You walk into Brooklyn Bowl and the size of this place will just fuck your head.  It’s one of the biggest things I’ve seen in Brooklyn.  You enter and there’s a gigantic wall of knock-down carnival punks.  Past the punks wall are about twenty bowling lanes on the right and a gigantic stage on the left.  This gigantic Alexander poster is about twenty feet long and keeps watch over the area in front of the bathrooms.

I’d heard almost nothing about Brooklyn Bowl and thought it was a skate place or that shitty, shitty bowling alley on North 14th street with the lumpy lanes and overpriced bowling.  There are seriously no real fucking bowling alleys in New York City. There’s Bowlmor where you wait forever and pay too much, Chelsea Piers where you just pay too much but they still had arcade games last time I went and that shitshow on North 14th where it’s crowded and the lanes suck and it’s expensive.

The only affordable bowling alley I’ve been to is the one nestled in the greasy/grimy confines of the Port Authority and I’m not going to put my fingers into their balls.  The name of this place Leisure Time.  Vidiot and I went there one time to play a boxing video game where you put your hands into heavy gloves attached to huge cables and there was some guy passed out in front of it. I guess the game beat him. We came back later and some guys were injecting stuff into him.  I asked the guy working at the front desk about it and he said something like , “There are EMT workers here?”  The bar inside the bowling den of evil was called “Splitzzz.” I always figured that it had those extra Z’s because people like to come there to pass out.  I didn’t get a chance to sample Brooklyn Bowl’s bowling but it looked pretty decent.

I bought this hand drawn Total Slacker shirt. The text on the back reads,”Who’s that creep with the bowl cut?” Hand drawn for five bucks. CDs were two. I can’t believe they raised their prices. Used to be that their shirts and CDs were a dollar. They got swelled heads when they got big.

I liked seeing this shirt.  It looks good in real life.  There were some folks in costume and cute girls but I was kinda blown away by the gigantic space we were in to focus too much on any one thing.

Total Slacker were on first. That guy in the Crass shirt is Adly, their number one fan. He sings along and gets really into every song.  He is a good guy and has young sweetness.

The guitarist is Tucker and the bassist is his girlfriend Emily.  They were featured on Hipster Wife Hunting which then got mentioned on Street Carnage. They are super sweethearts. The drummer is Ross.

Total Slacker shows start quiet and slow and they end loud and frantic.  I’m really happy with this photo.

Total Slacker did their first public performance of Hangin’ Tough, originally by New Kids On The Block.  You can download it from a lot of music blogs right now.  They really get into those “whoa-ohhhh-oohhh-ohhh-ohhhs.”

Then Tucker threw his guitar into the crowd and let it stay there for a while.  People eventually started slapping on it and later he came back down to join them.

This was a pretty slammin’ showcase of talent and exuberance.

Then there was a battle between a gorilla and a Godzilla and everybody started watching that instead.

Around this time my date disappeared and did a bunch of drugs.  Some corny cabaret shit started up which didn’t really fit with the fairly unshctickyness of the bands playing.  They seemed like they should be at a Murder City Devils show or something. So I went and found my date.

While I was talking to someone she came up on me and tried to push me down a really big staircase which then escalated into me slapping her so hard that she went hurtling backwards. Onve we were done fighting we had a heart-to-heart that seemed to be going pretty well until she threw her glass against the wal. They exploded and she disappeared into the ladies room to do a whole lotta drugs.  I spent he rest of the show fearing for her safety, my safety and repercussions from all the bad stuff she was probably going to do.

Tucker from Total Slacker invited me backstage which was pretty boss.  The guys who were acting as Jay Reatard’s band were now backing up Nathan in Wavves.  We hung out in the backstage area until Wavves started and we went back to see that the giant building was full of people.  I texted my crazed date but she didn’t respond.  I figured that there were a few possible things going on… First, that she was passed out face down in the ice somewhere. Second was that she was doing all of her coke in the bathroom and getting even more crazed and unpredictable. I envisioned this second scene being a little like when the Shredder transformed into the Super Shredder in TMNT II after drinking a whole canister of mutagen ooze. Tucker commented that we should start a mosh since no one was moving and we did our best to make that happen.

This pretty little Asian babe told me she was visiting from Tokyo and told me she knew me from “Mishka Media.”  I told her Arigato and Ohio Gozimas.

SoCo was sponsoring the whole thing.

At one point I saw an ID and some cards on the ground so I picked them up and while I was trying to figure out whose they were some guy pulled them out of my hands and gave them to this girl.  I figured he knew her and ignored his rudeness but after the song finished he pointed at me and said “This guy tried to steal them!”  So I got into a little argument with the guy, what a douche. The crowd was big but mostly just the kind of folks who stand and stare at shows.

Wavves were good.  There isn’t as much of a theatrical element to their show as there is to Total Slackers’s but the music is rad.  It’s weird seeing such a gigantic stage with just three people and seeing them stand so far apart from one another.  There were some other bands who played between Total Slacker and Wavves but I was dealing with girl and angry douche problems while they were on.

The pit was small but fierce.  I was too busy worrying about what had happened to the crazed female I’d shown up with.

The girl’s I get with are usually either really crazy or really boring or way out of my league (and I don’t get with those ones for too long because they find someone taller, cooler and more moneyed then me). I found my gal pal later and she was doing drugs out in the open like a scary idiot who is about to get in a lot of trouble.

These two lame skanks got up on stage and were dancing until security ushered them off. It happened again with a different girl a little while later. It really was a House of Blues kind of environment except that the bands were actually good.

After the show I got invited to fun stuff but instead felt obligated to go collect and protect whatever it was that my dated had mutated into.  When I found her, she was a giddy mess. As we were leaving I stopped to talk with the guys who used to be in Jay Reatard’s band about his death while ,y date then wobbled off somewhere. When I found her yet again I shoved her in a cab and propped her up to make sure she got home. The next day she remembered almost none of this.

All in all it was a great night.  Thank you Wavves and Brooklyn Bowl.