I'm in my thirties now. Not 'youthful' certainly, but young enough to honestly floored and mystified when reminded that there are StillAmericans who see hip-hop not as intrinsic to the general American culture but as other peoples music. Seriously, what the fuck is this shit?
* In other news, the seasons in Nebraska have consistently been about six weeks behind schedule this year. Winter was more or less normal, routinely chilly and only truly frigid on occasion. The thing of it is that it started two weeks into January and lasted through several false dawns into April. "Summer" has mainly been mainly mild until this week, when we are just now receiving the blast-furnace 95F+ heat normally felt in mid-July. I don't know what if anything climate change has to do with it or what the end of this year will be like but it is damned odd.
** Still, school is back in session, and football has returned to make daylight drunkenness socially acceptable. It is unquestionably late enough in the year to start listening to Venom. Temperature be damned, if you will.
I was of course a huge "Beavis and Butthead" fan as a teenager and always felt a deep sense of imcompleteness over having missed the original 'Liquid Television' pilot. I finally did see it at about 19 and found it hilarious. I watched again today and found it goddamned horrifying! I don't know if this can charitably be chalked up to 'maturity' or what but, Jesus Chirst those fucking sociopath ghouls just up and bludgeoning living things like that! It's fucking sick and anyone who finds it funny is fucking sick! Ayy.
I'm torn as to whether the US should be involved in bombing Syria or anything along those lines or what. On the one hand it burns me to see a murdering dictator win but.... I don't know. Let the French do it, or Israel maybe, if they can get over seeing Iran as the only true puppet-master behind everything bad that is, aren't we paying for their military for any actual benefit to ourselves or our policies at all? Shit.
Actually a very sad reminder that history is not a series of tales about the good guys facing hazard and winning for our moral edification. History is actual breathing shitting people doing things and shit just happening. The good guys lose quite a lot actually. But I guess in this case "we" did end up winning in the end. And certainly it was worth the effort. Don't tread on my ninth cousins Uncle Joe.
Especially when it comes to classic indie rock. (The fuck did I just say that?)
The state fair moved outstate from Lincoln several years ago now. This actually makes me quite happy. That shit sucked. I did see 'Styx' when I had just transferred to UNL an eternity ago. It was fun sure. I am not going to post a Styx video here however. Have some 'Achilles Last Stand' instead.
If you use the ATM at 20th an O on the edge of downtown you will be fucking eaten. God forsaken demon bastards.....
And the "eastern" plains of Colorado are like Nebraska gone beyond Thunderdome. It is seriously as if the people who built the highways are the only humans who have ever been there, unless aliens did it.
There's some talk of succeeding from the hippie-infested front range out in those parts. One quote in the article speaks of 'rural concerns being ignored' which is of course pure bunkum. the backcountry is dependent, that's right, on money coming in from more productive urban areas in order to make a modern standard of living in the country at all possible. The real beef here is that rural concerns are not being obeyed. My own hometown was small enough to embrace the moral superiority of rural areas as a sacred patriotic truth and over the years I've seen this notion gradually merged into the talk-radio belief that political conservatism is morally entitled to always prevail, that it's correctness is so obvious as to be so to all ; that those who disagree are being deliberately wicked and must be shunned from being "of us".
Good people of rural Colorado I am sorry to tell you that you are the minority. You are the weirdoes. You are the strangers. You are the deviants. Accept it or don't. You have the right to see the majority as wrong and rage against that, I've plenty of practice there as a Nebraska liberal myself, and it can actually be fun in its own way, but you do not have the right to have your way even at the price of a world-burning snit fit. It's been tried, and as it turns out those city boys ain't actually so weak.
I was there for the Flaming Lips, naturally. Some impressions I gleaned from them and others:
Sons of Fathers:
After a night of some carrying on I made my way from 8060 Chicago to the Aksarben section of Omaha by way of the Keystone Trail, practically a freeway by foot it was so direct, at about 2:30 PM. 'Sons of Fathers' were who was playing when I got there and my feelings on them are somewhat torn. I'm very weary of any "authentic Americana" White minstrel act shtick but then again the pure musicality of these guys was quite good: particularly the harmonies of Dave Beck and Paul Cauthen and especially the guitar work of Tony Brown.
In the end they won me over. They music was crackling good and even though they're Texan and "we are so fucking Texan" in that Texan way they have they hung a flag of Wyoming up on stage while they played, which was a boss thing to do as Wyoming has the most stylish and appropriate flag in the whole Union.
B+ to these talented bastards.
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
Not much to say here. Thao is quite good at guitar as well and a good rock songwriter to boot. She's also beautiful and most all of her songs are about sex. :-}() I could of watched them play for the full ten hours I was there and been very happy. A-
The late afternoon and early evening brought a stream of bullrush ahead hard power pop sort of stuff; Bob Mould, the Thermals and local fixtures Criteria. They're all quite good at what they do, especially genre godfather Mould, and I do confess to personal prejudice in being sort of cool towards them. But I am simply not a three cords and the truth man at heart. I long for the grand and baroque in music; give me solos, give me thematic and sonic ambition with a heavy hit of eye candy.
