Thank You, And Goodnight

Last night I went to a show at a place that shares a wall with Alfred's Tomato Pies, and so the outside area where smokers and smokers' girlfriends hang out between bands is characterized by the divine aroma of Trenton pizza. Inside, though, it smells like a dentist's office, which is fitting since it used to be one. As you walk in, you are greeted by a large framed cartoon, drawn in what appears to be crayon, of a giant tooth with human facial features sitting in a dentist's chair, letting off a speech bubble that says, "The bill is HOW much?!?!?!" Outside, Matt smoked Marlboros and I popped Tic-Tacs, and suddenly everybody was corralled inside with a general, "They're going on!" I waited until Matt finished his cigarette and then we went inside too.

The place was dark except for sound-activated stage lights of so many competing colors that they all just bled into a dull, muddy purple. I stood at a place on this ramp where I couldn't exactly see the band that was playing, but I could see everyone staring raptly into the purple glow. I changed positions a few times but still couldn't see anything, as though a shifty man in a trenchcoat were holding all the flickering secrets of the universe balled up in his hands and constantly turning his back on me so I wouldn't get to see what was inside. Before I found a good spot, though, I decided that I liked them. I couldn't hear words and I couldn't even hear notes; there was just the duration of yells -- long, long, short, long -- like some sort of familiar morse code in which every member of the audience was fluent. They sounded like New Jersey, in the most nostalgiac, outline-of-New-Jersey-stenciled-on-a-piece-of-fraying-fabric kind of way, and I took immediate comfort in the fact that New Jersey sounds exactly the same even when I am not listening. When I finally made my way up closer to the stage, I saw that New Jersey looks the same too: skinny girlfriends with tattoos and too much eyeliner leaning languidly against their man, who is probably wearing a black hoodie and navy athletic shorts, a uniform that flies in the face of conventional ideas about matching, and one that pays some sort of sartorial tribute to when everything got really weird and angry and people started stabbing each other.

While Matt was setting up, a guy in a torn denim vest who I judged to be about sixteen tried to strike up a conversation with me. "Did you go to the Warped Tour, or whatever?" he asked. I told him I had not. "Well, would you have wanted to go, if you could have?" he asked, and I somehow understood his question completely. "I guess not," I said, though I had no idea who was playing this year. I resisted a sudden and embarrassing urge to explain my laconic answers by saying to him, "I don't live here; I live in DC," but I wasn't sure that that was entirely true. During his set, a kid wearing a sombrero came and sat down on the stage next to Matt. When the song was over, he politely asked, "What do you write your songs about?" Matt said, "Existential dread." Someone in the audience groaned, and rightfully so.

Later, outside, we talked with a guy who said he really liked the set. Then, completely unprovoked, he launched into a vivid description of a fight he was in at a show recently. The show took place at a roller skating rink where I had some of my best birthday parties in grade school. He lifted up his sleeve and showed us where some guy had stabbed him with a box cutter there. And he acted disgusted with it all, but then, with a creepy flicker of pride in his face, he told us a few keywords to search for on Youtube if we wanted to see a good video of the fight. I told him I probably did not want to see that. I liked it better before people started throwing chairs at each other and wielding baseball bats wholeheartedly; I liked it better when it was just a room full of starving eyes squinting at an almost invisible glow.

Summer of Strummer

Anyone who is from the Philadelphia area or has at one time or another found themselves scanning the radio dial while driving through its clutches can tell you one thing for sure: XPN rules. XPN is a local member-supported radio station affiliated with UPenn. NPR enthusiasts will know it as the place where they record World Cafe with David Dye. The good folks at XPN always seem to be cooking up some exciting special program, and this summer has proven no exception. On the ride home from the train station yesterday, I heard that XPN is doing a series called Summer of Strummer, where they are broadcasting hour-long segements of Joe Strummer's radio shows that he did for the BBC in the late 90s.

This is huge. These shows have never before been broadcast in America, but Julien Temple provided some memorable excerpts from them in his fantastic 2007 documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I've been itching to find some recording of them since seeing the film (which, if you're keeping score, is so much better than Westway to the World), so I can't wait for next week's broadcast. They'll be airing them every Monday afternoon at 3 for the rest of the summer. If you're not in the area, you can listen live online.

I Wish My Life Were A Smashing Pumpkins Video

Last Friday was Free Slurpee Day. Walking towards 7-11 in my work clothes, I found myself wishing that my current life was a little more like the Smashing Pumpkins video for "1979."



More often, though, I wish that life was more like the video for "Today."



Specifically around 1:42. There is something about the gleeful nonchalance on James Iha's face, his dress aflutter in the breeze as he hangs out the door of the ice cream truck, that makes me think, "they just don't make videos like that anymore."

