Noughtie Pine Retrospect

So with everyone wrapping up with a focus on the decade that's yet-to-be named (no "me"-decade as much as a "Generation OMG" or if you're over 30, the "I'm Still here-read my tweets!!!" decade).  It is, as Carrie Fisher described in an interview "googling yourself w/out lubicrant" - we're self-obsessed and self-promoting, so this is the decade where everyone has a medium of some kind where they go and "address their public" or "the haters....
it's been surprising that I've managed to hold onto this blog for nearly 10 yrs (having lapsed only once to the dark recesses of Livejournal between 2005-2006).   Like all things, I tend to go emphatically for a few months, lose the momentum due to real-time issues (aka - "real life"), so I won't do what alot of bloggers are doing in a "best of" because technically - this isn't a 10yr anniversary.   However, I will highlight my own milestones this year (if it's any interest):

• Started this blog and proceeded to join every single social app that was ever marketed to me in an attempt to get me to connect, sell, hookup, or just say a random hello.   However, as of this date - I have not tweeted once.
• I have had a dichotomy of work technology (all PC) and home/pleasure (all MAC).  This year, I  buy an iPhone and bridge the two - I get work email on my phone and have become 'one of those people'.
  
• Traveled to 2 major continents - Asia (JP) and Europe (UK, DE), went to NY, Chicago, LA a few times.
• Watched the twin towers fall on TV - visited ground zero a year later.  Still wondering why we've this paranoid nation of PTSD officials using it to justify everything from wars to wiretapping.
• Inspired by Stephen Merritt - start a band w/my friend Lyle.  Doesn't quite take off.  But it was fun.
• I buy a condo during the "bubble" and have knocked on all wooden surfaces for good equity at some point down the line. 
• I see Seattle boom, bust, boom again.  I see Broadway go vacant, Pike/Pine go hetero, 12th street go yuppie.   I see the Pine/Belmont block implode but not until a 5 month party of decadence makes it mark (and smart bars like Pony and Bus Stop return).  I see Ballard become hip, Georgetown and Columbia City places I want to visit more than Capitol Hill. 
• I see my own hometown become more cosmopolitan - almost in a strange capraesque nightmare, but also in some progressive areas as well.
  
• After years of being a skinny minnie my metabolism kicks in somewhere in early naughties, I gain 20 lbs of post-relationship/beer weight and in 2006 make an attempt to reclaim my youth.  I slim down to 150 with 8% body fat. 
• I also use bicycling as a means to both relieve stress and acheive said body weight goal.
• I returned to my theatrical roots and started doing crazy, exhibitionist things like this.   
• I still marvel that we don't have flying cars and we're not colonizing mars like they did in the 2010 of Blade Runner.   That said I still do suspect we're living with robots who emote better than we do.

Acceptable Abuse Policies

My fave femigossip site, Jezebel, linked to this sad, but interesting article in the Guardian about the cyclical return to misogynistic lyrics/narratives in pop music. Deborah Finding has been tracking various memes in pop music over the last 50 years and found a disturbing trend that emerges every so often in the lyrics: some form of acceptable domestic abuse. She site's the early 60's Crystal's "He Hit Me (and it felt like a kiss)" as a jumping off point and then tracks the social awareness and political stance through to the 90's with Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos (etc), and then see's a recent re-emergence of the "Gosh - I was surely asking for it" narrative again from recent UK winners, Florence and the Machine in the Post-feminist era. If anything is a canary in the coal mine how we're doing socially - attitudes toward women are a warning sign that we're not empowering generations to realize this shit is bad: we tolerated Slim Shady in the early 0ughties. Ladies and Gentlemen: civil discourse has left the building.
And now we're seeing in addition to this an 11% increase in hate crimes in the US - not to overlap issues, but usually when there's hatin' on the ladies, there's sure to be hatin' on the queers as well. I won't be one of those greying hipsters who condems rap in one breath and then says' they embrace the irony in the second - no, because it's not just hiphop: it's pervasive in quite a few music genres. I won't be banning anyone soon - but I will - as Lady Gaga suggests, shout them down as much as possible.
I guess, as Jezebel suggests - one strategy is to take the song and recontextualize it. Kinda like Tori Amos did in "Bonnie and Clyde 97" where she reduces Eminem's misogynistic rap to creepy element: Eminem is f'd up and creepy. In a similar vein, we've got queerish Grizzly Bear covering "He Hit Me". This is questionable if they're recontextualizing the meaning or simply enjoying a song's 4-part harmony (*that was written by Carole King after learning that one of the Crystal's was in fact abused by her boyfriend). I don't know. You be the judge.

(BTW - Hole covered this a while back and it, uh, kinda... well - you know.)

