Suicide and Outdoor Rock n' Roll Shows

It should be of some historical note that the night before The Swell Season played here, at the zoo, some guy threw himself off the roof of the stage and splattered in a big, embarrassing puddle at their feet.
This was somewhere in California, I believe. Apparently the gentleman was distraught over recently being left by his erstwhile lady love-interest, and figured he'd express his feelings in language she -and all of us- could finally understand.

That's the thing I don't remember about the story: whether or not she was there. Because this is a story told by stagehands, to stagehands. I immediately Went There, and so did everybody else. We all envisioned the ex-girlfriend there, and the minute he hit pavement, was all like, "Randy, you're such an asshole!" or, "You never do anything right!"

Ha ha ha ha! Seems like it really freaked out the band though. They were "restrained," to hear a favorite bartender of mine tell it.

Meanwhile, sometime not long after the picnic that my union local hosts, a young fool also decided to kill himself. I'd never thought a lot of him, and in this he resembles what few other people I've personally known who've "committed" suicide.
He was walking home, and stopped on a trestle over McLoughlin Blvd. He most likely sat there a while, based on the pile of cigarette butts. And then he either fell, was pushed, or jumped onto the busy thoroughfare below.

Last conversation I'd had with him was on the subject of...Fuselage grind? Undercarriage wear?
Well, he walked up behind me at the Dew Tour build earlier this summer and asked, very frankly, "Rich, what do you do about Gig Nuts? You know, when your balls chafe?"
Knowing full well that he had a relatively new baby in the house, but also because this was the answer, I said, "Diaper cream. You know like Desitin?"

Sure, sure he knew. The next time I saw him, I asked how that method was treating him, and he said he hadn't tried it yet. Again, let it be said that I never thought much of the guy. His white supremacist tattoos pretty much said it all for me. 'Oh, good; you're an idiot,' I thought, and didn't really feel like I had to give much effort beyond that.
As much as other folks I work with might like to say, "Oh, those were just jail tats," oh no they weren't. They were way too elaborate and professional-looking for that.

But in his defense, Steve would say about them that they were just reminders of a bunch of stupid mistakes he made earlier in his life. But this was also before kind of putting one of the few black people we work with on the spot: "But you don't have a problem with them, do you?"
And no, no; surprisingly this black man surrounded on all sides by white people he has to be nice to said that no he did not. As is often the case with this local, I just stood there and shook my head.

And when his kid was born last year, I congratulated him. We all did, of course. He had some wanna-be-deep shit to say about how he had some pause at bringing another person into this world, "especially these days, you know..."
As some who have read my shit for a while know, this is one of the dumbest things you can say, in my opinion. Pretty much no matter how you slice it, right now is a better time to be a human living in Western Civilization than any other time.
Would you like a simple metric? How likely are you to literally shit yourself to death and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it? Yeah, that's what I thought. "These days..." sheeeiiittt...

And he didn't hear that, because he was an idiot. He really was. From his rarely-smiling countenance to his ever-present death metal shirts, dude was a fucking simp. Of the dead, only the truth.
I liked that history, happenstance and simple truth made him the son of a man who decided late in life that he always had been a woman, inside. Hundred per cent true: it was literally as quick as: oh, there's Steve and his dad, at one gig, to oh, there's Steve; and who's that lady he's talking to?

I never asked him what he thought of his dad's transformation. I imagine it was one more thing for him to just not get. But I approve of what The Universe was up to on that one: ah. Intolerant, are you? Love your father, do you? Well...
For the record, I have no indication that he was awful to his dad about this, but then again, it's been a couple years since I've seen the man who is currently the late Steve's mother, so I dunno...

So why'd he kill himself? I don't know. Like I said, I kinda made it my business to steer clear of him. He was No Fun. I imagine his wife and kid are overwhelmingly impressed at how deep n' brooding he was. He just had to do it, don't you know? YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!

Heh. Sleep well, asshole.

So let's see.
That all happened in the middle of the runoff from Lady Gaga/American Idol/ Dew Tour, but that also fell right in the middle of that run From Hell:
Chicago, Crowded House, Doobie Bros., Two days of Bob Dylan with John Mellencamp and a band comprised of Harrison Ford's son and Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin's son. Vampire Weekend in the pouring rain, Pavement and a '90's northwest rocker's class reunion.

Those who were there for all of it will describe it in the apocalyptic terms usually employed by Civil War veterans who went all through the summer months unsure if they'd ever see sanity again. It's hyperbolic, but all the same, so true.
Little moments of beauty abound though, as always: late at night, we're all done, and signing out, getting ready to go home. We're all raiding what remains of the deli tray in catering, and I realize that right alongside me is this older Australian gentleman who is just as serious about getting the last of these coldcuts as I was: the lead singer of Crowded House. He smiles and says something comforting in Aussie. We're all just people clawing at the same buffet.

Some quick thoughts after spending an afternoon hanging lights in a high school auditorium

I should just have a 'David Brooks' tag.

His editorial today about varying modes of leadership has lots of the hallmarks of Brooksiana: the on-the-fly creation of weird catch-phrases that somehow fail to stick and sort of make you feel a little sorry for him...The odd Greater Point I'm Getting At Here that comes from a series of 'well, I'm not sure that's actually so' moments...I ultimately like this one though, because he ends up going with 'The Humble Hound,' rather than 'The Lion in the Boardroom.'

The guy he is initially talking about, who says things like,

“I can talk about changing things for the better, even if I don’t know what it is we’re going to change. I’ll just say we’re going over there somewhere. And I don’t quite know what that looks like, but it’s going to be fantastic.”

is not specifically described as a delusional maniac you wish like hell wasn't your boss, but David does quickly go from there to a more introspective leadership style, which...Well, this is Brooksiana again...

