This is something that sounds weird to say: I signed up for a continuing education course in project management at NYU. My job is paying for it, and I enrolled at the not-so-subtle urging of my higher-ups. ("You... need help with this.") I'm not sure why I chose the section that meets from 9 AM to 5 PM on consecutive Saturdays, but that seemed like the only time I'd be able to pay attention without falling asleep. Plus, it turned out to be a great way to stay out of the heat without missing out on too many summer activities. Professor Shapiro has a wide, toothy mouth and a sharky way of interrogating her students when they're equivocal about their past experiences with project management. She pronounces "ask" as "ahsk." Her favorite way of describing a project with a confused deliverable is as a "family-friendly house that's being built into a bachelorette man-trap." The class is held down on Park Place at one of NYU's downtown satellite locations. It's actually in the Woolworth Building, which is one of those huge, ancient buildings in lower Manhattan with crazy ornate exterior texture. The Woolworth is the one with the green pyramidal top. It's also got a cavernous, cathedral-like lobby covered in marble and gold leaf, with ceilings so high that they create an interior hollow into which the windows in rooms on the first several floors can peer, including our classroom. It looks like a bit like a geode growing inside an office park. The area around the building is a true wasteland, to the extent that I couldn't believe the Woolworth was actually where I was supposed to go on the first day and so passed it by several times. We get a few breaks to grab coffee and a longer break for lunch, and I spend almost all of that time trying to figure out what people who work down there eat if not pizza. I mean, if it's pizza, then, great. But I find that I feel polluted enough on a Saturday at noon. The best I could come up with was a bánh mi place way west of Broadway that puts lettuce on the sandwiches. Oh, the humanity.
On the Friday before the final class, my sister texted me at work to let me know that my grandmother had had a stroke. Or at least, something like a stroke: The staff at the nursing home wasn't able to wake her up that morning. My dad booked a flight to Sarasota, turning down an offer of company. I knew it probably wasn't going to be okay, so I kept my phone on with the volume turned down in class on Saturday. When my mom called in the afternoon, I knew that she had died. What to think about that. I sometimes (often) think of my experiences in terms of how much of my time on earth they account for: I have been dating Nina for 20% of my life so far; I have been in Bel Argosy for 10% of my life. I think of my grandmother's decade in her room in the medical wing of Plymouth Harbor, effectively a dorm room looking out over the fountain in the parking lot, decorated with a fancy antique credenza and bureau from the luxury apartment she'd lived in briefly before becoming ill, in the less "assisted" wing of the facility. Certain parts of life are like a bad dream -- not necessarily that their experience is so unpleasant, but that they have the sick permanence of bad dream. Temporary arrangements turn into long-term configurations. This is not what I was supposed to be doing. And so on.
That evening Nina and I shopped for a party we were going to throw at Eve and Jon's new apartment on Pacific St. (We're taking care of Sam and Sasha while the humans are on vacation in Canadian wilderness.) It felt a bit weird to be doing it that night, but we'd already invited people over and there was nothing I could do to assist in Florida. Nina'd bought hamburger meat from Fleisher's, where she'd observed a truly horrifying pageant, a toddler pissing on the floor while its distracted mother selected a cut of grass-fed steak. (People, it does not get more Park Slope than that.) So we went to Key Food and bought an assortment of condiments and breads and the Brooklyn Brewery Party Pack, which never disappoints although it is ungainly. Eve and Jon's new apartment is a duplex, absurdly luxurious. Among other amenities, it has a back yard, accessible down a set of stairs from a small wooden landing which is where the grill lives. Nina mixed in the requisite "perfect burger" ingredients -- egg, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire -- and after some hand-wringing over the right amount of lighter fluid to use, we cooked the meat, plus some Chik Patties for me and Jerry. We all ate down in the yard, in the dark, sitting on lawn chairs. Mercifully, the mosquitoes kept their distance. The charcoal died before we had a chance to roast the marshmallows we'd bought, so we did those in the kitchen with a little hand-held propane starter, using it like a pastry torch.
I'm counting it as a birthday party.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Monday, July 22, 2013
An Irish Wake
I celebrated my birthday quietly, though not in secret. My parents took me and Nina out for dinner at a fancy vegetarian restaurant called Gobo. My sister's back home from Denmark. She bought me hand-painted Simpsons matryoshka in Russia, probably the best bit of lopsided bootleg Groening I've ever seen.
We survived the week-long heat wave that settled in a few days later. It does feel like you're just enduring that kind of weather, even as you remind yourself that you only get so many summers. Knowing that The Aloe Farm's styrofoam exterior and narrow window ledges would be an awkard fit for our 5000 BTU paperweight of an air conditioner, I paid Pinter from Tarzian to help me install it. He rigged up a wooden crossbar to keep it wedged in place in the window frame instead of screwing it into the frame itself, which is too thick to drill through. We discovered that the plastic accordion wings were cracked (so much of life is trash and dirty plastic), so I trekked to Lowes to get foam replacements, taking a route through the trash-strewn expanse of 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and where it begins at 4th St. We'd set it up not a moment too soon! The heat became surreal. Every morning I'd wake up to find the floorboards still warm from the previous day's heat, pop some freezer grapes into my mouth or drink some mint tea, and put on NY1 to see what indignities were in store for the next 24 hours. About mint tea: It might be the Summer Jam. Take some mint leaves, which cost a bit more than they seem like they should, and add them to a big pot of boiling water, taking it off the burner. When the mint-yellowed water stops steaming (after an hour or two, say), pour it into a big plastic pitcher and put the pitcher in the fridge. Then you drink it when it seems like it's too hot to keep going.
I have been reading books on an e-Reader! I'd bought Nina a Kobo as a birthday present, in the hopes of making library books accessible again in a post-bed bug world. When I saw how useful it was, I decided I had to have one, too. After all, I'd been reluctant to pick through the stinking shelves at Epiphany and thus my own reading had fallen off. So I shelled out, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've read half a dozen books over the past few months, stuff that I'd been putting off, like London Fields and Rabbit, Run. I bring the thing on the subway now. I'm one of those people.
Katharine got me out to Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn on Friday with a promise that headliners The Waterboys sounded like a gentler formulation of The Pogues. She was right, but when I got there it turned out we'd crossed wires and I was alone at the festival. So I walked the transverse axis of the bandshell grounds like a ghost, scanning the faces in the crowd for someone I recognized and only half listening to the music. But what I heard of The Waterboys, a baseball team-sized squad of dudes wearing Oxford shirts and suspenders, was quite good. The song that ended their set was itself finished with a long series of triumphant Celtic downbeats. The BRIC representative who closed the show sounded as always like a schoolteacher who'd lost control of his classroom ("Please put your trash in a marked receptacle..."), and I was swept along with the exiting hordes. It was sweltering hot, and the hoped-for B63 did not arrive, so I marched myself back to Union St. in the dark, sweating hard and singing The Battle of Hampton Roads to pass the time.
I remembered that Appomattox, whom I'd been hoping to get a chance to see for quite some time, were playing at The Rock Shop, gracious host to Bel Argosy and, uh, Mommyoke (though not on the same night), but they wouldn't go on 'til 11, so I made a pit stop at home to dry off and watch a DVR'd episode of Drunk History, which is my current favorite thing. The Comedy Central version doesn't always reach the height of unmoored exuberance that the web series does, but Rich Fulcher's caricature of Lincoln's early career as a trial lawyer might be the best thing I've seen on television, ever. ("This guy... is like an ape!") I ran into Nina on my walk back up to 4th Ave. and managed to lure her into joining me for Appomattox. They'd just started their set when we got there. I was surprised to see that it's only two guys -- at least, I think: Their press kit says they're a power trio, but I could've sworn there was only a drummer on stage with the lead singer, who pivoted repeatedly from guitar duty to programming a synthesizer that provided loops of low range sound. The hooks in their songs reminded me why I'd wanted to see them, and I liked their arrangements; the band actually sounds better on stage than they do on their latest EP. The writing got on my nerves, though. I started to wish they were an instrumental act. An example of some lines that particularly annoyed me:
Maxwell's is closing. I claim no special knowledge of that place, but, you know, I've been there a few times, had slapped the sun-and-columns sigil of the Bel Argosy on the wall in the bathroom, hoping I'd play on that stage but knowing even at that time that I probably wouldn't. There are a lot of people that know that place better and feel stronger about it than I do (which is not very), but, still, I thought, I should go out there and see it as they partied the place to the ground. I missed getting tickets for the three (!) Titus Andronicus shows but figured it was okay 'cuz those should go to the Kids, anyway. Instead I'd bought tickets to a solo performance by Ted Leo, who's probably more Jersey that Messrs. Stickles and Harm anyways. I invited Tom, who couldn't in good faith marry into a Garden State clan without ever visiting Hoboken. I'd run into Chris the Friday before at Flatbush Farm and gotten fully soused hearing about how our mutual friend C. got an actual tick on his actual dick. Chris let me ride the handlebars of his bike and we caromed off a U-Haul truck. "I don't know anything about that guy," Chris said of Ted Leo, but agreed to use the ticket if no one else would take it. (Beau is a TL/Rx superfan but had to leave town.)
We met on Sunday at the WTC PATH station, crossed the river, and made the long trek up Washington Ave. We got to Maxwell's after Shellshag had left the stage. Ted Leo pushed his way through the crowd as we were buying Yuenglings at the bar. He played a talky set. Aimee Mann got name-checked more than once, and he played a handful of songs written for or with her. "So," he'd say, in his self-conscious and strangely deep voice, halting a song he'd just begun playing, and offer context for the song or tell a funny story. He told an anecdote about being heckled for thanking an unpopular local radio station in Baltimore, and reflected on the silliness of punk audiences' calls to "fuck tuning." "That's low self-esteem," he said. "Punks deserve the best!" And it was a long set. "There are twenty-six songs on this list," he said, but it seemed like he played more than that. He played favorites, like The High Party and Me and Mia. He played Bottled In Cork, and let the audience sing the entire thing. "It would have been really embarrassing if that hadn't worked out," he said afterward. Eventually we neared the end. "You know, this thing is like an Irish wake," he said, affecting an accent. "'This isn't a funeral, it's a celebration!' So this song is an Irish wake." I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right: He strummed the opening notes of Timorous Me, and the crowd cheered, knowing that the One Riff could not be far behind. We stomped our feet to it.
"Thanks," he said. We begged for an encore, and got in return a cover of Union City Blue. It was a late night, especially for a Sunday, and we found ourselves leaning against the doors of the PATH train for support on the ride home. Chris left his bike downtown in favor of disembarking at Penn Station.
We survived the week-long heat wave that settled in a few days later. It does feel like you're just enduring that kind of weather, even as you remind yourself that you only get so many summers. Knowing that The Aloe Farm's styrofoam exterior and narrow window ledges would be an awkard fit for our 5000 BTU paperweight of an air conditioner, I paid Pinter from Tarzian to help me install it. He rigged up a wooden crossbar to keep it wedged in place in the window frame instead of screwing it into the frame itself, which is too thick to drill through. We discovered that the plastic accordion wings were cracked (so much of life is trash and dirty plastic), so I trekked to Lowes to get foam replacements, taking a route through the trash-strewn expanse of 2nd Ave. between 9th St. and where it begins at 4th St. We'd set it up not a moment too soon! The heat became surreal. Every morning I'd wake up to find the floorboards still warm from the previous day's heat, pop some freezer grapes into my mouth or drink some mint tea, and put on NY1 to see what indignities were in store for the next 24 hours. About mint tea: It might be the Summer Jam. Take some mint leaves, which cost a bit more than they seem like they should, and add them to a big pot of boiling water, taking it off the burner. When the mint-yellowed water stops steaming (after an hour or two, say), pour it into a big plastic pitcher and put the pitcher in the fridge. Then you drink it when it seems like it's too hot to keep going.
I have been reading books on an e-Reader! I'd bought Nina a Kobo as a birthday present, in the hopes of making library books accessible again in a post-bed bug world. When I saw how useful it was, I decided I had to have one, too. After all, I'd been reluctant to pick through the stinking shelves at Epiphany and thus my own reading had fallen off. So I shelled out, and I've been pretty happy with it. I've read half a dozen books over the past few months, stuff that I'd been putting off, like London Fields and Rabbit, Run. I bring the thing on the subway now. I'm one of those people.
Katharine got me out to Prospect Park for Celebrate Brooklyn on Friday with a promise that headliners The Waterboys sounded like a gentler formulation of The Pogues. She was right, but when I got there it turned out we'd crossed wires and I was alone at the festival. So I walked the transverse axis of the bandshell grounds like a ghost, scanning the faces in the crowd for someone I recognized and only half listening to the music. But what I heard of The Waterboys, a baseball team-sized squad of dudes wearing Oxford shirts and suspenders, was quite good. The song that ended their set was itself finished with a long series of triumphant Celtic downbeats. The BRIC representative who closed the show sounded as always like a schoolteacher who'd lost control of his classroom ("Please put your trash in a marked receptacle..."), and I was swept along with the exiting hordes. It was sweltering hot, and the hoped-for B63 did not arrive, so I marched myself back to Union St. in the dark, sweating hard and singing The Battle of Hampton Roads to pass the time.
I remembered that Appomattox, whom I'd been hoping to get a chance to see for quite some time, were playing at The Rock Shop, gracious host to Bel Argosy and, uh, Mommyoke (though not on the same night), but they wouldn't go on 'til 11, so I made a pit stop at home to dry off and watch a DVR'd episode of Drunk History, which is my current favorite thing. The Comedy Central version doesn't always reach the height of unmoored exuberance that the web series does, but Rich Fulcher's caricature of Lincoln's early career as a trial lawyer might be the best thing I've seen on television, ever. ("This guy... is like an ape!") I ran into Nina on my walk back up to 4th Ave. and managed to lure her into joining me for Appomattox. They'd just started their set when we got there. I was surprised to see that it's only two guys -- at least, I think: Their press kit says they're a power trio, but I could've sworn there was only a drummer on stage with the lead singer, who pivoted repeatedly from guitar duty to programming a synthesizer that provided loops of low range sound. The hooks in their songs reminded me why I'd wanted to see them, and I liked their arrangements; the band actually sounds better on stage than they do on their latest EP. The writing got on my nerves, though. I started to wish they were an instrumental act. An example of some lines that particularly annoyed me:
So why am I so self-destructed?As Richard Stallman once said, those are just sounds to me.
Am I creature who can't be trusted
With anyone... except you?
You're too young
To keep a secret
From anyone
Maxwell's is closing. I claim no special knowledge of that place, but, you know, I've been there a few times, had slapped the sun-and-columns sigil of the Bel Argosy on the wall in the bathroom, hoping I'd play on that stage but knowing even at that time that I probably wouldn't. There are a lot of people that know that place better and feel stronger about it than I do (which is not very), but, still, I thought, I should go out there and see it as they partied the place to the ground. I missed getting tickets for the three (!) Titus Andronicus shows but figured it was okay 'cuz those should go to the Kids, anyway. Instead I'd bought tickets to a solo performance by Ted Leo, who's probably more Jersey that Messrs. Stickles and Harm anyways. I invited Tom, who couldn't in good faith marry into a Garden State clan without ever visiting Hoboken. I'd run into Chris the Friday before at Flatbush Farm and gotten fully soused hearing about how our mutual friend C. got an actual tick on his actual dick. Chris let me ride the handlebars of his bike and we caromed off a U-Haul truck. "I don't know anything about that guy," Chris said of Ted Leo, but agreed to use the ticket if no one else would take it. (Beau is a TL/Rx superfan but had to leave town.)
We met on Sunday at the WTC PATH station, crossed the river, and made the long trek up Washington Ave. We got to Maxwell's after Shellshag had left the stage. Ted Leo pushed his way through the crowd as we were buying Yuenglings at the bar. He played a talky set. Aimee Mann got name-checked more than once, and he played a handful of songs written for or with her. "So," he'd say, in his self-conscious and strangely deep voice, halting a song he'd just begun playing, and offer context for the song or tell a funny story. He told an anecdote about being heckled for thanking an unpopular local radio station in Baltimore, and reflected on the silliness of punk audiences' calls to "fuck tuning." "That's low self-esteem," he said. "Punks deserve the best!" And it was a long set. "There are twenty-six songs on this list," he said, but it seemed like he played more than that. He played favorites, like The High Party and Me and Mia. He played Bottled In Cork, and let the audience sing the entire thing. "It would have been really embarrassing if that hadn't worked out," he said afterward. Eventually we neared the end. "You know, this thing is like an Irish wake," he said, affecting an accent. "'This isn't a funeral, it's a celebration!' So this song is an Irish wake." I had a feeling I knew what was coming, and I was right: He strummed the opening notes of Timorous Me, and the crowd cheered, knowing that the One Riff could not be far behind. We stomped our feet to it.
