Ithica Is Many Things To Many People

Ithica is, as of today, nothing to me. I've never been there. A friend of mine went to college there, but I don't know anything about the place.

Yesterday I saw three Ithica t-shirts.

The first one I saw near my apartment. It said "Ithica is Gangsta." I giggled as I walked by the guy. Gangsta? Really? Or is Ithica trying to convice itself that it's gangsta because it sits in the shadow of NYC and Buffalo and Rochester and just about every other city in this state that has more than three traffic lights? I've seen this little-big-city complex before, in my hometown of Sacramento. This is a city with so few quality hotel rooms it can't host major sporting events like the NCAA Final Four. It has a small, decently cultured downtown area but from there expands for miles in all directions (not so far west, but the other three) in a sprawl of freeways, offramps, housing tracts and strip malls. Pavement's line about "every building same height, every street a straight line" was about Stocktown, a city south of I-5 from Sacramento, but it applies to Sacramento's suburbs, too. It has one pro sports team. It's restaurants aren't the best in the state. The weather is, for California standards, very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. Films aren't filmed there. No TV show since "Eight is Enough" has been based there. San Francisco is 90 miles away and laughs at Sacramento's redneck sensibilities. LA didn't even know Sacramento was there until the Kings beat the Lakers a few times. San Diego couldn't care less. The beach is two hours away. Skiing is two hours away. That's Sacramento's calling card, it's rationalization for civic pride: "Sacramento: We're Close to a Lot of Things." Close, but no cigar.

The next Ithica shirt I saw was at PS1, where I spent the afternoon listening to Francois K and Derrick May and throwing down plastic cups of Brooklyn Brewery's finest. The shirt said "Ithica is Gorges." Are there Gorges in Ithica? Did the Ice Age leave this city with a geological wonder? I wasn't aware.

Then also at PS1 I saw one that said "Ithica is Cold." No shit. If NYC is cold--and to me it's plenty cold--then living in Ithica has got to feel like laying naked on sheets of ice during a snowstorm. But why put that on a shirt? So it's a cold place. Don't say that to a Canadian lest you'll be laughed at. The shirt would be better if it added something like "Brrrr" at the end. "Ithica is Cold. Brrrr." To me that's funny.

I've gotta get me one of them Ithica shirts.

Seems Shorter Every Year

Are you telling me we had a summer? I remember a few brief phases of heat and humidity, but the last few months were more prayer and uncertainty than anything else. Is it going to rain? When is the oppressive staggering heat going to attack my body and put a sweaty vise grip between both temples? The summer was more calm than storm, more waiting for the sweat than actual sweat.

There's a chance, though, we could get a few equitorial days before fall brings long sleeves and premature scarves. Hopefully it will come next week during the RNC. I'd give the chance of riots a 50% less chance if it's simply too hot to riot. Heat, for once, could really save the citizens of New York from a lot of heartache.

So I'll wait, expecting one last climatic hurrah before the seasons change. When I was young, a friend's father--a former pro boxer--would often offer to give us $20 if we "took it in the gut." I never had the, er, guts. Those who did were forced to stand, waiting, nervous, while his father clenched his fist, put the other hand on the kid's shoulder and told him to relax, all the while waiting for those abdominal muscles to relax. He took his time, held his fist a mere three or four inches from the jittery kid's gut. Waiting brought anxiety, then calm. Just when you thought he wasn't actually going to punch him, that huge fist pushed forward like an atomic shockwave blowing through drywall. Some fell to the ground and turned white...though $20 richer.

Summer's meaty fist is near New York's gut and we're becoming less tense about the weather. Will that fist push forward?

Brief But Great Moments in Music

When Dee Dee Ramones sings back up on "Judy is a Punk." He comes in for the words "ice capades." I love it.

The way Travis' Fran Healy softly extends the last syllable in the word "seventeen" in the song "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"

The guitar interplay on Television's "See No Evil."

These Guided By Voices lyrics: "Buzzards and dreadful crows, necessary evils I suppose."

Pretty much any note sang by Sam Cooke.

More to come...

What Would Williams Safire Write?

Technology has a way of changing how people talk, how they write, how often they talk, how often they write.

I was out of the country for most of 2001. While gone, I had missed out on a lot of news, movies and music. And technology. One day, probably a few days after I was back in California, I was at a gas station filling up my mother's second, "weekend" car (mine "only" car was sold before I left). There was a woman behind me, on the other side of the gas pump, and she was talking to herself. No big deal, I thought. Every city has its mentally handicapped. So we have a few here. Or maybe she's simply the type of person to have conversations with herself.

