Music: itsnotyouitsme at The Stone on December 2, 2010

itsnotyouitsme comprises Caleb Burhans and Grey McMurray on violin and guitar with lots of wires and electronic doo-dads. This night, they played an hour of ambient chamber music, accompanied by singer Theo Bleckmann and bassist Skuli Sverrisson at a strange and wonderful little venue called The Stone, a stripped-down, music-only (that is, no bar, no t-shirts, no ticket processing fees) venue spearheaded by experimentalist John Zorn.

When I describe the experience as ambient chamber music, I mean less that their sound is a combination of "ambient" and "chamber" genres, and more that the music they made generated an enclosed, vibrating space, a warm womb of sound that cradled themselves with their small audience, as if twins in a shared amniotic sac (though we were perhaps 20 persons all together, we were as if two bodies, curling together). And as a mother's womb protects her developing seed from the exterior world, while feeding it transmuted information from that dark, cold place, so the musicians caught the sounds penetrating The Stone (an ambulance's siren, the honking of horns), and seamlessly (clairvoyant mages of sound that they are) made those sounds an essential aspect of the music, weaving them into the melting pulses of Theo's mouthings, Caleb's pluckings, Grey and Skuli's detailed working of strings.

For an hour, we drifted deeply into our shared self, emerging with blinking eyes as if from a salty, red bath, in which we swam with gills, sliding into and out of each other.

Music: Gotham Chamber Opera—El Gato con Botas

To file this post under "music" is a bit deceptive, but not any more deceptive than the Guggenheim promising "El Gato con Botas" and presenting "Puss in Boots." The Gotham Chamber Opera will be offering the Spaniard Montsalvatge's opera both in the original Spanish as well as English translation performances, but I was rather disappointed that the Works and Process preview gave us the lesser of those two choices.

I was equally disappointed that, promised "puppets" in plural form, we were only shown one puppet (though it was a puppet comprised of plural pieces, and quite an astonishing puppet at that), for this production at the New Victory Theater is a puppet production, inspired by Artistic Director Neal Goren's admitted discomfort with the idea of live people playing animal characters. No self-respecting opera star is willing to dress up in a cat costume, it seems—save that trash for Broadway.

The excessively caffeinated Goren practically stole the podium from moderator Anotoni Pizà, whose greatest moment was cutting off the conductor's effusive stream to ask him whether or not he keeps a pet cat. But the more intriguing character was Mark Down, the Artistic Director of Blind Summit Theater, the collaborators responsible for the puppets. For these are not Sifl & Olly sock puppets. The one puppet we saw tonight—the ogre—requires seven sweating puppeteers, never mind the opera singer who stands alongside them, sweating and heaving himself.

I found nothing particularly interesting in Montsalvatge's music (I'm by no means an opera fan, but I still think I can recognize whether a particular work has any value), but the puppet—oh the puppet! What a creation of astonishing artistic and physical genius. Never have I seen such an enormous living, breathing thing made of seven sculpted hunks of foam mounted on poles, operated by the nerdiest subcategory of theater nerds: professional puppeteers. What stars they are, these puppet-wielders, brutishly, nimbly, willfully dancing this other being into life.

I say, more puppets, less singing.

Music: Midnite at S.O.B.'s

I'm writing about this show nearly two months after the fact; I admit, I've been remiss, and I have excuses that you either already know, or don't care about. The one applicable excuse, though, is that I've been in somewhat of a quandary as to how to describe this experience. I was introduced to Midnite by a handcrafted mix-CD without track listings. I eventually found out that all the very best songs came from the same people: Midnite—and, because I am the luckiest, the person who made me this mix-CD also bought tickets for the Midnite show at S.O.B.'s.

When I used to go to late-night movies at Film Forum, and would descend into the Houston Street 1-train subway stop, I would always hear a pulsing beat leaking out of the vents of a utility room off the tracks. I used to think, "Damn, that MTA knows how to party!", picturing a secret break room behind those doors with a bumping stereo system. Eventually, I realized that the beat was coming from S.O.B.'s, a club right up above the subway station. That was years ago, but this was the first night I had ever been inside. It's a small club, wider than it is deep, which is good, because basically everyone is right up in front of the band—and Midnite is a band you want to be up close to.

