Miles of Piles

"Do you want to come upstairs?"

I was 12, and though I’d arrived somewhat late to the pheromones party, I’d seen enough movies to know that a question of this ilk was Admission: Granted in the dating game’s application process. Besides, I had almost expected the invitation for ascent, for earlier in the day I’d made a not-so-disparaging remark about ballet, which for preteen males is radical progressivism.

"Yeah. Let’s go upstairs."

This being one of my first solo forays into the female habitat, all the anatomical differences between boys’ and girls’ rooms frightened away my mojo. Soft pastel colors. Incense sticks in incense stick holders. A pink computer. Real furniture. Posters of bands I hated. An embroidered army of throw pillows.

There would be more girls’ rooms in my future, and somewhere along the evolutionary way, there would be womens’ rooms, in different countries and belonging to different economic communities. At that moment, however, on the literal threshold of what I thought would be my Man-itiation, the Crate and Barrel aesthetic was impenetrable. How can I impose myself here, and on this person, whose living space is more meticulously arranged than a mile of dominoes? This girl, all seven grades of her, was made of tougher stuff.

Beset by macro concerns about sexuality, gender, and where to sit if the bed was made, my immediate fate was determined by the room’s lone unordered element: clothing. Heaps of all styles, shapes, and identities—shirts, pants, dresses, socks, underwear (well, at least that was cool), skirts, tubes, tanks, and everything else—lay strewn about. The collection on the floor was quickly bloated by a cascade of garments from the dresser, which my friend was emptying with gusto.

“Sooo…I have to make piles,” she said, tossing handfuls of tees across the room. “And the thing is, I don’t really know what’s small on me and what’s not, so I’m just going to make piles of what I think I don't want anymore, and I’ll go through them with my mom tomorrow.”

It’s a scene that would replay itself dozens of times, and I read it correctly right away: Naughty stuff was not about to go down.


Indeed, piles of clothing are a disappointingly clear part of the male-female cipher. If they exist on or around a girl’s (or woman’s) floor, sex is not the offing. Luckily, men don’t have to participate in the ritualized folding, collating, and decision-making. This is probably because women realized long ago that, in all things couture, we have no idea what the hell we’re talking about.

Our sartorial sense never develops, even after years of watching our friends, girlfriends, and wives do the exact same thing over and over. Last night, I sat not five feet from two girls while they separated apparel into piles. I did not help, did not offer to help, and did not learn anything. Generations of men have had the same MO, and, barring heterosexuality's extinction, it will remain so.

The lesson in all of this?

Have a girl over to your place.

Stay Sorted, Piles
DJ Dresser

Put That Kid On a Leash!

Memo to anyone attempting to cultivate an even more belittling application for the term “love handle.”

Your work is done.

It was done for you, actually, by Liberte Apparel, a Long Island-based company edging us one dimension closer to hell.

Behold: "The Love Handle."


The issue of child leashes is contentious, or at least would appear to be so based upon the amount of stand-up comedy that addresses the subject. Central to the discussion is a single observation: putting your kid on a leash makes them look like a dog. Especially in urban centers, it takes a double- or triple-take to determine which species of creature is housed within the shackles. Seeing a child leash in action is psychedelically horrifying, a sight so scary, dehumanized, and outlandish that it should only exist in Hunter S. Thompson’s posthumous flashbacks.

Liberte Apparel’s site offers a fantastically flimsy defense for The Love Handle. To wit:

“The Love Handle® gives today’s multi-tasking parents (and grandparents!) an extra hand, and allows children to express their independence outside the confines of a stroller, while safely within arm’s reach.”

The essential question is, how much more multi-tasking do today’s child-toting adults perform than they did 20, 30, 100 years ago? We might live in a multitasked world, and professional lives might employ more gadgets, but when you actually have a child in tow, the basic setup is the same: one hand for the kid, one hand available. If a child is already walking, then it makes no difference whether you use your non-smartphone hand to hold the child’s hand or to grab the end of a leash.