Then I saw that she was holding a cell phone in one hand and pumping gas with her free hand. A thin black cord went from her cell phone to her ear. Below the ear was a small round nub that housed the microphone into which she spoke. Now, this is near the end of 2001, and I'm sure that these headsets had existed well before the end of 2000 outside of McDonald's drive-in windows and other places people talked and needed two free hands. But I guess I had never seen one before that day, because from 75 feet I would have bet $100 she was having a conversation with her imaginary friend.

When I moved to New York City a few months later, I would often play a game with myself: "On a Cell Phone or Schizophrenic?" Hard to tell from a distance if a guy dressed in modest clothing and looking quite normal was talking to himself (or voices, or whatever) or if he had a cell phone ear piece and microphone dangling from his inner ear. It took a few months to grow accustomed to people talking into thin air. Loudly.

Today, a 50-year-old man who works for one of my accounts spelled the word "cool" as "kewl" in an IM conversation. How phoenetic of him! I was taken aback because I never would have thought someone in his 50s would adapt to technology in such a way. After all, I still spell out words and use--for the most part--proper grammar in emails and IM. Plenty of younger people spells it "kewl" and I always took it to mean that the younger generation cared less about spelling that the older generations. Short cuts are acceptable because time is money, everybody is in a rush, so why take the long route and bother spelling words correctly? Spelling is for parents.

But "kewl" isn't a short cut. It's the same number of letters as "cool" and arguably more difficult to type since "cool" benefits from a repeating "o," so it's really like three keystrokes rather than four.

Blogs are commonplace, and text messaging is nearly ubiquitous these days, and so shortcuts and cute misspellings will surely make their way into American lexicon and stay there for good. Williams Safire probably won't use the spelling "kewl" any time soon, though.

Bowery Boys

Perhaps the fire marshall should stop by the Bowery Ballroom the next time the Killers perform, to help thin out the crowd. I'm not sure what the "official" capacity is for that joint, but it's safe to say it was as close to oversold as we're ever going to get. I came in a few songs late. Website said the show started at 10:15, I was in line no later than 10:25--but walking over from Welcome to the Johnsons, where the pre-show Pabsts were being thrown down at a good clip, I wasn't worried because the Bowery is always running at least 15 minutes late. But not last night. The show must have started right on time. Those all ages shows, I'll tell ya. Mom and Dad don't want to be left waiting in the wagon while the band is plugging away on stage.

Here's the amazing part: the show was over at 11pm. The encore--THE ENCORE--was over at 11pm. So my prediction before the show was a 70 minute set. 70 minutes max, with an encore or two, lots of chatting between songs to stretch things out. A band like that, with sweaty, young, adoring women lining the stage, could engage their loving fans and kill some time, I'd think. The band has one album, one short album at that, and I couldn't imagine them playing any cover songs. And the kids would want to hear the hits, so they're not going to go Husker Du and play a bunch of new songs that will be on their next album. I figured 70 minutes because I didn't think any headlining band with a current hit record--and growing--had the sack to play less that 70 minutes.

If there's one thing I learned about the Killers, it's that they have some nerve. Sass. Sack. Call it what you want. I'd have thought a band that played to a faithful Bowery crowd would walk off stage in bullet-proof vests if the set dipped under 70 minutes. Under 60 minutes and they would need to hire security guards. But under 50 minutes? That's so cocky that I downright admire them for it.

So how was the show itself? Pretty good, not great. Almost great, but the Killers' songs are better than their stage act. They've got a bit of stage presence but looked to be going through the motions. It went song-short break with no words spoken-song-song-a moment to rest without talking to the crowd-song-song you get the picture. By the book. No improv. Very by the numbers...which isn't exactly bad, that's not what I'm saying. But they played it safe. In the end, the songs won out. They could have stood up there like Kraftwerk in quicksand and I would have liked the show, because the songs are good. And that's what matters most.

Highlight of the show: the "ooh ooh" in the bridge of "Somebody Told Me" was sampled. You know those little "ooh ooh"s right after he sings "Bring it back down, bring it back down tonight"? Yeah, those were sampled. Nice, Killers, you're using sampled backing vocals rather that stick a few mouths up to the four vocal microphones that were on stage.

Oh, and the drummer roxx. That guy makes the band.

Rawkin' at Randall's Island

I know a lot of Strokes fans. Rabid Strokes fans. Only one of them was at the Little Steven's International Garage Rock Festival on Saturday. Just one. It wasn't a Strokes crowd.

