Fists With Your Toes

"There was a light at the window, there was a light under the door...

... but it's not there anymore."

The post below has been revised, but before you silently judge, please do me the favor of reading this excellent profile of Joe Lally, (former?????) Fugazi bassist.

It's a very well written and thorough article, with interesting comments from other Fugazi collaborators - Guy and Ian  - mixed throughout. One choice excerpt: “Portland also was a place I heard there were no jobs,” Lally says. “And not wanting to work, I thought we’d better go there.”

More? Okay, one more:  But for a guy with a wife and kid who describes his current financial situation as “hanging by a thread,” this determination to make it on his own could be viewed as suicidal. Or maybe that the occasional crappy show is a smaller price to pay than slotting into the next Queens of the Stone Age tour.

Major hat tip tip to Andrew Beaujon, who wrote the article.

(I've been to some of Lally's recent New York performances.)

Photo by Shawn Scallen.

"Shut the door so I can leave."

So no news is good news?

There is a new Dischord website. And this, from the band's individual page, is heartwarming:

"Fugazi

(Fall 1987 - present)"

So, in other words:

Since we live in present tense our only hope of making sense all depends on the source of light.

But... then there's this, in a recent interview with Guy: "As for the chances of Fugazi working again - my basic feeling is that it is very, very unlikely but you never know."

Yeah... I didn't want to say anything but I got that feeling like the proverbial ice water in the face when I met Brendan last summer at the Rooftop Films event. For a guy who leads a non-rock star lifestyle, the man looked, er, em... not so young anymore.

Canty (right) is the one who wanted to stop; he's got two dependents (but who's counting?) and probably a mortgage. I have a hard time seeing him want to pile into the van and sleep on couches or in dive hotels to tour with Fugazi.

With Ian's militant commitment to very low door prices, that's just how they have to roll. Whatever, they're just a band!

Okay, granted, Fugazi is was may be the apotheosis of punk.  Which is to say the apotheosis of rock. Which is to say it's a major challenge for me to write about music I love without coming off as an unbearably pretentious bore.

But fuck it. (My answer to everything!) Canty seems fulfilled with his other gigs (producing the new Ted Leo, the new Thermals, Burn to Shine, etc.) and supporting Bob Mould.

Maybe there's no more FUCKED UP, GOT AMBUSHED, ZIPPED IN vibrations to come, and maybe I care too much, but I must say it's strange to watch these four guys continue to produce music SEPARATELY.

Oh, well. There's always this Fugazi tribute band! (And yes, as older, more, er, em... mature readers know, I love The Evens and Lally's solo work too.)

The interview with Guy (he's the one in the upper right hand corner of the polaroid set, seemingly downcast) ends on a funny note:

Q: What's your favorite kind of party? (Birthday, Pizza, Democratic, for example.)

Guy: I will go with pity party... world's smallest violin etc.

Don't you sense my sense of humor?

Unrelated! Ironic Sans has really been shredding, eh? READ THIS NOW! It's a hilarious account, with documentation, of the unbelievably verbose notes he used to find slipped under the door from his neurotic downstairs neighbor in Astoria.

(Polaroids by Jem Cohen.)

"Mystery Train"

Hey, I saw Sonic Youth destroy a sold-out Webster Hall last weekend - the third time in nine months! Just saying. They're still launching it as far out of orbit as ever. And I've gone from being a casual listener who respected their studio work to a rabid, frothing fanatic for their live act. If you ever get the chance to spend an intimate evening with Sonic Youth, don't you dare hesitate. (Might want to ask Kim to kill the lights, though.)

The highlight of the night for me, out of many, was a blistering, interstellar Silver Rocket. Here's an older rendition:

One advantage of standing stage right for the fist time was a newfound level of appreciation for Lee Renaldo's guitar work. Thurston's flashier and gets most of the attention, but Renaldo is not only a consummate professional but ferocious in his own right. His is a more subtle intensity, but white hot nonetheless.

Fluxblog, who has the setlist, brings head to nail with his assessment that "like Radiohead, their performances are of a freakishly consistent and high level of quality, and after a certain number of shows, all you can do is offer yet another reverent WOW."

They came out for two encores, and before the first one Thurston said something baffling: "Thanks for coming, man. I know it's been kind of a clambake tonight." Anyone know what that means? He was also amusingly "confounded by the set-list" and informed the crowd that Lee is the only one who still lives in New York - though Thurston and Kim still "mess around" here - and provided details about his address. Somewhere on Broadway, between Duane and Reade. Buzzer 2B, according to Lee.

Earlier, Thurston noted that it was "good to be back at The Ritz". It got me thinking how great it is that this group of brilliant lunatics is still kicking after all these years. They're pretty much the last great band standing from that early NY post-punk scene, and they somehow keeping getting better with age. Sonic Youth is like an indomitable, fire-breathing dragon of rock history, still razing village after village, generation after generation.

How long's the tour?

(Top photo by TomVu, bottom by Pixxiestails.)

"I watch my stories, which I love."

Happy Bank's Closed But Back To Work, Plebe Day!

(Photo Cred.)

"Mirror mirror on the wall, Show me where them bombs will fall."

