kicking it w/ the shins in nyc

Dave, Matt, James, and Marty at MoMA
When you are spending time in a new place, it’s always nice when friends from back home come to visit. That is especially true when those friends are your most famous rock-star friends who are coming to play a show. So it was particularly nice this week when The Shins rolled through New York for a concert and a couple days of media stuff.
It is always fun hanging out with those guys. We’ve all been friends for a long time and have collaborated on a number of projects, and it’s been exciting to watch their steady rise to stardom over the past few years. But it is also a little weird when your friends get famous. You don’t see them as much, and when you hang out with them in party situations you become aware of the social clamoring that is going on around them. You see people desperately trying to make connections and position themselves as close as possible. The post-concert party is certainly one of the more intriguing exhibits of human social behavior and is almost like a game with different levels of play. First is to try to get back stage or to the after party. Then try to get into the same room that everyone is hanging out in. Then try to get a comfortable place to sit or stand and look like you fit in. Then try to get close enough to a band member and try to be introduced or maybe even snap a picture. Then try to start a conversation and make some sort of lasting impression.

The other funny thing about hanging out with your famous friends is that you become the person who has to take the pictures for all the people who want a picture with the band. Random cameras from random people get handed to you with the plea “could you please take a picture of us?” After a couple times of this happening James and I joked that next time I should just run-off with the camera, and then James would say to the fan “we don’t know him, I thought he was with you.” I was also tempted to just zoom in real close on the person who asked to have the picture taken, so that the band would be cropped out, leaving only a tight close-up of the picture requester. But in the end I didn’t really mind taking the pictures, but there is something a tad humiliating about it all.

Dave and Marty consider jumping out and grabbing the helicopter, but then decide against it.
The Shins played Wednesday night at a big out-door venue in Brooklyn called McCarran Pool. Apparently it used to be a pretty fancy place to go swimming back in the 1920s, but then was abandoned and left to rot for the past couple decades. Recently it was cleaned up and is being turned into an amphitheatre. The show was a lot of fun and it was good to hear some of their new songs. The next day we decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art to see the current DADA exhibit which I have to say is really great. I have always had a fondness for the Dadaists, and after seeing this exhibit I think that they just might be the first punks. Beyond their collages and ready-mades and crazy films, they also made zines, did media pranks, and had an underground social network that spanned Europe and America. They formed a real community of artists who were all so disenchanted with society that all they could do was mock and ridicule it.

it was almost heart-breaking to tell Marty he was looking at a blank wall.

Dave points to the mother-land. James is totally tripping out.
After spending the afternoon at MoMA we had to jet off to the Le Tigre clothing store where The Shins were scheduled a free shopping spree. Apparently, one of the perks of becoming a famous musician is that all the hip clothing brands want you to wear their clothes, so they go out of their way to give it to you for free. On the way there were caught in a downpour and got soaking-wet and walked into the store looking like wet mops. Marty convinced the folks at the store that I was a famous filmmaker and that they should give me clothes too, and our dreamy shopping-spree began. I assembled an ensemble that closely matched that of a UPS delivery person, while everyone else tried on out-fit after out-fit and filled several shopping bags. All the employees got a chance to say hi, and the manager, who may or may not have even heard of The Shins, proclaimed his long admiration for the band. Being able to walk off the street and out of a downpour into a clothing store where everything was free seemed like some strange utopia gone all wrong.

James: Is this color right on me?
Marty: Um, yeah, sure dude.

Matt + Jesse go for the team look. Marty + Dave are so happy.
Once we all got decked out in our new, dry clothing, it was then off to a media dinner event. The car service picked us up and delivered us to a fancy Mexican restaurant where journalists from Rolling Stone, Spin, and others were eager to talk to the band and get the inside scoop on the new record. I just hung out in the corner; excited about all the free food and drink I was grubbing while watching James get hounded by writers. Tequila shots started getting passed around and the dinner slowly transformed into a party. I had a nice conversation with a writer from Nylon magazine, and then to my great delight I was actually recognized by an editor from Res magazine who was familiar with my films. Everyone kept talking and hanging out and drinking shots of tequila, and then at one point some mysterious cookies started getting passed around with the warning to only eat one. I took that as a sign to only eat half of one, and sure enough the room started spinning and gravity’s pull became stronger than ever before. Luckily all the journalists seemed as messed up as the rest of us, and what started as a venue for conversation devolved into a stammering dance party. After a few hours we stumbled back to the hotel they were staying at and Dave forced me to listen to some freshly recorded tracks. The first couple songs where absolutely fab, but somewhere between song three and four the images on the i-tunes visualizer became too much for me and I had to say goodbye to the fella’s and make a break back to Brooklyn.
This morning I realized that I must have left all my new Le Tigre gear in the cab, but somehow it seems appropriate. The rock-star for a day magic slippers wore off, and I am now back to plain old Matt. That is probably for the best, however, cause I think I am going to need a couple days to recuperate.

marty, james, dave, and jesse. pre-show 8-23-06
there are more picts here: www.flickr.com/photos/matt_mccormick