Thursday, June 30, 2005
Manes in Flames
Working with heavy metal is hard, dirty, hazardous work but there's a major payoff: you can make pretty much anything, and it will last forever. My buddy Dorth is building a horse. I spent Saturday in a Brooklyn garage helping her cut, grind and weld it's legs.Last summer, Dorth woke from a nightmare relationship with an elephant man (a big guy and kind of a dick-swinger) fixated on horses. So she rented a truck, drove to Home Depot, bought several hundred pounds of re-bar and began building one. She has spent every free hour since bending, grinding and soldering steel - a regimen that's helped to mend her broken heart and given her biceps like ben wa balls. Rising sixteen hands at the withers, Dorth's horse is a grand thing to behold. When it’s complete she’ll set it on fire or plant it in her parent's yard, maybe both. Whatever the case, it will stand as a testament to her strength and vision, and it will stand for a very long time.
Something about horses brings out the best in girls. Freud knew it. Cowboys feared it. The British dressed it up in flash gear. There's a fantastic gang of horsewomen in "Gang Girls 2000," part of a double-feature I went to see this weekend at Le Petit Versailles, a garden gem tucked between two Lower East Side tenements like a drag queen's thing.
Gang Girls gives a pretty good sense of the kind of trouble the Ramones would get into if they were a.) still a living band and b.) hot babes riding around the East Village on Huffies. A relentless montage of chicks at work, play and ultimately war on the beaches of Brooklyn and Long Island, is welded to a blistering NY soundtrack (Lunachicks, Hammerbrain, Motordolly, GSX, Grounded, Johnny Goudie, Texas Terri, Simon & the Bar Sinisters, Rock City Morgue, Bantam, Lady Unluck) in a manner that pumps up an audience like a great rock show.
Gang Girls 2000 and Surf Gang – essentially Gang Girls (Rockaway Ruffnecks vs. The Ungratefuls) chilling in The Hamptons until the heat is off -- are the brainchildren of a horse-loving girl from Wisconsin. When we were both in our last year of high school in New Jersey/first year of college in New York, she made me a mix tape that went like this:
A SIDE
Teen Love – No Trend
Ugly People With Fancy Hairdos (Boat People) – Art (The Only Band In the World)
Pank – The Nina Hagen Band
Good Mornin’ Blues -- Leadbelly
Spin Y’r Partner – Love Tractor
Captain Coconut – Jimi Hendrix
Alan Watts (brief lecture on the zen master)
Dr. Art – Nina Hagen
Antiworld
B SIDE
Lakme – Leo Delibes
Blister In The Sun – Violent Femmes
Add It Up – Violent Femmes
Sweet Sixteen—Iggy Pop
Sharkey’s Night-- Laurie Anderson/William Burroughs
George Bernard Shaw 1937
Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing – Stevie Wonder
We became friends and she ultimately became Katrina del Mar, creator of The Sluts, The Glitter Girls, The Blades and The Ponies, a gang of switchblade-wielding, New York wenches who ride.
Check out Katrina del Mar’s website: http://www.katrinadelmar.com
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