EPISODE 940: MASS AT THE MONSTER

Wandering New York the Sunday After

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Yesterday was a quiet Sunday. The weather wasn’t too cold, and yet there was a hush in the air like the city at Christmas.

Since Tuesday I’ve felt like I’m walking around covered in cotton, my senses two or three layers removed from the world. Saturday I spent the day watching a British TV show about a bunch of reject spies who manage to save the day over and over while their largely corrupt bosses try to kill them. Every time I went online I was inundated with political material I just can’t stomach. Is there a Roku for articles?, I wondered.

After sitting for a while Sunday trying to come up with a title for this week’s newsletter—

• Kamala Harris and the Terrible, No Good, Very Bad American Electorate

• Welcome to Our Global Villains Era

• Other Than That, How was Your Week, Mrs. Lincoln?

• The One Where Chandler Admits He Voted For Trump (and It Turns Out They All Did Except Joey, who Accidentally Voted for Kennedy, and Phoebe, Who Only Votes “With Her Mind”)

• So This is What a Brexit Feels Like

—I decided I better get out of the house.

I sat in a coffee shop in the Village for a while, trying to make sense of the words I was supposedly reading. The next table over a bunch of 20somethings spoke at each other so fast it really was less words than music, a truly babbling brook. I can’t help but wonder who they voted for. Everyone I meet, I wonder that. Did you do this to us? Who are you really?

The Zs are obsessed with the upcoming movie version of Wicked. They speak of the cast in first names. Ariana is too perky. Cynthia is too serious. Jonathan is too old. (“He’s giving serious Ben Platt.”) Everyone is too much of something, and eventually they are too much for me and out I go.

There’s a gay bar in the Village called the Monster. It’s been here a long time. The name comes from a sea serpent on the carousel at Coney Island, but I’ve always interpreted it as the gay community taking the judgments of the straight community and embracing them. Where you would have us hide the parts of ourselves that make you uncomfortable, we celebrate them. We proclaim them.

Like many gay bars in New York, the Monster is a piano bar. At the other end of a long, Cheers-like double-sided bar there’s an open space where a pianist plays every night, and people come to sing the songs they love.

On the second Sunday of every month, one of the bartenders, David Coss, leads a jazz quartet from 3pm-5pm (see above). I’d often wanted to go, but never quite made it. But here it was, 3:30pm on this grey and kind of hopeless Sunday, and the bar was just a couple blocks away, so I wandered down.

The bar at the Monster is long enough that you can have a completely different experience at one end than the other. On this Sunday afternoon at the doorway end it’s mostly just people hanging out, looking for love, the usual. But even before I catch the music I see lots of regulars clustered at the other end and sense the buzz in the air. Grabbing a drink I see a friend near the band and take a seat.

Listening to the band work, I’m shocked at how fast the weight of everything else falls away. There’s something about live jazz well performed—even when the subject matter is sad (or you are), the performance somehow draws you up to a better place. It frees you from yourself.

I wonder if part of it might not be the improvisational nature of live jazz; even if you know these songs, you don’t know what this group in this moment is going to do with them. Every moment offers the possibility of a new surprise. The performance ends up encouraging you to be ready for delight. And the world somehow gets bigger.

The other thing is, somehow jazz makes you feel like you’re a part of the experience. Like it couldn’t have happened without us being there, or it would have been different, even though all we’re doing is listening and tapping our feet. I don’t understand it, but somehow it seems like the music happens not just in front of us, but amongst us.

Where I had walked in feeling isolated and probably scared, Coss and his band made me feel a part of something, something expansive and free and full of life. “It’s like we’re at church,” my friend says at one point.

And it’s kind of a joke, but it’s also kind of not.

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I couldn’t find a clip online of the Coss Quartet at Monster. But here’s David singing with the Danny Mixon Quartet some years ago. Thanks to him and his band for a lovely afternoon.

I’ll be back later this week.