Common misunderstandings

So maybe I did get a little cocky the other night, telling people I was going to the Common album release party in Manhattan, somewhere below ground in an Upper West Side swank club you needed to know somebody and be on the guest list and offer a bid for Barack Obama's senate seat to get into. Of course, I don't actually know anyone, except for Jeff Vrabel in this case, who knows many, many people, including some who still send him invites to album release parties in Manhattan in case he wanted to fly the supersonic jet he owns (thanks to that newspaper salary) to get there from South Carolina in a few hours.

The e-mail he forwarded me said the doors opened at 9, Common would perform at 10:30. I was going by myself since they removed all the plus ones from the list (sorry Barry!) due to the huge interest, so I arrived at the fashionable mid-range time of 9:50. The place was bumping with Hot 97 banners here and there. Some dude wearing a standard Okayplayer fan outfit walked up to me and leaned in to say something.

"Am I supposed to get you a wrist band?" he asked.
"Huh?" I said. He pulled back and looked at me.
"Aren't you here with Theo?"
"Uh, no."
"Oh. I thought you were .....uh ... you look like this other guy."

That's right, I thought. All white people look alike.

The guy ended up helping me get a free drink from the bar anyway. Just as he got to the bartender, the guy on the mike announced that the event was over. "Sorry y'all, we all got early planes to catch in the morning."

The free drink service had also ended. I did some reporting and it turns out Common did a little performance starting at about 9:30, making this probably the first time in history a hip hop show has started earlier than scheduled (hear that, Kanye?). Then he rolled out. I guess I probably caught maybe the end of the performance when I first walked in but didn't even realize it. The album, Universal Mind Control, is getting slammed in reviews anyway.

I wasn't the only one who was disappointed. But I guess it's a pretty big concession to remember that at Coachella in 2006, Common was the surprise guest who came on stage with Black Star as the three of them played way past the midnight curfew and Mos kept telling Common he would have to pitch in because they were going to pay the fine.

"Wait, how much is the fine?" Common asked, possibly not joking. Then he pulled like $5 out of his wallet.

But I decided to be a paparazzi anyway Monday night as he walked by me:

The club it was held at:

It was cool to be there at least, even if it was kind of a bummer that I didn't make it in time for the performance. I thought of something though -- it's lame to see a musician in the crowd at a concert but not actually see them perform. But who is it cool to see in the crowd at a show? Actors! Blah to Common the rapper but OH MY GOD LOOK OVER THERE IT'S GREEN LANTERN!!

Or maybe I just didn't play my cards right.

Don't Mess With the Suicide Doors

Today was a big day in the world of The Saturn, aka The Red Rocket, better known as The Only Car I've Owned That Has Yet to Be Towed Out of This World in a Fiery, Smoke-Filled Coffin of Misery: we hit the 100,000 mile mark.

I say "we" because I consider myself an integral part of this effort, as any other driver/owner of the Rocket probably would have let those weary wheels rest on occasion over the four years of service, whereas I made the machine stand in constant vigilance, ever ready for a last-minute jaunt up the East Coast or an ill-advised navigation through a roadside drainage system.

I am not entirely responsible for the mileage since the car came into my possession in July 2004 with a little more than 9,000 miles on it. It was found sitting idle in a Volkswagen lot in Monmouth County, New Jersey on Independence Day, a hastily agreed upon replacement for the much (and, by the end, deservedly) maligned Celica. Anyone from back in those days remembers the slow parade of atrophy and decay that was the final days of The Celica, when mirrors, knobs and other parts fell off with the disturbing grievance of a leprosy patient, until it hemorrhaged in a horrible fit on the Beltway, spewing unidentified liquids all over the windshield, finally gasping its final choked breaths on the exit ramp and coming to a final stop in front of the New Carrollton Metro station. There it sat overnight, where, upon my return in the morning to pay my respects and collect belongings, I discovered it had been towed.

