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| Sunday, November 16, 2008 |
| Least cool places for grafitti |
Back when I was teaching at Eastpointe, we had a problem with people tagging the bathroom. And to this day it confuses me why anyone would want to put their name onto a toilet. Crude jokes, bad drawings of naked women, and so on are to be expected from dumb high school students, but why would you want to claim a toilet? How does having your tag on a high school shitter make you cooler by any measure whatsoever?
There are other idiotic places to tag. When I was in (Catholic) high school, we arrived one day to see that someone had scaled the side of the very large church next to the school and tagged the roof. While the audacity of it was a bit staggering, I had a hard time picturing the gang members calling themselves Wessyde Bible Thumpas.
More recently, someone tagged my trash can. Seriously. I guess whoever it was likes the notion of having their name associated with trash. Then again, by tagging, I suppose it already is.Labels: high school, idiots, school, teenagers |
posted by Steve @ 9:51 PM  |
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| Saturday, February 02, 2008 |
| Why bands get less popular as they age |
Climactic moment in Type O Negative's hit Love You to Death, where the singer soars with the lyric, "Am I good enough for you?" It was spine-chillingly glorious when I was a teenager, rife with self-doubt and insecurity. "You," in that line, became about a dozen girls I'd had a crush on through all of high school and later in college. I think my wife eventually was included in that thought, as well.
But it's not something that many guys past age 30 will find themselves singing. Then again, the line "I would do anything to make you cum," is repeated about a dozen times over a minute and a half in the following song, and that isn't something normally associated with the 'settled' man, either.
Also, success has its own draw away from inspiration. Back in 2000, when the Smashing Pumpkins were breaking up, Billy Corgan noted in Rolling Stone that "when we had no money, no nothing, there was nothing else to do but be grungy and be in a band. Now there are many other options: 'I could be skiing.'"
So I suppose it's not such a shock that many bands lose their luster well before age thirty. It's a rare band that's so happy with each other and so hungry for improvement that they stay together and relevant (U2 comes to mind).Labels: age, music, teenagers, u2 |
| posted by Steve @ 5:43 PM |
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| Saturday, January 28, 2006 |
| A Funny Thing Happened Today no. 9: DJ-ing for teenagers |
Tonight I was the DJ for my friend Joe's fiancee's little sisters' party. It was, for the most part, music I don't listen to - rap and hip-hop. It comforts me that I managed to put together a good 4-hour set list of music I don't have more than a few minutes' time to check out and plug in. Officially, I can give myself credit for being a halfway decent DJ.
The most interesting part about it - the part the justifies a blog - is that I realise that there's a striking similarity between DJing a house party and a big club (like my old job at Maloney's). When the presents come out, you have to have the music people want to hear but won't really dance to. You can't have too many big dance songs in a row because people almost never manage to keep their insecurity down for more than 15 minutes (especially high school kids). There is an ebb and flow to be maintained, in every presentation of music in sequence: a rock show, on the radio, in a club, in a house, anywhere. Heh ... and in mix tapes. But if you want to know more about that, watch High Fidelity.
Recent books: Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Fight Club, White Teeth.
Labels: DJ, Maloney's, mixing, music, teenagers |
| posted by Steve @ 9:39 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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