NYPress.com - New York's essential guide to culture, arts, politics, news and more » Ben Lasman

Smoking And The Bandits

Ben Lasman — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The cabbie was squat and unshaven and had two packs of Seneca Lights jammed into the driver’s-side cup holder. I tightened my seatbelt, and he picked up the radio. “Rails to the Rez,” he informed the dispatcher.

We pulled out of the train station onto a desiccated main drag of Mastic, NY—all tilting delis and RadioShacks—and rolled into a woodsy suburbia.

“Where exactly on the reservation do you want to go?” the driver asked, and I said anywhere on Squaw Lane would be fine. He nodded, but he probably could have guessed where to drop me without asking. I was carrying a backpack. I had just gotten off the LIRR. I was obviously a New Yorker in town to score a shit-ton of cheap cigarettes.

We drove in silence down Shinnecock Avenue, and eventually, the cab pulled into a sort of commercial cul-de-sac, a loop of concrete buffered by a variety of impromptu retail space: prefab trading posts with drive-thru windows, step-up trailers, hollowed out vans with cash registers. The same red-lettered sign was everywhere, posted on trees, affixed to walls or staked in the grass: Discount Cigarettes Sold Here, with arrows pointing in all directions. I paid the fare and stepped out onto the Poospatuck reservation.

Outside the smoke shops, the vibe wasn’t so much busy as businesslike. Middle-aged men and women—mostly overweight, almost all white—kept pulling in and parking their minivans in a row along the storefronts. In a constant cycle, customers were walking in and out of the dozen establishments with cartons of Winstons tucked comfortably underarm, unlocking their cars and setting off from the sandy parking lot in a cloud of dust. A grown man in basketball shorts and a jersey rolled by on a tiny BMX. Save for the one Unkechaug teenager hanging out and smoking on the steps of the largest outlet, I was the youngest person in sight. No one seemed to stay here for long. The urge to stock up and get out was overwhelming.

I walked into the nearest building, a one-room trailer operation with a flimsy, marble-patterned counter. A young black couple was ringing up another customer, a white-haired guy with a ’burb belly and shorts. Before I had a chance to peruse the shelves of cigarette boxes piled behind the register, it was my turn to order.

“What do you want?” the woman asked, friendly and smiling. I told her I’d take some Parliaments and, within seconds, her taciturn partner swooped the carton down from the shelf, rung it up and passed it, unbagged, over the bar. “Thanks,” I said. The man didn’t crack a smile or say a word. Two-hundred cigarettes had cost $37, or just $3.70 a pack.

Crossing the street to the big trading post, I noticed the crop of vehicles had rotated in its entirety. A woman in an SUV was ordering take-out cigarettes at the smoke shop’s drive-thru. I walked past the teenager on the steps and into the store.

The interior was wood-paneled like a replica log cabin, the floor space for buyers dwarfed by the expanse behind the counter. White kids in polo shirts punched in tallies and maneuvered around the cigarette cache, which, in its enormousness and remove, resembled a bank vault more than a convenience store. As with the last place, I had no time to consider my purchase.

“Next!” the girl behind the counter yelled, and I, still somewhat shocked at the scale of the shop, stepped up and ordered something I didn’t want.

“Do you have a carton of Lucky Strikes?” I asked. I have a fetishistic attachment to filtered Lucky Strike Reds—the bullseye packaging, the dark harshness of the taste—and even though they discontinued them in the United States around 2006, I still ask every cigarette retailer if they, by chance, keep any in stock.

The saleswoman gestured to another kid, poised tensely by the goods, to fetch my carton of Luckies. Handing over my cash, $48, or roughly 24 cents a cigarette, the girl asked if I wanted a keychain. “Sure,” I said.

Fumbling under the counter for a second, she produced a white rubber object in the shape of a number 1. Printed across the front, in the same-colored type as the “Discount” signs out front, ran the name Peace Pipe Smoke Shop and the address. My smokes slid across the counter, unfiltered Strikes. I knew this would happen.

The keychain sported a picture of a tomahawk and the bust of a mascot Indian, all shell necklaces and earrings, a Mohawk bisecting his sloping red face. I affixed the souvenir to my hip, and turned to head back to Brooklyn.

Smoked Out

New York City currently has the most expensive cigarette tax in the country. With a combined state and city fee of $4.25 imposed on each pack sold, it is common for popular brands to run smokers in excess of $9. The logic behind the hike is simple: By burning a hole through smokers’ wallets, they will be less inclined, or less capable, of burning a hole through their lungs.

