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.
Four bands played Mercury Lounge last night: War on Drugs, Abe Vigoda, Ponytail, and Titus Andronicus (in that order). One band was just competent, one veered from boring to embarrassing, and the other two made me deeply, ecstatically grateful to have ears & eyes.
I won’t waste much time on the two bands that didn’t much move me (sorry Titus & W.O.D. fans) — the net’s clogged full of enough art-venom and musicblog-spew as it is. If an artist has at least a small talent and some passion, no matter how misguided or tired the product is, least I can do is hold back on snark and say (next to) nothing at all. Let blogo-Sneerers do the rest.
Abe V came on second. I was all grins as the L.A. foursome powered into their set with spiky change-up prunk. Love the delay & reverb on the rhythm guitar, the disjunct & nervy lead lines, the elemental, fragmented imagery & hail of language (”men from the boys I’m a girl I’m a tree”, “hope is a white hand that moves through my body”), and the drumming, the drumming, the drumming. With all the hyper time changes this band puts your ear through, it’s important for them to have someone behind a drumset who can lead the time spasms — and Vigoda’s drummer, Reggie Guerrero, does. He’s the band’s calm, focused storm-eye. Such a kinetic set. Left my ears in static blizzard and my feet sore from bouncing.
Ears & feet got no rest once Ponytail came on. If yr gush-sensitive, stop reading now, since anything I say about this band is going to seem ridiculously hyperbolic unless you’ve seen Molly Siegel, beaming & transported, her face alive with expressions as wild and uninhibited as the band’s raucous-joyous assault — her vocal chords too, swooping all over wordless terrain — and her body facing you in half-crouch stance, mixing challenge & grateful embrace of the band’s sound with arms held out, palms up.
Arms out, palms up. Like she’s offering her band’s galeforce sound out of her body to you in some giant neon yarn-boulder — or summoning the same from the sky to catch. Ponytail made me really fucking glad to be alive. If you want a band to tornado you into exhaustion and then smile really sweetly over your panting body, find these folks in a town near you & come ready to play. You’ll be shaky with wild magic; you’ll be ready to pull teats down from clouds & make them give up their secret mango milk.
Paper Rad are an art collective of wanderers who make cartoons, comics, paintings, videos, clothes, pizza, work on peanut farms, own two glitter factories, carve star charts in cactii, run a professional scab-picker’s service, respect the earth, breed oxen, respect oxen, love life and wrestle invaders in grand mal, glitchy glory.
They live in a reddish-magenta house and gather around green mac n cheese.
Now, these folks also created a team of six adventurers called the Problem Solvers: Pandemonia, a witch who is angry & a black cone, Dewey a hairy free spirit, Riviera a floating gelatinous cube, T Bubbles who is cool, D-O-G who is canine & powerful, Buck a stern Duck.
The image below is of Dewey with a Pizza Cape, alarmed. It comes from the Problem Solver’s video #1211: “Give Pizza A Chance” (also below):
I’ve watched this video many times. Maybe too many. I get a warm honey-knot somewhere in my chest in response to the garish color-bursts, the video game bleep-tunes, the jerky robo animations, the 80’s nostalgia (day-glo outfits, trolls, the very name “T Bubbles”), the dream-like narrative skips & stretches, and the finale: candy-raver peace-symbol triumph/blossom/burgeon all over the city.
More favorite parts are: Dewey’s Scalding Pizza Cape, Riviera’s impassioned & rambling love of the “number one day” he’s ever seen, the slow rise and fall of the hat-wearing bucktoothed monster at the end.
The video’s style: blunt & cartoony-brutish, fluoro-mallet, magenta-concussions. Reminds me of the scene in I Heart Huckabee where men are beating their own faces with red rubber balls.
As for the rest of Paper Rad’s productions — I eye-lap the fit-inducing strobe of their site, and the layered, massed impact of their printed works — dense with fluorescent ephemera, half-narratives & scrawls & repurposed cartoon characters. It all taps into the same hunger for sensory overload in me that I spend most of my waking time vehemently decrying as an inescapable blight upon the modern world.
Secretly of course I want to go on a neon bender staring at 116 youtube videos at once, 13 of which are playing obscure berlin disco, the rest of which are toxicolored beautiful beepy Paper Rad.
There is a comfort in noise, in the staticky womby bath of it. Paper Rad (not so much the Problem Solvers videos, but their site, cartoons & books, especially “BJ and Da Dogs”) offer the visual and color & nostalgic analogue of that noise & static: massed strobing mess, sheer assaulting saturation:
All the chunky pixels, all the pummeling graphics, all the Alf & Popples & Garfield cameos, and all the scraping-loud day-glo cascades — all this array massed and deployed on a monitor the size of the sky could never fully blot out the painful reality of being alive.
