Paris In Plantsville
15 West Main Street
Plantsville, CT (part of Southington)
6:00pm - All Ages (21+ to drink) - $8
Beer/wine will be provided for donations to the gallery - WILL CARD. Bring a non-perishable food item to be entered into a raffle (the next day is Thanksgiving!!) to help the less fortunate. Details on raffle prizes TBA. Some prizes include shirts donated by the gallery and select merch donated by the bands. Raffle to be held at the end of the show.
Please don't drink underage at the place, it would shut down the place.
Parking is available at the Wachovia Bank across the street, and there's a lot next to the place by a couple antique shops and the bike trail. There is limited street parking.
Lineup:
Transit (Run For Cover Records)
Into It Over It (No Sleep Records)
New Years Revolution
A Paper Tugboat
Paris In Plantsville is a new art gallery that is show friendly. But this space calls for a more intimate setting and happens to be only a little bigger than your typical basement. In the interests of the artists and keeping their works safe, loud punk shows wouldn't really work. And not to knock them, but the folk scene on the other extreme has their fair share of places to play. So in comes Chris Szczerba with the idea of challenging punk bands to play after stripping them of their volume.
He explains where the idea came from: "One notable event at PIP included an acoustic set by Dylan Rau of Bear Hands," says Chris, "I've also seen sites have bands sort of record exclusive acoustic versions of songs - most of which are filmed. I thought both of those were pretty cool. That is when I came up with the idea to get bands that don't normally play acoustic and have them come out and do an acoustic set at this place, sort of as a one-time or rare thing." And, of course, Chris plans to film these events.
Chris Szczerba stared Central Booking around two years ago hoping to add fuel to the music scene. "I've booked anywhere from gas station garages, to The Space, to basements, to churches, Heirloom Arts Theatre, art galleries and a few others." Jay Hricko joined Chris, along with a few others, which led to them wanting to grow beyond their area, so they changed their name to The Arc Agency. But, as life would have it, "we barely booked shows within central Connecticut when [we called ourselves Central Booking] and now after the change, all our shows have been in the [Southington] area." Eh, fuck it. Jay Hricko goes to the Hartt School for Jazz, Chris is at CCSU as a Business major. They split the workload, including "talking to the bands and venues, taking care of promo (whether it be flyering, online/press, etc), design (flyers, web/coding, etc), managing the shows day of, and whatever else comes up. Jay does some of the talking to bands/venues, promotion, and management of the shows."
Chris defines the new name pretty clearly: "I use the definition, "Arc- /ärk/ (n)- A continuous progression or line of development," to describe the meaning because I feel like we are working on doing our part to help continuously improve the CT music scene and also, this basically describes our progression as a booking agency- always improving and learning/developing upon ourselves."
Paris In Plantsville suits their style. The space "is a brand new gallery set to support and showcase the fine artist. As the brainchild of Sean Michanczyk along with other Hartford Art School Alumni, this gallery is set to become a tour-de-force in supporting modern and contemporary fine arts."
And why not put punk bands in a challenging context to see what happens? I was telling Chris how I can't help but think of that set Nirvana did on MTV Unplugged. It really didn't matter if you read Maximum Rock'n'Roll or Rolling Stone back then - from the covers they played that exposed kids to bands like The Vaselines or The Meat Puppets, to just the shear brilliance of challenging them to play in that context - it led to a moment that is nowadays essentially regarded as historic. In fact, today is the 17 year anniversary of that recording, which happened on November 18, 1993.
"All in all, we are heading in the right direction. I want to see where this takes me" says Chris. By the sounds of it, I think he'll be lead to some great times and genuine success.
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