2003-11-25 - 11:09 a.m.

regular readers of my blog will know i've been all sunshine and positivity lately. and why not? but now its time for a little bitching.

i play chess with a small group of like-minded nerds down at the lucky cat cafe every monday. p and i started the williamsburg chess and go club for wayward men and ladies a couple of years ago so we would have a few guaranteed matches not against each other. its something i look forward to every week. i love chess and believe that playing chess makes one a better artist.

we've had several problems of venue with the chess club. our first home, supercore, is a great place but the manager did not appreciate the chess club. he frequently closed the club on mondays without telling me beforehand. finally, he closed supercore for a month to turn it into a wine bar. so we had to move. i'm friendly with the folks who run iona, which is by far the best pub in the 'burg. they invited us to move the chess club over there, and we jumped at the chance. but after a few weeks, one of which involved a world cup soccer match, we realised that chess and sporting events and copious pints of beer were fundamentally incompatible.

in the meantime, though, the lucky cat cafe had opened down grand st. i went there on a tuesday afternoon and spoke to the vegan california girls who run the place. they loved the idea of the chess club and were happy to welcome us. lucky cat is large and comfy and perfect for chess. they even provided us with a few chess sets. we now share a monday night with the folks that show movies in the back room, and even that has proved enjoyable.

so it was with a light heart that i grabbed my tote bag of chess sets and headed down to the lucky cat last night. the usual grizzled crew was already there, anxious to trounce me with queenside openings and double attacks. after setting up boards and ordering a quesadilla, i realised that the regular movie program had been suspended in favor of live music.

i'm in a band myself and love to support live music. but i'm hardly exaggerating when i report that what i heard last night was an all-out assault on everything decent and good. a young man with a guitar began shouting and wailing into the PA with little regard for his audience. to my horror, he repeatedly yelled at the cafe owners to turn up his sound. we could hear underneath his shouting and flailing that he was probably a decent guitar player, but he seemed to be playing deliberately badly. the lyrics of his songs were banal and unfunny. he wailed atonally words like 'fifteen' and 'mosh pit' over and over and over. he was elvis costello without talent, an abrasive frank black with no sense of humor, a fugazi with no licks. i could not concentrate on my chess game, losing in about 35 moves to the guy recovering from brain surgery. i could not have been more relieved when he stopped.

but relief was short-lived, because soon a second act took the stage. two girls set up a casiotone-style keyboard and two mics and proceeded to eviscerate a beatles song. they sang in unison, but neither was on pitch, so they were constantly clashing with one another. compounding the problem was the fact that heavy layers of reverb and delay were applied to their sound. every once in a while, one girl was so far from the tone that they actually achieved harmony, but such happy accidents were unfortunately few. honestly, i've heard more musically satisfying alley cats. i started another chess game and began to make ridiculous mistakes. i lost my queen in an elementary knight fork that i should have seen from miles away. the girls' songs were predictably lame but inoffensive, about giving all to love and waiting forever and rainbows and doves. but my concentration was so shattered that i got up from the table, put on my headphones, and was home by 10:30p

i should note that both musical acts seemed to have actively interested followings, and lucky cat was as full as i've ever seen it on a monday night. the other chess players were kind of bitching about the music but none of them seemed to be as aesthetically offended as i was. what can i say? i'm sensitive.

i was ordering an iced tea at the bar when the first guitar player yelled at the bartender to turn off lauryn hill so he could get his set started. the bartender just shrugged and rolled his eyes.