I don't know much about them and I won't pretend to know more than I do; what you need to know is that they are from St. Croix and they are the antidote to what Reggae has become under the tutelage of Sean Paul. But at that opposite end of the spectrum, they don't merely inhabit what sound Bob Marley once did; they are something completely their own: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and totally rocking. Vaughn Benjamin is not a singer; he is a prophet. Streams of language bubbled up out of his mouth, and the rastas in the audience, with their dreadlocks bundled up in scarves, watched with reverence. A few times that night, while the band played over four hours straight, one of the older rastas in the audience, a lumbering man with dreadlocks down past his waist, held his locks up to Benjamin, simultaneously giving and receiving blessing.

We danced and danced and danced. A few times, I recognized a series of lyrics that linked back to mix-CD, but I don't know what songs were played; the experience was too organic for the "performance" of tracks. Not was the show like one of the drug-fueled interminable meanderings of, say, Phil Lesh—each moment was startlingly lucid, deep, memorable. I still see Vaughn's eyes glowing with a knowledge simultaneously dark and bright as he looked out and through us, holding the mic in fine, slender hands up close to his lips, murmuring warnings, instructions, and dedications.

Music: Talib Kweli and Jean Grae at the Powerhouse

It seems that my time in New Zealand, when not spent chasing chickens out of the house, is dedicated to hearing live performances of musicians with whom I'm not all that familiar. Looking for tracks produced by the 9th Wonder, I'd come to know a few of Jean Grae's tracks well, but I don't have any of her albums, or any of headlining Kweli's.

Hip-hop in Auckland seems a little out of place (Jean, Talib, and their back-up singer are perhaps the eighth, ninth, and tenth black people I've seen in this country—no exaggeration—and I've been here a month). That said, Jean was in high spirits, literally and figuratively, drinking Gray Goose straight from the bottle, and exhorting the audience to step up their game. She was particularly hard on the front row, stopping between songs to instruct a lardy blonde in hip-hop show etiquette: "Get your titties up off the motherfucking rail."

Sugar-coated belligerence aside, the girl can rap. No matter how drunk she got, she didn't miss one word; her delivery was crisp and clean, and her flow rhythmic and playful. Kweli, contrastingly, was loud but indistinct, hard and repetitive, like a jackhammer that paused every few minutes to exhort its own utility. While Jean and her back-up singer were making math jokes, Kweli was name-checking himself every few lines; while Jean told us to tip our bartenders, Kweli told us to buy his t-shirts. Not knowing his work well, but having always considered him a thinking-man's rapper, I have to admit that I was disappointed. If I'd never heard of either of them, and didn't know that hip-hop is, for the most part, a man's world, I'd have been surprised that Jean opened for Kweli and not the other way around.

Music: Massive Attack at the Vector Arena

I haven't been to a big show like this in a while, so found myself rather overwhelmed by the smoke and flashing lights and beer-swilling/spilling teeny-boppers pushing past me; I must be getting old. That said, Massive Attack put on a high-intensity show, considering they're even older than I am. They gave equal weight to their new album Heligoland and 1990s favorites like Teardrop, Angel, Safe From Harm, Unfinished Sympathy, and Karmacoma; the new songs are generally harder and more guitar-driven than the older dreamy grooves I prefer.

An enormous LED panel dominated the band's rotating cast of vocalists, and at times I wasn't sure whether the audience was cheering for the musicians or the light show. All Music Guide's first bullet point describes Massive Attack's mood as "druggy," so I suppose I should have been less offended by the textual accompaniment to their first song, in which the LED wall flashed name after name of recreational drug, flicking quickly through and then briefly pausing (ecstasy-cannabis-PCP-methamphetamines-HEROIN) as if an unlucky slot machine. The general remainder of LED accompaniment comprised the sort of pseudo-socially responsible headlines/hyper-leftist yellow journalism that is appealing to immature anti-establishment rockstars. I'm "anti-war" myself, but I don't think it's responsible to flash tidbits like "head in a bag" and "just doing our job" on the screen during a trip-hop show, at the beginning of which you've advertised the use of dangerous drugs whose cultivation and trade are deeply connected with the international violence and oppression you're criticizing. Nor is it just to compare the British PM's gardening expenses with the GDP of small African nations, unless you are also going to include for comparison the budget for your tour's LED set design. I will accept responsible political activism from an intelligent band like Radiohead, but couldn't help but feel like Massive Attack was clinging, in a very un-nuanced way, to Thom Yorke's coattails.

So long as I kept my eyes off the stage and on my dance partner, I enjoyed myself. Ultimately, my experience with Massive Attack is as a Tricky fan, so I was disappointed he didn't show (though the presence of Martina, whose voice I know from Tricky albums, totally made the show). When they ended the encore set with Karmacoma, even though I was dancing, I was itching to get home and listen to Overcome, Tricky's far superior version.

Music: Days of Wild headlines Sly Stone's Birthday Celebration at BB King's

How can I maintain that I don't like Funk when I spent all last night shaking it on the dance floor? Every ten minutes, one who will here remain nameless said, "Look! You do like the Funk!"

People. Just because I was dancing doesn't mean that I like the Funk. It means that I like dancing, and that Funk is fairly easy to dance to. In all honesty, the suite of Sly songs expertly executed by Days of Wild were a little too slow for dancing, as most of Sly's songs are. They are more like grooving songs than dancing songs—songs for dancing in your chair, not on your feet.

But there were two or three solos on the bass and guitar that did move me musically, which is more than I can say for the repetitive, canned Funk one hears on the radio. And all three vocalists had hidden surprises in their voices, released at timely moments.

Ultimately, it was worth it all just to see band leader Swang dance. Even if I can't really enjoy Funk, I can totally enjoy other people enjoying Funk.

Music: An Evening of Opera Scenes

When people ask me what kind of music I like, I honestly answer "everything—except opera." I'm snooty enough that I really should like opera (I don't think that classical music is boring, I go to see lots of performance arts, and I sang soprano in all eight semesters of high school chorus. But I tend to prefer chamber music to orchestral, and contemporary to traditional ballets—I don't do well with performative hyperbole (though I like it in literature and painting), and what is more hyperbolic than The Opera?

But this evening of opera scenes, which I attended to see a co-worker do what she really does (how weird is it to see a girl who walks past your desk all day with stacks of presentations, headed to the binding machine, on stage in a floor-length white gown and madly-teased hair, wailing in Greek?) reminded me that, just like there are ballets quite unlike Swan Lake, their are operas quite unlike those of Mozart and Puccini. It's true that the plots were still a bit "big" for my taste (melodrama, again, only works for painters), but the music—it was different! It was beautiful, lean, voices plus piano swooping in and out of each other, almost experimenting, rather than showing off. . . groping, feeling, and blindly finding bliss.

What were these delicious pieces of music? The end of the second act from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street (Karen Suarez's low, foreboding voice so atypical, wonderfully strange), the aria from Kurt Weill's Broadway opera Street Scene (which made me cry), Clytemnestra's murder scene from Richard Strauss's Elektra (a fantastic struggle between female voices), and the opening scene from Jonathan Dove's Flight (the best piece of the show for its humor, its unapologetic contemporaneity, and the brilliant physical drama of Courtenay Symonds, who supports her hysterical performance with full-speed-ahead vocal achievements), amongst others. Now I can't say I don't like opera. When people ask me what kind of music I like, I'll have to say "everything—except Puccini."

Music: Hank Jones at Birdland

Oh Birdland, with your carpet-papered walls all aglow in neon pink fluorescence, your diners from Jersey smacking loudly over their suppers, your solicitous barkeep who memorized my name and warned me not to be a stranger, and your midtown cover charge: how could you do Hank Jones so wrong, and on his 90th birthday?

This is not about the cake—that was sweet if not a bit stagey (did you do that every show? Is it more for the audience than the man himself?)—but something much more important: the sound. You let Mr. Jones—with his tidy hands—his gentle fingers that plink the keys as neatly as a young slim cat licks a bit of cream off its nose—you let him go up there and play a piano poorly amplified, its top shut tight to keep all the sound inside, so that some guitarist half his age could play over him, drown him out with waves of mellow riffs much easier for the audience to grab hold of, to "rock out" to, than the precise, chilled, plink plink plink of the solo piano playing Monk (an aural delight too subtle, I'm sure, for the soup slurping audience to understand).

Those were, you know, the best moments of the show, the opening solo, and the moment in the middle when the quartet silenced themselves for a minute to let Hank play on his own. If you are going to call yourselves "The Jazz Corner of the World!" you're going to need to learn how to properly mic a piano. And you should also run some edits on your website: you mention that the original Birdland was "located on Broadway, a few blocks west of 52nd Street;" surely you know that nothing but more 52nd Street is west of 52nd Street (unless Birdland was in the Hudson): the street runs east-west. Mr. Parker would be none too pleased, I'm certain.