"The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction...In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition — thinking about her thinking — and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses."

Okay, for starters let's assume you're a woman. In fact, let's refer to our nameless example here as a "her." He goes through a list of traits often attributed to women although generally at odds with the attendant stereotype of the ball-busting corporate cunt. The example of the Boardroom Lion is an actual person, The Humble Hound is a nameless woman.

This is why David Brooks Land is such a fun place to visit: he almost always distracts from his basic point by clumsy shit like this. It makes you stop reading his piece for content and instead start editing it.

He then (briefly) talks about being a stagehand, which is an oddly Collective Action and Teamwork thing for even a Thoughtful Conservative to be in like with:

"Being out when the applause is ringing doesn’t feel important to them. The important things are the communal work, the contribution to the whole production and the esprit de corps. The humble hound is a stagehand who happens to give more public presentations than most."

He then links to this article on actually being a stagehand. Note that 'applause not being important' thing. There's more of that. While the author, Peter J. Marks, gamely notes that it's just a stereotype that all stagehands are frustrated actors (or musicians), the fact remains that plenty of them are. They just happen to have a way more stable job in the entertainment industry.

If the point is that we're too centered and not-vain to seek the glory of the footlights and the adulation of the masses, I accept the compliment, even though it's often not true. I just decided a long time ago that I don't really want to hang around with actors. Or dancers. Or musicians.

Then too there's that thing I always come back to about stage-handery really being a refuge for lots of intellectually insecure people who want to have this one very specialized place in their life where they can lord it over other people. But really, that's any industry. I like the fact that there's a former theater critic who writes things very few people read on the Internet who is trying to impute some nobility to my profession, but it's still just a job, y'know? One I'm lucky enough to like, though.

But sometimes I still get a little misty when I watch all of us working together to build something, and the thing coming together beautifully. When we're all speaking each other's language, and having lots of laughs along the way. "The construction industry with less assholes," I've heard it called. It's the miracle of Cooperation, just like they used to tell you to about on 'Sesame Street'. Collectivist? Damn right it is.



And above all else, shit like this does indeed make me think that this would be the moment for a book that does for stagehanding what Kitchen Confidential did for restaurant kitchens, and The Immortal Class tried to do for bike messengers. Just seems like the blood's in the water.

But again, I'm unclear on what I'd call it.

Here's Why Nothing Works

You know what your life needs? A soundtrack. Something in the neighborhood of nine seconds long or so that just plays over and over again until you ask it to stop. In this vein, may I suggest...The 'Oh Brother' Punchline theme.
(That was entirely the work of The In Crowd, over at I'm Learning To Share!, who noted the passing of longtime Hanna-Barbera composer/arranger Hoyt Curtin by isolating the greatest bits of his work, and naming them.)

When I hear that tiny overture to failure, I consider the mendacity of Hollywood Lights. On Craigslist this morning, I see that they're hiring. This is odd, since they've been firing anyone with half an ounce of competence for the last year, while holding onto valuable people who happen to be related to the owner.

In this -of course- they strongly resemble the greater part of the American business community. For the last...Decade? Longer, surely. Anyway; this trend of continuing to cut labor while never ever getting rid of management is really making us all look like a bunch of goons who don't deserve to even be offered Nice Things. They keep eliminating Bone, until all that's left is Fat, which won't support you, if you're a Leg, say.
Thing is, all this cost-cutting that never seems to actually eliminate costs is done due to the bewildering vicissitudes of the market, y'know, which you'd think Management would be better at navigating. This is to say: it's their fault, but they never seem to lose their jobs, or even take a pay cut.

Now again, the Obvious Disclaimer: you can't run anything with only labor, or only management. It's cooperative; they need each other. But try telling that to some smilin' joe who thinks that only the people with the necessary capital should get to survive in this world.

Suddenly you'll be hearing that word 'Marxist' again, which keeps making a weird resurgence, especially in conversations that have nothing to do with economics. It's been a decade or two since I've met anyone who actually describes themselves as one, but any time you say you like da queeahs or something, you will be called this antiquated socio-economic term. To hear reactionaries tell it, we're surrounded with Marxists right now. And Leninists too, probably.

A popular trope among those with no discernible principles is to go on and on about how principled they are. And since you didn't ask, o Craigslist reader who is looking for a job in stage and event lighting, here's Hollywood Lights' principalia!


OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES:
* We lead with INTEGRITY. We are committed to doing what is right, even when there is great pressure to do otherwise.

* Our PASSION drives us: Be it our passion for creativity in design, our passion for providing innovative solutions to our client's challenges, or our passion for exceeding our client's expectations.

* We strive for a culture of DISCIPLINE. We desire to hire disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and disciplined action.

* TEAMWORK is encouraged and fostered through open communication, along with the knowledge that through collaboration we are greater than the sum of our parts.

* We embrace CHANGE and the opportunities it offers.

* We strive to grow wisely and PROFITABILY.

[A few notes about that:
1) I would hazard a guess that no substantial pressure is being brought to bear on this company to Do Wrong. But nonetheless they keep on stickin' up for what's right, eh? Go Team Integrity!

2) I've seen a lot of companies promise Passion. It's just generally not this embarrassing.

3) The inclusion of 'Discipline' here makes this lighting company sound like a leather daddy.

4) "Our approach to Teamwork is to get rid of most of the Team! This Works for us!"

5) 'Change', huh? Really? Good for you. You like the inevitable.

