What I've Really Been Up To

I've been working on an essay entitled "The Last Generation," about people who were born between 1977 and 1987. The basic premise is that we came after Generation X (popularly known for wanting there MTV) and yet do not extend the traditional generation length, which I believe to be roughly 20 years. The idea is, we have dealt with so many changes growing up; we remember what it was like when nobody had an answering machine, we remember getting our first answering machine, and we have fully embraced technology. It seems natural to us, in a way that differentiates us from those slightly older becuase they didn't all have ethernet in college, and in a way that separates us from even our slightly younger peers because they take it all for granted; their first computers at school were pentiums with hard drives while we all had Apple IIc's.

We're a generation that hasn't yet matured politically, even though we will be the ones called on to support our economy under the weight of our parents' retirement programs and our parents' backwards education policies that will leave young American workers in 15 years with half the skills of their Chinese and Indian counterparts. We can't understand political correctness and frivolous lawsuits.

We don't care if queers get married! Honestly, aren't there people dying somewhere?

You get the point. I'm still compiling data, so please send me any ideas/facts/anecdotes/studies/funny jokes you feel would be relevant to my pursuit. Please include your date of birth and gender if I don't already know. I'm not going to post my email address, so if you don't already know it, just leave a comment below. I promise to footnote you.

Also, hopefully we can get people to stop calling us Generation Y or the Millennium Generation or other such crap.

no subject

i will not be at homecoming this year. i'm sorry, brothers, but tell the guys i love them and i'll play some strat in memory of all of you.

Dark Star Crashes

Three nights ago I went to go see the Dark Star Orchestra at the Showbox. The Showbox is one of Seattle's better-known venues, and it was clear why this was so: not only did they have a bar in the lobby, but they had three once you got inside. There was no balcony like the 9:30 club, which I found to my liking; the lower ceilings made the whole affair seem much more intimate. If they had rolled tables out to the dance floor, it would have been just like an old vaudeville-and-dinner show from the 20s, or maybe the 30s. Anyways, Dark Star Orchestra is a Grateful Dead cover band (I know, I know) that strives to recreate the experience as much as possible, learning the particular notes played, the style of the time, and even mimicking the Dead's blocking on stage. I saw them once before in April at the Norva in Virginia, and it was a helluva time. The other night wasn't as good; they played an original set list in the style of the late 80s, a point at which I think the Dead lacked the spark of their youth that made them so fun. Despite playing a couple good tracks - Shakedown Street, Minglewood Blues, Althea, and Dark Star - the show overall was kind of slow. Also, the last time I saw them, I was with a huge group of friends who were also into the Dead, and this time I was with my anti-hippie roommate and our befuddled lead guitarist.

Uh, that's about it. We were having drinks before the show and we had this cute Swedish waitress that had the most beautiful gait you ever saw. Also, there was this girl there who looked exactly like Katie Bahr, but I figured that the odds were highly against that actually being the case. At any rate, I decided that Showbox would be our Winterland, our go-to place to go play...after we get a drummer and a keyboardist and a few more songs. But you'll come, won't you?

ReadyPost Dan Savage

This past Tuesday I went to go hear Dan Savage read from his new book, The Commitment, a story about gay marriage and family. Mr. Savage writes a syndicated sex column, "Savage Love," and is on the staff at our own weekly newspaper, The Stranger. I was casually excited in that way you get when you know someone's vaguely famous and you don't really follow them but want to be able to say you saw them back in the day, like when Arrested Development came to William and Mary. At any rate, by the time we showed up it was standing room only, and we're waiting around scratching ourselves and I'm looking at all these suspicously queer-looking fellows (and ladies) everywhere when I suddenly ponder to myself: is this a gay bookstore? None of the books advertised on the walls looked especially gay, but I knew Savage was gay and from the looks of the other patrons, I was in homo-domo. I put the whole thing out of my head for a while, but the deal was sealed when the gay owner of the bookstore got up to introduce Mr. Savage, and at that point it all came together as a stranger apparates out of the fog. I enjoy blazing neurons in my brain, and sudden realizations like that make me smile. Or, when I'm standing near the top of a really tall building and I look down at the street and then scan up a neighboring building, which always makes me feel pleasantly nauseous I think because of the perspective shifts.

