You Are Viewing As I Am Now

So everyone’s favorite Italian postpunk band Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger! are playing three shows at SXSW, practically as we speak.* Last year, for CMJ, we did a short interview and only now am I getting around to posting it. Because I am the most unreliable person in the world. Please read on! Oh, and also, download Whispers, a song off their new EP, HERE. An also, if you’re at SXSW (aha, no wonder the city’s so empty today), you should really go check them out.

T!S!T!T!: The Official TSTD Interview

Where did you all meet, and how long have you been together?

G: Nicola is my brother. Diego was one of our best friends. We met him in High School. We always had common interests in music but we didn’t start to play seriously together until 2006.

Who/what are your musical influences?
We grew up listening to 90s American indie rock bands, such as Built to Spill, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Pavement and almost all the records we could find from the kill rock stars catalog, and Nicola and I also listened tons of british pop music and obscure post punk bands.

Do you guys still live in Foligno? What’s the scene like there, and in Italy in general?

We are still living in Foligno, a very small city in the center of Italy, but despite what you might imagine, we are lucky to have one of the best rock clubs in the country. Over the years we’ve seen bands from all over the world and this certainly added to our musical growth. Unfortunately, haven’t had the same experience with Italian music in general. Here there’s a long cultural tradition of classic and melodic pop music, that is so far from our personal background! Hick!

In your experience, how do Italian audiences differ from NYC audiences?

It’s totally the opposite. Maybe you have a different way to approach to live music in U.S. Here in Italy the mainstream bands have a great audience, of course, but it’s not the same for underground bands. In NY people listened to our music in a very interested way, even if we were totally unknown. Here in Italy people don’t care about your gigs–they’re only waiting for the show to end to dance to electro music.

Of all your shows, which one has been your favorite so far?
For sure our first show in Milan. It was a messy and weird show, because we were totally out of minds because we were so excited to perform. Also, our last gig in Brooklyn at Tandem Bar, during the CMJ 09.

How often do you guys get to tour outside of Italy? Do you have any plans for an American tour?

Our first trip outside Italy was the U.S. It was totally exciting for us. We played twice in NYC, both times at CMJ–in 2008 and 2009. Austin is our third time in the U.S. and we love it! We haven’t yet planned an American tour but we hope that it could be possible very soon. At the moment we have some projects for a European mini tours (Germany, France, U.K) during springtime.

I’m thrilled that you guys came back to play CMJ this past fall. Aside from your own shows, which shows/bands were you guys most excited to see?

Pissed Jeans! They totally blew our minds.

Are you working on a new album currently?
Yes, we just finished to record our new EP, which we’ll present for the first time during SXSW. We’re very proud of it.

*Slight exaggeration. So tired today.

A lot has happened since the last time I reported on our domestic situation. First off, we lobbied our landlord to fix the shower–and he finally did, after 6 years! He did, because I told him N had scalded himself. “Scalding” is a magical word in NYC housing law. I was pretty impressed with my savvy.

So he sent someone to fix it, and they did, with mixed results.

On the plus side, we got new, non-leaking fixtures that actually allowed us to control the temperature of the water.

On the negative side, it took two weeks of us showering in a tub sealed off with contractor garbage bags and gaffer’s tape before they sent anyone to put tile over the gaping hole the plumber had created.

On the plus side, we met the super from the building next door*, a gracious former death metal drummer. (I don’t know what it’s like to go from touring Europe and getting blowjobs every night to living in a basement with your mother, in Queens. I imagine it’s not much fun.) We told him how much we hated hated HATED our neighbors and our apartment and the building, and he told us that if anything opened up in his building, he’d let us know. Because we are nice people.

Flash forward a few weeks and N & I had begun perusing Craigslist apartment ads daily in order to temper the escalating bloodlust we felt toward our neighbors. I was literally hitting Apple+R every 15 minutes.

An apartment from the building next door appeared in the list. A 2BR in one of the two most coveted lines in the building (this building is identical to ours, and is a prewar job, so each apartment line is–for some bizarre reason–a different shape. There are two lines with absolutely enormous living rooms, and this place was in one of them) and it was available for March 1. We went over to see it that night. We overlooked the quirks–the cabinet- and drawer-less kitchen painted bright green, the decrepit bathroom (I know, I know…)–because all we could think of was HOW BIG THIS PLACE WAS and how we could fit ALL OF OUR SHIT and THEN SOME. We grilled them: Are the neighbors noisy? Does anyone downstairs smoke? How is the water pressure? They claimed everyone was really quiet and kept to themselves.

So we decamped our 1BR with the awesome view of the city and not a single good quality beyond that, found someone to take over our lease**, and moved in last weekend.

It’s the biggest place I’ve ever lived in NYC. You could fit most studio apartments inside our living room. So that’s cool. The wood floors are nice and level. The bedrooms get good light. And they were right–the neighbors are pretty quiet.

So our first night, we got into bed, all proud of ourselves that we’d finally escaped all the screaming, banging, slamming, hammering, drilling, sawing, and smoking. It was so very quiet.

At first.

At 1 am, a startlingly loud whirring noise woke us up. I lived next to a long-haul trucker growing up. Sometimes in the winter he’d leave his truck running all night (or else it wouldn’t start). It sounded like that. We wandered around the apartment trying to figure out its origin–the floors were actually vibrating.

And then it clicked off. And 45 minutes later, it clicked back on. And then off. And then on. And then off.

It turns out that we live above the building’s boiler.