The data backing up the initiative is conclusive, but imbalanced in scope. The previous tax jump in 2002 lowered the city’s adult smoking rate by 21 percent and among high school-aged kids by 51 percent. On the day the new tariff went into effect, 311 was reportedly bombarded with 2,700 calls requesting nicotine patches, roughly three times the typical number. Still, excise taxes inevitably punish young, poor and minority smokers disproportionately to their more affluent, predominately white counterparts. Add to that the continuing ambiguity over tobacco’s place in popular culture (Mad Men offers an illicit fix of smoking porn every week), the massive disparities between states’ stamp duties and Bloomberg’s monomaniacal anti-cigarette rhetoric—and the moral and economic, if not medical, consequences of smoking—become increasingly difficult to dissect.

“Cigarettes are a legal product,” argues Audrey Silk, founder of the New York-based, pro-tobacco Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, or CLASH. “Considering the abundance of anti-smoking ads, it’s impossible to conclude that adults are not making an informed choice. It’s a contradiction by the anti-smoking groups to claim it’s an ‘addiction’ and not a choice but insist that an increase in price is some magic bullet that will cause a person to suddenly stop.”

Silk, with a voice like a trash compactor, sounds as if she had been smoking packs in her sleep since the ’60s. For a woman who advocates for the inalienable rights of smokers, I can’t think of a more persuasive poster child to dissuade kids from lighting up. Then again, the current generation of 18- to 24-year-old smokers, myself included, are as willfully ignorant as anyone that our nicotine fix won’t eventually kill us.

I smoked my first cigarette when I was 16, and never really stopped. It was a few years later that I realized that every bit of anti-smoking propaganda I’d heard as a child was effectively true. I smoked because my friends did and because it made you look fantastic. Still, this doesn’t really explain the ostensible jump in lanky, youthful cigarette tokers you find congregating outside Williamsburg bars and NYU dorms.

Somehow, smoking seems a lot more ubiquitous among the current crop of twentysomethings than it does in our Generation X peers; a kind of anti-Darwinian narrative in direct contradiction to every clean-air, talk-box TRUTH commercial. I think I speak for a lot of medium-grade smokers when I say that I don’t believe I am addicted to nicotine: I could, if I wanted, stop at any time.

It’s a cliché that the young feel invincible, but the super-human status quo becomes a bit more complicated in the light of every bit of malignant data we’ve seen over the past couple of decades. At this point, smoking is a much more existential experience than it was 20 years ago. It is a direct confrontation with one’s own mortality: arguing, in essence, that by intentionally committing slow-suicide via cigarette, we gain a certain control over the most uncontrollable aspect of our lives. We can quit as we see fit. No one, after all, wants to sound like Audrey Silk.

In light of this philosophy—universal or specific—the bombardment of mixed messages from legislators, from the media and ultimately from the nicotine-dependent body itself makes the tax hike seem less like an ultimatum for smokers to quit than an imperative for them to find alternatives.

On the Rez

Central to this debate on how to obtain, how to curtail and how to control the flow of cigarettes into NYC is the role of Long Island Indian reservations like Poospatuck. Excepted from state taxes due to their sovereign status, New York tribes like the Shinnecock in Southhampton and the Unkechaug in Mastic have made a killing in recent years from offering tax-free goods to non-Native Americans willing to make the trek. In this sense, the New York City tax bump on cigarettes was probably the best thing that ever happened to the tribes.

“Before the tax increase, we were essentially a welfare community,” explains Poospatuck Chief Harry Wallace. “Now we’re seeing a lot of new building on the reservation, we can afford to pay bigger scholarships to send our kids to school. It’s been hugely beneficial for our people.”

Visiting the reservation, one is struck not only with the scale of the operation—a dozen or more stores within yards of each other—but the seemingly uninhibited desire to expand. All around the block, construction crews were erecting new stores, and outside the existing sellers, residents had erected mountains of cartons on foldout tables. The entire population, it seemed, had cohered around a single business model. Even Chief Wallace has his office inside a smoke shop.

Despite the Poospatuck’s peripatetic conflation of residential and retail space, the buying experience is fastidiously streamlined and shockingly uncomplicated. Walk into any number of outlets along Squaw Lane—with names like the Peace Pipe Smoke Shop, Smoke Signal Smoke Shop, Smoking Arrow Smokes—and customers are greeted by a well-staffed counter, behind which sits thousands of stacked, brand-name cigarette cartons. Tell the cashier what you want, pay with cash or credit card and an employee will dislodge your box from the pile and hand it over.

The only problem with taking advantage of these discounts is that it might be illegal. For years, New York State has attempted to levy taxes on cigarettes sold on reservations to non-Indian customers. Unable to claim tribal affiliation, the government holds, U.S. citizens must pay the stipulated consumption fees. Native American communities, on the other hand, strongly object to the state’s request that they function as tax collectors. While Governor Paterson has hinted he may attempt to enforce the excise, such an accomplishment has eluded his precursors for more than a decade. In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could tax purchases made by non-Indians on reservation smoke shops. Three years later, when New York attempted to do so, Native American protestors near Buffalo lit fires in protests that shut down a number of interstates. Since then, the governors have, for the most part, let the issue alone.

