bicycle bracelet

This is a mild backblog right now, but it’s better than no post at all… and it’s a little story somewhat overdue and fairly worth telling. A few weeks ago, I received a fantastic package in the mail. An old friend from the Rat Patrol (we called each other “frienemies” due to our fondness for dueling) sent me a tiny brown paper parcel. It was a long-lost item which I had pretty much forgotten, but since I had a mailing address where I could be reliably reached and he was about to embark on months of work aboard the tall ship Bounty, it was as good a time as any.

In the summer of 2005, I bought a one way ticket to NYC and set about doing all the same things which I still do to this day in the city that I nevertheless refuse to claim as my own. I found the address to Time’s Up in my Slingshot and through them discovered Reverend Billy, radical puppeteers, and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. The only place I knew to go in Brooklyn was the Chicken Hut, coincidentally located in the neighborhood where I have now stayed more than anywhere else in the past few years. That visit, though, I made it out to 10,000 Wheels of Death and the ensuing Black Label Bike Club after party. Somewhere between the tire swings and the piles of mattresses on which I landed (these were the golden days before rampant bed bug paranoia) I lost my bike chain bracelet. It was a gift from a recent and beloved ex, a piece of the same chain we used on my chopper bicycle. As absurd as it was to call up a bicycle club and ask them to look for a small length of bike chain right after a massive messy warehouse party, by the time Bike Kill rolled around many weeks later, it had surfaced. My friend rescued it for me and brought it back to Chicago, but it took me over six years to get it back – mailed down the street from where I first lost it.

The world is strange and small and beautiful.

Baltimore and more

After what might have been the busiest work week of my life, I am finally posting about my weekend in Baltimore… the one which happened three weekends ago. I had left town that Friday eager to finally ready to consider taking the plunge and moving to Baltimore, as scary as the prospect of having a regular home might be, sometime in the near future. New York is a strange and jealous mistress, though, and my life in this city has undergone massive and dynamic changes in the past few weeks which are making it awfully appealing to stay.

Getting back to the stories, though – I woke up many weeks ago and headed to midtown, at an hour which seemed far too early, and caught a bus to Baltimore. I somehow forgot to bring my power cord for my netbook, so getting any writing done on my computer became a total wash. Regardless, I was happy to get a large amount of bus sleep. When I got to town, I had a considerable amount of time before my usual lowbrow intellectual meetup with the usual frustrating and charming character at Red Emma’s. Meanwhile, I wound up at Bohemian, making friends with a barista who knew almost all of my Baltimore friends. I invited a friend to meet me there and we went on a fruitless mission for a borrowed power cable down near the harbour. Eventually, he dropped me off at the cafe, where my other friend and I talked about writing for a bit and then headed to the small park nearby to play some music. It was good for both of us, who haven’t been improvising let alone playing with other people nearly enough recently. We realized that we were pretty much right outside of Peabody and jokingly called ourselves Occupy Conservatory – playing the music of the 99% (in our case, D minor folk tunes) for the 1% (the elite musicians). Afterwards, we took a long walk past MICA and I met up with my brass band friend over at Copycat.

While I had heard about this massive space a number of times over the past few years, I’m pretty sure I’d never set foot in the warehouse corridors of Copycat before that night. Even though my friend was a local, we still managed to get lost. Somehow, we acquired a random touring band from Berlin on our search for our own destination. Alas, we made them more lost than they had been when we found them wandering the halls. The spaces we were searching for were on the same floor, but only accessible from completely different exterior doors.

