In back, a trio of diners sat against the slither of a greentiled wall devouring rolls. “I’m full but I wanna continue eating,” one paused long enough to exclaim. “This is sooooo good!” But was it? I sat with my somewhat-willing date by the sushi counter, where odd fish hunks were protected by cellophane, near a clutter of fish sauce containers, rice wine and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black. A cackle from the kitchen announced our dinner: a warm sweet potato roll, a plate of pieces crowned by a red, whipped mash of spicy tuna and yellow tail, and a fleshy, gelatinous line of solo yellow tail bites, each bulging indelicately from a wrapping of sticky rice.

We drowned our wasabi with soy sauce and readied the sticks. Were we sure we wanted to do this? “I was just thinking…” I began to say. “Shhhh,” my date shushed, and she was right: contemplation is often the lesser part of bravery.

Ignorance is bliss, especially when it comes to raw fish. I’d gone to Fu’s after reading the restaurant inspection posted online by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) from the previous week. It listed a number of “Critical” violations, including “Evidence of mice or live mice” and “Live roaches present.” According to the DHMH, the restaurant is “not yet graded.”

After eating a number of C-grade meals, I discovered that I didn’t come down with anything worse than low-level anxiety. This was partially warranted
because, in an effort to balance the competing prerogatives of informing the public and giving restaurants a fair chance to clean up their acts, the city ends up glossing over some of the worst offenders.

The NY-DHMH is in charge of health and safety inspections for the city’s approximately 24,000 restaurants. Last summer, the government organization installed a new inspection system that awards grades based on points. The less points a restaurant scores, the better its grade, which must be posted in the window for anyone to see. A score of 0–13 points earns an “A,” 14–27 points earns a “B” and from 28 on, a restaurant earns a “C.” There is no grade lower than C.

In a June 2010 press release, before the grading system took effect, Health Commissioner Peter Farley said the purpose of the grades was “to help consumers make informed choices about where to eat out.”

But can consumers “make informed choices” when the worst-performing restaurants, the ones they are most likely to avoid, are also the least likely to have a grade? As of last week, there are around 2,400 restaurants that scored over 27 points on their last inspection, putting them in the C range. Less than a third of these restaurants actually have a C grade.

A graded school quiz is simple to interpret. A student answers questions, earns a certain number of points and receives a grade based on that total. The Health Department’s grading system does not work that way. It’s more like grading at a lax progressive school, where students pay a shitload to get a second or third chance, past performance is taken into account and it’s in neither the student body’s nor the administration’s best interest to flunk anyone.

On a regular basis, restaurants that scored in the C range on their last inspection will maintain its grade of B or A. The Breslin restaurant at The Ace Hotel, for example— which recently earned a Michelin star—has an A grade, although it scored in the C range on its most recent inspection. It’s not special in this regard: a quarter of all restaurants that scored 28 points on their last inspection still have A grades.

The grading system provides more conditions under which an inspection won’t be graded than conditions under which it will. A restaurant’s first inspection isn’t graded unless it receives an A. If it doesn’t, it has about a month to clean up before it receives a second “graded” inspection. Fu Sushi, which remains officially “Not Yet Graded,” is in this category. If a restaurant still scores in the B or C range on its “graded” re-inspection, it can choose to appeal the ruling to an administrative tribunal, where it can plead its case, pay fines, attempt to reduce its score and post a “Grade Pending” sign. A restaurant scoring in the C range will receive ungraded “compliance” inspections about every 30 days until it scores under 28 points or is shut down. Inspections based on complaints (for C restaurants and others) are also not graded.

Implicit in the relative rarity of graded inspections is the idea that a badgrade is seriously bad news for a restaurant’s bottom line. “A ‘C’ grade can be a scarlet letter for a restaurant,” says Andrew Rigie, the director of operations at the New York State Restaurant Association. “You’re issued a ‘C’ grade once, and if a customer sees that, they may never come back to that restaurant.”

While there are no statistics yet available for exactly how much restaurant owners stand to lose with a C, the fear of a C grade is palpable at the Administrative Tribunal, which is on the 11th floor of a cramped office building near the World Trade Center. The waiting room manages to combine the drudgery of the DMV with the anonymous dread of an STD clinic. The room has 16 rows of interlocking chairs and, at midday, they’re mostly filled. People are generally occupied with a newspaper or the important business of foot tapping and cheek puffing. The more prepared go over fat folders of documents to prepare their defenses, or just hold them in their lap, drawing strength from their weight.

