Was last night’s three-hour, hiccup-filled Hole show in Washington, D.C., the best concert ever or a complete trainwreck? “Of the nearly 30 songs (or song fragments), not even a handful were completed without some minor disaster,” reports the Washington Post’s David Malitz — although there are commenters claiming that the show was great! There’s much, much more; my favorite bits are about the attaché of Courtney Love’s who was onstage shooting the show with an iPhone for the entire night.

The quote that sums up a 10-year-old’s attempt to break the world record of wearing the most underpants at one time: “By the time he had on 195 pairs, Jack’s feet were asleep, so they laid him down and kept going.” He only (“only”??) had 20 pairs to go in order to reach the record-breaking threshold. [Via]

by Dan Horton

Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague of mine, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. There’s limited computer access on board; crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day. Dan has been sending letters home to his girlfriend, Lori, who has been passing them along to friends and family, and now, with their permission, I’ll pass them along to you. -Dave Bry

Subject: Daily Dan: On Boat At Long Last

Date: Friday, June 18th

Lori,


I’m sorry I left off without calling you back last night. I was at 
wit’s end, very tired. I ended up driving back to New Orleans, dropping off my 
relief and the rental car, getting a room and not sleeping and then taking a 
taxi back again for the 6 a.m. boat. I received a call from the airlines that 
I had left a bag at the airport. Totally forgot about that bag I bought 
hoping to get out of being oversized and overweight. (Payed $42 for the 
bag-big pink hearts on it-and it turned out that I still had the 
overweight charge.) Anyway, that’s what made me decide to go back to the 
city. It was the right thing to do, it would have been murder to sleep 
outside in the heat with the horseflies and alligators with no bedding. I 
only sleep with alligators when I have proper bedding.


Venice is about 75 miles out from N.O. It’s at the end. Ate dinner in 
a bar filled with roughnecks (oil platform workers) seemed like they’d been 
away from land, beer and women for way too long. Felt like a fight was 
going to break out any moment but none did.
 I’m on the boat. Writing this from the upper wheelhouse where I have 
a view of “ground zero,” the site of the initial explosion where the rig 
used to be. There are two bright fires burning there. I can see the lights 
from all the skimmer boats and other vessels in the area working the spill. The dispatcher in Venice said that there were 1300 boats out here in various 
locations. He’s in charge of sending out a fleet of crew boats to man and 
supply the vessels. That is one stressed out individual.
 Tomorrow I will get a better idea of what the water out here looks 
like. Today I was sleeping, both on the crew boat and on this boat when I 
arrived. It was the toughest two days of travel I’ve ever had.

Will write again tomorrow and will have a better perspective on what is 
going on here. They tell me we aren’t that busy, that it’s just a boat or 
two a day coming to us and offloading and that we aren’t taking much product 
when they do. Tomorrow I chip and paint and wait for the crude oil to be 
delivered. It is hot as blazes. â€¨

Love,


Dan

Subject: Hello from Dan

Date: Saturday, June 19

Lori,


Today was a hot one. We lightered two skimmer boats (big supply 
boats with outriggers). The work isn’t terribly hard, and no one on this 
crew has had any ill effects from the crude (though it smells BAD, especially 
with that damn dispersant in it) and they’ve been working with it for over 
two weeks. There is plenty of bottled water, Gatorade and soda on board and 
everyone is conscious of the need to keep fluids going though them as well 
as getting out of the heat as often as is possible.
 The crew seems like a really good bunch of guys. Folks are getting 
along, so that’s good. There are a total of nine people onboard.


I haven’t seen any life in the water. We are four miles off of “ground 
zero.” There is a sheen on the water-like a gas sheen in a mud puddle. 
It’s not dramatic, but noticeable. The crude has broken up into particles 
that you can see down through the water column (that’s the work of the 
dispersant.) The second mate tells me that the boat has sailed though miles-wide slicks where the oil was about three feet thick and a foot under the 
surface. It comes up in “blooms,” depending on where the currents take it.
 There were five, huge controlled burns today that I could see.