During the Thermals set I did see a blue suede jacket walk across the rear stage with a bunch of workers holding silver balls and knew immediately that it was Wayne Coyne even before I looked up to see his face. It made me happy.
Thermals: C+
Criteria: C+
Bob Mould: B-
Matt & Kim:
Holy fucking shit these guys were great! I don't think I'd appreciate their music much while sitting alone and blogging. I adore funky beats for so long as they're good and heavy and part of me will always see dance pop as innately inferior. But never mind. The show man. The. Fucking Show; A+
THE FLAMING LIPS:
The way they tore down Matt & Kims set and replaced it with that of a "Big Show" from a "Big Band" was impressive in itself. Stephen Drozd is generally regarded as the true heart of the band's sound while (Wayne is the showman) and it was great to see Steve out there leading the tuneup like a real proletarian. I wormed my way to near center front. Joints were passing around and I finangled my hands on a couple hits. The night and the feel were beautiful beyond perfect. And as for the show itself: my god it was wonderful. I love the more heady and less crowd-participation gimicky (which was wonderful itself by the way; RIP crowd ball) direction of this particular tour. I love how one of the great living jewels of American culture has hit a new creative peak with "The Terror" and how their current show keeps it new instead of flirting with a county fair/self cover band act as they've been recently, covering "Dark Side of The Moon" and such for entire tours. I love how they got the flash of a light show perfectly in sync with their new sound: Enthralling, enveloping, intoxicating and in the true classical sense of the term fucking Awesome. I love how they have gone new-school but of course saved "Do You Realize" for a sing-along encore anyhow. (They've never been Radiohead-style dicks; holding their own meal tickets in scorn for being so gauche as to like some of their songs more than others.) Of course they did. Though they only played one other song from "Yoshimi" and went no further back then "Soft Bulletin." RIP "She Don't Use Jelly" My beautiful, beautiful, brothers in shadily wondering their deserted Great Plains home towns at 3 in the morning. Beautiful. Lose the baby though Wayne. A+++
Treat yourself to a Sunday Bloody Mary at the Omaha Jake's too. You will not be disappointed.
I don't know why any better than you do. It was dead of course, and kind of chilly. Starbucks only added to the off-kilter vibe. They were playing "It was a Very Good Year" by the original fake gangster Frank Sinatra. There are periods of my life when I can appreciate Sinatra being in and of it but right now he's just sort of a harpy to my aging ears.
I did have bratwursts with a good amount of cheap Merlot last night that left me feeling pretty dispepsic. Might explain why I'm up early. I think that I'll just have a salad and a green tea for lunch. A rich caeser though, and probably coffee actually.
At 24000 people North Platte is the largest settlement for a hundred mile radius, more than double that to the west south and north. Its economy is largely based on being a way station for people on their way to somewhere else; either by Interstate 80 or more importantly the WORLD"S LARGEST RAIL CLASSIFICATION YARD where freight is chopped up and reassigned in route to and from the Middle and West West. I lived a block away from the tracks going up and to this day the unceasing clang in my parents neighborhood is heaviest in midweek, when Great Lakes-to-from-Socal traffic is coming through. At the symbolic level North Platte also marks the eastern border of the central time zone, with the sun going up and down a bit more than 50 minutes later than Chicago at the other end.
All of which is to say that there's a distinctly Tattooine feel about North Platte; and that it's identity is deeply affected by transitory culture; biker culture, trucker culture, vagabond culture. In our country and I suppose most everywhere these cultural strains are strongly associated with solitude/masculinity and that's without even getting into the cowboy influence upon North Platte. It is deeply instilled with an unreconstructed boys perception of masculinity, and certainly all the social problems that go along with that. There's also a lot of biker chicks. Lots of woman who could be generally described as "butch". Like seriously a lot.
So these rumors of "pegging" that I would routinely hear were not you see only just some insane protest-too-much homophobic witchhunt. They were that but not only just. They were reasons why an intelligent person could find any given tale plausible. I remember Merna in particular. She ran with the biker crowd, black leather in all seasons; a couple inches taller than my own 6'4 and stockier too. As we got acquainted I became privy to Merna's very large collection of gay porn and the strap-on that she assured me had indeed been used on most of her boyfriends, though not quite all. The woman was a gay man. That was her natural gender. I wouldn't say she had gender-identity issues as such because she did seem perfectly content with the body she had. She had the sex with men she wanted with no great amount of trouble and of course no one thought anything of it.
The last time I saw Merna would have been about six or seven years ago. I was home for Christmas wondering about town and found myself drinking with Merna and her boyfriend of the moment. The man told me how he admired george Bush's manhood, over and over again, how the invasion of Iraq had taken "balls".
