Century of Fakers

Ah, jeez, I guess I have to admit something. I like the Darkness (a waaaay over the top Queen-wannabe metal band that is huge in England right now). Actually, I just like this one song called "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." It's so stupid! The lead singer's totally ridiculous, with one of those voices that goes way high and shrill. He sings silly lyrics like "touching yoooooo/ touching meeeeee" with no apparent irony (or maybe lots, I can't tell anymore). The guitar solos are pretty tame, the production is so retro-glam, and the video's got a giant crab in it. I should be immune to things like this by now. And yet, here I sit, playing it over and over again, instead of the things I just bought at Amoeba.

[Brief digression: I always wonder what people buy when I see them with record store bags. I try to imagine what they got, and if it matches what they look like. Maybe I need to get a music store job, or any kind of job.]

Here's what I bought today:
Birdie's Triple Echo -- rainy day indie girl music that sometimes sounds perfect and other times sounds so utterly backboneless. Here's a funny review.
Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms -- Reissue of oddball 1970 folk album. Sounds like Sandy Denny tripping on brown acid.
Aerovons' Resurrection -- supposed to be the second or third or fourth coming of the Beatles, initially recorded in 1969 at Abbey Road. There's even a quote from Alan Parsons on the cover! Man, if you can trust anyone, it's Alan Parsons. Remember "Eye in the Sky"? Gold!
Sufjan Stevens' Greetings From Michigan -- kinda like a backwoods folk nice guy version of Elliott Smith. Shayde says Sufjan's going to blow up, despite the silly name. And if anyone should know, it's Shayde, since he's the super-nice used-cd buyer at Amoeba and the bassist in Kelley Stoltz's band. You should ask try this sometime: ask him if they have something used. He knows off the top of his head! You can keep your trapeze acts; I like me some indie music nerds.
M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts -- wow, this is some intense shit. Couple of Frenchies make waves of MBV noise with keyboards. I know I say this a lot but this is yet another great sex record.
Gene Simmons' 1978 solo record -- hey, don't laugh. I hate KISS as much as the next indie guy, but this album has a killer pop song on it, worthy of the Beatles or Badfinger. I won't tell you which one it is -- you'll have to buy the album and find out yourself.
The Bangles' All Over the Place -- thanks, Michele P, for the hot tip. Love that song, "James," and of course, "Going Down to Liverpool."

And now I must go listen to them all, so that I don't get bored of any one in particular.

I was just on the bus and overheard this 6'4" punk rock dude with a chartreuse mohawk squawking on his cell phone: "Batman's wife is pregnant and he's totally freaking out." Maybe it's just me, but I think that if anyone would be calm about his wife's pregnancy, it would be Batman. This guy totally needs a new nickname.

On the same ride, two men were talking about how hard their friend was, mostly because he drank his liquor straight.

"He's drinking the Hennessey all day long. Never any water."
"None."
"No water, nothing. I'd be cutting it with orange juice."
"Not him."
"Nope."
"He's at Sweet Willie's all the time, and it's flossing time."

I so want to know what "flossing time" is. Or when it is. You'd think it'd be first thing in the morning, while you shower, or late at night, after dinner. But I have a feeling it isn't.

I have been told lots of times -- and not just by homeless people soliciting change -- that I should smile more often. I guess I feel plenty happy on the inside but I don't look happy on the outside.

Maybe I should try to smile more. Or maybe I should just wear wigs more.

You never have to smile when you're wearing a wig. Everyone knows you're not serious. Like two years ago for Valentine's Day, when a bunch of us wore wigs and crashed a boring singles party in the Mission. Jake had a really long 'do that looked made of straw and had a ton of fake blood poured on it, Shana had on her dark red one that always attracted guys like cleavage, Chris wore his Strokes shag cut, I think I was wearing my Ramones wig.

And we saved that dull party. Suddenly all the button-down dudes and cocktail garbed gals had something besides the weather and their boring jobs to talk about. And all the weirder ladies flocked to us. Brent and I ended up going out to a bar with two gals, one of whom had just moved from Boston or New York (I can only recall her thick accent) and kept trying to sing Pink's "Get the Party Started" and the other one who tried to tell her friend to stop singing.

But then it came. That moment when the woman wants you to take off the wig. They always ask that. They want to see the real you. To discover your true self.

