He got up, clearly dazed, and scrambled on board. He'd taken damage, though -- blood began to flow insistently down his face from a gash near his hairline. "Oh, dude," said his friend. A well-meaning passenger produced a wet-wipe. I took a step back and watched.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Projects
Most of my friends and I do projects. Projects are a form of fidgeting until death, but I still feel like I have to do them. If I stopped doing projects, I don't know what I'd do!
Nina and I helped Beau out with his project Vanderpuss last summer. He spent the next six months or so editing it and prepping it for release. The DVD company sent him his first run a few weeks ago, and he finally screened it for everyone on Sunday at Cake Shop. He gave a funny speech to introduce the subject matter of the film, and he'd arranged for some bands to play before and after: There was a folk / anti-folk type dude who alternated between an acoustic guitar and Beau's day-glo painted electronic keyboard; he sang several crypto-misogynist songs about his problems with "blonde actresses." Then there was I'm Turning Into, a trio of plaid-clad dudes I'd actually been meaning to check out anyway. They were good! And they put out a strong vibe of enjoying themselves. Beau'd also managed to book a band called Eula, fresh from SXSW, who played jangly, punky guitar rock. They kept hyping the film, either ironically or earnestly referring to it as "Vanderpussy."
The movie itself was -- I don't know. I like it, but I'd already seen it several times and worked hard enough to blunt my own self-consciousness that I can't really tell how coherent it is. At the time we shot it, it seemed to be reasonably intelligible, a tribute to Beau and Doug and the other people who ginned up the ideas and the dialogue, so I'll trust that that hasn't changed. And it got laughs in the right places, and Drew as Vanderpuss was obviously in command of the material. It was fun!
Warning: Computer bullshit.
A little while ago, I finished a project of my own. I released an initial version of a software framework I'd been working on, in some form or another, ever since I graduated from college. It's called gzochi, and it's a system for developing multiplayer network games. I'd begun building it -- or feature prototypes of it -- around the time that Blizzard's World of Warcraft was really firing the consciousness of the media and the game-playing populace, and also at the same time that the Free Software folks were pushing both for Free implementations of popular bits of software and for Free game libraries and games. What I had in mind was a rich framework, a piece of software that would comprise, say, 90% of a working game. The only thing to be supplied by a downstream developer would be, well, game design, specified in as semantically direct a way as possible. Every other aspect of the application, from server-side persistence to client-side rendering, would be managed by the framework. Suffice it to say, this idea was worryingly vague and prohibitively ambitious. In fact, I spent the next several years side-tracked by the work required to create the systems that would support my hypothetical framework.
The time I spent working professionally in games -- at Rebel Monkey -- was a net negative, life-wise, except that I got to build some software on top of a Java game development framework called Project Darkstar that was tackling some of the same problems as gzochi. (Trivia: the Monkey actually hired Jeff Kesselman, the lead developer of that project, as its CTO. For about five months.) Instead of proposing a single, all-encompassing data model on top of the games it hosted, the PDS framework provided a set of container services that game applications could choose advantage of. Forget gaming: Project Darkstar is really more of a transactional execution and persistence framework. And the design of the system dovetailed with some lessons about software I was slowly internalizing at the time: One-size-fits-all software solutions are hard to develop; data modeling is the hardest and most important part of software engineering; the best way to expose software functionality is via thin, decomposable layers. So when I got the idea to pick up gzochi again, I decided to scrap what I'd done back in 2004 and re-implement it as a clone of PDS, using languages that I actually enjoy writing code in, C and Scheme. As a validation of that impulse, the past couple of months have been pretty nuts. I don't think I've ever had code come to me as easily as it has been for this project. And I just released an initial version! I'm going to take a break for a while and work on something else, but I'm bedeviled with fantasies of games to build.
Nina and I joined a gym over the winter -- for three months, I should say, beginning on New Years Day, so our membership is just about up. We went with Body Reserve, over on 5th Ave. and Union, which Tom and Jill have gently mocked over the years for its dopey eagle-with-a-barbell signage. They call it "American Dream Muscles." But they had the least aggressive terms and they priced competitively, relative to their offering, which seems, well, correspondingly modest. I hadn't exercised in a gym since, I don't know, college, but the qualia seem to be largely the same: There's a clammy, grimy texture to everything you touch, and a faint, not unpleasant worn-sneaker smell throughout. I was going primarily to run on the treadmill during the cold months, but I also pushed myself to branch out to other machines and exercises. I use the free weights, glaring at myself in the mirror as it seems is customary. I use one of the abdominal "crunch" machines. I do the thing where you pull down on a bar and it lifts up some weights, a kind of seated chin-up. Is it working? Unclear. I've got this little hot dog body, you see.
Bad Movie Night continues unabated. Recent selections:
I went out to Maxwell's on Sunday night to catch the WFMU Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia, the big karaoke party that signals the end of their annual two-week-long fundraising marathon. I know I'm not supposed to merely tolerate it, but I not-so-secretly love the marathon -- my favorite show, the lively Prank Patrol, brings out The Wheel Of Fate, a full complement of tortures unbecoming the middle-aged hosts: This year's edition promised underwear trading, foot kissing, and briefs full of coffee grounds. The other shows on the station get a whole lot more personable as well, since even the music shows with the most taciturn hosts are obligated to devote half their air time to shilling. You get to experience non-naturally-occurring DJ combos: Frangry vs. Station Manager Ken! Billy Jam vs. Bronwyn Carlton! Tom Scharpling vs. Terre T, pretending they're not real-life married! And Scharpling's show is always a stunner, even if it lacks the sweaty desperation of some of the less popular programs. I've pledged (to 7SD) the past several years, partly out of the goodness of my heart, partly out of a desire, as Andy says, to hear my name said on the "ray-dee-oh," but I'd never had the nerve to make it out to Hoof & Mouth. I decided to try it this year after watching a joyous video of last year's, and so I bailed early on dinner at Surfish with Eve and Jon and took the F to 14th for the switch to the PATH.
The hardest part of making it to Maxwell's is the trek down Washington Ave. When I was younger and more attuned to discomfort, my spirit revolted at the thought of walking eleven long blocks to my destination, especially in the cold -- that street really focuses the wind on your business. But I am older now, and I persevered, taking opportunities to peek into the windows of ground-floor brownstone apartments and check out the anti-Obama tchotchkes inexplicably on offer for St. Patrick's Day at more than one pharmacy. Hoboken's a pretty town, I thought. There's a sports bar on every corner, but I could live there. It's what I always think.
I knew I was at Maxwell's even before I saw the sign, because I caught sight of Ken in the window wearing his "vinyl suit," a set of armored plates built out of fire-wilted records. He was wearing a kilt, too, but not much else. Irwin Chusid and Therese were there, too, in a little reserved part of the front of the house where they'd set up a remote broadcasting system to finish out the fundraising. The real action was in the back, where the Sinfonia (a bunch of musically adept FMU DJs) were playing. I arrived in time to catch the end of X. Ray Burns' performance, delivered naked to the waist, his beard pointed like a satyr's. After him came songs sung by Bryce Kretschmann, Keili Hamilton, Lamin Fofana, and other DJs with familiar names and sometimes familiar faces. I picked out a bunch of WFMU luminaries in the crowd: AP Mike (Lisk), Frangry (whose real name, I overheard, is Francine), Andy Cohen, a guy I think might've been Kevin Nutt from Sinner's Crossroads. The big performances came at the end of the night. Ken invited "The Queen of WFMU," Terre T, to the stage, and she turned in a high-octane performance of "Ace Of Spades," quite possibly one of the most difficult songs ever to play or sing. And then it was time for "The King of WFMU," a characteristically disheveled Tom Scharpling, who sang "Communication Breakdown" and, as he'd hinted he would, "Killing In The Name Of." To make the latter song radio friendly (a feed of the festivities was going out over the air) he edited its refrain to "Fudge you, I won't do what you tell me." The appreciative mosh pit that had formed roared it right back at him. Upon finishing, he dropped the mic and stepped off the stage into the crowd, half rock star, half Joe Lunchpail.
Nina and I helped Beau out with his project Vanderpuss last summer. He spent the next six months or so editing it and prepping it for release. The DVD company sent him his first run a few weeks ago, and he finally screened it for everyone on Sunday at Cake Shop. He gave a funny speech to introduce the subject matter of the film, and he'd arranged for some bands to play before and after: There was a folk / anti-folk type dude who alternated between an acoustic guitar and Beau's day-glo painted electronic keyboard; he sang several crypto-misogynist songs about his problems with "blonde actresses." Then there was I'm Turning Into, a trio of plaid-clad dudes I'd actually been meaning to check out anyway. They were good! And they put out a strong vibe of enjoying themselves. Beau'd also managed to book a band called Eula, fresh from SXSW, who played jangly, punky guitar rock. They kept hyping the film, either ironically or earnestly referring to it as "Vanderpussy."
The movie itself was -- I don't know. I like it, but I'd already seen it several times and worked hard enough to blunt my own self-consciousness that I can't really tell how coherent it is. At the time we shot it, it seemed to be reasonably intelligible, a tribute to Beau and Doug and the other people who ginned up the ideas and the dialogue, so I'll trust that that hasn't changed. And it got laughs in the right places, and Drew as Vanderpuss was obviously in command of the material. It was fun!
Warning: Computer bullshit.
A little while ago, I finished a project of my own. I released an initial version of a software framework I'd been working on, in some form or another, ever since I graduated from college. It's called gzochi, and it's a system for developing multiplayer network games. I'd begun building it -- or feature prototypes of it -- around the time that Blizzard's World of Warcraft was really firing the consciousness of the media and the game-playing populace, and also at the same time that the Free Software folks were pushing both for Free implementations of popular bits of software and for Free game libraries and games. What I had in mind was a rich framework, a piece of software that would comprise, say, 90% of a working game. The only thing to be supplied by a downstream developer would be, well, game design, specified in as semantically direct a way as possible. Every other aspect of the application, from server-side persistence to client-side rendering, would be managed by the framework. Suffice it to say, this idea was worryingly vague and prohibitively ambitious. In fact, I spent the next several years side-tracked by the work required to create the systems that would support my hypothetical framework.
The time I spent working professionally in games -- at Rebel Monkey -- was a net negative, life-wise, except that I got to build some software on top of a Java game development framework called Project Darkstar that was tackling some of the same problems as gzochi. (Trivia: the Monkey actually hired Jeff Kesselman, the lead developer of that project, as its CTO. For about five months.) Instead of proposing a single, all-encompassing data model on top of the games it hosted, the PDS framework provided a set of container services that game applications could choose advantage of. Forget gaming: Project Darkstar is really more of a transactional execution and persistence framework. And the design of the system dovetailed with some lessons about software I was slowly internalizing at the time: One-size-fits-all software solutions are hard to develop; data modeling is the hardest and most important part of software engineering; the best way to expose software functionality is via thin, decomposable layers. So when I got the idea to pick up gzochi again, I decided to scrap what I'd done back in 2004 and re-implement it as a clone of PDS, using languages that I actually enjoy writing code in, C and Scheme. As a validation of that impulse, the past couple of months have been pretty nuts. I don't think I've ever had code come to me as easily as it has been for this project. And I just released an initial version! I'm going to take a break for a while and work on something else, but I'm bedeviled with fantasies of games to build.