The excerpts were from a road trip he and his partner took a year ago to protest the former crisis of gay marriage. I enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a former crisis that never got resolved. The plot centered around particular travails involving the couple's 6-year-old son, who comes down with a bad case of diaper rash, and the general horror of raising children. This one time, they stop in Somewhere, South Dakota and the kid wakes up in the middle of the night screaming that his butthole hurts because he's got this awful rash. So there they are, in some small motel, trying to clean this kid's ass while he screams "no daddy don't do that! my butthole hurts!" and everyone's sure that the cops are going to bust in and arrest the whole bunch. When this fails to happen, the author's nervous tension turns to anger over the seeming nonchalance of the other patrons in the face of very audible screams of incestual pederasty. It's the sort of thing that makes me think, "haha! please pass the condoms."

That's the moral for today: practice safe sex. And make sure you have a third party witness the consent (ideally, a pneumatic Brazilian).

Anyways, the prose was very easy and flowing (and kind of gay, I think) and managed to convey accurately what it is like to raise kids (full disclosure: I have no kids). Ultimately, I think the point was merely to combine an On The Road with a story about family for gay people, and this is something I've always found strange: There's never anything particularly novel in gay stories; by and large they seem to follow the same formulas as any other story, except the protagonists are homosexuals. Perhaps that's part of the point, that the gay subculture just wants their 'own' versions of similar tales, just like they make black movies with all black people and the token white guy. My least favorite token white guy was the bus driver in Spike Lee's movie "Get On The Bus." Alternatively, another possibility is that such 'gay' stories are merely to inform an otherwise heterosexual audience that gay people have the same sorts of very human struggles that all of us endure - and yet seem to be convinced are unique - in areas of love, life, work, etc.

Have I concentrated too much on the gay side of things? I mean, it was a book about gay marriage written by a gay person being read in a gay bookstore in the gay neighborhood; I call them as I see them.

The Q&A afterwards was also fun; except for some of the throwaway liberal lines, Mr. Savage spoke a little about recent tours he has done (he periodically travels around to college campuses and talks to people about sex). If he comes to your school, try to go see him. Especially if you go to a prude school like, for example, one that shall remain nameless. Next up, he's writing a book about why we should take sex education out of schools and it sounds promising.

Cop-Out

Sorry for lack of content. This week hasn't ben an especially exciting one, and the climax of a crushing defeat at the hands of the Denver Broncos has really fouled my day. What was the deal? Things were looking good until the defense stepped onto the field. They just looked like amateurs today; I'll allow them that one long run by Tatum Bell for the TD, but in general they seemed outmatched and outfoxed. Especially the rookie Carlos Rogers, he's going to have to step it up and play like it's the big leagues and in the meantime I hope Walt Harris gets better soon. After that last, long drive I really thought we were going to convert the 2 points...it seemed the only appropriate ending for a team that's squeaked out victories the whole season.

Next week should be both fun filled and action packed: jamming on Monday; listening to Dan Savage read on Tuesday; Dark Star Orchestra on Thursday; Kinski on Friday; and some metal show on Saturday. I'll try to write about all of them, because I know how obnoxious it is when someone is too lazy to update their webpage.

Getting Lost = Something New

I've been a big Pink Floyd fan for years; some of you know this more than others. So when I saw that the Pacific Science Center (right underneath the Space Needle) was having a Dark Side of the Moon laser show, I knew that the time had come to see it. (Side note for those interested: the PSC has laser light shows for Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Nine Inch Nails, and Led Zeppelin every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. Seattle Laser Dome for exact info.) Our laser artist was Ivan, so I think the shows are different each time.

The show itself was pretty good. I've never been to a laser light show, and it was about what I expected. Kind of like Milkdrop, except on an IMAX screen and more intelligible shapes. What was really cool was when they turned on the fog machines and the lasers would beam through the haze just a few feet over your head. My favorite tracks off the record are "Time" and "Us and Them," but my two favorite parts of the show were "Money" and "Any Colour You Like." As cool as this already was, for the encore Ivan played an old track called "Summer '68," off the record Atom Heart Mother. As some background, I love this song. I was really into the whole album around the end of high school, and I hadn't heard this song in maybe two years. It was penned by their keyboardist, Rick Wright, and begins with very pretty, soothing third chords on the piano, and gets slightly more jarring. I took it as a sign.