I hate that moment.

Because you can't hide anymore. You are what you are. And that's a scary thing.

I don't know if I can chronicle all the oddball folks I came in contact with this weekend in one blog entry. But I'll try. Oh, I'll try.

Friday, a bunch of us went to see the Bruce Haack documentary at the Oakland Metro. If you don't know about Haack, he was this electronic music pioneer in the '60s and '70s. He took a lot of drugs, built his own synthesizers, made bizarre children's music (with songs like "Chant for the Unborn" and "School for Robots"), and freaked out Mr. Rodgers. (The doc's clip from the show is totally surreal -- all the actors, including Mr. R, seem to be on different drugs.)

Haack's undoing appeared to be when he couldn't get his big opus - Haacula, a concept album about the blood-sucking nature of the music business - released by a major label. Go figure.

Naturally, the crowd was a little odd. The first questioner during the Q&A wanted to know the name of the film that we'd just watched! And then asked the name of the Swedish short that proceed the film, which the director had absolutely nothing to do with. The director himself kept humping the mic stand, to show his displeasure with big stars who wouldn't give him an interview.

But all this was nothing compared to the Quirkyalone party on Saturday.

When I first arrived at the Rickshaw Stop, there wasn't a single person there under 45. And all of them seemed to have mistaken Quirkyalone for meaning "desperately lonely." While attempting to get a drink, I was pounced upon by a 50-year-old woman who tried to use the QA quiz to engage me in conversation. Apparently, this was the process all night -- it was just a single's event disguised as an empowerment exercise.

During the scrotum-shrinking folksinger portion of the evening, I was getting my tunes in order, and this older, yuppie-ish woman rushed up to me. "Have you seen a tall, good-looking guy named Joe?" she yelled.

She came back a minute later, during a short, inexplicable speech by a man who was supposed to say something about gays in the military. (Instead, he told how he'd suggested to John Kerry that the QA honcho be named to some government post for the sadly single.) And the woman comes to me and yells, "Is that guy GAY?!!" I'm not sure, I tell her, maybe you should ask him. Or hump his leg and see how he responds.

After the belly dancer finished ("How many of you have seen a belly dancer before?! It's quite a thing to see!!"), I busted out the old and new-school hip-hop, which garnered a range of responses:

"Hey, are you going to play anything besides hip-hop, like Big Audio Dynamite?"
"Are you going to play anything else?" "I was hired to play hip-hop." "Oh, really? Hip-hop? Huh, really. Is that so? Huh. Well. Okay."
"Do you have any funk?"

Probably the best dancer of the night was an old, Hispanic guy in bunny ears who spazzed out from beginning to end, no matter what I played. He even danced to R.Kelly's "Ignition" remix, which is soooo good. It makes me want to ride a jeep to the prom. All I need now is a date.

Sunday, I witnessed perhaps the least funny comedian ever: Brent Weinbach. Ruzz and I have wanted to see him for ages, because he used to be this dweeby dorky KALX dj who would play horrific jazz fusion and grating '80s computer soundtracks. He was so deadpan that we couldn't tell if he got the joke, or if there even was one. And then Fresh Pink said he was funny in a bizarro way, so we went to the Du Nord to see him.

And he's still a dweeby dork. But now he tells "jokes" about his poop and does impressions of ethnicities. Dear god. Have we reached a point in history when we have retro commedians? He apparently thinks this is highly original and that he's pushing the boundaries of good taste. Perhaps he wasn't around for the '80s and so he doesn't remember Andrew Dice Clay. Every single one of those people in that club who were laughing should be taken out and shot. That would truly be pushing boundaries.

Lastly, we headed to "Smile" at the Hush Hush. Elka seemed to hit it off with DJ Neil, who she said does the long-haired, balding thing well. This was in reference to having seen pictures of me with longish hair in the early 90s. Man, why didn't any of my friends tell me how stupid I looked? She decided that I look far hottter with less hair. I'd have to agree.

Sunday was the third day in a row I spent with Elka. Three days! This is a big deal. I need lots and lots and lots and lots of space. So three days in a row tests my patience. But not this time. Maybe it was because we were surrounded by so many weirdos that we felt relatively normal. Or maybe it was something else.