Nina and I joined a gym over the winter -- for three months, I should say, beginning on New Years Day, so our membership is just about up. We went with Body Reserve, over on 5th Ave. and Union, which Tom and Jill have gently mocked over the years for its dopey eagle-with-a-barbell signage. They call it "American Dream Muscles." But they had the least aggressive terms and they priced competitively, relative to their offering, which seems, well, correspondingly modest. I hadn't exercised in a gym since, I don't know, college, but the qualia seem to be largely the same: There's a clammy, grimy texture to everything you touch, and a faint, not unpleasant worn-sneaker smell throughout. I was going primarily to run on the treadmill during the cold months, but I also pushed myself to branch out to other machines and exercises. I use the free weights, glaring at myself in the mirror as it seems is customary. I use one of the abdominal "crunch" machines. I do the thing where you pull down on a bar and it lifts up some weights, a kind of seated chin-up. Is it working? Unclear. I've got this little hot dog body, you see.
Bad Movie Night continues unabated. Recent selections:
- Snowboard Academy: A miscalculated slobs-vs-snobs comedy that pits snowboarders against skiers -- as if the distinction were somehow important -- in a tussle for liebensraum at a fancy resort. The always unhealthy-looking Corey Haim plays a degenerate 'boarder who somehow becomes the ambassador for his "sport," asserting that "snowboading is new, it's happening, it's hot, it's fresh." A beef jerky-textured Jim Varney makes an appearance as a hack road comic who's inexplicably promoted to management. The movie attempts nothing and goes nowhere.
- Undefeatable: We were pretty excited to see this one, as it's the source of a famous Internet video called Best fight scene of all time. It is actually a very good fight scene, cartoonishly destructive and unnecessarily shirtless, but the rest of the movie is richly silly as well -- the guy who gets his eyeball poked out at the end is a wild-eyed caricature of a villain with an Oedipus complex that drives him to kill. But the funniest part for me is how seriously the film takes the martial arts pedigree of its stars, John Miller and Cynthia Rothrock. There are multiple, endless scenes of lame dudes in sweatpants delivering very serious-looking practice punches to the air. It's as much of a boner-killer for the concept of karate as people who pronounce it kah-rah-tay.
I went out to Maxwell's on Sunday night to catch the WFMU Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia, the big karaoke party that signals the end of their annual two-week-long fundraising marathon. I know I'm not supposed to merely tolerate it, but I not-so-secretly love the marathon -- my favorite show, the lively Prank Patrol, brings out The Wheel Of Fate, a full complement of tortures unbecoming the middle-aged hosts: This year's edition promised underwear trading, foot kissing, and briefs full of coffee grounds. The other shows on the station get a whole lot more personable as well, since even the music shows with the most taciturn hosts are obligated to devote half their air time to shilling. You get to experience non-naturally-occurring DJ combos: Frangry vs. Station Manager Ken! Billy Jam vs. Bronwyn Carlton! Tom Scharpling vs. Terre T, pretending they're not real-life married! And Scharpling's show is always a stunner, even if it lacks the sweaty desperation of some of the less popular programs. I've pledged (to 7SD) the past several years, partly out of the goodness of my heart, partly out of a desire, as Andy says, to hear my name said on the "ray-dee-oh," but I'd never had the nerve to make it out to Hoof & Mouth. I decided to try it this year after watching a joyous video of last year's, and so I bailed early on dinner at Surfish with Eve and Jon and took the F to 14th for the switch to the PATH.
The hardest part of making it to Maxwell's is the trek down Washington Ave. When I was younger and more attuned to discomfort, my spirit revolted at the thought of walking eleven long blocks to my destination, especially in the cold -- that street really focuses the wind on your business. But I am older now, and I persevered, taking opportunities to peek into the windows of ground-floor brownstone apartments and check out the anti-Obama tchotchkes inexplicably on offer for St. Patrick's Day at more than one pharmacy. Hoboken's a pretty town, I thought. There's a sports bar on every corner, but I could live there. It's what I always think.
I knew I was at Maxwell's even before I saw the sign, because I caught sight of Ken in the window wearing his "vinyl suit," a set of armored plates built out of fire-wilted records. He was wearing a kilt, too, but not much else. Irwin Chusid and Therese were there, too, in a little reserved part of the front of the house where they'd set up a remote broadcasting system to finish out the fundraising. The real action was in the back, where the Sinfonia (a bunch of musically adept FMU DJs) were playing. I arrived in time to catch the end of X. Ray Burns' performance, delivered naked to the waist, his beard pointed like a satyr's. After him came songs sung by Bryce Kretschmann, Keili Hamilton, Lamin Fofana, and other DJs with familiar names and sometimes familiar faces. I picked out a bunch of WFMU luminaries in the crowd: AP Mike (Lisk), Frangry (whose real name, I overheard, is Francine), Andy Cohen, a guy I think might've been Kevin Nutt from Sinner's Crossroads. The big performances came at the end of the night. Ken invited "The Queen of WFMU," Terre T, to the stage, and she turned in a high-octane performance of "Ace Of Spades," quite possibly one of the most difficult songs ever to play or sing. And then it was time for "The King of WFMU," a characteristically disheveled Tom Scharpling, who sang "Communication Breakdown" and, as he'd hinted he would, "Killing In The Name Of." To make the latter song radio friendly (a feed of the festivities was going out over the air) he edited its refrain to "Fudge you, I won't do what you tell me." The appreciative mosh pit that had formed roared it right back at him. Upon finishing, he dropped the mic and stepped off the stage into the crowd, half rock star, half Joe Lunchpail.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Tug Job
We -- Bel Argosy -- played our first show of the year at Don Pedro's on Wednesday, February 1st. Nina's brother Michael booked the show for us. He's trying his hand, I think, at being a show promoter / all-around music guy. I made the poster for this one. It's the first poster I've made since, gee, the one I drew for The Headliners back in 1998, in ball-point pen, with Billy and Chris and Simon as Abraham Lincoln (there was no photo of him to work from). I think I used it in my college applications. For this one, I went with a paper-and-Scotch tape 80's hardcore aesthetic. I think it worked out okay. As part of the Bel Argosy 2012 marketing initiative, Chris and I went out to Bushwick the weekend before the show to hang up flyers. Don Pedro's has changed, babies. The last time I was there was several years ago, when I saw Fuck School and Cerebral Ballzy, and back then it was a bit scarier. It looked like a rec center that'd been trashed during a World Cup, all crumbling asbestos tile and Latin-American soccer club banners. It's gone through some design iterations since then. In addition to an overall renovation, there's a photo booth and two Skee Ball machines, clearly an attempt to draw a hipster crowd, and they've got a menu with pulled pork "sliders" -- a sine qua non, I think, for trendy bars with kitchens. We hung up all three of my painstakingly photocopied flyers and then settled in for a drink. The band on stage, which I think was called Born Loose, finished their set and retired to the bar to have a drink themselves and receive well-wishers from the audience. "Isn't that the guy from The Candy Snatchers?" Chris asked, nodding at the lead singer and referring to a band we saw a few times in high school, notorious for their blood-spraying live act and an interview with Maximum Rocknroll that left our teenage selves tittering over the phrase "brain ass." He didn't want to bother the guy, but I was drunker and maybe a bit less star-struck than him, and so when he went to take a piss I went over and introduced myself. He was super nice! And his new band is very good. Celebrity!
On the night of the show, I trained it up to Billy's house to pick up our equipment, and then he and I took the train back downtown and into Bushwick. We lugged the drum stuff, a guitar, and a guitar amp the six or so interminable blocks from the subway to Don Pedro's. I'd bought a new snare drum a week or so previous, as part of the Bel Argosy 2012 Capital Improvement plan, and this show was its debut. The old snare drum was part of the ancient Headliners drum kit we'd bought (cymbals included) for something like $250 from a sneering, dismissive clerk at Sam Ash back in freshman year of college. It's served us / me very well over the years, but was starting advertise its age and quality pretty obviously -- despite replacements and tuning attempts over the years, the tom and kick drum heads are all slack and wrinkly, and the snare drum itself is covered in a criss-crossing pattern of black electrical tape to patch tears in the heads and keep the tone appropriately flat.
So Beau and I hit up the Guitar Center at the Atlantic Ave. mall on an overcast Sunday afternoon -- they may be Kryptonite for local music stores, but they're way friendlier. I didn't know exactly what we were looking for. We struggled to describe our "drum sound" to the salesperson, a big guy with an Australian accent and a scar running down his forehead. If there's a vocabulary for drum tone -- surely there is -- I surely do not know it. "We want, like, a really... 'crack' kind of snare sound," I said. "Kind of flat and military-sounding. As little melody or resonance as possible." Ultimately we had to resort to mouth noises to explain. But the dude was game and showed us a bunch of different snare drums, and we found one that I think sounds really good, a steel-shell Pearl with a really crisp sound. And it was only $200!
The first band of the night was called Yankee Bang Bang. They're a three-piece who play poppy, guitar-oriented punk songs with some strong Raga flavor. Their frontwoman, Sita, took singing lessons in India, and they do a mean cover of "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" -- no small feat once you see first-hand how fast and tricky that lead line is. After them came Stuvoodoo. Their Facebook page says they're "what comes after Green Day," but they sounded a lot more like, say, The Doors. They've got a kind of bluesy, cock-rock sound, and a frontman who looks like Victor Creed. I particularly like their song "Grow My City Goldmine," although I suspect that it may be about Warcraft. We played last. The new snare worked great! Crack crack crack.
Meeting Sita worked out to our mutual advantage: Her band was playing a show at Cake Shop on the 16th, and one of the bands on the bill had dropped out; she asked if we could fill in. Of course, we said. It was good to be back at Cake Shop! It's a very comfortable venue to play -- there's an actual green room (of sorts); they've got a real backline; and the sound guy, always recognizable in his tights and knee-length sweater, provides a clear mix, at least for us on stage. The first band up was Cave Days, a three-piece who play moody, drone-y guitar songs. We were after them. We played a new song we'd been working on called "Albert Chasey." I think we sounded good! I got a little too drunk and made the mistake of playing around with the tinsel hanging behind the stage, which led to a private moment of panic as Billy started a song while my hi-hat hand was firmly entangled in the stuff. Yankee Bang Bang was after us, and they played a really great, tight set, even better than the last time we saw them. They were followed in turn by Clinical Trials, a really awesome guitar-and-drums two-piece who were kind of like a female version of Ken South Rock -- or maybe KSR is a male version of them, since Clinical Trials has been around longer. They played bluesy garage punk songs, with shreddy guitar parts and hoarse, Distillers-style vocals. Their drummer was particularly impressive, breezily rolling up and down the kit without breaking a sweat. She was nuts. It was a fun night!
It's the middle of February, though, and we've only played two shows so far this year. How have we been spending our time? We're trying to press some vinyl! Billy and Chris, veterans of a half dozen bands that are no longer of this earth, had the observation that the rush to record might have stunted the development of some of their earlier projects, and so we spent our first year playing out and not worrying about putting anything down on tape. But people had been asking for full-band recordings of our songs, and Cenk let us know that he'd help us release something once we had something to release. So we prepared the Practice Hole Mark II and started experimenting with microphone placement and cable configurations, and over the course of several months we've found a process that so far seems to serves us well. Here it is: Billy records a "scratch" guitar track to a metronome in Logic. We use three mics for the drums -- two dynamic mics, one for each of the kick and snare drums; and one condenser mic for the cymbals and other drums. I play the drums to the metronome and the scratch track, and we record it to a four track tape, which seems to lead to a more forgiving sound -- less echo-y and with a little bit of microphone hiss. After that, we "bounce" the drum tracks back to the computer, and Beau and Billy and Chris record the two guitar tracks and the bass track directly from the amp to the computer. It usually takes me the most takes to get a workable track -- a testament both to my particular level of skill but also to how "clean" the drum track needs to be -- followed by Chris. Billy and Beau can usually nail their tracks in one or two takes. It's not a race. In the end we get something great!
