Upper WET Side
You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
2/4: Save the Roller Disco!
February 5, 2012
TRAGEDY returns to Asbury Lanes, as the ONLY metal Bee Gees tribute you’ll need see this weekend puts on their bowling shoes for a bit of Saturday Night Kegler — while lensman Mike McLaughlin is among the vibey visionaries represented in PINK NOISE, the 3rd Anniversary group show opening at Parlor Gallery.
All in all, it wasn’t the best week in which to be PINK.
Between the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s face-reddening “Pink-Gate” PR debacle, and the viral backlash against the infamous McNuggets “Pink Slime” photo, the once-proud color of Barbie and Elvis and Quisp was looking a beat-up and pulpy shade of purple by Friday. Which is why Pink Noise, the official Third Anniversary group show installation at Asbury Park’s pop-art paradise Parlor Gallery, could not have arrived with better timing to pull the PINK back from the BRINK.
A chance to feel “In the Pink” is especially needed here in a week with the news that Asbury Lanes — that Cold War-era tenpins taproom turned kitschy-cool alterna-arts odditorium — had been sold by its longtime owner to local developers Pat Fasano and Vince Gifford. It’s a bit of news that set off brain-alarms in anyone for whom the Lanes has served as everything from Fellini-esque corner bar, to a destination worth crossing several state lines to reach — and, justified or not, it was a potential tragedy that put many of us on a reflexive “Save the Roller Disco” alert straight out of 80s movies like Xanadu and Lunch Wagon.
Of course, the Lanes is no stranger to Tragedy, having hosted this hemisphere’s premier all-metal tribute to the music of the BeeGees many times over the years. Tonight, February 4, the 2012 edition of the continent-crossing metalizers (brothers Barry Glibb, Mo’Royce Peterson, and Robin Gibbens, with little brother Andy Gibbous Waning on bass and family patriarch The Lord Gibbeth, on drums) retakes the center Lanes in a late-skewed setsnack for which your award-winning DJ Jack the Ripper will serve as “amuse bouche.”
Before that, however, the windows of the Cookman Avenue arts bloc’s Parlor Gallery will be steaming up like an electric casserole dish, as First Saturday rages in downtown Asbury and some dozen music-minded artists (including DEVO poindexter Mark Mothersbaugh) team up for a de-waxing blast of Pink Noise.
1/3: Asbury Park, Where Game Shows Live
January 3, 2012 — 1 Comment
Eyes on the prize: Ball-tumbler belle Sarah Potter shows off some of the swingles-scene swag awarded during Sex Toy Bingo, the latest edition of which returns to Asbury Lanes on Thursday, January 5.
We don’t mean to alarm you, but…
Game show hosts! They walk among us.
Not that you’re in any imminent danger of an awkward Dunkin Moment with Wink Martindale — it’s just that after too long ceding the spotlight to other, more “talented” performers or “serious” artists, the aspiring quizmasters/ mistresses of the land are finally finding a forum in which to hone their sweet science of reading from index cards, accepting jellyfish kisses from stay-at-home moms, and pointing at washer/dryer combos.
It’s true that hopeful young actors have always enjoyed access to such ladder-of-success opportunities as community theater, uber-indie film and endless auditions. Musicians can ply their craft in every cafe corner that can accommodate a barstool; poets and proseurs can workshop their wares in a live slam setting, and budding stand-up comics can be every bit as substance abusing and self-loathing as their big-league counterparts at any restaurant lounge or Open Mic that’ll have ‘em.
But game show hosts? It’s not like there was an established circuit of “game bars” to gig around at; no summertime busking for vowels on boardwalks and boulevards; no amateur productions of I’ve Got a Secret or Tic Tac Dough to cut one’s teeth on. Until now, that is — here in Asbury Park (a place, we have it on good authority, Where Music Lives), a small but almost subterraneously thriving scene is beginning to take root and prosper; spearheaded by a surprise weekly hit (Tuesday Night Trivia at the Brickwall Tavern) and a couple of occasionally appearing live attractions at Asbury Lanes. When we found out that one of them was called Sex Toy Bingo, upperWETside decided to investigate.
