I got off the L train on Jefferson Street yesterday after work and saw nothing but industrial buildings, factories, barbed wire gating.  A thick smell of fish carcass hung in the air, and I was the only person on the street as far as I could see.  A pick-up drove by slowly, the window rolled down, a catcall yelled.  I phoned my friend, cursing when I got his voicemail.  Where the hell was I?

A few days ago, fellow Verso intern Colman Durkee, Sara Lawrence ’10, had invited me to a show that his house was hosting in Bushwick.  His band would be playing, along with a number of other punk bands from Boston, New York, and Seattle.  This is not something that I would normally go to.  But that’s probably becauase I never have.  Colman had come to a show of mine earlier this summer and I was sort of fascinated by the scene, the music, his tattoos.  So there I was.  Walking into a huge red building that looked more like a prison than a coop.

They (nine or ten of them at any given time) live in a vegan, substance-free apartment above what turned out to be an envelope factory with a third floor walk up to the roof.  Graffiti covered the building’s door, the stairs, the hallways.  Inside the apartment, bicycles hung in racks suspended from the ceiling along with beautiful, elaborate, and somewhat disturbing hand-made prints.

As the showtime drew nearer and then passed, the emptied apartment began to fill up.  Six bands got ready to play and one dude began stretching in preparation for the mosh pit.  If you thought punk died out in the mid-nineties, boy were you were wrong.

After the jump: the music rocks, I bump into Nate Dern – Harvard ’07 – of Beauty and the Geek fame, and yeah, shut up, i know my Orientalist theory.

The music was…loud.  I can’t say I’m versed in punk rock criticism.  But from what I do know about music, the musicianship was versatile, the band mates were tight, and the live performance was more than spectacular.  I stayed glued to the wall so that I wouldn’t get my nose broken.  But the guys kicking and punching people front and center seemed to be having a good time as well.

I don’t really do too well with the sight of blood, so I went up on the roof to check out the view of Manhattan.  Suddenly I realized that the boy five feet away from me was the infamous Nate Dern, (Harvard, ’07) of Beauty and the Geek/Star Wars Tribute band fame.  This was the guy who was apparently “too cool for Beauty and the Geek,” now with less hair and less beard.  What a small world.  We had played at the Harvard-Yale Battle of the Bands together at the 2006 tailgate, so we got to talking.  Apparently Beauty and the Geek alumni graduate from Harvard, go to Oxford for their master’s degrees, Teach for America in Brooklyn, and hang out at punk shows.  Who knew?

Even though I was out of my element all night (I’m not punk in any sense of the word- aesthetically or politically) it’s hard to criticize the scene.  There’s definitely a subscribed look and feel to the crowd; but there was very little bombast.  Perhaps my view is orientalist and impartial, but the people I met were more welcoming and genuine to me than the next Ivy League indie hipster waxing poetic about the new music trend of the past five minutes.  There was a pervasive sense that the uniting factor between a lot of these people was the political and ethical community that it fosters.  That, and of course the music.

This will be one the most memorable nights of the summer for me, if only in the sense that I feel like I’ve travelled in a small way.  You should try it if you can – get a little uncomfortable before you go back to your ivy-covered dorms and manicured lawns. …but hey, i don’t want to be getting too personal here.