Every few minutes, a clerk at the front counter calls out a restaurant address and an owner’s name and sends him or her scuttling off to one of the little hearing rooms in back. The room makes a commercial for The Price is Right feel like a luxury getaway. The walls and support pillars are scuffed. Signs say you can’t eat, and no one does. You can’t talk on your phone, but doing so doesn’t seem to land anyone in trouble.

I talk to the owner of a pizza place in Queens (who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous), who says his appointment for the tribunal was at 10 a.m. Although he arrived at 9:30 a.m., it’s now nearing one in the afternoon, and he isn’t sure when his case will be heard.

According to Pizza Guy, he was sucked into food court after his father passed away a few months before, leaving him a restaurant he had no desire to operate. He’d prefer to sell it as soon as possible. When his restaurant’s address is finally called, he bolts to the front to receive further instruction.

“From what I’ve seen, this is one of the better agencies in New York,” Pizza Guy says, better than what he remembers at the DMV.

Next, the owner of a recently opened cafe (who also would rather not be identified by name) explains that when the inspector visited his restaurant, there were plastic bags filled with construction debris that hadn’t been removed. He says the inspector declared there was food in the bags, a violation, but refused to open them up and look when challenged.

His restaurant is in the B range, but Cafe Guy says, “A B [grade] is telling the consumer there’s some inferior situation going on.” After 20 years in the restaurant business, and payments to a consultant in order to ensure his cafe is up to code, he declares, “I would eat off the floor in my place.”

He thinks the system is too complicated. If it takes him hours to figure it out, how is a tourist supposed to understand it? The system counts critical and minor violations towards a restaurant’s final grade, which means it’s possible to have an A with evidence of rodents, and a B when enough bathroom doors don’t close on their own.

There is also the problem of milk temperature. If someone takes milk out of the fridge for five minutes, it could easily rise to a temperature that will put it into the violation range on an inspection, even though that milk was going right back in the fridge and was at the right temperature a minute ago.  Inspections are inevitably snapshots, nailing down judgments across a hundred fine lines.

SIDEBAR: Read What Food Scores the Best

The repercussions for inspectors who screw up are also unclear, Cafe Guy  explains, and he suspects a sort of “juking the stats” of food inspections to raise revenue. Food court will bring a man to think many things he wouldn’t otherwise.

Restaurant owners outside the tribunal have similar criticisms. “The inspector used to come in, and you didn’t get nervous when they walked in the
door,” Vinnie Mazzone says. He owns Vinnie’s Chicken Masters, in Sheepshead Bay, where he masters chicken by rubbing it in spices, frying the hell out of it and serving it hot with thumb-thick steak fries. His restaurant has an A grade, and he was one of the few restaurant owners who would speak on the record with his full name.

For Mazzone, the notion of having to put up a grade is an affront to his pride. “I take it as an insult,” he says. “I don’t need anyone to grade my store.”

Mazzone also finds the system needlessly complex, with scoring arbitrary depending “on time of day.” But given the many chances that restaurants
are given to improve their score before grading, he says, “If you wind up with a C, there’s something seriously wrong with your place.”

There’s no one like an epidemiologist to put the concerns of restaurant owners in perspective.

“I’m not going to apologize that the general public may not know the nuances between an ‘A’ and a ‘B,’” Dr. Mel Kramer says. “And let me tell you something: These things are not mission impossible.”

Kramer has a PhD in environmental health and a masters in public health. He runs EHA Consulting Group, which handles inspections for facilities like
hospitals and corporate dining rooms, which aren’t covered by the Health Department.

What’s more worrisome to Kramer— and it’s worth noting his job is to worry about this sort of thing—is the fact that New York City’s system for reporting foodborne outbreaks of illnesses pales to that operated by the state of Minnesota. He also mentions a less-than-reassuring study from the Journal of Food Protection that “basically said that fairly large numbers of food workers admitted to working more than one shift when they actively had vomiting or diarrhea.”

According to Kramer, the fines and settlement offers of the new grading system are not extraordinary “in an environment where you’re trying to cut cost
and maximize efficiency,” adding that “we do the same with parking tickets.” Although there can be cases where minor violations tip the scale and change a grade more than a major one might, Kramer says, “That’s generally not the case.”

What matters is not quibbling, but the sum of the effort. “Anything that elevates the level of sanitation to the public… is positive,” Kramer says.

To date, the city has inspected most of its 24,000 restaurants. In a report after the first six months of the grading program, the city said “of restaurants
that scored in the C range on their first inspection, 72 percent improved enough to earn an A or B on the second.”

