THE PLACE: Citarella Market
THE PLAYERS: A male employee speaking to a female employee
MALE EMPLOYEE: Oh, I got a Prince Albert while you were away.
THE PLACE: Citarella Market
THE PLAYERS: A male employee speaking to a female employee
MALE EMPLOYEE: Oh, I got a Prince Albert while you were away.
May 10, 2020 in Food and Drink, New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
THE TIME: 8:20 on a balmy summer Sunday evening
THE PLACE: Bleecker Street
THE PLAYERS: A twentysomething guy and his friend
TWENTYSOMETHING GUY: That's because, at the end of the day, you're the one who gets up every morning and puts his pants on.
May 10, 2020 in New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
THE PLACE: the L train
THE PLAYERS: two hipsters
HIPSTER #1: "Have you ever seen Steven Tyler's high school yearbook photo? It looks like someone put a wig on a wild trout."
May 10, 2020 in Music, New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
THE TIME: 6:20 on a Sunday afternoon in August 2015
THE PLACE: the downtown 6 train
THE PLAYERS:
A middle-aged gentleman with a strong Long Island accent
A middle-aged lady with a strong Long Island accent
GENTLEMAN: Didn't your son beat up Cathy Lee Gifford's son?
LADY: Yeah, he was a little pussy.
May 10, 2020 in New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
THE PLACE: an eastbound LIRR train.
THE PLAYERS: two early-twentysomething dudes in the seat in front of me.
DUDE #1: That's why you read Pitchfork and live your life ironically.
DUDE #2: I don't do anything ironically.
DUDE #1: Oh really? Then why are you wearing those shorts?
May 10, 2020 in New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
One fortuitous evening in the autumn of 2000, I walked into the Bowery Ballroom in New York. I was there to see Trans Am. But I happened to get there early and caught the entire set by the opening band. They were all pallid, malnourished guys in black turtlenecks; they looked like characters in a Beckett play or a painting by Egon Schiele. And they were amazing: pounding, odd meter rhythms that would be the envy of any prog band, but with a brutal sense of sex and violence that very few prog bands ever attain. Savage and brainy, they grooved so hard that you could dance to even the craziest rhythms.
They would play motifs, as in jazz, then riff on variations on them, then move on to a new section. They were listening to each other like jazz musicians, and with the extraordinary technique of jazz musicians too, but with the incantatory repetition of the so-called (I hate this term) krautrock bands. Those German bands called their music "motorik" — expressly designed for driving — but I'm not sure you'd want to drive to this music. You would wind up zooming off a cliff and hitting the ground in an earth-shaking fireball.
It was freakin' intense. I was blown away.
Afterwards, between sets, they were hanging out in the audience, in front of the stage. I really wanted to know who they were. But I also didn't want to know who they were — I kind of didn't want to hear them speak, because I thought it might ruin the spell. I couldn't even figure out whether they were American or not, because they didn't sing, or even say anything between songs. They seemed maybe Eastern European, but only because they were so pale and dissipated-looking. But curiosity got the better of me and I worked up the nerve to walk up to one of them. "Man, you guys are great! Do you have a mailing list? When's your next gig?" And the guy said very flatly, in straightforward American-accented English, "That was our last show." There must be a German word for feeling both lucky and sad.
I had the foresight to buy the CD they were selling at the show, which was great because in the months that followed I was able to find very little information about the band, and it was nearly impossible to buy any of their records. They had no website, there was no current contact information on their CD, and there had been very little written about them. So I had to satisfy myself with the memory of that mind-roasting set, and until now one single CD would have to be my souvenir.
Later, a couple of them formed the Psychic Paramount, who are jaw-droppingly amazing in a different way, and I have since made it my business to see them whenever I can.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: always catch the opening band.
Laddio Bolocko's Live and Unreleased 1997-2000 is available on the redoubtable No Quarter Records.
December 04, 2015 in Music, New York | Permalink | Comments (0)
The time: 9:20 on a balmy summer evening
The place: The Prospect Park Bandshell
The players: a hefty thirtyish guy and his apparent girlfriend
Hefty guy: I have to make sure Facebook can't access my photos on my phone
Apparent girlfriend: Why?
Hefty guy: Because I don't want my dick-pics to go up there by accident.
August 03, 2013 in New York, Overheard, Photography, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Brooklyn, Celebrate Brooklyn, Facebook, Prospect Park
September 04, 2012 in Music, Photography, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (5)
Tags: Azerrad, Breakup Song, cellphone, Deerhoof, DIY, Ed Rodriguez, Greenpoint, Greg Saunier, John Dieterich, punk, Satomi Matsuzaki
The time: A Friday morning in spring
The place: University Place in Manhattan
The players: Two young men walking down the street
Young Man #1 suddenly veers toward a newsstand which displays a copy of the New York Post, whose cover prominently features a buxom blonde.
Young Man #1: Man, why can't I ever get with these kind of bitches?
Young Man #2: Because you call them bitches.
May 06, 2012 in New York, Overheard | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: New York, Overheard, street
When Brian Eno made his classic semi-ambient 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, he probably didn't mean it as a requiem. But that's how it came off Friday night at a live performance of the album at the Winter Garden in New York City.
Composed for a documentary about the Apollo space program, the music was originally recorded by Eno on a variety of heavily processed synths, accompanied by his protégé, pedal steel virtuoso/guitarist Daniel Lanois, and Eno's brother Roger. This time there was a core band of pedal steel guitar, electric guitar, electric bass, violin, and a vintage Yamaha DX7 synthesizer (which host John Schaefer pointed out now qualifies as a historical instrument). As a large screen behind the band displayed stock footage of space missions and lunar landings, some guest guitarists — David Torn, Noveller, and Tortoise's Jeff Parker — wandered in and out of the soundscape.
The vast, reverberating Winter Garden is tailor-made for long, slow tones such as these, and the music produced apt sensations of weightlessness, distance and stasis. The accompanying footage of spacewalks and booster rockets looks quaint now, and although the musicians were funneling their instruments through what must have been a battery of digital effects, the gesture of painstakingly rendering this synthetic music by hand seemed an appropriate way to evoke a thoroughly bygone era.
Apparently some of the Apollo astronauts brought along Buck Owens and Merle Haggard tapes, hence the pedal steel, played by session ace and longtime Dylan sideman Larry Campbell. But the instrument's distinctly country flavor also recalls those Texan accents from Mission Control and the uniquely American nature of the achievement. More profoundly, it conveys a sense of, appropriately enough, wide open spaces, the frontier. As that quintessential rural American sound brushed up against the otherworldly, Campbell's pedal steel softly sang like a space cowboy.
But that night, the pedal steel, along with the Apollo footage, seemed even more poignant than it usually does. The last manned lunar landing was in 1972. Well over half the current population of the United States was born after that, and has no memory of people walking on the moon, or of any really colossal feat of human exploration. The Apollo music, with its long, tolling waves of sound, became an elegy for the ghosts of American astronauts.