January 23, 2012 at 2:53pm
Home
Notes on the ‘Official Girls Afterparty’ I Went to Like a Week and a Half Ago
- I wanted to feel cool about rubbing thrifted cardigans with Best New Music royalty in the basement of a swanky Tribeca hotel, but I got the sense that a gaggle of pre-teen orphans could’ve limped in there if it meant that they, too, could have their wide, trusting eyes opened to the wonders of Stoli vodka. (Stoli was one of the event’s sponsors, although all I learned about Stoli was “it is just as if not more expensive than other vodkas.”) And plus even if I’d been personally invited by Girls’ Christopher Owens to don a belly shirt and partake in his post-afterparty painkiller extravaganza, aren’t I too old to be finding joy in exclusivity? Are we not all just flesh bags of various sizes, dreading our expiration dates and looking to be loved?
- The whole scene reeked of the bar mitzvah circuit (of which I am a seasoned veteran; play “Mambo #5” in my vicinity and watch me lapse into a feral PTSD-fit) except replace the DJ (“Getting the Party STARTED Since 1972!”) with a band Pitchfork recently described as “good fun,” replace the drunk uncle (a podiatrist and part-time member of the temple board of trustees) hitting on your cousin with Neon Indian, and replace the nervous, hormonal adolescents with nervous, hormonal adolescents.
- Odd to think that Girls and Real Estate, both of whom DJed the event, are operating within a spiritual if not sonic tradition whose practitioners, fifteen years ago, wouldn’t only have spurned but would not have even had the chance to turn down an invitation to play what was essentially a makeshift Stoli convention.
- I wanted to approach one of the members of Real Estate, but a) a good half of the people at the party could’ve plausibly been in Real Estate, and how embarrassing would that be, to mistake some graphic designer for Martin Courtney and b) I am not very good at talking to artists I admire, for example check out this exchange between me and Gabriel Byrne in the lobby of a movie theater: “Are you Gabriel Byrne?” “Yes.” “Whoa!” (runs out of movie theater)
- And yet I was not too nervous to approach King Krule, in part because he is seventeen years old, in part because in real life he doesn’t give off the “street urchin wearing nice clothes only because he picked them off the body of the bougie hipster he killed when nothing good was on TV” vibe that turned his “Out Getting Ribs” video into a viral hit. “Do you know what I was doing when I was seventeen,” I asked him. “No,” he replied, reasonably. “Getting high in basements, mostly,” I said. “What do you think I’m doing?” he said. We then discussed his music career as an elaborate excuse to get high in basements all over the world, and the marketing potential for a book called “King Krule’s Guide to Getting High in Basements,” which we agreed should be two heavily footnoted pages. I then suggested he beat the shit out of someone at the party, for the publicity, and we amiably parted ways.
