In case you were still scratching your head after all the ridiculously obvious hints we dropped, or you didn’t notice when Brooklyn Vegan itself let the cat out of the bag, Real Estate was the not-secret-headliner at the SXSW pump-up party Micro-Pixel-Rites hosted at the PIXELHORSE HQ in Bushwick last Saturday night. (Come on guys, the Facebook invite said “featuring members of Ducktails, Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, and Predator Vision”).
Visitation Rites, Microphone Memory Emotion, and PIXELHORSE are TERRIBLY sorry for the all the cigarette butts, PBR cans, and falafel balls that were left behind in the stairwell of said loft building, but also TERRIBLY touched to have hosted some of New Jersey’s finest in a context they have all but outgrown. After watching them become an international success story, I got to see these vocational boys-next door in exactly the way they should be seen: at a house party, surrounded by friends and ear-to-ear grins on all sides, watching Seinfeld Season 3 on the overhead projector, and hearing the cops roll up just in time for the closing chord.
The result was so much fun that most of us can barely remember it, but also a little bit bittersweet — just like Real Estate’s music, I think. One of my fellow organizers likened Martin Courtney’s songs to “a bunch of balloons that you try to wrangle under your coat but that just keep floating away, ’cause you can never really own the air inside them anyway.” Personally, all three of the interrelated pop bands that performed that night — Real Estate, Family Portrait, and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks — tend to fill me with that soft sinking feeling you get when you wake up after a really lovely dream and realize that none of it ever happened. I guess that is kind of how I felt when I woke up the next morning, but at least Rhiannon Marino left these photographs behind to prove that this time, I was wrong:
REAL ESTATE
FAMILY PORTRAIT ALEX BLEEKER AND THE FREAKS Additional coverage on P-Fork, New York Magazine, and Brooklyn Vegan, including another batch of beautiful party pics by Erez Avissar. Tags: Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, Ducktails, Family Portrait, Micro-Pixel-Rites, Microphone Memory Emotion, PIXELWHORSE, Predator Vision, Real Estate, Visitation Rites
Pretty miffed I missed this, but looks like a resounding success.
I didn’t notice until just now that you quoted me in this post. My little fake Cat Stevens lyric. How sweet.