Concert Review: The Gotham 4 at Club Midway, NYC 7/31/07

You have to wonder why these guys do it. Is it the money? They brought a good crowd, but let’s face it, if everybody in the band got to bring home fifty bucks apiece they would have been lucky.

Is it the fame? Hardly. Everybody in this loud, nebulously 90s, two-guitar unit has been around the block a few times, and as we all know, you don’t get signed to a record label these days unless your parents arrange for it, or you’re college-age and cute. These guys’ frontman was once in a band with one of the Psychedelic Furs that came thisclose to getting signed; the bass player is a ubiquitous type who had the good sense to catch on with a couple of other acts (Randi Russo and Erica Smith, to be specific) who seem to be right on the verge. Otherwise, the Gotham 4 are barely distinguishable from the literally hundreds of acts playing this town in any given week.

Maybe it’s that they’re clearly having fun, at least that’s how it seemed tonight. Their lead singer/lead guitarist has become something of a belter lately, and it served him well, giving the songs a welcome edge. The bass player was bobbing and weaving around a corner of the stage in Spinal Tap mode, the rhythm player delivering a steady blast of chordal fury, the drummer having fun throwing in some neat rolls and fills to keep everyone on their toes. And the audience loved it. They opened with a brief number that pretty much encapsulates what they do, totally early 90s anthemic Britrock with more than a nod and a wink to Led Zeppelin, especially where the solos are concerned. But they’re far more melodic than, say, the Verve or Ride or early Radiohead, more like Oasis without all the stolen Beatles licks.

The high point of the night was a long, flamenco-colored number called 3001, building from a White Rabbit-style, staccato verse to an explosive chorus, to a long solo where the lead player got to stretch out while the bass player did his best John Paul Jones imitation. Later songs gave off echoes of U2, the Furs (big surprise), the Who circa Who’s Next and (sorry, guys) Oasis in their prime. Their lone cover was an attempt to rock out the Stones country classic Dead Flowers. One can only wonder how many other unsung bands tonight gave it their all and received as warm a response from such an unlikely large, enthusiastic crowd.

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9/11 and Its Aftermath Through Uncommonly Perceptive Eyes

What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change, by Jocelyn Lieu

Nation Books, $13.95, trade paper, ISBN-13 978-1-56858-346-4

Lieu, author of the short story collection Potential Weapons, kept a journal from September 11, 2002 through the following July 3. Based on that journal, this book chronicles the events of those fateful months through the eyes of an ordinary New York City resident (in her case, a New School professor and mother of a toddler living on East Seventh Street in the Village). Lieu has taken what seems to have begun as a purely personal attempt to make sense of what was happening, and turned it into first-class, first-person history. She could have written a polemic, and this can certainly be taken as one, but her genius in crafting this was to keep her anger (and her eventual wrath) close in check, to let the story speak for itself. Lieu writes in a tersely crystalline, imagistic style, as befits a fiction author. If only this were fiction.

With an eerily calm, matter-of-fact delivery, Lieu begins with the all-too-familiar images: the acrid smoke blowing uptown, the desperate posters put up by family members searching for loved ones, the city Balkanized with police barricades, its residents terrorized. These were wartime conditions: Lieu’s church ran out of food for the homeless, her neighborhood pizza place ran out of everything except onions and since it was a hot week, she and her neighbors had to sweat it out, as putting on the air conditioning might well have proven lethal. Lieu reminds us how just about everyone here knew someone who knew someone who died in the towers, and how utterly ridiculous it became to try to escape the order of the day by concentrating on one’s mundane, workaday activities.

But she really hits her stride in the weeks and months afterward. Friends, relatives and colleagues voice their rage against the invasion of Afghanistan, the authorities’ contemptuous disregard for the rights of antiwar activists and the lack of a coherent investigation into the demolition of the twin towers, while Lieu focuses on her teaching and her family. Her precocious infant daughter Gracie does double duty as Greek chorus and to keep her mother rooted in the immediate, present reality; her husband Chuck Wachtel (author of the novel Joe the Engineer) makes the occasional appearance as a taciturnly reliable bullshit detector. Daily dramas – a suicide, a family illness and a crime (Lieu’s purse was stolen but recovered from an inept, most likely mentally ill thief) – play out against a backdrop of disbelief and post-traumatic stress disorder. Armed with a new sense of priorities, Lieu doesn’t let the theft phase her: on the contrary, she takes pity on the culprit, knowing that he will probably be locked up for a long time.

Lieu’s only humorous indulgence is to mete out silly pseudonyms (Breyten, Dublin et al.) on the BoBo parents and children on the Tompkins Square Park playground where she takes Gracie. And she only editorializes when the Bush regime’s incessant fearmongering, running orange and red and yellow alerts up and down the flagpole, becomes completely intolerable. By then, she and her family have already bought the requisite duct tape and masks. And then it’s over. Overwhelmed, stupefied and disheartened, Lieu stopped writing. The police state had perhaps inadvertently done its work, putting an end to the most understatedly revealing of the many good post-9/11 New York City narratives. The Plague Year had Daniel Defoe; the Holocaust had Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. New Yorkers should be grateful to have Jocelyn Lieu. One of the essential historical works of our time, What Isn’t There should be required reading for all college students.

Sadly, interested readers searching for this title in stores need to look very closely. Even if the book’s displayed face-out, only the subtitle is visible from a distance against its white cover: marketability has taken a back seat here to some art director’s idea of negative space.