We've decided to name the record "Tug Job," for a couple of reasons: One, because we liked the cheeky, obvious innuendo, which puts me in mind of similarly-titled albums by The Dickies, The Queers, and The Dwarves, among others; and two, as a tribute to how long it's taken us and how much effort we put in to get it done. "Getting this album out has been a real tug job," Billy suggested as an apropos example usage. It sounded plausible enough that I took it as a piece of idiom with which I'd been hitherto unfamiliar. It's not -- give it a Google and see what, uh, comes up.
On the night of the show, I trained it up to Billy's house to pick up our equipment, and then he and I took the train back downtown and into Bushwick. We lugged the drum stuff, a guitar, and a guitar amp the six or so interminable blocks from the subway to Don Pedro's. I'd bought a new snare drum a week or so previous, as part of the Bel Argosy 2012 Capital Improvement plan, and this show was its debut. The old snare drum was part of the ancient Headliners drum kit we'd bought (cymbals included) for something like $250 from a sneering, dismissive clerk at Sam Ash back in freshman year of college. It's served us / me very well over the years, but was starting advertise its age and quality pretty obviously -- despite replacements and tuning attempts over the years, the tom and kick drum heads are all slack and wrinkly, and the snare drum itself is covered in a criss-crossing pattern of black electrical tape to patch tears in the heads and keep the tone appropriately flat.
So Beau and I hit up the Guitar Center at the Atlantic Ave. mall on an overcast Sunday afternoon -- they may be Kryptonite for local music stores, but they're way friendlier. I didn't know exactly what we were looking for. We struggled to describe our "drum sound" to the salesperson, a big guy with an Australian accent and a scar running down his forehead. If there's a vocabulary for drum tone -- surely there is -- I surely do not know it. "We want, like, a really... 'crack' kind of snare sound," I said. "Kind of flat and military-sounding. As little melody or resonance as possible." Ultimately we had to resort to mouth noises to explain. But the dude was game and showed us a bunch of different snare drums, and we found one that I think sounds really good, a steel-shell Pearl with a really crisp sound. And it was only $200!
The first band of the night was called Yankee Bang Bang. They're a three-piece who play poppy, guitar-oriented punk songs with some strong Raga flavor. Their frontwoman, Sita, took singing lessons in India, and they do a mean cover of "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" -- no small feat once you see first-hand how fast and tricky that lead line is. After them came Stuvoodoo. Their Facebook page says they're "what comes after Green Day," but they sounded a lot more like, say, The Doors. They've got a kind of bluesy, cock-rock sound, and a frontman who looks like Victor Creed. I particularly like their song "Grow My City Goldmine," although I suspect that it may be about Warcraft. We played last. The new snare worked great! Crack crack crack.
Meeting Sita worked out to our mutual advantage: Her band was playing a show at Cake Shop on the 16th, and one of the bands on the bill had dropped out; she asked if we could fill in. Of course, we said. It was good to be back at Cake Shop! It's a very comfortable venue to play -- there's an actual green room (of sorts); they've got a real backline; and the sound guy, always recognizable in his tights and knee-length sweater, provides a clear mix, at least for us on stage. The first band up was Cave Days, a three-piece who play moody, drone-y guitar songs. We were after them. We played a new song we'd been working on called "Albert Chasey." I think we sounded good! I got a little too drunk and made the mistake of playing around with the tinsel hanging behind the stage, which led to a private moment of panic as Billy started a song while my hi-hat hand was firmly entangled in the stuff. Yankee Bang Bang was after us, and they played a really great, tight set, even better than the last time we saw them. They were followed in turn by Clinical Trials, a really awesome guitar-and-drums two-piece who were kind of like a female version of Ken South Rock -- or maybe KSR is a male version of them, since Clinical Trials has been around longer. They played bluesy garage punk songs, with shreddy guitar parts and hoarse, Distillers-style vocals. Their drummer was particularly impressive, breezily rolling up and down the kit without breaking a sweat. She was nuts. It was a fun night!
It's the middle of February, though, and we've only played two shows so far this year. How have we been spending our time? We're trying to press some vinyl! Billy and Chris, veterans of a half dozen bands that are no longer of this earth, had the observation that the rush to record might have stunted the development of some of their earlier projects, and so we spent our first year playing out and not worrying about putting anything down on tape. But people had been asking for full-band recordings of our songs, and Cenk let us know that he'd help us release something once we had something to release. So we prepared the Practice Hole Mark II and started experimenting with microphone placement and cable configurations, and over the course of several months we've found a process that so far seems to serves us well. Here it is: Billy records a "scratch" guitar track to a metronome in Logic. We use three mics for the drums -- two dynamic mics, one for each of the kick and snare drums; and one condenser mic for the cymbals and other drums. I play the drums to the metronome and the scratch track, and we record it to a four track tape, which seems to lead to a more forgiving sound -- less echo-y and with a little bit of microphone hiss. After that, we "bounce" the drum tracks back to the computer, and Beau and Billy and Chris record the two guitar tracks and the bass track directly from the amp to the computer. It usually takes me the most takes to get a workable track -- a testament both to my particular level of skill but also to how "clean" the drum track needs to be -- followed by Chris. Billy and Beau can usually nail their tracks in one or two takes. It's not a race. In the end we get something great!
We've decided to name the record "Tug Job," for a couple of reasons: One, because we liked the cheeky, obvious innuendo, which puts me in mind of similarly-titled albums by The Dickies, The Queers, and The Dwarves, among others; and two, as a tribute to how long it's taken us and how much effort we put in to get it done. "Getting this album out has been a real tug job," Billy suggested as an apropos example usage. It sounded plausible enough that I took it as a piece of idiom with which I'd been hitherto unfamiliar. It's not -- give it a Google and see what, uh, comes up.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Punchums
Winter has been dry, the weather alternating between periods of eerie warmth and icy cold. This is the cold and sleepy time of the year. It's the dead time, when the cost of all the business of the past year is brought to bear. I'm feeling sluggish and drained these days. Nina's been quite sick -- fever, etc. -- and the world just seems like it doesn't wanna get out of bed.
Nina and I went to brunch last weekend at Stone Park Cafe. We've been eating a lot of weekend restaurant brunches these past several weeks, often at Juventino, sometimes across the street from it at Perch, sometimes a few blocks north at Bogota. I guess it's kind of an expensive habit, but as expensive habits go, well, it's not really that expensive. Stone Park is usually thronged with dopey Park Slope yuppie types -- you can tell exactly how busy it is inside by how many people wearing sunglasses and pastel-colored fleece are lurking around the entrance waiting to be called in for a table. Sunday was bitterly cold, though, and so we were able to sneak in after a mere ten-minute wait. We ordered Bloody Marys with our food, and they came with oversize caper berries in them instead of olives, each berry packed full of crunchy little seeds like some kind of extra-terrestrial shipping container. Nina had the bluefish cakes. I think I had a "chef omelette." It was pretty good, but I don't think there's any brunch that's worth waiting on line for. Waiting on line at restaurants is horse shit.
After brunch we resolved to go to the grocery store, heading up to 6th Ave. in the hopes of presenting less of ourselves to the freezing wind. It worked, at least until we got to 9th St. and had to turn right, at which point we felt the icy sting of a powerful westerly wind. Or rather, I felt it -- Nina, ever practical, had deployed her full-length down coat, which afforded her its rich and downy protection. I was wearing my dumb leather jacket-and-jeans combination, no hat, no gloves, which was useless at this temperature. I begged for a pit stop at the CVS to warm up and wipe my nose.
We made it to C-Town, though, and wove drunkenly up and down the aisles, plucking stock off the shelves according to habit. Our take-away: D'Anjou pears (4); Gala apples (4); an orange Holland pepper (why not); Stoned Wheat Thins crackers; Arnold Health Nut sandwich bread; Nature Valley granola bars (peanut butter flavor); a jar of pickled beets; Celestial Seasonings tea bags (Sleepytime); Krasdale peanut butter (chunky); 3M Dobie scrubbing sponge; Friskies Special Diet Beef & Liver Entrée (8 cans); Bachman hard pretzels; Desert Pepper salsa (spicy black bean flavor); Green & Black's chocolate (1 bar) (peanut with sea salt flavor, a reward for running errands); Pete & Gerry's cage-free organic eggs (half dozen); Breakstone unsalted butter (2 bars); Morningstar Farms "Chik Patties" (1 box); Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers (1 box); Amy's Organic burritos: bean and cheese (2), Especial (2), black bean (2); Krasdale frozen peas; Krasdale swiss cheese. We considered buying, but did not buy: Expensive, exotically-sourced strawberries and blueberries; a live lobster, as always.
It was still freezing on the way back from the grocery store. We passed a vendor selling knit caps off a folding table outside the Brooklyn Wholesale storefront. I bought one for five bucks and put it on my head, which stopped my monk dime (okay, sand-dollar) from stinging. I still needed gloves to help me get the groceries home, and Nina stopped us at Save On Fifth. I'd bought a tiny little barbecue grill there many years ago for ten dollars. The cold had sapped my will, but not enough so that I wasn't capable of making a fuss over the which exact pair of gloves to buy. "Too bulky," I told Nina when she suggested a pair of big padded work gloves. "Those are lady gloves!" I said about another pair. Finally, the security guard, overhearing all this from his white particle-board cubicle by the door, admonished me, "Come on, man. Just do what she says!" So I did.
There is a new beer technique I need to explain. I learned it from Evan on New Year's Eve, as we were sitting around his apartment in Williamsburg. He got a can of Tecate from the bag of them we'd bought at the gas station, and instead of bending the tab up and over to open the can, he raised one knuckle and punched down on the perforated tab area on the top of the can several times until it tore, spraying a bit of beer but opening the can enough to drink. He said he'd learned the trick growing up as a bad kid in Wisconsin. I tried it on a can myself, and, lo and behold, after punching and swearing a bit, it popped open! I love this trick, because, unlike, say, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, it requires no special knowledge or particular dexterity. You just have to be willing to punch a metal can seven to ten times, harder than seems reasonable to punch an object that you are holding, and quickly enough that the can opens before your hand starts to hurt too much to keep punching. You may often hit the raised lip at the edge of the can a bunch of times by accident, which really hurts. That's just part of the deal. You may also wind up tearing your knuckles open and getting blood on things, which is just, you know, icing.
Oh, so I think we should call Tecates "punchums" from now on. Let's see if that takes off.
Nina and I went to brunch last weekend at Stone Park Cafe. We've been eating a lot of weekend restaurant brunches these past several weeks, often at Juventino, sometimes across the street from it at Perch, sometimes a few blocks north at Bogota. I guess it's kind of an expensive habit, but as expensive habits go, well, it's not really that expensive. Stone Park is usually thronged with dopey Park Slope yuppie types -- you can tell exactly how busy it is inside by how many people wearing sunglasses and pastel-colored fleece are lurking around the entrance waiting to be called in for a table. Sunday was bitterly cold, though, and so we were able to sneak in after a mere ten-minute wait. We ordered Bloody Marys with our food, and they came with oversize caper berries in them instead of olives, each berry packed full of crunchy little seeds like some kind of extra-terrestrial shipping container. Nina had the bluefish cakes. I think I had a "chef omelette." It was pretty good, but I don't think there's any brunch that's worth waiting on line for. Waiting on line at restaurants is horse shit.
