it's just the way that you love me (it ain't your Maserati)
Libby calls as George and Miranda and I are driving to the Fischerspooner show. George and I are so happy to talk to her that we forget to stop for beer on the way. She wants me to go to Long Beach for grad school and be in the museum studies program she is starting there, and I'm simultaneaously participating in the conversation and doing mathematical calculations in my head as to exactly how much West Coast Life I'll be able to stomach in the coming years. She says, "you and George drive out here sometime," in her Texan accent. She asks me about cities I went to in Italy. We're in the parking lot and I'm hanging off the edge of the wall so the reception will be better, looking at the construction of another parking lot below and telling her about Venice and Rome. George and Miranda are looking at me expectantly and I have to tear myself away from the phone.
We have free tickets to the Fischerspooner show because all the record stores in town have been given piles of them. No one in vegas knows what Fischerspooner is so the ticket sales were at rock-bottom. Because of this I am surprised at who shows up; surprised at the everyone-cool-and-their-cool-mama-too air of privelege in the line outside the House of Blues. I expect to see people carrying in lap dogs and bowls of warm spiced peach juice that they drink with a straw. The House of Blues is a shitty venue architecturally arranged to resemble a pig's trough and decorated with weakly appropriated Lousisiana-style creole blues iconography. It makes me spiritually uncomfortable but not in the way that the owners of the venue want it to. It's pretty interesting that a building that's supposed to celebrate African- and Creole- Amercian cultural heritage is built into a casino and they search you for weapons and cameras and booze at the door. There's a camera check. It costs $2.
When we get inside it feels like a mini episode of This Is Your Life, truncated into This Is Your Past Six Weeks Staring at Things In Your Town. The scenester hell indie crowd, hardcore kids, well-dressed high school boys and girls on spindly legs, artgoths wearing tulle and masks. My postmodern lit and theory professor is there along with her husband who is Bryan's commercial photography professor. Dave Hickey shows up too, a debutante in a white Texan suit, flanked by grad students drinking Miller Lite out of plastic cups. I tell him, "I was just on the phone with Libby in the parking lot." He says, "Ha! Did she tell you I was out here, hanging out with street trash?" I say, "I think she wanted me to find out for myself."
The show is really, really great. I'd been preoccupied of late with how one prevents one's performance art from becoming overly didactic or banal or awful performance art, and I thought the carefully engineered fits and starts, the cheerleaderlike dedication to mistakes and glitter for glitter's sake was really charming. It tore us all away, I think, from the engineered aesthetic of the looker and user to that of this collective god-identification. Like you could do the same thing with smoke machines and wigs on the roof of your apartment. Some people found it off-putting that Casey kept yelling at everyone but I really like yelling. The whole thing was reduced to glamorous shoulder-baring bouts of dancing and then me not being able to dance because I was taking in the choreography of the Fischerspooner dancers. I think I know what I want to be when I grow up.
Later at a party I meet this kid who asks me what I think of Vegas. I tell him that everyone's been very nice to me but that it's hard not to feel like all these subcultures are mashed into a tight ball of small-town choices. Is this the case in a lot of cities? And why does the House of Blues always upset me no matter what is taking place inside it?
We have free tickets to the Fischerspooner show because all the record stores in town have been given piles of them. No one in vegas knows what Fischerspooner is so the ticket sales were at rock-bottom. Because of this I am surprised at who shows up; surprised at the everyone-cool-and-their-cool-mama-too air of privelege in the line outside the House of Blues. I expect to see people carrying in lap dogs and bowls of warm spiced peach juice that they drink with a straw. The House of Blues is a shitty venue architecturally arranged to resemble a pig's trough and decorated with weakly appropriated Lousisiana-style creole blues iconography. It makes me spiritually uncomfortable but not in the way that the owners of the venue want it to. It's pretty interesting that a building that's supposed to celebrate African- and Creole- Amercian cultural heritage is built into a casino and they search you for weapons and cameras and booze at the door. There's a camera check. It costs $2.
When we get inside it feels like a mini episode of This Is Your Life, truncated into This Is Your Past Six Weeks Staring at Things In Your Town. The scenester hell indie crowd, hardcore kids, well-dressed high school boys and girls on spindly legs, artgoths wearing tulle and masks. My postmodern lit and theory professor is there along with her husband who is Bryan's commercial photography professor. Dave Hickey shows up too, a debutante in a white Texan suit, flanked by grad students drinking Miller Lite out of plastic cups. I tell him, "I was just on the phone with Libby in the parking lot." He says, "Ha! Did she tell you I was out here, hanging out with street trash?" I say, "I think she wanted me to find out for myself."
The show is really, really great. I'd been preoccupied of late with how one prevents one's performance art from becoming overly didactic or banal or awful performance art, and I thought the carefully engineered fits and starts, the cheerleaderlike dedication to mistakes and glitter for glitter's sake was really charming. It tore us all away, I think, from the engineered aesthetic of the looker and user to that of this collective god-identification. Like you could do the same thing with smoke machines and wigs on the roof of your apartment. Some people found it off-putting that Casey kept yelling at everyone but I really like yelling. The whole thing was reduced to glamorous shoulder-baring bouts of dancing and then me not being able to dance because I was taking in the choreography of the Fischerspooner dancers. I think I know what I want to be when I grow up.
Later at a party I meet this kid who asks me what I think of Vegas. I tell him that everyone's been very nice to me but that it's hard not to feel like all these subcultures are mashed into a tight ball of small-town choices. Is this the case in a lot of cities? And why does the House of Blues always upset me no matter what is taking place inside it?