New York City and Mayor Bloomberg take a slightly different line. The mayor’s Aug. 4 editorial in the New York Post speculated that the planned increase in MTA fares could be avoided should the state opt to make good on their obligation to collect cigarette taxes from reservation vendors. Contained in the proposal, however, was a far more insidious detail, ostensibly unrelated to the issue of taxation but calculated to damage the reservations’ reputation as legitimate merchants: “Failure to collect the tax not only hurts public health,” suggests the mayor, “it hurts the rest of the state’s small businesses, who must sell cigarettes at far higher prices. Worse, there’s reason to believe that tobacco smugglers are funneling profits from Indian reservation sales to terrorist organizations overseas.”

No term is more galvanizing for post-9/11 New Yorkers than terrorism. In making the claim, Bloomberg was not merely laying out an economic plan to stabilize train fares but also explicitly linking the reservations with acts of violence committed against his constituents.

The mayor’s accusation stemmed from a Congressional report from April commissioned by New York Representative Peter T. King that called for prompt investigations of cigarette smuggling operations rumored to be funneling profits to Hezbollah, Hamas and al-Qaeda.

Upon the release of the report, numerous tribes issued statements defending the integrity of their retail operations. “The Seneca Nation is equally opposed to terrorism at home and abroad, and our patriotism should not be called into question in any report brought before a Congressional subcommittee,” retorted Seneca Nation President Maurice John Sr, long a spokesman for New York Indian rights.

Poospatuck Chief Harry Wallace, typically old-mannish and soft-spoken, here becomes cataleptic: “To say that we fund terrorism is deeply offensive,” explodes the leader. “We’re an easy target for this kind of discrimination, because of our small size and the unpopularity of the product we sell. But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”

Hard Not to Cough

Earlier this year, Rodney Mullen, the Costa Rican proprietor of the Peace Pipe Smoke Shop on the Poospatuck reservation, was arrested on charges of ordering the firebombing of a woman’s car. Apparently concerned over competition from rival tobacconists in Mastic, Mullen had initiated a minor terror campaign to intimidate his competition. After federal agents seized his business, the owner offered to put up an unheard-of $54 million to secure his bail. While the bond was refused, the incident still served as fodder for critics of the reservation’s practices, indicating simultaneously that enormous sums of money were being made in the absence of tax enforcement and that infiltrating the community from the outside, as Mullen had done by marrying a Native American woman, was not particularly difficult. While Mullen had no proven terrorist ties, the basic message gleaned from the scandal remained consistent with Bloomberg and King’s warning: Violence and disorder were inherent to the continued forbearance of the state. The reservations must be forced to tax their customers.

What these arguments fail to acknowledge is that criminal consequences occur on both sides of the legislation. While cracking down on reservation sales may mean the curtailing of certain smugglers, it also may lead to more felonies being committed in the city in the name of cigarettes. Just this July, a pair of Fifth Avenue convenience-store owners made headlines when they caught a group of thieves stuffing cartons of smokes into backpacks in the business’ storage room. Taking the law into their own hands, Mohammed Othman and his brother set upon the bandits with machetes and chased them from the premises.

“It’s painfully unbelievable to hear lawmakers complain that these sales fund terrorists when they are the ones that create the ideal conditions for that market to grow,” notes Audrey Silk. “Crimes like the attempted burglary would have gone uncommitted were it not for the lucrativeness of reselling stolen cigarettes, thanks to the do-gooders who seem happy to trade a matter of a private and ‘unhealthy’ choice for an unwanted gun at the head.”

The problem cannot be solved through excessive local taxation, or the specific targeting of a community. Rather, if Bloomberg and his supporters are serious about cracking the cigarette cartels, the approach will have to be holistic and expansive, rather than obsessive and pedantic.

If I, a sometime-smoker on a limited budget, would be willing to trudge an hour and a half out on the LIRR to purchase two cartons of smokes to last me the next couple of months, then imagine the lengths a full-fledged illegal enterprise, reliant upon finding cheap smokes for its livelihood, will go to stay liquid. Given the approach of the city so far, it’s hard not to cough.

After putting those two cartons of cigarettes in my backpack and walking back out into the dust swirl of the parking lot, I figured it would be easier to hike back to the train station than wait for another cab to show up on Squaw Lane. The reservation doesn’t end abruptly; it fades into the suburban grid of Mastic. The cigarette shops disappear, the construction sites dwindle. But little else changes. Cars of customers en route to the Peace Pipe roll by, smoke clouds billowing from the open windows. Packs of kids roam the matrix of lanes and streets with basketballs and scooters. I got completely lost and had to call my friend to Google-map me directions.