It’s 
nighttime now, and I’m looking out at the main fire as I type. There are 
four rigs nearby it and a tanker. They are burning off the gasses as they 
come up to the top, with two fireboats continually hosing them down with sea 
water-to keep the heat down, I suppose.
 I am well and as comfortable as can be hoped for. It’s good to be 
working. I miss everyone of course.
 The Crocs that Yvonne bought me are amazingly comfortable. Thanks 
again, Y! I wore them for traveling down here and now they are my leisure 
wear for the boat. The Stieg Larsson book is great (I’m on the first one 
still) and I was happy to be reading about wintertime in Sweeden [sic] this 
afternoon out on the deck… a little blast of imaginary Nordic chill does a 
body good in the summertime Gulf of Mexico. Glad I brought the guitar too, 
thanks to Josh’s advice. Thank you, Lori, for moral support during what I 
hope will be the worst crew-change travel expedition I ever have to endure 
(the drive back to New Orleans instead of sleeping outside in Venice with 
the black flies and alligators.)
 Will write more tomorrow.


Love,


Dan

by Seth Colter Walls

Breaking: Williamsburg threw an indie-style music festival over the weekend, and it seemed pretty well-attended! The organizers at L Magazine did a nice job mixing heavily-sweated acts with lesser-known artists (never an easy balance). Though I continue to believe the lo-fi grind of the Woodsist label is in large part an aesthetic counterfeit job — Neil Young’s worst-reviewed 70’s record, Journey Through the Past, reconciled wispy pot-headed-ness with nods to gravitas a lot better, which is maybe different from saying it did so “well” — it’s certainly claiming a lot of mind-share at the moment. (The label’s showcase at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Saturday night was solidly packed from the drop.) Apparently the scuzzier sound put over by Wavves was also a big draw (and it got the typically smart Jon Caramanica treatment in the Times as a reward).

This current lo-fi thing going around is obviously punk-inflected, but also too uncertain about something — clarity, maybe? — to merit the unmodified genre classification.

Meantime, you know what didn’t draw a lot of people? Actual punk stuff. The Saturday evening set by Fucked Up at the Barge Park “metroPCS” stage was only about half full. Oh well: more room for Pink Eyes to run around hugging people (and carrying them on his back, as in the sadly too-short YouTube clip above). They played “Generation,” as well as “Crusades,” and also “No Epiphany” — so I was pretty damn pleased. What’s interesting is that, even though Fucked Up are clearly interested in experimenting with the boundaries of “hardcore” — writing long-ass songs and such — they never seem anything less than 100% committed to the form. It’s a cool trick, nailing that sweet spot between well-executed reverence and the excitement of moving things forward.

Pink Eyes even closed the set with an appeal to populist solidarity straight out of the hardcore-scene playbook. “Anyone can get up on stage and do this,” he said. “I’m proof that you don’t need to have talent to be in a band.” By the time Liars followed in the 8 p.m. hour, the hard-court concrete park was actually filling up to a respectable level. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because the punk was becoming comfortably hyphenated and masked behind conceit again.

Of course more people show up as it gets later in the evening, you might argue. But my Friday night Northside highlight was also more proudly hardcore than is currently fashionable, played later in the evening — and did not wind up being very well attended, either (competing as it did with the Woodsist showcase). You may recall a brief discussion of Minneapolis rapper P.O.S. from our Pazz + Jop autopsy, but it bears repeating: the Minneapolis-based punker cum rapper is something special!

About 18 people showed up to Bruar Falls at 11 p.m. to hear him do his thing — and about 10 of them seemed to know P.O.S. personally, bear-hugging him like old pals after the half-hour set. What his new 3-piece band lacked in polish (P.O.S. said this was their fourth show together, scheduled at the last minute on the margins of this weekend’s Afro-Punk festival), they made up for with intensity, sticking mostly to tracks from last year’s Never Better. P.O.S. even picked up a guitar to do a little extended vamping on “Graves,” which was dope.

Here are some of the official videos from Never Better, because, y’know — you’ve probably already enough about Wavves and Woodsist-related stuff already.

Oh, and right: a bunch of scary stuff also happened, with event publicist Andrea Rosen harassed by an angry, drunk jerk — plus another thrown beer bottle that drew the cops out to quash a Pitchfork event. But the Observer’s chief Pitchfork correspondent has got you covered on that latter score.

Seth Colter Walls has a day job.

