... remembering New York, randomly

If you've followed my twitter feed, you've probably been annoyed to death by details of my recent trip to New York City. It could have been worse as I had been planning a daily diary of what went on while I was there. The better angel of my nature jumped in and said that that would be boring. However, the devil in the details made a pretty convincing point that there were a few things worth pointing out about the trip. There's also a longer post comparing the MTA and the TTC coming up soon, which I think some of the transit fans might get a kick out of.

This was actually my second trip to NYC. I first went there in 2005. That was the more touristy trip, with visits to the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, a Yankees game, Letterman, all that fun stuff. This trip was taken with a bit more of a "live like a local" attitude - we were going to be checking out some restaurants, but we got the suggestions from people who traveled around the area and not as much from guidebooks and newspaper articles. And as opposed to big store shopping, most destinations of a capitalistic nature were going to be smaller, locally owned and operated places. This didn't mean we were gonna be in full "HEY, I'M WALKIN' HERE" mode, but it also meant we weren't gonna be all "Hey Mabel, it's ZZ Top!" when in the Hasidic areas of town.

So, here are some random observations

• We were there over one of the fiercest rainstorms in recent memory. Parts of New Jersey flooded, and the winds were approaching hurricane force. Most of the garbage cans were filled with umbrellas that had fought valiantly but in vain against the wind. It wasn't so bad if (1) you were against a building or (2) when the wind was calmer. But anytime we had to cross a larger avenue, we ran the risk of being blown into traffic. We did ponder turning around a few times, but I'm happy to say that we didn't.
• Having said that, our umbrellas survived, except someone stole one of them after brunch in the West Village, which meant we had to get a new one in the only part of town where there weren't people on the side of the street selling cheap umbrellas. (Well, I'm sure whoever did it just accidentally took ours instead of theirs and there was no malice aforethought. On the other hand, this is my story, so I'll call it as "stolen"!)
• The third floor of every building along any of the avenues in Manhattan is a gym.
• You can read about our sojourn into Brooklyn and The National concert here.
• We did try to get into Saturday Night Live. We waited in line (see above re: the wet conditions of doing so) from 5 AM until 7 AM. We had planned on going at 3 AM, but were too tired when the time came around. When we got to 30 Rock (1) there was a long line for auditions for The Biggest Loser and (2) the SNL line was well populated but not too daunting. We got standby tickets and reported back at the allotted time, but were unable to get in. This normally wouldn't have phased us too much, but Pearl Jam was the musical act. However, we also got to see Jeffrey Jones (pile of laundry), Matthew Broderick (very dapper) and Sienna Miller (feh) cut in front of us to get into the show.
• New York may have an extensive subway system, but it's not so good at telling you exactly what parts of it are down, or how to avoid those parts until you've paid your fare and are on the platform.
• We found a couple of holy grails at Rebel Rebel record shop in Greenwich Village - 7 inch singles of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Atmosphere". Very nice. This store is not for browsers, but the staff knows everything that's in there, and actually brought the "Atmosphere" single to us after we said we were going to get "Love Will Tear Us Apart".
• Also in The Village: An entire store devoted to The Big Lebowski. Also in that store: Not much I couldn't get anywhere else for a lot less, and one of the most annoying hard selling owners of all time ("Did you see this shirt? I really like this shirt! Did you see this wall with quotes? Did you..."). This Dude does not abide the hard sell.
• There are far more Billy Joel bootlegs available than should exist outside of Long Island.
• The MoMA has a nice exhibit on the art of Tim Burton. It has a lot of movie props, but also a lot of his notes and early work (like an ad for the side of a garbage truck and a children's book he wrote in high school). Now either the MoMA likes small rooms, or really underestimated how many people would go to this show, because we were packed tighter than Augustus Gloop in the tube!
• Dawn will probably talk more about the dinner, but when we went to Blue Hill we wound up sitting next to Adam Levine of Maroon 5. He's pretty much the same as we would expect, and that's not a compliment. I wanted to lean over and tell him I loved his work...with Kara's Flowers (Google it yourself).
• Making this a little easier to handle was the fact that behind us was former mayor Ed Koch. I did not see the Beastie Boys there, so I could not attest if they were still more over than their mayor Ed Koch (If you have to Google that I'm ASHAMED of you, because it means you don't have a copy of Paul's Boutique.)
• Strand Bookstore has the best selection of Moleskines I've ever seen, including one that was a series of storyboards. I picked up all they had with an eye for doing wireframes at work.
• Newark is really the only airport to use. The AirTrain and NJ Path service gets you right to Penn Station, and it's a nice fit from there to anywhere in Manhattan. I'd take that over riding the MTA in all the way from JFK. However it does mean you have to be in....NEW JERSEY....
• Taxis in New York aren't too expensive. Your mileage may vary on this I'm sure. We took a few in pinches and they were a bargain. (We should have known, however, to give destinations based on cross streets. Every time we gave the address of our hotel we'd say "90 Park Ave" and get hit with "You want to go up to 90th and Park?")

