via Rubulad's Kickstarter

​The announcement of this month's Rubulad bash, which takes place this Saturday near the Gowanus Canal, comes with the note "please forward wildly." There are plenty of good reasons for this, the least of which is that it will be awesome; the forthcoming installment of the 18-years-running DIY art party will have a Light Circus Extraordinaire, G. Scopitronic's Non-Stop Film Fest, and an array of dance rooms, live acts, and food.

But not long ago, a typical Rubulad invite warned recipients against posting the information to "any public lists"; even glimpsing the party's often dangerously packed dance environs, let alone knowing its name, was a word-of-mouth treat. That, though, was when the art-party collective had a home, one located a few BQE exits north from this Saturday's Santa-themed extravaganza.

For the past six years, Rubulad has occupied an unassuming two-story building in the Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy hinterland nestled between iron shops, glitzy Bar Mitzvah palaces, and the BQE. But that time is nearing an end. Rubulad's Kickstarter campaign to relocate ends on Thursday, and it's currently raised $21,375—somewhat far from its ambitious fundraising goal of $35,000.

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And the grand-goodbye continues. LCD Soundsystem played their second of five farewell shows, or their fourth-to-last show ever, last night at Terminal 5. Monday saw a Reggie Watts guest appearance, rude dudebros, and ultimate catharsis. Last night apparently featured a very similar set list and so much Tweeting that James Murphy had to reprimand you all, suggesting "maybe put down the phone" and "maybe just be here." You didn't, of course. And here's what you said.

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Reggie and James

LCD Soundsystem
Terminal 5
Monday, March 28

Better than: The rest of those Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Thinks

We are gathered here in New York City's Terminal 5 to say goodbye to one of the most impeccable music projects of our adult lives. It's all very fitting since we live in a world that seems, at an increasingly alarming rate, to be on the precipice of something, and that something doesn't seem very easy, or simple, or carefree. And LCD Soundsystem was never any of those things. It was, at least in this revered projection, a proposition of tremendous emotional heft, a means of battling resignation, loss, frustration, bullshit. An acknowledgment that things are fundamentally wrong, while attempting to maintain a sense of self-respect and livelihood, while maybe even getting blitzed and pogo-dancing. And that's the gist of tonight, we surmise, the first night in a string of five meant to send the band off into the darkness, or the light, depending: a chance for this 41-year-old ultimately fighting teddy bear to walk away from his third decade (plus one) with dignity.

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You can forget sometimes, reading the rapturous reviews, that there are many people in this country who have never forgiven Kanye West for his notoriously checkered past and self-aggrandizing present. "Ya'll forget that I got called 'nigger' on Twitter so many times--yo, I lived that," West rapped on "Chain Heavy," and it's still a bit disorienting to see the degree of animosity he provokes when out in public. Like, say, at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where he donned a fancy Phillip Lim coat on a goofy float and rapped "Lost In the World" for a national television audience. In broadcast clips like the above, it seemed like a reasonably triumphant performance. In this video taken live from the parade, not so much:

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Extra Place

​Well, it's not that secret--both The Fader and the CMJ Music Marathon have already made use of Extra Place (we've been there before, too), the new private, "never open to the public" performance space that is located on, wait for it...Extra Place, the blind alley off 1st Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery. The street has a long history--see, for instance, this iconic photo of the Ramones "standing alongside a wrecked car in a garbage-strewn alley," as Forgotten New York's Kevin Walsh once put it. Lately, both Bespoke Chocolates and Montana Knox Apparel have moved into the tiny, crowded dead end. And now comes Extra Place, the venue, here to revive the "renegade spirit of the Bowery," complete with a CBGB "shrine" containing the "wall and sink from original CBGB bathroom (odor not included)." Anyway this place isn't exactly meant for regular humans but if you were to get in, this is what you would see:

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Maro Hagopian

Scene from Rubulad's Bunny Hop party earlier this year.

Oh, Rubulad. The low-rent Cosmic Cavern. The Burning Man of Brooklyn. The place NYU students write home about as what it's "like to be inside the brain of Lady Gaga." Well, the Bed-Stuy communal-living space that intermittetly functions as a packed party den is apparently having some problems. Big ones. Ones that don't allow them to inhabit the first floor of their premises. Or as the Brooklyn Paper so delicately puts it:

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​Protip: If you're ever looking to get a show shut down as fast as possible, whip a bottle at a police car. "The plan was originally for Ryan Schreiber, founder of Pitchfork, and Patrick Stickles, lead singer of the grouchy New Jersey band Titus Andronicus, to DJ at Shea Stadium from 2 a.m. until dawn," notes the Observer's Leon Neyfakh of last night's ill-fated fete at Shea Stadium, official afterparty to the Wavves show at the Knitting Factory. Instead, some clown threw a bottle, and this happened instead:

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Above, the scene at Ella; below, the nefarious Corona-based secret door at Stay. Pics by Puja.

​New York City's downtown party scene adheres to a finely tuned set of rules. It's one of those things that everyone understands and no one talks about--a delicate balance of power that's maintained at every turn. Promoters and club managers take turns sucking up to one other, DJs and their fans fawn over each other, bottle-serviced tables are carefully manned by the appropriate gaggle of giggly girls, and the door girl is only as important as the guest list she's holding. Ultimately, though, the bouncer has the first and last word on who gets in at all. It's all pretty exhausting, but we'll take it. That is, until the name-calling begins.

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​The conversion of CBGB into a fancy boot emporium is ancient news at this point, and as evil or wrongheaded as John Varvatos has often seemed on the Bowery--a sliver of the old wall, behind glass! Guns N' Roses!--putting CBGB out of its misery in 2006 was a mercy killing. It hadn't been good for a long, long time. At the same time, attempts to leverage the club's considerable legacy into commercial credibility on what nowadays is called "Bowery 2.0" have never seemed less than cynical, or worse--DBGB, anyone? So though at this point we're not surprised when people call on the memory of Hilly Kristal to help up-sell commercial real estate, it's sad to see a tenant as respected as the New Museum getting in on the act. The image above is part of a brochure the museum's real estate goons put together to help advertise commercial space in a building the New Museum owns adjacent to their own, at 231 Bowery. There are more where that came from:

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​And thus, the pasty record clerks and furtive customers of the old Tower Records space on East 4th give way inevitably to the musclebound men and women who beat them up in high school. That vacated storefront on the corner of Lafayette--home, variously, to Halloween costume pop-up shops and holiday craft-fairs and at least one Tower-themed art show in the four years since the erstwhile record shop closed--will now become an Equinox-branded temple of fitness, reports the Observer. Hard to get nostalgic about Tower, whose astronomically expensive inventory and indifferent curation remains to this day a monument to the folly that basically brought music retailing to its knees. But did its replacement have to be so...Darwinian? [Observer]