Popular Resistance

File from a "Future that never happened" circa 1999 (as intrepeted from 1982): I love this video mashup of post-punk group Family Fodder's "Film Music" with a 1982 BBC sci-fi drama "Play for Tomorrow". The low-brow neutral patina of what is supposed to be a minimalist future (complete with a pop-history that is hyper-linked by flat screen TV's) is nothing short of a brilliant advertisement for youth rebellion as choreographed by American Apparel. Description of the short as follows:

Shades By Stephen Lowe. 1999 again: A tower block contains youths ‘bought off’ by the government, in a climate of microchip-created endless leisure, who experience (often pornographic) virtual reality-style fantasies by donning the titular ’shades’, until a 1980s theme party (they predicted that right, at least) leads to ideology and political thought seeping in under the dazed lifestyle.

How can you go wrong with wrap-around shades and a belted lame tunic, I ask?

Norman Rockwell Conquerors

The crispness in the air, the leaves changing and my civil rights are up for a vote in a few weeks. Gosh, I love fall. It really is great to have to remind the confused, out-of-touch voters in remote areas that Ref 71 has nothing to do with taxes or (god forbid) the children... And I can't tell you how much I trust the virtual hoards of these voters like I would if they were carrying torches and pitchforks. I'm picturing a Norman Rockwell mob here - a well-meaning lynch mob decked out in Pendleton wool plaids; civil, optimistic, and helping to start a bonfire where we're all chained... Gruesome, yes - but pastoral and in fall colors.
Sorry for the dark cynicism - but this whole thing is like the annoying children's game "Perfection" -- we run around plugging the oddly shaped pegs into manic small holes with seconds to pass, and then boom - our rights are thrown asunder and taken away and we're three steps back. I try to think bigger picture here - that maybe there is some paradigm shift around the corner where people realize it has nothing to do with them. That there is some point where where you're not the manifestation of years of dogma coming at you, that there might be a few more advances toward enlightenment. But then again, there are still people who believe in witchcraft and cosmic forces, so there you go... we've not advanced...

Flarts

The air is artificially crisp, movies are slower-paced, and the poly-wool blends are hitting the racks at H&M. That can only mean one thing - FALL ARTS (which I'm hoping to condense into a new phrase: FLARTS... workshop it around, etc). Flarts means more art than we can shake a stick at. Instead of foliage, we hibernate into big buildings with theme-shows... Like we have SAM anticipating "Target Practice", and who better to intro this but Paul McCarthy here in all his goeyness at SAM ... I share the same fascination with him as the Stranger, but alas, his talk is happening as I type this and had i known, i would have cut my cardio-20 minutes short and walked down there from the gym. Oh well. I can only hope they can stop things like this from happening:


Also - my perennial fave Ryan Trecartin has posted new videos from his Younger Than Jesus Show on UbuWeb. K-corea is bit too blond and shrill (but the themes are global credit which is both blond and shrill), but i do like the Sibling Topics (which you can tell he filmed at the PDX Eagle of all places).
Sibling Topics (section a) from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

Peel slowly...

Randomness (or this is how I spent my summer vacation while the world spun out of control...):

• 500 Pine Party - You can't return home. Even for a night. We've tried, but good attempt.

• Apparently , late-century art school transgressive passion is back in all it's androgynous Cate Blanchet fabulosity.
  

• But then again, so are hipster beer guts. No, No, no!!!

Idea for a reality TV series: Dinner Party Disorder - 2 people are given a mystery ingredient and a celebrity guest list. They are given one hour to clean their place and create a meal using the ingredient. They then have to entertain celebrities for approximately one hour. Merriment ensues. Guests leave. Last 20 minutes features the cleaning up in silence as waves of melancholy wash over the hosts.

• Ed Varga featured for Homo-a-go-go (*which I quasi-attended this year in SF) on Butt.
• Also featured - Sissy Nobby shows you how to do that thing (that i need to learn how to do by Saturday Night)...
• And while we're on the subject of freak dancing, is there such a thing as too much freak

Ways that my life currently resembles a Wes Anderson film:
Working out to Ziggy Stardust on my MP3 player next to a father and son in matching unitards.
Brightly colored zip covers on book jackets in Viet Wah.
The cab that takes me uptown.
A montage of various activities accomplished over the course of 3 months.
Ways that my life currently resembles a Hal Hartley film:
Repetition.

• You can buy shit from Tao Lin on eBay. Don't though - because he's going to teach us how to Shoplift from American Apparel soon enough.
• Finally - a lunatic fringe of our very own...
  

I lost it at the movies...

...to quote the late film critic Pauline Kael. Not that there's any major cultural void with the passing of John Hughes, however you can't deny that he recreated our teenage years (if you were part of last century) and had an impact on modern movie comedy. Time will only tell if he'll be seen as prolific as Capra (maybe - even with cheeze-doodle fare like Home Alone), but he did give us some moments and lines that still come out from time to time. Plus - his protagonists were usually those boho-80's nonconformists and freaks that we were at one time (Ducky does not fall from anyone's tree...) In any case - this is honor of the late mr Hughes, the BratPack mashup: