Yoshi and Nevin arrive together, unnoticed. As the rest of the Bellhouse fraternity gather for Amateur Ping Pong, steadying our nerves with $2 Bud lights, infantile one-upmanship, and delusions of grandeur, Yoshi and Nevin take to the tables with their own balls and paddles, readying themselves with shadow play, carefully sand-bagging their way through the first few rounds.

It used to be that you had to either be Chinese, North Korean or an eighties throwback in matching sweatbands, tight shorts with a strong command of power-ballads to  command any respect from across the net. But times done changed and the Bellhouse has thrown it’s Amateur Ping Pong night open to any rank amateur, any dreamer that has awoke paddle in hand from another all-night training session, any heartbroken would-be-Olympian, any Brooklynite that’s grown weary of Skeeball, Shuffleboard, Barcade or lonely drunken nights with surly bartenders and country music, this means YOU.

Tonight is more about selling beer than discovering future champions, it is at once a clash of metal and pine, of Metallica and pong, it is an all swilling, all twiddling homage to the armchair athlete, a Wiifit gone 3D.

It was so supposed to be so easy. I, the reluctant hero, throw the requisite $5 in the kitty, biding my time in the early rounds, reserving my patented counter-clockwise spin serve for the Semis, my non-chalant smile and easy-going nature hiding the truth of my Machiavellian gambit.

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Royal Jousting, living chess matches, maidens, maypoles…and Pirates? It may read like a cynical Bill and Ted prequel but for sufferers of Peter Pan Syndrome it is the best re-imagining since the Creation Museum.

For those tentative to venture north of 14th Street, 16th century Elizabethan England is unlikely to elicit much excitement, the first two syllables of Re-nai-sance Fair enough to turn eyes to ceiling, heel to road, and friendships to a close.

For others the suggestion of Pirate invasions, chainsaw juggling, tightrope walking, and what NYT referred to as “the next extreme sport” is reason enough to watch this video, pack a lunch, a lancet, and head upstate to heed the bugle’s call.

The Pirate Invasion runs on August 28th and 29th for directions to Tuxedo, New York visit their website here.

Long before you arrive at a Not Blood, Paint show the rumours reach you. They are music, they are spectacle, they are hit ’n run theater, car crash club night, they are a disorientating re-imagining of what four men, five coats of make-up and accomplished musicality can do with a six by ten space.

Once Abe Lincoln showed up to assassinate an impostor Lincoln on stage, there was a duel, it was 1865. At Bizcon 2009, posing as businessmen sprinkling the secret to their success, the band were removed from the stage and cussed-out by an irate venue owner, suspicious that they weren’t really a band.

And it can be confusing, casual observers leave tonight not sure what just happened, some feeling like NBP have been inside their heads moving around the furniture, others wondering aloud: “have I just been punk’d?”

Tonight begins with sacramental wine, occult chanting and a swelling audience. Before long we are guided on laundromat flirtations, pantyhose washing one-liners, we get a how-to on histrionic four-part harmonies, witty interplay and languorous bass-lines and that’s just in “Watch Your Mouth”.

Beyond the immersive physical theater, beyond the site-specific improv and pageantry NBP sound as much post-punk as post-prog, as much pastiche as parody, they are a guided tour through a minefield of ambitious, dynamic melodies and assorted guilty pleasures. Not since the Horrors pillaged krautrock and post-punk has a band’s Vinyl collection been a subject of such insatiable scrutiny.

Tonight there is no need to preface your secret love of King Crimson’s “House of the Crimson King” with qualifiers, tonight you need not defend your “Mr Blue Sky” ringtone to indignant friends, tonight even Toto’s ‘Africa’ is welcome. Tonight is post-irony, let the chips fall where they may.

Following a directive from the band the NBP faithful, the so-called Not Fans, Painters or Paintbuckets, dance their asses off in glam, in glitter, in various metallics, in fur, in jewels, face-paint and masks. Rumor has it that a Bomb Squad producer is here tonight as a precursor to what one can only imagine would be a show-stopping future recording.

Somehow, behind the costuming, the breathtaking four part harmonies, beyond lead vocalists Joe Stratton and George Frye’s assured stage manner, the band manage to share the dynamic time-changes and dueling harmonies of the Dirty Projectors, the spastic inventiveness of neo-prog acts Yeasayer and Of Montreal, and the bombastic histrionics of MUSE or Queen all without falling into knowing clever-clever Pitchfork revisionism.

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When you think of the Flatiron District, its wholesale shopping, its long surpassed skyscrapers still reaching heavenward, rarely would you have had occasion to consider the morality of homosexual dolphins, the predatory instincts of bears, or to ponder the reproductive imperative of ants. But thanks to the Museum of Sex‘s latest exhibit “Sex Life of Animals” you may find yourself doing just that.

It begins innocently enough: slightly flirtatious manner, revealing clothing, subtle innuendo. In 15 minutes though we are in an orgy in Death Valley, fondling naked Realdolls, watching Looners erotically busting balloons, Gainers suggestively eat cake, engrossed in Robot reproduction, we are watching Pam and Tommy do, what we imagine Pam and Tommy do, in just another 5 minutes we are lost, like foreign tourists, asking directions on our own sexual road-map.