For all of the jokes about Occupy Conservatory that afternoon, I found myself completely surrounded by Peabody students that evening. While our new German friends prepared for their rock show on the other side of the wall, we readied ourselves for a long foray into one of the popular examples of modern classical music. As intimidating as we found the other musicians, my friend and I were both eager and curious to play In C. I had opted for my clarinet, although it proved to be quite a challenge when it came to sight reading, and I wound up using Eb (alto sax) sheet music for sake of familiarity. The piece became quite long I could see most of the horn players in the room pausing periodically and shaking out their hands. By the end, I had switched to my friend’s little accordion and he had traded his violin for my clarinet. My favourite instrument choice that night was a guy who opted for a kazoo on the melody lines, meanwhile plunking out the underlying rhythm on a piano. There were a lot of keyboards that night, even among a couple dozen musicians. The event was also a potluck, with a ton of food and drinks before and after our little insular concert. While everyone was quite welcoming to us, my friend and I totally alienated some conservatory kids in the elevator – they were considerably disturbed by our enthusiastic 3 hands / 1 accordion arrangement of the Toccata in Fugue.

My main reason for going to Baltimore that weekend, apart from the usual wanderlust and inexplicable fondness for that city, was to be my brass friend’s fire safety at a circus show the next day. I had nearly gone down there the weekend before to see a work by Nana Projects, so I was eager to help out on their production that week. Before the matinee and the evening show, my friend spun fire staff out front while stilt walkers encouraged passers by to check out the show. The puppetry and music inside was quite wonderful, and the show told the fascinating story of the tragic circus train wreck which happened in Indiana very many years ago. I now have a personal mission to visit that graveyard. The puppeteers used three projectors to cinematically cast shadows on the wall, which they explained during the talk back after the show. Between shows, we went out to lunch with a couple of local burlesque mavens who were quite hilarious. That night, my friend and I went to see his violin teacher (who had helped make In C happen the night before) play her rock band’s last show over at the Windup Space. Overall, it was a very full day of culture, and left me with an even better impression of Baltimore.

After two very full days, I was back on an early morning bus to New York on Sunday. The short visit had been very worthwhile, but I wanted to make it back to NYC in time for the Occupy Museums show at the Armory Art Show. Despite missing my original bus in Baltimore and miscalculating my destination, I made it to the right part of Chelsea Piers just in time. I had been invited there by the violinist I had met at an action the previous week. I thought it was funny that an action they had done at Lincoln Center had nearly coincided with my recent comped ticket visit to the Metropolitan Opera with an often-arrested Occupy activist. Nothing is without its contradictions, especially in the arts. My new friend and I played some improvised art-viewing music for those passing by, meanwhile Occupy Museums offered them free art and information.

Another incentive for arriving back in town early was the New Music Bake Sale, which I had been invited to by both the Occupy violinist and the one who I had met at In C that weekend. I could not have imagined how much fun I would have at the event, nor how many significant connections I would make. The concept was brilliant. A bunch of composers and new music groups had set up tables around the dance floor of Roulette, a vintage theatre space in downtown Brooklyn. While a variety of performances happened on stage, the audience was free to browse the tables, buy snacks from the groups, or enjoy a beer up in the balcony. I had a lot of fun, and what’s not to like about a massive party full of good music and food? I had intended to stay for only a little while, as I was still a bit tired from my trip, but wound up sticking it out to the very end in order to see Gut Bucket, the punkest band there. It was the first time I had seen Inferno’s bari player in quite a while. I made new friends and reconnected with others. The night went on beautifully from there.

The rest of that week seemed to go by so quickly. The day following the bake sale, I saw some of the same folks at another show in downtown Brooklyn, where of course I busied myself helping stock the makeshift bar. I finally made it out to the weekly Roots and Ruckus show at the Jalopy and got to see the new bar they’ve opened up next to it. I also finally saw Wood Spider play, after sharing a bill with them a number of times in various bands and always somehow missing their set. I worked one day at the old venue, then two days for a fun character I had met at the aforementioned new music events. He asked what I did and I told him that, when not on tour playing music, I pick up odd gigs doing things like helping out at venues. He had just moved to town and needed a considerable amount of help setting up his new space and readying it for shows, so our chance meeting became quite fortuitous for us both.

