five years later

I'm getting together with a friend of mine tomorrow night for dinner that I haven't seen since I moved out of Kent in '06 and am trying to figure out how to squeeze the greatest amount of rockingness onto one mix CD.

We were part of the same crew of various quirky types who hung out together, spent our work-study money on tickets to shows, slacked around in various dorm rooms and apartments watching movies, playing videogames, listening to way too much music. I wasted a lot of time with real losers just because we liked the same bands but he was one of the few people who was just a really nice and decent person which is why I'm even bothering to reconnect to ramble about loud guitars, and life in general.

I re-read some of my writing from when I was there and I thought I knew everything and had this total attitude and I really thought I had way more of the answers, and was way more angry about really pointless things like this band that totally sucks or that lame group of hipsters or how stupid that professor is.

I was so immersed in subculture that I couldn't always see beyond it and thankfully I left the college town, ended up in Cleveland around people that weren't like me and places that I never thought I'd be and it's humbled me a lot, and while I still have a big mouth, it's not quite as ridiculous as it used to be. I'm more willing to admit when I'm wrong and hopefully I listen more instead of just waiting to speak.

I'm sure I'll look back at what I've just written a few years from now and wonder what the hell I was thinking but hopefully not as much as then.

No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones...

"Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are
and will do for the rest of your life."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
letter to his daughter, September 19, 1938

At a family function this past weekend, I made a snarky comment about my little sister's oh-so-twee indie bands, with "all their chimes and handclaps and stuff," to which my other more mature than myself sibling countered with "well you like all that weird world music" and thankfully dessert in the form of cherry pie arrived to end all sonic disputes.

We all prefer the sounds of our adolescence, though the prior generations have done a great job of monopolizing the canon, as if there wasn't good music made before 1965 and as if the world stopped ten years later.



It's not that I really hate Freedom Rock all that much, but the entitled mentality of certain members of that generation and infinite PBS fundraisers with washed up 60's burnouts doing The Songs That We Got High To and the assumption that well duh there hasn't been anything good since the Beatles and Bob Dylan and maybe I just don't understand the hagiography of the agnostics in my midst because when I think of St. John I don't think of Lennon and his primal screamer of a soulmate.

While I do love the first couple Police albums, this song exemplifies everything wrong with my Boomer Overlords. Ian Mackaye once sang that we're not the first and we know we're not the last, and that's a good kind of humbleness to have to realize that. Sting on the other hand, well...



This might be particularly sensitive to some of us peons, due to a time warp vortex especially strong in Parmastan, where classic rock never died, those who consider themselves more hip will maybe prefer the Velvet Underground or Elvis Costello but little beyond that or their influences, crackers still wash their Camaros while listening to "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" on the boombox, and every other classmate of mine in high school that wasn't into the Wu-Tang Clan seemed to own an AC/DC t-shirt. Something about those post-war bungalows and bowling alleys where time hasn't changed much. As inner-ring suburb Cleveland kids, a love of some kind of classic rock is almost a birthright even if some of us prefer more fuzz and weirdness.



I don't understand the appeal of Of Montreal or Throw Me the Statue or whatever the Urban Outfitters/American Apparel set are listening to these days, but I don't have to. I've still got power chords, black t-shirts, and my dad's flannels to fall back on.

incoherence

I had all good intentions of staying up late last night to get my creative juices flowing since I go late in the next day, but Slowdive left me passed out on the couch next to a cup of herbal tea. Shoegaze was my first musical foray into the realms of non-corporate radio, thanks to older and cooler friends who used to be into the goth scene and introduced me to the likes of My Bloody Valentine and other Brits who preferred making glorious noise to having charismatic stage presence.

If I ever start playing in a band again, I want to do that too.

The sun coming through the windows and the faded green of the front lawn has me restoring order to my domain, talking on the phone with my mom, plotting gardening options, what can I grow on my balcony in containers (all that southern exposure), and will the next people downstairs be bothered if I get adventurous on the side of the house or the front yard.

And despite giving myself a self-imposed deadline for art/writing pursuits, I've been an even worse slacker than my creative partners. Too much L7 and giggling at the absurdity of post-Gorbachev Pravda. At least I can write better than these people, with the heady combination of Putinista propaganda and Weekly World News-worthy items that remind me of Calvin's show and tells and book reports in the greatest comic strip of all time.

It's an "Epic in Emergencies" when people dial 911 for frivolous reasons, three giant spaceships are evidently heading for Planet Earth, while the comments are full of weirdos talking about vengeful Greek deities, the usual conspiracy theory cabals, and general strangeness.

Meanwhile on the homefront, the brave Russians are struggling against Killer Icicles, the Olympic Bear of Discord is causing all sorts of drama, Moscow lavatories are a real test for Western tourists. Not only that, but the defense industry is revealing "striking novelties," and the Kremlin considers the space program "childish."

Any chance of a revolution here anytime soon? Nyet.

I know it's a matter of time before the inspiration hits again, and it'll come, it always does.