After brunch we resolved to go to the grocery store, heading up to 6th Ave. in the hopes of presenting less of ourselves to the freezing wind. It worked, at least until we got to 9th St. and had to turn right, at which point we felt the icy sting of a powerful westerly wind. Or rather, I felt it -- Nina, ever practical, had deployed her full-length down coat, which afforded her its rich and downy protection. I was wearing my dumb leather jacket-and-jeans combination, no hat, no gloves, which was useless at this temperature. I begged for a pit stop at the CVS to warm up and wipe my nose.
We made it to C-Town, though, and wove drunkenly up and down the aisles, plucking stock off the shelves according to habit. Our take-away: D'Anjou pears (4); Gala apples (4); an orange Holland pepper (why not); Stoned Wheat Thins crackers; Arnold Health Nut sandwich bread; Nature Valley granola bars (peanut butter flavor); a jar of pickled beets; Celestial Seasonings tea bags (Sleepytime); Krasdale peanut butter (chunky); 3M Dobie scrubbing sponge; Friskies Special Diet Beef & Liver Entrée (8 cans); Bachman hard pretzels; Desert Pepper salsa (spicy black bean flavor); Green & Black's chocolate (1 bar) (peanut with sea salt flavor, a reward for running errands); Pete & Gerry's cage-free organic eggs (half dozen); Breakstone unsalted butter (2 bars); Morningstar Farms "Chik Patties" (1 box); Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers (1 box); Amy's Organic burritos: bean and cheese (2), Especial (2), black bean (2); Krasdale frozen peas; Krasdale swiss cheese. We considered buying, but did not buy: Expensive, exotically-sourced strawberries and blueberries; a live lobster, as always.
It was still freezing on the way back from the grocery store. We passed a vendor selling knit caps off a folding table outside the Brooklyn Wholesale storefront. I bought one for five bucks and put it on my head, which stopped my monk dime (okay, sand-dollar) from stinging. I still needed gloves to help me get the groceries home, and Nina stopped us at Save On Fifth. I'd bought a tiny little barbecue grill there many years ago for ten dollars. The cold had sapped my will, but not enough so that I wasn't capable of making a fuss over the which exact pair of gloves to buy. "Too bulky," I told Nina when she suggested a pair of big padded work gloves. "Those are lady gloves!" I said about another pair. Finally, the security guard, overhearing all this from his white particle-board cubicle by the door, admonished me, "Come on, man. Just do what she says!" So I did.
There is a new beer technique I need to explain. I learned it from Evan on New Year's Eve, as we were sitting around his apartment in Williamsburg. He got a can of Tecate from the bag of them we'd bought at the gas station, and instead of bending the tab up and over to open the can, he raised one knuckle and punched down on the perforated tab area on the top of the can several times until it tore, spraying a bit of beer but opening the can enough to drink. He said he'd learned the trick growing up as a bad kid in Wisconsin. I tried it on a can myself, and, lo and behold, after punching and swearing a bit, it popped open! I love this trick, because, unlike, say, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, it requires no special knowledge or particular dexterity. You just have to be willing to punch a metal can seven to ten times, harder than seems reasonable to punch an object that you are holding, and quickly enough that the can opens before your hand starts to hurt too much to keep punching. You may often hit the raised lip at the edge of the can a bunch of times by accident, which really hurts. That's just part of the deal. You may also wind up tearing your knuckles open and getting blood on things, which is just, you know, icing.
Oh, so I think we should call Tecates "punchums" from now on. Let's see if that takes off.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner
I handed the reins of New Years Eve proper over to Nina, who responds to a challenge to celebrate with actual ambition instead of with annoyance, like I do. I spent part of the day up at the Practice Hole 2.0 participating in the awarding of The 2011 Argosies and working on a new song with the band. Then I rode the train downtown with Chris and Beau. Chris followed me to Park Slope, and we copped a drink at The Gate while we waited for Nina to put the finishing touches on her appearance. Despite their having shelled out for signage announcing all-night activities (noisemakers, complimentary champagne at midnight!), the place was pretty much deserted at 9 PM with the exception of a few guys playing cards in a corner and a single couple in a booth squirming around on top of each other -- really doing everything short of intercourse. We had a couple of drinks, which got me pretty drunk, and then hit the road. After that I steered us towards Canal Bar, which turned out to be every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped it would be. We drank beers. The guy gave us popcorn.
Nina was ready to start her night at this point and met us outside. Chris departed to North Brooklyn and Nina and I hopped a cab to Prospect Heights, where we slipped in the door of a huge building where a friend-of-a-friend of ours was DJing a party in one of the penthouse apartments. The place was thronged with revelers, each of whom seemed to be at least five years younger than us and have their own personal fifth of whiskey. We met Winnie and Evan outside on the little roof patio, and watched the fireworks going off above Prospect Park to mark the actual rolling over of the year. Still trying to get a handle on my level of drunkenness, I wolfed an empty hot dog bun. Some wags found a way to get onto the roof proper, one level above us, and launched a bunch of Roman candles directly over our heads. I got a hot spark in my eye -- lot of people probably did -- but it was dazzling and worth it to be that close to an actual exploding firework.
Soon after that we hit the road again, clown-carring our way to Williamsburg where we sat in Evan's apartment drinking gas station beer. Drunk girls collapsed on chairs and sofas and were variously led away to cars or other apartments. The crowd winnowed itself down to a handful of people and "Mickey," a vaguely mouse-shaped accumulation of colored cotton balls purchased from a homeless guy and mounted as a bust on top of some motion-sensitive electric motors that would make it pop-and-lock in a truly creepy way. Ray (aka Dramus from our tabletop adventures earlier this year) showed up, an unexpected delight! We partied up and took to the basement, our goal to spelunk our way into the abandoned G train station Evan's assured us lurks behind a boarded-up door down there. Ray was wielding a broom handle for wrangling spider webs, and there were a fuck ton of those -- I would have balked, babies, if I hadn't been so lifted. There was also a creepy storage room with a crucifix, some doll parts, and, no kidding, a wedding dress wrapped around a pipe joint. Maybe on account of it being 3 AM, no one had the stones to venture through the magic door, so we returned to the surface and took to the streets in search of food.
Every venue on Metropolitan was packed, and the waits were horrendous, so Nina and I split and shared a cab with a stranger, a very drunk girl who berated the poor cabbie into turning up Hot 97 to deafening levels and then ranted about how environmental studies should be "integrated into... into ev'ry... fuckin' class in school." She bailed at 8th Ave. and Carroll, wordlessly pressing five bucks into Nina's hand before bolting out of the car and running down the night street.
Hello, 2012!
Nina was ready to start her night at this point and met us outside. Chris departed to North Brooklyn and Nina and I hopped a cab to Prospect Heights, where we slipped in the door of a huge building where a friend-of-a-friend of ours was DJing a party in one of the penthouse apartments. The place was thronged with revelers, each of whom seemed to be at least five years younger than us and have their own personal fifth of whiskey. We met Winnie and Evan outside on the little roof patio, and watched the fireworks going off above Prospect Park to mark the actual rolling over of the year. Still trying to get a handle on my level of drunkenness, I wolfed an empty hot dog bun. Some wags found a way to get onto the roof proper, one level above us, and launched a bunch of Roman candles directly over our heads. I got a hot spark in my eye -- lot of people probably did -- but it was dazzling and worth it to be that close to an actual exploding firework.
Soon after that we hit the road again, clown-carring our way to Williamsburg where we sat in Evan's apartment drinking gas station beer. Drunk girls collapsed on chairs and sofas and were variously led away to cars or other apartments. The crowd winnowed itself down to a handful of people and "Mickey," a vaguely mouse-shaped accumulation of colored cotton balls purchased from a homeless guy and mounted as a bust on top of some motion-sensitive electric motors that would make it pop-and-lock in a truly creepy way. Ray (aka Dramus from our tabletop adventures earlier this year) showed up, an unexpected delight! We partied up and took to the basement, our goal to spelunk our way into the abandoned G train station Evan's assured us lurks behind a boarded-up door down there. Ray was wielding a broom handle for wrangling spider webs, and there were a fuck ton of those -- I would have balked, babies, if I hadn't been so lifted. There was also a creepy storage room with a crucifix, some doll parts, and, no kidding, a wedding dress wrapped around a pipe joint. Maybe on account of it being 3 AM, no one had the stones to venture through the magic door, so we returned to the surface and took to the streets in search of food.
Every venue on Metropolitan was packed, and the waits were horrendous, so Nina and I split and shared a cab with a stranger, a very drunk girl who berated the poor cabbie into turning up Hot 97 to deafening levels and then ranted about how environmental studies should be "integrated into... into ev'ry... fuckin' class in school." She bailed at 8th Ave. and Carroll, wordlessly pressing five bucks into Nina's hand before bolting out of the car and running down the night street.
Hello, 2012!
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Best Of Best Year
Gentlefolk, here is my list.
Best book I read: Elizabeth Costello; runner-up: Nineteen Seventy-Four
Best album: Tie: David Comes To Life / Undun
Best song: The Last Living Rose (Let England Shake); runner-up: We're Back! (Turtleneck & Chain)
Best show I went to: Shilpa Ray, opening for Man Man at Music Hall of Williamsburg, May 31st
Best show I played: Bel Argosy at Lone Wolf, July 15th
Best movie I saw in the theater: Bridesmaids
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Heavenly Creatures
Best worst movie: Double feature: Twin Sitters / Double Trouble
Best pickles: Claussen Kosher Dill (sandwich slices)
Best Not-Just-Rugelach scone replacement: Raspberry-walnut coffee cake, Blue Sky
Best brunch: Huarache, Juventino
Best veggie burger: Italian Herb Chik Patties, MorningStar Farms
Best snack: Store-brand peanut butter and Stoned Wheat Thins
Best houseplant: Spider Plant
Bel Argosy played our final show of the year on Saturday the 17th at Legion (again) with Majuscules and a couple of bands we'd never played with before: Cool Shirt, a duo who are impossible to google but who are apparently both members of other famous bands (Rapid Cities?); and The Long Eye, also a two-piece. Cool Shirt turfed out early in their set with irreconcilable technical difficulties: I guess they'd asked for the lights on the stage to be lowered to a cave-like darkness, but found that they couldn't see their instruments in the gloom, and Dennis (who told us upon arrival, "I'm a ghetto Dorian Gray!") was unable or unwilling to get them back bright enough in time. So we took the stage a bit ahead of schedule. While Cool Shirt were playing, I'd leaned over to Beau, and by way of making idle conversation, said, "You should go crazy on stage tonight." He'd taken it to heart, though, and when we started playing, he really did go crazy: thrashing around, jumping off stage debris, doing that thing where you limbo yourself way down while taking a solo and just kind of fall over. He even managed to cut his fingers open on his strings, lashing blood across his face and guitar, Townsend-style. We were playing to what looked like a full house, there were no equipment issues or fuck-ups. It was a great way to end the year. Majuscules played after us, and after them The Long Eye played what seemed like a super-long set that was crazily well-attended -- and their audience included, we think, a very beardy Cillian Murphy. We'll just go ahead and count him as one of ours.
It's kind of amazing to think back on how many shows we played in 2011: Twenty-two! It would have been more than that, even, were it not for some illnesses, double bookings, etc. And there were lots of other milestones this year -- press, t-shirts, promoters -- that really blow my mind. I went into our first few gigs mortified but determined (sort of like what Janet Weiss describes feeling when she started out at, uh, sixteen) and tried to trust that I'd either learn to play better or the whole thing would crash and burn, whichever way it went I wouldn't have to be self-conscious forever. And it worked! Sort of. I mean, I'm always the least proficient person on a bill, but I've learned to stop worrying and love it like a great job.
Ted Leo and his Pharmacists played The Bell House on Friday. I'd snapped up tickets when they went on sale for fifteen bucks dollars in November or whenever, knowing that I would of course want to go. By the time New Years Eve-eve rolled around, they were a scarce commodity, and people were scalpin' 'em for, like, sixty-five bucks. Emma and Jay managed to get a free pair out of the blue, when one of Emma's Twitter fans had two he couldn't use, and so we all went together. We stood around listening to the music over the PA and waiting for Kurt Braunohler to take the stage.
At some point I realized I was hearing "Prisoners" by The Vapors, and I got curious and looked over at the DJ booth. It was Ted Leo himself spinning records! He played a bunch more quirky, not-quite singles before introducing Kurt, who did some jokes and showed an episode of a new web series he's working on. I'd seen some of his material at Hot Tub, his excellent Monday-night show with Kristen Schaal at Littlefield, but everything was still very funny -- I loved his spurious Wikipedia "fact" that parakeets live fifteen human years or one million mind numbing parakeet years -- and I think I've managed to figure out what his appeal is. He doesn't have a particularly distinctive joke-writing voice, but there's a surprising strain of puckish rudeness that comes out on stage, and which he seems helpless to control, that contrasts well with his posh, geeky appearance.
Obits were up next, and they played a weirdly flat set. I'd heard them on Terre T's show and liked them, but their lead singer -- who, appropriate for their sound, looks like William Sanderson with a wasting illness -- introduced their set by saying, "Let's keep things mellow. We did this last night. We're doin' it again tomorrow night at Maxwell's. I spent today curled up in bed. So let's try to keep it mellow." Seriously? Textbook example of how not to get a crowd excited. And they sounded great, especially their drummer, who had an economical but muscular style of playing, but of course nobody moved.
There was a guy -- there always is -- a few feet away from us who was being that guy all night: saying too-loud, unfunny shit to the band; antagonizing other dudes; hitting on unaccompanied girls way too aggressively. Nina and Emma were actively plotting his demise, and so was I. But when Ted Leo started his set and literally nobody was dancing around, he was the only person who'd bop around with me. In fact, I'm gonna credit myself, that shitty guy, and this little short dude for getting a proper, you know, mosh pit going. (That is probably not how it happened, but.) So I was thinking, you know, maybe I'm gonna disagree with Nina. Maybe this guy's not so bad. But then he blew all his good show karma by repeatedly taking this tambourine away from some girls to show them the "right" way to play it. Yikes. Talk about doing it wrong. The band was stellar and played all the songs I was hoping for: "The High Party" was in there, as well as "Timorous Me" and "Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?" which Ted dedicated to Joe Martin and Patrick Stickles, both of whom were apparently in attendance. Kurt Braunohler interrupted the set about half way through to remind Ted that it was almost New Years Eve-eve. They counted down, Ted serenaded him, and then he made to stage dive into the audience. I was right under him and gestured "I've got you," assuming that the people next to me would have him as well. Not so -- he jumped and I crumpled, both of us winding up on the floor. (He really does have a "tod bod," as he explains in his act.) We hoisted him back up, though, and passed him to the back of the house, where Emma and Nina promptly dropped him again.
"I was fine," he told us after the show. "I've practiced falling so that I always land directly on my spine, where it's safe."
Feeling bruised and clammy, I parted ways with people and shuffled all the way to Eve's house, where I gave her and her fiancée Jon's two cats (Sam and Sasha) their second ration of the day. Along the way, I passed a place on 3rd Ave. called Canal Bar that seemed like pretty much the greatest bar ever: Fairy lights everywhere; abandoned on a Friday night. I couldn't stop then -- and felt too weak and wretched, anyway -- but vowed to return.
Best book I read: Elizabeth Costello; runner-up: Nineteen Seventy-Four
Best album: Tie: David Comes To Life / Undun
Best song: The Last Living Rose (Let England Shake); runner-up: We're Back! (Turtleneck & Chain)
Best show I went to: Shilpa Ray, opening for Man Man at Music Hall of Williamsburg, May 31st
Best show I played: Bel Argosy at Lone Wolf, July 15th
Best movie I saw in the theater: Bridesmaids
Best movie I saw not in the theater: Heavenly Creatures
Best worst movie: Double feature: Twin Sitters / Double Trouble
Best pickles: Claussen Kosher Dill (sandwich slices)
Best Not-Just-Rugelach scone replacement: Raspberry-walnut coffee cake, Blue Sky
Best brunch: Huarache, Juventino
Best veggie burger: Italian Herb Chik Patties, MorningStar Farms
Best snack: Store-brand peanut butter and Stoned Wheat Thins
Best houseplant: Spider Plant
Bel Argosy played our final show of the year on Saturday the 17th at Legion (again) with Majuscules and a couple of bands we'd never played with before: Cool Shirt, a duo who are impossible to google but who are apparently both members of other famous bands (Rapid Cities?); and The Long Eye, also a two-piece. Cool Shirt turfed out early in their set with irreconcilable technical difficulties: I guess they'd asked for the lights on the stage to be lowered to a cave-like darkness, but found that they couldn't see their instruments in the gloom, and Dennis (who told us upon arrival, "I'm a ghetto Dorian Gray!") was unable or unwilling to get them back bright enough in time. So we took the stage a bit ahead of schedule. While Cool Shirt were playing, I'd leaned over to Beau, and by way of making idle conversation, said, "You should go crazy on stage tonight." He'd taken it to heart, though, and when we started playing, he really did go crazy: thrashing around, jumping off stage debris, doing that thing where you limbo yourself way down while taking a solo and just kind of fall over. He even managed to cut his fingers open on his strings, lashing blood across his face and guitar, Townsend-style. We were playing to what looked like a full house, there were no equipment issues or fuck-ups. It was a great way to end the year. Majuscules played after us, and after them The Long Eye played what seemed like a super-long set that was crazily well-attended -- and their audience included, we think, a very beardy Cillian Murphy. We'll just go ahead and count him as one of ours.
It's kind of amazing to think back on how many shows we played in 2011: Twenty-two! It would have been more than that, even, were it not for some illnesses, double bookings, etc. And there were lots of other milestones this year -- press, t-shirts, promoters -- that really blow my mind. I went into our first few gigs mortified but determined (sort of like what Janet Weiss describes feeling when she started out at, uh, sixteen) and tried to trust that I'd either learn to play better or the whole thing would crash and burn, whichever way it went I wouldn't have to be self-conscious forever. And it worked! Sort of. I mean, I'm always the least proficient person on a bill, but I've learned to stop worrying and love it like a great job.
Ted Leo and his Pharmacists played The Bell House on Friday. I'd snapped up tickets when they went on sale for fifteen bucks dollars in November or whenever, knowing that I would of course want to go. By the time New Years Eve-eve rolled around, they were a scarce commodity, and people were scalpin' 'em for, like, sixty-five bucks. Emma and Jay managed to get a free pair out of the blue, when one of Emma's Twitter fans had two he couldn't use, and so we all went together. We stood around listening to the music over the PA and waiting for Kurt Braunohler to take the stage.
At some point I realized I was hearing "Prisoners" by The Vapors, and I got curious and looked over at the DJ booth. It was Ted Leo himself spinning records! He played a bunch more quirky, not-quite singles before introducing Kurt, who did some jokes and showed an episode of a new web series he's working on. I'd seen some of his material at Hot Tub, his excellent Monday-night show with Kristen Schaal at Littlefield, but everything was still very funny -- I loved his spurious Wikipedia "fact" that parakeets live fifteen human years or one million mind numbing parakeet years -- and I think I've managed to figure out what his appeal is. He doesn't have a particularly distinctive joke-writing voice, but there's a surprising strain of puckish rudeness that comes out on stage, and which he seems helpless to control, that contrasts well with his posh, geeky appearance.
Obits were up next, and they played a weirdly flat set. I'd heard them on Terre T's show and liked them, but their lead singer -- who, appropriate for their sound, looks like William Sanderson with a wasting illness -- introduced their set by saying, "Let's keep things mellow. We did this last night. We're doin' it again tomorrow night at Maxwell's. I spent today curled up in bed. So let's try to keep it mellow." Seriously? Textbook example of how not to get a crowd excited. And they sounded great, especially their drummer, who had an economical but muscular style of playing, but of course nobody moved.
There was a guy -- there always is -- a few feet away from us who was being that guy all night: saying too-loud, unfunny shit to the band; antagonizing other dudes; hitting on unaccompanied girls way too aggressively. Nina and Emma were actively plotting his demise, and so was I. But when Ted Leo started his set and literally nobody was dancing around, he was the only person who'd bop around with me. In fact, I'm gonna credit myself, that shitty guy, and this little short dude for getting a proper, you know, mosh pit going. (That is probably not how it happened, but.) So I was thinking, you know, maybe I'm gonna disagree with Nina. Maybe this guy's not so bad. But then he blew all his good show karma by repeatedly taking this tambourine away from some girls to show them the "right" way to play it. Yikes. Talk about doing it wrong. The band was stellar and played all the songs I was hoping for: "The High Party" was in there, as well as "Timorous Me" and "Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?" which Ted dedicated to Joe Martin and Patrick Stickles, both of whom were apparently in attendance. Kurt Braunohler interrupted the set about half way through to remind Ted that it was almost New Years Eve-eve. They counted down, Ted serenaded him, and then he made to stage dive into the audience. I was right under him and gestured "I've got you," assuming that the people next to me would have him as well. Not so -- he jumped and I crumpled, both of us winding up on the floor. (He really does have a "tod bod," as he explains in his act.) We hoisted him back up, though, and passed him to the back of the house, where Emma and Nina promptly dropped him again.
"I was fine," he told us after the show. "I've practiced falling so that I always land directly on my spine, where it's safe."
Feeling bruised and clammy, I parted ways with people and shuffled all the way to Eve's house, where I gave her and her fiancée Jon's two cats (Sam and Sasha) their second ration of the day. Along the way, I passed a place on 3rd Ave. called Canal Bar that seemed like pretty much the greatest bar ever: Fairy lights everywhere; abandoned on a Friday night. I couldn't stop then -- and felt too weak and wretched, anyway -- but vowed to return.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Dying On The Inside
The NYPD raided Zuccotti Park early yesterday morning, sweeping up tents, tables, books, signs, bins, bags, and people; clearing it out enough that you could actually see the light panels between the paving stones. (The park's owners even turned them back on.) The Occupiers had seen it coming, sort of -- they'd published a number several weeks ago that you could text to be notified of an event like this, with the idea, I guess, that you could show up and be biomass. I didn't sign up, though, and so I learned of the raid ex post facto, waking up to the news as reported to me by NPR in my cozy Park Slope apartment. I didn't feel like I needed to go to Liberty Plaza to see the aftermath; I knew there'd be video of the destruction as it happened and that it'd be much chewed-over by everyone. And I'd also apparently slept through an early-morning rally at Foley Square. So I resolved to go before work to Duarte Square, over on Canal St. and 6th Ave., which a breathless email from the "Occupied Kitchen" address had designated as the "new" Occupy Wall Street headquarters.