More writing to come soon, now that my days are a bit less frantic. There will be more stories of Baltimore and NYC, shows and brass bands, puppets and Occupy, bicycles and warm weather, as well as the stories I choose not to tell but which somehow always seems somewhat apparent when read in between the lines…

another week in New York

Apologies for the long delay in posting, but I needed some extensive time to myself. As with any period where I’m off the road (so… am I off-roading?), the attention toward taking care of myself and plotting my next move tends to put a significant dent in my time for blogging. That’s not to say that I haven’t been writing or doing interesting things, I just lack the discipline needed to persevere without the structure of long drives and a one-per-show goal. Since getting back to NYC and settling into some sort of life, I’ve had the added bonus of living in what is essentially a cave, so my friends have seen me with barely more consistency than this blog has. I can’t remember the last time I had a place to live with my very own door! So, I’ve made little notes and continued to chip away slowly at this post, yet it has evaded completion until now.

The question now – what in fact was I doing the first couple of weeks of March? Well, there was quite a bit of hiding in the dark basement in Bed-Stuy. While there was much catching up on sleep, I cobbled together a decent routine of fasting, yoga, and practicing the accordion. I’d get a tune stuck in my head the night before, look up the chords online, then begin learning it whenever I woke up. It was like an artistic retreat for my short attention span – no risk of distraction. When I would break out of my self-imposed exile, I mostly stayed local. A startling number of friends live in the neighborhood, not to mention the fact that Goodbye Blue Monday and Project Parlour are walking distance, as are Tiny Cup and Square Root Cafe. In spite of myself, I’m realizing I’ve missed the neighborhood. It became a time of good late night cabaret shows (including the weekly open mic nearby with its modern-day beatniks) and mid-afternoon brunches. Fortunately, despite the creeping gentrification of the neighborhood, nothing obnoxiously hip has reared its ugly head this side of Broadway – yet.

My living situation continued to work out quite well. Keeping the house relatively tidy wasn’t too difficult and I relished tasks like cleaning out the refrigerator. During one weekend, there was a houseguest from Toronto who insisted on doing the dishes, which made my role in the household even easier. She had come down from Toronto for a Burning Man camp party that weekend and it turned out that we had numerous friends in common. We got along quite well despite the 20ish year age gap. I was headed to Bryant Park for an Occupy action one morning and took her along with me on our way to respective destinations in NYC. Of course, by the time I got there, the people I knew had been arrested – one for riding his bicycle on the street and the other for dressing up as a clown and being cheerful. We ran into a friend of mine from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, who was glowing from the peaceful direct action they had successfully executed earlier that morning. By the time we arrived, though, the event was dispersing and a light rain was falling. I met a charmingly shy violinist, though, and we made plans to go busking sometime soon.

The main point of my trip downtown was to meet up at Grand Central with one of the Broadway child actors for whom I sometimes nanny. He had an audition that day and I was responsible for keeping an eye on him until he headed back to Connecticut. Somehow I wound up with a large chunk of time to kill between the protest and work, so I sought shelter in the massive old public library. I had visited it a few times before, but each feels like the first; I tend to forget the majesty of the building. Our culture has become so conditioned by consumerism to think bookstores and coffee shops are the only public places fit for loitering over a book or on the internet. I was astonished by how few people were in the library despite the rain. I also think that most people, New Yorkers and tourists alike, tend to assume that nothing in Midtown is free. Somehow I had forgotten that the main library has exhibits as well. I lost myself for about an hour in a tiny room devoted to the life of Percy Shelley, making it only halfway across the room. I had a fun time looking after the kid again, he had a good audition, and he showed me an awesome little cafe in the back of an old church where the prices are good and you can loiter in their library undisturbed. Again, it was not terribly full. After I dropped him off at the train, I met up with my friend who had been arrested earlier in the day and dragged him back to the big library with me. We looked at activist relics in a huge exhibit which was closing that weekend, finished up the Shelley room (xo Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), and took a lap around the building. Afterwards, we went looking for food and somehow wound up at a Moroccan hookah bar with live jazz.

