Orderly Noise

"Alas, poor Yorick, thine music sucks." Text message from the BF halfway through last night's noise rock concert/reality show taping at the Knitting Factory.

This is going to be a bit heavy on the vitriol.

You don't realize how well the subway system works in New York City until it breaks down. Last night, I took a bus, a train, another train, and another bus to get from my apartment to the Knitting Factory. It took me an hour and a half to go four miles because the F and G trains were out of service, but in different places, with an uneven outness overlap, which can be described by the mathematical theorum: F^G=F(c*B)/G(V-2c) where B is Brooklyn, c is the speed of light, and V is a wandering variable equal to the number of fuck-yous coming out of the MTA at any given moment.

It's not even a journey worth making. The Knitting Factory is in that hipster shithole, Williamsburg. I know Williamsburg is considered one of the better neighborhoods in Brooklyn--and considering that I lived in Bedstuy for a year, I'm not in any position to judge shitholes--but I look at all those shingle-covered houses and chic pubs and ironic beards, and it just makes me what to punch someone in the throat. The only way you can get me to go to Williamsburg is if you pay me.

And the Village Voice was paying me to go, so I went--and walked right into an MTV reality show. That's not a euphemism for getting felt up by the lighting guy in the vestibule. An MTV camera crew was actually there shooting footage for this reality show starring a Pratt student. The network had bribed a bunch of people with the promise of a free concert to come to the Knitting Factory so that it looked like their Star was attending a hot, sold-out event. They shuffled these extras around to heighten the illusion of a packed house, which made me laugh, because there were actually less people there than usual.

Yes, reality shows are staged. Sorry if anyone's world just shattered to pieces around them. You can go cry under a shelf in the bathroom now. I'll wait.

The cameras made it really difficult for me and the other Street Teamsters to do our thing because we didn't want to get in the shots. My life is difficult enough without having to explain a split-second MTV reality show appearance to my friends and family. Plus, it's difficult for me to get into my perky saleswoman persona when I'm being devoured by pity for the subject of a reality show. The Star stopped by our table to sign up for Voice email alerts and get a free mustache, and even though I knew that she'd made the choice and probably actively scrambled for her role on the show, I couldn't help but think that nobody deserves this. To be followed by five cameras when you're hanging around the club--knowing that everyone else in the room is only there to fill in the blanks of your fake life--being constantly surrounded by seething film school graduates who have shelved their dreams of documenting elephant migrations and natural disasters in developing countries because the only work they could get was on an MTV reality show--ugh, the existential angst of the situation was so intense I nearly conceived of a masters thesis in media alienation.

I probably would have enrolled myself in graduate school via my partner's iPhone right then and there if the music hadn't been sucking my will to live. Music at the Knitting Factory has never exactly blown me away with its genius and originality, but my g-d, at least it was never four sets of noise rock before now. I wanted to stand up on my stool and scream, "It's just noise! It's just orderly noise!" That's all it is, amelodic, atonal screaming and grunting and pounding, the soundtrack to Hell, and not the good kind of Hell in Dante's "Inferno," with Florentine artists and Roman poets. More like the music from the Hell of Upside Down Stupid People, where the only food is honey flavored ham jerky, and flaming drops of Mountain Dew and Zima rain down every day at six, just in time for "Jackass" reruns. That Hell.

Three hours was enough of that for me. I pleaded sickness and ran screaming into the night, where I threw myself into a yellow cab because the thought of struggling through another hour-long round of bus-train-bus-train at midnight in Brooklyn was just too much. So half of my paycheck from that evening went to cab fare, leaving me with barely enough left over to do my laundry.

Here's hoping Monday night's Village Voice Off Broadway Awards Ceremony doesn't leave just a huge, gaping wound in my soul.

Mustaches at the Knitting Factory

On Saturday night, it was back to the Knitting Factory for another round of Street Teamstering. We've been here before, remember? With the silly putty and the indie rock and the sound check that absolutely WAS NOT part of the band's set? I'm more experienced this time around. To preserve the thin shreds of dignity I have left (trust me, they're there), I never clap at the end of songs now. Ever. I've decided that the Knitting Factory does not, in fact, have concerts, just three hour-long sound checks, none of which are worthy of my applause.

The Knitting Factory is now part of the Village Voice's regular Street Team rotation, so they generously bequeathed us a table and some chairs in the corner by the band merchandise booths. It's always better to have a table between me and the general public (f**k you, Electric Zoo). And the Voice bequeathed us a proper photographer, with a camera the size of her head, to wander through the crowd and take pictures of hipsters with mustaches. The mustaches are part of the Street Team's new, bold initiative to lure people to our social networking websites via paper facial hair. One side of the mustache is a mustache; the other side is a business card with our Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LikeMe addresses. Once a week, our Facebook page posts a Mustache of the Week picture, and while I think I'm excluded from the contest because I work there, how awesome is my mustache lei?