Merna's strap on was a truly elaborate thing. It had balls too, big ones, with the sort of bristles one might find in a good strong hair brush. It would have been a top-shelf piece by 1990's standards but I don't know if she still had it on this night or not.
In my childhood Mother had a friend and neighbor named Sue. In the mid-eighties when I was very small Sue lost her teenage son to an undetected heart condition. Things fell apart with her husband in the years after. They divorced and Sue has never been really centered in her life since then. Years later when I was drunk her boyfriend of the time pulled next to me in his big van and asked if I wanted my dick sucked. He politely accepted my decline and that was good on him so far as that goes.
Behind Buffalo Bill's ranch immediately outside North Platte along Lakeview Rd.are some oil storage tanks that I used to drive by while smoking weed. In the late nineties somebody tagged what looked like "bull sex" on the front gate though I later found it was actually "butt sex" The tag stayed there for like seven or eight years before somebody cleaned it up. In my mind the spot will always be Buttsex Point.
I was a somewhat younger child during Jeff Foxworthy's heyday. I can't honestly say that I didn't find him funny. I was white and rural myself you know. And young.Those are my excuses and I'm sticking to them. I remember his joke about the meaning of the word "indifferent" something like "hello, I go to Butt Pirate High School and I love my boyfriend because he's the only one who puts it in different." Gay men and anal sex exist. That was the joke. Zing.
I'd hate to say that I understand homophobia and so imply that I emphasize. But it is pretty damned common in a wide variety of cultures. I'm rather more mystified towards this othering of butt sex as something alien and freakish. Anal sex is only as freaky as sex itself by definition is. All sex with all variety of partners has the same H.R. Geiger science fiction weirdness to it. The smells and things being enveloped and disappearing is all there always. the word funk exists for a reason and I greatly prefer George Clinton's language in describing intercourse to any high- flown rot about Lovers or Ecstasy. All sex is funky, guttural, strange; buttsex no more inherently so. At any rate I can guarantee you that white, married, Christian, hetero couples are having anal sex right now; some with the woman on top. There's technology these days.
I remember hearing the whispered stories of "pegging" at the rate of once every few months in North Platte; always in the same appalled tone I would hear say how Rick or Jeff or Tom or Bill had 'let' his wife or girlfriend fuck him with a strap-on. Always the people around me would be horrified and usually someone would exclaim that "that's so gay". (How people of generally average intelligence could be so confused I don't know. They'd just heard with their own ears that a man had sex with a woman. Beating a rhino to death with a warhammer is something besides a man having sex with a woman and therefore closer to gay, if you're into strict oppositions.)
Looking back as I've matured I've come to strongly suspect that the crowd's reaction was mostly theatre. (Also no more essentially gay than buttsex, mistaken notions aside.) They lived in the same small town that I did and were probably hearing tales of peg with the same frequency. My neighbors were only pretending to be stunned by what was actually a very easily imaginable act. Their reaction was more like the Mccarthyites of old who were always aghast when some new egghead was named a Commie; when actually they clearly longed for a world in which everyone but themselves was a Red traitor. So it was that my NP brethren dreamed of a world in which they themselves were the only Real Men on top, heroically besieged on all sides by secret homoheteros.
I myself do not walk among the who have been pegged. I did once have a girlfriend a bit bullish in manner and she would often make it known that she would maybe be alright with it but... no. I've no moral objection and I hope I've made that clear but; shit just looks like it hurts is all.
I make no claim to knowing why the staff at Parkview Christian school here chose to do this thing. Perhaps they buy into the old stereotypes of everyone in theatre being gay, when in fact the proportion of gay actors is only about four or five times greater than the general population. Or maybe the lords of Parkview take pride in being more righteously anti-Nazi than the Jewish man who wrote 'The Producers' whose to say? I'm sorry that a man lost his job over whatever form of priggish nonsense this is.
I'm a Catholic high school alum myself, and I can tell you that private schools in general and religious ones in particular are a god damned swindle and no more. The quality of education at private schools is no better than a public one funded and equipped at the same level. In fact if the private school is of the contraception/evolution "We are so fucking Christian" then the quality is objectively worse. Private schools exist to provide a layer of superior social status for its own sake and we all agree that "everyone knows" the privates are inherently better for that very same reason.
I could get behind this idea maybe. Of course it doesn't taste the same, a little bland from the reports I see, and it may well be the the salt of mortally horrified tears are a necessary spice. But then this pursuit is still only in its early stages and there's plenty of time to improve. I'm not terribly worried about the ranchers who insist that there way of providing meat is the only way mandated by God/nature for all time because of course that's what they'd think. Everyone's job is the ultimate reason why the universe exists.
Now if you excuse me I need to get dressed up for the gay Communist Muslim sabbath day. The outfit is something like a cross between the guy with a scimitar that Indiana Jones just shoots in Raiders and this dude....