"Thanks," he said. We begged for an encore, and got in return a cover of Union City Blue. It was a late night, especially for a Sunday, and we found ourselves leaning against the doors of the PATH train for support on the ride home. Chris left his bike downtown in favor of disembarking at Penn Station.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Wet June
It really has been. Drizzles, downpours, big fat drops. My company's new office has an expansive southern view of Park Avenue, wunderkammer Manhattan skyline against a background that turns a dark matte gray when it's rainin' time.
Sarah was turning thirty. Coincedentally, she'd been offered the Rectory of St. Andrew's on Fire Island as hers to do with as she pleased, more or less, for a week, if only she'd deliver several sermons at the Episcopal Church in Saltaire. So she invited us up for a sleepover and birthday party. We'd also been invited to use the remains of a full kilogram of Spanish chorizo we'd bought at La Boqueria to grill pizza at Aanie and Brooke's place in Patchogue. Tight schedule: we (I) agonized over how to make the transportation work, and then flung ourselves onto the LIRR, chorizo in hand, six-pack of Budweiser in hand, bags of Doritos Party Mix plus other semi-edibles in a bulging sack. It takes two transfers to get all the way out there. How do people do that every day? A & B met us at the station. On the way to their house, we paused at a dog-sitter friend of theirs to say goodbye to their dog (ferried off to compete in a show) and meet a petting zoo complement of friendly goats and ducks. We fed slices of white bread to both contingents. A goat climbed into Nina's lap. Another one nibbled holes in my t-shirt. They pressed their bony, lightly furred heads up against us, their puzzle-piece eyes staring outwards seemingly at nothing. The poop just falls out of their butts. We left and drove to the house, where I got quickly drunk on some kind of lemonade. And then I got back in the car with Brooke and drove down the road to the supermarket, where I grabbed a bunch of pizza fixings in a boozy haze: Jalapeño? Check. Cilantro? Check. Gruyère? Check, for some reason. Red onions? Yeah, I don't know, but yeah.
Back to the house. Aanie mixed the dough, asked me and Nina to punch it a few times. Back in the car, this time to The Steam Room in Port Jeff, where we ate hush puppies and I had my first steamer clams, Aanie showing me how to kind of, uh, deglove them before dousing them in lemon and some kind of cayenne sauce. We were pushing up against our scheduled ferry departure by the time we started making the pizzas -- the propane grill in the driveway, like it was an emergency. Aanie spread the dough into rectangles, toasted it firm, and then we'd dress it with a combination of weird ingredients before subjecting it to the full heat of the grill. We took the results inside and sat down at the kitchen table to eat them. Holy shit it was the best pizza I think I may have ever had, ever. More cilantro on pizza, world. Aanie and Brooke were nice enough to drop us off at the ferry terminal in Bay Shore. Too late we realized that our ferry was actually leaving from a much further dock, and so we had to run across two parking lots. "I don't think you can make it," said the teenager in the ticket booth, helpfully. But we did make it, and soon we were knifing across the water of, what -- Long Island Sound? Nina says no, but I'm saying that's what it was.
Saltaire is one of the "straight" parts of Fire Island, which among other things, means the houses are a little less fancy. But there still were plenty of drunk revelers, Kennedy cousins with gin blossomed faces and half-unbuttoned Oxford shirts waiting to meet us on the dock, along with the dulcet (read: non-dulcet) sounds of something called The Cravin' Band. Mosquitoes swarmed us as we walked the U-shaped route from the ferry dock to the Rectory, and we realized why: All the rain had turned the sand and dry grasses growing under and around the boardwalk into a swamp. We hustled over the planks, slapping and cursing. We passed an iPhone, half-buried in the sand and with a sequined cross glued to the back. At last we came to the Rectory at the far end of the street, and rattled the windows and doorknobs until Chris let us in. We were just in time for dinner, so we contributed our remaining grilled pizza and our Doritos things, and ate some veggie burgers thoughtfully provisioned and cooked for us by Sarah. We drank and talked for a while, and stuffed our pockets with Budweiser cans and walked down Marine Way to the beach. It was a little before midnight, but we were the only ones out (straight part of the island). Chris and Jessie waded right into the darkness of the ocean, the supermoon painting the water with a big fat crossing lane.
Like any regulation vacation property, the Rectory had a single jigsaw puzzle (racing yachts) sitting in a nook in the living room. Upon returning, we took it out and dismantled the previous solvers' work and then set about rebuilding it, as the radio played Billy Joel and John Cougar Mellencamp. It was after 2 AM when we all retired to our rooms. Nina and I made the mistake of not running the air conditioner in ours, which I guess offered the mosquitoes an open invitation to enter through its vents and attack us in our bed. Too late we realized that the hook above the bed was for. "Fuck," I hissed at 4 after waking up for the second time with a whining in my ear. The moon shone in brightly through the curtains and there was a chorus of frogs and insects outside the house. I switched the light on and went after the fuckers with a rolled up National Geographic, dispatching sixteen (!) while Nina used the bathroom.
The next morning, a little bit ragged around the edges (Nina'd got bit on the eyelid), we creaked downstairs and Chris made us coffee while Jessie slept and Billy and Sarah were at church. We finished the puzzle. A little later Chris and I took some of the Rectory's spare bikes for a ride down the rattling boardwalk streets to Fair Harbor, the next town over. There wasn't much town to speak of -- tellingly, the commercial storefronts are mostly real estate offices -- but we stopped at a small grocery store and bought cans of cream soda from the bored sunburned teenage girls working the register. Chris was resplendant in a Mets cap and WASP summer gear; I worried about sunburn on my exposed scalp. Fairskins both, we lathered on sunscreen back at the house and then returned to the beach. I made it all the way into the water this time and swam out to where I couldn't quite touch bottom, and let myself get rolled a few times by the rough surf. There were medium-sized purple jellyfish in the water, ominously bobbing into view and then disappearing before you'd safely plotted their course. But no one had to pee on me and I didn't have to pee on anyone else, so it was okay. Chris and Nina and I took an early afternoon ferry back to Bay Shore, dozing in the lower deck, wearing the roar of the engine like a blanket. Chris drove us all the way back to the city in Roger's antique Volvo, the entire thing the color of cigarette tar. It took hours, but we played the radio the whole way, speculating about the appearance of the jazz show DJs and trying to guess the Summer Jam -- Nina says it's Get Lucky for sure, but I like I Love It, or -- worst case -- Can't Hold Us.
I didn't really do Northside this year. Shows didn't grab me: everything seemed to be some variation on "synth" or "psych." Am I out of phase with The Scene? I'm probably at least out of phase with The L Magazine. The one show I went to was Shilpa Ray and Her Good Luck Girls (nee Happy Hookers) at The Gutter, the performance space of which I don't think I'd seen before. It's alright. Lazyeyes was wrapping up by the time I got there. They were quite good -- indie pop with a rough edge. I wondered if Bel Argosy could play a show with them. When Shilpa Ray started playing, the house lights dropped and someone turned on a disco ball effect that made the room swim like little fish in a sea of blood. You can tell the band is new -- the hooks aren't totally there yet, and the arrangements don't showcase their best asset. "More vocals!" someone in front of us hollered. "More vocals?" she asked, perhaps faux-incredulous. "I hate the way my voice sounds." Surely she understood that we'd all come to hear her sing. But the band is good, even if they're visually than musically satisfying. It's a menagerie of weird-lookin' dudes, like a something you'd see in an early Merry Melodies cartoon or, more like, a David Lynch movie: Sinister weirdos intensely focused on their instruments.
I went to 4Knots on Saturday, arriving in time to see Reigning Sound on stage, WFMU's DA the DJ playing the organ like Viv Savage. For a band that has -- visually -- a strong dirtbag vibe, they play an awful lot of moody songs about girls. I watched from a few different vantage points: in the crowd on wooden slats of the pier; up the ramp adjacent to the stage; I even went through the process of gaining entry to the cordoned-off beer zone (set up around some Sandy-vacated exterior storefronts from the Pier 17 mall) and obtaining a plastic pint cup of Bud Light. Bracelets, tickets, a twenty minute wait in line. Is 4Knots "over?" But I was there to see Kurt Vile. Not necessarily because I love the Violators' chilled-out sound, although I've come to really appreciate the signature nasal dissonance of the vocals, but because I like the character actor vibe he brings to rock performance. He reminds me a bit of some old video footage I'd seen of Joey Ramone on tour in Europe -- shy stringbean with a wall of hair and a too-big shirt. They played KV Crimes, the Scharpling-directed video for which impressed me with K. Vile's goony stage presence. Afterwards, Nina and I walked around the seaport, inspecting the See/Change shipping container city, the candy store selling comically enormous gummy candy. The fancy pizza place on Front St. looked appealing, but there was a steady flow of reeking human waste from the fancy Port-A-Pottys right across from it. The cobblestones shone with piss.
Sarah was turning thirty. Coincedentally, she'd been offered the Rectory of St. Andrew's on Fire Island as hers to do with as she pleased, more or less, for a week, if only she'd deliver several sermons at the Episcopal Church in Saltaire. So she invited us up for a sleepover and birthday party. We'd also been invited to use the remains of a full kilogram of Spanish chorizo we'd bought at La Boqueria to grill pizza at Aanie and Brooke's place in Patchogue. Tight schedule: we (I) agonized over how to make the transportation work, and then flung ourselves onto the LIRR, chorizo in hand, six-pack of Budweiser in hand, bags of Doritos Party Mix plus other semi-edibles in a bulging sack. It takes two transfers to get all the way out there. How do people do that every day? A & B met us at the station. On the way to their house, we paused at a dog-sitter friend of theirs to say goodbye to their dog (ferried off to compete in a show) and meet a petting zoo complement of friendly goats and ducks. We fed slices of white bread to both contingents. A goat climbed into Nina's lap. Another one nibbled holes in my t-shirt. They pressed their bony, lightly furred heads up against us, their puzzle-piece eyes staring outwards seemingly at nothing. The poop just falls out of their butts. We left and drove to the house, where I got quickly drunk on some kind of lemonade. And then I got back in the car with Brooke and drove down the road to the supermarket, where I grabbed a bunch of pizza fixings in a boozy haze: Jalapeño? Check. Cilantro? Check. Gruyère? Check, for some reason. Red onions? Yeah, I don't know, but yeah.
Back to the house. Aanie mixed the dough, asked me and Nina to punch it a few times. Back in the car, this time to The Steam Room in Port Jeff, where we ate hush puppies and I had my first steamer clams, Aanie showing me how to kind of, uh, deglove them before dousing them in lemon and some kind of cayenne sauce. We were pushing up against our scheduled ferry departure by the time we started making the pizzas -- the propane grill in the driveway, like it was an emergency. Aanie spread the dough into rectangles, toasted it firm, and then we'd dress it with a combination of weird ingredients before subjecting it to the full heat of the grill. We took the results inside and sat down at the kitchen table to eat them. Holy shit it was the best pizza I think I may have ever had, ever. More cilantro on pizza, world. Aanie and Brooke were nice enough to drop us off at the ferry terminal in Bay Shore. Too late we realized that our ferry was actually leaving from a much further dock, and so we had to run across two parking lots. "I don't think you can make it," said the teenager in the ticket booth, helpfully. But we did make it, and soon we were knifing across the water of, what -- Long Island Sound? Nina says no, but I'm saying that's what it was.
Saltaire is one of the "straight" parts of Fire Island, which among other things, means the houses are a little less fancy. But there still were plenty of drunk revelers, Kennedy cousins with gin blossomed faces and half-unbuttoned Oxford shirts waiting to meet us on the dock, along with the dulcet (read: non-dulcet) sounds of something called The Cravin' Band. Mosquitoes swarmed us as we walked the U-shaped route from the ferry dock to the Rectory, and we realized why: All the rain had turned the sand and dry grasses growing under and around the boardwalk into a swamp. We hustled over the planks, slapping and cursing. We passed an iPhone, half-buried in the sand and with a sequined cross glued to the back. At last we came to the Rectory at the far end of the street, and rattled the windows and doorknobs until Chris let us in. We were just in time for dinner, so we contributed our remaining grilled pizza and our Doritos things, and ate some veggie burgers thoughtfully provisioned and cooked for us by Sarah. We drank and talked for a while, and stuffed our pockets with Budweiser cans and walked down Marine Way to the beach. It was a little before midnight, but we were the only ones out (straight part of the island). Chris and Jessie waded right into the darkness of the ocean, the supermoon painting the water with a big fat crossing lane.
Like any regulation vacation property, the Rectory had a single jigsaw puzzle (racing yachts) sitting in a nook in the living room. Upon returning, we took it out and dismantled the previous solvers' work and then set about rebuilding it, as the radio played Billy Joel and John Cougar Mellencamp. It was after 2 AM when we all retired to our rooms. Nina and I made the mistake of not running the air conditioner in ours, which I guess offered the mosquitoes an open invitation to enter through its vents and attack us in our bed. Too late we realized that the hook above the bed was for. "Fuck," I hissed at 4 after waking up for the second time with a whining in my ear. The moon shone in brightly through the curtains and there was a chorus of frogs and insects outside the house. I switched the light on and went after the fuckers with a rolled up National Geographic, dispatching sixteen (!) while Nina used the bathroom.
The next morning, a little bit ragged around the edges (Nina'd got bit on the eyelid), we creaked downstairs and Chris made us coffee while Jessie slept and Billy and Sarah were at church. We finished the puzzle. A little later Chris and I took some of the Rectory's spare bikes for a ride down the rattling boardwalk streets to Fair Harbor, the next town over. There wasn't much town to speak of -- tellingly, the commercial storefronts are mostly real estate offices -- but we stopped at a small grocery store and bought cans of cream soda from the bored sunburned teenage girls working the register. Chris was resplendant in a Mets cap and WASP summer gear; I worried about sunburn on my exposed scalp. Fairskins both, we lathered on sunscreen back at the house and then returned to the beach. I made it all the way into the water this time and swam out to where I couldn't quite touch bottom, and let myself get rolled a few times by the rough surf. There were medium-sized purple jellyfish in the water, ominously bobbing into view and then disappearing before you'd safely plotted their course. But no one had to pee on me and I didn't have to pee on anyone else, so it was okay. Chris and Nina and I took an early afternoon ferry back to Bay Shore, dozing in the lower deck, wearing the roar of the engine like a blanket. Chris drove us all the way back to the city in Roger's antique Volvo, the entire thing the color of cigarette tar. It took hours, but we played the radio the whole way, speculating about the appearance of the jazz show DJs and trying to guess the Summer Jam -- Nina says it's Get Lucky for sure, but I like I Love It, or -- worst case -- Can't Hold Us.
I didn't really do Northside this year. Shows didn't grab me: everything seemed to be some variation on "synth" or "psych." Am I out of phase with The Scene? I'm probably at least out of phase with The L Magazine. The one show I went to was Shilpa Ray and Her Good Luck Girls (nee Happy Hookers) at The Gutter, the performance space of which I don't think I'd seen before. It's alright. Lazyeyes was wrapping up by the time I got there. They were quite good -- indie pop with a rough edge. I wondered if Bel Argosy could play a show with them. When Shilpa Ray started playing, the house lights dropped and someone turned on a disco ball effect that made the room swim like little fish in a sea of blood. You can tell the band is new -- the hooks aren't totally there yet, and the arrangements don't showcase their best asset. "More vocals!" someone in front of us hollered. "More vocals?" she asked, perhaps faux-incredulous. "I hate the way my voice sounds." Surely she understood that we'd all come to hear her sing. But the band is good, even if they're visually than musically satisfying. It's a menagerie of weird-lookin' dudes, like a something you'd see in an early Merry Melodies cartoon or, more like, a David Lynch movie: Sinister weirdos intensely focused on their instruments.
I went to 4Knots on Saturday, arriving in time to see Reigning Sound on stage, WFMU's DA the DJ playing the organ like Viv Savage. For a band that has -- visually -- a strong dirtbag vibe, they play an awful lot of moody songs about girls. I watched from a few different vantage points: in the crowd on wooden slats of the pier; up the ramp adjacent to the stage; I even went through the process of gaining entry to the cordoned-off beer zone (set up around some Sandy-vacated exterior storefronts from the Pier 17 mall) and obtaining a plastic pint cup of Bud Light. Bracelets, tickets, a twenty minute wait in line. Is 4Knots "over?" But I was there to see Kurt Vile. Not necessarily because I love the Violators' chilled-out sound, although I've come to really appreciate the signature nasal dissonance of the vocals, but because I like the character actor vibe he brings to rock performance. He reminds me a bit of some old video footage I'd seen of Joey Ramone on tour in Europe -- shy stringbean with a wall of hair and a too-big shirt. They played KV Crimes, the Scharpling-directed video for which impressed me with K. Vile's goony stage presence. Afterwards, Nina and I walked around the seaport, inspecting the See/Change shipping container city, the candy store selling comically enormous gummy candy. The fancy pizza place on Front St. looked appealing, but there was a steady flow of reeking human waste from the fancy Port-A-Pottys right across from it. The cobblestones shone with piss.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tapas Musicales
Where to begin? It's been a crazy week. Nina and I just got back from Barcelona, where we'd been vacationing and attending the Primavera Sound music festival. I'm a bit overwhelmed with experience, but here's what I got.
