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| A passing shower this evening over our garden. |
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
When Brooklyn is not enough
There was a time when going to Pearl Street was a big part of my summers. During my summers back home when I was in college, I'd usually make it a few times to the Northampton night club, which was a part of the indie rock circuit at the time. This summer, with a month to myself while the wife and daughter are visiting relatives, I kept a close eye on the listings. I noticed last week a show of a few bands from Brooklyn, so I drove down for dinner and to see what the kids are up to today.
I think the last time I went to Pearl Street it was to see the Swedish band The Soundtrack of Our Lives, which I and maybe ten other people seemed to enjoy. The club was the same as I remembered — filthy and dark, but not as smelly as I remembered thanks to the smoking ban. The security was absurd, the drinks expensive, the sound wretched — all the same.
Their schedule this summer has, more or less, sucked. Ordinarily I wouldn't be super excited to see a bunch bands from Brooklyn, but it was honestly the only thing that remotely caught my attention. And I don't really know why — maybe because I like MGMT, and one of the bands were friends with them in college. Maybe because New York still might mean something as a creative hub. But it was really weird how each of the bands frequently told us they were from Brooklyn (not New York, Brooklyn), as if that was a desperately critical piece of information we had to drill into our heads or all would be lost. I would love to know what these guys think Brooklyn means out here in the sticks, but I bet it's not what they think it means.
The first band was an outfit called Total Slacker, which to my amusement/horror is a 90s nostalgia act. That is, their bassist wore a t-shirt with Fox Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster on it. Lead guitarist/singer Tucker Rountree borrows a bit from Kurt Cobain's look and Thurston Moore's voice. I enjoyed their set — knots of noise and feedback, plenty of drones and grooves. I actually sort of liked them, but I never thought the culture of my youth would be a retro throwback for the young'uns. At least not yet.
It is a much richer experience to see bands in small, out-of-the-way, divey joints like Pearl Street. You see a lot just waiting around — who's fighting with their chick, who needs a smoke, who is drinking maybe too much before the show. There are these little moments — Rountree walked right past on his way to the stage, and we made eye contact for a second, nodded and said "hey." This sort of matters, I realized this is a guy who is aware that he's doing something that involves other people. That small human connection makes you root for them. I still have a soft spot for Jen Trynin based on that one time I saw her at Pearl Street in 1994.
I think the last time I went to Pearl Street it was to see the Swedish band The Soundtrack of Our Lives, which I and maybe ten other people seemed to enjoy. The club was the same as I remembered — filthy and dark, but not as smelly as I remembered thanks to the smoking ban. The security was absurd, the drinks expensive, the sound wretched — all the same.
Their schedule this summer has, more or less, sucked. Ordinarily I wouldn't be super excited to see a bunch bands from Brooklyn, but it was honestly the only thing that remotely caught my attention. And I don't really know why — maybe because I like MGMT, and one of the bands were friends with them in college. Maybe because New York still might mean something as a creative hub. But it was really weird how each of the bands frequently told us they were from Brooklyn (not New York, Brooklyn), as if that was a desperately critical piece of information we had to drill into our heads or all would be lost. I would love to know what these guys think Brooklyn means out here in the sticks, but I bet it's not what they think it means.
The first band was an outfit called Total Slacker, which to my amusement/horror is a 90s nostalgia act. That is, their bassist wore a t-shirt with Fox Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster on it. Lead guitarist/singer Tucker Rountree borrows a bit from Kurt Cobain's look and Thurston Moore's voice. I enjoyed their set — knots of noise and feedback, plenty of drones and grooves. I actually sort of liked them, but I never thought the culture of my youth would be a retro throwback for the young'uns. At least not yet.
It is a much richer experience to see bands in small, out-of-the-way, divey joints like Pearl Street. You see a lot just waiting around — who's fighting with their chick, who needs a smoke, who is drinking maybe too much before the show. There are these little moments — Rountree walked right past on his way to the stage, and we made eye contact for a second, nodded and said "hey." This sort of matters, I realized this is a guy who is aware that he's doing something that involves other people. That small human connection makes you root for them. I still have a soft spot for Jen Trynin based on that one time I saw her at Pearl Street in 1994.
The second act up was Junior Prom, a pair of hilariously photogenic young men with an array of synthesizers that do this hopped up disco-skiffle thing. I admired their energy, which is the apparent result of the naive hope and optimism that comes between your debut EP and first LP. Everything is looking up for these guys — or at least to these guys. They might make it, or they might disappear. I can't predict which.
Then we can to the main act, a group called Bear Hands (from Brooklyn, no one can stress this enough). I almost didn't go just because of their name alone (speaking of which, geezus, these were the worst band names I've ever seen in my life). They've been around for a few years, and are touring on their second album. They have a couple of videos on YouTube — but these days making a pro-looking video is just about the easiest thing you can do. But there's very little buzz about them in the usual places.
The kindest way to describe their set is to say that it didn't really connect. It starts with Dylan Rau, their singer, who keeps his eyes firmly shut and sings in a mannered kind of yelp that feels like a particularly insolent kind of karaoke. It was clear they were tired; they've been touring all year, and have a lot more ahead of them in the next few months.
It wasn't at all what I expected. Based on their albums and videos, I figured they would realize that their hook-heavy songs really need a bit of Junior Prom's energy to come across. But it wasn't there. They opened with "Agora," a decent song that somewhat thoughtfully deals with agoraphobia. But the cheerlessly professional version they offered was almost sad. The same thing for their other single, "Giants," which is really a downer they way they played it.