This is how an ordinary Voice event should be: good seating, helpful comrades, mustasches, and inoffensive lilting rock.

Speaking of which, I'm a little disappointed in the New York music scene. I've been on the Street Team for just about a year now, and most of the events I've attended with them are concerts and music gigs, so I think it's fair to say that I get around. Occasionally, I hear something I like, but most of the time, the music is merely tolerable. Not once have I heard something that I love. It's both surprising and sad, because New York is to musicians what Paris is to depressed poets, or Tokyo is to disaffected cosplay lovers (I scored high on the analogies section of my SATs).

The BF and I were discussing this, because he doesn't think anything musically interesting happened after 1990 except Weird Al and I haven't been pleased with any new music since 2005 (Gorillaz, Demon Days). We decided that modern music--HUGE sweeping generalization to follow--is brittle and clear, like it's made out of plastic and glass. The indie music I hear at the Knitting Factory is a perfect example. It's somewhat rock n roll-ish, but blander and prettier, like someone drained the pulp out and left a see-through frozen sculpture behind. But the music of GenX, to make another sweeping generalization, was like raw red meat. It had substance, a heft and a squishiness you could wrap your fingers around. You could really gnaw on it, or throw it against a wall and hear it go splat without worrying that it was going to shatter.

I know that there's got to be really good music fomenting somewhere in this damn city, like I know there's got to be life on other planets in the universe: it's just statistically probable. On the other hand, I've never been anywhere else in the world where people don't dance when they see live music, so maybe my statistics are wrong. Seriously, concert-goers in New York don't dance. It was illegal for many years to dance in bars and clubs--something about caberet licenses, but really just an excuse for cops to close a place down if there was too much drug-taking and gay people. We're talking a few generations of New Yorkers going out and not dancing to live music. They've forgotten how. They all just stand in front of the stage and stare at the musicians, not even swaying a little (which has got to be unnerving for the musicians). Again, sweeping generalization, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. And the not-dancing has got to affect how New Yorkers feel about music. Not dancing produces a demand for non-dancable music, and a prevelance of non-dancable music leads further and further away from truly rocking out.

Please, everyone I know in the Inland Northwest, come to New York and teach them how to dance again. If they learn how to dance, they'll start demanding music they can dance to. Someone's got to break the cycle!

The Knitting Factory

If this place had anything to do with actual knitting, my ears wouldn't be ringing this morning with the echoes of indie rock. Just another evening in the glamorous life of a Village Voice Street Teamster.

I love live music. My Daddio is a blues musician and I've been hanging out in bars and helping him unload equipment since I was twelve. The smell of spilled beer and cigarette smoke in a dank, dimly lit bar makes me go warm and fuzzy inside. And the Knitting Factory, in Williamsburg, about fits this description, even though to smell the cigarettes, you have to get right up to the bricks and sniff deep, because nobody smokes inside anymore. I guess the Knitting Factory is some kind of New York music scene institution. They've got old music posters with David Bowie and the Ramones posted in the vestibule, so that's got to mean something. Whenever I stumble into some "famous" place like this in the city, I feel like I'm running into someone I've met so often that I should remember their name, but can't, so I fake recognition. "Oh, hi, it's so good to see you, how have you been?"So yes, the Knitting Factory, of course, how cool, I haven't seen their new location, who's playing tonight?


Their website said the first band went on at 8, so I get there at about 7:30 and hang around with my silly putty and my clipboard and my Preachers That Lie shirt (thanks, Dean!). When the music starts, I go into the performance space and see that there's only three people in the audience. A band playing to an empty to is about the saddest thing in the world, right next to an empty restaurant and a wet, shivering kitten. I feel a pang of angst for them. It's like throwing a party and none of your guests show up! So when they finish their song, I clap and wooo! to show them that someone was listening, dammit! And everyone swivels around and stares at me. "We could use less bass," the guitarist calls out.

That's when I realize that they weren't performing. They were doing a sound check.

I felt like such an idiot.

But if there's one thing I've learned in all my years as a roadie--and apparently being able to tell the difference between a set and a sound check isn't one of those things--it's that the show must go on. Rather than slink out of the bar and scurry weeping into the night, I stick out my chest, break out my best PR smile and my silly putty, thrust my clipboard out and sign the band up for free email updates from the Village Voice. They were very into it. It's probably pretty rare for them to get applause just for practicing.


That's just how I roll.