Lugging my customary weekly tribute of several dozen bagels from Bagel World, I found Duarte Square less than half full, with most of the people kind of milling about on the north side of the park. Some people were perched on the top bar of the chain-link fence that separated the square from the neighboring lot owned by Trinity Church; they were holding a big yellow Occupy Wall Street banner. Everyone seemed pretty bummed out. Nobody seemed to be in charge. I couldn't figure out who to give the food to, and didn't want to be take responsibility for distributing it myself. Luckily, I found one of the heroic and perpetually beleaguered OWS medics (identifiable via their olive drab-and-red cross uniforms) who was gracious enough to "own" the bagels for me. Eventually the police started to show up, massing in the dozens on the eastern side of the park. With them was Detective Rick Lee, the infamous "hipster cop," crossing the park from Canal St. and heading in the direction of the protesters. Consistent with his reputation, he was impeccably dressed (trench coat, vest, tie) and had uniformly ecru hair. Nobody seemed tense or upset, but I took that as my cue to leave, since I was already late for work. And I flinched a little walking past the uncannily realistic cop mannequin in the window of the security camera place down the block.
That night, Chris and Alec and Nina and I went to go see Titus Andronicus and Fucked Up play a show at Warsaw. It seemed like an inappropriate time to rock out, but what could we do? We already had the tickets. When I got there there was a band on stage called Liquor Store, which hails, I think, from Glen Rock, the sort-of hometown of Titus. I'll cop to being put off by them at first, because oh man were these guys ever gross: The lead singer was a sweaty goon sporting a John Waters mustache; his weird, too-light eyes -- like those of a wharf drunk who'd fallen asleep on the beach -- bugging out below a dirty knit cap. The bass player was a downright skeletal dude with a catatonic demeanor -- a real heavy metal roadie-looking guy, like if you put Derek Smalls on the rack and fed him a bunch of quaaludes. Both guys were pretty much exactly the type of guy you wouldn't want to date your daughter, which is, I think, the look they were cultivating. But they sounded punchy and rehearsed, the songs were catchy sing-alongs a la Wimpy-era Queers, and the lead singer's insistence on conducting all of the inter-song banter in a mix of grunts and gibberish cracked me up. So I'm gonna say they're pretty cool. They're pretty cool!
Titus Andronicus took the stage after they finished up. They've changed: Amy is gone, replaced by another squirrely-looking white dude; Patrick's beard is gone, although that forehead of his still gives his glower the same Neanderthal intensity. I assumed he'd have something to say about Occupy Wall Street, on account of the big cardboard tiles (paint-lettered 'O', 'W', 'S') they'd brought up on stage with them, and, well, just 'cuz it's them, and I wasn't wrong. The raid was bullshit, he said, as soon as he got on mic. And it was bullshit that the constitutional rights of the Occupiers were violated "by the people that are sworn to uphold [them]." We agreed. "Shit is fucked up, but we're going to survive," he added, lest the proceedings wax too gloomy. And then they opened with a version of "Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ" dedicated to Mike Bloomberg. And they rocked! They followed up with what is quite possibly my favorite song of theirs, "Richard II (etc.)" I danced, hard, to everything, pushing and shoving as required, reaching for Patrick's guitar when he said, "Watch me!" I thought about conspiring with Chris to put Nina up, but her venture into the pit resulted in her getting whomped in the nose by some kid's elbow, which seemed to temporarily poison the experience for her. She stalked off to drink beer. Absent from their set were some of their standards, like their theme song and "No Future Part III;" but this might have been to make room for a couple of new songs they played, from an album that is currently in the works. I really liked the one called "In A Big City," which reminded me of The Jam and The Pogues -- in a good way, although they might resent the comparison.
Nina returned, though, and we positioned ourselves off to one side of the stage, deferentially, to make room for the people who were bigger Fucked Up fans than we were. (Which put us right next to the bass player from Liquor Store.) Damian came out wearing a big purple tie-dyed shirt and carrying his son, whom he briefly presented to the crowd, Lion King style, before handing him off back stage. The shirt stayed on for maybe one and a half songs, and then he took it off and it was just like all the concert photos you've ever seen of the band. But those photos don't do justice to the spectacle in motion: A huge, sweaty, bald, hairy, mostly naked guy charging up and down the stage and down into the audience, roaring into the microphone as he's mobbed by adoring punks and boosts them up onto the stage, onto his back, onto the hands of the rest of the crowd, paying special attention to the dudes in the audience that look most like him (heavy-set, hirsute); while the band -- five comparatively clean cut and prim-looking people -- rock out in strict formation. It's pretty nuts to behold. You know me, babies, I've been to shows, but my mouth fell open involuntarily several times during their set. Damian's crowd work is like watching a crime or a bar fight or a video game "boss battle" -- it's visually arresting because of how dynamic and wonderful it is. And the band doesn't sound quite like anything else, either: Obviously it's easy to get distracted by the vocals, but I think Fucked Up is actually a guitar nerd band, what with the finnicky degree of synchronization between the three (!) guitarists they had on stage. And dig the sad, sweet intervals in the lead line for "Queen Of Hearts."
True to the bill, they played the entire album. I'm not gonna lie, it was a bit grueling, not least of all because this band is loud, babies. For the encores, Damian quit the stage, and the band played covers of songs from bands they'd been in previously -- because these people are all veteran hardcore punks, albeit of the sweater vest-wearing variety. In particular, Sandy sang a song called "Unrequited Love" by the band Redstockings -- which is listed as one of the fictional bands on the "David's Town" LP but which I think was an actual band she was in in high school, if I understood her explanation. It was a cute, funny song, whatever its origin.
After they finished, we shuffled outside and found our way to the ever-convenient Enid's, where Chris and Nina and I settled in for a post-show beer. Chris came over to my side and agreed that Titus Andronicus is, in fact, the best band in the world. We stayed out pretty late for a Tuesday. Chris biked home. We took the C/A/B line.
Bel Argosy's played two shows so far this month, the second of which was on Monday, at Otto's. But the first: Our friends in MiniBoone are releasing a new EP called "On MiniBoone Mountain." (By hearsay I am given to understand that their intent is that you pair it with their first release, "Big Changes." The two titles, side by side, give the name of their planned full-length album.) In celebration of this achievement, they're playing a three-week residency at Pianos, performing with a bunch of hand-curated at each show. We were slated to be, observers and not, uh, talent, at these events, but they had a last-minute cancellation (morning of!) for the November 10th show and asked us to fill in. Of course we said yes! But we had to scramble a bit to furnish equipment, and it looked like our time slot might be a bit tight for Chris who had just started a new and exciting job at the United fucking Nations. When Billy and I got there, amp and cymbals in tow, there was a nine-person (!) funk band on stage. They had the chuckle-worthy name New York Funk Exchange, but they were actually pretty good -- their singer was a blond lady with a rich, powerful voice, and their songs were danceable. Billy and I danced.
"Alright," the sound guy told me when I stepped on stage. "To keep things moving, I'd like you guys to set up and be ready to play in 10 minutes." "We'll try," I said. "I've seen it done before," he said. Still Chris-less, we hustled. He showed up at T minus a couple minutes (although who gives a shit) and jumped on stage with his bass, slightly winded, still wearing his work clothes like an indie rock Angus Young rushing to a gig straight from Ashfield High. Our friends in the audience said we were loud, but I gauge our sound by the on-stage mix, which was nigh perfect, and it was the first show we ever played where there was "lighting design" -- all of a sudden things would go all red or blue. It was exciting! We played our set (pretty well, I think) and then handed out some of our new "Bell" Argosy design t-shirts (want one?).
After us was MiniBoone, who played a thundering and characteristically precise set of songs, starting with the four on the EP. They were great, especially the second track, "Brand New Thing." And I always have a soft spot for "Cool Kids Cut Out Of The Heart Itself."
Lugging my customary weekly tribute of several dozen bagels from Bagel World, I found Duarte Square less than half full, with most of the people kind of milling about on the north side of the park. Some people were perched on the top bar of the chain-link fence that separated the square from the neighboring lot owned by Trinity Church; they were holding a big yellow Occupy Wall Street banner. Everyone seemed pretty bummed out. Nobody seemed to be in charge. I couldn't figure out who to give the food to, and didn't want to be take responsibility for distributing it myself. Luckily, I found one of the heroic and perpetually beleaguered OWS medics (identifiable via their olive drab-and-red cross uniforms) who was gracious enough to "own" the bagels for me. Eventually the police started to show up, massing in the dozens on the eastern side of the park. With them was Detective Rick Lee, the infamous "hipster cop," crossing the park from Canal St. and heading in the direction of the protesters. Consistent with his reputation, he was impeccably dressed (trench coat, vest, tie) and had uniformly ecru hair. Nobody seemed tense or upset, but I took that as my cue to leave, since I was already late for work. And I flinched a little walking past the uncannily realistic cop mannequin in the window of the security camera place down the block.
That night, Chris and Alec and Nina and I went to go see Titus Andronicus and Fucked Up play a show at Warsaw. It seemed like an inappropriate time to rock out, but what could we do? We already had the tickets. When I got there there was a band on stage called Liquor Store, which hails, I think, from Glen Rock, the sort-of hometown of Titus. I'll cop to being put off by them at first, because oh man were these guys ever gross: The lead singer was a sweaty goon sporting a John Waters mustache; his weird, too-light eyes -- like those of a wharf drunk who'd fallen asleep on the beach -- bugging out below a dirty knit cap. The bass player was a downright skeletal dude with a catatonic demeanor -- a real heavy metal roadie-looking guy, like if you put Derek Smalls on the rack and fed him a bunch of quaaludes. Both guys were pretty much exactly the type of guy you wouldn't want to date your daughter, which is, I think, the look they were cultivating. But they sounded punchy and rehearsed, the songs were catchy sing-alongs a la Wimpy-era Queers, and the lead singer's insistence on conducting all of the inter-song banter in a mix of grunts and gibberish cracked me up. So I'm gonna say they're pretty cool. They're pretty cool!
Titus Andronicus took the stage after they finished up. They've changed: Amy is gone, replaced by another squirrely-looking white dude; Patrick's beard is gone, although that forehead of his still gives his glower the same Neanderthal intensity. I assumed he'd have something to say about Occupy Wall Street, on account of the big cardboard tiles (paint-lettered 'O', 'W', 'S') they'd brought up on stage with them, and, well, just 'cuz it's them, and I wasn't wrong. The raid was bullshit, he said, as soon as he got on mic. And it was bullshit that the constitutional rights of the Occupiers were violated "by the people that are sworn to uphold [them]." We agreed. "Shit is fucked up, but we're going to survive," he added, lest the proceedings wax too gloomy. And then they opened with a version of "Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ" dedicated to Mike Bloomberg. And they rocked! They followed up with what is quite possibly my favorite song of theirs, "Richard II (etc.)" I danced, hard, to everything, pushing and shoving as required, reaching for Patrick's guitar when he said, "Watch me!" I thought about conspiring with Chris to put Nina up, but her venture into the pit resulted in her getting whomped in the nose by some kid's elbow, which seemed to temporarily poison the experience for her. She stalked off to drink beer. Absent from their set were some of their standards, like their theme song and "No Future Part III;" but this might have been to make room for a couple of new songs they played, from an album that is currently in the works. I really liked the one called "In A Big City," which reminded me of The Jam and The Pogues -- in a good way, although they might resent the comparison.