Another installation of this game I play where I open Itunes, enable Shuffle, listen to the first song that comes up, and write whatever comes to mind about it.
This time I was served up a song from The Knife, off their record “Silent Shout”, called “The Captain”. I love this song — it always settles & unsettles me with its cold vistas & brittle expanse.
Spray of marbles skipping
along vast mesa of chrome.
Slow fanning wingspan of
hungry metal owls
sweeping over stone.
A long thunder, away.
Measured avalanche of
straw, sand & aluminum
upon meadows of
magenta blossom.
Old indigo geysers,
dusted with crimson flakes.
Gray coral spiking up from pink ponds.
The distant throaty lowing of beasts.
My mom got me into Los Panchos when I was a teenager. She used to play the famous trio’s records all the time, and before I knew it their harmonies & romanticism had me hooked. It wouldn’t be until my late 20s though that I’d really start to fall under their spell.
This song in particular is a good example of what they do well. I love the rich panning, the spacious production, the hand drums on the left, the maracas on the right, that opening & decisive guitar solo so characteristic of this style of mexican ballad (known as the bolero).
I love too the lyrical themes, again so typical of the form, saturated with longing, ruefulness, graceful tragedy. This song’s title loosely translates to “If You Say to Me: Come”. Other lyrics, simple and trenchant: “If you say to me: come, I’ll leave it all behind”; “my secrets, which are few, belong to you as well”.
Then there’s the guitar solo at 1:44, always my favorite moment of Los Panchos songs: cascading, nimble, fleet & yet heavy with feeling.
The whole song makes me feel like I’m on a sturdy raft, making my way down a misted river at night, with soft, warm, puddling rain falling on embankments nearby.
“Hey Joni” is one of my favorite tracks from Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation”. It’s a record of bone-sculpted terror, and this song is among those sawed sharpest.
It’s not just the cut’s sound — lacerating sheets of guitars — that gives it such depth and impact, it’s also the lyrics. The weight & power of the text is typical of Ranaldo: violence, startling imagery, criscrossing emotions, overlapping themes (think “Skip Tracer”, “Pipeline/ Kill Time”). The song’s words settle and expand, layers of color & flavor revealing themselves over the song’s duration, shades of emotion ripening, popping out, furtive then brash then hiding again.
To begin with, there’s that urgent, liberating refrain: “Hey Joni, Put it all behind you.” There’s the current of nostalgia throughout, weaving the song together with silver cord: “I remember our youth, our high ideals / I remember you were so uptight”. Then there’s the contradictory plea to ignore the past and simply focus on the Now: “tune out the past, and just say yes” ; “Now it’s all behind you.” There’s the narrator’s desperate search for meaning: “tell me Joni, am I the one to see you through? / In this broken town can you still jack in and know what to do?” There’s the murky promise of mysterious violence: “that time in the trees, we broke that vice”, “shots ring out from the center of an empty field / Joni’s in the tall grass”. Finally, there’s that troubled rural backdrop of an “empty field”, of “tall grass”, of Joni “jumping off that truck,” blighted and creepy like something out of Dorothy Allison. So much packed in each line, Ranaldo’s poetry dense & blossoming with each noise-saturated measure of music.
And then there’s Joni — who is she? What does she want? She emerges from the
song as some kind of blithe dreamchild, unconcerned with time or memory while the speaker pushes, pries, tries to figure her out:
“She’s not thinking about the future
She’s not spinning her wheels
she doesn’t think at all about the past
she thinking long and hard
about that high wild sound
and wondering will it last?”
Joni is just Joni, she’s just life & blood and bone, living in the wild violent now, dancing in empty fields while gunshots shatter stillness, careless of past or future, dervishing with blank & unreadable expression. The speaker takes his confusion to her, throwing her his urgent “Hey Joni, when will all these dreams come true?”, his questioning at times feeling hungry and justified, almost indignant, at other times nonsensical & pathetic when compared to Joni’s carefree immediacy, her pure pulsing being.
Joni is sound and breath and blood, all impact and abrasion, all beautiful undoing, a “snap of electric whipcrack”, a “sailboat explosion,” embodying the rasp of sound the song wraps the words in.
And what about that sound? Well it’s much easier to talk about words than music. Sound, like wine or food, has a way of making even the most earnest attempts to corral it in words sound like pure, vulgar charlatanry.
So I’ll just focus on a moment instead: Ranaldo’s “kick it” at 2:56, rousing and raw, the guitar taloning and scraping up great seas of stone, Ranaldo having to shout above it, Steve Shelley’s drums attacking right after, battering every beat in 2/2 time all through 3:22, manic and scraping, & sweet Joni’s spirit shooting through it all like a comet.
