back to the culture.
I’m not exactly sure why I tuned in, perhaps just my morbid curiosity. Because it really has been a bummer watching former heroes try to hold on to the what once was of their faces with increasing desperation and futility, to the what once was of the past in fillers and lifts.
I was struck. Struck when I saw that their show has not changed a lick in twenty plus years. Gwen still beckoning the crowd to jump during “Different People” in the same way she did at the amphitheater in 2003, the same as the first show I saw of theirs at the Long Beach Civic two years prior to that. At first it felt to me sad, some artificial ploy. But then I found myself moved, my eyes misty seeing a crowd comprised of people that were likely not alive when Tragic Kingdom was released in 1995, jumping at Gwen’s direction, singing along with her.
Ploy or not, I will take this common thread over the rejoinder some of our older generations have been rightfully associated. A much better place to be, forever and always - screaming lyrics from a favorite band out to the heavens from the midst of a mosh pit with the young folk.
I have yet to get through a full listen of the new Taylor Swift album, the first one, non-surprise one. I don’t know, I got a few songs in and it started to feel so typical. Some white girl taking up an immense amount of space to talk about herself for an interminable amount of time. And by interminable I mean the length of this double album.
Continuing on my mainstream media apocalypse tour of destruction I have now cancelled both The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the case of the Post I no longer was willing to subsidize Bezos’ media venture at $4 a month, particularly given the yacht, the union busting, et cetera. He has enough money. I’m sure he is able to fund it himself. In the case of the Times my reasoning was two fold. Yes, they are the paper of record, all of the writing they do for the rich - pied a tier this, vacation home that, which house did they buy for one point eight mil?On top of which, it was just starting to feel like I was paying $4 a month to fund my own demise, given their coverage and editorials about trans people.
So fuck that, I subscribed instead to The Nation and Mother Jones.
Hilariously, I received this from The Post the next day.
Found books in Berkeley, one of the reasons I love living here, they comprise the most recent additions to my shelves. Of course I’ve found them in the myriad of Little Frees tucked here and about throughout the neighborhoods. So, too, you’ll find them in boxes on curbs or in boxes on steps. Sometimes, tossed on the shrubbery in front of a house.
This one from a Little Free, I’d not heard of this author before, Hector Tobar. It’s hard cover what caught my eye, initially - The Last Great Road Bum. It would be a blend of fiction and non, the author’s finishing what began as his subject matter’s work, written in longhand across thousands of pages of diary and manuscript. His name was Joe and he spent a couple of decades on the road, living a life he intended he’d write about later. He never did beyond those initial scribblings, his family left asking so many questions, attempting to fill in the mysteries of his life for themselves all of those years he lived away from them, so poignant to me for both of these reasons. I found myself weepy as I finished, sitting in the open box office at work, singing voices wafting out of the theatre, rehearsing the musical about to open.
In the days since the lost trip around the world my mother dreamed of taking me on after she’d hoped to recover from cancer, the dream of taking it up, of making this for myself the rest of my days.
we shall see we shall see
Another listen of Cowboy Carter as I’ve been writing this. Tis an interesting conversation, indeed…
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