Our flight from JFK to El Prat took eight hours. Thankfully, there were several very long movies available to watch -- Nina and I teamed up on Les Miserables, which, for some reason, I'd been looking forward to watching. The rest of the flight I tried to sleep but mostly just pretzeled myself into different postures and periodically accepted plastic cups of Fresca from the flight attendants. Upon landing, we rode the Aerobus to the Plaça de Catalunya. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called El Raval, which was variously described as being rough and ungentrified, and as being a prime destination for tourists. We were on El Carrer de Hospital (named after the hospital where Antoni Gaudí was treated after being hit by a tram in 1926), one block away from La Rambla, the huge central promenade leading from the Plaça down to Port Vell. The street has two gutters on either side that are just wide enough to allow a car to pass, but I wouldn't want to drive it -- La Rambla is always thronged with people: People on their way to things, people just kind of strolling, and a consistent distribution of South Asian men selling cheap LED whirligigs (which they demonstrated non-stop); little devices to put in your mouth to make you sound like Donald Duck (which were also extensively demonstrated); and six-packs of red cans of Estrella Damm, which seems to be the Spanish answer to Miller High Life or Beast. There are several dozen kiosks dotting the street that sell flowers, postcards, and fruit juice. Places like La Rambla are the ones where everyone tells you to keep close tabs on your personal effects, so we did.
We checked into the hotel and promptly napped for four hours. When we awoke, we figured we'd better get our bearings and sort out our access to the Festival. We dressed and exited the hotel. El Raval isn't much like Williamsburg, as somebody suggested; it's got a lot more in common with SoHo, a mix of crumbling bohemian lofts and big new construction, brushed-metal coffee shops and dingy storefronts hawking third-world plastic crap. We crossed La Rambla into the Barri Gòtic, the truly ancient part of the city whose boundaries trace the Roman fortifications erected in the first century BCE. Walking around there is like a being a rat in a wonderful maze: The narrow, criss-crossing streets are girded by an irregular distribution of beautiful old stone buildings, each with rows of balconies dangling flowering vines into the piss-smelling gutters below; and there are a million tiny storefronts, some for hip-looking coffee joints, some for dusty old-man bodegas. The Barcelona metro is like the New York City subway in that the lines have different colors; and that once a swipe of your pass gets you into the system, you can ride the trains as you please. It's much cleaner, though, and has very nice amenities, like vending machines on the platform and ubiquitous and accurate countdown clocks to let you know when the next train is arriving. It shuts down at midnight, except on Saturdays when it runs around the clock. We took the train 7 stops to Parc del Fòrum. I wanted to get out at the Villa Olímpica stop to take a picture of the riot of scratch-graffiti accumulated on the blue station wall, but we were burning daylight.
Parc del Fòrum looks like it's half industrial park, half fairgrounds. It's right on what I think is a working harbor -- the guy from Hot Snakes claimed he could smell a "shrimp factory" upwind -- and its concrete and metal terrain doesn't particularly lend itself to recreation. (Parkour, maybe?) And yet there are several amphitheater-like structures across its dozen or so acres. The Primavera Sound festival includes a couple of these for a total of eight stages: One huge one for headliners, and others of varying sizes named after their sponsors: Ray-Ban, Heineken, Pitchfork. There's a central promenade, a kind of main drag where all the t-shirt vendors, record shops, and radio stations had discrete canvas tents wired with power and Internet. The first stage we found that night was a joint venture by the Spanish mint candy Smint (owned by Chupa Chups!) and, uh, Myspace. The band playing was Evans The Death, a somewhat goofy punk band with a lady singer and a bunch of dudes with a laissez-faire attitude about keeping their guitars in tune. They were great! Our programmes suggested that this night of the festival was already winding down, so we decided to explore a bit further and strolled down the promenade towards the crest of a small hill and the sound of another stage. ...Where we encountered a crowd of maybe more people than I've ever seen outside of Yankee Stadium. This was the Ray-Ban stage, and everyone was there to see Delorean, a Spanish dance rock band. They were good! As we hadn't eaten, we walked over to the food vendors the majority of which were gathered in a large open area with tables and a huge metal "roof" from which were dangling confusing bits of netting and metal chain, like the remnants of an oil-refinery circus that'd left town. We got seitan sandwiches from a booth called BoomBoomRest. They didn't taste like much, although they proved a bit troublesome later on. We looked for the WFMU tent, but it didn't seem to be open yet, so we made our way back to the hotel for the evening.
The next morning, we had breakfast at a small diner down the street from our hotel, La Granja Viader on C. de Xucla, cappucinos with an ensaimada for me and a jar of fancy kefir for Nina. And we ate lunch at Bar Pinotxo, a kiosk in the Boqueria Market in Raval. They were running low on provisions, and practically the only thing left was navajas (razor clams) which were quite good. It was great! Our goal for the day was to visit La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's famous unfinished cathedral in Gracia. It's the thing that every guide book and fellow traveler tell you to visit, and once you do you can see why: True, it's yet another pompous tribute to the Catholic church, but it's strikingly, almost subversively weird-looking, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's more rococo imaginings. We waited in a line wrapping around the block, and bought tickets to see the internals as well as the partly-unfinished towers, because, hey. The interior of the basilica is a bit like a forest floor, with the struts of the roof poking up into the canopy here and there, knobbily jointed like giraffe legs. Every stained glass window runs the full spectrum of the rainbow. To get to the towers, you take a small elevator that lets you out at one end of a narrow stone bridge that spans the two of the mid-level tower structures -- the taller ones are still being worked on, it looks like. From that bridge, you can see pretty much all of Barcelona in both directions, surrounded by Gaudí's geometrical stone-and-tile fruit trees. Across the bridge and through over some more stone walkways, there's a vertiginously long spiral staircase that takes you back down to the basilica. That one was actually harder for me -- with my acrophobia, babies -- than the bridge. Never look down.
All of the stages of Primavera were going when we got there that evening. We stopped by the WFMU tent, which was fully set up, and introduced ourselves to Liz Berg, Evan "Funk" Davies, Scott Williams, and Brian Turner. They were all super nice, and it was a bit of a struggle not to let on how thrilled I was to meet all of them. I pulled myself away before I got too creepy. I don't know how to describe our zig-zag progress from stage to stage. These festival sets are like musical tapas, if I can draw a rather facile analogy: They're short, and you can come and go as you please, sampling bands until you're full. In that vein, I'll keep the summaries short.
Savages, Pitchfork Stage: Savage, intense, weird. They were great.
Tame Impala, Heineken Stage: They're not my favorite, but their arrangements are nicely complementary, and their lead singer sings like a lady.
Metz, Pitchfork Stage: Very, very good. The presentation was a bit less dramatic than when I saw them at CMJ, to their credit. They're loud and fast and polished to a brilliant sheen.
Dinosaur Jr., Primavera Stage: Hey, it's those dudes! The guy with the hair. I'm not a Dinosaur Jr. fan, but so many of my musician friends are that I figured I should at least take a look. As they're probably required to do, they played Feel The Pain, which is a pretty good song, even if it kind of captures why I'm not crazy about them. And J Mascis sure can shred. "I never thought I'd see them in my lifetime," I remarked to Evan "Funk" Davies after wandering over to the FMU tent. "Yeah, but you walked away," he pointed out. "Yeah, well, I guess I know all those songs already," I said. And that's kind of how I feel about that.
Bob Mould, ATP Stage: We stayed for the whole set, although I don't think Nina's crazy about him, and I'm not sure if I am, either -- grown-up me is ambivalent about the sound that Hüsker Dü originated, even if it informed the style of every band I liked in high school and college. But they were fast and polished, and Bob Mould paced the stage with obvious joy, his nasal singing voice itself like an electric guitar line. And I don't know if I've ever seen Jon Wurster play live before, but, wow. That dude plays perfectly and makes it look easy.
Hot Snakes, ATP Stage: This band is loud.
Fucked Up, Pitchfork Stage: Wonderful, joyous, coordinated. Talky: Damien went on a riff about the rich heritage of Spanish hardcore. The sound system didn't do a lot of favors for the lead guitar lines, but even so, how can you not stomp your foot to Queen Of Hearts?
Death Grips, ATP Stage: This band is loud. Or rather, that dude is loud. He seemed to be playing solo, although it was hard to tell wth the smoke machines going.
We decided to head home around two o'clock, well after the metro had stopped running for the night. Nonetheless, we followed the crowd walking to the Meresme stop, figuring they knew what they were doing. Some did, maybe, since they kept going once they got there. The others queued up at the stop for the night bus, which was just a few feet from the entrance to the metro. The Estrella-sellers swarmed us like mosquitoes. Almost everybody said no, although one British girl's interest was piqued by an offer of cocaine. "Do you have it here?" she asked. "No, you go over there," the guy said, indicating a patch of trees and bushes growing on the meridian across the street. She demurred. And then we saw something awful: One of the South Asian men who'd apparently exhausted his inventory walked over to a sewer grate near where we were standing, knelt down and fiddled with a latch to open it, and retrieved... a fresh six-pack of red Estrella cans!
Estrella Damm: The toilet beer.
After what felt like almost an hour of waiting, the N6 arrived, and we got on. The night bus takes a circuitous route whose endpoint is the Plaça del Catalunya. It didn't stop near our hotel, so we had to guess where to get off. We chose a stop that seemed latitudinally equivalent but west of where we had to go. The twisty-turny streets of Raval got the better of us, and it took us quite some time to get home, running a gauntlet of Estrella salesmen and drinkers, the line between them becoming increasingly unclear. A few of them chucked foaming cans of the stuff at our feet, like gunslingers demanding that we dance. We persevered and made it back unscathed.
The third day, Nina said, looking at the festival schedule, was going to be a doozy. But the test wouldn't begin until the evening. During the day, we visited -- on Tom's urging -- the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona. It's part history museum, part archaeological dig, sort of like Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen: You can go down to a basement level and actually walk around in the stone ruins of a part of Barcino, one of the predecessors of Barcelona. Of particular note are the wine-vats and the fabric dyers facilities, which included vessels for collecting urine from the general public to be used in the setting of dye. The depressing thing that I learned is that like so much of Europe, early Spanish history is pretty much just Roman history. I don't know. Is that depressing? I suppose in my ignorant way I was expecting something a bit less recognizable. We spent several hours browsing various artifacts of Roman occupation, mentally translating the Spanish halves of the plaques on the display cases. Afterwards, we stopped by La Plata, a small corner bar that serves three dishes, all of which are great: Sausage wedges pinned to pan-con-tomate (a Spanish stable); olive-onion-tomato salad; and a bowl of just-fried sardines. We timed our arrival to the Fòrum to enable us to see Daniel Johnston play a set at an indoor auditorium adjacent to the Fòrum. We waited on a stupendously long line -- whose progress took us on a helpless circuit around a couple who were really sucking the fuck out of each others' faces -- before realizing that we needed special tickets to get in. That was a drag, but we consoled ourselves with:
Breeders, Primavera Stage: They were playing the entirety of Last Splash, which brought to mind my middle school practice of taping songs off Z100. There was something weirdly restrained about their live performance, as if they'd engineered their playing and production to sound exactly like the album. But those songs are quite good.
Solange, Pitchfork Stage: She had a tight band with her, and she can definitely sing. But I dunno. The hooks weren't that big. The crowd (big for a small stage) seemed to love her, though. Or maybe they were just happy to begin with: A group of people behind us were huddled around a big novelty cardboard guitar pick -- a piece of Smint swag -- doing lines off it.
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Heineken Stage: Despite being Shane MacGowan's favorite band, they failed to move me. What is the fuss about? They'd erected a big cruciform lighting display behind them, which I think was dismantled before Blur took the stage after them.
Swans, Ray-Ban Stage: They play -- with gusto and sustained intensity -- a sort of of drone / noise rock that I found very difficult to bear. Although she liked them, Nina gave me a reprieve after about half an hour, and we shuffled up the hill to the food tent to pump more Euros into the Spanish vegan restaurant economy.
We walked down to the Pitchfork stage, where Titus Andronicus were setting up. Patrick propped up two paperback books on his guitar amp. We strained to read their titles. I think one of them was The Sun Also Rises; Nina disagrees. He addressed the now-substantial crowd in pidgin Spanish. "Hola amigos! Es muy bueno to be here at Primavera! Muchas gracias to Pitchfork for having us." He paused. "Pitchfork dice que Titus Andronicus third album es muy malo. Pitchfork es muy estupido! Muy, muy estupido." Patrick's voice was ragged, as it sometimes is, but he sang with abandon and the band (the Dudes) were delightful, as they always are. We took a brief detour up to the Primavera stage, where The Knife were playing. Nina'd wanted to see their acrobatic live set, but the crowd was so thick that we couldn't get close enough to see the performers themselves, just the huge digital monitors, which aren't much different than watching the thing on TV, really. So we ended up going back down to the dudes in time for The Battle of Hampton Roads.
It was after 4 in the morning when they wrapped it up, Patrick pointing at his throat to indicate that there would be no encores, but Nina reminded me that I'd pledged to stick around for King Tuff. "I do the fireball," sang Kyle Thomas. "That's how I kill them all." He sounded great, like a punk cartoon, maybe. I'd been lukewarm on them at CMJ, but at Primavera they were tight and efficient. Nina relented and said we could leave before their set was over, but I wanted to hear them play their hit, so we stayed until they did. Then we trudged up to the main concourse and said goodbye to the radio people. We spent a few fruitless minutes outside the Fòrum trying to hail a cab before giving up. Horrifyingly, it was late enough that the metro was beginning to run again, so we waited with the horde of sleepy / not-so-sleepy revelers to be let onto the platform by Control. I felt sick, babies, and propped myself up in the ass-clefts that are so helpfully molded into the seat backs on the L4. When we finally got back to the Hesperia, we slept -- I kid you not -- until 4 in the afternoon. Have I ever done that in my life? Surely not.
There wasn't much time for anything on Saturday, so we got some coffee at one of the many dusty Forns in Raval and headed back to the Frum. We arrived in time to see The Wu-Tang Clan take the Primavera stage: RZA, GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God. "I don't know where the rest of our family is," said GZA before launching into Shimmy Shimmy Ya. "Maybe they got contractual issues, or maybe they missed their flight. There's one guy that's got a good excuse for not being here." They were accompanied by DJ Mathematics, who took a "scratch solo" or sorts, which involved mixing with his feet, Jerry Lee Lewis style. The whole thing was a sight to behold, even if those guys are getting pretty long in the tooth.
After that we visited the Heineken stage, where Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds were playing a set of extended arrangements of the classics. He had two drummers on stage pounding out a dirty beat, and he spent a lot of time undulating in and on top of the crowd, especially during a crowd-pleasing version of Stagger Lee, in which he focused his crotch squarely in the face of a young woman in the front row. "I'll crawl over fifty pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole." So. That dude is looking well-preserved, and he must have hell of lower back muscles. I wonder if he ever gets sick of doing Red Right Hand.
We rounded out the evening with Crystal Castles at the Ray-Ban stage. Their set was almost -- no, it was -- eclipsed by their lighting display, which was complex, intense, and definitely Not Safe For Epileptics. The crowd overflowed the bowl of the amphitheater. A guy next to us who must've been really, you know, feeling it, waved a big black-and-white flag back and forth like Enjorlas in Les Mis. It kept getting in peoples' faces, and they shooed him away. But that set was our last one. We said goodbye to the radio people and returned to Jaume I. At my request, we made a post-festival pit stop at Nevermind, a horrible Nirvana-themed (!) bar in the Barri Gòtic, where we payed full price for two bottles of Estrella. It's... drinkable, though not good. We sat across from a heinous mural of Kurt Cobain in a shredding duel with Jimi Hendrix. I put a WFMU sticker on the lid of the toilet tank in the men's room, although given how clean it was compared with every other surface in the place, I expect my sticker will be expeditiously removed so as not to interfere with people, you know, uh, going skiing.
