saturday night began at 7 or so at the italian american veteran’s hall behind d’errico’s on shrewsbury st.. i rolled up when i thought the show would be well underway to discover that it was just about to begin. nadir is the grindcore band from maniac mansion, they played first and it ruled. concrete facelift was all hardcore skater music, mouth sewn shut was hardcore with reggae and ska parts and from the angle i was at, the guitarist looked exactly like my friend david moore and moved like him too. the last two bands were from vermont but i left early. the weird thing about this show was that the hall was just too big. no complaints about the cathedral ceiling, but the floor was so wide it messed everything up. hardcore dancing is all a derivate of the circle pit, and all involves pacing from side to side, but also running, skipping, crawling, rolling, shoving people, and whirling around. in a basement or smaller club this is fine, there’s a packed buffer of people ensuring nothing gets too big. but at this huge spot people dancing built up so much speed that they were really plowing into people hard. and since the dancers were at the front, everyone else played the back, and the bands got lonely. not anyone’s fault, just a victim of architecture. the saving grace was that it was big enough that you couldn’t really get across the room twice without being a little winded. anyway, this isn’t me complaining, it’s just me observing. i had fun, some friends of mine were there, i felt like a sore thumb amongst all the comraderie, but that is nothing special. at one point one of the dudes drinking at the bar (just one of the club dudes) pointed at me and yelled “hey, that guy’s not wearing black!”. yup. but no one there looked down on me for not being in uniform, it was just me feeling conspicuous.
after i left i rode over to ralph’s for Boston League Of Women Wrestlers, which two drinks is the referee for.actually i stopped at the supermarket to get an apple and a bag of carrots. eating a carrot at a bar- funny, also satisfying. before the wrassling there were a few pretty bad rock bands, which was weird to see after getting destroyed by hardcore only an hour before. i drew in my book and talked to people outside, while kirk used my bike chained to the fence as a backdrop for his scene portraits. the wrestling show itself was pretty good, with themed matches between characters (a nun vs a girl scout, a stewardess vs a nurse, an american indian steroetype (?) vs an 80s rocker. two drinks told me that a lot of people get riled up and complain about the announcer, who really antogonizes the audience. and it’s true, he said some pretty shitty stuff. but it wasn’t fun to hate him, it was just, i don’t know, an appropriate action.
rode home eating carrots in the rain, slept through the major taylor race this morning, which i had really been looking forward to but still somehow forgot about.
talking to nice guy matt at the crust show about wikipedia, so here’s the wikipedia entry for all varieties of syllabus-free dance, including the circle pit, the pogo, and the ickey shuffle.