Movies/Music: Powaqqatsi

For three dollars, a person really oughtn't complain (this screening and live performance by the Philip Glass Orchestra was part of a series of practically-free evens offered in Brooklyn's Prospect Park), but I don't have much good to say about Powaqqatsi, the second in a trilogy of "Qatsi" films collaborated upon by director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass. I had seen the first, Koyaanisqatsi, in San Francisco, also screened along with a live performance of the score. While that film hadn't done much to augment the beautiful score with which I was already familiar, it was neutral enough not to spoil the music. The footage of Powaqqatsi, though, is different. (N.B. I have yet to see or hear the final film/score of the trilogy, Naqoyqatsi.)

None of the three films have dialogue, characters, or plots per se; instead, they are comprised of a barrage of images, some stock footage, and, in the case of Powaqqatsi, much original footage filmed in Brazil, India, Kenya, China, and Peru, amongst a variety of other third world countries. Whereas the images in Koyaanisqatsi consist mostly of inanimate movement—cars, buildings, factories, bridges, etc.—and the people, when they are included, act only as ciphers for cogs themselves, pushing through crowded streets in the thousands, or working along manufacturing conveyor belts—Powaqqatsi's footage focuses on the person as an aesthetic individual. Though people are photographed in groups, the camera reads them as humans rather than cogs, as individual souls, and in the light of a beautiful tragedy.

And there is the rub. Powaqqatsi, a kind of two hour long commercial against humanity, engages in a fetishization of the Third World typical* of the Western First World. The film is, in fact, a kind of pornography of poverty for the liberal upper-middle class, in which we can gaze, with real desire, at the regal sashay of an African woman, her starved hips swinging under layers of colorful fabric, or the elegant tilt of an Indian woman's neck, as she balances a basket on her head, or the innocent eyes of a group of children with dirt-crusted faces. Here, we can lament, as we watch the bare feet of a boy running in the dirt that seem to re-evolve into animal feet, sturdy and natural, our own pinched toes, pale and sweating in designer shoes, made, most likely by a boy like this, in a factory, which we have built. For that is, essentially, the meaning of the Hopi word "powaqqatsi," that we, human beings, are devouring ourselves and our earth, destroying it, and the beauty of humanity in the process. And that is no lie; Reggio was rather prescient to speak this theme so strongly in 1988, before the contemporary ravings of An Inconvenient Truth and WALL-E. But must he fall so easily into the trap of the tourist visiting India for the first time? And what answer does he propose? For while the film might incite more avid members of the audience to join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, most will not find solace in mass, conscious suicide.

The film, I think, (the whole trilogy, in fact) is designed as a warning: change your ways, before it becomes too late. There is, toward the end, a "call to prayer," during which the echo of Arabic ululations rings against footage of people meditating, bowing, kissing a wall. Again, the director favors aesthetics over logic, failing to acknowledge that religion is rather deeply connected with the project of colonization, inter-tribal warfare, and all the other cultural boogie men that have put us into the mess in which we find ourselves. But Reggio is clearly not interested in problemetization. And Glass, too, fails us, incorporating "influences" from "world music" in a way that water down his bare-bones aesthetic. Koyaanisqatsi, with its bowel-rattling chanting, rips into our centers and grasps our souls; Powaqqatsi flits around our heads like a too-loud insect experimenting with the Doppler Effect. There is a distinct moment during which Powaqqatsi redeems itself, visually and aurally, past half-way through and beginning with the footage of a moving train, but that is only Koyaanisqatsi retread: we soar over a city's buildings and hear Glass' traditional, clean arpeggios. But then the picture shifts back to the brown bodies beautiful with starvation, the world music theme revives, and the film reverts to its emotionally exhausting incarnation. I can do without.

*You see, I cast the first stone at myself.

Music: The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band at the Blue Note

Though I have always been one for Jazz in general, I've never been one for Big Band in particular, and so was rather pleasantly surprised by the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star lineup at the Blue Note this week. This is mostly thanks to the wicked pealing of the trumpets and a jaw-dropping, never ending, tear-it-up sax solo from Antonio Hart. Leader Slide Hampton gave enough room to individual performers to break things up so that this wasn't any kind of Lawrence Welk soporific (except for perhaps one Monk piece toward the beginning of the set that rather dragged, like an old cat with a too-big belly). Mostly, it was shoulder shaking (me), toe-tapping (my date), and hand drumming (the other person at our table) good stuff.

I have to admit to liking the Roy Hargrove originals better than the original Dizzy composition Things to Come, which I'm certain is something of a cardinal sin; blame it on my youth. Out of sync with that youth, though, is my nostalgia for the upright bass, replaced here by an electric that continued to irk me as too processed, too amplified, and too noisy (as in lacking clarity) amongst the clean sounds of the other instruments (their own cardinal sin, if I dare say so myself). Roberta Gambarini came up to sing on a few pieces, impressing me with her nervous but capable scatting (Was it an off night? Online, I read nothing but raving about her technique, but she felt a bit uncomfortable), and, with a few ballads, providing a not quite necessary break in the hard bop of the set.

Ultimately, I could do without the lounge stuff during live performances, and keep it for quiet nights at home with my books, but there's a crowd to appease, and I suppose some audiences need a rest now and then. Not me, though, I could have listened all night.

Music: Omar Sosa at the Blue Note

Writing about music is hard for me. There is no narrative to grasp hold of, and no imperative, even, for language at all. The better the music is, the harder it is to write about. And the music Wednesday night was great. I might have written before about the old Cafe Babar in San Francisco, where I used to hang out as a kid on Saturday nights, drinking hot chocolate at the bar and playing solitaire while my dad's band practiced in the back room; that's where I learned an appreciation for jazz. The cafe's owner had an absurd mustache, a crowning bald spot over his otherwise bushy gray hair, and the most amazing vinyl collection of jazz I've ever seen; I'd love to get a Fulbright just to sit in his house for a year, digitizing the entire thing for posterity. In any case, I've been listening to jazz since early childhood, and nothing gives me that warm, secure sense some people find in smells and tastes so much as the low loud trill of a trumpet, the clink clink of a piano, and the swish of a brush against a snare. I have the standard albums, Miles Davis Kind of Blue, and the bit more out there Mingus Ah Um, and Keith Jarrett's Coln Concert. But as for anything happening, jazz-wise, these days, I'm clueless. I'd pretty much assumed it was over and done with, having seen one or two crappy shows at Lincoln Center's dedicated Jazz space.

The looks of the Blue Note didn't help to inspire; because of its location (West Third and MacDougal), and its still cover charges, I'd always assumed it was little more than a tourist stop, where Midwestern couples could moon at each other over the atrocious "smooth" jazz before going back to the Hilton to horizontal mambo. Once inside, that fear is confirmed; the walls are paneled with strips of mirror and black sound-proofing; the tables are cheap and set in regimented lines instead of casually scattered; the stage is hung with a tacky black strip of cloth and a big, shining sign that reads "Blue Note" and features their ultra tacky logo of, you got it, a note that is blue. I was there with my mom, who was giddy, having arrived early and gotten to chat with Omar himself, and I was expecting the worst. And then the musicians came on stage, started playing, and totally blew my mind.

I had a great seat, about two feet away from Omar himself, and partially behind him, so that I could see his hands on the piano keys and all of the electrical pedals and samplers he had on the floor. Their music was not the Latin Jazz I had been expecting (for no other reason than the name "Omar Sosa," but a kind of post-Miles Davis fusion, heavy on Sosa's brilliant piano licks, with spoken lyrics in an unfamiliar African language, crazy weird percussion, ambient sampling, and killer trumpet, saxophone, and flute playing by Leandro Saint-Hill (to a person who cannot play one instrument, a man who has mastered more than three (for there were two different kinds of flutes, and two different kinds of saxophones) is beyond amazing), as well as drumming that sounded like rain and an electric bass (although I do always prefer the upright, I suppose this was a better fit). Sosa is a strong leader and the band was perfectly tight; watching their network of constantly shifting glances, warning and encouraging each other, was fascinating, as was the man's energy. Despite his obvious depth of skill and knowledge, the man plays with the fresh excitement of a child, a huge, open grin on his face, as if he can't believe how well things are going.

Sosa invited another musician into the mix, whose name I infuriatingly missed, who comes out of a completely different tradition (ancient American folky bluegrass, as in pre-Civil War), but who managed to blend with the group for a few fascinating numbers; he played banjo (for which I am a sucker), fiddle, and sang with deep, twangy mountain-man voice, reading lyrics from what seemed to be a pocket-sized bible, brown and worn with a hundred years' use.

I wished the set had been longer; I didn't really want the music to ever end, but the cocktail waitresses brought checks, interrupting the last number, because everything at the Blue Note, great music aside, works like money-making clockwork, and the tables needed to be cleared for the next shift of cover-charge paying people. That place must rake in a fortune, filling up fresh three times each night. But I can forgive them, if only for introducing me to Omar Sosa, who is, basically, amazing.

Music: Beach House and The Papercuts

I found out about Beach House last year, when they opened up for The Clientele. I don't love The Clientele (in fact, I ended up leaving in the middle of their set), but had gone along with a few friends who did. Beach House turned out to be the delicious creme filling in the middle of two otherwise dry cookies (I don't remember the name of the first act, but they were fairly forgettable): sweet and dreamy and viscous. A good-looking but shy bearded man played a sedated twangy surf guitar (think Sleepwalk by The Ventures) while an even more shy girl sat at a keyboard (organ? I dunno; clearly I am no expert), perpendicular to the stage, slouched over with her long hair hung all over her face. She played slowly and moaned sweetly into the microphone. That was it. But it was magical. My friend bought the CD and I listened to it again and again.

This year they came back, but it seems that instead of taking opiates, singer Victoria Legrand dropped some acid. Or maybe a year of touring and good reviews has helped her self-esteem. Either way, she. . . still needs to work on her performance strategy. This time, her keyboard was set up to face the audience, and the techs had her bathed in light (leaving guitarist Alex Scally in the dark; perhaps he's still shy). She talked a bit in between songs, but instead of coming off as friendly or inspiring or sweet, she just came off as a wee bit crazy and somewhat annoying. As the show wore on, she began to gesture strangely with her fingers in the air in front of her face (keyboards and hand gestures go together about as well as ice cream and soy sauce, by the way). She also amped her singing up a bit, so that at times, she growled instead of moaned (think Stevie Nicks versus Patti Smith. . . of course no great insult to compare her to either).

Of course, the expectation principle was strongly in effect here (I most enjoyed Beach House when I had no expectations), so I won't say anything dreadful, and I will probably still procure their new album. But I might not go out of my way to see them live again. As other people have argued, their quiet, dreamy sounds are more appropriate for intimate late nights in small spaces, and the mood they invoke is not one that you want to share with 500 drunken strangers pushing and shoving and spilling beer on your shoes. Also, you probably need to by lying down to best appreciate their sound, not standing for three hours waiting for them to come on, and then standing for another forty minutes while they play, so that all you can think about is how much you need to stretch your lower back. That's just distracting.

As for The Papercuts, their music is fairly pleasant, if a bit repetitive and lacking in virtuosity. Singer/songwriter Jason Quever has a thin warbly voice and seems to be yet another casualty of the Thom Yorke school of mumbledom (mind you, Thom Yorke is one of my top five favorite people in the history of the world ever, but that doesn't mean his greatness can be appropriated by cribbing his style, although performer after performer has tried (the singers of Palo Alto and Muse come to mind immediately). It took him quite some time to warm up, and even then, he was reaching for notes he couldn't even hit with a bow and arrow pointed at the sky. The bassist is going to develop horrible carpal tunnel if he doesn't learn how to hold his instrument properly.

Music: Art Brut and The Hold Steady

Art Brut, whose first album (which is completely brilliant (and hilarious)) came out last year, opened for The Hold Steady last week. Some other English guys who call themselves the 1990s opened for Art Brut. The show was at Terminal 5, the only decent venue conveniently located within walking distance from my house, and I went, even though I had no clue who or what The Hold Steady was; I like Art Brut enough that I didn't really care.

I'm not one of those people who goes to shows every week. I clearly don't know anything about the local music scene, since I hadn't ever heard of The Hold Steady (they are, apparently, from Brooklyn, and epitomize, as I would find out, everything that I can't stand about Brooklyn. . . or should I say "new" Brooklyn, that is, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope; not Sheepshead Bay, Bed Stuy, Bay Ridge). The performances I am accustomed to attending have assigned seating (or at least seating) and generally well-mannered audiences. And even when I was a teenager who loitered in malls after school, I wasn't an ill-behaved one. The worst I ever did was shred food court napkins into tiny pieces and leave them like miniature haystacks on the plastic table tops, with the excuse to my cohorts that I was "creating jobs." (These days I am fanatical about cleaning up after myself in public places, and have gone so far as to insist on taking my own trash out of Starbucks when the employee was standing right there, trying to take it from me.)