The sidewalk leading up the main drag to the railroad was littered with butts, empty Seneca packs, used condoms. I felt as if I was following some sort of breadcrumb trail out of the wilderness. The housing block opened up: Here were the twin RadioShacks again, the same Long Island Gothic deli. In the window of the convenience store were signs for Newports and Marlboros, the familiar parallel to Poospatuck’s “Discount” banners. The prices seemed exorbitant at $8.50 a pack and somehow more legitimate. The sub-criminal rush I had gotten in the Indian smoke shop was eluding me now. I wanted to return my unfiltered Luckies. I wanted to go home. The deli was empty. A fat guy in a white T-shirt hibernated over the counter.

I sat down on a bench next to the LIRR track, pulled out a Parliament and lit it. The smoke rushed into my mouth, and I leaned back in my seat, hanging on to this place between home and the sedated vision quest of the nicotine reservation. Maybe it was time to quit.

Smoking a pack of Marlboro Lights a day will cost you roughly $8.50—a total of $255 spent on cigarettes in a single month. But that doesn’t mean you need to give up your smokes cold turkey. Plenty of people are adapting their lifestyle to new ways of working around the system. Here’s a few ways to curb your spending habits—while still getting your nicotine fix.

—Compiled by Patty Lee and Ben Atkinson

Have your Southern friends ship cigs from South Carolina, where a pack of Marlboro Lights runs $3 ($90 a month shipping)

Indian Reservation: $3.50 ($105 a month)

Nicotine Gum: $70.09 a month

Nicotine Patch: $108.43 (plus there are city programs that will help you out for the first month)

Rolling Your Own: $13.95 a can/each can makes 200. Approximately $41.85 a month (plus the price of rolling papers)

Electric Cigarette: After the initial outlay of $79.95, breathing liquid nicotine will only cost you $30 a month.

Arts Brief: Doveman Cuts Loose

Ben Lasman — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What happens when the ironic isn’t? Cultural consumers of the 21st century recognize artistic ambivalence so readily that even the most catch-all buzzwords can send them reeling into a resigned, winking acceptance: heavy metal, dolphins, the 1980s. The problem with this reflex, of course, is that it becomes nearly impossible to discern between kitsch and the quintessential. Everything that could be construed as emotional or ambitious is instinctively assigned camp status instead.

Doveman’s (aka Thomas Bartlett) latest, Internet-only release gives off all the warnings of an irony mine ready to explode. A track-by-track reconstruction of the Footloose soundtrack performed in the whispery pall that has become Thomas’ trademark, the disc recalls the taste of a tongue-in-cheek indie-rock cover.

Thomas’ best friend, artist Gabriel Greenberg, found a tape of the original among the belongings of his late half-sister and asked the musician, who had never heard or seen the Kevin Bacon classic, to remake the album in her memory. After downloading the album, listening to it a couple of times, and printing out the lyrics, Thomas was ready to commit his re-imaginings to tape.

“This wasn’t a whim,” explained Thomas. “For Gabe, there was a pretty clear connection between these songs and Doveman.”

Where the Footloose songs evoke a fantastic, histrionic take on the myth of high school, Doveman’s records have always explored a similar emotional territory; if Footloose is the archetypal footballer lounging by the lockers and smacking girls on the ass, Doveman is the poetry-writing recluse looking on tragically and enviously from the water fountain. “There’s this epic thing about the Footloose songs, freedom and high school,” said Thomas. “Gabe saw a similar thing on my albums, that same feeling, but wounded, self-indulgent, just turned inward.”

On the verge of a tour with longtime associates Nico Muhly and Sam Amidion, Thomas has yet to set an official date for a live debut of Footloose but says he’s excited to bring the set to stage. He knows, however, the dangers of irony. At a recent radio session with famed music producer Steve Lillywhite, the studio Svengali offered some advice: “Steve said, ‘You should do Flashdance and make a career out of it,’” recalled Thomas. “I was like ‘No! No!’”

Drumming Out Of Time

Ben Lasman — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Despite being the most mystical band on the planet, the Boredoms (pictured) still have yet to figure out how to be in two places at once. After 77 drummers joined the Japanese noise shamans for a cosmically proportioned beat circle under the Brooklyn Bridge last July, the expectations for this year’s follow-up have been about as high as Yamatsuka Eye, the group’s inimitable frontman, must have been when he famously piloted a forklift into an Osaka stage back in the d’90s. Dubbed “8/8/08,” the concert will see something of a resurrection of last year’s mind-melting must-see, except the progenitors have relocated their expanded army of percussionists to the toxic shores of L.A. That, and Nike has slapped on a sponsorship.

The saving grace for an East Coast show lies in Brooklyn’s own Gang Gang Dance, handpicked by Eye to carry the groove torch forward. Moving the party to the Williamsburg waterfront, the protégés have assembled 88 trap-masters of their own in an attempt to realize the century’s first bi-coastal rock show.

“In California, they’re going to be arranged in a counter-clockwise spiral, and we’re going to be going in a clockwise spiral,” elucidates Gang member Josh Diamond. “The two spirals will then combine to make an infinity symbol.”