My options, as interpreted from the comments from the supremely helpful and not at all condescending towing company employee were:
A) Pay the $100 towing fee, plus the rapidly mounting $70 per day storage costs to retrieve the car
B) Pay the $100 towing fee, hand over the title to the car and sign the corpse over the towing company
C) A Celica? What the hell is a Celica? Who is this? How did you get this number? Stop calling me! Hello? *Click*

Assuming there is no warrant for my arrest in Prince George's County, Maryland right now, I think I made the right choice.

I did the math real quick: the mileage put on the Saturn since that July works out to an average of 59.2 miles a day. This is the equivalent of driving from Beachwood, NJ to Philly every day; or from Hilton Head Island to Yemassee, which, as everyone knows, is practically the City of Brotherly Love of South Carolina (replace "brotherly" with "steak" and "love" with "get your gas, karaoke, alcohol, dinner and line dancing in the same establishment").

Yet the car has held together well, save for one unfortunate accident last year that crumpled the front of it like a paper doll on US 278 (for the record: my car — looked like a piece of stepped-on Play-Doh thrown on the street. Mammoth SUV in front of me — tiny hole in the bumper. Guess which driver freaked out more). Plus, there's that bizarre problem that causes the car not to start for upwards of 20 minutes on occasions when the temperature drops over night. This of course only happens when I'm alone, and never, not once, not even a little bit, when there's a mechanic within 400 yards of the vicinity. I left it at the mechanic all day one Friday last year to see if he could spot the problem. Said he tried it several times throughout the day, and it started fine. When I went to pick it up an hour later after he had already gone home, I could hear engine laughing at me as it refused to turn over. This has led me in my amateur mechanic's training to diagnosis the problem as a terminal case of VPJ (Vindictive Poltergeist Jerkdom).

Major feats of endurance have included: three nine-hour trips to College Park in one year; one drive to New Jersey; two to Orlando; several to Raleigh; miscellaneous others to Asheville, Atlanta, Gainesville, Annapolis, Myrtle Beach and way way waaaay too many to Bluffghanistan on a near daily basis.

The single worst drive of my life happened inside the claustrophobic bosom of the Saturn, where she and I forever cemented our bond of the open road. It was on the way back from a trip out to Coachella in 2005. In booking this trip, blinded by an utter inexplicable commitment to camaraderie and conquering distance, I decided to fly out of BWI with festival buddy SteveChris. This involved driving up to Maryland after work, arriving in the middle of the night, getting a sparse two hours sleep on a hard Commons couch, then heading to the airport for a weekend under the stern eye of the 100-degree California desert sun. Then we took an overnight flight back east, landed at 1 a.m., and I was bound to my ridiculous scheme of driving back to South Carolina. For work that morning. At 9 a.m. Ah, to be young and dumb.

During that long, lonesome, death march down I95, I knew madness. It emerged from the corners of every wood-paneled, smokey truckstop store in Virginia, where women inexplicably unbothered by the hands pointing to 4 a.m. on the Winston clock overhead pumped coins into slot machines I weren't sure were entirely legal; it was stocked on refrigerator shelves next to over sized, violently labeled bottles of what alleged to be energy drink that contained no evidence that their existence was known to federal health officials; it rode out of the radio on the waves of static penetrating the silence of North Carolina, somewhere just out of range of sunrise when I started chain smoking black box American Spirits just to threaten my body into remaining awake. I crossed a bridge and nearly let the madness win; trees were downed across the road and I began to swerve the Saturn in my harassed conscious state. Only they weren't trees — it was shadows, conspiring with my tiredness to resemble shape and menace.

I made it back home in a miserable state, still smelling like the inside of a pup tent warmed over with the stew of hipster sweat resin and the crunchy, dry desert air. I collapsed for the blessed relief of a nap. And, despite it all, I still made it to my meeting and wrote my story for the day.

All thanks to one dedicated Saturn who wouldn't give up on me, even in the darkest night, when the darkness of that terrible highway nearly overcame me. Also, it's got sweet suicide doors, which have yet to kill me, and are featured prominently in at least one Kanye song.

Thanks Saturn, and here's to 100,000 more.

(Um, but I'm hopeful it's not with me. I mean, gas engines? Still? Let's get a move on it, inventors. That's the real American Spirit we need.)

You'll Only Read This Post Because You Hate It

It's fun to pick on the hipsters. Go on, try it --- follow one of them from your local PBR dispensary as they bike down to the farmer's market to cram their messenger bag full of local, organic groceries while listening to an album leak on their iPod by a band you can't even pronounce. See, good fun, right? If you're a hipster yourself, you can still do this, because the Hipster Code of Irony requires that at no point you recognize the value of the subculture you're a part of, or that you at any point are actually part of a subculture. This is alternately known as the "I Only Wear This T-Shirt Because I Hate It" Theorem.

The bashing of hipsters (like any other predictable subset of society; see also "Dude Where's My Boat?" style) is pretty much ever-present, and, truth be told, often times warranted. Example: the grounds of Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2006, watching girls attempt to out-hipster each other with increasingly oversized sunglasses so large I swear I saw one girl lose balance and take a face plant into a pile of Parliament butts.
Example of when it's not warranted: summer of 04, Barry Schwartz and I going to get tickets for Ted Leo at The Black Cat in DC. As we walked up, the big metal door rolls up and a man looking like Iggy Pop, except more bedraggled, standing behind the door stuck his hands up to his forehead to shield his face from the sun, the brightness of which was clearly causing himself some discomfort. "F---ing good morning," he murmured, shrinking back into the darkness of the club. Barry and I looked at our watches — it was 6 p.m. Barry and I shared a look of awe that said simply: "Punk rock."

The problem is, no one in the history of time has ever actually admitted to being a hipster. Doing so would be so completely anathema to the idea of hipster they'd probably take away your Soulseek account immediately. The term is so nebulous that it's applied to anyone who wears tight shirts, or anyone who is mildly cynical about pop culture. In practice, it's such a big tent that anytime someone criticizes hipster culture, it's usually just representative of the other end of the spectrum. "I can pick on your tight jeans because I don't wear them, even though I have a blog I use to cynically tear apart other people." Snark begets snark and the snake keeps eating its tail. Until the tail becomes part of the mainstream culture. Then that snake is sooo over it.

So that's why the following is kind of ridiculous. Adbusters, that anti-commercial publication that costs $6 and is usually buried deep in the Barnes and Noble rack way behind Out Magazine and The Woman Astronomer, ran a cover story this month titled "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization." The article breaks down the hipster culture into tiny bite-sized caricatures resembling a Webster's definition of the term. Surely Adbusters would be up in arms if another publication took such reductionist liberties describing the anti-capitalist movement.

Author Douglas Haddow writes:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

and:

But it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it.

This leads to the question: if the people behind Adbusters aren't hipsters, then who the phuck is? If the people who disdain every single element of commercial culture (including Chucks, the fundamental element of any hipster wardrobe) and shun the mainstream aren't paragons of the most elite form of hipsters, then no one is.

In reality, the reason hipster as a classification is so loathed — yet so lacking in self-identified membership — is that it's a lazy way to describe anyone who took a sharp left turn when everyone else was funneling into the mainstream classroom line. Is there a term for the people behind Adbusters (asides from pinkos, anarchists and, um, boundless contrarians)? Not really. Is there a term for people who dress in thrift store clothes because it's cheaper, not because it mimics the Urban Outfitters look? Not yet. And what about Chucks? CAN'T I JUST LOVE MY CHUCKS AND BE DONE WITH IT?!?! Apparently not.

