photos by Rebecca Smeyne

The Hold Steady
McCarren Park Pool
June 29

Love the sly attempt on the Hold Steady's "Magazines" to get New York involved in the band's mythology: A familiar portrait of yr average HS Twin Cities barfly, unattainable, past her prime, but then Finn slips the nod in--"New York gets pretty heavy/Girl I hope it doesn't crush you." Their newest, Stay Positive, is out now, kind of. Certainly enough people at McCarren Park Pool knew the lyrics.

Santos Party House
Thursday, June 26

I'm aware this Santos Party House thing requires some wishful thinking. Named in the style of your average teenager-run punk basement in Iowa City, located directly on the Mudd Club/Dave’s Luncheonette axis, and painted in nursery school–type primary/secondary colors inside, the place obviously hopes to be infinitely more gritty/comfy/casual that the speculative multi-million dollar endeavor it almost certainly is. There are at least 10 or 20 different definitions of what’s cool battling it out at SPH, from the multiple, impenetrable door lists and scantily-clad female clusterfuck entrance ritual to smoking hot merch girl wearing the house merch, on which yet another objectively attractive woman is pictured. Moby is in the building. And downstairs, guys with bucket hats, ponytails, and Hawaiian shirts are break-dancing, to the eventual delight of the 50-person cipher that howlingly circles in around them. At one point, a midget with a shirt that said “Little Jimmy” on the front and “Think Big” on the back got in the mix and krumped, and nobody blinked. The bar serves champagne in actual champagne flutes, parties of two argue over who’s paying while waving bills of such high denomination I had no idea such currency even existed, and onstage, Moby is DJing.

Love Is All at the Cake Shop last Thursday
photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Love is All
Bowery Ballroom
June 17

Easy to see now how Love is All's "Make Out Fall Out Make Up" is heroin to indie rock kids, all reigned-in abandon and bespoke signifiers (the "records" in the song's first couplet: "Records and clothes on the floor/Remind me of the night before"; cigarettes, red wine, smudged lipstick). As it happens, lots of tropes in this circle actually drive me to real despairing frustration. (The way openers and reunited indie stalwarts Versus ask "What is up?," instead of "What's up?"; their drummer, whose visibly intense concentration on the band's unbelievably straightforward drum parts is itself distracting.) Even the faux-naif territory Love is All themselves swerve into-- frontwoman Josephine Olausson venturing out on stage like a tiny gremlin wrapped in an orange hoodie, giggling right into the mic--is probably too resigned for me, cute but pandering. To say nothing of Olausson taking about measuring things in "fahrenheits" and inviting the crowd to meet in the park tomorrow in order to eat pickled herring.

This lovely rendering of last night's show was done by Matt of the Syndicate Blog

M83
Bowery Ballroom
Wednesday, June 4

Fussy French dude Anthony Gonzalez’s M83 set up onstage pretty much like you’d expect: first somebody comes and drags one of those acoustic glass cages out around the drum set and you just know when the drummer emerges he’s going to have to wear headphones in order to hear what’s what; then the keyboard tree goes up stage left, ostentatiously studded with all sorts of incredibly expensive looking boxes surrounded by other custom high-tech boxes hand-forged or whatever for the purposes of protecting the original probably-custom boxes inside; the guitar amp, when it arrives stage right, is the incongruous size of a large suitcase. Gonzalez gets his own entrance/applause, then come the rest of the band. All four members have microphones, but the vox on the first song trickle out via sample, a troubling sign.

Jammys
MSG
May 7

Obviously the norms and folkways of the dudes in hats and sandals who attend things like the Jammys are the proverbial fish/Phish in a barrel—the Burning Man that records fatalities annually when it falls on oblivious hippies, the propensity of the movement’s heroes to be rolly-polly dudes who do things like play the mouth-trumpet and seem like they’d be really good dads—so let’s stick to just one cultural practice. Not sure what they call that dance guys do, where you hop up and down but also swing your fists and play an imaginary flute, kind of like the one the Grateful Dead bears are known for? Let’s call it the Kokopelli.