They played dutifully, then said goodnight. I don't have any idea what becomes of this band. Maybe they get worked into an episode of Girls. Maybe they land a VW commercial. As it stands, if your capsule bio says more about where you are from and other bands you sound like, you probably aren't thriving. I don't know what they can do to change it, and I suspect they don't know either.
Happens to us all, kids. But God, just shut up about Brooklyn already.
Then we can to the main act, a group called Bear Hands (from Brooklyn, no one can stress this enough). I almost didn't go just because of their name alone (speaking of which, geezus, these were the worst band names I've ever seen in my life). They've been around for a few years, and are touring on their second album. They have a couple of videos on YouTube — but these days making a pro-looking video is just about the easiest thing you can do. But there's very little buzz about them in the usual places.
The kindest way to describe their set is to say that it didn't really connect. It starts with Dylan Rau, their singer, who keeps his eyes firmly shut and sings in a mannered kind of yelp that feels like a particularly insolent kind of karaoke. It was clear they were tired; they've been touring all year, and have a lot more ahead of them in the next few months.
It wasn't at all what I expected. Based on their albums and videos, I figured they would realize that their hook-heavy songs really need a bit of Junior Prom's energy to come across. But it wasn't there. They opened with "Agora," a decent song that somewhat thoughtfully deals with agoraphobia. But the cheerlessly professional version they offered was almost sad. The same thing for their other single, "Giants," which is really a downer they way they played it.
They played dutifully, then said goodnight. I don't have any idea what becomes of this band. Maybe they get worked into an episode of Girls. Maybe they land a VW commercial. As it stands, if your capsule bio says more about where you are from and other bands you sound like, you probably aren't thriving. I don't know what they can do to change it, and I suspect they don't know either.
Happens to us all, kids. But God, just shut up about Brooklyn already.
Friday, July 18, 2014
A stupid game
I've been slowly getting through Orlando Figes' recent book about the Crimean War, seeing how relevant that part of the world has become again. What strikes you first is just how much of an anomaly the Soviet experience was, and how quickly Russia jumped back to earlier times. To when Russia was a socially retarded, violent, paranoid feudal state, with a ruthless top-down power structure, a complicit national faith with delusions of being the next Roman empire, and a swaggering sense of racial superiority.
It's often tempting to leave them alone and deal with them as best we can, but what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight yesterday shows what happens when this bullshit spills over. 298 people who had nothing to do with this stupid little farce in eastern Ukraine were blown out of the sky, and setting aside all the usual caveats about what we know and don't know, the moral dimension is very clear. To Putin's power structure this is all a big f-ing game. It's jaw-dropping how creative the bootlicking Russian media has been happy to publicly fantasize about what might have happened.
The news yesterday was a huge shock to those of us who have continued to follow the news from Ukraine closely. It has felt for awhile that the situation was beginning to sort itself out. That with Crimea firmly in hand, Putin wasn't all that interested in a huge flare-up in the east. And the quiet support from Moscow was worrying the separatists enough that they began whining about being abandoned. And the world was beginning to see what was happening — that these separatists were a small, violent minority made up of the usual unemployable lot of track-suit wearing losers you find getting drunk in housing projects all over Eastern Europe.
I hope the world can maintain a sense of outrage about this, and that there will be real consequences for this regime. But I don't expect that will happen. The history of civilian aviation is full of moments like this — when airline passengers have been murdered by misunderstanding — and nothing really changed.
Putin and his crew don't care what the world thinks. Holy Russia is beyond reproach, and all that matters is the integrity of the internal "power vertical." And worse, as David Remnick pointed out on the New Yorker website: "Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control."
It's often tempting to leave them alone and deal with them as best we can, but what happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight yesterday shows what happens when this bullshit spills over. 298 people who had nothing to do with this stupid little farce in eastern Ukraine were blown out of the sky, and setting aside all the usual caveats about what we know and don't know, the moral dimension is very clear. To Putin's power structure this is all a big f-ing game. It's jaw-dropping how creative the bootlicking Russian media has been happy to publicly fantasize about what might have happened.
The news yesterday was a huge shock to those of us who have continued to follow the news from Ukraine closely. It has felt for awhile that the situation was beginning to sort itself out. That with Crimea firmly in hand, Putin wasn't all that interested in a huge flare-up in the east. And the quiet support from Moscow was worrying the separatists enough that they began whining about being abandoned. And the world was beginning to see what was happening — that these separatists were a small, violent minority made up of the usual unemployable lot of track-suit wearing losers you find getting drunk in housing projects all over Eastern Europe.
I hope the world can maintain a sense of outrage about this, and that there will be real consequences for this regime. But I don't expect that will happen. The history of civilian aviation is full of moments like this — when airline passengers have been murdered by misunderstanding — and nothing really changed.
Putin and his crew don't care what the world thinks. Holy Russia is beyond reproach, and all that matters is the integrity of the internal "power vertical." And worse, as David Remnick pointed out on the New Yorker website: "Vladimir Putin, acting out of resentment and fury toward the West and the leaders in Kiev, has fanned a kind of prolonged political frenzy, both in Russia and among his confederates in Ukraine, that serves his immediate political needs but that he can no longer easily calibrate and control."
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