In Williamsburg, on Havemayer Street somewhere north of the JMZ line, there's this anonymous building that houses the businesses of local medical practitioners, one of whom's named M. Sack. It's probably always a mistake to think that society has come along far enough that some guy with a sharpie and a refined taste for dick jokes can resist using said sharpie to spot out what naughty double-entendres he happens to come upon in public. One case in point: when I was driving to the Oakland Airport last week I saw a one-way sign that somebody had enhanced with a spray-paint "B" so that the "ONE" read instead "BONE". As such, if you're called Dr. M. Sack, you really ought to know better than to post your name out in the open within arm-plus-sharpie-length's reach, because the sad truth is that you're never going to live down the innuendo that you thought you left behind in high school. It's just not going to happen.

I can't really pin down exact chronological figures, but I'm gonna venture to say that we spent the vast majority of our time stalking around Williamsburg. For me this was a really good thing, and here's why: The typical New York Experience is heavily Manhattan- and skyscraper-centric and has for anyone brought up on American pop myth a pretty surreal and unsettling quality--in my previous visits to New York, I would walk by the Seinfeld diner or Carnegie Hall or the spot in Central Park commemorating John Lennon's life/death or the Empire State Building and I would never know quite what to think except something like "Oh, this place is actually real." I sort of think this is the pure tourist's understanding of a place, in which the sites are so objectified and packed with this weird nostalgia for things you've never experienced for real (and yet you still feel nostalgic for) that you can't help but be let down by the real thing, because the real thing isn't the same thing as what existed in your imagination, nor is its physical manifestation at all tied up with all of the cultural baggage that's associated with it. Maybe let down is the wrong word for it. I guess it's more that you really are impressed, but it's the kind of impressed-ness that comes as a result of this feeling like you ought to be impressed by it all.

So the practical advantage of not carting oneself from Impressive Building X to Museum Y and then to Broadway Show Z is that you have a lot of time to walk around in the cold or sit in a cafe for an entire afternoon and basically do nothing. When we were in New York I developed an impulse-purchase habit for semi-junky food and drink like everything-topped bagels with cream cheese (which I kind of overdosed on because they are in retrospect way too salty with all that stuff on it) and cafe mochas and/or coffee products of any kind and doughnuts and the sensational blended strawberry milk sold at this ambiguously Latino bakery called La Bonita.

I recently talked with a former New Yorker about NYC artistic communities, and his account of Williamsburg as NYC's gentrified bohemia du jour had distinct after-the-fall overtones, as if things have gotten softer and less edgy since the passing of some golden era that might be the 60s or 70s or 80s depending on who's doing the wistful reminiscing. Talk like that is always a little suspicious because of how self-congratulating it seems (e.g., "I was there when things were real", etc.), but then maybe you can see his point a little: Wiliamsburg is as pure an example of a Hipster neighborhood that you will ever see. It's kind of hard to pin down an objective definition of what exactly a Hipster is, since the tastes and fashions chance so quickly, but at any given moment it always feels like there's a concrete, pre-packaged aesthetic that everyone's ordering from a catalog and subsequently using to decorate their respective art spaces and record shops and vegan cafes with.

Chelsea and I had a long and rambling conversation about it as we walked through town, and eventually settled on some rough concept of Hipsterdom as first and foremost a form of conspicuous consumption, although I'm not really sure how far we got with that. If nothing else, "hipster" is a pejorative, and so nobody you ever meet will ever self-identify as a "hipster". Conversation while in Williamsburg was rife with sarcastic jabs at hipsters, to the point that Mark actually said something to the effect of "Well, hipsters aren't really so bad", and you just know the contempt is thick when somebody feels the need to apologize for it. But I'm also tempted to believe that making fun of hipsters is itself an identifying trait of a hipster--that's to say it sorta takes one to know one, and that I guess I shouldn't act surprised if somebody accused one of us of being a hipster him/herself. Let's remember that we were, after all, having such fun romping around Brooklyn with our skinny jeans and scarves and variously worthless liberal arts degrees, reminiscing (with infinitely regressive irony) about the 80s and drinking coffee and talking about music and film and how awesome it is or would be to live in Japan or Germany.

As with SXSW, the NY leg of So So Modern's US tour originally had only one show penciled in. Thanks to the free play of networking the likes of which I'd never seen prior, the NY schedule blossomed into some half-dozen sets, plus one or two guest DJ sets and a few sets for Grayson's solo stuff. Partly this was a geography thing, since a lot of the industry insiders that the band knew personally were based in New York, and since the city also happens to have a staggering number of formal and informal venues for bands to play in. I have to reiterate that the success in booking and logistics during the NY stint was mostly the result of people performing favors and other random acts of kindness for the band. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, although I suspect this is the way it happens for any band touring on its own dime.

(It might or might not be worth mentioning the weird expression of gender politics that I think I saw going on: every one of the immediate contacts that went on to arrange things and find stuff for the band was female, and so I'm forced to speculate that the band's charms and NZ cache and/or Commonwealth accents had something to do with it. It may be that that sort of work just happens to be more appealing to females, or that females are just better suited to its core competencies (which are basically to be really patient, organized, high-strung, and hip all at the same time, and to be really nice most of the time but also to be able to flip a switch and kick some ass when it's ass-kicking that is needed), or there's some kind of glass ceiling at work that keeps the ground-level logistics of the music industry a disproportionately female affair. Maybe I'm just smoking crack. Also not as interestingly but just FYI, the people that ended up loaning stuff to the band, i.e. gear and vehicles, were all male, but they'd all been reached indirectly, through said females.)

One huge and potentially tour-saving coup came in the form of Chelsea's friend Brit's beat-up white Suburban, which was loaned to us at minimal cost and complaint. The Suburban had Brit's U of Colorado stickers attached and looked like it had been driven across the length of America and through all of its varied climes and terrains, and several times over. The rear-view mirror on the driver's side had at some point been socked a good one and was more kaleidescope than driving aid. There was an ancient tape-deck adapter with a quarter-inch jack and the sound coming from the speakers had that weird treble/bass imbalance you get when the stereo signal is messed up somewhere along the line. Brit took special pains to instruct me on how to jimmy the rear gate with a screwdriver he kept in the drink holder up front for that specific purpose. There was room for five to sit comfortably and it fit all of SSM's gear more or less exactly. Aside from the assassinatingly shitty mileage and the poor aesthetics of referring to the Suburban as a band "van", I would say it was perfect for our purposes.

Now when I say "perfect" though, I mean "perfect" in a kind of fits-the-experience way, not "perfect" as in chick-magnet and/or Car Practically Drives Itself and/or GPS-navigation with computer-mediated-climate-control or some such nonsense; actually operating the thing took some getting used to and led to some of the more intense experiences of the tour. Note that driving anywhere in the general vicinity of the Williamsburg Bridge on either side of the river is a clusterfuck par excellence, one of one-way streets and concomitant forced turns, and then of extremely creative and unpredictable traffic direction and obstruction by members of the New York Police Department, and let's not forget the tiny unreadable street signs (if it means anything to you, I repeatedly almost missed Bowery coming off of Delancey and vice-versa) and general lack of parking spaces and constant road construction and good lord the derring-do and overall balls of NYC motorists and pedestrians alike. After the three or four days of maneuvering through Brooklyn and south Manhattan in a car possessing roughly the size and demeanor of a triceratops, you're either going to be very competent or very dead. At this point virtually no aspect of Southern California driving scares me, and it very recently amazes me that anyone could have a bad word to say about LA traffic at all.

I can't remember for sure, but I think Day 1 in the Suburban was also the same day that SSM was scheduled to perform their one pre-booked gig, in the Lower East Side at the Lit Lounge, which was a weird juxtaposition of cave-like performance space and frou-frou art gallery. I think Mark could already sense a tension building between me and the car and the streets of New York, and so he bought me a chicken kebab dinner before the show.

The Lit Lounge was fun but also terribly annoying (I thought) from a performance perspective. First of all, the floor plan consisted of a long, skinny rectangle with the stage and the make-shift green room residing on opposite ends, thus requiring before and after the set that we to ferry gear back and forth along the entire length of the premises, and this while it was jammed with patrons. The stage was tiny and one corner of it was actually somehow not attached to the rest of it, and it would wobble perilously and unbalance mic stands and generally terrify anyone within view of the band's feet. Despite this the band seemed to have a good time, perhaps due to Dan's not feeling stoned on antibiotics, and also a terrific crowd atmosphere that I did not at all see except for passing glances while I was shooting the possibly incompetent sound guy the look of death, which I am 100% certain he could not see. Either the owner or the floor manager was sufficiently impressed with SSM's performance that s/he invited them back at later dates for not only another performance but also a DJ set, both of which gigs s/he (the owner or floor manager) subsequently completely forgot about and left SSM sorta high and dry and forcing them to cancel the DJ thing completely and then truncate the second show to like 15 minutes, which, for what it's worth, apparently turned out to be really high-energy and cool.

There was a bonafide dance party after the bands stopped playing that was filled with the requisite goofiness and homoerotic grinding, mostly perpetrated with pneumatic enthusiasm by Dan (and I think maybe sometimes Aidan, because he and his groin are tall) upon basically everyone on the dance floor. Then we loaded all of SSM and Cut Off Your Hands (who'd played IMO one of their best shows that I'd seen of them despite my contempt for the venue at large) and also myself and our new NY acquaintance Rachel to whom we'd offered a ride into the Suburban--all in all, ten people, mostly drunk, and the gear of two bands. For an abstainer who moves frequently in the company of lushes, expats, and most recently rock bands, I am stupendously untalented at putting up with the behavior of drunk people, and I tend to greet all the silly good will with constipated smiles and humorlessness and am pretty consistently a fucking asshole about it, which maybe comes from the fact that I am jealous that I don't seem to be having as a good time and am somehow missing out (now see if that isn't the classic unavoidably self-fulfilling train of thought).

Anyway, the carful of people was actually not so bad and maybe even secretly fun for me; instead I waited until after maybe half a dozen navigational mishaps on the trip home to go absolutely apeshit. I think it was when we were just off the bridge into Brooklyn and I realized we had no way of getting off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from the inside lanes of the bridge (which as I later learned were labeled as such, but only past the point where you no longer had the choice, fuck you very much) and I was looking into rear-view mirror trying to change lanes and I couldn't see a goddamn single thing in it, and I proceeded to emit a reasonably coherent stream of mezzo forte profanity, which tirade I think fairly well scared the crap out of the band, and for the rest of the ride they were mostly quiet, a kind of brows-raised Holy Shit quiet. To add insult to insult, no later than 3 minutes after we'd entered Brooklyn, I took a tactically-disastrous forced right turn, which immediately took us back onto the bridge and into Manhattan; had their been tolls involved I probably would have driven the van right through the gate.

I'm hoping to have this wrapped up once and for all in the next post. This is so late it's getting embarrassing!