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. Read the rest of this entry »