The following day, we walked to the Catedral de la Santa Creu, where there was a Catalonian cultural festival underway. The giants were out, a knight with a morning star facing some fancy lady, enormous, motionless, anonymous -- at least as far as I knew. Behind them on the steps, teams of tumblers were pitted against each other building human pyramids in a competition strangely relevant to Catalans. Later, we made our way to the CaixaForum in Montjuïc, one of the larger contemporary art galleries, and looked at an international collection of new photography, sculpture, and video art; and a surprisingly comprehensive exhibition of artifacts and film projections by and about Georges Méliès, the director of A Trip To The Moon. It was really fun, although Une nuit terrible brought back some bad memories. The National Art Museum was closed, but we walked up the Av. Reina Maria Cristina to the "Magic Fountain" anyway in the hopes of seeing a promised "light and music display." Which started abruptly a minutes or two after we'd sat down on the fountain's edge -- I grabbed Nina's shoulder in fright, to her amusement. We walked up the big staircase and around the museum to the old Olympic grounds behind it, the somewhat forlorn-looking torch-shaped Communications Tower rising above the trees in the distance.
The final full day of our trip we used the way I think travelers often do, trying to pack in all of the small things we'd put off or hadn't yet found the time to do. Working from a friend's list, we took the L3 to Fontana in Gracia, and walked to the Lucania II, a Spanish pizzeria. Spanish pizza reminds me not unpleasantly of the square frozen Krasdale pizzas I used to buy when I was living in Prospect Heights. Nina and I shared a pie topped with fried egg yolk and one stuffed with blood-red sopressata. From their we hiked up Carrer Verdi to Parc Güell, the gated community Gaudi designed for Eusebi Güell and his rich buddies. We touched the iconic water-drooling lizard. Then it was back down to the foot of the hill in Gracia, where we stopped in at a hot chocolate cafe (!) called La Nena. We'd hoped to find Spanish orxata, but we settled for two cups of molten suizo. Then back to Raval for more eating. La Bodega de La Palma was another recommendation from a native, but we'd twice found it shuttered when we'd tried to visit earlier in the week. Third time's the charm: They were open, and we ordered a round of tapas, which completely overwhelmed us. Cheeses, cured ham, patatas bravas, croquettes.
Hobbit! on the plane ride home.
Our flight from JFK to El Prat took eight hours. Thankfully, there were several very long movies available to watch -- Nina and I teamed up on Les Miserables, which, for some reason, I'd been looking forward to watching. The rest of the flight I tried to sleep but mostly just pretzeled myself into different postures and periodically accepted plastic cups of Fresca from the flight attendants. Upon landing, we rode the Aerobus to the Plaça de Catalunya. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called El Raval, which was variously described as being rough and ungentrified, and as being a prime destination for tourists. We were on El Carrer de Hospital (named after the hospital where Antoni Gaudí was treated after being hit by a tram in 1926), one block away from La Rambla, the huge central promenade leading from the Plaça down to Port Vell. The street has two gutters on either side that are just wide enough to allow a car to pass, but I wouldn't want to drive it -- La Rambla is always thronged with people: People on their way to things, people just kind of strolling, and a consistent distribution of South Asian men selling cheap LED whirligigs (which they demonstrated non-stop); little devices to put in your mouth to make you sound like Donald Duck (which were also extensively demonstrated); and six-packs of red cans of Estrella Damm, which seems to be the Spanish answer to Miller High Life or Beast. There are several dozen kiosks dotting the street that sell flowers, postcards, and fruit juice. Places like La Rambla are the ones where everyone tells you to keep close tabs on your personal effects, so we did.
We checked into the hotel and promptly napped for four hours. When we awoke, we figured we'd better get our bearings and sort out our access to the Festival. We dressed and exited the hotel. El Raval isn't much like Williamsburg, as somebody suggested; it's got a lot more in common with SoHo, a mix of crumbling bohemian lofts and big new construction, brushed-metal coffee shops and dingy storefronts hawking third-world plastic crap. We crossed La Rambla into the Barri Gòtic, the truly ancient part of the city whose boundaries trace the Roman fortifications erected in the first century BCE. Walking around there is like a being a rat in a wonderful maze: The narrow, criss-crossing streets are girded by an irregular distribution of beautiful old stone buildings, each with rows of balconies dangling flowering vines into the piss-smelling gutters below; and there are a million tiny storefronts, some for hip-looking coffee joints, some for dusty old-man bodegas. The Barcelona metro is like the New York City subway in that the lines have different colors; and that once a swipe of your pass gets you into the system, you can ride the trains as you please. It's much cleaner, though, and has very nice amenities, like vending machines on the platform and ubiquitous and accurate countdown clocks to let you know when the next train is arriving. It shuts down at midnight, except on Saturdays when it runs around the clock. We took the train 7 stops to Parc del Fòrum. I wanted to get out at the Villa Olímpica stop to take a picture of the riot of scratch-graffiti accumulated on the blue station wall, but we were burning daylight.
Parc del Fòrum looks like it's half industrial park, half fairgrounds. It's right on what I think is a working harbor -- the guy from Hot Snakes claimed he could smell a "shrimp factory" upwind -- and its concrete and metal terrain doesn't particularly lend itself to recreation. (Parkour, maybe?) And yet there are several amphitheater-like structures across its dozen or so acres. The Primavera Sound festival includes a couple of these for a total of eight stages: One huge one for headliners, and others of varying sizes named after their sponsors: Ray-Ban, Heineken, Pitchfork. There's a central promenade, a kind of main drag where all the t-shirt vendors, record shops, and radio stations had discrete canvas tents wired with power and Internet. The first stage we found that night was a joint venture by the Spanish mint candy Smint (owned by Chupa Chups!) and, uh, Myspace. The band playing was Evans The Death, a somewhat goofy punk band with a lady singer and a bunch of dudes with a laissez-faire attitude about keeping their guitars in tune. They were great! Our programmes suggested that this night of the festival was already winding down, so we decided to explore a bit further and strolled down the promenade towards the crest of a small hill and the sound of another stage. ...Where we encountered a crowd of maybe more people than I've ever seen outside of Yankee Stadium. This was the Ray-Ban stage, and everyone was there to see Delorean, a Spanish dance rock band. They were good! As we hadn't eaten, we walked over to the food vendors the majority of which were gathered in a large open area with tables and a huge metal "roof" from which were dangling confusing bits of netting and metal chain, like the remnants of an oil-refinery circus that'd left town. We got seitan sandwiches from a booth called BoomBoomRest. They didn't taste like much, although they proved a bit troublesome later on. We looked for the WFMU tent, but it didn't seem to be open yet, so we made our way back to the hotel for the evening.
The next morning, we had breakfast at a small diner down the street from our hotel, La Granja Viader on C. de Xucla, cappucinos with an ensaimada for me and a jar of fancy kefir for Nina. And we ate lunch at Bar Pinotxo, a kiosk in the Boqueria Market in Raval. They were running low on provisions, and practically the only thing left was navajas (razor clams) which were quite good. It was great! Our goal for the day was to visit La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's famous unfinished cathedral in Gracia. It's the thing that every guide book and fellow traveler tell you to visit, and once you do you can see why: True, it's yet another pompous tribute to the Catholic church, but it's strikingly, almost subversively weird-looking, like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's more rococo imaginings. We waited in a line wrapping around the block, and bought tickets to see the internals as well as the partly-unfinished towers, because, hey. The interior of the basilica is a bit like a forest floor, with the struts of the roof poking up into the canopy here and there, knobbily jointed like giraffe legs. Every stained glass window runs the full spectrum of the rainbow. To get to the towers, you take a small elevator that lets you out at one end of a narrow stone bridge that spans the two of the mid-level tower structures -- the taller ones are still being worked on, it looks like. From that bridge, you can see pretty much all of Barcelona in both directions, surrounded by Gaudí's geometrical stone-and-tile fruit trees. Across the bridge and through over some more stone walkways, there's a vertiginously long spiral staircase that takes you back down to the basilica. That one was actually harder for me -- with my acrophobia, babies -- than the bridge. Never look down.
All of the stages of Primavera were going when we got there that evening. We stopped by the WFMU tent, which was fully set up, and introduced ourselves to Liz Berg, Evan "Funk" Davies, Scott Williams, and Brian Turner. They were all super nice, and it was a bit of a struggle not to let on how thrilled I was to meet all of them. I pulled myself away before I got too creepy. I don't know how to describe our zig-zag progress from stage to stage. These festival sets are like musical tapas, if I can draw a rather facile analogy: They're short, and you can come and go as you please, sampling bands until you're full. In that vein, I'll keep the summaries short.
Savages, Pitchfork Stage: Savage, intense, weird. They were great.
Tame Impala, Heineken Stage: They're not my favorite, but their arrangements are nicely complementary, and their lead singer sings like a lady.
Metz, Pitchfork Stage: Very, very good. The presentation was a bit less dramatic than when I saw them at CMJ, to their credit. They're loud and fast and polished to a brilliant sheen.
Dinosaur Jr., Primavera Stage: Hey, it's those dudes! The guy with the hair. I'm not a Dinosaur Jr. fan, but so many of my musician friends are that I figured I should at least take a look. As they're probably required to do, they played Feel The Pain, which is a pretty good song, even if it kind of captures why I'm not crazy about them. And J Mascis sure can shred. "I never thought I'd see them in my lifetime," I remarked to Evan "Funk" Davies after wandering over to the FMU tent. "Yeah, but you walked away," he pointed out. "Yeah, well, I guess I know all those songs already," I said. And that's kind of how I feel about that.
Bob Mould, ATP Stage: We stayed for the whole set, although I don't think Nina's crazy about him, and I'm not sure if I am, either -- grown-up me is ambivalent about the sound that Hüsker Dü originated, even if it informed the style of every band I liked in high school and college. But they were fast and polished, and Bob Mould paced the stage with obvious joy, his nasal singing voice itself like an electric guitar line. And I don't know if I've ever seen Jon Wurster play live before, but, wow. That dude plays perfectly and makes it look easy.
Hot Snakes, ATP Stage: This band is loud.
Fucked Up, Pitchfork Stage: Wonderful, joyous, coordinated. Talky: Damien went on a riff about the rich heritage of Spanish hardcore. The sound system didn't do a lot of favors for the lead guitar lines, but even so, how can you not stomp your foot to Queen Of Hearts?
Death Grips, ATP Stage: This band is loud. Or rather, that dude is loud. He seemed to be playing solo, although it was hard to tell wth the smoke machines going.
We decided to head home around two o'clock, well after the metro had stopped running for the night. Nonetheless, we followed the crowd walking to the Meresme stop, figuring they knew what they were doing. Some did, maybe, since they kept going once they got there. The others queued up at the stop for the night bus, which was just a few feet from the entrance to the metro. The Estrella-sellers swarmed us like mosquitoes. Almost everybody said no, although one British girl's interest was piqued by an offer of cocaine. "Do you have it here?" she asked. "No, you go over there," the guy said, indicating a patch of trees and bushes growing on the meridian across the street. She demurred. And then we saw something awful: One of the South Asian men who'd apparently exhausted his inventory walked over to a sewer grate near where we were standing, knelt down and fiddled with a latch to open it, and retrieved... a fresh six-pack of red Estrella cans!
Estrella Damm: The toilet beer.
After what felt like almost an hour of waiting, the N6 arrived, and we got on. The night bus takes a circuitous route whose endpoint is the Plaça del Catalunya. It didn't stop near our hotel, so we had to guess where to get off. We chose a stop that seemed latitudinally equivalent but west of where we had to go. The twisty-turny streets of Raval got the better of us, and it took us quite some time to get home, running a gauntlet of Estrella salesmen and drinkers, the line between them becoming increasingly unclear. A few of them chucked foaming cans of the stuff at our feet, like gunslingers demanding that we dance. We persevered and made it back unscathed.
The third day, Nina said, looking at the festival schedule, was going to be a doozy. But the test wouldn't begin until the evening. During the day, we visited -- on Tom's urging -- the Museu d'Història de la Ciutat de Barcelona. It's part history museum, part archaeological dig, sort of like Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen: You can go down to a basement level and actually walk around in the stone ruins of a part of Barcino, one of the predecessors of Barcelona. Of particular note are the wine-vats and the fabric dyers facilities, which included vessels for collecting urine from the general public to be used in the setting of dye. The depressing thing that I learned is that like so much of Europe, early Spanish history is pretty much just Roman history. I don't know. Is that depressing? I suppose in my ignorant way I was expecting something a bit less recognizable. We spent several hours browsing various artifacts of Roman occupation, mentally translating the Spanish halves of the plaques on the display cases. Afterwards, we stopped by La Plata, a small corner bar that serves three dishes, all of which are great: Sausage wedges pinned to pan-con-tomate (a Spanish stable); olive-onion-tomato salad; and a bowl of just-fried sardines. We timed our arrival to the Fòrum to enable us to see Daniel Johnston play a set at an indoor auditorium adjacent to the Fòrum. We waited on a stupendously long line -- whose progress took us on a helpless circuit around a couple who were really sucking the fuck out of each others' faces -- before realizing that we needed special tickets to get in. That was a drag, but we consoled ourselves with:
Breeders, Primavera Stage: They were playing the entirety of Last Splash, which brought to mind my middle school practice of taping songs off Z100. There was something weirdly restrained about their live performance, as if they'd engineered their playing and production to sound exactly like the album. But those songs are quite good.
Solange, Pitchfork Stage: She had a tight band with her, and she can definitely sing. But I dunno. The hooks weren't that big. The crowd (big for a small stage) seemed to love her, though. Or maybe they were just happy to begin with: A group of people behind us were huddled around a big novelty cardboard guitar pick -- a piece of Smint swag -- doing lines off it.
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Heineken Stage: Despite being Shane MacGowan's favorite band, they failed to move me. What is the fuss about? They'd erected a big cruciform lighting display behind them, which I think was dismantled before Blur took the stage after them.
Swans, Ray-Ban Stage: They play -- with gusto and sustained intensity -- a sort of of drone / noise rock that I found very difficult to bear. Although she liked them, Nina gave me a reprieve after about half an hour, and we shuffled up the hill to the food tent to pump more Euros into the Spanish vegan restaurant economy.
We walked down to the Pitchfork stage, where Titus Andronicus were setting up. Patrick propped up two paperback books on his guitar amp. We strained to read their titles. I think one of them was The Sun Also Rises; Nina disagrees. He addressed the now-substantial crowd in pidgin Spanish. "Hola amigos! Es muy bueno to be here at Primavera! Muchas gracias to Pitchfork for having us." He paused. "Pitchfork dice que Titus Andronicus third album es muy malo. Pitchfork es muy estupido! Muy, muy estupido." Patrick's voice was ragged, as it sometimes is, but he sang with abandon and the band (the Dudes) were delightful, as they always are. We took a brief detour up to the Primavera stage, where The Knife were playing. Nina'd wanted to see their acrobatic live set, but the crowd was so thick that we couldn't get close enough to see the performers themselves, just the huge digital monitors, which aren't much different than watching the thing on TV, really. So we ended up going back down to the dudes in time for The Battle of Hampton Roads.
It was after 4 in the morning when they wrapped it up, Patrick pointing at his throat to indicate that there would be no encores, but Nina reminded me that I'd pledged to stick around for King Tuff. "I do the fireball," sang Kyle Thomas. "That's how I kill them all." He sounded great, like a punk cartoon, maybe. I'd been lukewarm on them at CMJ, but at Primavera they were tight and efficient. Nina relented and said we could leave before their set was over, but I wanted to hear them play their hit, so we stayed until they did. Then we trudged up to the main concourse and said goodbye to the radio people. We spent a few fruitless minutes outside the Fòrum trying to hail a cab before giving up. Horrifyingly, it was late enough that the metro was beginning to run again, so we waited with the horde of sleepy / not-so-sleepy revelers to be let onto the platform by Control. I felt sick, babies, and propped myself up in the ass-clefts that are so helpfully molded into the seat backs on the L4. When we finally got back to the Hesperia, we slept -- I kid you not -- until 4 in the afternoon. Have I ever done that in my life? Surely not.
There wasn't much time for anything on Saturday, so we got some coffee at one of the many dusty Forns in Raval and headed back to the Frum. We arrived in time to see The Wu-Tang Clan take the Primavera stage: RZA, GZA, Ghostface, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God. "I don't know where the rest of our family is," said GZA before launching into Shimmy Shimmy Ya. "Maybe they got contractual issues, or maybe they missed their flight. There's one guy that's got a good excuse for not being here." They were accompanied by DJ Mathematics, who took a "scratch solo" or sorts, which involved mixing with his feet, Jerry Lee Lewis style. The whole thing was a sight to behold, even if those guys are getting pretty long in the tooth.
After that we visited the Heineken stage, where Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds were playing a set of extended arrangements of the classics. He had two drummers on stage pounding out a dirty beat, and he spent a lot of time undulating in and on top of the crowd, especially during a crowd-pleasing version of Stagger Lee, in which he focused his crotch squarely in the face of a young woman in the front row. "I'll crawl over fifty pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole." So. That dude is looking well-preserved, and he must have hell of lower back muscles. I wonder if he ever gets sick of doing Red Right Hand.