As for letting children “express their independence outside the confines of a stroller?” To quote Cartman, I hate hippies. I wanna kick ‘em in the nuts. What does "expressing their independence" mean? What kind emancipation are we talking about, and how, exactly, does canine-level treatment let kids express it? I may not be a child psychologist (or a hippie), but perhaps a more expressive form of outside-the-stroller freedom would be…um…regular walking.

"The Love Handle® is fully self-adjusting and fits children of all sizes from the time they take their first steps as toddlers, and for years to come."

How many years, exactly? Evidently, Liberte Apparel intends for parents to use The Love Handle for years untold; perhaps even decades. If my parents put me in a Love Handle back in 1985, would I still be in it now? Moreover, would it not be humiliating for a child to amble up to pre-school in a Love Handle? Is that not psychological abuse? And if you're in that kid's class, you have to kick his/her ass. Schoolyard laws dictate it. By direct causation, putting your child in a Love Handle is tantamount to physical harm.

"With The Love Handle® adults look hip, and kids keep their dignity intact."

Really? Like, really really? Did you see the video? When the woman puts the handle through the shoulder loop, it looks like she is about to string up that poor little girl like a birdhouse. There is no dignity—repeat: THERE IS NO DIGNITY—in wearing a leash. That’s why dogs wear them, and humans do not.

While it might be nice, furthermore, for parents to think they’ll look hip with The Love Handle, it is very difficult to look voguish when you're walking your kid like a pet.

It doesn’t matter that The Love Handle comes in a variety of designs with post-modern names. Carnival Candy, Raspberry Tie Dye, Sunburst, and Robin Stripe should all be renamed “Subhuman Idiocy” and eliminated from the global marketplace.

We’ve let this tyranny go on for too long.

Stay Strollered, Kids
DJ Dog Leash

Seeing Bread

I saw an erect penis poking out of a pair of shorts while its owner casually asked a group of guys if they had a condom. I saw a Porta Potty with one type of human waste on the walls and two more in the toilet. I saw a dreadlocked girl scrunch her face and wonder how it came about, at this same festival one year ago, that she statutorily raped a high school student. I saw the beating sun cook up a toxic miasma of hippie sweat, body odor, and septic overflow. I saw Snoop Dogg.

I saw a lot of things at this year’s installment of Camp Bisco—the seventh, if you’re counting—but what I mainly saw were white people. Nearly everyone roaming the Indian Lookout Country Club’s sprawling grounds, from the Hells Angels security detail to the thousands of scared-to-death-of-Hells-Angels attendees, was woefully Caucasian. So Caucasian, in fact, that during his performance, a bewildered Snoop repeatedly asked the crowd if we were ready to hear 311—despite the fact that 311, currently touring with the estimable Dogg, were not there.

Camp Bisco was not unlike its myriad counterparts dotting the neo-counterculture summer landscape. Music and camping events, typically held over weekends, have sprung up everywhere from Masontown, West Virginia (All Good), to Lawrence, Kansas (Wakarusa), to piney Mariaville, New York (Camp Bisco). The format, by now, is wonderfully formulaic. Organizers mash a few famous acts with a buffet of no-names, place the concert stages in the midst of vast dirt fields, and then make sure that it rains. If you’ve been to any of the summer festivals, you’ve already deciphered these answers for yourself: yes, mud comes out of leg hair fairly painlessly; no, I would not like to purchase the drugs you’re selling; yes, you’re better off peeing in the woods than anywhere else; and, actually, what drugs are you selling?

While the specter of a drug-addled, sound-tracked vacation should be universally appealing, the reality is a bit more antebellum. A festival is where Whiteness goes to regroup and have a self-affirming experience before returning to its one-bedroom apartment above Mitt Romney’s house. The pasty crowds don’t dance so much as they get rickety and throw glow sticks at people several rows in front of them. Glow stick culture, moreover, operates along a quirkily white hierarchy, wherein people who wear many of them are almost as cool as people who fashion spinning glow stick wheels, while both groups look up to the Glow Stick Kings—the luminescent lords who sell the toxin-filled tubes to other white people for bizarre prices.