Kimlau Square is a little park in the southern section of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Follow the stern gaze from the statue of Lin Zexu and, in about 40 feet, you’ll hit Dim Sum Go Go. The restaurant is a New York magazine “Critic’s Pick,” and has received a recommendation by the Michelin Guide every year since 2007. The week I visited, it had a less-prestigious distinction, having earned the worst score of any sit-down restaurant in Manhattan.

Officially, the restaurant is not yet graded. Still, it had racked up 91 points (this score has since been disputed and lowered to 47). It had seven
critical violations, including: “Eggs found dirty/cracked; liquid, frozen or powdered eggs not pasteurized,” “Live roaches present in facility’s food and/ or non-food areas” and “Food not protected from potential source of contamination during storage, preparation, transportation, display or service.”

I sat at my white tablecloth during the mid-afternoon lull and started in on my pot of tea, propelled by a half-baked rationale about the fortifying power of hot liquids and antioxidants. I had three dipping saucers, one with red-flecked vinegar, another with a leaky mix of ginger and scallion and a third with oily chunks the color and consistency of jerky. I think, maybe, it was shrimp. I checked off the box for 10 assorted meat dumplings on a paper menu left on the tabletop.

The waiter informed me that the dumplings would be some combination of pork and seafood. In a matter of minutes, he returned with a cylindrical
bamboo steamer. After a voosh of escaping vapor, I discovered 10 plump designs, each as vivid as coral blooms. There were pink bows and translucent yellow purses. A rubbery chunk of pork was topped by a dumpling button, which in turn had a sprinkling of orange fish roe. I had no idea what sort of meat was contained inside of each little dumpling.

I glanced at the Chinese business lunchers and wiped-out tourists as they munched away. The inspection score was bad, really bad. But not bad enough to
close the place down. I was hungry, and a system for restaurant improvement relying on simplified public assumptions didn’t have much to say about that. Food is good enough to eat, or it isn’t. And anyway, it all looked sooo good.

In terms of cuisine, American is currently No. 1, with 653 C-scoring restaurants. That’s followed in geopolitical parallel by the Chinese, with 303 C-scoring restaurants. Next up is Pizza, with 171, but if you add those to the somehow separate categories of Italian (110) and Pizza/Italian (39), the Chinese take a step down on the yuck podium.

With cuisine types that have more than 100 restaurants, none have much more than 15 percent in the C range. But for the culinary hypochondriac looking for a safe bet, smoothies, ice cream and donuts all have less than a 5 percent chance of scoring in the C range.

The breakdown of where C-scoring restaurants are is roughly proportional to the total restaurants in a given borough. The Bronx performs the worst in terms of percentage, with 12.3 percent of its restaurant in the C range, followed by Manhattan with 11.4 percent, Queens with 10.4 percent and Brooklyn with 9.3 percent. Staten Island should stand up and take a bow: only 6.2 percent of its restaurants score in the C range.

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Surprise, surprise, the local color has not been drained from Williamsburg. In fact, the multi week Giglio feast shows just how strong the neighborhood’s cultural and religious roots are. The feast, celebrating the patron saint Palonius of the Italian city Nola, goes back over a hundred years, and features a series of processions, religious ceremonies, and the lifting of a 2-ton, 50-foot-tall shrine by feast participants. With the mixture of religious events and an accompanying carnival, the festival is quite a logistical undertaking.

Attendee Joanne Manna’s husband Phil earned the top spot as the Capo for two years “My husband worked 53 years for the church as a volunteer, and he worked up the ranks as a lifter, an organizer. It’s not something you’re nominated for.” Manna was quick to point out the oft repeated mantra regarding the Giglio’s (ghee-lee-O) importance, saying “This community has three holidays: Easter, Christmas, and Giglio Sunday.”

On its last night, the Giglio was a busy if somewhat scrunched carnival scene, taking the shape of a cross on Havemeyer between North 6th and North 9th and west from Union on North 8th. The street lamps were decorated with large tinsel flowers and a wind farm of flags (8/10 Italian, 1/10 Puerto Rican, 1/10 American) and the stick streets were  filled with  rickety circus rides, booths for plastic novelties, impossible to win carnie games, pina coladas, zeppolis, and fried seafood.

Families with strollers mixed with prowling teens, bored cops and the occasional representative of the area’s many over-styled and underemployed. Local Mike Locascio has been attending the feast for some 50 years, and has been witness to the neighborhood’s various demographic shifts, including the most recent wave. “You wanna call em yuppies, I could say that.”