We rounded out the evening with Crystal Castles at the Ray-Ban stage. Their set was almost -- no, it was -- eclipsed by their lighting display, which was complex, intense, and definitely Not Safe For Epileptics. The crowd overflowed the bowl of the amphitheater. A guy next to us who must've been really, you know, feeling it, waved a big black-and-white flag back and forth like Enjorlas in Les Mis. It kept getting in peoples' faces, and they shooed him away. But that set was our last one. We said goodbye to the radio people and returned to Jaume I. At my request, we made a post-festival pit stop at Nevermind, a horrible Nirvana-themed (!) bar in the Barri Gòtic, where we payed full price for two bottles of Estrella. It's... drinkable, though not good. We sat across from a heinous mural of Kurt Cobain in a shredding duel with Jimi Hendrix. I put a WFMU sticker on the lid of the toilet tank in the men's room, although given how clean it was compared with every other surface in the place, I expect my sticker will be expeditiously removed so as not to interfere with people, you know, uh, going skiing.
The following day, we walked to the Catedral de la Santa Creu, where there was a Catalonian cultural festival underway. The giants were out, a knight with a morning star facing some fancy lady, enormous, motionless, anonymous -- at least as far as I knew. Behind them on the steps, teams of tumblers were pitted against each other building human pyramids in a competition strangely relevant to Catalans. Later, we made our way to the CaixaForum in Montjuïc, one of the larger contemporary art galleries, and looked at an international collection of new photography, sculpture, and video art; and a surprisingly comprehensive exhibition of artifacts and film projections by and about Georges Méliès, the director of A Trip To The Moon. It was really fun, although Une nuit terrible brought back some bad memories. The National Art Museum was closed, but we walked up the Av. Reina Maria Cristina to the "Magic Fountain" anyway in the hopes of seeing a promised "light and music display." Which started abruptly a minutes or two after we'd sat down on the fountain's edge -- I grabbed Nina's shoulder in fright, to her amusement. We walked up the big staircase and around the museum to the old Olympic grounds behind it, the somewhat forlorn-looking torch-shaped Communications Tower rising above the trees in the distance.
The final full day of our trip we used the way I think travelers often do, trying to pack in all of the small things we'd put off or hadn't yet found the time to do. Working from a friend's list, we took the L3 to Fontana in Gracia, and walked to the Lucania II, a Spanish pizzeria. Spanish pizza reminds me not unpleasantly of the square frozen Krasdale pizzas I used to buy when I was living in Prospect Heights. Nina and I shared a pie topped with fried egg yolk and one stuffed with blood-red sopressata. From their we hiked up Carrer Verdi to Parc Güell, the gated community Gaudi designed for Eusebi Güell and his rich buddies. We touched the iconic water-drooling lizard. Then it was back down to the foot of the hill in Gracia, where we stopped in at a hot chocolate cafe (!) called La Nena. We'd hoped to find Spanish orxata, but we settled for two cups of molten suizo. Then back to Raval for more eating. La Bodega de La Palma was another recommendation from a native, but we'd twice found it shuttered when we'd tried to visit earlier in the week. Third time's the charm: They were open, and we ordered a round of tapas, which completely overwhelmed us. Cheeses, cured ham, patatas bravas, croquettes.
Hobbit! on the plane ride home.
Sunday, April 07, 2013
Holi
Nina took me to Holi, the Indian festival of colors. But I was in an irritable mood because I hadn't eaten and because I'd wanted to see Nick Cave's (not that Nick Cave) dancing "horses" at Grand Central. It was the last day of the exhibition, and by the time we arrived at the atrium, pounding the echoing floors of the station like we were late to catch a train, they were loading the horses into wooden crates. We walked east, to Dag Hammerskold Plaza, and I was embarrassed to be reminded of The Dark Tower. We found the festival a few blocks north at D.H. Park. A light rain was falling, but nobody seemed to notice. The band was still playing to a mob of revellers, and people were still queueing up for the booth selling little sachets of colored powder. Every so often someone would throw a handful of stuff into the air, and there'd be a little burst of green or purple above everyone's heads. It was very pretty, but I was feeling hungry and cranky, and so when an exuberant young lady passed by and colored both our cheeks with a bright crimson handprint, it just made me sulk harder. Nina fed me, which helped my mood, but the festival soon wrapped things up. We took a rainy stroll around Turtle Bay, up the stairs to Tudor City, gawping at the huge tree growing inside the dark glass of the Ford Foundation building.
With some help from Drew (one of my castmates from Vanderpuss) Bel Argosy managed to book a show at Fort Useless, a DIY venue in Bushwick whose stage I'd begun covet after seeing about a million shows there advertised on Facebook. It'd been a while since we'd played a show that wasn't in a bar or at a proper rock club, and I yearned to return to our origins playing loft shows at places like Cheap Storage. I made the spectacular miscalculation that it would make the most sense for Billy and Sarah and I, in our traditional transportation of gear from the Practice Hole Mark II, should take the L to Jefferson. (In my defense, that is the, uh, second closest L stop. Which would be okay if the L were the right train to take.) So we ended up having to walk for about half an hour to get to the place, laden with guitars, cymbals, and, I think, an amp. Our walk took us through a cross-section of Bushwick, passing art galleries, community centers thowing quinceañera parties, fancy burger joints, rotting dive bars. We passed the new location of Silent Barn, which is so undifferentiated that we would've missed it entirely except for the noise of indie rock coming from behind a rusty door with a piece of notebook paper taped to it winkingly announcing it as the entrance of the Barn's "Champagne Room." We walked on, sweating. Finally we came to Ditmars, the cross street of Fort Useless, and a made a left. The Fort really is just some dude's (Jeremiah's) ground floor apartment, the performance space / gallery is the living room, the small hallway kitchen is where you sort out your gear. There's a hanging sheet that partitions off the part of the house that's, I guess, off limits. I didn't peek behind it. Lest you think it an unofficial operation, though, I tell you there was staff: A dude seated at the door collecting donations, a dude tending bar, a dude doing sound. Jeremiah himself sort of puttered about, taking the occasional picture and sorting out cables and such.
Our openers were Black Salad, a two-piece noise band featuring Max from Quiet Loudly, Clouder, and about a million other groups. We arrived in time to see what was, I think, the second half of their set. Max and his Salad-mate Steve knelt on the floor in front of a tiered array of synthesizers, keyboards, and pedals; intermittently leaning over to generate a sound from an instrument and capture it with their equipment, after which they'd repeat it, alter it, compose it with itself and with other samples they'd trapped. Did they have songs? I don't really know. But all that sound, crashing in waves against your face, kind of forces you to turn inward, and the result is that for all its abrasiveness, their set produces a calm and meditative state of mind. Among other curiosities, they'd lined up an array of glazed ceramic cones at the perimeter of the carpet that marked out the part of the wood floor that was the stage. We showed up too late to see what part they played in the set, and when I asked Steve what they were for, he wouldn't say. "You'll just have to show up earlier next time."
After that, we set up and played. It's always thrilling and feels risky to assemble the drums in front of a crowd. They can see me, I can sort of see them. We all know there's nothing that's gonna stop the train from leaving the station. (Does anyone relate to this?? Write in pls kthx.) At any rate, here we are, in full Instagram-filtered glory.
After us was Jane Eyre, Drew's band, a skillful dutty rock three-piece. True to form, Drew wore a yellow sundress for his performance. It was sweltering inside the Fort, so I was in and out for the duration of their set taking gulps of cool spring air mixed with cigarette smoke in the little 8-foot-square courtyard in front of the building formed by a high wrought-iron fence. From the selection of songs that I heard, J. Eyre's a litte bit Creedence, a little bit Pumpkins. Definitely a guitar band, polished but nasty.
After the show a contingent of our friends / fans converged on a Spanish buffet restaurant that had foolishly left its doors open though the steam table trays were all packed away, uprooted from like teeth, leaving just the steaming sockets. Nina and I showed up late and found a dozen people huddled in the back with a flight of Coronas. A radio blared an aggressively-DJ'd Latin station, plenty of air horn and exhortations to "¡Baile, baile, baile!"
With some help from Drew (one of my castmates from Vanderpuss) Bel Argosy managed to book a show at Fort Useless, a DIY venue in Bushwick whose stage I'd begun covet after seeing about a million shows there advertised on Facebook. It'd been a while since we'd played a show that wasn't in a bar or at a proper rock club, and I yearned to return to our origins playing loft shows at places like Cheap Storage. I made the spectacular miscalculation that it would make the most sense for Billy and Sarah and I, in our traditional transportation of gear from the Practice Hole Mark II, should take the L to Jefferson. (In my defense, that is the, uh, second closest L stop. Which would be okay if the L were the right train to take.) So we ended up having to walk for about half an hour to get to the place, laden with guitars, cymbals, and, I think, an amp. Our walk took us through a cross-section of Bushwick, passing art galleries, community centers thowing quinceañera parties, fancy burger joints, rotting dive bars. We passed the new location of Silent Barn, which is so undifferentiated that we would've missed it entirely except for the noise of indie rock coming from behind a rusty door with a piece of notebook paper taped to it winkingly announcing it as the entrance of the Barn's "Champagne Room." We walked on, sweating. Finally we came to Ditmars, the cross street of Fort Useless, and a made a left. The Fort really is just some dude's (Jeremiah's) ground floor apartment, the performance space / gallery is the living room, the small hallway kitchen is where you sort out your gear. There's a hanging sheet that partitions off the part of the house that's, I guess, off limits. I didn't peek behind it. Lest you think it an unofficial operation, though, I tell you there was staff: A dude seated at the door collecting donations, a dude tending bar, a dude doing sound. Jeremiah himself sort of puttered about, taking the occasional picture and sorting out cables and such.
Our openers were Black Salad, a two-piece noise band featuring Max from Quiet Loudly, Clouder, and about a million other groups. We arrived in time to see what was, I think, the second half of their set. Max and his Salad-mate Steve knelt on the floor in front of a tiered array of synthesizers, keyboards, and pedals; intermittently leaning over to generate a sound from an instrument and capture it with their equipment, after which they'd repeat it, alter it, compose it with itself and with other samples they'd trapped. Did they have songs? I don't really know. But all that sound, crashing in waves against your face, kind of forces you to turn inward, and the result is that for all its abrasiveness, their set produces a calm and meditative state of mind. Among other curiosities, they'd lined up an array of glazed ceramic cones at the perimeter of the carpet that marked out the part of the wood floor that was the stage. We showed up too late to see what part they played in the set, and when I asked Steve what they were for, he wouldn't say. "You'll just have to show up earlier next time."
After that, we set up and played. It's always thrilling and feels risky to assemble the drums in front of a crowd. They can see me, I can sort of see them. We all know there's nothing that's gonna stop the train from leaving the station. (Does anyone relate to this?? Write in pls kthx.) At any rate, here we are, in full Instagram-filtered glory.
After the show a contingent of our friends / fans converged on a Spanish buffet restaurant that had foolishly left its doors open though the steam table trays were all packed away, uprooted from like teeth, leaving just the steaming sockets. Nina and I showed up late and found a dozen people huddled in the back with a flight of Coronas. A radio blared an aggressively-DJ'd Latin station, plenty of air horn and exhortations to "¡Baile, baile, baile!"
Saturday, March 23, 2013
The Contest Winners
Sam had been hyping All City Hour, his new public access show, on Facebook for quite some time. We resolved to watch, setting our DVR to record it since it airs on BCAT at 3:00 AM. The first episode we watched was mostly cell phone footage of Sam and a guy with a lot of face tattoos wandering around at SXSW. I was initially confused, and then a bit disappointed -- the show seemed to be mostly an extended promotion for Adam's movie, Gimme The Loot, which, as it turned out, featured both Sam and the tattoo'd guy, who goes by the name Meeko Gattuso. But then I watched a few more episodes, and the show started to grow on me. The first one I'd seen turned out to be an anomaly. Most of the episodes have a kind of variety show format, with a number of different segments, each of which is quite charming: Sam and Meeko interview a local celebrity on a sofa in someone's fancy apartment in what loos like Long Island City; Meeko teaches Cooking In Jail (toilet coffee, some kind of ramen burrito log); Sam delivers an improvised but flawless monologue on some aspect of New York City history ("Aqueducts, aqueducts, aqueducts!"). They give advice to people who write in. There are musical guests. They talk about nutcrackers! In one particularly thrilling show, the crew visits an illegal "street dentist" somewhere in the Bronx so that Meeko can get a missing tooth worked on. Meeko is very funny, and Sam's odd, shaggy confidence really sells the show as a cheerful introduction to the underworld. Questions of authenticity and exploitation aside, that idea is pure catnip for me. Access! Experience! R-U-1... Judo?
And it serves All City Hour's primary function very well: We were very excited to see Gimme The Loot, and so when Adam announced that they were having the premiere on Friday, we made plans to go. On the day, I jogged across town from my office to the IFC Center in time to make the 6:30 screening. I loved it! Like The Warriors, Adam's movie has a fantastical narrative premise -- two unknown taggers try to make a name for themselves by bombing the home run apple at Citi Field -- and also like that movie, the plot in Gimme The Loot is way less important than the setting the film evokes. ...That being, in The Warriors, a thrilling but wildly inaccurate Heathcliff-the-Cat version of New York City at permanent midnight, all fishbones and garbage can lids. In GtL, it's a lush and endless city summer day, a million locked doors and a few open ones, less racist but certainly not post-racial. Among my favorite parts: A geography-bending chase that impossibly criss-crosses lower Manhattan and Midtown in about five minutes of screen time. And everyone in it -- Sam and Meeko included -- is wonderful, especially Tashiana Washington, who plays Sofia (who writes "Sofia"). It's definitely one of those bits of art that's so effective at realizing an idea you thought you had to make or write a thing that it's actually a bit disheartening to watch. No point in me doing that, now. So.
Bel Argosy's second EP, Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, is in the can! We're thinking about releasing this one on cassette tape. "So that it's more accessible," I tell bloggers, jokingly, than our vinyl 7". But the real reason we're doing it (at least, that I'm doing it) is so that we can work our way through every form of physical media that preceded the founding of the band. MP3 may be the currency of the realm, but we're out there planting fossils in the desert like we were actually there in 1990. (We also have MP3s.)
WFMU had their annual fund-raising marathon last week. I've said it before: I love the marathon, and in fact have come to regard it as one of the milestones that breaks up the year for me. Although the station is pure joy year round -- I've actually stepped up my consumption this past yeay, by listening to it at home in stereo as if I were within radio broadcast range (and owned a real radio). I use a UPnP media server called PS3 Media Server, which I run on my work MacBook and then use the control point built into the Xbox 360 to pull the stream from WFMU's servers and play it on our big TV speakers. It works really well! But, marathon: Everyone is talking about Tom Scharpling's marathon show, which as usual broke some kind of fund-raising record, and in which John Hodgman went head to head with Cory Booker in a Star Trek trivia battle; but my favorite parts were from Seven Second Delay: First, The Lickathon, which featured Station Manager Ken licking the handle of a toilet; then, obviously, the Wheel of Fate, which ended up forcing Andy to drink a shot of soda out of Ken's belly button ("Ken, I'm 58 years old!"), but which failed to produce hot noodles poured into anyone's underwear. The whole thing wrapped up with a multi-hour performance by the Hoof 'n' Mouth Sinfonia. I'd had a fun time watching that live last year, but that wasn't on the table this time around. The 2013 Hoof 'n' Mouth was a test flight of the new basement performance space the station is almost done building out. It's not a venue and not a bar, Ken was careful to point out, and thus the show wasn't open to the listening public. So I stayed home and watched the DJs do their karaoke thing on Ustream, which only made me feel a little bit creepy.
But here's the crazy part: The morning after, I got an email from Asst. General Manager Liz Berg congratulating me for winning the Primavera Festival raffle! (I'd entered because I was eligible and because, you know, why not.) "Not sure if you were tuned in last night," she wrote. And the thing is, I was tuned in, but I stepped away from the Ustream for a few minutes, maybe, to go to the bathroom or something. I guess that's when they announced the results. But, yeah, Nina and I are going to be flying to Barcelona in May to go to this crazy Spanish rock festival! The whole thing is a bit much to take in, not least of all the idea of myself as a contest winner. Although I've certainly been plenty lucky in my life so far. So it's really just an unfair heaping-on of good fortune. But I've learned, over the years, not to interrogate the significance of stuff like this too much. And for some reason, the title "The Contest Winners" occurred to me as a good fit for, say, a particularly prosaic short story in the style of Vonnegut or Salinger. So we are doing things like renewing our passports, sifting through the list of a hundred and seventy-odd bands that'll be appearing at the Festival, and leafing through some guidebooks graciously lent to us by Jay. We'll be staying in El Raval, which seemed like the place that, you know, the kids go.
