Tuesday, September 16, 2008

No one played Rock You Like a Hurricane - but they did play Purple Rain

There’s something woefully decadent about sitting out under a big tent during a Midwest version of a hurricane, listening to cover bands playing MTV Hits of the 80s as kids dangle from large rubber bands in the rain.

Never mind that people in the Chicago area were having their belongings float away as we partied. You would have thought it was New Orleans, but for the tunes.
 
Why can’t I get just one kiss? You give love a bad name, so I may as well jump  - or be sedated. The words all blurred together as I traded in my orange tickets for brew. And it all was innocent fun until a cigar just about did me in Saturday night. Booze I can handle. The culprit was a thick stogie: Try taking a drag on one in 100 percent humidity. See where it gets you. Wuss that I am, it sent my head spinning. I needed air, on a night when the air was made of water.
 
I may have been suffering from fest fatigue brought on by two nights at the same event, the Heritage Fest in West Dundee. With the remnants of Hurricane Ivan mixing it up with other funky fronts, there wasn’t much else to do but stay close to home and hope the river didn’t spill out of its banks like so much wasted Bud Light.
 
At all these fests there now seems to be a food version of the carnie set, a group of vendors with similar signage working the circuit offering up 10-inch sausages, Chinese chicken on a stick and other delicacies that go well with alcohol served in plastic cups.  Alas, there’s less local even at local festivals – but more teeth and better hygiene.
 
And since people who are in their 30s and 40s are the core audience for this sort of suburban fling, the music typically is from their youth – meaning less Beatles and some Beastie Boys and maybe Brown Eyed Girl - and in one case a band fronted by a guy who looks like Beck on a bender, playing these Video Killed the Radio Star oldies. I call this White People Wedding Reception Music. I should put out the box set or whatever that would be called in download world.
 
Hell, one band covered Madonna’s Like a Virgin and George Michael’s Faith – so, naturally, being the American Idiot I am, I had to semi-drunk dial a friend who likes both and hold the phone up so he could hear them in Chicago. I am that kind of pal.

Since you can't really hear the people whom your with - and since I was in no mood to leave my cake out or stand in the rain, lest my T-shirt get wet and my nipples hard, as when I was in my Flash Dance phase - it became almost Zen like to be under the tent. That could have been the tobacco talking, but I went into that scary place where you think all your thoughts are deep ones.

My mantra (or movie poster tag line): In a corrupt world, ruled by the inane, and you might as well make up your own rules.

Was that inspired by hearing Billie Jean, the song that launched the psycho superstar phase of the smooth (as in he removed his body hair) criminal, Michael Jackson? Or was it due to another weird week at a company where the former owner is serving time for absconding with millions of dollars?

That's a mere pittance, a drop in the billions buckets involved in the ponzi schemes being "uncovered" on Wall Street. Now everybody is coming out of the woodwork saying, "I told you so." But everyone wanted in on the ridiculous mortgages being given to people no one thought would be paid back, but no big deal, we'll just bundle 'em sell 'em and make 'em someone else's problem. No when to fold 'em, indeed. The government will be there with welfare checks for the wealthy.

It happened with the Dot-Com days and it will probably happen again with the impending Alt-Energy craze. No one wants to really make anything anymore, they just want to win the lottery and move into a house they still can't afford. Money makes you drunk and you wind up putting lipstick on a pig and you're so out of it you still wind up kissing its ass.

I hope the "I don't believe in evolution or dinosaurs friend" of Sarah Palin don't see this.

So much for the high road this time, eh? So much with a campaign that focuses on the issues. So much for two guys who seemed like good guys succumbing to the id of politics.I just wish they would get right to the meat of it with the ads: McCain - he's old. Obama - he's black.

No wonder the poor little guy with the crewcut I saw by the beer table was having trouble deciding whom to vote for. He's just an American kid doing the best he can.

Yeah, all this was going through my Bon Jovi- addled brain, my John Cougar Melon Head. And yes, the one band ended its set with Purple Rain.

Flash forward to late Tuesday afternoon - I noticed someone dented the front bumper on the passenger's side of my car. It probably happened over the weekend, and I, being oh-so-observant, didn't notice because I don't usually look at the front of my car, approaching it from the rear most times.

I bring this up because I left out an essential part of my mantra: You can make up your own rules as long as you don't hurt anyone else. With the music playing so loud these days, it's pretty damn easy for all of us to change them up and to sing along - "as long as you don't get caught."

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Festering again - with jazz, oysters, Germans and dino-rock

Just a week ago, I was alone in a crowd at Grant Park in Chicago, splayed on a lawn trying to listen to genius jazzman Ornette Coleman play his sax among the din of yuppie conversations. I moved closetr to the stage to get a better hear, the postcard I bought earlier from a beggar in my back pocket. That was to make up for not buying the guy with the kid who was looking for food for him and his kid anything. Hey I couldn't find a McDonald's close by, and I was in a naive, giving, tourist mood.

Sometimes you have to fest by yourself. Other times, the fest comes to you.

For this weekend, for whatever reason, complete strangers were coming up to me and starting conversations.

Maybe I looked bold and sexy wearing my White Sox jersey on the North Side to the Guinness Oyster Fest in Roscoe Village.

Eating raw oysters has a slight potential to cause hepatitis. But since I don't recall that being a question they ask people who give blood, I figured what the hell? Maybe Irish beer kills the germs.

I did have to listen to a Dave Matthews tribute band, which was sort of scary as the lead singer was a method actor type and would not break character between songs, talking in a voice that sounded like the mush mouthed Matthews. And sort of oddly fitting to hear this band at a fest honoring animals found in brackish water as Matthews' tour bus once dumped crap into the Chicago River.

The band had its own groupie, a 30ish blonde woman who automatically turned into a bad dancer, flailing about and whooping it up to every noodling violin solo, her pants marching, crashing into tripping Billy...oh make your own damn joke. More amusing was a woman in a weird pink, punk ballerina skirt who bent over to pet a dog revealing a pair of red underwear.

And a middle aged gay couple came over to share the scant table space with me and a pal, offering extra oysters for the room. Never one to turn down free eats, I had two, upping my raw total to 14 and my total oyster intake to 20 (six of the cooked, Rockefeller genre). Per what I mentioned before, if you were thinking of having sex with me, this alone should rule out that thought - for several reasons, actually.

Next it was German Fest in Lincoln Square, where Canadian beer, Labatt's, was considered a domestic, and where it was $10 for a big plastic stein of it. Here the Sox jersey worked its magic twice, once with a nice woman in line for a sausage of some sort, who talked baseball with me until we learned the line was way shorter at the booth just 20 feet from where we stood.

Next was a guy in lederhosen and sunglasses who also wanted to talk baseball and to share his big line for the weekend about wanting to go to caribou hunting with Sarah Palin. What a hoot! And where do you look when you are talking to a guy in lederhosen without wanting to laugh. I mean, you look like an oversized Pinocchio.

In fact, trad German party clothes are way more fabulous than those of my people. Sure, you can look like you've been in your grandma's closet - or like an ugly Catholic school girl - if you put on a kilt and don't know what you are doing (example: this guy with Phil Donahue hair who was emcee at the Fox Valley Irish Fest Friday night, who tucked his tie dyed t-shirt into his man skirt). But if you do wear it well, well hell, you could front a metal band - or bounce at a leather bar.

That is way more butch than German carnival clothes, which look like something out of Liberace's closet.

Speaking of over the top performers, next up on my round o' fests was happening upon a horrible Led Zeppelin cover band, which I hated because: they had a freaking drum solo!; the quartet collectively weighed 250 pounds; they were wearing Steve Nicks' old wigs.

The band was at a free concert for the Boys and Girls Club of Elgin fundraiser, the Duck-a-palooza, so named because they have one of those duck drawings. Please, let's have a moratorium on calling anything a "palooza."
And on Zep tributes. Or tribute bands of any sort.

I was waiting for an actual blues band, not cock rock from the 70s warmed over - which would make it Viagra metal. Fittingly, the port-o-john I used was coated in Jon Bonham style vomit. As I wiped my shoes on the grass, a straight couple started a conversation. One of their friends had the same crappy crapper experience and somehow we bonded over this and over the fact I looked like a lot of the dude's buddies. But let's be honest. Who doesn't have an orc with a goatee and a shaved head as a pal these days?

They were actually there to see the fake Zepsters, and sort of invited me to head out to the bars of Elgin with them. But deep down I knew I don't rock like they do, and politely bowed out. I mean I would have probably wound up with another piercing, a raunchy tattoo or two, some blow in my glove compartment and some dead hookers.

Plus, I was supposed to go to Ikea Sunday - I mean, out on my Harley.

So we heard one more band and gave up before the headliner took the stage, leaving the 75 or so people in the park to dodge drizzle without us.

I was home by 10:30 and all fested out - at least until next Saturday.

GOPer broke

Here's what I learned from watching GOP week.

1. Republicans are better at being mean and sarcastic than Democrats are. Democrats are better at being smarmy.

2. The GOP has lost its edge in convention production values. They used to put out the spread, but this time the Democrats had the pizzaz.

3. McCain's subtext is very Batman: Obama is the hero you want, McCain is the hero you need.

4. Sarah Palin looks like one of those women from an 80s or 90s hair metal bands who played a teacher or librarian - the took off her glasses, let her hair down, and danced on her desk. If she would have kissed Cindy McCain, now that would have sealed the deal on the frat boy vote. If McCain had kissed Palin's hunky husband, well, now, that would have been maverick.

No pussyfooting around here with the sexism - none of that, what the hell is someone who had five kids, including a Down syndrome baby and a pregnant unmarried teen daughter doing running for VP. Going right for being a pig here.

5. White people should not be allowed to dance in public, especially ones who are openly Republican.

6. What the hell is a maverick anyway? And if you have been in Washington since the 80s, WTF?

7. If you are a Democrat, don't go on Bill O'Reilly's show unless you really know how to play in the the twilight zone. David Lettermen is the only guy I have seen who knows hot to handle him, and Obama is not programmed that way. I love how O'Reilly has to break his Obama interview into segments. This allows him to bring out conservative blonde Hooters girls to rip on him (no subtext there, eh?). This basically is saying his audience has short attention spans and has to be spoon fed the talking points. O'Reilly would have been fun to watch had he been around in the 1950s.

8. McCain seemed more comfortable one on one on Face the Nation than he did in front of his own party. So much for the hostile, liberal press, eh?

9. If race is no longer an issue, why the lack of blacks or Hispanics at the GOp convention?

10. What the hell is abstinence education? And how much do you think they are paying the baby daddy?