By Charlie Moorin

I think we can all agree that JP is a sweet place to be: the people, sick the people with mustaches, nurse the pond, prostate the dogs, the young mothers and fathers walking with their children and dogs on a sunny Sunday, the quiet, San-Franciscan streets with houses painted all sorts of cute colors, the tiny front yard gardens of said houses, Deep Thoughts, the 39 bus, the orange line, the bikes, the Behan (a true drinking hole!), the “cultural diversity”, the culturally diverse restaurants- I’m looking at you, Ethiopian joint, Cuban deli, fancy Scottish restaurant with late night burgers- the Red Sun printing press (for Social Justice!), the waffle specials for brunch at Centre Street Café, the impossibly obscure craft beer selection at Streetcar, the escalating price of real estate near the main drag, the $30 price tag on dishes at Ten Tables and VeeVee and Tres Gatos, the questionable practices of a certain charter school built to save the cities immigrants from a life of poverty and utter despair, the… wait, what the fuck is this? A music review? What school is this guy talking about? But my brother and his wife live in this great building on Green Street, its super modern and cute and I love them so much because they are so great and cute and nice and their first kid is due in a few months and I love their little corgi, Samantha, and the other night we- me, my brother, his fiancé, my friend Ben from college, my parents- went for drinks and tapas and vinyl at Tres Gatos and we all got pleasantly buzzed on mildly expensive red wine and shared a bunch of really tasty small plates and talked about how inspiringly beautiful Jamaica Plain is in comparison to the depressing and tragic socio-economic realities of the “globalized” world- JP being a perfect example of this anxiety over class disparity- and how we- everyone at the table, except for my friend Ben, who’s parents are first generation Korean Americans and had busted their balls to send Ben to a top rate liberal arts school, happily, nonetheless tragically, giving him the chance, right now, for true bourgeoisie success at the expense of so many of the world’s citizens… well, so… I guess you can include Ben in the we- were all benefactors of this systemic imbalance of power, as we were, indeed, sitting at that very restaurant, Tres Gatos, in Jamaica Plain, enjoying expensive food and drink and laughing and relishing in ourselves but knowing that it’s all so impossibly difficult to try and do and be good and pure in a world layered and layered and layered and layered and layered…

And so I decided that JP just won’t do, because of three cats and other shit, and that there must be somewhere else for me to take my parents money, some place far hipper than this formerly hip place. And then I read the tour announcement for Alex Bleeker and the Freaks, and wouldn’t you know it, they were playing in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Shit, hitting Providence for a show is hip in itself, but to drive five minutes from Brown and go to the who-knows-how-hip pseudo city of Pawtucket! I mean, come on people! Surely, this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

So me and two friends drove to Pawtucket: we yelped and found a 4 star Irish pub with great reviews, omg, I bet it’s hipper than the Behan! But alas, it had a fold out craft brew list like the one they have at Sunset, and we got burgers and (famous!) wings, and the waitress looked at us with disdain- like, fuck these rich Brown kids- and she suggested a new red IPA they had just got in and my friend and I argued over who was going to order the saison on the list and I finally said screw it, I’ll get the red IPA, and it all felt very fun and great because it was this random little pub in the middle of the emptiness that is Pawtucket- especially on a Wednesday night at 9- and we gulped down the last of our drinks and Google mapped the venue, called Machines with Magnets, and we were super confused as we drove past what Google told us was the address, until we spotted a faint purple light coming from the back of this complex of abandoned industrial space, and we figured, hey, that must be it, especially because there was a guy standing outside smoking a cigarette; so we walked over to the light and sure enough the guy told us we were in the right place and we walked down the stairs and at the bottom there was this guy with a bass guitar around his neck and he asked us- paying or playing?- and we paid him $8 each and walked into this tiny bar space giggling to ourselves about how funny it was that the guy had a guitar around his neck and asked us if we were playing, and, for that matter, how funny the venue was itself, because there was no stage, just equipment set up next to the bar, and a few IKEA looking wood panels and furniture against the wall to sit and view the “stage”, and there was a room behind the bar with the lights on and people, we assumed the musicians, playing ping pong and drinking miller light bottles and we were obviously not cool enough to be in there, let alone play a game of ping pong, and it turned out that this room was the art gallery, because actually Machines with Magnets is an art space/recording studio/bar/venue owned by this guy with a lot of friends in the music/art industry who found this space and pulled the trigger because it was cheep, and at one point this dude in a deep white v-neck and a red suit came in with a white spray painted bike fork and rim and the girl he was with had a stand and they came in and put the fork into the stand so there was just this random ass bike wheel standing straight up in front of us and we thought, is this some kind of pop-art or wtf, until the guy took his jacket off and hung it on the rim, but he soon put the jacket back on so we still had no idea what they had brought it for; then, we realized that, actually, the doors were at 9, and the first act wasn’t going on until 10, and, as it turned out, the first band played for an hour, and so did the second band, so that Alex Bleeker and the Freaks didn’t go on until just after midnight, and, since it was Wednesday and at least two of us had work in the morning, we decided it best to listen to the first two songs- both of which ended up being from the Freaks newest album, How Far Away (Woodsist), not, as we had hoped, from their first self titled release- so we left at 12:30 thinking: ok, that was bizarre, and we didn’t even get to hear Bleeker and his friends play “Spring Jam” but I guess that’s okay because clearly spring is never going to come, but summer will just suddenly appear and it will be deadly hot, and surely this is a sign that the world is ending faster than we thought or like to think.

Right, and so Alex Bleeker and the Freaks played at the Middlesex Lounge two nights ago, its in Central Square, but I drank too much the night before, so I had zero enthusiasm for life the next day- the day of the show- and didn’t end up going.