¡Qué extraño!
And it serves All City Hour's primary function very well: We were very excited to see Gimme The Loot, and so when Adam announced that they were having the premiere on Friday, we made plans to go. On the day, I jogged across town from my office to the IFC Center in time to make the 6:30 screening. I loved it! Like The Warriors, Adam's movie has a fantastical narrative premise -- two unknown taggers try to make a name for themselves by bombing the home run apple at Citi Field -- and also like that movie, the plot in Gimme The Loot is way less important than the setting the film evokes. ...That being, in The Warriors, a thrilling but wildly inaccurate Heathcliff-the-Cat version of New York City at permanent midnight, all fishbones and garbage can lids. In GtL, it's a lush and endless city summer day, a million locked doors and a few open ones, less racist but certainly not post-racial. Among my favorite parts: A geography-bending chase that impossibly criss-crosses lower Manhattan and Midtown in about five minutes of screen time. And everyone in it -- Sam and Meeko included -- is wonderful, especially Tashiana Washington, who plays Sofia (who writes "Sofia"). It's definitely one of those bits of art that's so effective at realizing an idea you thought you had to make or write a thing that it's actually a bit disheartening to watch. No point in me doing that, now. So.
Bel Argosy's second EP, Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, is in the can! We're thinking about releasing this one on cassette tape. "So that it's more accessible," I tell bloggers, jokingly, than our vinyl 7". But the real reason we're doing it (at least, that I'm doing it) is so that we can work our way through every form of physical media that preceded the founding of the band. MP3 may be the currency of the realm, but we're out there planting fossils in the desert like we were actually there in 1990. (We also have MP3s.)
WFMU had their annual fund-raising marathon last week. I've said it before: I love the marathon, and in fact have come to regard it as one of the milestones that breaks up the year for me. Although the station is pure joy year round -- I've actually stepped up my consumption this past yeay, by listening to it at home in stereo as if I were within radio broadcast range (and owned a real radio). I use a UPnP media server called PS3 Media Server, which I run on my work MacBook and then use the control point built into the Xbox 360 to pull the stream from WFMU's servers and play it on our big TV speakers. It works really well! But, marathon: Everyone is talking about Tom Scharpling's marathon show, which as usual broke some kind of fund-raising record, and in which John Hodgman went head to head with Cory Booker in a Star Trek trivia battle; but my favorite parts were from Seven Second Delay: First, The Lickathon, which featured Station Manager Ken licking the handle of a toilet; then, obviously, the Wheel of Fate, which ended up forcing Andy to drink a shot of soda out of Ken's belly button ("Ken, I'm 58 years old!"), but which failed to produce hot noodles poured into anyone's underwear. The whole thing wrapped up with a multi-hour performance by the Hoof 'n' Mouth Sinfonia. I'd had a fun time watching that live last year, but that wasn't on the table this time around. The 2013 Hoof 'n' Mouth was a test flight of the new basement performance space the station is almost done building out. It's not a venue and not a bar, Ken was careful to point out, and thus the show wasn't open to the listening public. So I stayed home and watched the DJs do their karaoke thing on Ustream, which only made me feel a little bit creepy.
But here's the crazy part: The morning after, I got an email from Asst. General Manager Liz Berg congratulating me for winning the Primavera Festival raffle! (I'd entered because I was eligible and because, you know, why not.) "Not sure if you were tuned in last night," she wrote. And the thing is, I was tuned in, but I stepped away from the Ustream for a few minutes, maybe, to go to the bathroom or something. I guess that's when they announced the results. But, yeah, Nina and I are going to be flying to Barcelona in May to go to this crazy Spanish rock festival! The whole thing is a bit much to take in, not least of all the idea of myself as a contest winner. Although I've certainly been plenty lucky in my life so far. So it's really just an unfair heaping-on of good fortune. But I've learned, over the years, not to interrogate the significance of stuff like this too much. And for some reason, the title "The Contest Winners" occurred to me as a good fit for, say, a particularly prosaic short story in the style of Vonnegut or Salinger. So we are doing things like renewing our passports, sifting through the list of a hundred and seventy-odd bands that'll be appearing at the Festival, and leafing through some guidebooks graciously lent to us by Jay. We'll be staying in El Raval, which seemed like the place that, you know, the kids go.
¡Qué extraño!
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Year Of The Snake
Queens! We're visiting places.
We took the 7 train out to Kissena Blvd. to see the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. I'd gotten the idea to do it from a bunch of MTA flyers advertising it the same way they'd warn you that the R isn't running, and I felt a little weird about that, like maybe we'd get there and it wouldn't really be anything, just some bored volunteer sitting at a table with pamphlets and warm juice. But the intersection where we exited the station was totally mobbed. We turned the corner onto Main Street to find a vantage point, but it was almost impossible to make forward progress. People moved around us in all directions, some trying to get a better view, some trying to get away, some trying to make contact with a friend they'd recognized in the crowd. A middle-aged South Asian woman who squeezed passed us started screaming that she thought she might be dying and why wouldn't anybody help her. I think she was having a panic attack, and so did, I guess, the couple of strangers who hissed at her to calm down, but even if she was actually in trouble, there probably wasn't much that could be done. Eventually we made it to a construction scaffold that Nina could clamber up on, and we got to watch the last bit of the parade. The marching groups ranged from radio stations and travel agencies who'd built big, ostentatious papier-mâché floats (giant baby) to more staid groups like karate or dance schools who had their students march and perform in formation. There were at least two marching contingents that represented organizations that help recent immigrants adjust to life without the Communist Party. As might be expected, there was no shortage of dragon-lion... things.
The last person in the parade was a homeless guy in a dress that I used to see every morning outside a flophouse in Chelsea back when I worked at the 'Monkey. As always, he had a bushy beard that he'd dyed a rainbow of colors, like a color wheel, and he had with him a parrot and a baby carriage in which he was pushing a small, shivering dog (also dyed). I can't believe he was part of the parade, though he was acting is if he were, walking at a leisurely pace and waving and smiling at the crowd as he passed. The police and parade officials seemed to be rolling up the carpet behind him, collecting the traffic barriers and letting the onlookers spill into the street. The guy turned onto 39th Ave. and a group of people gathered around him to take pictures with him and his bird. The guy chattered away in a combination of gibberish ("Lady Gaga Lady Gaga") and what sounded like Spanish. Nina took a few pictures, but we were distracted by the sound of fireworks up the street. There were rolls of red paper firecrackers attached to the lintel of one of the storefronts in the Queens Crossing mall -- ironically enough, it was a Paris Baguette franchise. Dudes were lighting the tails of each roll, which would make gray smoke and little popping explosions as the flame traveled up the streamer, and then a big explosion at the top where there was a larger firework that shot out a little jet of sparks and slowly-falling stars. We watched until all the streamers had burned up, and then walked down to Prince St. where we got red bean pastries for luck at Chinese bakery.
A few weeks later, at Winnie's suggestion, we took the G out to 21st Street so that we could check out an art installation called Headscapes in a warehouse gallery. The entrance to the gallery was through a small storefront off Jackson Avenue and down a short hallway with an information desk on one side where there was a stack of "maps" of the different environments on display. The gallery itself was a big open room with a concrete floor across which the "spaces" had been distributed. Each one was a small, discrete environment you could enter, with a discernible but usually unspecified theme: Spider webs, for example, or a tree house. We crawled around and explored them all, shimmying up ladders or through tunnels as the installation required. My favorites were a black, igloo-like structure made of live stereo equipment pumping out tracks from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; and the nook in the corner arrayed with beautiful unfinished wooden furniture and feathered with an explosion of shingles, like a section of a whittling hoarder's apartment. We left after we'd had our fill and walked down the avenue toward PS1, where we stopped for a moment in the hopes of trying out the M. Wells dinette. No such luck, but I managed to convince Nina to pick something out from the selection of fancy, imported art magazines in the gift shop. We walked away with an issue of Frankie, which appears to be an Australian quarterly for twee craft girls. Nina pointed out the spot on the Citigroup building where she peed once. We ate down the street at the Sage General Store, where we stayed so long, I think, that they gave us a free cookie along with the check for our meal.
Cat news.
Kitty is in the middle of a kind of renaissance of play right now, brought about by a significant expenditure of attention and love on Nina's part. Or maybe it's just that she was just profoundly depressed in our old apartment; plenty of reasons that'd be plausible, too. But whereas she used to spend all day and night sprawled disconsolately across the top of some giant tupperware crate, now she charges up and down the length of the apartment, flinging toy "fur mice" up into the air for herself to catch after we've gotten sick of throwing them for her. She's even started playing with a blue handball that Nina fished out of deep storage, nosing and pawing it into noisy action across the living room floor. And she's what, fucking fifteen years old? Kitty 2.0, people. Fuck all other pets.
We took the 7 train out to Kissena Blvd. to see the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration. I'd gotten the idea to do it from a bunch of MTA flyers advertising it the same way they'd warn you that the R isn't running, and I felt a little weird about that, like maybe we'd get there and it wouldn't really be anything, just some bored volunteer sitting at a table with pamphlets and warm juice. But the intersection where we exited the station was totally mobbed. We turned the corner onto Main Street to find a vantage point, but it was almost impossible to make forward progress. People moved around us in all directions, some trying to get a better view, some trying to get away, some trying to make contact with a friend they'd recognized in the crowd. A middle-aged South Asian woman who squeezed passed us started screaming that she thought she might be dying and why wouldn't anybody help her. I think she was having a panic attack, and so did, I guess, the couple of strangers who hissed at her to calm down, but even if she was actually in trouble, there probably wasn't much that could be done. Eventually we made it to a construction scaffold that Nina could clamber up on, and we got to watch the last bit of the parade. The marching groups ranged from radio stations and travel agencies who'd built big, ostentatious papier-mâché floats (giant baby) to more staid groups like karate or dance schools who had their students march and perform in formation. There were at least two marching contingents that represented organizations that help recent immigrants adjust to life without the Communist Party. As might be expected, there was no shortage of dragon-lion... things.
The last person in the parade was a homeless guy in a dress that I used to see every morning outside a flophouse in Chelsea back when I worked at the 'Monkey. As always, he had a bushy beard that he'd dyed a rainbow of colors, like a color wheel, and he had with him a parrot and a baby carriage in which he was pushing a small, shivering dog (also dyed). I can't believe he was part of the parade, though he was acting is if he were, walking at a leisurely pace and waving and smiling at the crowd as he passed. The police and parade officials seemed to be rolling up the carpet behind him, collecting the traffic barriers and letting the onlookers spill into the street. The guy turned onto 39th Ave. and a group of people gathered around him to take pictures with him and his bird. The guy chattered away in a combination of gibberish ("Lady Gaga Lady Gaga") and what sounded like Spanish. Nina took a few pictures, but we were distracted by the sound of fireworks up the street. There were rolls of red paper firecrackers attached to the lintel of one of the storefronts in the Queens Crossing mall -- ironically enough, it was a Paris Baguette franchise. Dudes were lighting the tails of each roll, which would make gray smoke and little popping explosions as the flame traveled up the streamer, and then a big explosion at the top where there was a larger firework that shot out a little jet of sparks and slowly-falling stars. We watched until all the streamers had burned up, and then walked down to Prince St. where we got red bean pastries for luck at Chinese bakery.
A few weeks later, at Winnie's suggestion, we took the G out to 21st Street so that we could check out an art installation called Headscapes in a warehouse gallery. The entrance to the gallery was through a small storefront off Jackson Avenue and down a short hallway with an information desk on one side where there was a stack of "maps" of the different environments on display. The gallery itself was a big open room with a concrete floor across which the "spaces" had been distributed. Each one was a small, discrete environment you could enter, with a discernible but usually unspecified theme: Spider webs, for example, or a tree house. We crawled around and explored them all, shimmying up ladders or through tunnels as the installation required. My favorites were a black, igloo-like structure made of live stereo equipment pumping out tracks from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; and the nook in the corner arrayed with beautiful unfinished wooden furniture and feathered with an explosion of shingles, like a section of a whittling hoarder's apartment. We left after we'd had our fill and walked down the avenue toward PS1, where we stopped for a moment in the hopes of trying out the M. Wells dinette. No such luck, but I managed to convince Nina to pick something out from the selection of fancy, imported art magazines in the gift shop. We walked away with an issue of Frankie, which appears to be an Australian quarterly for twee craft girls. Nina pointed out the spot on the Citigroup building where she peed once. We ate down the street at the Sage General Store, where we stayed so long, I think, that they gave us a free cookie along with the check for our meal.
Cat news.
Kitty is in the middle of a kind of renaissance of play right now, brought about by a significant expenditure of attention and love on Nina's part. Or maybe it's just that she was just profoundly depressed in our old apartment; plenty of reasons that'd be plausible, too. But whereas she used to spend all day and night sprawled disconsolately across the top of some giant tupperware crate, now she charges up and down the length of the apartment, flinging toy "fur mice" up into the air for herself to catch after we've gotten sick of throwing them for her. She's even started playing with a blue handball that Nina fished out of deep storage, nosing and pawing it into noisy action across the living room floor. And she's what, fucking fifteen years old? Kitty 2.0, people. Fuck all other pets.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Zaphod Beeblebrox
Our flight back from Sarasota landed, and we cabbed home to Gowanus. We dropped off our bags and walked straight to Barclays Center, where we had tickets to see the Nets play the Denver Nuggets.
How do I regard that building? With some ambivalence. True: It's ugly; they didn't build the housing they promised; it does nothing good and does some bad things. But those Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn people -- aren't they all sort of landed aristocracy? The reason they Love Brownstone Brooklyn is that they own a piece of Brownstone Brooklyn. They already got theirs. A tiny violin plays. (Am I thinking about it wrong? Educate me. Wait, don't.) So I am mostly mad at Barclays Center for taking away O'Connor's, which is still shrouded in white plywood, its sparkling concrete-and-glass upstairs protruding from the roof like a second head. And I do kind of like the funny little moss-wave they built in the plaza by the entrance, fulfilling, I guess some line-item requirement for greenery. To the point, though: Barclays Center is real nice inside. It's very controlled and a little too nice, like a strip club is nice -- in spite of you. At various points along the winding ramp that led up to the nosebleed seats, there was a little wagon that sold Brooklyn Brewery beers, a little wagon that sold fancy sausages, a little pizza wagon. Our seats were almost at the top of the stadium, and we experienced the same feeling vertiginous peril you get at Yankee Stadium when we side-stepped our way through the row to get to them. We were a few seats over from Eve and Jon and several other people that we knew.
Look, basketball is not quite my thing. At least, it is not quite my thing, yet. But the quarters went by quickly, and it was exciting to see a sports team zipping around the court and actually, you know, exerting themselves. And it turns out there are still some goony, character-actor types, like Kosta Koufos on the Nuggets, who add a welcome bit of, uh, personality. So I'm not quite sure how to evaluate the proceedings, but it seemed like the Nets beat Denver pretty handily. In between quarters, there were funny little pageants on the court, like a class of Greek Orthodox elementary school kids playing a five minute expo game. A slightly confused-looking community organizer was trundled out to be honored for her contributions. There were no dunks.
The following Saturday, Nina and I stopped by the Mercury Lounge to see bands. Ski Lodge was opening for Ex-Cops, who I thought Nina would get a kick out of. I think they were the early show. Ski Lodge is one of those bands that doesn't move around a lot. The two guitar players and the bassist wore their instruments high up on their chests and strummed them in a very deliberate and controlled way. The lead singer sounded a bit like Morrissey and had a pale blue Oxford shirt on that he tucked into his pants. The band sounded like The Smiths. They were okay. Ex-Cops were a bit more exciting. I guess they're properly a two-piece, a guy and a lady, but they had a bass player and a drummer up on stage with them. They've got a very hip look -- the lady's improbably good-looking, in a particularly North Brooklyn sort of way; the guy is carefully scruffy, sports a denim jacket and a baseball cap with a flipped-up brim like the skater skeleton on Cerebral Ballzy's album cover. They played tightly controlled, high speed punky pop songs, bopping in place as the lights flashed around them. The best thing in their set was a song called Broken Chinese Chairs. As we were leaving, I heard someone call my name. It turned out that my friend Adam from high school had been at the show with a lady friend. We cross-introduced each other and chatted for a while on Houston Street. We agreed in our assessment of the bands. Nina and I complimented him on his success: We'd learned on Facebook just days earlier that not only had he made a feature film but that it had won the top prize at SXSW. I hadn't seen him in years.
Nina and I stopped at Cake Shop afterwards so I could check something. Had Andy Bodor put a copy of our record up for sale in the "Cake Shop Recommends" bin? Indeed he had. Internet, now I can die.
Time passes.
