oiseaux/ciseaux

southtwelfth:

Here’s a photo my friend Andrew took last year, when I was in Louisville. That is me and Nate, standing inside a Buffalo Wild Wings on Bardstown Road.

The Buffalo Wild Wings is located inside the shell of an old theater that once housed the Bardstown Road Youth Community Center, known as the BRYCC House. The BRYCC House was an all-ages venue in which me and Nate and our noisy post-adolescent rock band played about two dozen shows between 2000 and 2002, alongside many other soon-to-be-forgotten noisy post-adolescent rock bands with names like Lowercase O, Ayin, the Blue Goat War, Grand Prix, the Pointy Kitties (the early ’00s were a golden age for bands named for obscure Simpsons references), Monorail (see?) and Totally Ointment. 

The BRYCC House closed sometime in 2004. Maybe earlier. After that, it became a carpet warehouse. Then, it became a Buffalo Wild Wings. 

Nate and I are pictured here gazing wistfully at the shattered remains of our youth. The shattered remains of our youth have been slathered with Spicy Garlic, Asian Zing, Caribbean Jerk, and Mango Habanero-flavored barbecue sauce and served in a fast casual dining atmosphere.

They did have a jukebox, so we thought we ought to punch in a few appropriate numbers as a sad elegy while we creepily hung around and refused to be seated for beers and wings (it was a weekday afternoon and totally empty, so no one on the waitstaff seemed to care). There were no selections on the jukebox by Sleater-Kinney, the Raincoats, Gene Defcon or Richard Hell & the Voidoids, for some reason. So instead we played a few songs from the first Strokes record, which seemed to be the closest in spirit. The interior of the building looked very much the same as it did then, except with flat-screen televisions and neon signs for popular American and Dutch beers on the walls. 

Do Nate and I look out of place? We totally look out of place. 

Oh, youth. I believe it was Glenn Danzig that was once described by Henry Rollins as being “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.” I rarely feel that way myself, but if I ever begin to, I am reminded of the fact that anywhere important to you at the age of 21 will eventually be turned into a Buffalo Wild Wings.