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In Waste Of Paint, our writer/artist team of Jamie Peck and Debbie Allen will review goings-on about town in words and images.

Remember when you had to drive an hour to a town you'd never been to just to see whatever D.I.Y. shit was going down in your state that weekend? You'd bitch about it at the time, but it gave you a kind of treasure hunt-like satisfaction. Waste of Paint recaptured some of that (suburban) adolescent spirit this weekend by voyaging to two exotic locales: Ridgewood and Hoboken.

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via Yelp

That is some parking lot.

​About two weeks after playing a sold-out show at Terminal 5, one of the city's biggest venues that doesn't also double as a sports arena, the rollicking indiepop bands Real Estate has a show lined up in the back room of a Chinese buffet in Queens. Who else could be behind this but Todd P.?

The event, happening tomorrow at Ridgewood's K&K Super Buffet, also has Black Dice, The Babies, Dogleather—and DJ sets from Oneohtrix Point Never and Ducktails—on the bill. It also serves as a sort of rebirth/rebranding for longtime D.I.Y. impresario Todd "Todd P." Patrick. He spent a good chunk of the last decade building an off-the-grid concert empire in New York, only to see much of his work undone in the past year or two as the city began to rein in semi-illegal spaces. Venues in which he had varying degrees of emotional, legal, and financial stakes—Monster Island Basement, Market Hotel, and Silent Barn—have either shut their doors or been forced to relocate. This didn't leave Patrick with a lot of options. "For things to keep growing," he told SOTC earlier this week, "doing things outside of the concert industry, it has to... go legit."

"But 'legit' doesn't mean working within the monopoly control of the concert industry," he was quick to add. "It just means being more creative and utilitizing the dozens, hundreds, thousands of spaces in the city that work as venues but go unutilized."

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Hey, maybe the real estate agent can let her in.

​Lady Gaga's old apartment at 176 Stanton Street has gone on the market for the I-have-no-idea-if-it's-reasonable price of $1,850 a month (via Spin). The "phenomenal 1br" where the shape-shifting pop star once resided is listed on the Citi Habitats website and it looks pretty cute and sunny, although the Lower East Side location means that your weekend nights might be spent navigating around people looking to "make" that neighborhood's "scene." Full description, and a clip of Gaga trying to get into her old pad while a camera crew from 60 Minutes looked on, below.

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​Last week, the Voice reported on former Roc-A-Fella Records mogul Damon Dash's recent troubles with the law. The city brought a restraining order against the owners of 172 Duane Street, which used to house Dash's club/art gallery/rehearsal space DD172, as well as against Dash himself. They claimed six violations of the liquor code, namely storing and selling alcohol without a license. While DD172 had vacated the spot back in June, the city didn't serve the property with papers till last Wednesday.

Yesterday at the courthouse in Lower Manhattan, the judge, Cynthia S. Kern, signed a stipulation settling the matter as long as 172 Duane Street Realty abides by the liquor laws in future and agrees to provide security guards when holding events, agrees to warrantless inspections by police, and abide by their certificate of occupancy. In other words, the property is agreeing to not break the law.

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all photos by Paul Quitoriano

Guitarist Tim Maybury and singer Tanya Horo of Sherlock's Daughter, at their Queens kitchen table

Last April, Sherlock's Daughter frontwoman Tanya Horo told YIMBY columnist Christopher Weingarten that she resided in "an Olympic swimming pool in Long Island City." That was a bit of hyperbole meant to describe the loft downstairs from the one we visited recently for this week's cover, where Horo was living at the time. (Olympic swimming pools are typically over 13000 square feet.) What she could say accurately is that their 3500 square feet space is the same size of the world's smallest Wal-Mart. (Fun fact: the world's largest Wal-Mart apparently squats in Albany.)

Horo shares the place with guitarist Tim Maybury, band manager David Benge (who also manages Brisbane's Violent Soho and coordinates tours for Civil Society/Handsome Tours), and two other friends. With the help of Home Depot, they've not only set up four bedrooms, a makeshift office, and a living area (the kitchen was already installed), but a home studio for Sherlock's Daughter. "It set a pretty high bar for what you can make possible in your own house," says Maybury. "If we have to get out of here and move into some smaller apartment somewhere and not have this, it's going to be quite an adjustment."

The band doesn't practice in the loft, though. "A lot of people imagine that because we're a band and we live together, and we have this big warehouse, that we just practice here as well," says Maybury. They actually rehearse two blocks away, in a rented basement studio. "I wouldn't really want to practice in here, or where I live, because practice spaces tend to stay quite messy." Their home is not, as you can see:

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The loneliness of a former property owner. Photo by Raquel M. Horn.

​Rap mogul turned downtown striver Damon Dash may be resurrected in the pages of this week's Voice, in which Ben Detrick chronicles the executive's self-reinvention as a cuddly Warhol figure, but the past isn't quite through with him. In 2008, the bank moved to foreclose upon Dash's 25 N. Moore Street duplex; though he's tried frantically to sell the place in the interim, it looks as though the loft is finally going to auction tomorrow. This is not the Duane Street space Dash is currently running his DD172 operation out of: there, we know from experience (because he once begged us by proxy to stop getting him in trouble with his landlord), he pays rent. Let's recap, as per our story this week:

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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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The old marquee, before the new marquee, which is now the old marquee again. Pic via Joe Madonna's photostream

​Goodbye, "Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza"--your many syllables and unwieldy national branding associations will not be missed. The Times reports today that Live Nation is backing away from its attempt to get New Yorkers who have been attending shows there since the '40s to call the venue by the longer, less felicitous name they gave it back in 2007. "Since I've been here I haven't had anyone say to me, 'What a great idea that was,' " a Live Nation executive told the Times. "Almost everybody I talk to in the New York music scene, one of their first experiences was at Irving Plaza. And I'm really excited to be able to bring back to the New York music scene what people have overwhelmingly desired." Why they ever thought otherwise, who knows, but welcome back! Wonder why they're doing it now?

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The Dirty Projectors last summer, apparently pissing someone off royally. Pic by Abbey Braden.

​Folks on Fifth Avenue apparently complained, so this summer, when Pavement finally arrives to play those shows you bought tickets for a half-year ago, a new quarter-million-dollar soundsystem will ensure the neighbors don't have to hear it. (Possibly mercifully.) Per DNAinfo.com:

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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]