6) The word you want there is 'profitably', not Profitbily, which -with the addition of one more 'l'- would make an awesome musical genre.
Also: a company that wishes to make a profit, eh? Will the wonders never cease?]

So in closing: Christ, you people suck. I hope you fail, and you deserve to be losing all your business to Christie Lights.
I wish the same failure to Timberline Dodge, Jeep & Chrysler, but on the other hand, they're already heading there of their own accord, if I had to guess.

The Treachery of Images

You know how time passes? Yeah. Let's review the small brick of identification badge photos I occasionally wear around.
Although let it be said first that I am not one of those stagehands who never, ever take the damn things off. I don't understand this, as the damn things will almost certainly get in your way while working, and to those who practice this strange pretension, I inevitably make jokes about needing to "sniff each others' laminates" to identify one another.
They always act like they don't get it.

Now see, that one there is the one I use when I work at the Rose Garden. It is from three, maybe four years ago. Damn, that's a young-looking me, considering. And I might add that probably at the time, I spent not a little time looking in the mirror and sighing piteously. Even then.







Whereas this one here is from a year or two later. I use it to open doors at that shoe manufacturing concern that I occasionally work at.
Okay, it opens one door, and I haven't actually worked there directly for the company in over a year. Here, I have already started to gain weight, feeling weird about same.


Whenever I work in Seattle Center, I gotta use this thing. A few more years had passed, and I was a bit more okay with my perma-beard used to conceal increasing chin swag, further enchanted with my ever-so-subtly graying hair.

It also, of course, has a film flaw that makes it look like I've got a perfectly flat, white, horizontal scar that runs -strangely- over my moustache on the right side of my face.

It also just says RICH, in caps. No last name.


This one is my favorite, as I look like a murderer. It is the one I use when I work at the casino, and due to the exigencies of digital photography, my head is somewhat longer here than it generally appears. And both my moustache and eyes are drooping in a manner that I for one find sinister.

Would you employ this man? He looks like he's looking for ways to do something that will result in the mug shot that this already resembles being taken.



Speaking of casino work, let us briefly consider the career arc of one Harry Wayne Casey, who we know (and love) as K.C., leader of The Sunshine Band.

That's a pretty flattering photo. I know this because I spent last Saturday evening more or less forced to stare at him, as I was training a spotlight on him.

This act has always been a pretty good band fronted by a pretty bland singer that sings bland lyrics. He has decided to reinforce this by being embarrassing.

Okay; a whole three songs into the set, he stops everything. The band, the dancers all leave the stage, and K.C. engages in ten to fifteen minutes worth of the worst stand-up comedy I've ever heard. This even included the line, "What else is going on in the news these days?" This was followed by three maudlin ballads.

Then he got back into some crowd-pleasin'. This isn't hard, since there's at least ten songs they could play that literally everybody there would know. But again we stop- introduce the band! Okay, now we do "Get Down Tonight", but wait- you know what would be really appropriate? How about a disco-themed salute to Our Troops Overseas? God Bless America!


Yup. That's every bit as bad as it sounds. Mind you, Ronnie Milsap was a pretty funny show too.

Ronnie is also heavy on the god-and-flag love, but pretty much everybody on the casino circuit is. Not only are you inevitably playing to a house of Olds, but you also have the fragile egos of performers themselves to consider. The fragility is increased tenfold the morning they wake up and realize that now all they're good for is casinos and state fairs. They cry a bit, and then start getting religious.

Anyway, Ronnie's lighting director is also a longtime friend and Superfan, which I'm told he was being ridiculed for by the rest of the roadies. For my part, I can say that he was almost too busy laughing at Ronnie's jokes and singing along to call the light cues properly. Fortunately, Ronnie doesn't move much.

This show too, had a comedic element. It was opened by this asshole who apparently is also a longtime friend/superfan. He tells shitty jokes! Then he leaves, and heeere's Ronnie! When he did the inevitable "My record company is a buncha crooks..." type joke, lighting director Superfan says, "Oh, don't go there...Heh heh heh..."

Jeeezus. And when Ronnie made the joke later on that the spotlights we were training on him were "so bright that even I can see 'em!", the crowd turned around and glared at us, as if we were trying to hurt Ronnie, or make fun of him.

After the show, and the thank Jeebus, and Bless Our Troops, after Ronnie left the stage and house lights came up, a family of tanks came up to Corey and I and said, "Not your kinda music, huh?" Corey just shrugged his shoulders, and I said, "Drive safely."

Also too the one

Not sure why I put that thing up there. Something new. Its actual name is 'subpage event wave', and is part of the layout on the Spirit Mountain Casino 'events' page. It's not even big enough -when reproduced- to be a decent header image here. So it sits there, looking like some sort of sparkly abstract whale-thing. Depressing.

Last night, I was running a spotlight at the Portland Erotic Ball. Let's get the obvious joke out of the way: boy, a whole lotta people sure did decide to dress up as "fat chick in a bustier and fishnets" this year! HAW! Anyway...

Anyway, amidst all the sexy nurse/cop/satans, there was one lady who decided to go really simple with her costume: a pair of jeans and no shirt. She had paint all over her chest in some sort of design, and was accompanied by a gentleman in jeans and a t-shirt that read, I think, I LOVE TO BANG WOMEN. I think; they were kinda far away.
Strangest thing about it? She just kinda hung out at the merch table looking uncomfortable while he ran around with a camera, either trying to get people to take a picture of him and his topless girlfriend, or perhaps trying to get pictures of other people. Again; they were far away. I decided that his costume was Shitty Boyfriend.

It sort of felt like a junior-high dance, but with way higher unrealistic expectations. My bulb blew -that's right- halfway through the first band, and there was no replacement bulb, nor would they have allowed me to get into the guts of the spot because it was a rental. A rental from a boss of mine, but a rental all the same. You could hear the broken glass inside, rolling around in the fan.
So my evening ended early.

The night before, it had been Rascal Flatts, with Darius Rucker opening up. Yes, The Artist Formerly Known As 'Hootie' has been trying to re-image himself as someone who plays country...Or 'country' in as much as Rascal Flatts plays country, anyway.
This led him to cover Hank Williams Jr.'s "Family Tradition", which he shouldn't have done for a plethora of reasons, but most of all for the chorus, with its cascade of "Hank, why do you..."(s). Even more curiously, he closed with Prince's "Purple Rain". The world, I have decided, no longer makes sense.

While sitting around waiting for this show to be over, I got news that Elton John has postponed his tour due to illness. E-coli, one person told me: I have no idea whether or not this is true. This effects my life because I was going to go up to Seattle tomorrow and begin what was probably going to be several days of tech-ing on the show, then do the actual show on Sunday, then turn around again and do it here.
Meanwhile, Billy Joel, who was co-headlining, certainly could have done the show himself, I guess, but isn't. I'm told by those who know that these days, he has a constantly filled glass of vodka and ice only, on his piano.

So for those keeping score, the drunk Long Island Jewish homeboy will not be appearing with the middle-aged gay cartoon character, at least not immediately.

Last weekend, it was 'You Who', which is a thing for hipsters with children, actually. It was the dream of The Decemberists' drummer (I think) and his baby mama (again, I think). It combines people in costumes doing skits -people dressed like giant owls, and I would have liked to include a picture of that here, but I think all the images belong to McMenamins, and you can't. That hyperlink up there takes you to their Flickr page- and your hip young local bands doing that thing that they do.

So, the twee factor backstage was pushed to near toxic levels, but above all else I think it is a very nice thing. I would very much have liked to have a place to go like this back when I had a young kid in the house: your friends say they'll babysit for you while you go out and have a good time, but they won't. So to be around a buncha other painfully hip people who are learning the usual eternal lessons of child-rearing? Yeah, that woulda been okay, I guess.

Up n' comin': Ozomatli at the Crystal, and Ronnie Milsap/Lorrie Morgan at Spirit Mtn. The image of Ronnie that they use on the billboards for this evening of '80's country is a prime example of the I'm So Happy To Be Blind (tm)! photo that I was making fun of in my last post.




There she is.

"Ha! Ha Ha! This also does double duty as my 'So Happy 'Cuz I'm Saved By The Lord (patent pending)' photo! HA!"

I mean, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder did it too, and I don't necessarily feel like it's only a blind fashion thing, but still...

More Lip Impressions

Wayne Coyne apparently begins each show by crowd surfing in a big, transparent hamster ball. He seems to enjoy it immensely, and god knows the fans enjoy it. Here it is in test mode.

Again, there's this highly egalitarian thing going on (or at least great pains are taken to make it appear that this is the case) where they say again and again: we recognize that there's no difference between you and us, really.

Interestingly, the best song by far was 'Convinced of the Hex', which has the insistent chorus, "The difference between us...", and sounds like P. Floyd's 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun'.

That's something too; the music. I've never thought that their music was all that great, and this show left me feeling that they're still kinda lightweights. But that doesn't matter nearly so much when they have such a compelling live show. In that context, a song like the "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" makes all the sense in the world. Listening to that many people affirming something is really powerful.

Speaking of powerful affirmations, later in their set, the frenzy cooled down for a few as a lengthy piece was spoken. It concerned how...Well, I'm not sure how to summarize it. It kind of had to do with the idea that, while one may not necessarily agree with our various (and constant) wars around the world, one does need to accept that those are your brothers and sisters out there serving in -and dying in- them. Now, credit to Coyne for not making it into that terrible 'they're just doin' their jobs!' thing that everybody seems to make it into: it was a reminder of the human factor.

And how they chose to memorialize was this: as 'taps' was played on a single trumpet, all of us raised our hands in a 'peace' sign. Nothing but a sea of upraised fingers, for as far as the eye could see. Suspension of critical thinking required? A little, but it was surprisingly un-schmaltzy, this moment, and no more manipulative than any emotional event is.

The confetti. God, all that fucking confetti. Yesterday, as we tore down the stage at Edgefield, the further we got into the guts of the stage, the more orange and yellow slips of paper we found.
On top of the four confetti cannons, there was repeated use of the homemade balloon-inflation-device to blow up -first to size, then to explosion- enormous balloons that were also filled with confetti. The fans onstage were blowing all this around (along with the still-returning balloons, which were starting to either explode dramatically in the blackberry bushes, or lodge there where they would stay for weeks thereafter). Toward the end, there was so much floating paper in the air that I had to close my eyes. I was getting paper in my eyes, and was sort of fearing catastrophic amounts of paper cuts, yes.

This was chaos. It was good chaos, though, and much is to be said there, I guess, for the confluence of hipster and hippie. There's plenty of places where they flow together and don't mutually dislike and distrust each other. The Flaming Lips may not seem like an obvious example, but they do have that special place in The Middle firmly occupied.

The Lips have a mythos that they've been building for a while now, with stories and characters, songs that are easily sung-along-to with li'l life lessons that you might just go ahead and take home with you. The song "Do You Realize" is a dead ringer for The Dead's "Eyes of the World", in terms of lyrical content.

