March 31, 2007

I am not in this picture. I also didn't take this picture. A photographer named Yosra shot this at the Living Room for the first live review I did for New York Cool. I disliked that site pretty much the entire time I wrote for it. The format was weird and antiquated, the editor was kind of clueless and re-keyed everything I submitted (which occasionally introduced typos), and the name was silly. My writing was pretty rough, though, so it was probably a good fit, and I was able to use the name to get onto several press lists.

In addition to being my first New York show review in the city, this was also my first time at the Living Room. I wasn't terribly nervous because this sort of stuff had been my bread and butter when I wrote for the paper at Ohio State, but I still remember feeling (or maybe imagining) this air of cool all around me. I was a writer in the Lower East Side of New York City. I felt an excitement that I tried valiantly to tamp down on, because excitement isn't cool, and because (I thought) reviewers shouldn't be impressed by things like history, and background.

The show was good, and my review was adequate, I suppose. It contains some flowery habits that I haven't been able to shake to this day, along with some turns of phrase that I still overuse.

The singer, Gretchen Witt, I actually knew beforehand. She was my downstairs neighbor, living in an apartment that had been reportedly occupied years earlier by Norah Jones. When Gretchen moved out she was eventually replaced by a studio guitarist whose claim to fame was that he'd played on a couple of Cake albums. I guess it was just a musical space.

As detached as I'd tried to look then, and as little as I liked that site, I remember being excited in my tiny, formerly-Norah-Jones-adjacent apartment when I saw that it was live. Sure I hadn't gotten paid for it, but it felt like... something. A step? A beginning? There were a lot of shows after this. And booking managers and press badges and VIP areas. Never any money, but certainly my fair share of free tickets and free CDs, and occasionally some free drinks. Not to mention oh so much pretending that what I was doing wasn't completely, totally, unbelievably cool.