In search of a summer anthem, part I

It wouldn't be a trip back home without some time spent digging through my old CDs and finding another ancient comp to upload onto my computer. This time around it was one that I had been looking for for maybe years now: the summer 2002 Drive-Thru Records compilation. True, even people who will still admit to being Drive-Thru enthusiasts for one fleeting moment of their youth will tell you that 2002 was a good year or two after the label had jumped the shark. And true to that, a few of the tracks on there have not held up well at all (even among the most die-hard of Movielife fans, I didn't know anyone who thought Steel Train didn't suck). But there are some bona fide pop-punk masterpieces on this disc. Here's my favorite:

Homegrown - "I'll Never Fall In Love"

What a summer anthem! Guaranteed to make you feel like you are fourteen again, nursing what could be sun poisoning because you were too cool to put on sunscreen at the Warped Tour. I was never a big Homegrown fan, but I've always loved this song; I would still contend that the beat in the beginning of this song when the drums kick in is one of the most sublime moments in the whole entire Drive-Thru discography. Here's an added bonus:

Allister - "Scratch"

I can think of no better time than right now, knee deep in summer, to roll the windows down and blast these tracks in your tricked out Civic. Or, you know, if you're really concerned with things as trivial as good taste, feel free to leave the windows up.

On Fingernails

I had about two hours to kill at my grandparents' house this weekend, so I found myself going through my grandmother's nail polish collection and, for the first time in probably four or five years, painting my nails. It's so exciting. Every movement of my hands is now punctuated with a manicured ladylikeness; I feel uncommonly genteel. This is so new to me that I actually just looked up genteel in the dictionary to make sure it meant what I thought it did. Goodness knows that I have never used it to describe myself before.

But this wasn't always the case. When I was much younger (we're talking ten or eleven) I took nail care very seriously. I had this huge collection of nail polish and would keep my nails really long and meticulously filed. It was strange. I remember attempting intricate designs (peace signs and yin-yangs, really!) with these tiny little brushes and doing French manicures with nauseating color combinations (silver sparkles with navy blue tips was a particular favorite). For some weird reason, my long nails were a particular point of pride for me.

I also played the viola at this point in my life. I started when I was nine. I I liked it a lot at first, but I tired of it pretty quickly. By my end of the year recital in fourth grade, I was so lackadaisical about the whole thing that I "air bowed" most of the songs I played with the orchestra. My parents, greeting me afterwards with congratulatory balloons and flowers, were none the wiser and still probably do not know about the whole affair to this day.

These two things came to a head in the middle of fifth grade. One day during a one-on-one lesson, my orchestra teacher grabbed my hand, inspected it carefully and said, "You're going to need to cut those nails." Cut my nails? In all my life I'd never been so insulted. Of course I wasn't going to cut my damn nails. If I cut them short, they wouldn't be long enough to paint the tips a different color. Did this woman actually expect me to walk around with monochrome nails all the time? Seriously? Get real.

"Why?" I asked her.

"Because they're getting in the way of you fingering the notes. You're never going to get any better if you don't cut them."

"Well I'm not going to do it." That was that. At eleven I was, as you may be aware, more nobly defiant than I have ever been and probably ever will be in my whole life. By the year's end, this trait would have me dishonorably discharged from the Safety Patrol and holding the distinction of being the only girl in my class to receive a behavior demerit. It got me in a bit of trouble at the time, but now I find myself wishing I could approach more daily tribulations with the mentality of a snot-faced fifth grader.

"Well then you're going to have to quit playing the viola," my teacher replied.

"Then I guess I will," I said.

Sure enough, the next morning I dropped my case off in my orchestra teacher's room for good. I don't think we exchanged any words at all. Anyway, I wasn't very good. There wasn't going to be any big cinematic moment of her saying, "You're too talented to throw all this way" and begging me not to quit; I'm pretty sure she was privy to my air bowing at this point anyhow. I didn't feel much of anything as I left the orchestra room for the last time ever. Never again would I see that stupid portrait of Wagner, hanging behind my teacher's piano, that always made my friend and me giggle because of the stupid expression on his face. Never again would I be excused from Math class to go to my lesson, making sure to swing by the adjacent nurse's office to get a mint on the way there and back. It was all over, all because of the pride I had in my fingernails.

I would sacrifice my nails for good about three years later when I started playing guitar. I guess that goes to show what I was willing to do when it came down to an instrument that I actually loved playing, but at this point I had also come to find long nails pretty unattractive. The first time my guitar teacher handed back one of my quizzes to me, I jerked back in surprise when I was confronted with the long, pointy nails on his right hand. A year later, when he was teaching us how to finger-pick, he handed out a worksheet with detailed instructions on how to file our nails into the proper shape for this technique: a slanted, asymmetrical little point, sort of the shape of Gumby's head. I tried it out, but it didn't help me much and it made itching myself a pretty perilous endeavor. I cut them a few days later, and, until this moment, it had been years since I'd given a second thought to my fingernails.

I looked at nail polish at Target today, thinking that I might try out this whole genteel business on a regular basis and pick out a few shades. But it was all so much more expensive than I remember it being! $6 for some of the lower end stuff. I decided to pass. Perhaps the days of fancy nails will forever be a thing of my past. Even so, I think I was right in giving up viola; that teacher was an idiot.