Which means that everyone whose name I cursed for the past 6 years has had the last fucking laugh. Oh, but let’s just see who’s first up against the wall when the revolution happens. At least our living room’s bigger now.

Lullaby for the Strange, by Gabriel Hart. [Via A Little Necrophilia.]

*Who, unlike the super from our building–the Serbian war criminal who once told me, when he was hooking up my gas stove in a rather cavalier way, “In my country, is man talk and woman listen, you know?” –actually does work.

**More on that later.

LC invited me to a reading at Bluestockings on Friday night, which was awesome and not just because I got a last-minute reprieve from working the Winter Antiques Show, longing for the release of a bloodbath or at least for the redistribution of wealth with an auto-da-fe on alternate Thursdays.

I’m glad I went. It was an entertaining reading. A big group of readers, too–several members of the Broad Set Writing Collective, who are very talented and also young. (Fuckers.)

In addition, their professor Mickey Hess, who is totally hilarious and also young(er than I am), read. (Fucker.) He signed a book for me: “Keep on rockin’ it!” Why have I never thought of that inscription?

He read from his book, Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory,* as well as a chapbook called Shittin’ on a Jet:

If you ask me, the greatest hip hop success story has to be that of Brian “Birdman” Williams, founder of Cash Money Records. In his song “Poppin Bottles,” Birdman takes the typical American Dream story to a new level. Generally, American success stories take us from rags to riches or from the poorhouse to the penthouse, but Birdman tells us that he “went from shittin’ in a cell, to shittin’ on a jet.” In that one line, Birdman re-envisions success as going from shitting in one place to shitting in another.

….Then I realized Brian had pictured Birdman squeezing through the aisle, sliding closed the OCCUPIED lever in a cramped Southwest Airlines bathroom, looking at himself in the tiny mirror above the sink and thinking I made it.

Shitting in an airplane bathroom is maybe three steps above shitting in a cell. In between you have gas station, hospital waiting room, and Burger King.

But Birdman doesn’t say airplane. He says jet. Jet implies private jet. I bet Birdman’s is made of diamonds.

And then the evening got better when, rather than going out and spending money we don’t have, LC and I went back to her abode, had pizza** and wine delivered, and looked at old photos. A perfect wintry Friday night.

*I really like Garrett County Press. Many years ago, during the #1HS era, they sent me a copy of Mykel Board’s Even a Daughter Is Better Than Nothing and set me up with an interview.
**The pizza we had delivered was DiGiorno, which makes the whole scenario like a Zen koan: It’s not delivery…it’s DiGiorno…except when it’s delivery.

…Even after (or in spite of, depending) two giant cups of coffee. I’m feeling scattered, because I have lots of stuff to do this week and I [totally and completely lost track of what I was typing just then, because I decided to do three other things simultaneously, all of which are probably half-assed].

As such, this post will have no real narrative arc.

N and I are officially sans automobile. Last week we were trying to get our 20-year-old station wagon inspected before the current inspection expired, but our usual mechanic–who generally holds onto our car for weeks at a time, like it’s car rehab or something, and then returns to us a rejuvenated car with a more clearly defined sense of purpose–couldn’t fit us into his rather busy schedule of holding onto other people’s cars for weeks at a time.

So, our inspection expired and we drove our illegal automobile over the bridge to Greenpoint, where the mechanic wisely looked under the hood before he even began the inspection.

“You need two new struts and this hose needs to be replaced.”

N and I have discussed precisely how much money is too much to throw at a car with a Bluebook value of $50 (and that’s because it has a tape deck). “How much would all that cost?” N asked.

The mechanic motioned the garage owner over.

He started out, “Yeah, you’re looking at probably $90 for each strut, plus $65 labor for each side, plus this hose–well, the hose is like $20–but we have to remove the axle to replace it, and that’s like two hours right there…” at which point I stopped hearing anything except for an old-fashioned cartoon adding machine.

He seemed to think it was a totally reasonable amount of work.

N and I turned to each other. “Maybe we should just put it up on the Free section of Craigslist,” N suggested.

“Yeah, I guess that’s our best bet.”

And it really was a bet, because part of me was hoping that maybe the owner would make a counteroffer of, say, $75 to repair everything. But it was only a really tiny part of me. Paramecium sized.

“Well, hm,” the owner said, lighting up an unfiltered Camel [Aside: They still MAKE those? I can't believe it] and looking like he was trying to convey Deep Thinking in a game of charades. “The mechanic here needs a car.”

The mechanic looked vaguely embarrassed.

“Do you want the car?” We both asked this at the exact same time, our voices probably an octave higher because of our excitement.

The mechanic shrugged. “I could probably do something with it.”

“It’s a great car,” I offered. “Runs really well.” And that wasn’t even a lie! And even if it maybe were a little bit of a lie, the guy’s a fucking mechanic and the car is fucking FREE. Take it take it take it take it take it, I willed him telepathically.

He shrugged again. “Okay.”

I’d like to say that this was an act of altruism and generosity, or, as N’s parents would say, a “blessing.” But really, it was the opposite of selflessness. We dumped that car like it had a curse on it.

Hooray! I took the plates and registration and we marched over the bridge home, feeling a little sad. It felt like the walk of desperation you make when your car breaks down. But in this case, we were abandoning it.

Well, not quite, because the next day I marched back over the bridge to bring him the title and clear out all our cassette tapes. I patted the back hatch in a totally detached way, like I was trying to convey Old Yeller in a game of charades. Goodbye, car!

I wonder if we’ll see him driving around? Or will he opt to dump it in the East River, something we considered more than once?