And where would any concentration of Whiteness be without some better-living hypocrisy? Not at a festival, that’s for sure. Drug dealers, after failing to sell you MDMA, ask if you’d rather sassafras, an all-natural alternative to MDMA that is better, they say, since…well…MDMA is bad for you. Birkenstockers preach Green while ingesting a series of chemicals and foods more inorganic than Angelina Jolie’s immediate family. It’s all hilarious (and a lot of it’s on videotape), and about as swarthy as the American picket fence.



Camp Bisco is particularly egregious, since its eponymous band, The Disco Biscuits (who both organize and headline the event), are the whitest band of all time (if you can stand the anti-Motown pallor, click on the Biscuits picture above, snapped on CB7 premises by photojournalist extraordinaire Robust). I have seen the Disco Biscuits on more than a dozen occasions, including two Camp Biscos, and have come up with the following bio: they are four white dudes who dress like each of the four archetypal White Guys (punk, prep, slob, and skater, respectively), play music with no groove, and have an almost exclusively white fan base. The Disco Biscuits are so white, in fact, that they were recently awarded their own genre: “Jamtronica.” Doesn’t sound too bad? Consider this: most non-white musics—funk, jazz, blues, soul, rap, rock—have one syllable.

“Jamtronica,” besides for sounding ridiculous, has four.

Conclusion: The Disco Biscuits are four times whiter than they should be.

Let there be no misunderstanding—festivals, Camp Bisco included, are completely egalitarian. Anyone and everyone is welcome, from tatterdemalion vagrants to RV-rearing VIPs. That they’ve become the Whiteness War Room is simply a sad, weakly pigmented aside.

But I can only report what I saw.

Stay Sassy, Frassy
DJ Dogg

A Sea Monster Surfaces in New York

In a large oblong room with raised ceilings and a faded brick veneer, Shmuel Levy was picking up the pieces of his scattered songbook. “This is terrible,” he muttered, crawling along the floor, examining more than 100 three-hole-punched sheets that just a moment before had spiraled from his black music binder. “This is a really terrible thing.”

An Israeli by way of Casablanca, Morocco, Levy cut an odd prostrate figure. With a silver-burnished beard, foot-long sidelocks and incandescent spheres for eyes, the singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name “LevYatan” — homage to “leviathan,” a biblical sea monster — looks half-beatnik, half-Bible.

To see Levy sprawled and stammering in an office-cum-rehearsal space in Brooklyn seems all the more strange after realizing that he isn’t much of a stickler for organization. Though, at the time of this interview, he has a number of shows scheduled at Manhattan’s Sullivan Hall in the coming weeks, Levy only recently (May 21) started auditioning backup musicians.

“I have no worries,” Levy said, “and anyway, I have an acoustic set that I can play by myself.” Not sounding totally convinced, he added, “But I will get a drummer and bass player.”

Levy’s search for musicians was still on in late May. The band from the week before didn’t stick, and he hasn’t yet explored other options.

“[God] is taking care of everything,” he said. “Everything has its purpose. You just have to be aware of His wisdom.”

Religiosity is a recurring theme in Levy’s two Hebrew-language albums, “Yismah Moshe” and “Wisdom of the Stream,” and in the English-language album he released in 1998, “Mystic Heart.”

Levy’s music is notably dark and melodic. Deep, loping bass lines and straight-ahead rock beats counter hypnotic guitar patterns and haunting vocals. The result is a heavy, blues-tinged answer to most Jewish music of the day.

The music on “Mystic Heart” is particularly urgent. “I’ll Hate To See You Go” is a stripped-down arena rock number, reminiscent of such groups as Iron Maiden and Megadeth. The acoustic guitar and vocal arrangements on “Wooven,” meanwhile, call to mind Soundgarden’s more laid-back work. The disc's craftiest cut is "Wise Eyes," a cyclical multi-rhythm mover with glutinous themes and incalculable drama (see video below).