But they still have hipster cache leftover from those many, many years that they toiled in obscurity and didn't sound like they currently sound at all. I myself felt like being a pest and requesting that they play their stunningly gritty cover of Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69". "She Don't Use Jelly"? Well, both hippie and hipster alike enjoy a song that is easy to sing along to, has a not-especially-concealed in-joke, is prima facie absurd...Something for everyone.


Above all else, I guess that the whole thing has a tribal aspect that I officially deem Nice. What I specifically mean by that is how rare and wonderful this particular tour is for this industry in particular. How they interact with their audience is great; how they interact with other people who put on shows for a living is fucking unheard of.
And dare I say that they seem to have actually meant all their utopian crap? I mean, even if it's a pose, what a great pose to have, as opposed to what recording artists generally say.

That they see a hole in the market that could be filled with, hey life's a funny thing, and there's songs and stories to be made out of all of us, and perhaps we could all be a bit braver, and nicer to each other, and it's not too late to halt this here decline shows an interesting prescience, at least.

Top Moments o.' the '09 summer concert season:
1. The Decembrists doing "July, July!" at the end of July, also their cover of "Crazy On You".
(Lesser equivalent: Actually watching Heart do "Crazy On You".)

2. Being thanked by Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal for doing our jobs.
(Much lesser equivalent: Carlos Mencia coming outta his dressing room after running two hours over time, with his cronies [with a midget, which is idiot shorthand for 'funny'] and saying, "Let's get a picture with the people who do the hard work and never get any of the credit." Then more or less forcing all of us to stand there grinning while a picture is taken.

Again, motherfucker was already keeping us there late. Secondly, this was just wasting more time, and besides, I hate the guy. He isn't funny, which is all that he need be to be a comic.
Lastly, all the credit I require for doing my fucking job is a paycheck, you asshole. )

3. Best show start to finish: Al Green.
(Wayyy lesser equivalent: Keith Sweat.)

4. Most visually stunning show: The Flaming Lips.
Runner up: The Decemberists.

5. Best in-between-song banter: Lyle Lovett.
(Worst: Sugarland. I had to watch two nights of that bitch pretending to be more southern than she actually is.)

6. Most difficult load-in: Miley Cyrus, as it was Day One of her tour.
(Simplest load-in: The T-Mobile tent outside the Blink 182 show. No really; The Pretenders.)

7. Coolest piece of swag: Hand painted, hand pulled poster for The Decemberists, Andrew Bird and Blind Pilot. Not many people got these. I'm noticing an increase in the practice of making a thousand kinda ho-hum posters that get distributed everywhere and about ten really cool posters that only friends of the band get.
(Weirdest piece of swag: A tiny piece of paper saying "feed me", with the Jonas Bros. seal on it. This was my meal ticket, and I suspect one day it'll be a collector's item.)

8. Best and worst crew shirt: The Flaming Lips are famous for this kind of thing. The shirt this year had an enormous pot leaf on the front, with the words 'FUCK YOU' above it, and the words 'I DO WHAT I LIKE' beneath.
On the back of the shirt, four vaginas with legs with the word 'band', and an arrow pointing to them. And in much larger letters, 'CREW', with an arrow pointing to this big neanderthal-looking guy wearing a shirt with a big pot leaf on it that says, 'FUCK YOU, I DO WHAT I LIKE'. Beneath all this, the legend reads, 'I LOADED IN WITH THE FLAMING LIPS, AND THEY WERE A BUNCH OF PUSSIES'. And beneath that, 'Thanks to all the great load-in/load-out crews of the world'.
All of the foregoing is in glow-in-the-dark material. I will probably never wear it in public.

(There is a partial picture of this, from the Flaming Lips naked video shoot up on Mount Tabor the other day. Said shirt is on the guy standing next to Wayne here. For some reason, I can't just reprint it here. Possibly due to Terms Of Service.)

9. Weirdest brush with fame: being waved at by Nicole Kidman. I was leaving the Keith Urban show for a few hours, and I see the runner van arriving. The van is driven by a woman I know, so I wave at her. But I notice that this thing with reddish-blondish kinky hair in the back seat thinks that I was waving at it, and...Well I can even see the whole thought process:
"Oh, yes yes...I still need to do this whole thing, don't I? I have to smile and wave to these people even when I'm just riding in a van with my husband. Ho ho; well, let's do this thing one more time for my adoring fans...Wave wave, smiiile...Yes. Ah, stardom."

At least I imagine that's what happened. That's what it suddenly appeared to be.

(Weirdest brush with fame not happening to me: Corey was standing backstage watching the Heart show, when Ann Wilson comes offstage briefly, blows a kiss at him. That was okay, but then she took a swig of dong kwai (or however we spell that) "for the throat", and threw the bottle at him, narrowly missing his head. The chief electrician shouted, "What the hell was that?" There was no explanation offered for this.)

(Heart, as viewed from the spot tower, September 25th, Edgefield)

10. Worst crowd moments: Heart (five brawls at Heart, causing me to say, "That kind of music just brings out the bad element, y'know?") and The Gipsy Kings, where...It's a long story, but those people sucked...

A list of all the shows I did, June to September, as taken from the notebook where I write down all such things:

Il Divo
Dionne Warwick
Jazz Attack
Jonas Brothers
American Idol
Steve Miller
Anita Baker
Decemberists (x2)
Sugarland (x2)
Lyle Lovett
The Fray
En Vogue
The Flaming Lips
Dave Koz & Brian Culbertson, with Peabo Bryson
The Pretenders
Al Green
Chris Isaak
Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal
Keith Sweat and Teena Marie
Gipsy Kings
Blink 182
Keith Urban
Miley Cyrus
Gov't Mule
Carlos Mencia
The Killers
Heart
Jason Mraz

[*(x2) denotes two nights of show]

Also, Microsoft Tech Ready, Nike Fall Sales, Portland Opera's production of 'La Boheme' and some band/performance art thing from Ireland that I did for PICA. I'm lucky I work so much. Hell, I'm lucky in general.