My final destination in Manhattan that day was a late-night monthly open mic in the top floor of a place on restaurant row. My mother’s friend has been in the same Broadway show for about a decade and this small cabaret is where he and a handful of other stage professionals get a chance to try something a little different. The actors and musicians perform material unlike what they do at work, original pieces or not, while the tech crew try their hands at stand-up comedy and ballads. It felt like an honor to be there. The only people who hadn’t been invited were two Australian tourists who smiled broadly the entire time.

A highlight of my time back in NYC was an event at my friend’s DIY speakeasy space near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a New Wave sing along, but it was brilliant. It was led by a few folks who guided us through both protest songs and new wave classics. I had been working on a Nouvelle Vague version of a Clash song on the accordion, so I found the banjo-led renditions particularly interesting. I took note of more songs I should learn. Playing an instrument with chords has opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. I began to emerge slightly from my basement and jam with friends, including at an exciting spot in a run-down old school beside a church.

I was rewarded for finally leaving my neighborhood by an exceptionally eccentric Saturday. I began the afternoon accompanying a friend to a monthly Baroque dancing class in downtown Brooklyn. It was actually a whole lot of fun and the music was provided by a live violin player, plus I can now say I have a vague idea how to dance a Minuet. Awesome! On the complete opposite end of the musical spectrum, I spent the evening helping out and partying at the annual Purim pageant and dance party. I’ve heard it is arguably the funnest annual party for anyone in the radical, brass band, klezmer, puppet, labor, queer, and/or trans scenes. It goes without saying that the RMO was there and played a fabulous set. The pageant was long and epic. One of my volunteer tasks was finding change for the bar – twenty dollars at a time, it turned out. This led me on an absurd adventure through a somewhat desolate part of Brooklyn, including a guy who claimed to be a famous Mexican singer and insisted on buying me old man brandy before his friends at the bar would buy me change. The party itself was far more fun.

The next morning, I explored an incredible warehouse co-op space and hit up the Brooklyn Flea Market in its historic indoor winter settings, found a feminist hardware store, and had a long sunset brunch at a friend’s place. Full of fresh energy, we hit up an Occupy meeting back in downtown Brooklyn and plugged the bicycle agenda, grabbed a little more nourishment at Grub, headed to the LES to sit in on the Time’s Up radio hour, then rode our respectively absurd big and little bikes back over the bridge to Brooklyn. It felt like old days when I was first sort of living in Brooklyn. I stopped in at Project Parlour to say hi to the DJ, but of course recognized a variety of folks and succumbed to the free and ready hot cider, flattery, and vintage cocktails. The next day I had the headache I deserved, plus the added pain of sleeping through a friend leaving town.

After a fairly useless day, I was back in downtown Brooklyn, a place I’ve found myself with increasing frequency this year. On a side note, one of my friends insists that my blog is not personal or travel but indeed a food blog. While I deny such claims, it is true that I talk about food quite a bit here. If you’ve been on tour, you probably understand. As I was saying, though, I went to two food spots in Brooklyn on the same unlikely strip near downtown which were pretty remarkable. A friend and I went out to a fantastic lunch at a bizarre vegan place that gives you funky, self-referential comic books at the door. After he took off on his outlandish bicycle, I decided to loiter a bit at a fantastically dirty bohemian cafe nearby. I was thrilled to find such an unlikely place in a neighborhood like that, which appeared to have gentrified around it. The sad word on the street was that the cafe was closing soon. I finally retired to my cave and got to back to productive hibernation which, along with some housecleaning, busied me until the weekend. I also got back to working at the same old venue, where I spent numerous hours sweeping up fake snow from their last theatre production. I doubt I will be able to appreciate a staged snow fall for quite some time. I was out of shape for manual labour, so it was a tiring day, but fortunately I finished out the night hanging out with friends who play accordion and banjo. Overall, New York was quite welcoming towards my slow return to its strange embrace.