INTERACT

COMMENTS

Welcome to a new column, courtesy of your Senior Editor who doesn’t live on the Left Coast. I’ve cribbed the title from a book of the same name, recently released, which covers New York’s music scene from 1978-88, a period Yours Truly spent being born and learning how to speak English. Meanwhile, people like Thurston Moore and Basquiat and Warhol and David Byrne were busy reinventing the way we conceptualize art and music and culture in general. But no matter—now I’m a fully sentient adult living in the city, and I get to see David Byrne all the time, walking around town with his shock of white hair and a bicycle helmet. We once chatted in the balcony at an Animal Collective show. He was shocked at how many of the night’s musicians were performing without wearing shoes. I offered him a nip of vodka from my flask. He declined. That makes me more rock’n’roll than the ex-frontman of Talking Heads, which means I can steal the title of a book that he figures prominently in. So: moving on.

The past two weeks have been all about mixing nightlife and high art in NYC. We got started with DFA’s dance party at MoMA, which firmly proved that museums are more fun when you’re slightly drunk and trying to take home a member of the opposite sex. Then it was off to the industrial wilds of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where we swung by 31 Under 31—a group show of Young Women In Art Photography that’s currently up at 3rd Ward, and well worth a visit.

And finally, we enjoyed the A-list clusterfuck that was the opening night party for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Dan Colen was there—he’s about thirteen feet tall, and best known for spraypainting large rocks. Banks Violette was there, looking appropriately heavy metal, and causing us to rethink our feelings about neck tattoos. Yet the biggest surprise—wait for it—was that the majority of the art on display DID NOT SUCK. Sure, there was the usual amount of sculptural junk assemblage that’s somehow become the prominent artistic signature of our generation—visit the New Museum recently?—but beyond that, much of the work was worthwhile and even inspiring. Video art made the strongest showing. Anthem’s personal favorite? Home 2, directed by Olaf Breuning, who we personally want to befriend and hang out with, forever. It’s an ironic and unsettlingly hilarious vision of the global tourism industry and how we turn foreign places and people into commodities. (It’s also a bit like Jackass, if that show were scripted by an artistic genius and narrated by the aforementioned David Byrne). Breuning collaborated with photog Jeremy Kost in the latest issue as part of a new series; you can watch the entirety of Home 2, along with other videos, on Breuning’s lovably quirky website.

In other New York news, the downtown nightclub 205 is officially over. You hear? Over. Note to management: you can’t ride the groundswell of a few Sunday Style articles in the Times forever. This is a club that manages to have a velvet rope every single night of the week, despite the place being full of bored kids who are pissed off about paying $10 for a whiskey on the rocks. (Just say you’re on the list. Trust us. Any list. The American Beef Council. NAMBLA. If you’re desperate, say you’re on BlackBook’s list). What used to be a frenetic dance floor in the basement seems to have been taken over by pasty, middle-aged white dudes trying to parlay their bottle service into barely legal hipster sex (and probably succeeding). We’re just going to have to wait until Andrew W.K.’s new venue—dubbed Santa’s Party House—finally gets authorized to open its doors and shake things up a bit.

On a brighter note, NYC got its ass kicked by Black Mountain, who played three consecutive nights in the city. We caught them at a very weird, very sullen party for VLES.com (that’s Vice magazine PLUS Viacom cash) in which about fifteen people paid attention while bored hipsters sat in the back with laptops and updated their Myspace profiles. (If you haven’t heard, VLES.com is a “virtual Lower East Side,” a la Second Life. Why try to market a virtual Lower East Side at a concert in the actual Lower East Side, you wonder? Yeah. So do we). BUT two nights later we caught Black Mountain again, this time at perennial favorite Glasslands, a D.I.Y. event space in Williamsburg. They brought the psych-rock fury like no one else can—and we turned up early to watch Bon Iver who, ashamed to say, wasn’t on our radar months ago. Think Neil Young mixed with that oddly uplifting melancholia that early Shins nailed so well, all delivered in an unabashed, beautiful falsetto. (It also reminds us of friend-of-Anthem Quinn Walker, whose new double-album should be in your collection by now). Check out this high-quality NPR recording of a Bon Iver set in D.C.; you’ll fall in love, we promise.