Julian, singer of the city's favorite band not named Interpol, who is looking rather puffy these days, was getting heckled by some people behind me. The first time the guy called him a "fat ass" it was pretty funny. After all, Julian's snug black pants left little to the imagination--though the head Stroke left on his jacket in a possibly attempt to cover up a bloated midsection. But by the fourth "fat ass" and the second "have another donut" the joke was old. Damn repeater. Jules didn't hear, and if he heard he wouldn't have cared. The guy was blitzed. Blotto. Staggering over cables and monitors like an ex-sorority girl struggling to get from the velvet rope to the cab without breaking a heel.

The Strokes were tame compared to the NY Dolls before them and the Stooges after them. Iggy's hyperactive strutting and general mayhem played counterpoint to Puffy Julian's inebriated aloofness. Even Mike Watt, over there on the left, was ten times more lively than any Stroke, and Watt's from mellow San Pedro. You'd expect him to be the calm, flat-footed one. The Strokes were damn near shoegazers...but they rocked. Good tunes always win out over dancing around the stage.

Stooges, oh the Stooges. So timeless. The blueprint for decades of rock and roll. A few generations down the line it's been watered down and a few bad mutations have made their way into rock's gene pool, so it was a treasure to see the Stooges show what dangerous music is all about. Yes, dangerous. They have danger. Gimme danger.

Did I mention that the revolving stage broke a few hours into the show and the audience was subject to the worst MC'ing this side of David Faustino. Kim Fowley, who used to matter to somebody of some importance, manned the mic most often. Brutal, just brutal. When he handed the mic over to the loud-mouthed singer for the Paychecks (sic, hehe) is was even worse. Raspy-voiced garage band singer from D-Town in a sleek black dress, that day was her rock and roll prom, I guess, her big coming out party. But what a Courtney Love wannabe. Not musicially, not professionally. She was copping her annoying personality, the idiotic blurting, the drunken sobriety, the is-it-calculated? bitchiness, the fake Tourette's.

On occasion somebody would pass the mic to a go-go dancer. Did I mention that stage was semi-circled by go-go dancers? Yeah. Anyway, these girls had all the great commentary of wasted sophomores screaming into a "Girls Gone Wild" camera at South Padre Island. How many times did were we asked if we were ready to rock, if we were ready to party, if we were having a fucking good time? Then they'd scream something. "Yeeeeah!" "Paaaarty!" "I'm wasted!" You'd have thought we were at a Warrant concert in 1986 by all the brainless party time blather coming from the stage.

At one point, while a go-go dancer was embarassing herself and her family and probably her circle of friends, a friend turned to me and asked, "Doesn't she realize everybody in this crowd were the kids who hated cheerleaders in high school?"

Exactly. Keep the cheerleading off the main stage. Don't tell us that we're gonna get rocked, gonna get rolled and we're gonna have a good time. Just bring out the bands and shut your cake holes.

Another way to waste time while the stage crew set up equipment was to run down all the bands we were about to see. The Detroit Talking Machine did a lot of that. You're gonna see the Strokes. You're gonna see Big Star. You're gonna see the Stooges. Iggy and the Fucking Stooges, man. Iggy. Yeah, we (I'm speaking on behalf of the crowd, now) know. We know who we're hear to see. We've seen the line-up. We know the important of these bands. That's why we're here. We bought tickets, and we probably know more about these bands than you do.

By the way, who was that douche who walked on stage, took the mic from stickman Fowley and said something like, "How come we've gone all day and nobody has mentioned the Velvet Underground?" Yeah! Instant cred for you, dude! So very instant!

If anybody bootlegged the show, I'd love to get a CD of all the between-sets talking. It would make for the worst comedy record of all time.

Number two...and counting

Ah, another blog. For "other" stuff. For nonsensical blather. For dirty words and half-secrets. For coming home drunk and writing whatever wants to come out.

Yeah, as if I have any more time for another blog. The "other" one takes up too much of my time. It's such a relationship, like having a girlfriend. A high-maintenance girlfriend who gets cranky if left untouched for more than four or five hours.

This should be a weekend of rest. I was out the last four nights. Didn't get home terribly late on any one night but there's only so much alcohol a person can take during the work week. Each night I'd swear on a six pack of Bibles that I was only going out for a little bit. Show my face. My my appearance. Then I'm out of there. Home. Gotta get some sleep. Gotta save some money--even $2 cans of Pabst can add up after a few hours.

But it never worked that way. I'd reach the 30-minute mark, realize I was having a good time, realize I was a little buzzed and then give the shoulders a shrug and say to myself, "Oh well, it's not like I need to get up that early in the morning." Or I may defer to my standard rationalization for excessive nightlife: I'm in New York City, so I'd better take advantage of it. If I lived in Des Moines I might as well get some sleep.

Sorry, people of Des Moines, but you're very often the opposite end of my spectrum. You're the far end of my mental bell curve. You're what I shouldn't be doing. New York is what I should be doing.