Sacred geometry is nothing new to the Boredoms. Last year’s concert, “77 Boadrums,” took its theoretical impetus from the band’s Sevena, a towering noise maker comprising seven stacked guitars, and some Okinawan creation story about stars and caves. Flip the 8 of 88 on its side, and this year’s agenda becomes clear.

Less spiritual is the intervention of the world’s most popular shoemaker into the mix. “The organizers were really apologetic about all this corporate stuff,” explains Diamond. “Apparently they told Nike running was a lot like drumming.” The logic of repetition, it seems, has no limits: Everything is the same as everything else. It’s a philosophy those skeptical of a Boredom-less Boadrum, and certainly the members of Gang Gang Dance, might do well to honor.

Too Cuil: Ex-Google employees launch new search engine today

Ben Lasman — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:41:46 +0000

Google’s web-hegemony has become so unquestionable at this point, that any attempt to topple it comes off not as merely futile, but as a kind of Brechtian joke. The successors to the search-engine standard line up, boast revolutionary features and vamped-up security. They have vague, inviting names like ChaCha and the Jeeves-less Ask.com. And yet, it’s all tech-nerd theater. Nothing changes, nobody cares. In a best-case-scenario, most people will simply search Google for the details on its own ostensible competition.

A new model named Cuil (and pronounced, unexpectedly, “cool”) goes online today. Engineered by former Google employees as reported by HuffPost , the engine boasts access to a larger pool of websites (120 billion) than its rival, and can organize search results graphically by category. The site’s homepage is a troubling, portentous black, and the logo, “Cuil” in a Helvetica-ish font with a blue-dyed “i”, is decidedly less cheery than the G-spot’s rainbow Times New Roman. The presentation, sparse, spacey, and emphatically inhuman, needs some work. By contrast, Google’s homepage today features an adorable drawing of Peter Rabbit being chased with a rake. Even though the massive Menlo Park-based corporation might be evil underneath its pastel sheen, I still feel safe searching in its coddling hands. With Cuil, I couldn’t shake the creeping fear that the system would throw me nothing but tentacle porn and pages in German.

But how about the crucial diagnostics? Here’s a rundown of my intensive trial sesh:

-Search for my name turned up 6,040 hits on Google, 384,375 hits on Cuil. I’m obviously more ubiquitous on the latter, but also less existent. There’s a lot on nonsensical stuff about Linux and some guy named Jeff on the first page. Google, meanwhile links to that video of me singing a song about pirates on YouTube pronto. Verdict: TIE

-Looking for illegal music is hit or miss with both methods. As with before, Cuil racks up obscene numbers of hits, but doesn’t focus content to the extent Google does. I know what I want is here somewhere, but it might take weeks of clicking “next” to find it. Also, Google puts up more links to viable commercial outlets, like Amazon or Rhapsody. If I wanted to pay for music, I would pay for it. Verdict: CUIL, by a hair.

-Google bombs are alive and well on Cuil. “Miserable failure” still nets a million articles on Bush. The first link for “French Military Victories” on Google remains a mock-up page referring you to the search term “French Military Defeats”. Cuil, however, goes the whole nine yards, displaying no search results and delivering the devastating message “We didn’t find any results for French Military Victories.” Verdict: CUIL.

Of course, Cuil does not have a lot of the nifty featurettes we’ve come to expect on G-love. There’s no “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, there’s no maps, or images, or video search. There’s no cloud-computing gadgetry. But unlike most of the search-engine also- rans, the app manages to impress with the sheer brute force of its content turnout. The web is big, but Cuil makes it seem bigger. Which, of course, is terrifying. But also, well, kind of cool.

Deer Diary

Ben Lasman — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When a couple of blogs leaked the news that San Francisco avant-pop gurus Deerhoof would be performing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” with NYC’s Metropolis Ensemble for the Celebrate Brooklyn! festival on July 18, a lot of people canceled flights and blew off weddings in an attempt to catch the once-in-a-lifetime show. There was only one problem: Deerhoof had never actually intended to perform the Russian composer’s masterwork. Metropolis would be playing the piece alone. A red herring, it seemed, had been dropped into the rumor mill.

“It’s the case of a blogger skipping a couple prepositions or leaving half the email out of the browser window,” explains Greg Saunier, Deerhoof’s drummer. “I’m kind of sad all these people aren’t that excited for plain, old Deerhoof.”

Saunier’s description of the band comes off as something of an oxymoron considering the ripe expanse of aural variables the group has toyed with over the course of its eight studio albums. From the noise blitzes of their early records to the melodic quirk-core of their more recent popular apotheosis, the quartet has always shown a degree of difficulty courting convention, while at the same time managing to mold an ever-evolving niche of their own.

“A few years ago, our sound wouldn’t have made sense to anyone,” remarks Saunier, “Now, when people say something reminds them of Deerhoof, we’re always like, ‘What?’ To know your band’s sound is a known commodity is flattering, but it also makes you wonder if the things identified with your style are necessarily something you would want engraved on your tombstone.”