A Los Angeles resident since he married in 1990, Levy alternates between performing as LevYatan and as a sideman for various California-based projects. He sees this stint in New York as something of an East Coast coming-out party, so he planned accordingly: In mid-May, he packed his guitar and effects pedals, bought a plane ticket and left his L.A. life behind for what stands to be well over a month.

All signs point to Levy being comfortable on the road. Before settling in L.A., he did a fair amount of traveling. He left Morocco in 1965, at age 8, and moved to the northern Israeli coastal town of Nahariya. It was there that he first picked up a guitar. Levy learned to play rock, jazz, fusion and a number of Israeli styles, and later fulfilled his obligation to the Israel Defense Forces by entertaining the troops.

After completing his army service, Levy moved to Paris, where he formed a group called The Rail. He stayed in France for most of the 1980s and then immigrated to America.

Along the way, he picked up the name LevYatan.

“A friend and I were speaking about the sea lion and the fish of the sea and trying to get a name that was close to that,” he explained. “We came to ‘LevYatan.’”

The moniker had the added advantage of containing his last name, Levy.

LevYatan, Levy pointed out, also includes the Hebrew words “lev” and “yoten,” which together mean “the giving heart.”

“I want to open the heart to play music,” he said. “If you truly play from the heart, the other person will feel it.”

With a number of new songs in various stages of completion, Levy plans to record another album when he returns to L.A. One of the tracks — not yet named — sounds like a synthesis of Israeli artist Idan Raichel and indie-rock trio Dispatch. As with his previous recordings, the lyrics are very metaphorical, and there’s a lot of talk of hearts: giving ones, free ones and joyful ones.

Perhaps Levy’s road warrior mentality or his Hasidism, or both, serve as catalyst for his obscure lyrics. Still, for a guy who already looks a little out of this world, Levy doesn’t want to give concertgoers another reason to fancy him alien.

“I don’t want to confuse anybody,” he said. “I just want to sing songs.”

Stay Spiritual, Shmuel
MC Mystic Heart

Kobe Beef

In securing their 17th NBA championship, the Boston Celtics continued New England’s ho-hum (if you don’t live in New England) reign of post-2000 sports dominance. If the Patriots could have salted away the New York Giants in this year’s Super Bowl, we’d be looking at a Boston whitewash—and the truth is, we still are. The Red Sox shattered the Bambino’s curse in 2004 and won the World Series again this past year, the Patriots have won three Super Bowls this decade (and came up a touchdown short in February), and now, the Celtics capped the greatest regular-season turnaround in league history with an unabashed disembowelment of the Lakers in the clinching Finals game.

Unlike virtually every other red-blooded New Yorker, I do not detest our chowder-happy neighbors to the northeast. I am a Mets fan, and entered long ago into the Red Sox-Mets anti-Yankee fraternity. I am also a Jets fan, so the Giants-Patriots subplots were largely uninteresting; in fact, I watched the Super Bowl mostly to vet for a) debilitating hits, b) long touchdown passes, and c) good catered food.

Last, and most important, I am a Nets fan. Though the Celtics may be a default “intra-division rival,” and although the two squads met in the playoffs a couple of times in the early 2000’s, it is an onerous task to hate the likes of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Eddie House. Much like the Super Bowl, the 2008 NBA Finals pleased me for a reason having nothing to do with my hometown rooting interests.

The Celtics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, whose best player is Kobe Bryant.

I hate—HATE—Kobe Bryant.

I hated him before he’d played a moment in the NBA. Years ago, a local paper profiled the country’s five best high school players. At number two, just below Tim Thomas, was Bryant. The petulance, pretension, and egomania were evident even in that grainy black-and-white: here is an asshole, I thought. Better hope he never makes it.

But, of course, he made it. What’s worse, in the post-Jordan, pre-Lebron’s prime that is our current NBA era, Kobe is undoubtedly the league’s best player. Most talented, clutch, motivated, fearless, and exacting—these are Kobe’s truths, and they are self-evident. He is also, LeBron aside, the game’s most recognizable face.