Correction from earlier: Meddle is amazing. (thank you axwage.) The show itself started at 9:15, and much of the crowd seemed to be high school stoner types, but there were a decent number of older, formerly hip people (but not that formerly, since they're still taking their young kids to Pink Floyd laser shows). Because the album is only 45 minutes long, you'll still have the entire evening ahead of you for other pursuits; Belltown is right up the street, and there's a Catholic church right across from the science center. My plans were to go back to Fremont and see what was happening up there, but since I don't know my way around the city I ended up in Pioneer Square, and picked the first bar I found (I thought it was called the Firehouse or something but I can't remember. It's just off 2nd street on the main street that crosses over to 1st. I'll look it up). It had a nice setting, and a good feel with about 12 taps and a big black bouncer. The music was kind of crappy - it reminded me of middle school dances and this girl named Annie Snodgrass. Remember that Mariah Carey song "Always be my Baby?" I think they played the entire album. Anyways, so there I was, chatting it up with the bartendress, when this guy came in and sat down at the bar, introducing himself as Kenny. Kenny, it turns out, had just come from a hotel in South Seattle because the police had shown up after he called a prostitute. When the self-employed female entreprenuer couldn't produce identification, the 5-0 made her leave and told Kenny to scram, which brought him up my way. Also, he had a court date later in October to sue the police department for breaking his fingers (apparently he was a heavily sought-after guitarist) that was a reschedule because he missed the initial hearing on account of being locked up. Kenny was half-black, half-Indian, and spent a good deal of time telling me how much it sucked being half-black, half-Indian. I talked with him for a while, because as someone once told me: you need to be open-minded. You never know when one idea will change your life completely.

After some time Kenny decided we needed to go for a walk. Now this isn't a great area of town, and all the bartendresses were leaning in and being like "are you okay? Make sure you're careful." I was already in one of my grandfather's sport coats, but just to be safe I donned my aviators and Kenny and I took off.

We passed a few policemen and some homeless people rolling joints, one of whom was friends with Kenny. He introduced himself as Doc while Kenny tried in vain to get us in the back door of this one club that I actually had been to before and really liked - they had live music going, and it sounded pretty good. It turns out Doc had some sunglasses of his own, so he put them on too. Also, he kept bothering me for cigarettes, even though I kept telling him I didn't have any. So now we're a bona fide crew, with Kenny in his loud blue Carolina jacket, Doc in his red beret, and me in Chucks. We saunter down 1st street, passing various clubs that aren't admitting Kenny and finally, after passing the main drag, turn around. We're walking back and this girl comes up to me and is all like "those are really big sunglasses!" and takes them off my face. I'd like to point out, for the record, that I'm a fairly easygoing guy, so I says to her "haha! can I have my sunglasses back?" which causes her to shriek and run off into her group of friends (mostly guys). So now I'm getting a little angry because I'm in no mood to flirt with this girl and one of the guys sees me making a move and is like "what's up?" and I told him that this girl had run off my aviators and he -- to his credit -- was all like "oh you better go get that shit back!" and I was like "damn right." The guys turned out to be very reasonable; when this one guy stripped them off the broad to give them back to me and dropped them on the sidewalk in the process he was genuinely apologetic. The shades themselves were unharmed, so I told him it wasn't a big deal and thanked him for his help. I have a lot of respect for men who can keep their heads on their shoulders when triflin' bitches are afoot. However, at this point Kenny had started to give this girl trouble, and I kept trying to pull him away but every time he would make a move she would step in front of him and block his path. I had honestly had it with that scene, so I just stepped away and talked to Doc for a little bit before Kenny eventually rejoined us. At this point, Doc acquired a cigarette and just sort of wandered off. I wasn't too stressed about it; he had just gotten out of jail a few hours earlier and I figured he probably had some things he'd been meaning to do. The entire time I kept thinking of that Pink Floyd song, "The Great Gig In The Sky."

So the lesson is, wearing your aviators at night is a surefire way to find out which persons in your immediate vicinity are totally lame. Also, keep a look out for Kenny - he's always looking for someone to jam with.