At Sultan Room (234 Starr St.), Bushwick’s hottest second-floor rooftop, Death—Tsu Tsu dressed in black with a cow-skull mask—marched out with two masked butoh dancers (Jake W.R. Foster and Alexa Cassill) before blessing headliner Beaven Waller.

Waller’s voice resembles Rowland S. Howard and his band includes Marlow Shields on guitar and keyboard, Chance Williams (of Why Bonnie) on bass and Michael Ferguson on drums (looking like they dragged him out of the ditch nearest to a Madill truck stop). They were jaunty in the way of Dead Man’s Bones: unobtrusive bass and complementary keys, with Waller’s plucked guitarwork recalling flamenco and making me feel like it’s impossible to talk about music, how every discussion ends up drowned in referents.

Ferguson exercised restraint as Waller evoked the voices of American fossils: James Dean, road trips and love affairs, actual dive bars and the fantasy that conventionally handsome frontmen would again be possible. It was the sort of twee that’s possible in a society that’s sometimes evolved beyond irony.

Through the music, the butoh clowns danced out romance’s successes and failures. They lit candles surrounding a mini-column on which the clowns’ masks nested in a bowl. They broke the plane of the stage. The act was not just raised inches above the rest of us. It was squirming on the ground, at the crowd’s feet, proving that live music in a public gathering is theater, that everything is some kind of ritual.

For a brief moment of chaos—Ferguson unleashing, Marlow Shields’ Mellotron imitating a vaudeville fiddle, a trumpeter (Maximilian Gordon) appearing from the crowd—it was the world I was promised: guys in vests danced to noise with clowns and beautiful women. I felt the allure of a moment that could absorb me, so I told a man named Joey that Louis Farrakhan was right to think Yakub made white people in a cave; that we are homunculi made of wheat chaff, broken shirt buttons, and strips of donkey hide, all of it capable of affected mechanics, but not real joy. Anything to avoid suspending pretension.

To have not said anything would’ve been an admission of joy, however brief: that this was what it was, what it is and always ever will be—a life full of people trying—and that the unnamed openers were the same, no matter how I paid mind to them. 

And it ended quietly, in an understated closer that evoked John Martyn, Michael Ferguson’s drumming far in the background. I’ve known Michael for 12 years, had borrowed nights on each other’s couches, and I was sure that he wasn’t born with that mallard tattooed on his neck. Beaven, I hadn’t seen in a decade, since college. I’ve been around just enough to throw around long numbers like those with regard to the people I’ve known.

I’d even once been in a band with Michael. We called it Real Quick and it lasted about that long too. We briefly shared in working toward something with friends like Devin Smith, still in St. Louis, even if it never made it out of a basement.

In another city, where I had met Beaven and Michael, I chased that and found nothing before coming here to pretend I had no hope for culture in mind though I yearn for it daily, for the electric and alive that makes me forget my cheap, never-ending critique and briefly enjoy myself. The hill I hate dying on, a milk carton kid. Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary reminds me too much of the world I yearned for as a teenager when I saw now-historical hipsters in line outside the Masquerade for Danny Brown. 

I wound up here, the 13th kidney stuffed into a body that had no need for me, and I’m still around looking for that lost child. Bushwick used to be a declined urban core where people found a way to make families. What dominates now is an infrastructure of distraction. I’m 31 and it doesn’t sit right with me to have a lease here. Too much, too quickly, not enough, too late. This is no longer the place to think of growing old. 

At the end of the show, I recognized someone from college talking to other people I knew from college, and was able to place their name only after they left. Their hair was so much shorter now. Here we were, strangers again, living in a time where it made chic sense to wear huge denim shorts with cowboy boots. When had the years gone?

P.S. I counted one videographer and three camera operators (myself included; if I could without breaking it, I would’ve turned the camera in on itself). Everything captured in a lens, our mode of life less notable by the day. The crowd didn’t even flinch when I flashed them. Everything, made into an event (record our effort, don’t watch us rotting!).

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Photos by Aaron Tomey.