Things that used to be small milestones for me but which I hardly notice now:
How do I regard that building? With some ambivalence. True: It's ugly; they didn't build the housing they promised; it does nothing good and does some bad things. But those Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn people -- aren't they all sort of landed aristocracy? The reason they Love Brownstone Brooklyn is that they own a piece of Brownstone Brooklyn. They already got theirs. A tiny violin plays. (Am I thinking about it wrong? Educate me. Wait, don't.) So I am mostly mad at Barclays Center for taking away O'Connor's, which is still shrouded in white plywood, its sparkling concrete-and-glass upstairs protruding from the roof like a second head. And I do kind of like the funny little moss-wave they built in the plaza by the entrance, fulfilling, I guess some line-item requirement for greenery. To the point, though: Barclays Center is real nice inside. It's very controlled and a little too nice, like a strip club is nice -- in spite of you. At various points along the winding ramp that led up to the nosebleed seats, there was a little wagon that sold Brooklyn Brewery beers, a little wagon that sold fancy sausages, a little pizza wagon. Our seats were almost at the top of the stadium, and we experienced the same feeling vertiginous peril you get at Yankee Stadium when we side-stepped our way through the row to get to them. We were a few seats over from Eve and Jon and several other people that we knew.
Look, basketball is not quite my thing. At least, it is not quite my thing, yet. But the quarters went by quickly, and it was exciting to see a sports team zipping around the court and actually, you know, exerting themselves. And it turns out there are still some goony, character-actor types, like Kosta Koufos on the Nuggets, who add a welcome bit of, uh, personality. So I'm not quite sure how to evaluate the proceedings, but it seemed like the Nets beat Denver pretty handily. In between quarters, there were funny little pageants on the court, like a class of Greek Orthodox elementary school kids playing a five minute expo game. A slightly confused-looking community organizer was trundled out to be honored for her contributions. There were no dunks.
The following Saturday, Nina and I stopped by the Mercury Lounge to see bands. Ski Lodge was opening for Ex-Cops, who I thought Nina would get a kick out of. I think they were the early show. Ski Lodge is one of those bands that doesn't move around a lot. The two guitar players and the bassist wore their instruments high up on their chests and strummed them in a very deliberate and controlled way. The lead singer sounded a bit like Morrissey and had a pale blue Oxford shirt on that he tucked into his pants. The band sounded like The Smiths. They were okay. Ex-Cops were a bit more exciting. I guess they're properly a two-piece, a guy and a lady, but they had a bass player and a drummer up on stage with them. They've got a very hip look -- the lady's improbably good-looking, in a particularly North Brooklyn sort of way; the guy is carefully scruffy, sports a denim jacket and a baseball cap with a flipped-up brim like the skater skeleton on Cerebral Ballzy's album cover. They played tightly controlled, high speed punky pop songs, bopping in place as the lights flashed around them. The best thing in their set was a song called Broken Chinese Chairs. As we were leaving, I heard someone call my name. It turned out that my friend Adam from high school had been at the show with a lady friend. We cross-introduced each other and chatted for a while on Houston Street. We agreed in our assessment of the bands. Nina and I complimented him on his success: We'd learned on Facebook just days earlier that not only had he made a feature film but that it had won the top prize at SXSW. I hadn't seen him in years.
Nina and I stopped at Cake Shop afterwards so I could check something. Had Andy Bodor put a copy of our record up for sale in the "Cake Shop Recommends" bin? Indeed he had. Internet, now I can die.
Time passes.
Things that used to be small milestones for me but which I hardly notice now:
- Swapping out a used-up razor blade
- Buying a new brick of supermarket cheese
- Renting a movie
- Buying a new pair of jeans
- Getting a haircut from Edward
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Tube Dude
Finally, a proper piling of snow, although the timing could have been better. Impelled by equal parts filial guilt and "No, really" nudging from my job's HR department, I'd schedule some vacation time and plunked down for a flight to and hotel room in Sarasota. Two birds, one stone, my thinking went: I can see my grandma and get Nina some sunlight. And maybe I'll drink a margarita or find some fossilized sharks' teeth or something. I am not immune to the idea of vacationing, babies, but like many things in my life, I find it hard to engage with it if I'm not fully sold on the idea; examples: John Kerry, backpacking through Europe, writing a proof. At any rate, we were scheduled to fly down to Florida on Feburary 9th, which is exactly when Winter Storm Nemo landed in New York and Boston.
Delta promptly canceled our flight. Which was not a problem, really, since it gave us the following day to observe Nina's birthday, which she'd been trying to duck as usual. That night, though, we put out a call to our friends in the neighborhood to the effect that we had hot chocolate and whiskey and would people like to brave the storm with us stranded as we were in our rickety apartment by the bridge over the part of the Canal where the sick dolphin died in shit. And we were expecting that they would pass on it, but instead our house filled up with our friends and we set up an assembly line to boil milk, mix in Swiss Miss, and spike the result with Glenlivet. Everybody had some except for Tom, who had strep throat and asked for tea instead. I thought of another time he'd had something similar, right around the time we were graduating from college, and how sick we all used to get back then because we didn't have jobs or health insurance and you'd just walk around suffering for weeks. We all piled onto the couch and I put on the dreadful movie Vibrations, which almost but not quite captured peoples' attention. The storm howled outside, blasting the street with powder: The front door was adrift in fresh snow whenever I went downstairs to let someone in or out. And when the last people had left, Nina and I stood by the front windows, between the toasty warmth and the cold, and looked out over Union St. Small curiosities! One of the casket companies had hired a tiny earthmover to scoop snow out of the driveway. Nina edited together a short video of it. It was really zipping around!
The next day, Nina had to endure receiving her birthday presents, but after that we were at loose ends. She'd been waiting all winter for an opportunity to go sledding -- for real, with a proper sled, not just some cardboard from the recycling. Okay, I said, sure. Let's do it. In the late afternoon we walked over to Save On Fifth for a sled, picturing something luxurious, a two-seater Rosebud. But all they had were these enormous circular sleds shaped like dinner plates with ass prints, like they'd been sat upon before being fired in the kiln. We bought a blue one, and, disc in tow, we trekked up to the Park and trudged out to the north meadow through the gray brown purple darkness. A guy hollered at from the base of a snowy hill near the 3rd St. entrance to lend him the sled for his kids, but I told Nina we should ignore him. "He didn't ask nice," I said. When we got close to the middle of the meadow, we saw that someone had built a snowman there, leaving it in the dark, featureless like an obelisk on a dead planet. It was very cold. Nina took out her phone and turned on the lightbulb to get a better look, and we saw that somebody had hung a cardboard plaquard around the thing's neck that identified it as Ed Koch. Ha! We pulled our sled up the slope on the eastern side of the meadow where the lights were and readied ourselves for the ride, Nina taking the helm and me behind her, motorcycle-style, with my legs wrapped around her torso. Oh man that thing went fast! It was at least as fast as the greased cardboard we'd used last year for the same purpose. We worked through several variations: Her behind me, each of us on our own, a little bit north where the hill was steeper, a little bit south (The Bunny Slope) where it was less. We called it quits after an hour, my tailbone bruised and our clothes caked with snow. Anyway, we had plans to visit Sean and Kate at their apartment in Crown Heights. We didn't know their precise address, and our cell phones had both died by the time we got to their building, so it was only through a stroke of wild luck that a woman happened to be leaving a building that looked like it was theirs and was willing to let us in. And that she happened to be Sean and Kate's next door neighbor and thus could tell us their apartment number, well, that was very improbable as well. We left our sled in the hall with our snowy boots. Kate welcomed us into the kitchen, where there was a bolognese sauce simmering on the stovetop, and up to the second floor of their duplex where, no shit, there was a fucking fireplace with a fire burning in it. "He's in a truculent mood right now," said Kate of Sean, by way of warning, I guess. "He's been drinking whiskey since noon." He was up there with Jon, and yeah he was tight, but we got fucked up ourselves and watched WarGames by the fire and ate spaghetti.
The next morning it really was time for us to fly, so we hustled out to Laguardia and hopped our flight, and three hours later we were at Sarasota-Bradenton Int'l, another world, everything turquoise and smelling faintly of sulfur. We walked up to the Mote Marine kiosk above the baggage claim and chased a stripey lobster around the tank. We'd planned that Nina, a recently-legal car renter, would rent a car to get us around, and she did: Level up! José from Enterprise gave us tips on what to see and do, although I already fancied myself a pro. The first thing we did was drive to the Sarasota Holiday Inn, down by the ocean. On the way, we passed by necessity through St. Armand's Circle, a large rotary that forms Sarasota's downtown. The businesses along its perimeter are inconsequential (okay restaurants, galleries for terrible art), and the interior of the circle is decorated with white marble and limestone statues of a gauche variety of classical (the "Seven Virtues of Sarasota") and non-classical (several busts of John Ringling, town patron / tyrant). It's a perfect display of vapid, new-world pretentiousness. The room we'd reserved faced inland, giving us a direct view of an array of cranes and earthmoving equipment performing surgery on a row of unfinished villas across the street. (Winter is "building season," a local informed us.) After dropping off our stuff, we got back into the car and drove back up the Tamiami Trail to visit my grandma at the retirement community where she lives. My dad was there to greet us; he flies down periodically to help her keep track of her finances and other things. My grandmother is obviously losing the thread, but she's armed herself with a mirror frame wedged full of snapshots so she knows who everyone is. She asked Nina for one to add to her collection. We drank Jim Beam with her in her room, and then took a stroll around the grounds. She pointed out a pelican diving for a fish in Sarasota Bay: "You see how he plunges? He can see a fish from way up there and heplunges ." She told us again a minute later. In the evening, my dad took me and Nina out to dinner at The Crab & Fin. The last time I'd been there was with my grandmother. I'd found a mussel pearl.
The next day we visited granny again. I re-introduced her to Nina before she could ask. We spent a few minutes with one of her friends within the facility, who showed us a piece of sculpture made by a local craftsman known as Tube Dude. In the afternoon, we drove up the trail a bit further and visited the Jungle Gardens. When I was a little kid and my family would stay in a bungalow on Casey Key, we would go there every year, and I remember thinking it was exotic and manicured. As agrup I can see that it's a little exotic and a little manicured, but it's also, you know, a roadside zoo: Musty smell, threadbare animals, bird shit everywhere . Whatever -- they take in abandoned pets and critters that get hit by cars. They're great. We watched a little show in the amphitheater featuring a coffee-colored skunk named Mocha (Nina got to hold her like a baby at the end) and some birds with clipped wings did tricks like riding little bicycles across a table. When you buy your ticket, you can shell out a little extra for a bag of food pellets to feed to animals roaming the grounds. It took us a little while to figure out where the. They were surprisingly gentle, if insistent -- a flamingo nipped Nina's elbow to get her attention when she turned away from a moment. But they'd turn their heads sideways and lay them in your hand to kind of lap the pellets up with of the sides of their mouths. Some of them were a little worse for wear: One had a mangled-up beak, curved out and up like a bruised fingernail about to pop off; another didn't seem to want to its head up off the ground, swinging it back and forth like a clock pendulum to shoo away hungry sparrows. Beyond the flamingo grove was a strange and apparently neglected part of the gardens. It was a small, wooded grotto ringed with little glassed-in dioramas depicting scenes from the Bible: Jesus doing something with lepers, Jesus crucified at Golgotha. The figures in the dioramas had a grotesque look about them, like a harbinger of evil discovered by a character in a Lovecraft story. They were squat and ugly, their faces grotesque and undifferentiated. The dioramas themselves looked like they might have at one time been interactive or light-up or something, but not any more. There was dust and dirt all over everything, inside and outside the glass. Several of the scenes had cardboard "out of order" signs taped over them. We got back to the hotel a little before six. It was already quite dark, but the swimming pool was open and warm. We quick-changed into bathing costumes and borrowed towels from the front desk. We bobbed around for almost an hour, trying to keep everything below our necks submerged, until the cold air made even that untenable.
The following morning we knew we wanted to go to the beach, so after eating oatmeal at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel we put on our beach things and went across the street. We rented a beach umbrella from one of the leatheriest dudes I've ever seen. But I wanted to roam the beach and find a few fossilized shark's teeth; I'd collected hundreds of them as a kid, but Nina was skeptical. "So they're just lying on the beach? I don't see any." I remembered to put sunblock on everything excepy my ears and so promptly got a sunburn there (February!). But I did find three teeth. Nina found one, too! After that we swam in the pool some more, irking the serious lap-swimmers by playing "Water Taxi" in the shallows; and then we drove out to Mote Marine Laboratory. The live animal shows were all wrapping up by the time we got there, and the grounds were emptying out, but that was maybe a good thing: No lines for the touch tanks! We prodded and inspected decorator sea urchins, small horshoe crabs, a racing circuit of slimy rays. A team of divers was cleaning the shark tank (partitioning it first with a weighted, heavy net) and we watched them, mostly old men, their hair clouding away from their skulls like algae as they buffed the glass and repositioned the various ornaments in the tank, occasionally giving a friendly pat on the flank to a curious fish. Back to St. Armand's Circle, where they were celebrating Mardi Gras. An awful band (teenagers) played Beatles covers ("Thanks, everyone! That was 'Let It Be,' by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.") at the head of the rotary. We poked our heads into various shops, looking for trinkets to reward our friends who were feeding the cat. We made the mistake of entering a commercial gallery of blown-glass surf art -- end tables hoisted onto the backs of translucent sea turtles and small dolphins. An array of flat-screen TVs showed a documentary about the mercenary hack responsible for some of the glittery crap, and as we stood momentarily transfixed, an imbecilic salesman approached and started slobbering about how the artist was going to be coming to the store in person next week and how lucky the staff was to be graced with his presence. We escaped to a nearby fudge shop, where we bought fudge, and then to a store that specialized in hot sauce, where we bought salt and vinegar-flavored crickets.
We drove out to Fruitville for dinner, to a place recommended by a friend of Nina's family. It was called The Old Packinghouse Cafe, and it turned out to be a real (well, real to my gullible eye) "road house." Which is to say it was deserted except for a party of black leather motorcycle people sitting at a wooden table outside and complaining loudly about Barack Obama, and the guy playing a guitar on a stool inside the restaurant also worked in the kitchen. We opted for an outside table as well. A fearless tabby cat came over and lay down in the dust next to the table. Nina ordered a catfish sandwich that was unbelievably good. I had some kind of chicken thing. The bikers roared. We drove back to the hotel, parked the car, and then returned to the Circle on foot to take care of some unfinished business: Fruity drinks at the Daquiri Deck. It was chilly, so we parked ourselves squarely under a palm tree-shaped propane heater. I had a piña colada. Nina had something called a "green parrot."
Did we try the snacketizers? We did not.
Delta promptly canceled our flight. Which was not a problem, really, since it gave us the following day to observe Nina's birthday, which she'd been trying to duck as usual. That night, though, we put out a call to our friends in the neighborhood to the effect that we had hot chocolate and whiskey and would people like to brave the storm with us stranded as we were in our rickety apartment by the bridge over the part of the Canal where the sick dolphin died in shit. And we were expecting that they would pass on it, but instead our house filled up with our friends and we set up an assembly line to boil milk, mix in Swiss Miss, and spike the result with Glenlivet. Everybody had some except for Tom, who had strep throat and asked for tea instead. I thought of another time he'd had something similar, right around the time we were graduating from college, and how sick we all used to get back then because we didn't have jobs or health insurance and you'd just walk around suffering for weeks. We all piled onto the couch and I put on the dreadful movie Vibrations, which almost but not quite captured peoples' attention. The storm howled outside, blasting the street with powder: The front door was adrift in fresh snow whenever I went downstairs to let someone in or out. And when the last people had left, Nina and I stood by the front windows, between the toasty warmth and the cold, and looked out over Union St. Small curiosities! One of the casket companies had hired a tiny earthmover to scoop snow out of the driveway. Nina edited together a short video of it. It was really zipping around!