Rather than galvanizing any discernible trope from rock’s decomposing backlog, the kind of markers one might characterize as the Deerhoof vibe—whiplash guitar symphonics, singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s schoolgirl birdsong—satisfy a sonic logic singular to the band. It’s the kind of creative Catholicism that would make the “Rite” myth not only believable but eminently desirable. Can you imagine the Red Hot Chili Peppers remixing The Ring Cycle, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs doing the Brandenburg Concertos? The prospect in either case would be mystifying—and terrifying. It is undoubtedly a testament to a band’s greatness when any lunatic idea they come up with—or, in this case, don’t—carries the weight of a must-see event.

Even without its touted hook, this week’s set will nevertheless bend toward the new and exciting: Cuts from Deerhoof’s upcoming LP, Offend Maggie, will form the core of the concert in anticipation of a more sustained touring program through the United States, Japan and Australia in support of the disc’s October 7 release.

While wiping the board clean is the ho-hum cliché of most follow-up albums, the group’s redefined approach to the new track list seems particularly harrowing: Before hitting record on Maggie, the band wrote a bunch of songs, rehearsed them and played them at some shows.

“In the past, one of us would show up in the studio with a song he or she had written the night before and say, ‘I have one part, this is how it goes,’” recalls Saunier. “Our big, radical reinvention this time was to do what most bands do normally. But it brought out a new result. It’s a weird sound on a Deerhoof album—that we actually know what we’re doing.”

While frequently cited for mind-blowing live shows, Deerhoof has always kept a distance between their headphone and headlining aesthetics. The experimental Maggie approach had its origins in that disjunction, explains Saunier, with the group attempting to close the divide between the stereo and the stage.

“Before we were always kind of a Deerhoof cover band,” he says. “We had been talking to Wayne Coyne [of the Flaming Lips] about how he always gets mad when a band sounds some way on record, and then you buy a ticket and the whole thing is completely different. It was something we wanted to rectify.”

Of course, if the band’s pattern of self-disavowal remains intact, the rejoinder of mediums on Maggie might as well propel their gigs even farther into left field. Saunier says the band might be game to rework “Rite of Spring” sometime in the future, but remains enthusiastic about their pairing on the Celebrate Brooklyn! showcase.

“A lot of times I feel like festival lineups underestimate the audience,” he says, “The idea of the words ‘Celebrate Brooklyn’ and ‘Deerhoof’ and ‘Metropolis Ensemble’ being mentioned in the same breath is pretty amazing. It shows that it’s not about ‘indie rock’ or ‘art music’ but ideas and being put in an unknown situation that requires a solution. It gives you the chance to refresh, to press the restart button, to reckon with your own assumptions.”

Stravinsky, perhaps the original mother of reinvention, would be proud.

Deerhoof performs with Metropolis Ensemble July 18, Prospect Park Bandshell (Prospect Park West & 9th St.), Park Slope; 7:30, free.

Bummer Stage: Santogold and Diplo at Central Park

Ben Lasman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:54:51 +0000

The queue never ceases to amaze me. Folks line up dutifully for an iPhone upgrade or a last-minute look at the Telectroscope or the All-Star Game, and a grandmother’s position ahead of an American Gladiator is respected as tantamount to a constitutional commitment: do not cut, do not push. It’s a British convention that, while retaining that country’s predilection for rueful politesse, not to mention a uniquely Stateside bent towards compassionate competition, is still about as close as the common capitalist can get to egalité, fraternité, liberté while still pursuing his gadgety passions and hard-on for spectacle. It’s a sublime compromise. To get the things we want, we must wait our turn, stomach a couple seconds of social collectivism in the name of stuff, stuff, stuff.

Sunday’s Santogold/Diplo show at Central Park’s SummerStage not only had a queue out of Exodus, but an aesthetic mentality poised on the cusp of one-world wishwash and consumerist crassness. Waiting in a line that snaked about a mile out into the wilderness, we panted and smoked and looked for shade, all the while hoping that the thuds emanating from over the foliage-soaked horizon were, in fact, the concert and not some carefully concealed guy with a boombox having a picnic. When the baggage check did come into sight, so did the skeletal outline of an impromptu mini-stadium, covered in banners for Time Warner, Snapple, and white-dudes pistol-poking the air. For some reason, security at these events are under the impression that they’re responsible for peacekeeping at a Gaza checkpoint. They gesticulate and yell like everyone is under fire, waving the crowds through with a gritty desperation I haven’t seen since those tapes of Hilary Clinton landing in war-torn Bosnia.

