CMJ & New York City (October 18, 2011)

  Janet Weiss & Carrie Brownstein of Wild Flag @ Bowery Ballroom: photo by Michael Ligon

First, sorry for the late posting. CMJ and my trip to New York City in October has already been over for almost a month now, and I've been really lazy getting photos up on my Flickr and posting about the CMJ shows I went to. Overall, it was great to be back in The Big Apple. The CMJ lineup this year felt more subdued than last year, but with the amount of acts I had to choose from, I caught a number of good bands I hadn't heard before. In any case, CMJ is well worth the trip when you have the city and all that it has to offer to fall back on. I hope to get up these posts on a daily basis, although don't hold me to that. Grammar be damned, for expediency's sake, I'm going to shoot this off point form:

Things I did / saw / ate / heard:

- Bowery House (check-in) - good location in lower Manhattan, the hotel itself feeling somewhere between a hostel and a boutique hotel. I got myself a private cabin which basically was a room with a bed and a dresser and that's it but of course I was hardly going to be in the room anyway. The bathroom/shower facilities are however shared, except for the one individual bathroom available if you were lucky to snag it when no one was using it. The price was good and the staff were friendly. I recommend it if you're looking for a inexpensive and clean hotel in Manhattan.
- Ramones-in-front-of-CBGB's poster on the wall of my room - cool.
- New Museum
- John Varvatos Store (@ 315 Bowery St., the site of where CBGB's used to be)
- Chinatown (peanut rice dumpling, hmmm)
- Sara D. Roosevelt Park
- random conversations with others (including one photographer from QRO Magazine) in line outside of Bowery Ballroom trying to get a ticket for the Wild Flag, Eleanor Friedberger, & Hospitality (basically a mini Merge Records fest with local NYC outfit Hospitality its newest signees) show (success!); by the way, the people I met were really friendly.
- locals Hospitality opened the show with a spiky set of indie pop tunes
- Fiery Furnaces' Eleanor Friedberger almost stole the show with her fantastic set of pop tunes.
- Wild Flag set was an intoxicating mix of musical influences and was really a sum of it's parts ie. the art-rock influences of Mary Timony's old outfit Helium and the punk, garage influences of Sleater Kinney; I'd also perceived a psych-rock influence at times.
- Wild Flag's Carrie Brownstein kicking her plastic glass of beer into the crowd at the end of the main set
- Wild Flag, for their encore, playing covers of Television's "See No Evil", and Patti Smith's "Ask The Angels"

Photos: CMJ & New York City (October 18, 2011)