WEEKEND PARTY UPDATE: August 2010

Sam & Dave the art show is up now at By And By Gallery in Williamsburg until the end of the week. If you are in New York you should stop in and say hello to them and then say hello to some really nice paintings. The opening on Friday night was really fun. The mood was summery, hanging on to the last shimmers of August's golden twilight drenched to the bone in cheap beer with a dash of vintage anxiety you can only get when your paintings are on public display.

Saw many an old friend and caught up with my favorite sisters in the struggle. While I was in town I was fortunate enough to catch Max Steele and the Party Ice perform at Pussy Faggot on Thursday night in the LES. Max's agit-electro performance pop really turned me on, the force and etiquette of his lyrics possessing a buzzing rhetoric which was really moving. Like everything not cheap, its difficult to describe, but something about the flagrant urgency of Max's sexual demands made from on stage, ultimatums tossed out at the club like epithetical come-ons, or conversely, uttered like sweet nothings of an advanced political nature. Things said, sung or shouted to make you feel like what you're up to at night still isn't safe or right or condoned or agreed on but aggressively transgressive, self-possessed of its own beauty and thus, reliant on nobody but the consensual. "Sodomy? Sodo-you!"

The problem with all bands these days, and why rock and roll is dying, fast, is that its hard to believe in it sexually anymore. Punk or rock and roll or any of these things are supposed to be more than just sexy, but sexual, which I have thought was determinedly signified by a mix of risk, body performance and vulnerability, freely offered using skill sets that resist traditional virtuosity. There ought to be evidence to suggest that whats happening on stage serves as a preamble to later intimate commingling. Intimacy unlikely won under normal circumstances. Today's shitty bands touting the promise of rock and roll usually only hint at premature ejaculation or worse, rape. Anyway, Max Steele, for me, restores faith in the promise of the Lower East Side, in post post post electro-punk, in getting on stage, all of that. And lets face it, I'm such a lousy blogger, I didn't take any pictures.

Moving on, here are pictures from Friday night at By And By Gallery: