Live Show

Inside a small club in the Lower East Side, a man plays a large, white, electric blues guitar, staring out beyond the audience with an insane look on his face.  His eyes are wide open, glazed over, lost.  But that expression is a ruse, a trick. His eyes quickly dart back down to meet the packed audience; the muscles in his face flex and relax to paint a portrait of calm and inviting warmth.  The quick contrast is immediately enjoyable and frightening.  He is dressed in a tight fitting, white, vintage, button down shirt, with black, skinny jeans, and a velvet boa.  Pleading and pained, his eyes dart to the right.  He sings, screams in a soulful falsetto, "Hipster Girl! why you always lookin past meee!  why you always hurt me!!"  To the man's right is another smaller man, handsome, possibly Latino and dressed in a grey pinstripe vest exposing his bare arms and much of his chest.  He plays a white bass guitar.  The two men move simultaneously, in choreographed dance steps while they play their guitars and the man to the right continues to sing.  The singing man's face contorts again, flashing that juicy pain, and then serious, staring right past the audience, drilling a hole in the back wall.  Soul flows out of his out his mouth and their guitars, while the white-boy, big-bird drummer, with high knees squished in the drum set, continues to keep strict time, tist tist tist on the high hat cymbal, then the powerful snap of the snare.  "Hipster Girl! you walked out the pages of a 2006 Cosmo magazine!  always hip never ever played out by the trains on 7th Street! Hipster Girl! you make me wanna smaaack you because you make me feel so blue when you make me want you!"  The club lights bleed reddish, bluish then white on the three man band.  The wooden stage is about four feet off the ground, and the audience numbers around 150.  The place is packed and smells of stale beer.  Pressed up against the wall, two men in the audience sit on high stools with bottles of Bud Light on the tall, small, round, wooden table.  Most of the audience is standing and many are drinking Stella.  The front man continues to screetch and get inside the stomachs and heads of the audience.  He has light, yellow skin, but possibly African-American or Afro-Caribbean features.  This ambiguity mixes with the shifting facial expressions.  He is in one moment insane and the next a model of rationality.  He is gay but obviously straight.  He wails black soul music, while playing white postpunk guitar.  The two front men are women, dancing, dressed effeminately, cocksure.  This is what the audience paid for, a little finger in the asshole, a little bit of spunk, a little bit of "I'm not sure." The music is two large black women in pink fish net stockings and Sex Pistols t-shirts, busty as hell, coming up and around, making it all feel so good.

with love,
Anthony