Weekend before last, caught Los Straightjackets at Southpaw in Brooklyn. I'm going to go out on a limb here and declare the group America's finest lucha mask wearing surf rock combo. If there's a better lucha mask wearing surf rock group out there, I haven't heard them.

    The show was excellent. The masked musicians took the stage with Big Sandy, a charismatic showman who belts out Spanish-language versions of classic rock-pop tunes.

    Perhaps more notably, I got to meet the delightful Unsteady Freddie.

    Robot Al pointed him out to me. "See that guy with the curly mullet," Al said. "That's Unsteady Freddie."
    Unsteady Freddie was standing front and center, right next to the stage. In the break between the opening act and the headliners, he leaned with his back against the stage, holding court to a select group of surf rock fans. He was a little taller than I am, was wearing a green Hawaiian print button up. To be fair, Unsteady Freddie's unique hair style is not really of the mullet family. It is longer in the back than it is in the front, but the almost 'Fro-like curl of his black hair really puts it into a style category entirely its own.
    Unsteady Freddie, Robot Al informed me, is the central figure, the indispensable man, of New York City's energetic, if microscopic, surf rock scene.
    Surf music is a weird sub-genre of rock and roll. It is to rock what epic poems are to literature: a genre that can now only be produced in a sort of self-aware, postmodern way. There are still metal bands, somewhere in America right now there's a hardcore punk band that is thrashing away like it is still 1978, Southern rock has its modern practitioners, and nobody will look askance at a band that wishes to wallow in the worst excesses of prog-rock. But there's something about surf revivalists that suggests an awareness of their own novelty. Perhaps this is why modern surf rockers also seem so heavily into curious gimmicks. Aside from the lucha masks of Los Straitjackets; you've also got the mortuary get-ups of the Ghastly Ones (with their go-go dancing companion, the lovely Necrobella): the "secret identities" of Mexico's Surfucks: and numerous bands that provide their twangy tunes with a schmeer of Space Race Era sci-fi kitsch: including, but not limited to, Laika and the Cosmonauts, Man or Astro-Man?, and Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet.
    Even without the revivalist impulse to variably ironic meta-ness, there's always been something strangely distanced about surf music. Most notably, I guess, in its dubious relationship to the recreation it is named after. Certainly Southern Cali was ground zero for the genre, but two of the genre's most famous groups – the Trashmen and the Astronauts – were from landlocked, Midwestern states. The Honeys (surf's women's auxiliary), though formed in Southern California, got their marching orders from the Brill Building in NYC. The dress rehearsal of the Beatles-led British Invasion featured the Shadows, a Brit surf-esque instrumental act with a thing for imagery from Hollywood Westerns. There were even surf acts from Eastern Bloc nations – like the East German Die Sputniks – that, one assumes, had little opportunity to enjoy surfing, hot rods, or any of the other trappings of the SoCal youth culture so associated with the music.
    Which brings up back to Unsteady Freddie. What makes a denizen of the Lower East Side (he's a fixture at Otto's Shrunken Head, on 14th near the northern boundary of Alphabet City, where he promotes his Surf Shindigs on the first Saturday of every month) become an apostle of this curious rock and roll backwater? Unsteady Freddie maintains something like 8 or 9 Web sites and nearly as many blogs, all spreading the crisp, sharp guitar driven 4/4 gospel of surf music, partaking in a fun in the sun ethos that is about as New York as La Brea tar pits. It is, I feel, a bit quixotic.

    It's hard not to dig on Unsteady Freddie. There's something wonderfully out of place about him – like he's the ambassador of some weird country where everybody is young, they've all got sweet rides, and school is perpetually out for summer break. In this faraway land, this California of the mind, boys have "best girls," people drag race to resolve points of honor, and everybody is absurdly good natured about everything.

Books

    May sent me an invite to be her "friend" on Shelfari. If you haven't seen this (or any of a dozen or so similar sites), it is a social networking site that revolves around a virtual library you construct out of a database of titles you plug in.

    The theory is that people who like the same book needs must have a wealth of common interests and ideas.
    "I see you have read Eliot's Mill on the Floss. I too have read Eliot's Mill on the Floss. Let us be friends for life."
    This is, I think, a false premise. Certainly, I feel the impulse to judge people by their bookshelves. In fact, just about any media collection will do: DVDs, music, stereoscope plates, etc. Still, I do this more out of habit than out of any experience that I've gained useful insights into in owners of said collections.

    What I do find interesting is the member counts that Shelfari tags on each book. More Shelfari members have read Devil in the White City than have read American Psycho, the transgressive adventures of a fictional serial killer apparently pale next to escapades of a real one. By far the most commonly read work is, according to the numbers provided, The Da Vinci Code. It garnered about twice the readership of every Jane Austen title combined. Of the books on my shelf, the runner up to Mr. Brown's tome is Huxley's Brave New World, and that's a distant second: it has about a fifth of the readership of The DC.

    Despite my lack of interest in any of the social functions of Shelfari, I must admit that I'm somewhat curious about those titles where Shelfari lists just two readers: me and one other person. Out of all the cats and kittens on the site, just we two read this book. When I see such titles, I can't help but wonder who they are. Not enough, though, to actually contact anybody.