‘I Am Feeling Very Boat’: Three Bands, One Giant Boat, New York City
This excellent photo of Cole from Model/Actriz upside down was shot by Caroline Safran and was provided to us by Grandstand HQ.
Last Thursday, while waiting to board New York City’s favorite musical seafaring vessel, I flicked a cigarette at a trash can and it hit a pigeon in mid-air.
I felt very bad about this, but took it as a good omen, as the pigeon was unharmed and popped back out to stare me down. Shirt tastefully unbuttoned and camera (which would break almost immediately) in hand, I walked the metal gangway onto what seemed to me from afar like upper decks of a booze cruise obscured in a haze of fruity vape clouds blown from the pursed lips of hundreds of younger, more attractive people from all around New York City, but upon closer inspection, I determined to be the upper decks of a booze cruise obscured in a haze of fruity vape clouds blown from the pursed lips of hundreds of younger, more attractive people from Bushwick, specifically.
This photo of people looking at the sunset from the top deck was also shot by Caroline safran. She’s the best.
Departing from Pier 36 in the Lower East Side, as I stood in line to pay fifteen dollars for a can of Modelo, the vessel pulled away from land and embarked down the East River, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and spent most of its time hovering around the Statue of Liberty while three of New York’s best bands - Water From Your Eyes, Kassie Krut, and Model/Actriz - played powerful sets to an absolutely packed room below deck.
In retrospect, an incredible date idea and an uncomfortable thing to attend alone, but a fun prospect altogether, as I, too, fell victim to the curiosity sparked by the vagueness of what was referred to over and over again as simply, The Boat Show.
The mood was energetic, confusing, and anxious. There was a palpable delight at the sheer strangeness of the occasion - an anticipation for simply anything to happen, and most importantly, for it to happen here. What were we all here to see? What were we all engaging in? In a word: music. In another word: boat.
I will admit that I was too preoccupied with sucking down half a pack of cigarettes like a socially anxious vacuum cleaner (again, it was an uncomfortable thing to attend alone) and watching the sun go down over the river that was somehow and most assuredly thicker than water is supposed to be (in addition to my honest to God inability to locate where the live room was) to catch more than the very end of Kassie Krut’s set, but they put them out over the speakers and I can say that while we haven’t featured them in MC before, we surely will soon.
These photos of Water From Your Eyes were indeed shot by Caroline Safran. We owe you a beer, caroline.
Rachel from WFYE found me on the middle deck looking out at Fidi with some disdain and kept me company for a while, which was simultaneously a relief and a new exhilaration to be anxious about. I find that my conversations with Rachel are usually if not always of very high quality, in that we both skip the bullshit phases of social interaction where we talk about essentially nothing in favor of getting into the meat of however we happen to be feeling in life lately, until they told me that they had to leave to play their set. I followed them downstairs to watch.
The live room was the lowest level of the vessel and arguably the most warm. No air may rotate nor a single window be open. It is stifling and reminded me of that time I took a catering gig on a catamaran in Hawaii and there were these drunk middle aged hula dancers who took to the stage to put on a form of dance routine that was near enough to tourists’ expectations of Native culture for them to recognize it and tell their friends about it upon their return to wherever they were from, but also near enough to actual Hawaiian practices to not be insulting.
There’s something very pure about rooms like this, where the ceiling, the stage, the lights, all low to the ground. It eliminates the hierarchy of artist to crowd to sound guy to girlfriend-of-band-member to janitor to photographer. It is so incredibly unglamorous that it brings everyone together for a common purpose; a common passion. Rooms like this - hot and sweaty and impossibly close - are where memories are made.
Before their set, I asked Rachel how they were feeling about all of this; about carrying on this strange tradition of taking a piece of NYC’s oddest music on a three hour tour and about selling out said tour and about insisting on kitsch and quality at the same time. Rachel said, ‘I’m feeling very boat’. I agree.
I haven’t yet seen Water From Your Eyes play a disappointing set, and I don’t expect that I ever will. Each song, each performer, each embodiment surprises me, and I live for the unexpected. Music shouldn’t be predictable, it should be challenging and engaging and at best, make you go, ‘huh, why is this good? Why is this doing it for me? I don’t understand what is happening but I am glad that it is,’ and WFYE has a knack for all of the above.
What happened between WFYE and Model/Actriz is a bit of an anxious blur. I remember it being very warm and sweating through my favorite shirt. I recall listening to the boat’s engine idling. I recall standing on the upper deck. I took a selfie with the Statue of Liberty. I watched a man vomit into the ocean. I ate an empanada. I moved back down into the live room - the vessel’s dungeon - to get a good spot for the final act of the evening, one of my favorite bands, Model/Actriz.
Standing in the crowd and waiting, spurts of chant rung out from the drunk and fashionable observers. You’ll ask yourself, like I did, ‘what do drunk twenty-somethings chant while impatiently on the high seas?’ You’ll be disappointed to learn that the answer to that question is the simple and efficient, ‘Boat! Boat! Boat! Boat! Boat!’ They are an uncreative bunch.
Guess who shot this photo. It’s Caroline. Also, look at the face that one guy is making. Same, man. Same.
Cole, Model/Actriz’s blessed singer, embracing the theme of the night, sauntered out as a drunken sailor - full costume adorned, wine cork in teeth.
The band began to play and the crowd did, too. There was a maelstrom on the East River as bodies began to swirl and sweat and move into each other and in a room that small, there was nowhere for people to escape. If you were in that room, you were moving or being moved. The cost of seeing Model/Actriz is being in a mosh pit. The crowd may be uncreative, but they make up for it in enthusiasm.
Caroline Safran shot this photo of who we think could very well be our writer upside down, we aren’t sure.
Cole moved about the crowd, stripping off bits of costume at their leisure, pressing forehead to forehead with entranced fans and leaving them on the floor. One crowd surfer kicked my camera out of my hands with her boot, a move that I became unfairly infuriated by until suddenly I was picked up by my legs and hoisted into the air. I turn thirty in mere months and I could feel the cartilage in my decaying body cracking over the crowd of youths, all more than happy to carry me, and I knew that this, here, in the bottom deck of The Boat Show, ‘Mosquito’ blaring into my ears, would be my final and most valuable crowd surf.
I took it in and felt my possessions departing from my pockets, which worried me for a moment, but then, who needs possessions in a moment like that? My phone can be recovered, but the moment can’t, and again, I believe that this is the value of shows like these. It isn’t a show at a club or a theatre. It is sort of shit. It is sort of strange. It is kitsch, and camp, and there is mild discomfort built into the fun. Danger, even.
Bless your heart, Caroline Safran.
Shows like this spark in you an atavistic yet endlessly empathetic way of existing, even if for just those hours; the sort of existence that pushes and shoves and punches and leaps, and throws water over head to cool anonymous dancers, and lifts up those who have fallen under foot, and hoists strangers like me overhead without hesitance - the fun was not only there and available, but inflicted upon me. Shows like these bring out the ugliest faces but the most beautiful moments and the deepest hearts. Strange and uncomfortable and smokey, The Boat Show made me feel fourteen and sixteen and twenty and twenty two again.
Model/Actriz finished their set as the vessel’s lines became cinched and I found myself back on land, sweatier but happier, and excited for next year. Good show.