Pig Money
"I would prefer you dance."
Room to Move
The music of Michael Rother, an early member of Kraftwerk and co-founder of Neu!, expresses the freedom of the road, a vision of swift and orderly traffic, which is not what anyone can reasonably expect driving from Philadelphia through New Jersey and into New York City. Even with the intervention of congestion pricing, the trip was enervating, but I had to take the chance. It’s quite rare to see Rother, a pioneer or experimental rock and electronic music, playing live in the United States, though the setting could have been better.
The concert happened at Knockdown Center, a former glass factory, located in a still-industrial area of Queens. As you would expect, neighborhood amenities were lacking. A halal cart took advantage of a lack of options by attempting to charge $50 for two falafel sandwiches. The venue, despite its excellent curation, wasn’t much more accommodating. There was no reentry into the venue and barely any place to sit for the nearly 5-hour concert. If I’m expected to stand for that amount of time, I’d like a work meal and minimum wage plus tips.
But that amount of standing couldn’t be avoided, at least in my case, since the opener, Eiko Ishibashi, was fully half the appeal of the show. Like a lot of people, I first heard about her through her soundtracks for the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Ishibashi’s set was quite different from her lush orchestral work or from the intimate lounge rock of her latest solo album. For this set, she played solo flute and electronics, subtly shifting the pitch of her instrument to build up these deep cacophonous loops of sound.
The other acts were less demonstrative. HTRK played dirge-y electro-rock that would have been fine in a more intimate club setting, preferably one with tall leather booths, but was a bit of a drag in such a large, open concert venue. Thurston Moore played an energetic set of improvised noise rock, complete with two percussionists, but at that point, I just wanted to see the headliner—not a feeling I like feeling, especially towards a musician whose work I admire otherwise.
Rother made the whole ordeal of car travel, of standing for four hours, worth the effort. Hearing his songs played live, it was easy to see how he was an influential figure in the development of early punk and indie rock. He and his band played very very loud. The propulsive motorik beat, pioneered by Rother’s deceased bandmate and onetime antagonist Klaus Dinger—personality conflicts, along with poor album sales, ended Neu!’s initial run after just four years—made me feel considerably lighter on my feet.
Appropriately enough, there was a passel of happy, belligerent Germans directly in front of me. One of them, in response to a now out-of-date concert projection celebrating 50 years Neu! (1971-2021), shouted “Du bist alt!”—“You’re old!”—at Rother. The guitarist himself was quite bemused by the enthusiasm of his audience. Midway through the set, he asked us, “Is there enough room for you to move? Because if you can move, I would prefer you dance.” That was my preference as well.
Hitching Posts
The street above mine still retains a pair of hitching posts: waist-high poles with cast-iron horseheads atop them. I would never hitch a horse to these poles, though, since any horse—except for maybe a warhorse—would be liable to spook. A big German Shepherd lives in the house fronting the posts. Its owner keeps it on a tether just short enough to prevent it from biting passersby. For that reason, the house is the most reliable location for street parking, weekends excluded, when suburbanites come to enjoy the “urban experience, small town charm” that the neighborhood development corporation advertises itself with. The dogs do lend a certain ambience. Along the side streets and thoroughfares alike, you can see crumpled blinds and windows smeared with nose-prints. At all hours, in all weather, the streets can echo with barks and howls, sometimes solo, sometimes as a duet or a trio, often at no one in particular, enough the waken the dead, veterans of the Revolutionary War and The War of 1812, who, though they might have kept similarly ill-tempered dogs themselves, maybe expected a reprieve from minding the animals.
Pig Money
A local beer store has video slot machines. Combining vices must make good business sense. Instead of a jackpot, one of the machines displays the word: “Pig Money”. I laughed out loud when I first saw this, making a quick trip to the store before catching the bus, I laughed until realized the possible implications of the phrase “Pig Money”, what that said about the manufacturer of the machine and how the manufacturer, as a matter of company culture if not company policy, viewed the users of their machines. I didn’t stop laughing, but I didn’t laugh as loudly.