You, Your Fucking Life, and the Flaming Lips

I think we could all tell it was going to be a good day when we saw the orange. Every crew member that greeted us that morning was wearing bright safety orange, with bits of pink and red mixed into their ensemble.

It was also an immediate good sign when we noted that Shane and Sam were part of the crew. Shane spent years at the Crystal, where I and many others toiled, and Sam was a soundman supreme. They've both been touring with the Flaming Lips for three or so years now.

Yet another great sign was that the bass player for the band is also a full-time roadie. He worked onstage all day long, played a show that night, and did load-out too. Wayne Coyne was onstage for most of the day too, which is to say; a lead singer that not only didn't just stay on the bus all day, but came out and oversaw the technical aspects of the show. This is -frankly- unheard of.

It was pointed out to me early in the day by Shane that the tour is scaled down to bare bones, and that all the band members are techs, while all the techs have a role in the performance. He was wearing a shirt that had a hammer and sickle on it.
I think Sam said it even more clearly: "We're commies!" -unless that wasn't Sam. I do know that Shane wore his commie shirt into a Lowe's a few days before this, and was more or less refused service by some old asshole who worked in the tool department.

Tools were very important to them, because the set -which "changes every forty days" according to Shane- is still sort of in the process of being figured out. The fact that I had a leverage tool (a spud wrench, actually) was of great interest to them.
I soon had a small crowd of orange-clad people around me, as was Wayne, who wore the same suit all day. "What is that?" ran the question, and I pointed out that every working tour should have at least one drift pin, malleck or spud wrench for making holes align in truss.

Especially when said truss is in a giant half-arc with lots of Versatube attached for video. There was lots and lots of little holes, all of which needed aligning.

They had a ton of staging, all orange. Truss, monitors, road boxes, instruments; all of it. Fortunately, lots of things can be bought that are already orange. For everything else, there's spray paint.

This led to an interesting contrast between locals and tour staff: the people in orange, and the people in black.

Not that those of us in black aren't any fun, of course, but one might look at it that way. I had this impression of a rolling circus, and it made me want to join. Later, when we were checking vocals at the beginning of a very long sound check, Wayne was saying something I couldn't quite make out along the lines of "you, your fucking life, and the Flaming Lips..."
For whatever it's worth, my life has changed a lot in the last several years, in ways I never would have envisioned, and most of which I can't quite quantify. There was something odd going on here; music always drives me deep inside my head, but this time even more so.

What all their money seemed to be spent on was a shit ton of confetti, and a whole bunch of large balloons. I've tried to give some sort of scale here (for instance, that dimmer over to the left comes almost up to my chin), and lets just say that this undertaking was a bit more involved than one might think.
It was done with another example of Lips improvisation; the device with which we inflated all those balloons was a leaf blower with the top of a two-liter bottle duct taped to it. I noticed lots of home made fixes like this throughout the day.

These balloons would be thrown by myself and others like me out at the crowd, later that night. I know that I was smiling my everlovin' ass off while doing so.

Ah. More on this later. Publish.

A Place in Time

Here is the stage set for The Decembrists, Andrew Bird and Blind Pilot. I realized then that I should have taken pictures of the actual musicians, later that evening, but everybody does that.
Seriously though; I should have shot the Decembrists at least. It was probably the most visually stunning show I've seen so far this year, with David Byrne being a close second.

(Taylor Swift gets an honorable mention third place, though, for the water gag. I'm sure it will be industry standard in a year or so, but for now it's novelty to have a machine that spells out words in falling drops of water. She'd sing, "oh," and the word 'OH' would appear amidst the waterfall. So this means that there's what amounts to a sprinkler up there that is controlled by a computer program that strictly polices each and every spout so that it shoots the exact amount at the exact moment.
Like I say, once upon a time not everybody had a video wall, either. I notice that the Jonas Bros. already have a water gag too, so get ready.)

I was getting ready to dismiss this entire two-day event as Twee Fest '09, and to be sure, it kind of is. But it was still good, goddamn it, and I appreciate that people working this particular angle can make money this way.
And that angle would be: pretty music, played on quirky instruments. Vaguely perverse lyrics and knowing archaism, but the general vibe being that everything's just fine. Ladies in pretty dresses and the men cleaned up just nicely enough. Whistling is allowed here, and the occasional weird breaks of classic rock are both ironic and one hundred per cent serious homage.

At first, I was sighing to my cynical ass self, noting that Andrew Bird's road guy was a hipster charicature right down to the Bianchi single speed he brought with him. Also, a light blue terrycloth shirt with enormous collar, turqoise belt buckle, feathered hair and cookie-duster moustache. I think I can actually be forgiven for rolling my eyes and saying, look at this fucking hipster...
On another level, I was kind of thinking of rock journalism of the past, and how so often the writer is right there at the right time; it's clear that they're right in the middle of a pivotal point in history. I was thinking; maybe ten years ago. Maybe when it was a bit harder -well, impossible- to envision that orchestral pop with strong countrypolitan tinges might sell out small outdoor venues.

