July 25th, 2008
I saw Ponytail at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday. On the way home, I walked into the N/R Canal train station, and saw:
I watched these hieroglyphs, let their untranslatable code broadcast to me, tattoo my brain, ignoring the impulse to make it all mean. They impacted me, in a way I can’t articulate, those blue wriggles, shapes, lines; their motion, design. I stood there a long time, happy.
It was much like what I had just seen onstage at the Knit: Ponytail’s Molly Siegel reveling in pure throated sound — no discernible words, just grinning yowl. Relieving me of the need for mouthed sound to mean, to be locked in language. The band’s restless tumult lodging in a wild knot inside me, unraveling throughout my torso in warm ribbons.
Seeing Ponytail live tosses the reins of reason out of your hands, suspends thought, replaces it with inarticulate joy.
I stood in the pit & let sound & shout dapple me, like I was a giant window collecting thousands of multicolored leaves, asking not to be washed, becoming such wild autumn.