By all accounts, Kobe is a deplorable teammate. He nixed a dynasty by forcing Laker management to deal Shaquille O’Neal (only one the best 20 best players of all-time) and to disown coach Phil Jackson (only one of the two best coaches of all-time) after Los Angeles lost to the Detroit Pistons in the 2004 championship series. Bryant then ushered in the self-righteous-ball-hog period, a personal three-year hiatus from sportsmanship, professionalism, and accountability. He hoisted a historic number of shots en route to recording a historic amount of points, culminating on January 22, 2006, when he scored 81 points, the second-most ever in a regular-season game, by jacking an unconscionable 66 shots.
That’s 13 three-pointers, 33 two-pointers, and 20 free-throws. Yes, the Lakers beat the Raptors that Sunday, but something far greater was lost: the last shred of Bryant’s already-withering integrity.

Three years prior, just before the Lakers were to embark upon a suicide-blitz on the championship with Shaq, Bryant and the newly-acquired Karl Malone and Gary Payton, a woman in Eagle, Colorado accused Bryant of rape.
While the charges were dropped, and virtually no evidence of forced sexual contact ever surfaced, Bryant copped to having slept with the plaintiff—albeit consensually. Reportedly, Bryant made comments to investigators about Shaq's infidelity, widening the distance between the two embattled teammates.

They didn't stay teammates for long. The next off-season, after losing in the Finals, Bryant’s bedwetting PR nightmare from the rape trial only worsened. According to most inside sources, he demanded that ownership cede him the franchise, and encouraged them to export Shaquille O'Neal to Miami. Phil Jackson, who later called Bryant "uncoachable" in a book, quit his post. When the season started, and with the ink still running off Bryant's $136 million contract extension, the Lakers performed woefully and missed the playoffs.

Before the 2007-2008 season, after a run of unremarkable campaigns in which the Lakers couldn’t navigate beyond the first round of the playoffs, Bryant publicly demanded a trade. Then asked to stay. Then demanded a trade again. Los Angeles brass was appalled, incredulous at Bryant’s claim that after the team had mortgaged their present, their superstar, and their sage to clear the path for Bryant’s ascension, Bryant accused them of not working to assemble a more talented roster. Ignoring the obvious irony—that if Shaq and Jackson had stayed, the Lakers likely wouldn’t have been mired in mediocrity—Bryant’s backstab raised another curious conundrum: how do you trade the best player in the league?

It was a query, ultimately, that Los Angeles owner Jerry Buss never answered. The Lakers opened the season, Bryant in tow, on tenuous ground. Kobe was unhappy; the team kinda sucked; although Jackson was back as coach, not even the man who shepherded Michael Jordan and Co. to basketball Olympus could make topiary out of the weeds.

The Lakers hemmed and hawed, unsure as to whether they were a team or Kobe’s team. Teammates lived in fear of the mercurial, condescending superstar, who never thought it in bad taste—not in practice, not in the media, not during games—to scream, tirade, and tantrum in anybody’s, everybody’s direction.

Then, the pinnacle of unjust: the Lakers’ young players started clicking. The Lakers started winning. The “Kobe is a dog” conversation became the “Kobe is a leader of men” conversation. Finally, the Lakers traded for Memphis star Pau Gasol and got hotter than Bryant’s hotel room in Eagle. The “Kobe is a leader of men” conversation became, unbelievably, the “Kobe for Most Valuable Player” conversation. Indeed, the man who tried with all his might, just a few months earlier, to bail on his team, who thought nothing of dressing down and mortifying his teammates, who threw under the bus the organization that gave up everything plus $136 million to keep him, who flouted the coach and conducted himself with horrifying impunity, was the likeliest candidate to be coronated the league’s “most valuable” person.

TNT, ESPN, and ABC broadcast the rest. The Lakers marauded through the playoffs, hack-sawing through the Nuggets, Jazz, and defending champion Spurs with an incandescent offense. In the midst of all this, Kobe did, as predicted, win the MVP, a move that still represents a stultifying blow to the principles that ostensibly underwrite the award.

Doe-eyed broadcasters and analysts sucked at the Kobe teat, championing everything from his leadership (ha!) to his commitment to “team” (ha!) to his similarity to Jordan (triple ha!). The Lakers advanced to the Finals, where they were to take on an uninspiring Celtics team whose playoff run had been every bit as unimpressive as the Lakers’ was dominant.

Jesus Christ: Kobe Bryant was about to lead his team to the NBA championship. A pompous cancer was about to earn inarguable propers for pompous cancers everywhere.

As we know—and as the greatest proof that God exists—Kobe did not win. Instead, he played well, but not exceptionally well, and was out-performed by the Celtics’ Pierce. In the deciding Game 6, Kobe’s cadre got outgunned by a surreal 39 points, a record margin in a clinching contest. The Kobe schlock, disposed of by the Celtic mystique. This, for once, was the universe aligned.

During Game 2 in Boston, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling (quoted in my previous blog, “The Un-Sport”) sat next to the Lakers’ bench. In an NBA Finals column, ESPN writer Bill “The Sports Guy” Simmons points to Schilling's post-game reflections, which serve to further eviscerate Bryant.

Writes Schilling:

“Kobe. This one stunned me a little bit…what I got to see up close and hear, was unexpected. From the first tip until about 4 minutes left in the game I saw and heard this guy bitch at his teammates. Every TO (time out) he came to the bench pissed, and a few of them he went to other guys and yelled about something they weren’t doing, or something they did wrong. No dialog about “hey let’s go, let’s get after it” or whatever. He spent the better part of 3.5 quarters pissed off and ranting at the non-execution or lack of, of his team…Watching the other 11 guys, every time out it was high fives and “Hey nice work, let’s get after it” or something to that affect. He walked off the floor, obligatory skin contact on the high five, and sat on the bench stone faced or pissed off, the whole game…He’d yell at someone, make a point, or send a message, turn and walk away, and more than once the person on the other end would roll eyes or give a ‘whatever dude’ look.”

It is my sincerest hope that losing these Finals will forever tarnish Bryant’s legacy. I am not a sadist, nor am I a purist—I am, however, a member of society. I’ve met Kobe Bryants, and they are all the same—destructive, self-obsessed, insufferable, and thoroughly unlikeable. They know right from wrong, yet knowingly operate to the contrary. Kobe Bryant—the Kobe Bryant—is wonderfully talented, but he’s hidden his malevolent persona behind virtuosity for far too long.

Here’s to another Boston championship.

Stay Second Place, Kobe
MC MJ

The Un-Sport

Earlier tonight, New York Yankees pitcher Chien-Ming Wang sprained his foot while rounding the bases. Wang, who had to be helped off the field, came up lame while trotting at three-quarters speed on a meticulously maintained field of play.

Hearing this news after watching the Celtics and Lakers maul each other for 48 minutes only reaffirmed a gnawing suspicion:

Baseball players are not athletes.

The dictionary, of course, roundly rebuffs the previous statement. According to dictionary.com, an athlete is “a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.” And this point I will concede—baseball players are extraordinarily gifted, blessed in all manner of throwing, hitting, and going to salary arbitration.

Something is wrong, though, when a player can’t run—nay, jog—without getting hurt. Something is askew when a sport can sport an obese vegetarian. In professional basketball, football, hockey, soccer, or just about any other institution inhabited by bestial, sculpted automatons, running is merely the prologue to a story built of jumping, cutting, checking, dunking, blocking, tackling, scissor-kicking, and fouling. Even golfers, whose “athlete” status is heavily disputed, can walk 18 holes without heading to the disabled list.

Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, a luminary of the sport and future Hall of Famer, describes himself on his blog as “not having one ounce of athletic ability.” Imagine Tracy McGrady, Randy Moss, or Sidney Crosby saying the same of themselves—not only would they be incorrect, but the very nature of their work would inherently disprove such a claim. Professional basketball (McGrady), football (Moss), and hockey (Crosby) demand a masterfully integrated skill set, wherein speed, power, and agility (and in hockey’s case, skating)—in other words, athleticism—are paramount.

