ham fisted theatrics

Where to start.

I went to the Siren Festival Saturday. It is this gargantuan free music festival on Coney Island run by The Village Voice that goes out of its way to get particularly indie-ish bands, hence the abundance of "The" acts on the bill. Five, by my count (Constantines, you're not fooling anybody by dropping the "The" from your name. All The Ramones' albums feature just the word RAMONES on the cover and everybody still calls them The Ramones.) What follows is a tale of rock, sun, flyering, hipsters, and funnel cake pined after and unreceived.


I got on the F train at like 12:30, drinking coffee and eating a cherry pop-tart. I also had my kitschy retro copy of Salinger's "Nine Stories," as it's the only book I have that fits in my back pocket and I needed subway reading as I anticipated about 8,000 stops before Coney Island. On one of the 8,000, two hispanic guys and a woman got on with giant trees of cotton candy. A stop later, three mariachis got on. They started playing. Across from me were two Puerto Rican kids and their mother. The kids were loaded down with beach toys and repeating the words "Coney Island" as if the more times they chattered the phrase in giddy anticipation the sooner we'd get there. The mariachis moved on; I quit reading when the train went above ground and started crossing the bridge. Lack of sleep and caffeine made everything eye candy: graffiti, sun through the train car, a blue sky.

I thought about summer and about California, because for me, the two are inextricably linked. I've talked to a couple kids here that have never been to California and the concept fascinates me. In Arizona half the kids you grow up with are transplants from California; the interstate and the presence of Disneyland and the beach (two things home don't have) make it a vacation default. God...how can you not have been to California? In n' Out Burger! Del Taco! (Two things we'd eventually get in AZ but I first experienced on a road trip with my dad to see ASU play in the Rose Bowl) Weezer! California is America. It invented surfing and blonde people, and while it didn't invent rock n' roll, it's one of its most constant muses. It was like home but it had the beach. Shit, no California? Might as well move to Moscow.

My family is in San Diego this weekend. San Diego trips are our big summer thing. My friends are in...San Clemente, I wanna say? I'm not sure. Anyway, living here is making me realize why summer is a big deal. In Arizona, summer is just the rest of the year with no school. Here, and, I'm assuming, pretty much everywhere else in the world, it is the reason for living. For enduring. It makes you think about how scientists say the universe will end in heat death (the complete extinction of heat energy? Right? Donovan?) and if cold equals death than heat equals life, and, by extension, barbeques and sunblock and ice cream and partial nudity.

The aerials on every rooftop in Brooklyn were going by. Those'll have to do for the windmills that line the highway, I thought. Sunshine. Mariachi music. Hell, I could have California right here on the train.

The kids were trying to fit "Coney Island" into every sentence possible: "I'm gonna play in the water at Coney Island!" "What time will it be when we get to Coney Island?" It worked. We got there a lot faster than I was expecting.

I gave Donald (Hammerkatz) a call, he just started interning at UCB and they'd enlisted him to flyer at the festival starting at 8 in the morning. He said he was "by the rollercoaster." Giddyup.

They had him working this booth staffed by UCB people. Something about cellphones and handing out free fans and candy and sparkly sunblock. Dunno. I got roped into flyering for the Del Close Marathon, which is in a couple of weeks. 70-something consecutive hours of longform improv honoring the man who invented the artform. We have a slot at 6:30 am Sunday, mainstage. Twenty dollars gets you into for the whole weekend. C'mon, you know you want to get into the NY area just to see me and my boys (and girl) drop mad improv science at an hour when all the world is a-sleeping, plus like 130 other amazing shows.

I did not tell all that to people I handed out fliers to. "Improv comedy. Upright Citizens Brigade. Come check us out" was more the schpiel. I perched at the entrance to the main stage and fliered the fuck out of people. Oh, wait, I'm fucking up my chronology. Before I started flyering I stood towards the back of the meager-at-that-hour crowd for The Ponys, who I found to be like Franz Ferdinand plus a girl and minus any fun or decent songs. There was no talking to the crowd, no "We are The Ponys," just droning warble, on rare occassions, a warbling drone. My favorite bands are Death Cab and Belle and Sebastian and I wanted to beat this band's frontman up. After three songs, I fliered. Only a band that bad can make you WANT to flier.

Fliering is, for the uninitiated, probably one of the most soul-deadening activities you can legally engage in. It's a pasttime for people for whom normal life doesn't offer rejection at a quick enough pace. You have to start out knowing that 1 out of every 3 people, if you're lucky, will take your flier, and if you're REALLY lucky, one out of every one hundred of those people will think about showing up to your thing. I know fliering is annoying to the layman, but it's all we've got, folks. Hammerkatz has developed a couple fun ways of doing it (which I really need to talk about at some point) but the typical "please accept this thing I'm handing you, or, failing that, don't be rude about not accepting it" form of fliering is the sort of thing people put their head in ovens about.

Anyway, the sun was still shining and people were friendly enough, so I got on kind of a streak. Hearing "Upright Citizens Brigade" come out of my mouth caused a couple of them to run back after intially declining the glossy mammoths (they have the full festival schedule on 'em.) I managed to work up a not-entirely-false smile and get rid of a couple stacks before the first band I wanted to see...