Somewhere, a friend of mine had seen this show advertised as the “sounds of the future.” While that pitch was obviously written by someone over the age of forty, the claim does have some basis in fact. Diplo and 8-Track are masters of the mash-up, not so much DJs in the traditional, coherent sense as much as rap-radio recontextualizers, patching our favorite bits of our favorite thug anthems into each other and changing the recipe often enough to let us forget that we’re hearing a Frankenstein. It’s cool for about twenty minutes, but then you just want to hear a fucking song, one full song, any song! The strategy works in clubs, where it’s air-conditioned and dark and loud as an airport. But in the open air, in pulverizing heat, on a surface that seemed to be stolen from the nearest putting green, only drunk, fat people in bikinis want to dance. At one point, a hype man shouted “Get your guns out!” If he’d been serious, I’m afraid we’d have had another Jonestown on our hands, except the Kool-Ade would cost something like $7.

I missed Santogold and went to hang out under a tree. “Get off the grass!” yelled some enormous guard from afar. This is something I wouldn’t expect to hear in a park, but of course, it had been years since I’d been to football camp. In the distance, I could hear the boom-boom of the backing DJ, the singer’s quasi-bhangra balling. It was a short set, by all accounts, about 6 songs and half-an-hour in length. When I opened my eyes, I saw a sea of people cascading out of the bleachers, a queue rolling downhill with terrible and anarchic velocity. It was like the stadium had suddenly gagged on the thousands of hands that fed it.

Photo courtesy of Gayborhood Gringo on Flickr

No Pain, No Age

Ben Lasman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:48:15 +0000

No Age’s exodus out of the L.A. Smell scene into the larger taste-made universe is even more auspicious for the fact that their sound is more timeless than timely. When everyone else is busy dabbling in afro-clash and new kinds of irony, the duo opts to iron punk’s ragged remains and cut out a few patches. While they keep a white-noise board on hand, the static breakdowns are more transitional than compositional, a cowry of cultural currency that doesn’t necessarily need to be there, even if it makes the band look cooler.

No Age did look pretty cool, though, Friday night at the South Street Seaport. Kind of amazingly, their fans, a lot of whom might be prepubescent, are completely crazy, moshing like bros, climbing over barriers, patting red-faced guards on the head. It’s a wild vibe, kind of like wandering into the edgiest mall in Burlington. If the blogosphere can make music like this teeny-boppable, then I’m all for the inevitable after school special. No Age indeed.

The band held up their end of the bargain pretty well. The stripped down combo sound works better in the open air then many of the Seaport’s past choices, and the whole thing was scuzzy and loud without dissolving into the fuzz puddle I’ve come to expect from the venue. No Age didn’t talk a lot, but when they did, they seemed very polite. No one threw anything, and the duo invited us all to Death by Audio after the gig. A Place to Bury Strangers didn’t do that a couple weeks ago, and they fucking live there.

But with aww-factor comes the prospect of backlash. I could feel it brewing under the sea of fresh faces in HEALTH shirts, in the sweat-drenched security holding them back. When the unmarketable is suddenly fielding questions about Fall Out Boy, more than a few fans are going to feel like their baby has been dropped out the window. No Age are growing up. Catch them while they’re hot.

Photo by Ben Lasman

BoltBus is the Prep-Tech Way to Travel

Ben Lasman — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:40:50 +0000

The holiday weekend taught me a few new things about how to get out of the city on the cheap. I was headed home to Boston and decided on BoltBus (rather than the always dubious Chinatown bus choices). BoltBus steals the “$1/seat*” concept of the Midwestern Megabus venture, but throws in the added flash factor of onboard Wi-Fi, power outlets, ample legroom and flatscreen TVs that don’t turn on.

“Bolt for a Buck,” however catchy, is not entirely true, as the $1 seats typically sell out days before you plan on leaving. For the non-neurotic, expect to foot a $15-$20 bill for a one-way cruise, that, despite what the ticket says, will arrive at its destination a minimum of half an hour late. Ignoring the fine print, Bolt is a comfy, clean experience whose preppy, tech-y riders could constitute an Apple commercial unto themselves. All good things to keep in mind as the next summer weekend approaches and you begin to get that itch to escape the simmering city streets.

Drawing Blood: Draw-A-Thon Theater Searches for Home, Crashes Temporarily at Creatorâ€™s

Ben Lasman — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:01:35 +0000

This Saturday, artist Michael Alan plans to fill his Williamsburg house with nude Marilyn Monroe impersonators, sparklers on the roof and in the butt, a cake on someone’s head, and an orgy. It will be, promises Alan, wild fucking fun.
As the next installment of Draw-A-Thon Theater, Saturday’s event would mark the healthy continuation of the much-covered, well-attended public performance art-cum open studio trip Alan and his troupe founded in 2005 were it not for the nagging fact that the project, as of this writing, is homeless.

“We had an arrangement with a Chelsea gallery through the end of August,” Alan explains via telephone, “But they didn’t want to pay the $500 insurance.” Booker back-outs of this kind are nothing new to the group. Alan has sought legal action on at least three occasions against flaky curators.

