...with sheer noise-guitar shred at Sonar last night. Show was $20. I think Ira's Fender Stratocaster (rosewood fretboard, looks like it's from the last 1960s, original finish unknown; worn down to bear wood) should file a domestic abuse case. Often James and Georgia would just vamp on anything from one to three chords for 15 or 20 minutes while Ira's amps spat a stream of what could only be termed "notes" in the loosest of senses, but more like whirlwind howls and organic sheet-metal shrieks, as the man himself contorted and spasmed across his half of the stage, scraping his guitar against his amps, pounding strings against pickups with his right fist, fretting off the end of the fretboard, doing things to the whammy bar that made it painful to think about it as the phallic symbol it's traditionally been for 40 years. The best part was when he fucked with the Strat for a long piece, twisting the tuning heads until it was probably impossible to play any sort of tonally coherent thing on it anymore, then unplugged it with the feedback on loop, grabbed his Jazzmaster off the stand and plugged it right in, and finally resuming to play what could possibly be described as a "song."
Some dude who bore an uncanny likeness to Frank Black (baldness, fatness and all) jumped up and down, plowing all the way through the second and third rows from one end of the club to another, during a streetpunkish (what?) song about "going to New York" (I'll admit it--I do not know 90% of Yo La Tengo songs) to bounce up and down grinning with childish glee in front of Ira. The kid behind me took a picture of him with his camera phone.
But then there were the quiet songs too--so quiet that, before the second one, Ira asked the people in the back of the room to withhold their "conversation." A very un-Baltimore thing to do. But it just shows the massive spectrum of moods their songwriting can cover.
Near the end of their 90-minute-plus set, I realized my temples were aching. I'd left my earplugs at Miguel's--going to the show was a last-minute decision--and I'm not sure if it was just that, or if Ira was actually the loudest guitarist I'd ever heard after J Mascis. Either way, I think he's my new guitar hero, and I'm only going to play like him from now on. Trafalgar beware.
The club wanted to charge us a second time for the late show--Taxidermy Lounge presents The Rapture. They started kicking people out of the main room, telling them even if they had tickets to both shows (which I didn't), they had to leave and then come back in. I thought, fuck that, so I decided I'd camp out in a toilet stall until the crowd for the late show came in. I learned that, if you stay in the men's room of a dance club long enough, something bad was bound to happen. In my case, it happened when two drunk guys came in, and one of them tried to take a leak in the stall next to mine. "Eww, someone puked all over this toilet!" (Someone had.) "Dude, piss it off!" I barely had time to register, "oh fuck, oh no" in my mind before the ghastly fluid started tricking under the barrier between the stalls.
And then the bouncers cleared the bathrooms and kicked me out. I pretended to be strung out to avoid having to talk to any of them. Damn capitalists and their why-profit-once-when-you-can-profit-twice; but, I suppose, I tried.
Met up with Sterling, Jess, John, Miguel, and Josh after getting back in. The Rapture were all right; the music didn't interest me much (!!! is still at the top of my dance-rock list), but it would have been good to groove to--that is, if the room hadn't been so damn packed, you couldn't even move. I thought it sort of defeated the point. It seemed to me that their drummer was always dropping the tempo. Their singer crowd-surfed a couple of times.
Overall, though I got jostled a lot, and jostled right back to make some room for myself, I wasn't too into it; didn't particularly feel like dancing after listening to nothing but shoegaze (mostly Slowdive) all week, and after Yo La Tengo's set of relatively down-to-earth, earnest rock songs. Was a bit tired and ill in the stomach (didn't make sense--all I'd had that night was home cooking and an apple), too. As with so many times going to Sonar parties sober, I saw the downtown scene backlit by my own fatigue, and couldn't decide whether I was more drawn to or more driven away by it. Some part of me just wants to connect with whatever I see, but another part, the stubborn and uncompromising one, wants a more familiar, quieter beauty. I suppose these are questions best left for another day--or perhaps the answers depend on what day it is.
Funny, too, because I quite enjoy dancing a lot of the time--I'm not sure which one is the real me, the one who wants to dance like Ian Curtis, or the one who just wants to be quiet and smile unconsciously all the time. Since I haven't been drunk in almost two months, the latter seems to dominate these days; the two-drink rule has held so far, and I've no real intention of breaking it anytime soon. Unless something particularly dire happens that prompts me to go get wasted on my stockpile of single-malt Scotch whisky...but that would be rather unexpected. Been living with a sword hanging over my head--explanation later on why that might be.
Saw Katelyn at Sarah's on Thursday night. Despite all the trouble she caused me a while back, this was actually only the second time we hung out in person--see what kind of an absurd existence I lead? We talked about cats and blankets and got into a half-hearted pillowfight.
Speaking of which, Annie H. is crashing on our futon right now. Some trouble with Power Hour after I'd left the house earlier this evening. People always seem to end up on our futon. I'm not really sure why.
Officially, then, here is a list of people who have crashed on our futon this year:
1. Granger
2. Alice
3. Granger, again
4. Katelyn
5. Yuli (coined term, "the futon of lost souls")
6. Granger, again (don't you have better places to go?)
7. Annie H.
That makes me feel more loved than I probably am. Most likely it's just because we have a guest bed in our living room. Then again, if your friends don't have guest beds, they're probably not worth having. Right?
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