...The Thermals. The Fiery Furnaces were rambly and strange but not in a cool way and I was far away so I said "fuck it" and started walking to the second stage, figuring I'd be in plenty of time. I got there and realized I wasn't, the Thermals were onstage, they started early, not taking me into account, bastards. They're a three piece, if Green Day had never learned to play more than three chords and recorded all their music in their kitchen on a fourtrack they would be The Thermals. But they're not. The Thermals are. They rock. They rage against insincerity ("no new deafness/no self-reference") without being Polyphonic-Spreeishly lame and acknowledge the audience, which was the first of that I'd seen all day. Lots of "thank yous" and "thanks, you guys," and even one "We're The Thermals from Portland." It's sad that this is something appreciable in a live act, but there were so many bands that day that didn't seem to realize they were playing in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, they just wandered on and noodled precociously and left. It's not cool. The Thermals are cool. Fun. Remember fun? Buy their record.

I fliered a little more than tried to work my way towards the mainstage for TV On The Radio. Basically I wanted them to prove me wrong. I'd heard a few of their songs and was not all that impressed; they're being heralded with all kinds of "new sound of rock" craziness, but I dunno, their songs just really didn't seem to move for me. Hard to explain. Sarah found me in the crowd, against all odds, and we watched them together after they took something that felt like an hour setting up. In short: I was wrong. I'm not sure if they're the saviors of rock but they sound like Radiohead plus soul and that's definitely something. They're dark and damn pretty. By the end of the intro to "Young Liars," which just CRUSHES, I knew I was wrong. Their frontman has a fantastic presence, shimmying and singing towards the sky and generally being awesome. I felt lucky to be there. I've gone back and re-listened to a lot of their stuff since then and while it's still not my personal favorite thing ever, there's a lot to love. They feel like somebody decided "this is how I think music should sound," which is too rare.

I told Sarah I had to go get a good place for Electric Six on the second stage because dammit, I did. She went off to meet her friend who had backstage passes. Everybody won.

Electric Six...I've opined about them before, a little. Basically, they are indescribable but here goes anyway: Technically proficient heavy metal slash disco plus amazing hilarious lyrics. You may have heard their songs "Danger (High Voltage)" ("fire in the disco/fire in the Taco Bell") and "Gay Bar" around places. I was in no way disappointed with them live. Their lead singer clearly KNOWS he looks like your dad and can't dance, instead he's concoted these little half-dances for every song. A new song (which he promised would "blow (our) dicks off") he punctuated after every chorus with a retarded jig and an insane grin. The chorus, as I remember it: "be my dark angel/be my drug-free school zone." My only complaint with the set was the crowd...this was not music to stand around and appreciate to, but here was every hipster in the tri-state area, standing around and appreciating to it. No, you fuckers. Dance. Jump up and down. The kids at the Warped Tour may not have the best taste ever but at least they know how to get sweaty and injured. I caused at least one disgusted girl to move away from my Rocking and singing along. It was then that I knew that I was doing it right. Granted, she still had her dignity, but dignity is worthless when the band onstage is singing "We're starting a fire/Electirc demons in love." Worthless. Totally Rocking The Fuck Out is the international currency, the gold bullion of situations like that.

Electric Six were over. It was 6:00. Death Cab was on the main stage at 7:30. Time to go get a good spot for that, I figured.

I was wrong. I thought I was clever, going in through the side entrance to the mainstage crowd area, but it was five minutes of crowd-jostling and claustraphobia before I could even see the stage, where, at the time, Blonde Redhead was playing. At the time and given the situation, their long meandering dual guitar whatever-it-is seemed more than a little self-indulgent. Maybe it was the volume (depressingly low). I dunno. Alison will eat my face for saying this, but at the time I couldn't help thinking if the White Stripes and a jam band had a baby and it was half-Asian it would be Blonde Redhead. I like 'em on wax, and once I got into a more comfortable spot I enjoyed them a little more, and their encore song was cool. No hard feelings, BR, but you are decidedly not a festival band.

Anyway. Death Cab. A little backstory: I have missed seeing them three times, all of them for comedy. I actually could've missed them Saturday as well, if I hadn't opted out of a little show Hammerkatz was doing. Glad I didn't. They are, as I may have mentioned above, one of my favorites. Nobody captures in-between feelings quite as well; ambiguity, less-than-sobriety, things that are definitely not love dressed up as love. I remember downloading one of their songs a couple years ago, beginning of senior year. "Steadier Footing," the first track on The Photo Album. And I remember my exact thought: "What the fuck is this?" Not in a good way. Then a couple months later I listened to "Blacking Out The Friction" and had one of those rare hey-this-song-is-exactly-what-I-am-feeling moments and thus began a one-way love affair with a high-voiced man and his songs about not being sure if you are drunk enough or not drunk enough to sleep with somebody. The rest is history.

They opened with "Title Track" off We Have The Facts I was a little worried, it wasn't exactly tight. I remembered Emilie saying they sucked live when she saw them. "A Movie Script Ending was decent and once they started into Transatlanticism stuff things got better, much. The songs are structured in a way that just works better live, maybe they're more excited about them, I dunno, I'm not a rock band. But it was fantastic. "Lightness"...oy. Gorgeous. They played "Photobooth," which is one of my favorite songs of all time, bar none, ever, etc. Ecstatic. "The Sound of Settling" and "We Looked Like Giants" I've never been too fond of, but they held up admirably, "Giants" was extended into an epic. After the requisite we're-done-just-kidding-here's-an-encore (which I realize is retarded but I have a showmanship hard-on for anyway) they played "Transatlanticism," Gibbard starting at the piano then moving up front towards the climax ("so come on/come on"). It's as awesome as you're imagining if you're imagining it was completely fucking awesome.

We (me and everybody else) headed for the exit on a carpet of the fliers I'd been handing out. Ah well. I returned to Manhattan on an train full of hipsters and a woman playing the radio too loud and singing along to her kid, which was kind of cute. No reading got done. It was okay. I was in love with the world and heading toward a burrito.

Posted by DC at July 19, 2004 02:25 AM