But really, this is the moment. Colin Meloy is a total hipster superstar. He is exactly what those who sell things might very well enjoy selling you. His songs will be in quirky rom-coms. They may very well show up in a televised attempt to sell you a certain brand of beer. He writes really catchy songs, and knows when to get the crowd to sing along. He also will awkwardly sandwich in a plea for health care reform, and how we all oughta bug Ron Wyden about it. It was charming, as opposed to annoying.
And the fans worship him/them. The whole thing had a decidedly revivalist vibe to it. On one hand, they were singing most of a song cycle/concept album, so the theatrical elements had to be there, but I get the feeling that this is the way it always is. Certainly for home town heroes come back to roost.

They did a stunning version of "Crazy On You" by Heart as one of the encores. It was sung by the two lady guest-vocalists, who were undulating and pointing at the audience, drawing them in. It was the moment -hardly the first- where we crossed right over irony and into appreciating a kickass song that, y'know, I always did like...
And there even was The Crazy. That nice little piece between outright clinical insanity and where the rest of us live. Where we are in the mysteries, feelin' the magic. This tends to be a collective thing.

These are hipsters growing up and having kids; the audience certainly reflected this. These are the people with the day jobs, and for the first time in pretty much all of our lives, they were watching people on the stage who were the same age, and had managed to quit theirs, to just do this for a living.

More of the Same

So what I did last weekend was log almost thirty-six hours working for World Wrestling Entertainment. That to the right there is not an image from that particular show, but it is an example of what can happen to you in the nutty world of show-biz: Chris Jericho might just ram your face up some dude's ass.
I guess the trip is notable for lots of reasons, but the thing that always fascinates me is how it seems clear to me now that the only ways one may make money anymore from a touring show are wrestling, children's shows, and religious shit.

We tend to fall into what I used to describe as 'the same twelve people over and over again,' but really I suspect there's something more on the order of perhaps twenty basic personality types, with permutations thereof and rarely, occasionally, someone who truly does not remind you of anyone else. This being said, it's lots of fun to go work in another city.
You get so used to working with/enduring the people in your own home sphere that it almost comes as a shock when you go somewhere else and note that they're there, they just changed clothes, genders, age...

This leaves me saying (in my mind, you understand); Oh, so you're the girl who complains about everything, even all the way up to refusing to accept the common phrase "good morning" with any sort of pleasantry. Or, so you're the guy who won't stop talking ever, until I find some reason to walk away, and what you're talking about is both ridiculously general and increasingly personal, spiralling down into itself with juxtapositions of, say, how folks at that other place you used to work treated you with so much more respect as well as how Americans are so blind to the 'cutthroat reality' of the world outside the United States...
Or, you're the Capital L Lesbian who needs to remind us all that you're a lesbian every five minutes, because you're a lesbian. Or you're the one who is somebody's kid, a higher-up in the local, who is a know-it-all that no one really likes, but everyone tolerates, and has dyed blue hair. Probably identifies as a lesbian, but really just can't get anyone at all -male or female- to have sex with her.
And, so you're the one that sees some sort of conspiracy at the fact that you don't work as much as I do, and you're the one who wants to only talk about health and dietary-related issues, likely to use phrases like, "See, we're only evolutionarily designed to process nuts and seeds..." And you're The Jewish Homeboy, literally from Long Island. Portland's local doesn't have one of those, but I'm always happy to see this archetype; we always get along.

Well, and in fact stagehands tend to be people who are not often seen as experts at anything else in their lives, I think. So when they have a chance to be a know-it-all loudmouth, they take it and run with it. At least he has something to be proud about, I often say.
So yes, a lot of them are not so bright, but good enough at this thing that they do that is just technical enough to be a craft that they get their rare chance at being that guy who gets to talk big.
There are also plenty of people in the industry who are quite good at their jobs and do not go around crowing about how clever they are. These tend to be the better stagehands, actually.

About The Talent: the women all have fake tits, the men all have fake tans, and are a great deal shorter than they appear on television. The Undertaker actually seems like a pretty nice man.

While in the middle of day three of this adventure, I had some hours to kill and went back to Hattie's Hat. It was Sunday Brunch, and there was critically little space for me, but I found some. I was seated next to a girl who was talking loudly about her disbelief that anyone would ever go to a gay bath house, what with all the exposure to disease, and all...
Actually, as much as she tried to make her disgust sound rational, really she was just going through the depths of The Ick Factor: all those fluids...So a guy who I had thought was her friend finally said, "Well, why does anybody do anything?" and launched into his own list of examples of how there is inherent danger in anything you do.

For some reason, this devolved into how, for instance, there's laws concerning the safe preparation of food, and (she said) that is something we can take comfort in, knowing how safe we are, while (he said) it also seems like those laws are guidelines at best that few people take seriously enough that it would seem that those laws safeguard almost no one.
At this moment, I noticed a foot-long black hair in my fries. I pulled it out of there, and joined the conversation long enough to point out that one of the codes in this law mandates that hairnets be worn if cooking, and you're long-haired.

Back to Portland, not enough sleep. Another one-day in-out with WWE, then three and a half hours of sleep, do the in for Thomas The Train... Creepy soundcheck with diseased carnival music and choruses of children screaming. (From behind the speakers, everything sounds more sinister.)
And in the middle of all of this, a focus group. I went into a room in the Terminal Sales Building (does every city have a building so named? I know Seattle does) downtown and was plied with information about Camel's new smoke-free options. The Orb (which is not, strictly speaking, an orb: more capsule-shaped), The Strip (which is much like a Listerine Strip, and every bit as tasty), and The Stick (which is pretty much a toothpick coated with nicotine). For sitting there for an hour, I received fifty dollars.

There's certainly some more to that story, but that's for another time. Tonight, more Thomas The Train, and the possibility that I'll just be called back to Seattle to do that all over again. When it rains, it floods.