This song is getting tiresome and out of tune: the Supreme Court, 5 to 4, has just decided that, essentially, no state or local government may prevent our proud citizens from owning guns. But what about the states’ rights, to do as they see fit? Clearly the owning of guns is not an issue regarding which we must protect our sovereign states from those meddlers in the Congress. And what about everyone’s right to liberty-our right to not be shot and stuff? In light of a brutal gun attack on Saturday- three people in a crowd were randomly shot Saturday night in San Francisco at a gay event-it seems worthwhile to look at Justice Stevens’ rather stern dissent.

The notion that a right of self-defense implies an auxiliary right to own a certain type of firearm presupposes not only controversial judgments about the strength and scope of the (posited) self-defense right, but also controversial assumptions about the likely effects of making that type of firearm more broadly available. It is a very long way from the proposition that the Four­teenth Amendment protects a basic individual right of self-defense to the conclusion that a city may not ban handguns….

[F]irearms have a fundamentally ambivalent rela­tionship to liberty. Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders, they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims. The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crime has devastated many of our communities. Amici calculate that approximately one million Americans have been wounded or killed by gunfire in the last decade. Urban areas such as Chicago suffer disproportionately from this epidemic of violence. Hand­ guns contribute disproportionately to it. Just as some homeowners may prefer handguns because of their small size, light weight, and ease of operation, some criminals will value them for the same reasons. ….

Hence, in evaluating an asserted right to be free from particular gun-control regulations, liberty is on both sides of the equation. Guns may be useful for self-defense, as well as for hunting and sport, but they also have a unique potential to facilitate death and destruction and thereby to destabilize ordered liberty. Your interest in keeping and bearing a certain firearm may diminish my interest in being and feeling safe from armed violence. And while granting you the right to own a handgun might make you safer on any given day-assuming the handgun’s marginal contribution to self-defense outweighs its marginal contri­bution to the risk of accident, suicide, and criminal mis­chief-it may make you and the community you live in less safe overall, owing to the increased number of hand­ guns in circulation. It is at least reasonable for a democ­ratically elected legislature to take such concerns into account in considering what sorts of regulations would best serve the public welfare.

Kanye West returned to the televised-awards-show world on last night’s BET Awards, where he lit up his bonkers new single “Power” while standing on top of a (fake) volcano and in front of a projection that looked like it had been constructed from running around while videotaping old Sears Portrait Studio backdrops. Still, at least you could at least see him through the smoke that blew up his butt every time he uttered the song’s title — unlike poor Waka Flocka Flame, who was the star of a smoked-out hip-hop “Stonehenge” when he turned in a verse during a performance by Diddy’s new group, Dirty Money.

“We’ve got a casino, a prison and now a stadium… But we don’t have a recreation center or even a McDonald’s in this city.”
— Chester, Pa., resident Tajh Eshaad, on real estate trends in his hometown, which recently experienced four murders in an eight-day span — including one in which two-year-old was killed by gunfire — and was placed under a 9 p.m. curfew as part of a citywide state of emergency. The aforementioned stadium, which will serve as the home of Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union, opened yesterday; the game, during which the Union beat the Seattle Sounders 3–1, kicked off at 5 p.m.

I scoffed a little when today’s Post referred to today as TRANSIT DOOMSDAY, regarding the MTA cuts. (Though of course I’ve always been upset about the death of the M8, which is how everyone in the East Village gets across town.) Apparently, however, it literally is MTA TRANSIT DOOMSDAY in Williamsburg, if you depend upon the L train. A million junior publicists are late to work right now! Photo by Andrew Pile.

How will you remember Robert Byrd? As the man who was elected to the Senate before Barack Obama was born-back when Hawaii was barely a state that issued fake birth certificates, not long after the time when the KKK was a normal-seeming kind of social organization to which one might belong? As the man who built a thousand bridges, roads and tunnels for the people of West Virginia, a lifetime of steering money home that still didn’t do much for the state? As the loudest, most vehement opponent to the invasion of Iraq? As a pioneer of open government? As one of the last politicians we’ll ever see to have ever worked as a gas station clerk or a butcher? As a symbol that weirdly both affirms and refutes the popular (and possibly wrong!) idea that we all just have to wait for the older, bigoted generations to die off so that we can live in a better world?

“The team behind Down the Hatch is opening the 13th Step at the former Telephone Bar on Second Avenue…. The term the 13th Step means: This term is used as a euphemism for inappropriate sexual advances by a member to a newcomer in AA (such as sponsors toward sponsees).”
— Man oh man, are there a lot of terrible bars opening in the East Village soon.