After work, I took the 6-local train down to Bleecker Street, and walked up the stairs to Lafayette and Houston. Until I emerged from the station, it could have been ___ years ago, when I used to go to the old Knitting Factory. In 2k9, however, the corner has been transformed by the kind of tallish, nondescript green-tinted glass and metal buildings that seem to have been built with such fury (but only in 'desirable' neighborhoods, which is to say not Washington Heights, thankfully) during the first decade of the new millennium. I went into a Bank of America to get cash and was annoyed when both ATMs refused to read my debit card, even though it's relatively new. I wasn't particularly surprised, however, given that (like so many Bank of Americans) my recent relationship with 'the overlord' has been fraught with annoyance; just a few hours earlier, I had to fax two letters to some mysterious office (after paying a $47 charge) just to close a line of credit that we had never even used in the continuing attempt to appease the 'underwriter' of our (possibly) new financial institution, who we were informed was 'very close' to clearing our file after examining it in such microscopic detail for the past ___ months.
I crossed the street and ascended the stairs (the very ones that used to lead from the stage of the 'Old Knit' (as Scott and I used to call it, after the club moved to Tribeca, where we referred to it as the 'New Knitting') to the street, and where you could stand and listen to the bands if you didn't feel like going inside or the show was sold out) into the restaurant that now exists there; for some reason I will always remember walking by the steamed-up windows one winter night and hearing from within the alluring pulse of the Meat Puppets, this before Kurt Cobain rescued them from mild (and completely undeserved) obscurity by covering several songs from their amazing second album. Inside, I was approached by an exceedingly friendly if robotic 'hostess' who asked if I would like to be seated; I said that I was meeting some people there but that -- having only met them in the blogosphere -- I wasn't sure exactly what they looked like, but that nobody seemed to match their description. Her smile remained frozen on her face, in a way that I used to associate with suburban restaurant chains, but which I now understand to epitomize the kind of conformist desperation that clings to so many of us in the year 2k9, at least in our 'work environment' (via needing to survive in a shrinking, capitalistic economy). I blandly smiled back at her and said I would wait somewhere else. As it turned out, Lukas -- one of the bloggers I was meeting -- was sitting directly behind where I stood, quietly reading a book and drinking a glass of wine. He introduced himself and tried to convince the hostess to seat us, but she refused because we were expecting two others. It didn't matter that the entire back of the room was empty; she couldn't break the rule about seating 'incomplete parties.' Being completely averse to this form of conflict, I meekly suggested that we remain at the tiny shelf where Lukas had positioned himself, which satisfied her; but at some point as I waited at the bar to get a beer, a 'super-hostess' descended upon Lukas and guided him (followed shortly thereafter by me) to the vast expanses of the back, where we were seated. This was the exact same spot, I remembered, where I had once tried to initiate a conversation with the formidable ____, founder of the mid-90s indie-rock zine ____, with the hope of giving her a 'demo' of my band Saturnine 60, but all of my overtures had been rebuffed with one-syllable answers: she would always hate me and my band, I now understand, for daring to use the word Saturnine, which of course had been the name of one of her darling bands during one of their earlier incarnations, and I still shiver as I think of the icy depths of hatred that emanated from behind her trademark granny glasses. Fortunately, she was nowhere to be found on this night, and Lukas and I settled in and talked amicably if somewhat forlornly about various jobs in the publishing industry we have held. (It was not hard to understand how -- despite our age difference, for he is perhaps in his mid-late 20s -- we had managed to find each other, even in the infinite reaches of the internet.) Brian -- who lives in Washington Heights, and who I had met a few times (embarrassingly, I once arrived six days early at a party he hosted) -- soon showed up (somehow he knew Lukas from Tumblr), followed by another friend of Lukas' (thus completing our party, as I'm sure the hostess noted with approval). Not long after this, Bennett arrived -- his reading was the reason we had congregated IRL -- drifting waifishly, invisibly, through the predominately non-homosexual Nolita crowd in his ripped jeans and a tissue-paper thin Bacardi Rum t-shirt. He said he was a bit nervous, given that there were at least five others on 'the bill' and that the theme of the night was 'the occult,' for which he had prepared nothing.
As it turned out, however, this was to his advantage, as we learned a little while later, after we had made our way around the corner to the Housing Works, where the reading was held. I hadn't been to a reading since I saw Paul Auster 10,000 blog years ago in Park Slope (pre-B&N), when I used to live there, and I was reminded of how challenging the form can be. Not surprisingly, because I was there to hear Bennett and had read his book, I enjoyed him the most; his reading came closest to what I would consider a performance; he paused at surprising moments and at times almost slyly whispered his words, so that -- much like the book itself -- you felt as if you were being toured through another world, one both more magical and demented than our own. I felt more impatient when the others took their turns and I spent time aimlessly observing the audience, which though on the whole was young and nerdy and hipsterish and literary contained at least one attractive/burly man in a 'Minutemen: San Pedro' t-shirt and at least one woman with blond hair upon whom Bennett had based certain physical characteristics of the (anti)heroine of his book. As he confessed to me before the reading, this was another cause for concern because he had told her as much, but planned to read a description that -- while on the whole very flattering -- included a reference to the patches of acne under her thickly caked makeup.
After Bennett's reading, Brian and Lukas and I went back to the 'old Knit' (this time, downstairs) for another drink. It was filled with non-homosexuals from the nearby San Gennaro festival, which I have often heard proclaimed to be one of New York City's most enduring travesties, and with which on this night I could find no reason to disagree. But we soldiered on, bought drinks and found a spot. It wasn't too unpleasant until someone turned on the P.A. system with a loud screech that led me to drop my (empty) beer glass; I was reminded of the time when we were on tour, playing a show at SUNY Binghamton, and Jim almost lost an eardrum when -- in the course of bending down to retrieve a drumstick -- his head was only inches from a sudden onslaught of whining feedback from the speaker during sound-check (this was also the show at which one of the warmup bands had a song featuring the timeless lyric 'Do I haaaaaave to put hannnndcuffs on u momma?') But practical difficulties aside, Lukas and Brian and I managed to converse about the state of non-heterosexual literature extending all the way back to JK Huysmans and up into the present day; we professed our admiration for those bloggers who perhaps exist within both the 'gay' and 'literary' circles of the imaginary Venn Diagram of the blogosphere (or at least have an awareness of such), and professed our hatred for certain others -- such as ____ and ____ -- who most certainly do not.
On the way home on the (packed) A-train, I thought about a post I read yesterday on Emily Magazine, in which Emily attended a literary panel populated by 'published' fiction writers, some of whom predictably spent time bemoaning the decrepit state of popular culture in general and the internet in particular, as if the latter were the cause of the former. I won't bother to summarize Emily's well-reasoned arguments basically dismissing the simplicity of such overreaching generalizations, but I knew that the evening in which I had just participated -- along with several others who clearly believe in the merits of fiction and writing -- had been brought to me largely by way of the internet, which admittedly made me feel very small and tired, but also oddly grateful, the way I remember feeling as a child staring up at the night sky when I first considered the implausibly huge dimensions of the universe and my unspeakably small and insignificant place within it.
I still hope to see that shirt on one or all of the cats.
Fun night! Great post!
Posted by: Lukas | 09/19/2009 at 05:38 PM