Digressions aside, this was an 18-and-over show, and, while I want to respect the rights of young people to see their favorite bands perform live (I recall listening to one of my closest friends--a real indie aficionado--bitch for three years about how she couldn't ever attend the 21-and-over venues in Seattle, where she was going to college), I expect them to behave better than barn animals. Aside from the fan-boys who knew every lyric to every song (unheard of 1990s included) and the girls with snub noses, ironed hair, and autographed band t-shirts squealing in my ear (my friend gave me earplugs, but I needed them more for the audience than the bands), the crowd was basically tolerable.

The 1990s were pretty dismal (a guitarist who sang lead, a bass player, and a drummer who also sang, but clearly whose role in the band was to look hot, hence his placement front and center, and his inability to sing and play drums fast at the same time). When Art Brut came on, we all pepped up a bit, and did some minor jumping around (Art Brut is like, basic post-punk rocking with amusing, ironic, semi-intellectual, faux naive lyrics). They were pretty entertaining performers, if somewhat over-styled, but the propelling force of the music--the lyrics--were generally uninterpretable due to acoustics, audience participation, etc., making the live show a lot less enjoyable than listening to the album on headphones. Songs from the new album, which I don't have, and haven't heard, did not compel me to buy it or hear it.

Along with all of the teeny-boppers, there were plenty of classic indie rockers in the crowd: men in their fifties with glasses, grayed temples, and t-shirt clad foodie bellies. In the break between Art Brut and The Hold Steady, a young asshat (technical term) wormed his way to the front and center (where my friend and I were standing, perhaps three feet from the stage), and began verbally harassing a bald, bespectacled music fan, for "being too old for a rock concert" and the like (the kid not realizing that this guy lived through the bloody creation of rock as we know it, and even the birth of indie rock as we know it). When the band came on stage, the asshat began to jump and push, creating a mosh pit (to which creation the crowd was amenable). I remained put through one song, sustaining minor injuries, and then decided to leave. I am too attached to my body, plus the band was awful. Imagine a group of white, aging hipsters, the leader of whom looks like a cross between George Costanza and Newman, pretending to be hardcore. That, my friends, is Brooklyn, and its representative rock band, The Hold Steady. Give me Seattle or give me silence.

Music: Blonde Redhead

Italian twins plus a Japanese ex-art student? Hot. Turns out they're massively talented, too. Last night's show at Webster Hall blew my mind; we got there super early and consequently were only separated from the stage by one row of people. When Kazu stomped out on stage in ankle boots and short shorts and proceeded to stand right in front of me for the whole concert, I almost got a hard-on. She is beyond supermodel hot. Just look at her legs:

Now imagine the bottom half of them. So not only is she graced with a killer hot body, and an amazing soft, sweet, high voice, and some guitar and keys skills, and mad dancing abilities, but she is tender, too. Toward the beginning of the show, she saw a cluster of us holding our ears during parts of a song and at the end asked if it was too loud (there was drum machine that was cranked so that you not only felt the base vibrating through your solarplexus, but also a distinct pain in your ear that you felt compelled to protect yourself against), patiently interpreting our shouted remarks until diagnosing the problem and turning down the offending base.

The whole band, though, was incredibly generous and gracious; they did two encores, playing in total almost two hours, and though it was clear that they were exhausted, they kept going deeper and deeper into their zone. Kazu and Amadeo have an intense closeness and chemistry on stage, often playing face to face so that they're almost touching, and once she even reached out and pulled his hair in a tough, loving gesture of expression, and then she kicked him away. Most of the songs they played were off of the new album, 23, and their penultimate (my favorite) Misery is a Butterfly, including the title track and the great song Equus (which Kazu sang, more or less, to the seated horse sculpture they had on stage behind her keyboard, which she used throughout the show as a bench, caressing it's head and ears.)

Their opening act rocked hard enough to deserve a mention as well. The Fields are four British indie rock guys and a white-blonde Icelandic fraulein at the keyboards, and based on their hard-core rockage, I will definitely be checking out their debut album Everything Last Winter.