The next day, Nina had to endure receiving her birthday presents, but after that we were at loose ends. She'd been waiting all winter for an opportunity to go sledding -- for real, with a proper sled, not just some cardboard from the recycling. Okay, I said, sure. Let's do it. In the late afternoon we walked over to Save On Fifth for a sled, picturing something luxurious, a two-seater Rosebud. But all they had were these enormous circular sleds shaped like dinner plates with ass prints, like they'd been sat upon before being fired in the kiln. We bought a blue one, and, disc in tow, we trekked up to the Park and trudged out to the north meadow through the gray brown purple darkness. A guy hollered at from the base of a snowy hill near the 3rd St. entrance to lend him the sled for his kids, but I told Nina we should ignore him. "He didn't ask nice," I said. When we got close to the middle of the meadow, we saw that someone had built a snowman there, leaving it in the dark, featureless like an obelisk on a dead planet. It was very cold. Nina took out her phone and turned on the lightbulb to get a better look, and we saw that somebody had hung a cardboard plaquard around the thing's neck that identified it as Ed Koch. Ha! We pulled our sled up the slope on the eastern side of the meadow where the lights were and readied ourselves for the ride, Nina taking the helm and me behind her, motorcycle-style, with my legs wrapped around her torso. Oh man that thing went fast! It was at least as fast as the greased cardboard we'd used last year for the same purpose. We worked through several variations: Her behind me, each of us on our own, a little bit north where the hill was steeper, a little bit south (The Bunny Slope) where it was less. We called it quits after an hour, my tailbone bruised and our clothes caked with snow. Anyway, we had plans to visit Sean and Kate at their apartment in Crown Heights. We didn't know their precise address, and our cell phones had both died by the time we got to their building, so it was only through a stroke of wild luck that a woman happened to be leaving a building that looked like it was theirs and was willing to let us in. And that she happened to be Sean and Kate's next door neighbor and thus could tell us their apartment number, well, that was very improbable as well. We left our sled in the hall with our snowy boots. Kate welcomed us into the kitchen, where there was a bolognese sauce simmering on the stovetop, and up to the second floor of their duplex where, no shit, there was a fucking fireplace with a fire burning in it. "He's in a truculent mood right now," said Kate of Sean, by way of warning, I guess. "He's been drinking whiskey since noon." He was up there with Jon, and yeah he was tight, but we got fucked up ourselves and watched WarGames by the fire and ate spaghetti.
The next morning it really was time for us to fly, so we hustled out to Laguardia and hopped our flight, and three hours later we were at Sarasota-Bradenton Int'l, another world, everything turquoise and smelling faintly of sulfur. We walked up to the Mote Marine kiosk above the baggage claim and chased a stripey lobster around the tank. We'd planned that Nina, a recently-legal car renter, would rent a car to get us around, and she did: Level up! José from Enterprise gave us tips on what to see and do, although I already fancied myself a pro. The first thing we did was drive to the Sarasota Holiday Inn, down by the ocean. On the way, we passed by necessity through St. Armand's Circle, a large rotary that forms Sarasota's downtown. The businesses along its perimeter are inconsequential (okay restaurants, galleries for terrible art), and the interior of the circle is decorated with white marble and limestone statues of a gauche variety of classical (the "Seven Virtues of Sarasota") and non-classical (several busts of John Ringling, town patron / tyrant). It's a perfect display of vapid, new-world pretentiousness. The room we'd reserved faced inland, giving us a direct view of an array of cranes and earthmoving equipment performing surgery on a row of unfinished villas across the street. (Winter is "building season," a local informed us.) After dropping off our stuff, we got back into the car and drove back up the Tamiami Trail to visit my grandma at the retirement community where she lives. My dad was there to greet us; he flies down periodically to help her keep track of her finances and other things. My grandmother is obviously losing the thread, but she's armed herself with a mirror frame wedged full of snapshots so she knows who everyone is. She asked Nina for one to add to her collection. We drank Jim Beam with her in her room, and then took a stroll around the grounds. She pointed out a pelican diving for a fish in Sarasota Bay: "You see how he plunges? He can see a fish from way up there and he
The next day we visited granny again. I re-introduced her to Nina before she could ask. We spent a few minutes with one of her friends within the facility, who showed us a piece of sculpture made by a local craftsman known as Tube Dude. In the afternoon, we drove up the trail a bit further and visited the Jungle Gardens. When I was a little kid and my family would stay in a bungalow on Casey Key, we would go there every year, and I remember thinking it was exotic and manicured. As a
The following morning we knew we wanted to go to the beach, so after eating oatmeal at the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel we put on our beach things and went across the street. We rented a beach umbrella from one of the leatheriest dudes I've ever seen. But I wanted to roam the beach and find a few fossilized shark's teeth; I'd collected hundreds of them as a kid, but Nina was skeptical. "So they're just lying on the beach? I don't see any." I remembered to put sunblock on everything excepy my ears and so promptly got a sunburn there (February!). But I did find three teeth. Nina found one, too! After that we swam in the pool some more, irking the serious lap-swimmers by playing "Water Taxi" in the shallows; and then we drove out to Mote Marine Laboratory. The live animal shows were all wrapping up by the time we got there, and the grounds were emptying out, but that was maybe a good thing: No lines for the touch tanks! We prodded and inspected decorator sea urchins, small horshoe crabs, a racing circuit of slimy rays. A team of divers was cleaning the shark tank (partitioning it first with a weighted, heavy net) and we watched them, mostly old men, their hair clouding away from their skulls like algae as they buffed the glass and repositioned the various ornaments in the tank, occasionally giving a friendly pat on the flank to a curious fish. Back to St. Armand's Circle, where they were celebrating Mardi Gras. An awful band (teenagers) played Beatles covers ("Thanks, everyone! That was 'Let It Be,' by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.") at the head of the rotary. We poked our heads into various shops, looking for trinkets to reward our friends who were feeding the cat. We made the mistake of entering a commercial gallery of blown-glass surf art -- end tables hoisted onto the backs of translucent sea turtles and small dolphins. An array of flat-screen TVs showed a documentary about the mercenary hack responsible for some of the glittery crap, and as we stood momentarily transfixed, an imbecilic salesman approached and started slobbering about how the artist was going to be coming to the store in person next week and how lucky the staff was to be graced with his presence. We escaped to a nearby fudge shop, where we bought fudge, and then to a store that specialized in hot sauce, where we bought salt and vinegar-flavored crickets.
We drove out to Fruitville for dinner, to a place recommended by a friend of Nina's family. It was called The Old Packinghouse Cafe, and it turned out to be a real (well, real to my gullible eye) "road house." Which is to say it was deserted except for a party of black leather motorcycle people sitting at a wooden table outside and complaining loudly about Barack Obama, and the guy playing a guitar on a stool inside the restaurant also worked in the kitchen. We opted for an outside table as well. A fearless tabby cat came over and lay down in the dust next to the table. Nina ordered a catfish sandwich that was unbelievably good. I had some kind of chicken thing. The bikers roared. We drove back to the hotel, parked the car, and then returned to the Circle on foot to take care of some unfinished business: Fruity drinks at the Daquiri Deck. It was chilly, so we parked ourselves squarely under a palm tree-shaped propane heater. I had a piña colada. Nina had something called a "green parrot."
Did we try the snacketizers? We did not.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Letters To A Young Promoter
In the early, freeze-dried days of the new year, one thing I have been doing is mailing out review copies of the record Bel Argosy put out last summer, The Wreck of the Bel Argosy. The process is sometimes exhilerating (when the record is reviewed) and often frustrating (when the record is ignored). I'd like to say that it's led us to develop a more sophisticated strategy for promotion, but I don't think that's quite true. That is to say, can we expect a radically different response to the next thing we put out? Almost certainly not. Inevitably, though, we have learned a few things. The first records we sent out were like my first round of college applications: Requested information supplied, but nothing to supplement or distinguish it, and nothing to suggest a personality behind the envelope. We assumed people would be like, oh, let me listen to this strange and unsolicited record and judge it on its obvious merits. Because I am a record label / college radio station / blogger and that is just my job.
And it would be great if that worked, but that approach was largely unsuccessful for us -- even when we reminded our respective almas mater's radio stations of our membership in the class of oh-man-that-was-a-long-time-ago. (Hi, WESU Middletown!) Thus, our new tack is that we are willing to play ball and, you know, get personal. Open a vein. And that seems to work better: After all, a lot of blogs or magazines even suggest that you write a personal statement to accompany your record in order to help it stand out from all of the unsolicited free music they get in the mail every day, and many of them hint that your communication with them should contain entirely original content -- no form letters, please. So I've started writing little essays about what a fun band we are and how proud we are of the record and what an interesting time this is to be playing music in New York City -- all true, really. However, doing this anew for every blog we pitch is prohibitively time-intensive, and even when you do find the time to write something personal and evocative, it's no guarantee of coverage. I successfully reverse-engineered the kind of writing I thought one guy was looking for, and we got into a back-and-forth with him about editing it just-so for inclusion on his site, and then he abruptly shuttered his blog and moved to Paris. No lie, it pays to hedge a bit. But we've enjoyed a fair amount of success, too. In particular, blogs that specialize in reviewing vinyl records have been kind to us, as have a few local indie rock blogs. And publications that represent the intersection of the two, well, that's just gold.
Moving on. Truly, it's been bitterly cold out, but I didn't want to have spent it indoors like I did last year. Instead, I'm continuing the silly quest for for new experiences, as if I were 21 instead of 31 and a decidedly middle-class computer guy. I'd bought tickets to the Iceage show at 285 Kent last night, and, appropriately, it was well below freezing as I walked down Kent Ave. to South 1st. Kent in winter always reminds me of the very beginning of Moby Dick, where Ishmael is exploring a pitch dark New Bedford. There are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and a lot of barred windows on funny little single-story buildings that might be peoples' houses and might not be. 285 itself is right next to Glasslands and looks like maybe the freight entrance for that place; if there weren't a parka'd bouncer parked in front of the featureless door, you wouldn't know to go inside. Initially I thought it might be the place where Nina and I saw The Spunks-u several years ago, but 285 Kent is much bigger and, well,grander than that place. The room easily holds two hundred people, and the walls are covered in a network of aerosol and brush-painted black lines, part Keith Haring, part Mentaculus. It's cavernous and cold and a little intimidating, maybe like a much less cozy Death By Audio (which is right down the street).
The first band was Deformity, perhaps an ironic name since all the band members were good-looking dudes. They sounded alright, although I quickly deployed my earplugs. The lead singer, who vibed hardcore nerd rage in an IBM-style short-sleeve shirt, yelped his vocals in staccato, which made me think of Sarim al-Rawi from Liquor Store. "Fuck!" he shrieked, frantically diddling his guitar. The drummer took his shirt off. They played a short set, less than thirty minutes, I think. Maybe that's de rigeur for the genre -- which would make sense when there's not a whole lot in terms of hooks or lyrics for a listener to latch onto.
Raspberry Bulbs were next. I'd read their name here and there in the breathlessly-written metal coverage on BrooklynVegan, and I guess I'd managed to suppress or ignore my confusion over their name. Raspberry Bulbs: What gives? Is their name some kind of ironic meiosis? Or do raspberry bulbs look really, you know, brutal? I suspect it's the former, since the lead singer goes by the stage name He Who Crushes Teeth. "Turn the reverb, like, all the way up," he instructed the sound guy while adjusting his mic. That made me worried, but they were actually pretty good! Also, there are not one but two old bald dudes in the band, another several points in their favor. And their on-stage affect was pretty awesome, too, a careful balance between too-cool-for-school and rocking-too-hard-over-thirty; they were like blacksmiths working a forge. Unfortunately, the wiring on one of the guitars crapped out about four songs in, and they couldn't get it going again. He Who Crushes Teeth shrugged and signaled to turn the house music back on.
Nomads were up next. I don't have a lot to say about them: Screaming and noise. But they only played for twenty-five minutes. While I waited for Iceage to set up, I sat on a dirty couch in the foyer next to Craig Finn, who was talking to a pretty girl. The concrete floor was wet and dirty. I was tempted to drink another beer but started worrying about the calories, like an old guy who is getting soft. A few years ago, Iceage was notorious for being young ("Some of the band isn't even old enough to drink! And yet they do it anyway!!") but now I think people wan to know whether they're racist ("I heard they're racist!!"). I think I would have been super into them in high school, mostly because of their practiced punk rock disaffection: They played songs off a new album called "You're Nothing" and from the moment they got on stage, you could tell that Elias, the lead singer, was spoiling for a fight. He had an air of threatening nonchalance, dispensing the lyrics instead of singing them, and before too long he'd hopped down into the crowd to take care of business. Their albums have a thrilling buzzsaw energy to them, but their live sound was a bit unfocused and muddled. I'd gotten stuck at the back of the house as the room filled up before their set, and as a tall dude it was fun to see hundreds of people react to the violence, performative or otherwise.
Then back out into the cold and wet. We left our boots in the hallway.
And it would be great if that worked, but that approach was largely unsuccessful for us -- even when we reminded our respective almas mater's radio stations of our membership in the class of oh-man-that-was-a-long-time-ago. (Hi, WESU Middletown!) Thus, our new tack is that we are willing to play ball and, you know, get personal. Open a vein. And that seems to work better: After all, a lot of blogs or magazines even suggest that you write a personal statement to accompany your record in order to help it stand out from all of the unsolicited free music they get in the mail every day, and many of them hint that your communication with them should contain entirely original content -- no form letters, please. So I've started writing little essays about what a fun band we are and how proud we are of the record and what an interesting time this is to be playing music in New York City -- all true, really. However, doing this anew for every blog we pitch is prohibitively time-intensive, and even when you do find the time to write something personal and evocative, it's no guarantee of coverage. I successfully reverse-engineered the kind of writing I thought one guy was looking for, and we got into a back-and-forth with him about editing it just-so for inclusion on his site, and then he abruptly shuttered his blog and moved to Paris. No lie, it pays to hedge a bit. But we've enjoyed a fair amount of success, too. In particular, blogs that specialize in reviewing vinyl records have been kind to us, as have a few local indie rock blogs. And publications that represent the intersection of the two, well, that's just gold.
Moving on. Truly, it's been bitterly cold out, but I didn't want to have spent it indoors like I did last year. Instead, I'm continuing the silly quest for for new experiences, as if I were 21 instead of 31 and a decidedly middle-class computer guy. I'd bought tickets to the Iceage show at 285 Kent last night, and, appropriately, it was well below freezing as I walked down Kent Ave. to South 1st. Kent in winter always reminds me of the very beginning of Moby Dick, where Ishmael is exploring a pitch dark New Bedford. There are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and a lot of barred windows on funny little single-story buildings that might be peoples' houses and might not be. 285 itself is right next to Glasslands and looks like maybe the freight entrance for that place; if there weren't a parka'd bouncer parked in front of the featureless door, you wouldn't know to go inside. Initially I thought it might be the place where Nina and I saw The Spunks-u several years ago, but 285 Kent is much bigger and, well,
The first band was Deformity, perhaps an ironic name since all the band members were good-looking dudes. They sounded alright, although I quickly deployed my earplugs. The lead singer, who vibed hardcore nerd rage in an IBM-style short-sleeve shirt, yelped his vocals in staccato, which made me think of Sarim al-Rawi from Liquor Store. "Fuck!" he shrieked, frantically diddling his guitar. The drummer took his shirt off. They played a short set, less than thirty minutes, I think. Maybe that's de rigeur for the genre -- which would make sense when there's not a whole lot in terms of hooks or lyrics for a listener to latch onto.
Raspberry Bulbs were next. I'd read their name here and there in the breathlessly-written metal coverage on BrooklynVegan, and I guess I'd managed to suppress or ignore my confusion over their name. Raspberry Bulbs: What gives? Is their name some kind of ironic meiosis? Or do raspberry bulbs look really, you know, brutal? I suspect it's the former, since the lead singer goes by the stage name He Who Crushes Teeth. "Turn the reverb, like, all the way up," he instructed the sound guy while adjusting his mic. That made me worried, but they were actually pretty good! Also, there are not one but two old bald dudes in the band, another several points in their favor. And their on-stage affect was pretty awesome, too, a careful balance between too-cool-for-school and rocking-too-hard-over-thirty; they were like blacksmiths working a forge. Unfortunately, the wiring on one of the guitars crapped out about four songs in, and they couldn't get it going again. He Who Crushes Teeth shrugged and signaled to turn the house music back on.
Nomads were up next. I don't have a lot to say about them: Screaming and noise. But they only played for twenty-five minutes. While I waited for Iceage to set up, I sat on a dirty couch in the foyer next to Craig Finn, who was talking to a pretty girl. The concrete floor was wet and dirty. I was tempted to drink another beer but started worrying about the calories, like an old guy who is getting soft. A few years ago, Iceage was notorious for being young ("Some of the band isn't even old enough to drink! And yet they do it anyway!!") but now I think people wan to know whether they're racist ("I heard they're racist!!"). I think I would have been super into them in high school, mostly because of their practiced punk rock disaffection: They played songs off a new album called "You're Nothing" and from the moment they got on stage, you could tell that Elias, the lead singer, was spoiling for a fight. He had an air of threatening nonchalance, dispensing the lyrics instead of singing them, and before too long he'd hopped down into the crowd to take care of business. Their albums have a thrilling buzzsaw energy to them, but their live sound was a bit unfocused and muddled. I'd gotten stuck at the back of the house as the room filled up before their set, and as a tall dude it was fun to see hundreds of people react to the violence, performative or otherwise.
Then back out into the cold and wet. We left our boots in the hallway.
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