There, in a nutshell, are they key takeways from our trip to New York. As always, there are about 20 things we didn't get done, and 45 new things that we want to do next time. We were drowned rats, but we were drowned rats in one of the more exciting places in the world.

Here are some pictures from the trip, which will be updated as soon as we develop the film.

... The National, The Bell House, Brooklyn, March 12

The wifey and I had been planning a little mini break to New York City for about a month. It was the Monday before we left when the post came across my twitter - The National were to play two shows in Brooklyn at The Bell House featuring songs from their upcoming album High Violet. The next best part: the tickets were going on sale that day. The next next best part: $20. I won't tell you how much we're paying to see their two Massey Hall shows later this year, but it's more than $20.

So, yeah, we got tickets. And on Friday, during one of the fiercest rain and wind storms New York City has ever seen, we get on the F train and head into deepest, darkest, hippest Brooklyn.

The Bell House, well, let's just say that chances are that if you didn't know where it was you wouldn't actually find it by accident. It's location is quite similar to Kool Haus in Toronto in that it's in a waterfront industrial area where there isn't a lot of foot traffic. The club itself is made up of two rooms, one of which is a bar and the other is a concert hall. It's not terribly large and was a perfect setting for The National, whose songs fall into a a little sub genre I call "Night Music" - songs that feel immediate and personal but also sound better in the dark when you can really concentrate on and connect with them.

Yeah, we got a setlist

A good half of the show was made up of songs from High Violet , which was played in its entirety and almost in the same running order (if Wikipedia is to be believed). The songs follow the template set by Alligator and Boxer, melancholy but romantic songs where lead singer Matt Berninger's baritone rides along the band's solid rhythm.

The band itself was augmented by a series of sidemen so that at times the smallish stage seemed overloaded with 12 people (including a keyboardist, violin player, two horn players, and an extra percussionist). To top it off, guitarist Aaron Dessner and bass player Scott Devendorf would swap instruments from time to time (and let's not even count the track that featured both of them playing bass!)

This shifting and expanding line-ups on songs is one of the interesting things about seeing The National live. Aaron and Scott (the band features two pairs of brothers, so referring to members by last names can get confusing) swap instruments regularly. Sideman Padma Newsome seems to be able to play any instrument thrown at him and also provides backing vocals. Watch closely and you'll notice that it's not always the same members singing backup - Drummer Bryan Devendorf might provide backup on one song, his brother on another, Aaron and Scott on a third. These are all excellent musicians who take their sound seriously - if a voice, instrument, or playing style does not fit into a song it's not shoehorned in for the sake of being there.

And since they all play so well together you don't really notice these shifts and flourishes. It's the same when you see a band like the Rolling Stones or Bruce Spingsteen. All of them have honed their craft and talent so well that it seems natural and easy. It reminds me of when Pete Townsend wrote in a letter regarding a young Eddie Van Halen that while he was a great technical guitar player, there was little substance there. The letter ended with "When you have a smile that good, who cares?" (I'm paraphrasing here, I'll look it back up the next time I'm at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame).

Of the new songs played there were some standouts. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" has been staple for some time in their live set, and they've refined it very nicely. "England" moved over the stage and the crowd in ever increasing waves of sound. But the standout was "Terrible Love", which builds into the sound of a beautiful apocalypse like Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go". The older songs in the set were well represented also. "Mistaken for Strangers" had the same steady rhythm for most of the song, but went into a much jazzier ending, as did "Fake Empire". "Secret Meeting" seemed almost cathartic, but the standout was "Mr November".

It's a show stopper on the best of nights, but with Berninger climbing over the crowd to the back of the room and then back again as he sung the defiant chorus "I won't fuck us over/I'm Mr November" it was hard not to believe that this wasn't just boasting, but a statement to its fans from a band ready to make the leap.

... Muse, March 8, Air Canada Centre

There are a few things in my Rock 'n' Roll bucket list. There are some I've done (drink a PBR on a Saturday night in CBGB's, follow Pearl Jam), a few that are purely fanciful (see The Velvet Underground, see Pink Floyd perform The Wall live), and some that I should be able to accomplish (Glastonbury, punch Chuck Klosterman in the frakking glasses). One item on the list was "see Muse in a an arena setting".

If there's any award for best live act in the Europe, it tends to go to Muse by default - almost to the point where it should be retired, like women's hockey at the Olympic level (POW!). Their shows are large, bombastic, full of video and lasers and a commercially acceptable form of prog rock (they're prog in the same way that The National are No Depression. It's there, but not.). I'd seen them once before in Toronto at quite possibly the worst venue in the area - Avro Hall, which is basically an airplane hangar changed into a convention centre. Their music, their video screens, their light show was too big for the venue, and it was like being stuck in the elevator with Baz Lurhman who had some VERY IMPORTANT THINGS to tell you about King Crimson.

So when I heard they were playing the Air Canada Centre I figured it was the closest I was going to come to seeing them at Wembley (on the bucket list also). I was actually happy to see that my seat was at the far end of the arena, meaning I was going to get to at least see everything at an appropriate scale.

The stage was comprised of three pillars that various movies and effects were shown on during the show. For the overture (oh, I feels so fancy!) before the set they were bleak towers that looked almost like the cover of Original Pirate Material until they changed to silhouettes of drones walking up an internal staircase. After a minute they started falling down like dominoes, with one doing a full on, well, falling man. This hit on a frequent theme in the show and Muse's lyrics: The modern world is of forced conformity and mind control and fear and terror and aliens and stars and...you know...like....stuff.

The screens fell to show the band members, each on one of the pillars about 10 or so feet in the air. So what you had was a triptych of these performers isolated from each other, above the crowd, and almost in a straight line centered around a large drum kit on a rotating platform. I was pondering the meaning of this and kept coming up against another important theme of threes in music and literature, and I fully admit that I didn't put my finger on it until about the third number when the band descended to stage level: Emmerson, Lake, and Palmer.

It's apt. Muse sprung fully formed from the heads of ELP after a saucy union with Queen. It's loud, it's large, it has overarching themes of science fiction, paranoia and...I dunno...there's probably a Tarkus somewhere in "Knights of Cydonia". Although they are embraced by Twi-heads due to shout outs from Stephanie Meyers (check out them crazy Google hits, daddy-o!), their music is really more appropriate for some teenager's dream movie based on a mis-reading (or non-reading) of Nineteen Eighty Four.

That's not to say that they don't have a sense of humour or flat out musical skill. Many of the periods between songs featured little jam sessions, and even a brief ho-down. And their reputation as a live act is well deserved - they actually are very good musicians and you can tell they take pride in what they do (or maybe I just continue to be a sucker for bass players who play more with their fingers than a plectrum, Peter Hook being the exception. Oh, and Tony Levin, though when you spend a good part of time inventing instruments I'm not too sure how to chart you). And Matt Bellamy's tales of mind control and resistance and rebellion and ...you know....robots 'n' stuff...are sung in a voice that seems to go from Geddy Lee on 2112 to Phil Collins on Duke (shut up, it's a good album!)

The stage show itself, the reason one goes to see Muse is an arena setting, is worth the trip...kinda sorta well it depends. There's no doubt that the three pillars (which, by the way, the band would be re-risen on from time to time) were impressive and gave it a sense of spectacle. The videos shown during the songs rotated between band and crowd shots, as well as films that reinforced the themes of the songs to an impressive effect. The opening montage of people falling down a stairwell was kind of chilling, as well as a film chronicling the formation of the "United States of Eurasia". A simulated man being drowned during "Time is Running Out" actually made me feel a little guilty for enjoying the song, as did frequent data streams and simulated ID cards/CCTV screens.

Which brings up a fundamental disconnect that comes out during a Muse show. Matt Bellamy's lyrics can range for the pastoral to the epic, but often fall in the paranoid. There's a better than average chance that he's never met a conspiracy theory that didn't appeal to him on some level. So here you have these amazing set, all this great and impressive technology for songs about... well...how technology is going to enslave us...or save us...it's not clear sometimes, and I think it's both - it's going to ensave us I suppose. As well you have a lot of these paranoid images about mind control and surveillance, but then you also have huge beachballs designed like eyeballs falling on to the crowd to be knocked around.

But I'll tell ya - the kids, they like it. The floor was jumping and dancing the entire time, and the person behind me was dancing so hard to "Knights of Cydonia" that I actually thought someone had burst through the wall to the outside. So, you can't say they don't know their fans and give them what they want.

As the show ended and we filed out, I was thinking about Bellamy - he's young, he's a bit of a prodigy and obviously reads a lot, but it must be exhausting being him. Maybe that's why the show is so big, so bombastic, so full of energy. If he were left to his thoughts for too long without an outlet he'd certainly slip into David Icke territory in about a week and half.

Yes, I'm a bit of a prog fan, and yes I do like Muse. I'm glad I went to the show because it is an experience that just not many bands do right now. But I'm also glad that there's a strike through that item on my list now. It's a spectacle, but on some levels it's a little empty because of all the inherent and necessary contradictions contained within. I've said before that bands like Interpol and Pearl Jam can put on as engaging a show by just playing and coloring some of the lights, and I'll stand by it. I go back to it every time because it feels like that in the end you see a lot more from closer up.