Rocket from the Crypt and the Gotohells; The Memoir Thing Continues; An Amateur Monster-Wrestling Troupe; Mardi Gras Notes

Until April 15, you get the work of Marco Brambilla. A veteran filmmaker (he did 1993's Demolition Man), Brambilla is putting up an excerpt of his video Superstar, in which a man leaps from a skyscraper, falls until he's a few feet above the ground and freezes. He then stays suspended as he's circled by the camera, Matrix-steez, with his arms spread and a blue-and-gray spiral of buildings and sky behind him.

Thanks, Panasonic and Creative Time. New York cabbies will be thrilled, I'm sure, to drive down Millennium Way and see a spinning 360-degree shot of a guy about to cake the sidewalk?four stories high. Now that we're open to this kind of thing, I want to see some late-night tumor removal and building-sized Tetris on that screen. Hey, it beats looking for dead pixels on the crappy NASDAQ building. The "59th Minute" is up right now.

...Rocket from the Crypt plays Mercury Lounge (217 E. Houston St., betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts., 260-4700) on Thursday in support of their latest, Group Sounds. I'll let bass player Petey X describe the album: "For someone who knows the band, it has a lot of our history, combining the old wall of sound with the new stuff: horns and backing vocals. For people who don't know us, it's the best fuckin' rock 'n' roll record you'll ever hear."

Yeah. Group Sounds plays like Gwar with less metal and more feeling. The vocals are snarled and the songs are tightly written, but once you put horns in a rock band, you really can't avoid Gwar.

"I saw those guys down in Mexico, you know, throwing goat's blood on people," Petey X says of the world's premier cartoon-metal act. "Fun to see. Songs? I don't know."

Expect punk kids aged 10 to 40 at Mercury Lounge, and expect them to rock out. Rocket from the Crypt is one of the few bands in America with a following rabid enough to support the Tattoo 7-inch, which the band made and distributed only to those sporting RftC tattoos. The group is also loved by some eBay nuts who keep a near-complete Rocket discography online at all times.

"It's good that they do that, because I don't have a clue about our discography," Petey X says. "There are lots of records I don't remember. Ten years, every practice is a challenge."

Incidentally, the guys opening for Rocket from the Crypt are responsible for 2001's best album so far. The Gotohells, from Florida, released Rock N' Roll America in February, and it sounds like Live! Like a Suicide-era Guns N' Roses, with drawn-out AC/DC endings on every other song. "Rock N' Roll America," "Wasted," "Sin Baby" and "Lock Up Your Daughters" are the best cuts. The singer has gigantic muttonchops and gigantic balls; action commences at 8 p.m. this Thursday.

...All you people who love memoirs?and there must be a lot of you, because they keep selling?have two events of note this week. First, at the Park Avenue Borders (461 Park Ave. at 57th St., 980-6785), journalist Shelby Scates is discussing his book War & Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir.

Scates wrote for newspapers and the Associated Press for 35 years before quitting in 1991 to do books. He covered Earl Long in Louisiana, public school integration in Arkansas, war in Israel and Cambodia, and those guys who lost their toes climbing K2 in 1978. His book is in the nice clipped sentences he got used to while working for the International News Service. Scates speaks Thursday at 6 p.m.

Also, Melissa Swanjeremy, who must hate Ron Jeremy, is doing a memoir-writing workshop for those of you who think you lead interesting lives. That's over at Bluestockings Women's Bookstore and Cafe (172 Allen St., betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts., 212-777-6028), every Wednesday of the month, starting with March 7, at 7 p.m. Swanjeremy doesn't seem to have any writing experience?she doesn't even come up on Google?but like the rest of us, she has to start somewhere. Maybe she's collecting material for Seeking You, Seeking Me: How I Found Myself by Teaching Others to Write Memoirs. Class size is limited to eight, and payment is on a sliding scale (meaning you pay whatever you can pay) from $15-$45.

...Kaiju Big Battel, the amateur monster-wrestling troupe from Boston, has released its latest VHS spectacle, Mayhem in the Atrium III. It delivers the goods, with 36 minutes of guys in Japanese monster outfits beating the hell out of each other in some mall.

Kaiju operates by rolling into a city, finding a public space and erecting a wrestling ring. Then a plot is devised, usually involving arch-villain Dr. Cube, who's a college-age guy with a white box on his head and a face painted on the box. The action is presented WWF-style, with multiple camera angles, live announcers, hooting fans, broken tables and thrash background music. At the start of each battle, a Mega Man-style graphic introduces the competitors, with a female Asian voice deadpanning, "Shadow Trooper vs. Super Akuma," or something similar.

Mayhem in the Atrium III has tony performances from fighters Beefy La Ox, Silver Potato, Hell Monkey, Dust Bunny and especially Super Akuma, a guy in a black karate outfit with a high threshold for pain and fear. The video is available for $12 at www.kaiju.com; Kaiju Big Battel is still unable to get a gig in New York, so if you know of any leads, contact head of business development David Borden at info@kaiju.com.

...Mini-blurbs from my Mardi Gras on the Lower East Side: Manitoba's (99 Ave B., betw. 6th & 7th Sts., 982-2511) had the best crowd of the night, an attractive group of young women and older men who took part in complimentary sushi and made out downstairs while I played pinball. Sapphire (249 Eldridge St., betw. Houston & Stanton Sts., 777-5153) was a ripoff at $2, with NYU DJ Wil Milton attracting a sparse group of nondancers and one spastic septuagenarian. Idlewild (145 E. Houston St., betw. Eldridge & Forsythe Sts., 477-5005) had cool decor, but few people, probably because the thrill of chilling in airplane seats is lost pretty quickly. And La Nouvelle Justine (101 E. 2nd St., betw. 1st Ave. & Ave. A, 673-8908) is clearly the preferred hangout of those who used to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. At least they gave me free cake.