For Locascio, the festival has been, and continues to be, the celebration of a diverse community. “When I grew up we had a couple blacks, a couple Spanish kids, and it didn’t matter what color you were, because this is your feast.”

Photo courtesy of jeanettics on Flickr

1) I really don’t want you to stab me.

2) It is more than a little irksome that I even have to ask.

But since you various gang members, and generally violent, maybe insane people have chosen to stab at least six people over the last month or so, all within seven minutes walking distance of my apartment in Williamsburg, I guess it’s time for me to get right with (as much as I can anyway) the idea that my neighborhood is now stab central.

When I first heard of the threat, I though glibly of how I would respond to being attacked by a guy on a bike with a machete. Naturally disposed towards delusions of my own exceptionalism, I imagined my attacker approaching from behind, his bike gliding with slippery reptilian ease, his dry lips whistling a sickly tune before he’d brandish his stab vector with a comic book SCHINNK! I thought of myself then, flawlessly sweep kicking under his bike with the grace accorded the righteous before the machete flew up end over end into the air, landing lightly in my hand before I proceeded with holy rage to slash him to a chunky puddle.

In a slightly less cartoonish manner, I imagined a brief flash of struggle during which I would be wounded slightly, but in a cloud of defensive instinct and necessary violence whose exact proportion would remain forever ambiguous, I would vanquish (you) my attacker. I would then assume the mantle of a dark, hesitant heroism. I would become a damaged figure streaked with melancholic romance. I would reject the key to the city, draw my blinds for good, and the mystery of my action’s propriety and my dense, conflicted response would compel student documentarians to forever knock at my door, shuffle their feet in the ensuing silence, and leave baffled by it all.

Of course, as you and I know, you are far better at stabbing others than I will ever be at defending myself. So I’m forced to ask, could you please stop?

Now since it’s Williamsburg, and there are all those condos going up and yuppies moving in or what have you, there is an easy mistake to make, and that is to view some of your efforts as a response to gentrification, some real world reaction equivalent to your community being stabbed with the white hot tip of the gentrifugal sword or somesuch. Really though, a stranger to stab is a stranger stab- am I right? These stabbings might be indicative of the problems of demographic change, but they’re not the kibble for New York’s pet narrative of the moment.

And anyway, stabbing to curtail gentrification is sure to be counter-productive. I’ve already talked with some friends, and as soon as one of us is stabbed to death, the rest are going to get tattoos with the murdered friend’s name, strengthening the local gentrified economy just as we’re cementing our memorial. And true- Williamsburg plays way too much Joy Division (bars, coffee shops, children’s clothing stores, drug stores, restaurants, etc.), but if you keep stabbing people you will actually be creating an atmosphere of sufficient existential gloom to warrant Ian Curtis’ bummer bearing prominence. People will be too deflated to leave, and who wants to stab someone who doesn’t mind being stabbed?…Probably you.

Now, I’ve talked to a few lady friends, and they’ve both guaranteed that with a stab scar, I will be irresistible, a version of the melancholic hero described above. But you know what? I would rather not get stabbed than get laid. There is no silver lining, or coupon redemption value here. There is no value.

Please stop.

Of course, while S&G’s harmonic somnambulist routine provided yuppies with a defining “had to be there” moment, JBJ and his feathery-haired DUI clique look to deliver epoch making force via BNT nostalgia for the greatest middle school girl hits of 1986.
Lame.

Better ways to spend to time listening to music outside in the near future:

July 7- McCarren Park Pool, Ronnie Spector, Rabbit Factory Soul Revue

July 10- Celebrate Brooklyn, Freddie McGregor, Soul Steps

July 11- South Street Sea Port, No Age, Telepathe, Abe Vigoda
July 13- McCarren Park Pool, The Breeders, Matt + Kim, The Whip

The whole thing is really an object lesson in media dissemination, and the de-evolution of intended meanings via dissemination’s mass incarnation. When a tiny audience is receptive to a work, message control is easy, but when the artist loses control of the art’s context, and the work spins out in ever expanding arcs of access, the velocity of its trajectory strips it of its content. Of course, considering that DEVO, paragons of anti-consumerism already had been bought and co-opted by all sorts of companies these last few years , it might be a little harder for them to sob the puritanical tears of unsullied art, because that would make Gerry a hypocrite.

Still, they got ripped off; the hat, the style, the whole deal, and I for one, am happy to see McDonald’s take a hit under any circumstances (for making me love them so much as a child). But come on dude, it’s about cash money -which is alright for a band to make if they can- not corporate ethics. But apparently it’s OK to get your tunes in a toothbrush (cuz it’s a way to distribute the medium to a new audience).

The band Devo and solo artist Dan Deacon are prime examples of fascinating musicians formulating sounds from odd ideas. Fellow travelers, decades apart, they both fuse infectious, caffeinated, good-time sounds with hyper-critical, nearly apocalyptic visions of contemporary society. They also both share a certain theatricality: Devo through goliath stage productions and bizarre videos, Deacon through his sing-along, solo-electronics freak-outs. And don’t forget the shared interest in the childish and the absurd—just check any Devo video, or Deacon’s nonsense lyrics, for proof.

In the lead up to their June 26 McCarren Park Pool show, Deacon and Gerald V. Casale of Devo agreed to an email exchange, Casale from a tour, Dan from the computer lab he snuck into his apartment. They talked of end times, mass die offs, scavenger culture and crowd-pleasing—delving into the nitty-gritty of conspiracy theory. They provided ample evidence that if you’re going to have an interesting music culture, you need more than just music.

>>>>Email 1: The FUTURE! SAD TIMES? HAPPY MUSIC?
NYPress: Devo has always dealt with the dumbing-down, sloping-off and generally illusory nature of human progress. Although Devo addresses devolution in a winking, often hilarious way, the root issue is a colossal bummer.
Dan, you’ve referred to “Future Shock” as a problem between today’s culture makers (artists, musicians, etc.) and the mechanism of that culture’s dissemination, i.e. this super speed, suck-up spit-out, new-worshiping blog culture. Your music is nonetheless affirmative, sometimes tweaky party music. How does the present match up with your ideas of the future?

Gerald V. Casale: The present surpasses my darkest-held ideas about the future. Weird would be better than what it is: depressing and stupid. Despite any high-hoping message of better days ahead, it’s way too late to fix what is broken. The kernel of decency inside much of the human species is no match for the sheer volume of evil, both intentional and otherwise, unleashed upon the masses in present culture. The very ideas of freedom and equality are being eroded both philosophically and by environmental crises resulting from overpopulation and corrupt government. Corporate Feudal control backed by military regimes will eventually become the norm. The earth will become so sick soon that it will regurgitate the shit back on to the humans who put it there in the first place.

Dan Deacon: I guess it depends on how deep into the future we look. I agree that there are way too many people and that the proper infrastructure to support them isn’t and will never be there. I also agree that we are entering into a new Dark Age, far worse than the current imbalance between the elite and the masses.

I think companies like Monsanto, Blackwater, Microsoft, etc. and organizations like Federal Reserve Bank, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc. have mapped out the future, and I’m sure it involves about five billion less people alive on earth. But as evil and sinister as these human-corporate monsters are, they have always tried to alter nature and ultimately failed. If we look deeper into the future we’ll see a world free from the torments of human domination. If we look at industrialized civilization as the fire and the earth as the forest that is consumes, I think we will see a new forest growing from our ashes.

What has influenced these future-negative ideas for the two of you?

GVC: Besides copious helpings from 30 years of anecdotal observation, people far more intelligent and disciplined than myself have been clearly warning us in non-fiction and in fiction regarding what was in store for a species attempting to avoid living in harmony with nature and refusing to regulate itself. Bush and his unholy junta had been predicted as far back as Orwell. B.F. Skinner’s experiments in behavioral psychology and Wittengstein’s musings on the atrophy of reason lent scientific weight to the worst dreams of fiction writers. From there, semiotics and postmodern deconstruction mapped the social and physical evidence of de-evolution.

DD: “Conspiracy” theory culture has always been a major influence for me. I guess I first got into thinking about the controlled and calculated mass die off was after my mother died of cancer. I started researching the history of cancer and demography, cancer’s and heart disease’s role in developed nations for maintaining a minimum population growth. That opened my eyes to a lot of evils that seemed to be implemented by the power elite. The parallels between industrial and corporate growth and the rates of human suffering seem too glowing and obvious to not see. Most recently “Ruled by Secrecy” by Jim Marrs and the recently made video “Zeitgeist” on Google video have really changed the way view system and patterns in society and media.
 

How do these ideas find expression in your music (not just via the word content of music, but maybe music technology as well [...Dan]), or does it?
 

GVC: Computers and digital software programs have not resulted in a higher percentage of good songs to bad songs. That percentage is a constant of the limits of human creativity. The sound choices have increased exponentially as a result of new technology, but the capacity for new ideas has inversely decreased. I include Devo in this equation. We did as well as we could as long as we could and at least we were so new that, while no longer ahead of our time now, we still manage to sound oddly relevant, being that De-volution is REAL.

