Today's My NY entry comes courtesy of Brooklyn's winsome, Rough Trade-styled scruffy punk enthusiasts caUSE co-MOTION! The quartet's infectious and giddy "It's Time!" release on Slumberland Records compiles a handful of OOP seven inches in one tidy CD package. And tonight, they play at Ash's Place (234 Wythe Ave.) with Cheap Time, Jacques Detergent, and Ashley Epps. When they're not on-stage (or adding exclamation points to anything that moves), the boys might be found here:
Roosevelt Island
If you were designing a metropolis from scratch and had a little tiny island just within view of the city's business center to work with, what would you put on it? Weird modern Swedish-esque apartment complexes? Strange windy roads that always seem to end up back where they started? A checkered history of mental hospitals, prisons, and smallpox quarantines (with "A lounging, listless, madhouse air," according to Charles Dickens, that's endured since the 1840s)? Spooky ruins of said buildings cordoned off by busted chainlink fences? Oh yeah, and then how would you connect it to the rest of the city? An amusement park-style system of tramcars with a record of breaking and leaving passengers stranded hundreds of feet in the air, probably, right? This place actually exists and people actually live here.
Zaragoza Grocery on Avenue A
People who say you can't get good mexican food in New York have no idea - there are a ton of tiny bodegas all over the city with amazing, cheap tacos and you don't even have to go to Jackson Heights or Sunset Park for 'em. The pork tacos here are great and they usually have weirder stuff like chorizo/potato and goat and "lengua", too (the last is best avoided actually, unless simulaneously squishy/crunchy chunks of cow tongue are your thing). The four tables are usually occupied by wasted dudes talking politics in Spanish and listening to Tigres Del Norte on the incongruous internet jukebox but they're cool with it if you sit there with them. This joint narrowly beats out the wonderfully/wrongfully pessimistically named "Mexico 2000" as my favorite in the city, but these places are kind of all over and I don't know how any of them stay open selling $2.50 tacos so I'd encourage you to support them unless you think New York needs another T-Mobile store or hate awesome, delicious and cheap food and everyone who eats it or ever does anything awesome.
The Beach
I saw the craziest thing on the shuttle train back from Rockaway Beach last time. There were two bunches of kids who started puffing up at each other (I think because one of them wouldn't share his bottle of vodka with someone from the other group) and it pretty much seemed like some sort of fight was inevitable. The kid who wouldn't share, this really tall wiry dude with huge curly hair, started pacing back and forth, getting all loosey-goosey and saying, "Oh I love this shit, I love this shit," over and over. Then he went over to his sidekick (who was sitting right next to me) and, motioning his backpack, said, "Don't take it out unless he pulls something, then you give it to me" (this was the point at which parents-with-kids started standing up and moving to the other end of the train). The sidekick was like, "Yeah, yeah, okay," but then he held off the kid for a second and went over to talk to whoever the second-in-charge of the other group was, and the two of them talked for a while and I guess they must have squashed it because all of a sudden everyone from both groups, like 15 kids in all, STARTED DOING THIS REALLY CRAZY WIGGLY DANCE AND STANDING ON THE SEATS AND SINGING AND CLAPPING AND CHANTING something that I couldn't understand for like two minutes until the train pulled into the station and everyone got off. Anyway, New York actually has pretty nice beaches if you avoid Coney Island and I really like going to them. I feel like I'm writing for "Metropolitan Diary".
Gimme Gimme Records on 5th St. between 1st and 2nd Ave.
The only good record store still standing from when I moved to New York and for good reason; I feel like a pretty huge percentage of my favorite records I've gotten here. It's not uniformly cheap (the dude who runs the store knows what he's got), but most stuff's priced to get out of the store - dollar records are a dollar, 5 dollar records are 5 dollars, and actually pricey stuff at least goes on the wall for a while before it goes on eBay. It's also the rare store that's good for all genres which means you can fix a Beefheart jones at the same time as one for Diamond D and the Psychotic Neurotics. One of the few places left from my age-22-bum-around-on-a-sunny-day routine.
Tonight @ Ash's Place 234 Wythe Ave. $6 10pm
If you were designing a metropolis from scratch and had a little tiny island just within view of the city's business center to work with, what would you put on it? Weird modern Swedish-esque apartment complexes? Strange windy roads that always seem to end up back where they started? A checkered history of mental hospitals, prisons, and smallpox quarantines (with "A lounging, listless, madhouse air," according to Charles Dickens, that's endured since the 1840s)? Spooky ruins of said buildings cordoned off by busted chainlink fences? Oh yeah, and then how would you connect it to the rest of the city? An amusement park-style system of tramcars with a record of breaking and leaving passengers stranded hundreds of feet in the air, probably, right? This place actually exists and people actually live here.
Zaragoza Grocery on Avenue A
People who say you can't get good mexican food in New York have no idea - there are a ton of tiny bodegas all over the city with amazing, cheap tacos and you don't even have to go to Jackson Heights or Sunset Park for 'em. The pork tacos here are great and they usually have weirder stuff like chorizo/potato and goat and "lengua", too (the last is best avoided actually, unless simulaneously squishy/crunchy chunks of cow tongue are your thing). The four tables are usually occupied by wasted dudes talking politics in Spanish and listening to Tigres Del Norte on the incongruous internet jukebox but they're cool with it if you sit there with them. This joint narrowly beats out the wonderfully/wrongfully pessimistically named "Mexico 2000" as my favorite in the city, but these places are kind of all over and I don't know how any of them stay open selling $2.50 tacos so I'd encourage you to support them unless you think New York needs another T-Mobile store or hate awesome, delicious and cheap food and everyone who eats it or ever does anything awesome.
The Beach
I saw the craziest thing on the shuttle train back from Rockaway Beach last time. There were two bunches of kids who started puffing up at each other (I think because one of them wouldn't share his bottle of vodka with someone from the other group) and it pretty much seemed like some sort of fight was inevitable. The kid who wouldn't share, this really tall wiry dude with huge curly hair, started pacing back and forth, getting all loosey-goosey and saying, "Oh I love this shit, I love this shit," over and over. Then he went over to his sidekick (who was sitting right next to me) and, motioning his backpack, said, "Don't take it out unless he pulls something, then you give it to me" (this was the point at which parents-with-kids started standing up and moving to the other end of the train). The sidekick was like, "Yeah, yeah, okay," but then he held off the kid for a second and went over to talk to whoever the second-in-charge of the other group was, and the two of them talked for a while and I guess they must have squashed it because all of a sudden everyone from both groups, like 15 kids in all, STARTED DOING THIS REALLY CRAZY WIGGLY DANCE AND STANDING ON THE SEATS AND SINGING AND CLAPPING AND CHANTING something that I couldn't understand for like two minutes until the train pulled into the station and everyone got off. Anyway, New York actually has pretty nice beaches if you avoid Coney Island and I really like going to them. I feel like I'm writing for "Metropolitan Diary".
Gimme Gimme Records on 5th St. between 1st and 2nd Ave.
The only good record store still standing from when I moved to New York and for good reason; I feel like a pretty huge percentage of my favorite records I've gotten here. It's not uniformly cheap (the dude who runs the store knows what he's got), but most stuff's priced to get out of the store - dollar records are a dollar, 5 dollar records are 5 dollars, and actually pricey stuff at least goes on the wall for a while before it goes on eBay. It's also the rare store that's good for all genres which means you can fix a Beefheart jones at the same time as one for Diamond D and the Psychotic Neurotics. One of the few places left from my age-22-bum-around-on-a-sunny-day routine.
Tonight @ Ash's Place 234 Wythe Ave. $6 10pm
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