Letter

Music gear takes up most of a makeshift stage in what is usually the audience area in the middle of the floor at Thalia Hall. I’m early like always, but because it’s an all-ages show, there are a few eager adolescents milling about. This is one of the times when being ‘the old guy at the show’, a thing I’ve been for well over twenty years, may as well be broadcast via blinding neon light. I almost didn’t come. Not because of the being old thing.

I hate buying tickets in advance because I never know what mood I’ll be in day of. I’ve arrived at venues, looked around, then left before a single note was played more times than I can count. I wish there was some way to game it out but there isn’t. I fight myself over this one all day. Glad I made myself go after all.

Lightning Bolt played one of the loudest shows I’ve ever experienced at the Empty Bottle ten or fifteen years back. My hearing’s fucked from way back because I never wore earplugs over decades of earsplitting music. I have periodic but persistent ringing in one or both ears, but I don’t really care. I love being in the room where the sounds are being made so much that the damage is more than worth it. But Lightning Bolt that night was a lot even for me. I was pinned against the window, as far from the stage as you could be while still being inside, but it was like a jackhammer inside my skull.

Thalia Hall is many times bigger than the Bottle so I hope the volume of the band will disperse and spread in a more traditionally enjoyable manner. I don’t mind getting beat up a little, but, please, take breaks, and let me remain on my feet.

The old theater begins to fill up as the opener climbs up onto the makeshift stage. He’s a very fat bearded man from Nebraska who makes house music with words almost exclusively about his Pekinese dogs. Before hitting the electronics for the first beats, he takes off his button-up shirt and swaps it for a tee specially printed with his face on both front and back so that the audience on both sides of the stage can have eye contact. I run into him later at the merch table and he gives me a CD for free because he likes the German Shepherds on my t-shirt.

The Lightning Bolt set is a thing of beauty. Overlapping riffs and drum fills vibrate and waft up toward the rafters. It’s very loud, but the big softens and almost shapes the sounds as they disperse. I watch most of it from the balcony, then go downstairs for the last couple numbers. I can’t see the band, just the dark roiling mass silhouette of people with the occasional crowd surfer interrupting the headlight-like strobes panning the room off a vacant stage.

I forget about being the old guy. I forget almost everything. This is what music is for.

[I wrote up a theater piece of old people telling sex stories and distweeted the Oscars.]

“Browse uniforms, gear, equipment, and more at Brooklyn’s Coat Arcade, and look and feel like a winner next time your team hits the field.”

The Coat Arcade used to be on the ground floor of the apartment building I lived in in Borough Park, Brooklyn. 1805 49th Street. I was in apartment C3. I never went to the Coat Arcade though. Not sure it was even there in the fall of 1989.

I only lived there about six months, during my ill-fated first semester of art school at Parsons. I’d been trying to track down the address ever since watching a documentary about the murder of Yusef Hawkins. It had happened down the street in Bensonhurst, weeks before I moved in. I wanted to see how close I lived to the scene of the crime and the protests that followed. This was the event that cemented Al Sharpton’s place on the national stage.

I was nineteen and mostly unaware. I had my own very important issues——like avoiding my slightly insane geriatric roommate and the daily commute on the F train to Manhattan. The only thing I knew about Bensonhurst is there was a newsstand there that sold porn magazines.

I look at a Streetview scan of the building and have no memory of the doorway or any of the rest. Doubtless the storefronts have changed, but this is a brick apartment structure from 1923. How much could it have changed? It may as well be any one of a million random places I’d never even set foot in.

There’s very little online about 1805 49th Street. Some generic realtor photos, listings of former residents on for-pay reference sites, and Justo L Roman. There’s a photo of the man smiling in front of a wall of electronic gear. The picture is undated, but the form with his ham radio handle and info says 2016. No way it’s that recent. Unless that part of Brooklyn somehow remained a couple decades back.

The Coat Arcade has moved on to other locations. Not sure it’s still operational. The plague killed off so many small operations.

Somebody else will have to dress Brooklyn’s teams so they can feel like winners now.

I’m reading Olga Tokarczuk’s epic, The Books of Jacob, set in the 1700s in an area that’s now mostly Poland and Ukraine. The borders are ever-shifting, but unlike now, in that pre-industrial time, animals are ever-present in daily life.

Actual animals and ones made by art to stand in for either people or their ideas and feelings blur together sometimes. I write in my book-in-progress about a fellow art student who brought a pig head from Chinatown and painted portraits of it in a common room at school. Making a portrait of an animal, or, in this case, its severed head, divorces it both from its now-ended life as well as its place in whatever anyone could take as its natural place in the world. Now it’s no longer part of the animal kingdom——if it even ever was, since it was livestock bred to be eaten——but it’s no longer part of the food chain either. As that head sat and rotted on a table in a downtown Chicago art school the window in which it might have been consumed closed fast.

There are a million examples of amazing paintings of fish and game throughout art history. I wonder how many painters worked fast enough that they could cook their subjects for dinner after the picture was done?

I never painted a dead animal aside from memorial pet portraits. But those were from photos their grieving owners sent me. A very different kettle of fish. There are a couple ink paintings and pen drawings of the dog I had a short time I had to put him down because he had heartworms so bad the vet told me he likely wouldn’t survive the operations needed to rid him of them. Everyone but me was terrified of that guy. I still miss him sometimes though he was a handful.

Last weekend I got to catch my friend Bill play with his band, Black Duck, at Thalia Hall. Nice to see him let loose and shred in ways he usually doesn’t allow himself to. They were opening for Yo La Tengo, a band I loved in the 80s and early 90s. Last I saw them was in 1991 or 1992 at Lounge Ax. That club is long gone but they’re still at it.

I stayed for about five minutes of blissed out noodling, then biked home.

[I reviewed a good movie and a bad movie and talked with Mallory about a masterpiece.]