Caine Blog

“I don’t like to use the word payback,” said Mr. Simpson’s lawyer, Yale Galanter. “I can tell you from the beginning my biggest concern was whether or not the jury would be able to separate their very strong feelings about Mr. Simpson and judge him fairly and honestly.”

-New York Times, 10/4/08

Went home for a few days, and during that time had a chance to see some wicked condo-fication, of the same sort that’s going  on here in Brooklyn.  Or was going on, I should say.  The New York Times Magazine real estate supplement just came out, and actually published a piece about the DC market, focusing there on the condo to rental conversions going on out by U Street and 14th Street.  When I was growing up around DC, the U Street Corridor was always sorta dodgy; it’s where the rock clubs were, yeah, but it was depressed, a shadow of its heyday as D.C.’s Harlem.

Now?  Condos: all glass, as tall as the law allows, lobbies furnished with chain tapas bars and mega-thai restaurants.  But also: cool design shops, a few nice cafes (I went to Saint Ex on 14th Street and enjoyed it - their menu is reminiscent of DuMont’s), and a multiracial, fun-seeking crowd.  A mixed bag, as all such demographic (and infrastructural) changes inevitably are.

Also went to the new “cool spot,” the H Street corridor in Northeast DC.  It was a bummer - a row of empty bars on a forlorn street - and reminded me of, say, Bushwick at its most faraway and desolate.  Glad to be back here.

An odd night, right before the rain.

A really excellent show - like watching a bunch of hippies just let it all hang out.  Precise playing, a good selection of songs culled from the past two albums (although where was “No Satisfaction”?), and an appreciative crowd.  One of the audience members in the front row raised his hands to the sky as if in prayer, and ordinarily this would have been a kind of WTF moment but it made total sense last night.

Well damn.  I was looking forward to this show for a lot of reasons, mostly because of all the hype about Psychedelic Horseshit (above), and the fact is that it simply didn’t provide.  All three bands that I saw - less so with Eat Skull, more so with Psychedelic Horseshit - severely tested the notion of Death By Audio as a place for more experimental rock, punk, and noise, and fostered another, less welcome conjecture: that DBA is where bands play when they want to rock out without practicing, and not have anyone call their bluff.

Seriously, there was mediocrity in the house two nights ago.  Drunkdriver played a set of noisy thrash, the gimmick being a manic singer going crazy and a wild, feedback-loving female guitarist.  It was like…I don’t know…The Locust, but somehow less interesting.  Psychedelic Horseshit were downright dismal.  They sounded tired: the keyboard could’ve been straight from the Unicorns circa 2004, the guitar work was lazy (and not in an endearing way, mind you…just lazy), and the whole effect was a band playing to an audience too enamored by the scene to notice some very obvious shortcomings.  Eat Skull was okay, though: I’ll need to give their recordings some time, but they had their shit together.

Went to JFK yesterday for the unveiling of the new JetBlue terminal.  To wit:

Quite the ceremony yesterday at JFK Airport, with JetBlue rolling out their renovated terminal to employees, press, special guests, and all manner of dignitaries. Bloomberg was on hand, as were Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, a number of congressmen and senators, Port Authority execs, and—somewhat oddly—the Premier of Bermuda. The press conference began with an honor guard, a pledge of allegiance and a recitation of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and ended with a drum corps and a brief performance by the Rockettes.

Read the whole thing and see more pics here.

Pea green was cheap.

It’s been a couple months since volume 1, and I’ve been to far more bars than I have space to discuss.  The highlights:

Hotel Delmano: Williamsburg’s most expensive bar has quickly become a favorite.  Sure, ordering a $13 drink isn’t something you want to do all day, every day, but the quality of the mixed drinks, the carefully curated ambiance (courtesy of the Union Pool partners), and the vague promise of exclusivity (sometimes you have to wait outside for a couple of minutes!) makes this spot pretty much perfect.

Gemma (at the Bowery Hotel) is kind of a cool spot, expensive drinks but that’s how it goes.  Love the pseudo-cabana seating configuration in the garden.

Iona is a good bar, nothing too special.  Whatevs.  Running a successful bar off of Bedford Avenue is about as complicated as taking a piss.

Spuyten Duyvil has a great backyard and a renowned beer selection, although their draught lineup pales in comparison to Barcade.  It gets way crowded, and a couple of nights ago I was walking home and overheard two dorky kids in front of me as they headed there.  They were wearing jeans and untucked white button down shirts (which means nerdy avaricious kids!), and here’s what they were saying:

“Do you know where this bar is?”

“Yeah, I think so, I never come to Williamsburg.”

“Cool, tell me about the finance/deals/investing you’re doing blah blah blah.”

“We’re making shit tons of money, woo hoo!  Yay.”

And so on.  This sort of thing is how you know “the secret’s out,” by the way.

Just finished John Darnielle’s new book Master of Reality, and wow - what a potent little volume.  It’s certainly the most formally adventurous of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series; most of the authors in the series go about profiling their given album by way of Behind The Music-style rockumenting, with plenty of first-person pontification thrown in the mix for good measure.  “Tension was running high in the studio, and the band was fracturing at the seams…” etc.  It’s a pleasure to see Darnielle choose a different vessel - the diary of a troubled adolescent - in order to tell his story, and it’s an even greater joy to find out that, damn, Darnielle can write.  But you probably already knew that. [Read more →