Nina returned, though, and we positioned ourselves off to one side of the stage, deferentially, to make room for the people who were bigger Fucked Up fans than we were. (Which put us right next to the bass player from Liquor Store.) Damian came out wearing a big purple tie-dyed shirt and carrying his son, whom he briefly presented to the crowd, Lion King style, before handing him off back stage. The shirt stayed on for maybe one and a half songs, and then he took it off and it was just like all the concert photos you've ever seen of the band. But those photos don't do justice to the spectacle in motion: A huge, sweaty, bald, hairy, mostly naked guy charging up and down the stage and down into the audience, roaring into the microphone as he's mobbed by adoring punks and boosts them up onto the stage, onto his back, onto the hands of the rest of the crowd, paying special attention to the dudes in the audience that look most like him (heavy-set, hirsute); while the band -- five comparatively clean cut and prim-looking people -- rock out in strict formation. It's pretty nuts to behold. You know me, babies, I've been to shows, but my mouth fell open involuntarily several times during their set. Damian's crowd work is like watching a crime or a bar fight or a video game "boss battle" -- it's visually arresting because of how dynamic and wonderful it is. And the band doesn't sound quite like anything else, either: Obviously it's easy to get distracted by the vocals, but I think Fucked Up is actually a guitar nerd band, what with the finnicky degree of synchronization between the three (!) guitarists they had on stage. And dig the sad, sweet intervals in the lead line for "Queen Of Hearts."
True to the bill, they played the entire album. I'm not gonna lie, it was a bit grueling, not least of all because this band is loud, babies. For the encores, Damian quit the stage, and the band played covers of songs from bands they'd been in previously -- because these people are all veteran hardcore punks, albeit of the sweater vest-wearing variety. In particular, Sandy sang a song called "Unrequited Love" by the band Redstockings -- which is listed as one of the fictional bands on the "David's Town" LP but which I think was an actual band she was in in high school, if I understood her explanation. It was a cute, funny song, whatever its origin.
After they finished, we shuffled outside and found our way to the ever-convenient Enid's, where Chris and Nina and I settled in for a post-show beer. Chris came over to my side and agreed that Titus Andronicus is, in fact, the best band in the world. We stayed out pretty late for a Tuesday. Chris biked home. We took the C/A/B line.
Bel Argosy's played two shows so far this month, the second of which was on Monday, at Otto's. But the first: Our friends in MiniBoone are releasing a new EP called "On MiniBoone Mountain." (By hearsay I am given to understand that their intent is that you pair it with their first release, "Big Changes." The two titles, side by side, give the name of their planned full-length album.) In celebration of this achievement, they're playing a three-week residency at Pianos, performing with a bunch of hand-curated at each show. We were slated to be, observers and not, uh, talent, at these events, but they had a last-minute cancellation (morning of!) for the November 10th show and asked us to fill in. Of course we said yes! But we had to scramble a bit to furnish equipment, and it looked like our time slot might be a bit tight for Chris who had just started a new and exciting job at the United fucking Nations. When Billy and I got there, amp and cymbals in tow, there was a nine-person (!) funk band on stage. They had the chuckle-worthy name New York Funk Exchange, but they were actually pretty good -- their singer was a blond lady with a rich, powerful voice, and their songs were danceable. Billy and I danced.
"Alright," the sound guy told me when I stepped on stage. "To keep things moving, I'd like you guys to set up and be ready to play in 10 minutes." "We'll try," I said. "I've seen it done before," he said. Still Chris-less, we hustled. He showed up at T minus a couple minutes (although who gives a shit) and jumped on stage with his bass, slightly winded, still wearing his work clothes like an indie rock Angus Young rushing to a gig straight from Ashfield High. Our friends in the audience said we were loud, but I gauge our sound by the on-stage mix, which was nigh perfect, and it was the first show we ever played where there was "lighting design" -- all of a sudden things would go all red or blue. It was exciting! We played our set (pretty well, I think) and then handed out some of our new "Bell" Argosy design t-shirts (want one?).
After us was MiniBoone, who played a thundering and characteristically precise set of songs, starting with the four on the EP. They were great, especially the second track, "Brand New Thing." And I always have a soft spot for "Cool Kids Cut Out Of The Heart Itself."
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Cee Em Jay
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one. The College Music Journal 2011 Marathon just finished, and I saw a bunch of cool shows! This year I used the strategy that worked well for me last year: Wait a frustratingly long time for the CMJ web site to publish the official schedule; ignore the silly music industry panel events; find bands that sound cool within the bounds of my after-work schedule and at venues that are reasonably adjacent, geographically; run.
My first stop was at Brooklyn Bowl for the Live4ever showcase. I got there in time to see Le Blorr finishing up their set. They're a two-piece (guitar and drums) with a high-voiced lead singer whose hair falls in front of his face, Kurt Cobain-style, while he's singing. They were pretty good; but it was early and the crowd was thin. The band seemed relieved to get off stage -- understandably: It's got to be tough to play a cavernous space like the Bowl when you've got a spot in the line-up that's guaranteed to be under-attended.
1,2,3 was up next. They're a four-piece with a lead singer with Lyle Lovett hair and a nasal voice, weird but good. Their arrangements had strong, distinguished lead guitar lines and satisfyingly rubbery drum beats, by which (I think) I mean you could really hear the kick drum go "thwump." They sounded good! Catchy rock songs with an alt-country twang to them.
Fifth Nation was up next. They're a two piece with a lady on Stratocaster and a dude with an elaborate mohawk (Johnny Napalm from Guitar Hero-style) playing the drums. She looked like Debbie Harry as an extra in Easy Rider: She was wearing white and face paint and a dress with a long white fringe, but she could really shred and had a great voice. She wore a tuning fork around her neck. Their songs didn't stick to a fixed genre; they seemed like kind of a mix of college road-trip music: Jane's Addiction, Sublime, Manu Chao. I wasn't crazy about their sound, but there were definitely people in the audience who enjoyed it: Several of them moved up towards the stage and started doing that dance that white people do when Dave Chappelle has John Mayer play guitar for them, including one very straight-laced guy near me -- sweater, khakis, trench coat he'd folded up and placed in a corner -- doing a pretty decent Elaine.
I bailed about half of the way through their set so as not to be late for Bad Movie Night (not a band) at Tom's. This week we watched a long-awaited classic called Mutant Hunt, which is about some cyborgs (who are actually just plain old robots, I think) who get mutated by being injected with narcotics. And this makes them want to rape people, or maybe just do murders. The movie doesn't really make that clear. Although, to be fair, Tom and I were preoccupied with trying to choke down an airplane bottle of wormwood-flavored Swedish aquavit -- you may have heard of it by the name Malört, or Bäska Droppar. Whatever you call it, this stuff is icky, like chewing up a bitter mouthful of Tylenol, and the taste is difficult to dispel. Jeppson, the company that bottled the brand we drank, brags:
On Wednesday I hoofed it down to Fontana's on Eldridge St. to check out this huge twelve-band showcase show. I'd never been to Fontana's before, and I liked it alright -- it's like a nicer, bigger version of Fat Baby, I guess? I'd timed things right, because The Threads were just setting up in the low-ceilinged basement when I got there. I'd liked their Soundcloud offering, but got worried when I saw them wearing black silk shirts and fancy hats. Were they gonna be a super-serious bridge-and-tunnel ska band? Imagine my relief when they turned out to be an awesome, sleazy punk band whose performance hearkened way back to the rip-off shows I used to go to when I was in high school: A six dollar ticket'd get you into a bill that promised, say, UK Subs, but was stacked with four or five hours of unlisted openers you had to endure in the too-close company of (much older) strangers while you smoked yourself sick to your stomach. As frustrating as the experience was when I was 15, the curfew-less adult me wishes those shows weren't a relic of the 90's. The Threads' lead guy came out in a brown suit and a fedora (and sporting what I'm hoping were violet aviator shades), drink in hand, and lay down on the stage. He had the effeminate and dissipated air of a late-period Dee Dee Ramone, and he sang with the mush-mouthed half-articulation of Tim Armstrong (who does that in turn, I have heard, to sound more like Joe Strummer). Their songs had the same gloom-and-doom thematic touchstones as I Love Living In The City and Wart Hog. I ate it up. It didn't hurt that the guy also spent every non-singing moment fucking around with the other guys on stage, whacking the drummer's cymbals, putting the soloing guitar players in headlocks. Take note, rock and roll singers: That is a top five stage move.
After them was a band called Spirit Animal, which was a kind of synth pop group. Their lead singer was an enormous dude with a sort of half-bowl cut, wearing a European-looking multicolored leather jacket; kind of like Win Butler Meets The Wolfman. They were alright, but the whiskey I'd bought myself to keep my courage up had kicked in pretty hard and I was fading. I decided to bail. When I got home, I googled The Threads and realized why they tickled my memory the way that they did: Mick Brown, the lead singer, is a former member of the L.E.S. Stitches, a great Saint Marks throwback punk band that was a staple of my teenage show-trotting at The Continental and Coney Island High.
Thursday was the busiest night of the marathon for me. I started the evening at The Delancey, where I was looking to catch a set by Haim on the basement stage. "I don't know how to pronounce it," I told the girl stamping my wrist. "I'm pretty sure it's 'hi-m,'" she said, "but how cool would a Corey Haim-themed indie rock band be?" While I waited for it to be showtime, I lingered by the upstairs bar listening to the band that was playing on the miniature stage -- it's really just some elevated seating they'd cleared the chairs away from. I missed their introduction, but based on some cursory calendar-checking I'm pretty sure it was Lisa Jaeggi and her band (dude on acoustic guitar, dude on bongos). She's got really great voice, very high and sweet like Feist, and she wore feathers in her hair and face paint, like the lady from Fifth Nation. They played some very catchy, textured pop songs.
When they were done, I went downstairs to check out Haim, who were just getting started. They're a five piece band fronted three women who also cover bass, lead, and rhythm guitar; and who each sported variations on the same aesthetic. They were all cool big-sister types -- as near as I can place it, not having had one myself -- confident, casually authoritative, with long hair and black heavy metal t-shirts. At the beginning of their set, the girl on bass explained that they were all from L.A., and that this was their first unsupervised trip to NYC. "I don't know if it's the New York vibe or what," she said, "but I feel like buying condoms." They played 90s-inflected pop rock, trading off on the vocals, although there was a commonality to their voices as well. At the time, I thought they sounded a little like Lisa Loeb, but I don't know if that's right. They finished their set with a crazy drum-off, all three of the girls dueling the drummer. "Come make out with me, I'll be in the back," said the bass player.
No time for that -- I had to hop the F up to Broadway Lafayette to get to Dominion to see Street Chant. I'd always thought of Dominion NY (are there other locations?), what with its pretentious signage and convenient adjacency to the Blue Man Group theater, as being a bit of a douchebag preserve. And upon viewing their interior first-hand, I don't think I was wrong about that, but I didn't know that they've got a reasonably okay performance space in the back. Street Chant is a kiwi three piece, two girls with guitars, plus a guy on drums. Sonically, they were a mix of Bleach-era Nirvana punk and good, dissonant 00's indie rock (say, Sleater-Kinney). Their lead singer sang with a mumbly, punky snarl. I thought they sounded great, but it seemed like Dominion's monitors left something to be desired. "I can't even hear myself," the lead singer complained. Consequently, perhaps, they cut their set off a song early.
The amount of equipment stashed behind a velvet rope to the left of stage promised more bands, but I bailed to make sure I got to Webster Hall in time to see We Are Scientists. When I got there, there was a not-great frat metal band on stage with a lead singer who looked like the guy who plays Anders on Workaholics, and for a second I was worried that I'd forgotten what We Are Scientists sounded like, but in due time they announced themselves as being Recover, from Austin. We Are Scientists took the stage next, and they looked and sounded exactly like I remembered: Airtight arrangements, bright vocals and guitar lines, not-quite-pop hooks. And warning, dear reader, this is gonna sound lame, but: What impressed me the most about them was their easy stage presence and the way they handled a myriad of technical problems with grace and humor -- they broke strings, their mics and patch cables went on the fritz, but they kept the songs going without letting on how ticked off they must have been. "I've been playing with you for ten years," said Chris Cain to Keith Murray, "and every year it gets worse."