Our minds think back to simpler times. I was 16, she was 18, it was a cool summer’s night, we were in love. Flickering candlelight cast long foreboding shadows against the back wall as we undressed. Cruelly, ridiculously, she played Madonna’s greatest hits as we lay together, forever coupling my first time with “Like a Virgin.”

Such innocence has no place here, not the Museum of Sex, not in modern New York, when the Puritans set sail from Plymouth covered head-to-toe in frilly knickers, wide-brimmed hats and God’s honest truth, one imagines that this compendium of kink is exactly what they were fleeing.

Laid out across three floors, the MOS covers everything we wanted to know about sex but never knew to ask, Jungle Quest anyone? Film, photography, art, politics, disease, contraception, it flicks between erotic ‘how-to’s’ to parental ‘don’t-do’s’.

Ever wanted to be wrapped like a thanksgiving Turkey, apple in mouth, legs bound to your body, then stuffed in a mock oven? Maybe Cannibal play is for you. Ever wanted to dress up like a frontier pioneer and ride your mate like a Blackpool pony? Ponyplay, I’m just saying. Ever wanted to dress head-to-toe in latex like a living doll? Ok now that’s just strange. Ever wanted to dress up in leather gimp gear and have mock-doctors inject an obscene, leg-crossing quantity of fluid directly into your scrotum? Medical play is just a google away.

[Some images after the jump are mildly NSFW]

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“Pros’õ-pag-nõsé-â.”

Concentrate. 615,000 words in the Oxford English dictionary and you need only one. A flash from the New York Times photographer captures your confused face as you wrestle with half remembered pneumonic devices. This is serious, the flash intones, as if the paper of record need remind you, Think back to your training. Your palms moisten.  This is your final stand, your one chance, this is your Waterloo, your 8 mile.

From the audience the tension is palpable. Not since Williamsburg dropped it’s ‘H’ has spelling caused such excitement. Spelling’s resurgence is surprising, not least of all stemming from an education system seemingly obsessed with calling reading, writing and arithmetic the three R’s. Even now felled contestants in last night’s Williamsburg Spelling Bee can be heard blaming their iPhone’s auto-correct feature, admonishing themselves for the neglected ‘I before E’ in zwieback (twice baked bread), or finding solace in the one spelling they can be certain of: P-B-R.

Aside from the18 combatants, in Pete’s Candy Store last night it was just as much an occasion for laughter as learning, for polysemous homonyms as good-natured heckling. We cower behind our drunkenness as our learned comrades sally forth. The WSB is coming towards it’s fifth anniversary and she knows no boundaries, no borders contain her, she skips across continents, through history, through time. Before the evening ends we encounter middle Dutch, old Norse, Greek, Latin and Danish; we are introduced to Syssel, a district in Iceland, Akarpos, a greek word for not baring fruit, Borborygmus, the sound gas makes in your bowels, but it is medical terminology that concerns our contestant Wilson now.

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Long before The Suburbs debuted at #1 on both sides of the Atlantic and U2 accusations were bandied about, Canadians the Arcade Fire brought orchestral pop to the masses, unkempt, accessible and lo-fi, finally ridding it of Prog’s pompous, holier-than-thou trappings.

Even still, wind the clock back 2 years and no one is expecting Two Dancers by Wild Beasts. No one is expecting otherworldly evangelical indie to melt the Meatpacking Districts’ growing distrust of high camp. No one’s expecting a countertenor led band from Kendal, England in anything but a Mel Brooks musical, let alone as the latest capitalized Next Big Thing.

This could be a train wreck. The breathtaking castrato falsetto, the disco staccato percussion, high brow lyricism, it is moments from being King Arthur on Ice, but the confidence, the restraint, the alternating push/pull of twin vocalists Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming keep the reigns tight.

Instead of overwrought, aspirational 70 piece orchestras tonight we hear taught, refined, vignettes of a Lake District Springsteen; tales of bored skinheads starting fights for fun (“Hooting and Howling”), manic oompah lumpa vocals (“All the King’s Men”), we are left with tales of moonshine, sex and sadness, of Hounslow girls, of self-serving male Lothario’s bent on seduction, violence and cheap theatrics.

You could be forgiven for paying scant regard to the Wild Beasts first album Limbo, Panto anywhere but here. Along with new single “We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues”, it is two tracks from their previous LP that garner strongest responses. Tom’s convulsive mic presence is matched by the epileptic lighting and spirited dancing of fans. By the time the Kendal choirboys return triumphantly for an encore led by “Hooting and Howling” the crowd are enraptured.

Bookmakers may have countrymen The xx placed as 4/1 favorites for the coveted 2010 Mercury Prize, but more than a few anglophiles left the Highline Ballroom last Wednesday night readied to place bets on these 8/1 outsiders.

–by Daniel Gill (Let’s give him a big FREEwilliamsburg welcome in the comments)