No one at Gothamist wanted the press comp for Arcade Fire’s sold out opening night at Judson Church, so I was like, whatever, I guess I’ll check it out after work. Read all about it in deluxe Royal We Style.

I had the goddamn decency not to mention this fun fact: a small number (some say 50) of tickets were released at the door last night. According to my sources, a line began forming earlier in the day but even those who arrived after 7:00 got in.

Now, is this show worth waiting for outside in the cold for a couple of hours? Well, if you have to ask then I’d say probably not. It’s not like it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see one of the freshest bands in rock play a room smaller than you’ll ever see them in again, or anything. There’s probably some sweet re-runs of Friends on anyway.

(Photos from Fixed Geer's Flickr.)

It's also come to my attention that Kirsten Dunst was there with that greaser from The Trust-Fund Has-Beens. Cuts like a knife, Kirst.

"That dirty bastard! I knew it! He got hold of my woman! That dirty toad bastard! I knew I should have taken him out when I had the chance. Now he has her."

"Is it rayon or is it dust?"

I was lucky enough (thanks to the BeeV's well-timed ticket alert) to procure tix to Stephen Malkmus's show at Maxwell's Sunday night. So combined with his truncated set at the Plug Awards, I was in for a juicy SMalk sandwich, with a spicy little side of Deerhoof.

At 90 minutes, his Maxwell's set was twice as long as the award show set, and the song selection was a fecund mix of old, obscure and new. (He played the song with the Sheepshead Bay line both nights.) Pencil Rot was the opener.

Other personal highlights included Mama, Water and a Seat, Animal Midnight, Baby C'Mon, Dragonfly, Freeze the Saints and, finally, Do Not Feed the Oyster. Mmmm, fecund.

It was a swell time, but SMalk was a little subdued on account of being under the weather. His voice was pretty rough around the edges and at the set's end he informed the crowd that, "for those who haven't seen us in a while, this is not my new voice, not the new sound. I've got some kind of one day flu."

But that didn't stop him from shredding one bit, the trooper. Requests for Vanessa from Queens were met with, "We can play that later." Which, as it turns out, is not to be interpreted as "We will play that later."

There were also numerous requests for Shady Lane, which puzzles me. It's a nice little song, but to me there are plenty of SMalk tunes that are much more shout-out worthy. 1% of One? No More Shoes? Ramp of Death? Shave Your Mustache, Please?

At one point, at the barefoot bassist's request, they skipped ahead in the set list to rip through Baby C'Mon. That done, SMalk said, "Now we're going to go back in time..." Someone else in the band clarified that we were not literally going to go back in time, just back through the setlist.

SMalk: "No, we're going back in time to a song I wrote when I was 13!" And he proceeded to improvise a raging, hormone-driven solo, with repetitive lyrics about being psycho. (I think.) Had to be there?

A couple more close up photos of a skinny, sweaty, sickly mustached SMalk after the jump.

"For when the metal ones decide to come for you."

And they will.

Press play, friend; Sam Waterston wants to talk to you about robot insurance.

GO BEARS! GO COLTS!

(Quick! To the Memory Hole!)

"This one's ours; let's take another!"

Due to internets problems in my new crib and general bizayness, I haven't had time for you this week. Believe me, I'm as frustrated as you. Please accept some gleeful Village Voice bashing in the meantime.

How low can they go? There is no bottom! Since being swallowed up by the corporate empire New Times Media - now known as Village Voice Media - the number of fluff pieces about celebrities, candy and the mating habits of married people have been steadily outnumbering the diminishing hard news articles.

The dropping of Tom Tomorrow - who I once interviewed for my cable access show while wearing the silver unitard shown above - combined with the firing of most of their old-timers, is making for a publication whose greatest achievement seems to be a weekly transcendence of its own mediocrity. (Not to take anything away from their yet-to-be-fucked up theater coverage and some good on-line content, like Status Ain't Hood.)

There's a lively interview with former Voice staffers at Democracy Now, which takes a hard look at the right-leaning conglomerate's homogenized empire of "alternative" weeklies stretching across these United States of Generica. (I think The Stranger in Seattle is one of the last, best hold-outs.)

The only reason I still bother picking up the Voice these days is for the letters section. Whoever edits the mail remains brazenly un-castrated:

Wedded dis

Re Nora Shelley and Essie Carmichael's "Married, Not Dead" [January 17-23]: When the fuck did this paper become about people with nannies and housekeepers? There's a publication for the sexless, medicated, hyper-consumerist breeders of this town, and it's called New York Magazine. So let's leave them to find the perfect preschool for precious little Stockton and Sequoia and make snarky remarks to each other about who's the better practitioner of attachment parenting, and avoid turning the Voice into some kind of alternative weekly for the post-yuppie larvae swarming the city. I'm all for people fucking their spouses—I'm even up for people fucking other people's spouses—but the whole Cult of Domesticity thing that seems to be characterizing certain segments of the population is creepy and irritating.
H. Fons
Manhattan

ALSO:

Is there an editor actually working here in New York? What is this crap by the boring new sex columnists? You have fired the most interesting writers and outsourced writing to red states, and now bore us with this drivel from rich white women who have nannies, babysitters, and housekeepers and still can't have sex for three months. We live in New York, not some Hicksville schighthole in Bush's America.