Baseball does not demand the same prowess. The sport’s tasks are markedly linear and distributed: someone throws, then someone swings, then someone runs, then someone catches. Only one athletic act is performed in any given moment, and a different person performs each task. Forget an integrated skill set—baseball players only enact one motion at a time, and often, a player only possesses one skill. Pitchers in the American League, for instance, do not hit. Designated hitters do not field.

The result? A nominally agile, semi-out-of-shape guy who can nonetheless throw a ball with unusual velocity—say, Curt Schilling—can become a sports legend. In Schilling’s case, his skills, or lack thereof, could never translate into a career in another sport. Baseball is the only place, in other words, where a person without athletic ability is called an athlete.

If baseball players are to be considered athletes, then so are bowlers. And billiards players. And, for that matter, master carpenters—they, too, excel at a particular manual task. If baseballers are athletes, then by equivalency, so are musicians. One might argue that performing a Bach cantata takes more adeptness, accuracy, dexterity, and agility than throwing a baseball. If baseball players are athletes, then virtually anyone with a honed, individuated skill must be classified so.

Chien-Ming Wong hobbling off the field rang with inevitability: hurlers can’t be expected to run, just as a master carpenter can’t be expected to paint the house he builds. Just because two tasks happen in proximity to one another does not mean the same person can perform both.

As the Celtics-Lakers series slowly morphs into a classic, one can’t help but wonder how Wang or Schilling would fare in a machismo-laced battle with Kevin Garnett. Not well, no doubt, but no matter: they’re paid to throw a ball, and Garnett is paid to be an athlete.

Stay Sprained, CMW
DJ DH

The Clown Car Cartel: Indie Rock Hits the Small Stage

In a place where the climate flips from frigid to searing in a matter of days, the month of June, like a full moon does to werewolves, signals the amnesiacs to emerge. Those who bemoan the frost from November to mid-May forget the cold and abhor the heat. Tortured chants of “It’s so hot” arise as predictably as the sun.

It was in the nascent stages of the Manhattan furnace that Joe’s Pub, the most urbane of the city’s semi-haute music houses, hosted the CD release party for KaiserCartel, a Brooklyn-based indie duo. The pair, Courtney Kaiser and Benjamin Cartel, celebrated the birth of “March Forth,” their stripped-down debut, to what must have been a record-setting crowd for a Tuesday night.

Folk-clad and spare, with elements of T-Bone Burnett and KT Tunstall, KaiserCartel proved themselves something of a clown car cartel, with anywhere from two to six musicians crowding Joe’s Pub's diminutive stage during a given song. The crowd sat patiently as the Cartel worked out the spacing: before most tunes, tambourines, guitars, and xylophones were maneuvered to make way for personnel.

An unfolded accordion, in full plumage, stood behind glass to stage right, mirroring the graceful serenity throughout. With sweaty bodies in every seat, couch, and standing space—and near-tropical condensation on every glass—the Cartel’s easy listening calmed the folks inside. Without a bassist, and reliant on mostly airy instrumentation, the subways rumbling underfoot thundered more significantly than anything produced on stage. The band played through “March Forth” in its entirety, their coda a well-timed serenade, with Cartel following Kaiser through the crowd with an acoustic guitar as they harmonized one last time.

The evening’s most unpleasant turn was the venture outdoors following the performance, at which time most bars in the area were broadcasting David Cook’s rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the NBA Finals in Los Angeles. This season’s American Idol winner, Cook embodied the gaudy bombast so spurned by KaiserCartel. The contrast was striking: inside Joe’s Pub, both temperature and troubadour were cool; outside, the climate and Cook were overwhelming. As Randy Jackson might say, they were, “Hot, dog. Really hot.”

Stay Simple, Folk-Pop
MC March Forth