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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If Todd gets his way you may not miss the old place much

​Totally did not expect to see über-promoter Todd Patrick beaming from the virtual pages of both Grub Street, but there he is and the Voice's own Fork in the Road, eagerly discussing the new restaurant/club he's looking to open at Avenue A and Third Street in the East Village, at the spot most recently home to Aces & Eights, a beer-pong-hosting house of evidently ill repute. Working with Two Boots mastermind Phil Hartman, Todd P's vision is twofold: tamales and free jazz, roughly speaking.

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Via Todd P's Twitter

​So the Titus Andronicus NYE show was quite the time: First it got moved from Ridgewood Masonic Temple to 285 Kent due to liquor-license woes, then a bunch of people apparently lost their stuff. (Per TA ringleader Patrick Stickles: "Our sincerest apologies to those who had their belongings tampered with or carried off by unseen malefactors.") Ah, but maybe you just drunkenly left your coat there, eh? Had a bit too much Four Loko? Recognize your shit in the photo up there? Would you be so kind as to come get it?

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2010 was not a particularly pleasant year for venue/police relations -- see Market Hotel or Santos Party House -- and 2011 unfortunately got off on the wrong foot immediately. Ridgewood Masonic Temple, the pretty great Bushwick spot that hosted shows last year by Sleigh Bells, Das Racist, Lightning Bolt, and various others, is going dry, according to a bushwick.bk.com report on recent liquor-license snafus there that finally raised the ire of the cops. As a result, the Titus Andronicus/Real Estate show planned there for New Year's Eve by promoter extraordinaire Todd P was moved last-minute to a more, y'know, festive location. As Todd put it:

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​The year in music, circa 2010, started at the Cake Shop, with a shred-down to the New Year courtesy of Siren Festival MVP-to-be Marissa Paternoster and her band Screaming Females. After a tour through the NYE fetes of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, that night ended amidst a marathon show at Bushwick's Shea Stadium, right around the time the Blastoids' drummer poured paint on his kit and started splattering away.

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​Well, the ranks of the disappointed probably outnumber those who actually successfully scored themselves tickets to tonight's Yeah Yeah Yeah's anniversary shindig at Secret Project Robot. Tickets went on sale at 6 p.m. yesterday and were long gone by 7, and the internet is aflame with the three hundred plus people who waited in line only to get turned away (to say nothing of those who didn't even bother). Still: do not storm the door tonight! Promoter Todd P sends out this friendly reminder: "NO TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR, NO EXCEPTIONS." You should probably take him at his word. Because no one wants this thing shut down, and a mob of angry people outside a tiny Williamsburg storefront will inevitably lead to that. Let the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have their fun. They've earned it. All the rest of us can do is gaze in envy on these tickets:

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photo by Rebecca Smeyne

Scene from the Yummy Fur show at the Market Hotel this past January

The NYPD stopped by the Market Hotel earlier this month, much to our dismay, causing the venerable DIY venue to go dark and to relocate its already-scheduled programming to like-minded spaces like Monster Island Basement and the Silent Barn. For example, that sick Sleigh Bells May show is luckily happening at the Ridgewood Temple--good news since the stellar one at Coco 66 is already sold out. But there's finally an update on Market Hotel's future, the details of which we'll leave to Todd P:

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photos by Emily Nemens

Bonnie "Prince" Billy
April 1
Monster Island

Todd Patrick's back from Mexico, and last night our fearless local promoter hosted two very intimate, very sold-out, back-to-back shows for Will Oldham--touring on behalf of his Bonnie "Prince" Billy alter-ego--in Williamsburg's sweaty Monster Island Basement. It's something of a coup to get Oldham/Billy in such a small space, for only $12 a person, considering that last time Kentucky-born singer-songwriter played New York was at the Apollo and tickets were more than 40 bucks.

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MtyMx's Autocinema Las Torres, at night. All photos by Rebecca Smeyne.

​NYC promoter Todd Patrick's MtyMx festival wrapped late yesterday morning in Monterrey, Mexico's Yo Garage, the erstwhile after-party spot for three days of Brooklyn madness in another country entirely. Our report can be found here. Photographer Rebecca Smeyne was also there, arriving Sunday night from Austin after a 24-hour battle with various shuttle buses and border guards. The full slideshow from her trip can be found here; in the meantime, below are a few particularly poignant ones from an adventure few attendees are likely to forget anytime soon.

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The MtyMx site in Monterrey.

​We've taken a certain amount of joy in mocking the terrified teenagers and timid, jingoistic bloggers who greeted the announcement of Todd P's MtyMx Festival in Monterrey, Mexico, with the type of hysteria normally reserved for frothing nutjobs like Arizona-based "America's Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio. That said, the timing here is not exactly working out--the State Department issued a warning this morning to Americans traveling to Mexico after several U.S. citizens were murdered in Ciudad Juarez and police officers were gunned down in Acapulco. "The State Department warns of cartel and drug trafficking-related firefights and shootings in Tijuana, Chihuahua City, Nogales, Matamoros, Reynosa and Monterrey," reports the Phoenix Business Journal. In one gruesome incident cited by the Telegraph, "a victim had his face skinned and stitched on to a football" back in January, though not in Monterrey. However.

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