DD: Beyond music technology, I think it’s important to look at the context and setting that the music is made in. I think a lot of bands that are involved in DIY culture are focused on putting forth the vision of a sustainable and scavenger-based society; living in and performing in old factories or warehouses, building your own equipment, eating out of supermarket dumpsters, using society’s wastes as the fertilizer for new art and ultimately new life. Experimental, noise-influenced pop music attempts to expand the boundaries of what pop music is and what it can do. Major-label pop culture is extremely similar to a rotting post-industrial city. Both of them provide the framework for new radical ideas to grow in. Even an expensive show like this, that the article is promoting, is in an old, broken down pool, a relic from when the city had a greater investment in the comfort of its inhabitants.

Dan, how did you understand Devo as a kid?

DD: Before I answer this question, I guess it should be stated here that no other band has influenced my music more than Devo. When I was in high school my sister’s boyfriend bought an old beat-up copy of Q: Are We Not Men on vinyl from a yard sale. The album was just perfect. I immediately began collecting their work. They were the band that had finally figured it out. The music was really poppy but still super weird and aggressive. The songs were simple and easy to latch on to yet still complex enough to withstand countless listens. They created an entire culture, a new way to look at pop music. They have a greater understanding of performance and theatrics than anyone.

Playing this show with them is a dream come true. When I started rooting through dumpsters for oscillators eight years ago I never thought anything would ever happen…I hope I’m not just creeping them out.

>>>>>Email 2: Gerald, from your answers, it seems like we’re just beckoning the end times to arrive sooner every day, that the world is a hyper-tech shit puddle we’re all drowning in, and when we unclog the toilet, all the humans are going to be flushed with it. Whatever the case’s merits, it’s kind of a bummer.
On the other hand, Dan, you’ve offered inklings into how to acknowledge the current scatological (read: shitty) state of things without delving totally into eschatology (read: the MF-ing apocalypse) and posing answers to the problems of a de-evolved society through DIY scavenger culture.
Gerald, do you think the cultural pathways offered by Deacon represent a sustainable path forward? Is it possible for people to change their lives enough to at least weather the storm?

GVC: Dan’s answers are intelligent and perceptive attempts to cope with the 800-pound Gorilla of the Apocalypse. I appreciate and respect his insights and would absolutely love to participate in his optimism. The organism strives to fight death until the end.

DD: I’m not sure if I got this point across earlier, I don’t think the human species will survive “as we know it.” I do think a new Dark Age is coming, and it will be long and difficult and much pain, death and suffering will exist within our kind. However, an 800-pound gorilla can kill most of a village, but some run faster and know how to hide, or are already hidden. I don’t think we will ALL, as a kind, will perish, but even if we do, the beauty of light, sound, and time will still exist to some end, whether any person sees it or not. Even if these are the “final days,” I don’t think it’s wise to spend them staring at the clock waiting or wishing. I’d rather be naive/stupid and proactive about the future than wish for the lights to go out, as beautiful as it might be.

As a final issue, I’d like to bring up performance. What makes a performance a success for you? Is there a specific response that pleases you? With jaded audiences and 10 billion bands, how do you make something special, or at least memorable?

GVC: Watch the Nicholas Roeg film, Performance, starring Mick Jagger from 1970. The artist trades places with real-life criminals. They suggest that the best performance is one that transgresses the boundaries of what is safe and thereby moves the audience to catharsis. It can be very positive or very negative. We have experienced both at least once.

DD: I’ve been trying to work with the difference between those that participate and those that don’t. The first show I did at McCarren Pool last year, I made a really pompous and arrogant statement toward all the people who weren’t dancing. A review from Brooklyn Vegan called me out on it, and they were right. Everyone enjoys a performance for different reasons. Not everyone likes to dance, or sing along, or watch, or sit or whatever. The long/short of it is, hopefully people leave the show thinking they either participated in something unique or were there to see something unique unfold before them. I sound like such a fucking stupid hippy.

There will be a large span of age groups at this show (at least I hope so), and it will make for a very interesting experience. I’ll really have to work to win over a lot of the crowd that is there to see two legendary bands while some unknown dickhead tries to convince them to kneel on broke concrete for five minutes as soon as they get there. I wish it wasn’t $50. But that’s another article all together. I just hope people have fun at this show. Life should be fun, right? Yes! To the future.