The point is, hipster isn't a defined spectrum of tastes with specific ingress and egress points, like how metalhead is framed somewhere between Cemetery Gates and rabid, Ozzfest-canceling violence. The term hipster has a starting point — somewhere around anti-commercialism, admittedly traversing a predictable style of iron-on irony that gets copied in MTV2 videos — but without a final terminus. It kinda spans eternally to the side, taking in all the tattooed, wanderlust freaks and all the kids searching for cosmic meaning at the bottom of an iPod playlist, snarking at one another for acting too much the part in the meantime. Every now and then, they all meet up at Mousetrap at the Black Cat and pretend, just for one night, that being young and interesting and intelligent isn't a reason not to dance with a stranger. They're free for the moment to make a sincere request to, just this once, hear "Modern Love" twice in one night.

Not that all this ranting means I consider myself a hipster. I would never stoop so low.

If You Can't Take the Heat, Get Your Ass off the Main Stage

(As originally appeared in The Guide, 6/20/08) — You will never, ever hear anyone say the following sentence: “I just returned from a summer music festival and the temperatures were absolutely amenable. I kept a light shawl by my side at night and sipped cocoa at night under the stars. I smelled lovely each day.”
If you meet this person, punch them, as they are lying to you.
Summer music festivals are required to be hot. This is, I’ve come to learn, because the festivals are actually organized and run by a secret underground joint cabal of bottled water and Port-A-Potty companies, who have been lining their pockets with your sweaty cash since the first Woodstock.
More likely, you’ll soon cross paths with one of the 80,000 people who attended Bonnaroo in rural Tennessee this past weekend. They’ll be easy to spot, as they’ll be wearing a tattered Ratdog 1996 tour T-shirt (RIP JERRY!), most likely because they sweated through half their wardrobe last week, using the other half to wipe mud off their wineskins, treat injuries suffered while twirling in a circle for three hours straight and repairing hula hoops.
The heat is as much a staple of summer festivals as the overpriced food and the collective and potent crowd fragrance, commonly referred to as “Eau d’Pleaseshower.” Case studies from my own personal files:

1. Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, 2004: Average temperature: 101 degrees. Lesson: the way to get free water is to pass out on the grounds from heat fatigue, as our friend Ally did.
2. Austin City Limits, 2005: Top temperature: 108 degrees (seriously). Consequences: The parched earth turned against the festivalgoers by the last day, kicking up a dust storm that led some to walk around in medical masks like the park was the scene of a SARS epidemic. Lessons: Texas has a beer called “Lonestar” that somehow tastes better when mixed with dirt.
Bonnaroo — which started in 2002 and initially focused on jam bands and other Grateful Dead wannabes but has since expanded to include indie, mainstream and folk acts and is quickly turning into the king of North American fests — is designed to ensure you are the dirtiest hippie that has ever lived by the end of Day One. The festival scoffs at your attempts at preparedness: “Oh, young professional with a salary, 401(k) and iPhone, you think you’re better than Patchouli McHempants here? Well, take this! 98-degree days without a shower in sight! Then, a torrential downpour during the act you really wanted to see (My Morning Jacket)! Now, walk five miles back to your campsite through the mud and don’t come back without a bandana, hippie.”
So with all of this heat, copious free samples of Eau d’Pleaseshower and the general endurance test that is four days of rock festival, it’s understandable why the Kanye West Incident turned into such a low point for all the Boos in Bonnarooville.

The Kanye West Incident, if you missed Page 3, involved the Higher-Education-Hating One’s failure to take the stage until the absurd hour of 4:30 a.m., precisely the time the sun comes up in Tennessee and all the guys dressed like spacemen and the girls in cat costumes turn back into pumpkins.
The show was decent, but Kanye never addressed the crowd: not an apology, not a thanks, not even a “What’s up, Bonnaroo?” (and then he skimped on an encore). The spawned a sizable anti-Kanye movement the following day, which continues unabated on the Internet to this day.
That says a lot. The masses can handle the heat, the mud, the sub-civilized living conditions. But we’ll take the heat over an unchecked ego. At least the sun comes back for an encore.