“I always win because they’re always wrong,” says the artist. “They think, ‘Here’s this painter who’s crazy that we can take advantage of.’ I might be a painter, and I might be crazy, but I’m also intelligent.”

Draw-a-Thon stagings, which typically last 12 hours and, due to ever-present and tumescent nudity, don’t serve alcohol, have failed to jibe with the Modigliani-and-a-martini crowd. The show, packing the floor for an entire working day with amateur artists, naked things on fire and hurled eggs, has become considered something of a money pit.

The communal bent of Draw-A-Thon Theater seems increasingly at odds with the prevailing curatorial trends of the city.

“People say New York is the art capital of the world, but I’m not sure what that means anymore,” says David Koren, producer for the ongoing Figment arts fair on Governor’s Island at which Draw-a-Thon performed two weeks ago. “Does art capital mean where art is bought and sold? Dragged out of a cave and exhibited?”

In 200X New York, art means money and scene means graduation party. Underneath the bohemian veneer of Williamsburg (now available at Target) and the insta-bar openings of the Chelsea strip runs a current of privilege at once potent in its cultural influence and potable in its neuvo appeal. Thousands of kids, descending from the ivory tower into Brooklyn and Soho, are drinking the hipster ale. It’s a funny balance. These days it’s harder than ever to afford the tubercular lifestyle craved by cash-in creative types. For everyone else, there’s not much of an escape. Threats of moving from Bushwick to Baltimore, or Austin, or Portland are essentially clichés of their own at this point.

Alan, too, has considered the possibility of leaving the Apple, but has opted to hang on for the time being because of personal and self-actualizing obligations towards his hometown.

“I want to do something to make this city better for artists and bands,” he says. “If I could change something here, in this climate, I feel like that would be significant.” Draw-a-Thon is currently looking to purchase a space of its own, something Alan has dubbed the Positive Art Machine.

“We were thinking of Warhol’s Factory, but positive,” he describes. “It’s going to be a huge eyesore. I want everyone to come in.” With a fundraiser scheduled for September, the PAM may be a time away. But, Alan contends, the backers for the endeavor, not to mention the support of hundreds of collaborators, artists and musicians itching at the status quo, is there.

In the meantime, Draw-a-Thon will have to improvise. When their outdoor Governor’s Island gig was threatened by rain and lightning, the troupe spontaneously relocated to an abandoned church nearby. “We baptized a guy in paint over the altar,” Alan recalls, “It’s a statement of, OK, ‘What is the Church?’, but also points out that Draw-a-Thon is a new kind of church that’s weird in a positive way, the real positive way.”

The Figment performance drew a crowd of well over 100 people, a turnout which, while heartening for the performers, begs the question of how Alan will fit those kind of numbers into his digs this weekend. “I’m just looking for a space with a radio, a stage, and the ability to keep its word in the contract,” says the painter. “Until then, I’m just hoping I won’t get evicted.”

Stranger Things Have Happened: A Place to Bury Strangers at the South Street Seaport

Ben Lasman — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:59:06 +0000

Strange things happen when bands move up a stage size. Instant fans via Forkcast flock to shows with cameras and girlfriends. There’s massive buildup until the backlash. Suddenly, the bassist and the drummer are playing stints in Atlantic City with a rotating cast of cocktail waitresses. Friday night’s free A Place to Bury Strangers gig at the South Street Seaport felt like a set-length condensation of the buzz trajectory.

On a stage sandwiched between antique schooners and an Uno, the trio kicked out cuts off their debut LP, played some film-school-y super 8 business about ski slopes and pained women behind them, and destroyed a guitar. Other things demolished: My expectations of seeing a group that at one point, I was told, played a set in the dark with a single strobe hitched to the kick pedal. My irrational urge to check out the appetizer sampler at any one of the family-friendly joints down the diner canyon. The until-now uncontested notion that noise-freakouts, no matter the context, are wicked fun. Things oddly untouched: My hearing, which, if this showcase had gone where I was anticipating, should have been the evening’s first casualty.

The mix was fairly shite as well. It’s a major thumbs-down for a group whose entire claim to semi-fame lies in their effects pedal collection. The overall sound quality of the event was inexcusably poor, varying wildly in volume, levels and clarity depending on one’s orientation around the boardwalk. Obviously the environment, packed as it was with visiting families eating oysters on the half-shell and onion blossoms, played a factor. Apparently, Death by Audio, APTBS’ gear workshop, manufactures something called the Total Sonic Annihilator. This was more along the lines of a total yawn. Even when head-dude Oliver Ackermann pushed his vocal mic into his amp for the final feedback breakdown, the result was more irritating than abrasive. Everyone started cheering, like subjects in a white-noise conditioning experiment. Perhaps Uno’s should have employed such a strategy. A Place to Bury Strangers? How about A Place to Buy Burgers!

Photo by Ben Lasman