I’ve lived in Washington Heights for three years, and there are three restaurants that keep me consistently grateful for their existence: Park Terrace Bistro, Garden Cafe, and La Estufa. I’ll be reviewing them in ascending order of foodlust, La Estufa being somewhat slutted after, and Park Terrace being the most likely to reduce me to a grub-rutting fool. First up’s La Estufa.
I love La Estufa more and more with each visit. They serve healthy fare, loosely Italian-American, presented unassumingly, priced reasonably, and delivered with gracious & attentive service. It’s not often I feel this taken care of in New York during the course of a meal — & in a way that’s free from unctuousness, irony or uncomfortable fastidiousness.
La Estufa excels in simple grilled meat, fish & vegetable dishes, & has a solid wine list to pair these with. The restaurant doesn’t wow with innovative plating, striking flavor combinations, ambitious dish structures or arty ambience — and it absolutely doesn’t need to. Every dish I’ve had there has been tasteful, tasty, proportioned well, seasoned properly, fresh & wholesome (but not bland), & presented with sincere smiles & follow-up.
Food highlights include their bread (grainy & dense but moist & touched with what tastes like honey); their vegetables (zucchini and squash often accompany the meat entrees in a lightly oiled, garlicked, thin-sliced fan-spread); and their transcendent Pear Cabernet tart: silk-textured, simple & seductive.
My carps are minor: for starters, their brunch dishes I’ve found sparse — especially egregious was an over-priced & meager strawberry & apple fruit-dish. I also feel their dinner entrees could use a touch more creativity, daring, innovation — a signature dish here, a novel bit of flavor-alchemy there — something to set La Estufa apart in what’s increasingly becoming a competitive, Wahi+Inwood eating hub.
Still, with consistency, service & prices like these, I’m happy to keep coming back whether or not they change a thing. In an eating market like New York’s, cluttered with gimmick & forty dollar finery, graceful, honest basics like these stand out with very little need for improvement.
La Estufa
5035 Broadway (between 214th and 215th)
New York, NY 10034 La Estufa’s Website
I should have worn earplugs. It’s been four days and when I stop and listen to my skull there are still saws & scraping sheets. Muffled some by time & days of quiet music. Like floodlights absorbed by but still mostly soaking through heavy curtains.
Boris is a metal band from Japan, and I saw them at the Knitting Factory last Tuesday. They’re a 3-piece, they’ve been around since the mid 90s, & they just play catastrophically loud music which, whether fast or drone-slow, feels traumatically unhealthy to be standing in the presence of.
Their first song was “Farewell,” and after a few moments of set-up drone & swirling fog, there was this moment that still makes me shiver a little to remember. It was this breach, like the room split open. This vast gonging annunciation, this elemental sundering, and I was completely done in. Up until then I had been debating buying some plugs or snatching a bar napkin to tear into bits for my ears, but after that Rubicon all-chord I had no fucking choice. I just stood there, appalled and in love with all that snarl.
Then came Michio Kurihara’s solo (of the Japanese band Ghost, joining them for their whole set): gorgeous and wild, winding & carving in and out of “Farewell”’s ocean of sound like an arctic sea snake.
Their whole set was just like that, a seductive corrosion, like some Rothko in rust; an irradiated cathedral that you probably shouldn’t kneel in for very long.
That acid-etch of it all, for me, is the music’s appeal. It bathes ears and skull the way whiskey washes the throat: the scrape & burn’s the draw, and what the burn confers: that moment of loss of self in bright blinding sear. Because artful noise — like Boris builds, like Sonic Youth or Swans or Les Rallizes Denudes deliver — can be no less than another means to achieving non-being. Pure noise can grant a kind of death, and that’s the brass ring we yearn for, knowingly or not, in arranging our moments of transcendence — a moment so deafeningly beautiful that it pauses life and all its fears and troubles, blacks it out, stops its breath.
But still, I should have worn some goddamn earplugs.
I think about my tiny ear bones — the stapes, the malleus, the incus — all still outraged by what I subjected them to, and I’m vaguely nauseous and almost ashamed. I want to assure them I won’t do it again, that I got caught up in it all. I want them to forgive me, as ridiculous as it sounds. The way you want your guts to forgive you after you’ve puked up half of dinner and a carafe of cheap white wine.
But then I think of being happily lost in pure noise’s red garden maze: standing there and feeling my substance shift while this terrific cocoon of crackling static closes in around me. Getting wombed in noise until you can’t even think.
And I just don’t think I would have done it differently if I had another chance. I’d probably still stand, close my eyes, feel that vast amped palm scoop and cradle me for an hour. Gentle & motherly & torturous & redemptive. Until the lights hit, the sound’s clipped and the last twist of maze is echoing behind me.
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