I took Friday off. There were a few show that looked like they could be interesting, but after the requisite Bel Argosy rehearsal I was just so beat that it was all I could do to stay awake on the subway and plonk myself into bed.
On Saturday I went to the best show of this year's festival -- ours! That's right: Bel Argosy played CMJ this year, at Legion, thanks to the good will and connections of Cenk and The Cardinal Agency. We were joined by Majuscules, with whom we've performed several times before; and Porches, with whom we've been booked a couple of times before but who've never managed to make it for logistical reasons (and who turned out to be pretty awesome). We'd played Legion a few weeks previous, and the setting was mostly the same -- noisy little back room; fussy, manic sound guy -- but the somebody'd shelled out for a little drum kit, which saved us from lugging portions of our own, and there were real, honest-to-god monitors in front of the stage. What a difference! Mind you, I still turned in a characteristically sloppy and frantic performance, the weird little house hi-hat periodically tipping over and off of the stage; but I could hear everything that was happening this time.
No, it was fine -- a real treat, actually. I've been going to CMJ for years and never once dreamed I'd get to play a showcase show, as part of a band with less than a year of shows under its belt. And we made 50 bucks! Indie scene prestige; Benjamins: It's the Bel Argosy way.
My first stop was at Brooklyn Bowl for the Live4ever showcase. I got there in time to see Le Blorr finishing up their set. They're a two-piece (guitar and drums) with a high-voiced lead singer whose hair falls in front of his face, Kurt Cobain-style, while he's singing. They were pretty good; but it was early and the crowd was thin. The band seemed relieved to get off stage -- understandably: It's got to be tough to play a cavernous space like the Bowl when you've got a spot in the line-up that's guaranteed to be under-attended.
1,2,3 was up next. They're a four-piece with a lead singer with Lyle Lovett hair and a nasal voice, weird but good. Their arrangements had strong, distinguished lead guitar lines and satisfyingly rubbery drum beats, by which (I think) I mean you could really hear the kick drum go "thwump." They sounded good! Catchy rock songs with an alt-country twang to them.
Fifth Nation was up next. They're a two piece with a lady on Stratocaster and a dude with an elaborate mohawk (Johnny Napalm from Guitar Hero-style) playing the drums. She looked like Debbie Harry as an extra in Easy Rider: She was wearing white and face paint and a dress with a long white fringe, but she could really shred and had a great voice. She wore a tuning fork around her neck. Their songs didn't stick to a fixed genre; they seemed like kind of a mix of college road-trip music: Jane's Addiction, Sublime, Manu Chao. I wasn't crazy about their sound, but there were definitely people in the audience who enjoyed it: Several of them moved up towards the stage and started doing that dance that white people do when Dave Chappelle has John Mayer play guitar for them, including one very straight-laced guy near me -- sweater, khakis, trench coat he'd folded up and placed in a corner -- doing a pretty decent Elaine.
I bailed about half of the way through their set so as not to be late for Bad Movie Night (not a band) at Tom's. This week we watched a long-awaited classic called Mutant Hunt, which is about some cyborgs (who are actually just plain old robots, I think) who get mutated by being injected with narcotics. And this makes them want to rape people, or maybe just do murders. The movie doesn't really make that clear. Although, to be fair, Tom and I were preoccupied with trying to choke down an airplane bottle of wormwood-flavored Swedish aquavit -- you may have heard of it by the name Malört, or Bäska Droppar. Whatever you call it, this stuff is icky, like chewing up a bitter mouthful of Tylenol, and the taste is difficult to dispel. Jeppson, the company that bottled the brand we drank, brags:
Most first-time drinkers of Jeppson Malört reject our liquor. Its strong, sharp taste is not for everyone. Our liquor is rugged and unrelenting (even brutal) to the palate. During almost 60 years of American distribution, we found only 1 out of 49 men will drink Jeppson Malört.I think I'm probably a 98%-er on that front, but I'll let you know if I change my mind. Yeah, though, Mutant Hunt's a real stinker: Horrible leads, incomprehensible story, indifferent characterization and cinematography. Other things that make it an excellent Tuesday night choice: The line "Inteltrax has a government contract. It can hold anyone for 72 hours since the federation act of [...] two years ago, ever since the space shuttle sex murders," and the fact that its director, Tim Kincaid, also directed the (non-sci fi-themed) title Gale Force: Mens Room II and acted in the movie Cop Blowers. That list bit I learned from the excellent Destroy All Movies!!!, which Emma got me for my birthday; truly a gift that keeps on giving.
On Wednesday I hoofed it down to Fontana's on Eldridge St. to check out this huge twelve-band showcase show. I'd never been to Fontana's before, and I liked it alright -- it's like a nicer, bigger version of Fat Baby, I guess? I'd timed things right, because The Threads were just setting up in the low-ceilinged basement when I got there. I'd liked their Soundcloud offering, but got worried when I saw them wearing black silk shirts and fancy hats. Were they gonna be a super-serious bridge-and-tunnel ska band? Imagine my relief when they turned out to be an awesome, sleazy punk band whose performance hearkened way back to the rip-off shows I used to go to when I was in high school: A six dollar ticket'd get you into a bill that promised, say, UK Subs, but was stacked with four or five hours of unlisted openers you had to endure in the too-close company of (much older) strangers while you smoked yourself sick to your stomach. As frustrating as the experience was when I was 15, the curfew-less adult me wishes those shows weren't a relic of the 90's. The Threads' lead guy came out in a brown suit and a fedora (and sporting what I'm hoping were violet aviator shades), drink in hand, and lay down on the stage. He had the effeminate and dissipated air of a late-period Dee Dee Ramone, and he sang with the mush-mouthed half-articulation of Tim Armstrong (who does that in turn, I have heard, to sound more like Joe Strummer). Their songs had the same gloom-and-doom thematic touchstones as I Love Living In The City and Wart Hog. I ate it up. It didn't hurt that the guy also spent every non-singing moment fucking around with the other guys on stage, whacking the drummer's cymbals, putting the soloing guitar players in headlocks. Take note, rock and roll singers: That is a top five stage move.
After them was a band called Spirit Animal, which was a kind of synth pop group. Their lead singer was an enormous dude with a sort of half-bowl cut, wearing a European-looking multicolored leather jacket; kind of like Win Butler Meets The Wolfman. They were alright, but the whiskey I'd bought myself to keep my courage up had kicked in pretty hard and I was fading. I decided to bail. When I got home, I googled The Threads and realized why they tickled my memory the way that they did: Mick Brown, the lead singer, is a former member of the L.E.S. Stitches, a great Saint Marks throwback punk band that was a staple of my teenage show-trotting at The Continental and Coney Island High.
Thursday was the busiest night of the marathon for me. I started the evening at The Delancey, where I was looking to catch a set by Haim on the basement stage. "I don't know how to pronounce it," I told the girl stamping my wrist. "I'm pretty sure it's 'hi-m,'" she said, "but how cool would a Corey Haim-themed indie rock band be?" While I waited for it to be showtime, I lingered by the upstairs bar listening to the band that was playing on the miniature stage -- it's really just some elevated seating they'd cleared the chairs away from. I missed their introduction, but based on some cursory calendar-checking I'm pretty sure it was Lisa Jaeggi and her band (dude on acoustic guitar, dude on bongos). She's got really great voice, very high and sweet like Feist, and she wore feathers in her hair and face paint, like the lady from Fifth Nation. They played some very catchy, textured pop songs.
When they were done, I went downstairs to check out Haim, who were just getting started. They're a five piece band fronted three women who also cover bass, lead, and rhythm guitar; and who each sported variations on the same aesthetic. They were all cool big-sister types -- as near as I can place it, not having had one myself -- confident, casually authoritative, with long hair and black heavy metal t-shirts. At the beginning of their set, the girl on bass explained that they were all from L.A., and that this was their first unsupervised trip to NYC. "I don't know if it's the New York vibe or what," she said, "but I feel like buying condoms." They played 90s-inflected pop rock, trading off on the vocals, although there was a commonality to their voices as well. At the time, I thought they sounded a little like Lisa Loeb, but I don't know if that's right. They finished their set with a crazy drum-off, all three of the girls dueling the drummer. "Come make out with me, I'll be in the back," said the bass player.
No time for that -- I had to hop the F up to Broadway Lafayette to get to Dominion to see Street Chant. I'd always thought of Dominion NY (are there other locations?), what with its pretentious signage and convenient adjacency to the Blue Man Group theater, as being a bit of a douchebag preserve. And upon viewing their interior first-hand, I don't think I was wrong about that, but I didn't know that they've got a reasonably okay performance space in the back. Street Chant is a kiwi three piece, two girls with guitars, plus a guy on drums. Sonically, they were a mix of Bleach-era Nirvana punk and good, dissonant 00's indie rock (say, Sleater-Kinney). Their lead singer sang with a mumbly, punky snarl. I thought they sounded great, but it seemed like Dominion's monitors left something to be desired. "I can't even hear myself," the lead singer complained. Consequently, perhaps, they cut their set off a song early.
The amount of equipment stashed behind a velvet rope to the left of stage promised more bands, but I bailed to make sure I got to Webster Hall in time to see We Are Scientists. When I got there, there was a not-great frat metal band on stage with a lead singer who looked like the guy who plays Anders on Workaholics, and for a second I was worried that I'd forgotten what We Are Scientists sounded like, but in due time they announced themselves as being Recover, from Austin. We Are Scientists took the stage next, and they looked and sounded exactly like I remembered: Airtight arrangements, bright vocals and guitar lines, not-quite-pop hooks. And warning, dear reader, this is gonna sound lame, but: What impressed me the most about them was their easy stage presence and the way they handled a myriad of technical problems with grace and humor -- they broke strings, their mics and patch cables went on the fritz, but they kept the songs going without letting on how ticked off they must have been. "I've been playing with you for ten years," said Chris Cain to Keith Murray, "and every year it gets worse."
I took Friday off. There were a few show that looked like they could be interesting, but after the requisite Bel Argosy rehearsal I was just so beat that it was all I could do to stay awake on the subway and plonk myself into bed.
On Saturday I went to the best show of this year's festival -- ours! That's right: Bel Argosy played CMJ this year, at Legion, thanks to the good will and connections of Cenk and The Cardinal Agency. We were joined by Majuscules, with whom we've performed several times before; and Porches, with whom we've been booked a couple of times before but who've never managed to make it for logistical reasons (and who turned out to be pretty awesome). We'd played Legion a few weeks previous, and the setting was mostly the same -- noisy little back room; fussy, manic sound guy -- but the somebody'd shelled out for a little drum kit, which saved us from lugging portions of our own, and there were real, honest-to-god monitors in front of the stage. What a difference! Mind you, I still turned in a characteristically sloppy and frantic performance, the weird little house hi-hat periodically tipping over and off of the stage; but I could hear everything that was happening this time.
No, it was fine -- a real treat, actually. I've been going to CMJ for years and never once dreamed I'd get to play a showcase show, as part of a band with less than a year of shows under its belt. And we made 50 bucks! Indie scene prestige; Benjamins: It's the Bel Argosy way.
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