Caine Blog

Last night I fell down a hipster rabbit hole.  I’d paid five dollars for this concert, but upon entering the venue I was told the show was free and that I could have my money back.  Awesome!  It only grew stranger.  Why was a midget Kiss cover band opening for two Brooklyn bands du jour?  Why was the concert free?  Where was everybody? Why were there approximately twenty people at a free show that would’ve been packed anywhere else?

I don’t know, but the Mini-Kiss act was basically karaoke, Oxford Collapse was great, and Ninjasonik was kicked offstage after three songs on account of excessive horseplay.  By that point, there were ten members in the audience, an enormous, empty dance floor, and a lot of pissed off staff members (see bottom photo).  Best show ever.

I have no idea why I still have my current wireless router, as it’s a piece of shit.  I also have no idea why I bought it in the first place, because even at the time I purchased it - nearly a year ago - I knew that D-Link was the pits.

Today I opted against D-Link’s “premium customer service,” a gigantic, trimodal oxymoron that involves shelling out $30 just to speak to a human being about my expensive broken crap, and now I can’t set my router password thus allowing everyone on the block to use my internet!  And slow it down!

Somewhere, a tree grows in Brooklyn, but I know it’s not here.  Not tonight.

“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.