Empire II
Gershwin Hotel
Tuesday, April 29

What else could possibly represent the Tribeca Film Festival’s odd combination of real estate speculation, downtown nostalgia, self-mythology, and liquid assets better than a Warhol-checking film from the one-time maker of Blank Generation, shot out of the casement window of his Manhattan apartment? Amos Poe, standing before a clutch of vaguely affluent Tuesday-nighters in the converted lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, wears star-freckled pajama pants as he introduces his “no budget, no wave” version of Rear Window: Empire II, after Warhol’s eight-hour original. Poe’s film—a year’s worth of footage compressed into three hours, with all the day and night and snow, spring, and rain the interval entailed—simulates a wandering but comfortably ensconced Flatiron eye, shot out of some seriously sizeable windows, often past a varied and pleasingly fresh array of flowers that share the sill with his camera.

Steven Shearer, Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar, 1997

Double Album: Daniel Guzmán + Steven Shearer
New Museum
April 24

What a drag, being forced to behold the basic, untransubstantiated stuff of semi-music-related pop-culture—Leif Garrett pinups, Sonic Youth cassette tapes, Kiss makeup, Stooges logos—in places that could do better, like the New Museum. The general reverse Warholing of that which has been already Warholed, the bland regard for totems that already swim in self-regard; the idea that mass culture rock n roll can stand in for your identity in a way that transcends the manner in which it stands in for my identity: isn’t this the exact illusion we burn off when we become adults and realize that when we were sixteen, we were not in fact alone, were not in fact on some other planet? That we were in it together? That our concert T-shirts had twins?

Things I Learned from Watching Shine a Light
Union Square
April 17

Blame it on the debates last night, the spectacle one more time of a supposed elder talking sternly down to anyone in earshot who happens to be younger, the upshot as always I was there, as if being present then were somehow proxy for being fit to be present anywhere, in any position, ten or twenty or forty years later. Thus Shine a Light’s Keith Richards can blithely intone, as if bestowing upon his audience some timeworn piece of wisdom, “It’s good to see you all. It’s good to see anybody,” with an absolute surety as to the equal anonymity of anyone not named Mick, Charlie, or Ronnie, and his audience will crack up—because, of all things, they basically agree.

John Varvatos Store
315 Bowery
April 8

“It means much more to me than the ringing of the registers that we did the right thing in here."—John Varvatos, mtv.com

“NYC should not be a town just for the wealthy – but who can afford these clothes? Mr. Varvatos caters to a wealthy, male-dominated major-label mainstream rock world that has no claim on the CB’s legacy whatsoever.”—Rebecca Moore, “Varvatos Protest – my comments” (photocopy/bluviolin.com)

Varvatos Protest, my comments:

As a rule, I suspect stores that try to fend off protestors by entreating them to “come see our employees”—the one rocker guy with golden headband, the other guy with the snakeskin NYHC Converse, the not-Kim Gordon-looking woman who told me to stop taking pictures because “we have all these crazy rules”—i.e., there’s still a band playing every night at CB’s, except they’re actually retail clerks, and they “play” by selling clothes. I thought about playing a leather jacket but then I realized spring is almost here.

That said, I noticed some items that I imagined would be there were missing:

Heavy Metal in Baghdad
April 2
Anthology

One more sign of how yawningly distant Baghdad is from New York—the sight of Vice idiots Suroosh Alvi and and Eddy Moretti strapping on flak jackets outside their Baghdad hotel, spooked like guys who just happened to take a wrong turn on their way to work out on N. 10th St. Into the frame rush the security team, a band of shooters that starts at two and swells to 12 as the local Iraqis realize their wards have literally no conception of the danger they’re dealing with. “Journalists…it’s not safe for them,” one guard finally breaks down and explains. “Or for the guys that protect them.”

This to say nothing of the predicament that the subjects of last night’s doc, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, find themselves in. First-and-so-far-last-ever Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda—“the Black Scorpion,” named for the most deadly of all scorpions—can’t really headbang (looks like Jewish prayer), can’t really wear Slipknot t-shirts (looks American), can’t grow their hair long (ditto), can’t play a show pre-Saddam without including “Youth of Iraq” (the “Freebird”-type request/demand made by Saddam’s Culture and Media Ministry, in which Arassicauda take the bait and rhyme “Hussein” with “insane”). After Saddam, the four guys can’t really go outside at all, and then their practice space gets rocketed.