Project Mayfly

If you've been paying attention at all, you'll know that I spend the better part of my free time hanging around the various music clubs in New York. It's a habit I cultivated in fits and starts when I moved to DC, and became a full-fledged lifestyle after my last relationship ended. Funny enough, when you're with someone for a long time that frowns upon you engaging in certain activities (i.e. dancing, singing, drinking, fraternizing with the opposite sex, fraternizing with the same sex, maintaining good credit, etc), you become a little hell-bent on pursuing just those kind of amusements when you find yourself on your own.

But anyway, after I got whatever acting-out I needed to out of my system, I realized that I had accidentally found myself with a bunch of awesome, talented, lovely new people as friends. Some play music part time, some play for a living, some are photographers, writers, or just hangers-on who like to drink bourbon, dance spastically in the back, spend money and maybe, just maybe, meet boys. Guess where I fit in.

Two of my pals in this crew, the estimable Emily Rawlings and Lara Ewen, had a great idea to take over an antique store in Greenpoint, invite a bunch of people to play music for 20 minutes at a time, and turn it into a one-day only record store selling local music. Because as it turns out, it's damn hard to find anywhere in NYC these days that sells actual CDs at all, local or otherwise. It's probably the biggest difference between NY in 1999 when I last lived here, and NY now. So unless you're a gig rat like I am, local musicians have to hope that you're invested enough to find them online and pay money there.

So all day long, great people played great music and we drank great beer out of great paper bags and ate Pringles and sat on the floor and hung out and had us a time. And they made over $1000 that went straight to the artists who played there. And according to the NYC artist exchange rate, I assure you, this is very good indeed.

The project lives on at http://mayflylives.blogspot.com/ where the extra CDs will be available for purchase. Soon. Soon-ish. We kinda live and die by the -ish around here.

It was a bit of a love-fest, which is not a bad thing at all. Case in point, here's Bryan covering a song by Kelli Rae Powell, who couldn't perform her own stuff because she had an audition. Feel the love, you guys: