The City Mouse

                 Christian, one-time child actor and retired MTA employee, gazes longingly at all the young kids waiting for the L train. Oh, how youth is wasted on the young, he says to no one in particular. It is Friday night, they’re all probably going to their cool parties to do cool things, things I can’t do anymore.

                I tried my best. My kids moved out, found new places to live. Yet here I am, still living in the Big Apple, wondering why I’m doing it. Williamsburg wasn’t always like this, it used to be tougher. Now Duane Reade’s moving in. That park hosts free Flaming Lips and other relevant bands, but I don’t listen to that stuff. Nah, back in my day I listened to progressive rock and hippie freak-out music. 

                That’s how I met my wife. Man, we have to get out of New York. Move to somewhere warmer, somewhere that won’t tax my city pension. Hold on, I have to scurry underneath the platform, the train’s coming. Look at that, a cute out of town person pointed at me. I feel important, appreciated, terrifying for no obvious reason. 

                All my kids moved down south. Maybe I need to do that, go to North Carolina; they wouldn’t tax my pension there. Some of our friends, people I worked with at the MTA say North Carolina’s great, especially Asheville. The jerks I worked with went to Florida, so I can’t go there. I don’t want to be an old New York mouse going down to Florida’s, that’s like where New York mice go to die. Either that way or freaked out people throwing shoes at them, shrieking hysterically.

                 We have to get the rat hole in order, get it on the market. Yeah, the housing market isn’t doing that well, but we have an ideal location. That counts for a lot, perhaps some young yuppie couple into yoga or Whole Foods might like it. I don’t know, I eat most garbage people drop on the ground, but that’s not for all mice. Some prefer eating only organic food found on the ground. Each Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review section, looking for books about mice, but there are usually gross misrepresentations of what we’re all about. I mean, we’re not monsters. If anything, humans are monsters. They are bigger, louder, and much more intoxicated, at least around these parts.

                Bummer, I have to help move all this stuff into storage. We got a sweet spot to store our stuff to make the rat hole appear bigger. I spent the past week repainting it to an inoffensive shade of white and beige. Neither one of us knows what’s trendy right now, so we went with a full wood look. Sadly we don’t have brick exposures or hardwood floors, those things are hot right now.

                 Guess I’ll steal some of the leftover bits of pizza the kids dropped. It is time to get some sleep, watch repeats of stand-up routines on Comedy Central and dream of the warm pure North Carolina sun. A rat can dream, a rat can dream.

Out Hud – S.T.R.E.E.T D.A.D 8.4

Really, I have no idea what this acronym stands for. Nor do these California dance rockers offer any sort of insight either. But since (!!!) came out of this, you should probably realize that it is pretty good.

I prefer this album to their second one for a few reasons. For one, the best song on “Let Us Never Speak of It again” kind of harked back to the weird fests of this one (Dear Mr. Bush, There Are over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 for Music. Fuck You, Out Hud). Plus, this one doesn’t feel the need to win you over with coy lyrics and other cutesy effects.

Actually, Street Dad has a large amount of instability running through its vein. The song structures in this album are unsound, which is truly a delight once dealing with dance music. Most dance music focuses purely on groove, and tends to avoid these strange sidesteps.  “Dad, There's A Little Phrase Called Too Much Information”. Oh yes, that song sort of sums up their purpose. Grooves are built up only to be overwhelmed with additional blasts of over-distorted drum kicks.

Plus, there is that cello. Here they display it prominently. It adds to the groove, making it almost classical dance music, almost. “Hair Dude, You're Stepping on My Mystique” shows off some very nice cello playing, along with their aforementioned love of instability.

“The L Train Is a Swell Train and I Don’t Want to Hear You Indies Complain” is the best track on here. First, it is kind of a funny name, especially considering how the L train has become the gentrification express rather than something to be worried about. But there’s everything they are good at here: abrupt shifts, actual emotion, grooves, cello, etc. It is amazing how much inspiration they drew for this from the awkwardly named great project "Peter Gordon and the Love of Life Orchestra", right down to the length and classical influences.

I sort of wish that Out Hud continued with their project, but I know that (!!!) gained too much prominence for them to ignore that avenue. Also, many of these players ended up being in the even cooler LCD Soundsystem. Oh well, I guess we still have this to remember them by.

The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death

Mere words can’t express the utmost joy I had reading this as a kid. For whatever reason, this hit all the right spots for me as a child. Bizarre situations, random geographical references (I’m a sucker for any sort of nonsensical obscure geography reference), and just general hipster shit all baked into a delicious meal. 

Of course, the book came out (1982) long before hipsters were even a thing (Vice Magazine hadn’t been created, Williamsburg still was a scary place). That is what makes it work even decades later. Parts of this book, as I look it over now, seem almost like a word-for-word summary of what later happened in my life. Like the main characters, I “snarked out” and would just randomly hang out late at night, hoping for something interesting to happen. It never did, but that didn’t stop me. 

Daniel Pinkwater wrote this in some sort of silly craze. Every bit of it is positively absurd, right down the town name (Baconburg) and a high school named after Genghis Khan. Perhaps it is this sort of weird naming scheme that made me later receptive to Pynchon’s penchant for using hopelessly unrealistic names.

The kids are bored. Life is boring. They try to make it interesting. Orangutans are involved, as is an evil scientist, Iceland, and the entire profession of realtors. All of these elements are combined in such an effortless but instantly funny way. I know that a criticism of a lot of writing is how many references authors like to throw off, but here it feels genuine, not forced at all.

Before I read this book, I had been introduced to lamer variations on this theme. The Wayside School series, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle all had tried and sort of missed their mark with me (though Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle did have moments I enjoyed). What happened with this one was truly wonderful. I think this was the first piece of literature I had really “LOLED” or “laughed out loud” at. Displaying a group of intelligent bored students seemed natural to a kid who felt very out of place growing up.

 My parents gave it to me as a way of cheering me up. Around this time, I became pretty disillusioned. Dreams of designing cars started to recede far into the distance. Every year cars began to look more and more like bubbles with wheels. I wanted to create these beautiful contraptions that people could not only drive, but show a bit of pride in. Slowly but surely, my hope of bringing beauty to functionally got crushed as I saw more and more of these ugly things, these minivans, subcompacts, etc. Car design fell by the wayside as people began to accept the fact that function couldn’t coexist with style. 

After reading this I really started writing a little bit, like a door had been opened for me. Something else existed that I could actually try to affect for the good. Most of this writing is long gone, but ever since I read this little gem of a story, I go through various fits of inspiration where I’ll simply write hoping that perhaps this time it’ll get a little better. Thankfully literature hasn’t headed the same way to mass conformity the way car design has. 

If you want to give your kid a little bit of hope as their artistic chances feel like they are vanishing away, I couldn’t think of a better thing to give them than this inspiration.

Does New Jersey get New York’s “Sloppy Seconds” (tour-wise)?

New Jersey is a small plot of land adjacent to New York City and the surrounding area. Originally settled by well-to-do Dutchmen, it decreased in importance as New York began its ascent into the upper stratosphere of cool. Meanwhile, New Jersey continued being more relevant than Delaware, that combination hick/pollution state.

Bands know this. Every time a major band tours, they always hit New York. Hell, they even might do a few shows upstate. People from New Jersey know this as they have to take the colossal failure known as New Jersey transit, transferring multiple times before they arrive in Penn Station, before taking yet another train to Brooklyn.

Despite their obvious limitations, New Jersey can attract touring bands in a large variety of ways:

1.       When you arrive into Newark airport, you see a stop for a “Penn Station” only it isn’t actually in New York but in the industrial armpit known as Newark. Bands who have English as a second or third language thus get fooled into playing for the hipsters in the area who were too poor to afford New York

2.       Newark airport looms large over this one as well. As you wait for your flight out of Newark, you can decide to play a small show in Hoboken. Hoboken is kind of like Williamsburg except older and with Hipsters having evolved into the next phases of life, both cool dads and yuppies. That way you can make enough to afford one of those in flight sandwiches as you head towards a hipper city like Austin or Portland.

3.       This is called the “Mom and Pop” theory. Like Long Island, many people in New Jersey immediately realized how boring and lame their state was. Upon their graduation from High School, they applied to whatever New York based school they could and never looked back. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame did this, as did countless others. Eventually you’re forced to at least keep in touch with those who spawned you. Thus, a short stop to collect money and affection makes economic sense. Call it the “parents show”.

4.       You are on the New Jersey turnpike and understand why truck drivers get paid more for driving up North (this is assuming you’re a band outside the Northeast area). Slowly but surely you lose your mind and get hopelessly. Eventually you find an ultra-shitty (and actually sort of creepy) small bar and are forced to play in order to obtain free beer and Buffalo wings. Your life is at an all-time low. The reverse works for bands coming from up north going to PA, etc.

So New Jersey doesn’t offer any coolness of its own. Instead, it holds this “mooching pattern” as a way of siphoning off the cool, kind of like how you used to impress others by stealing your cooler sibling’s clothing. You didn’t know it was cool; you had just run out of things to wear and failed to understand basic laundry etiquette.

Hopefully at some point New Jersey evolves beyond this wretched cultural starvation. Perhaps someday bands really will want to tour there, instead of just being sort of stuck there waiting for their plane or getting horribly lost.