JOY, SHIT, AND THE JERSEY SHORE.
Your Senior Editor is writing this from the front porch of a rented shore house in Ship Bottom, New Jersey, the gateway to Long Beach Island. The weather is creepily nice; there’s not much to do but sip beer, break into hotel swimming pools, and crash College Night at Joe Pop’s Shore Bar. ($10 towers of Miller Lite. I always prefer my watery domestic beer to come in the regal form of a TOWER.)
Before decamping from New York City for a welcome dose of R&R, we had the unadulterated pleasure of seeing Baltimore’s Ponytail. We’ve written about the band before, but at that time we’d only heard their latest album, Ice Cream Spiritual. (And if that ain’t a title worthy of the dirty Jersey shore, we don’t know what is). Like most conscious critics have noted, the Ponytail experience is all about the live show. We were left floored, mouths agape, stupid with glee and sick with joy. The ecstatic caterwauling! The shredding, finger-licking, major key trills of two dueling guitars (and no bass! What do you need a bass for, motherfucker?) We nearly passed out from excitement—or that could have been the thousand degree swelter in D.I.Y. venue Market Hotel, who knows. Either way: Ponytail makes us smile. Some day they’ll tour with Liars—who killed us, killed us, outdoors at McCarren Pool—and then, like some pre-ordained noise rock prophecy, the Rapture can come. (The everyone-getting-sucked-up-into-heaven one, rather than the dance-punk act. Naturally.)
Still, re: aforementioned, Ponytail-induced joy…No one really dances in New York. I don’t dance in New York. I sort of feel like the people who dance are doing so for the wrong reasons, for twisted motivations—to get their picture taken, mainly—and that prevents us from really cutting loose. Sad state of affairs. Do people dance in other cities? I get the feeling that in, like, Portland, kids go buck-ass wild: moshing, crowd-surfing, bouncing off the walls, tearing their clothes off, howling like demented, possibly rabid wolves. We’ve never been to Portland, but that assertion feels about right.
As for the fecal reference in the headline? That wasn’t just for kicks and page views. Andres Serrano—a dude who has previously riled us up with crucifixes in piss, and had neo-Nazis vandalize his work—is back. This time it’s a show about shit. The show is called—wait for it—“Shit,” and it opens in September at Yvon Lambert in New York. “Although the theme is considered taboo,” the press release notes, “excrement has a discernable documentation in the history of art. In 1961 Piero Manzoni unveiled his ‘Merda d’Artista’ metal cans that supposedly contained the artist’s stool, priced according to weight. Karen Finley smeared herself with symbolic feces and even Andy Warhol was quoted in the National Review saying that he would like to market his own excrement as jewelry (he felt it was merely a matter of tasteful packaging).”
Shit as art? That circumvents all possible criticisms—and will surely lead to a slew of badly punning headlines. Well played, Mister Serrano.
Download Ponytail's "Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)" here.