King City Diary

When the rest of the country was on that crazy kick of naming major-though-generally-economically-depressed thoroughfares after Martin Luther King, Seattle got off easy by already having a street named 'King'. They wisely stuck an 'M.L.' in front of it, and dusted off their hands with an easy finality.
When you see it, you've just passed Tukwila, and have not yet seen Boeing Field. It always gives me kinda a thrill: I love approaching that skyline.


First stop: Physical! I rolled into the industrial section of downtown, found a pretty nondescript-looking building that had a parking lot I wasn't sure I should park in, and made my mandatory appointment with ten minutes to spare.
"The city's doing lots of hiring, aren't they?" the nurse asked/said. It's true. It looked like the majority of the others in the waiting room that day were there to do what I was there to do. A hearing test -amazingly- showed that despite many years spent around loud music, early chronic eustachian tube infections and a hereditary propensity toward ear wax, my sonic sensitivity is actually pretty good. My formerly 20/15 vision is now 20/25 (the right eye recently was injured in a stupid kindling-wood-chopping incident), and I don't seem to have blood and/or excessive amounts of sugar in my urine.

Then the actual doctor arrived. He seemed rushed. Too rushed, if you ask me. "Squat down! Stand up with your feet together! Grab my fingers! Push back against me! Drop your drawers!"
Here we go, I thought, and was thoughtfully starting to turn around for him when he said, "No; I'm goin' in through the front!"
I beg your pardon, I almost said, but it quickly became clear that hernias were what he had in mind, not the health of my prostate.

After, a trip to Ballard. That neighborhood is pretty much my default when I'm in Seattle. Met up with Disco Boy, discussed a number of things, including his discomfort with writing when so many other people do it better, or at least have already said it all before.
Been up against that one myself. Strange though; pretty much everyone whose writing I enjoy seem to do it so little. And writing, like any art, is simply for its own sake: get into originality questions and you'll never do anything.

Thence over Wallingford over to Kirkland. A visit to The Baron, and his swanky condo overlooking Lake Washington. Kirkland strongly resembles a much larger version of the town we attended high school in, except it's on an actual lake as opposed to an artificially-enlarged sink hole. More like an inland sea, really.
It's a douchebaggy place of massive proportion. If you wish to cross the street, there are these little receptacles of neon-colored plastic flags affixed to each sign post, and you become your own crossing guard. The coffee place that wasn't a Starbuck's or Tully's was filled with overfed dudes boasting loudly about their Microsoft stock profits. It featured barristas hired -certainly- for their looks, not their skills.

For instance, my request for 'one of those english muffin things' in the case was met with the correction, "They're breakfast sandwiches!", to which I replied, "Whatever. I'd like one." And I was repeatedly asked if I was staying or going, with emphasis on my need to go. I didn't get the americano I asked for until asking for it again, as those who should have been at work making the damn thing were too busy flirting with other awful people..

The Baron's place is sad. It has a lovely view; the eastern-facing Seattle skyline twinkling invitingly in the lake waters at night, lit all gold and orange first thing in the morning. But it also is a stunningly empty place; great knife set, beautiful pots and pans, clearly never used. The place would be perfect for entertaining, but I'm pretty sure all it ever sees are endless role-playing-game tournees and...I just kept wanting to ask: "So...Prostitutes, is it?" I don't know how he manages sex when he's spent the last fifteen or years locked into the highly profitable but ultimately soul-killing corporate world, where you can get anything but don't necessarily have anything resembling a social life.
In any case, we drank whiskey and watched "House", made fun of teevee culture, etc. It was good to see him.

The next day I drove back into Seattle proper, tried to kill a couple hours on Capitol hill, couldn't quite work it out. I was trying to diarize on paper, just like I used to, especially when travelling.
I spoke to Disco Boy, who encouraged me to check out a small used record concern located in a used clothing shop right up "past the fish fry". The entry in my notebook reads:
Where de fuck's de fish fry? Wandering around a town that's not quite yours can be a heap of fun, or not. Especially when you've got the limited funds, and don't especially relish wearing the sign that says, "I'm not from around here."

I guess I was expecting some sort of open-air seafood festival. The Fish Fry is in fact a small restaurant. I was writing the above in Oddfellow's, which is a pretty okay restaurant, though crowded at lunch.

So back to Ballard, then, and Hattie's Hat, where I always feel at home. Conversations there included comic books, the music of The Animals and Van Dyke Parks, and how condos are evil. I drove out to Shilshole Bay around sundown, and just sat there for a long time, finally napping a bit.

Girly-Girl and I got some sandwich Cubano at a great -though tiny- place, and went back to the home of she and Disco Boy, where we sat around talking about everything until I just had to go to bed.

The next day was a paid orientation at Seattle Center. It was a whole lot of sitting there repeating the obvious-though-legally/ethically-mandated. Also present: two other Portlanders, one who suggested ride-sharing, as he had rented a car to get up there, and another who recently moved to Seattle but spends a lot of his time working in Portland, still. The reverse of my schedule, really.
The one who had rented a car was going on a bit, as is his wont: I can't believe more people in Portland don't take advantage of this! There's people down there who don't even know about this, and we should organize a whole bunch of people to come up here, and...I was looking at the faces of the equally work-poor Seattleites around him, and was quietly gesturing that maybe he should shut up, when one of them said, "No, you shouldn't do that."

Fergie, the one who lives in Seattle now, was ostensibly going to provide me with lodging that evening. But it soon became clear to me that he wasn't a hundred per cent sure of how to explain how to get to his house, and I said I'd go spend the night somewhere I could be completely sure of the location. This was during the tour that followed the orientation, in which we noted with some surprise that the loading dock for Key Arena isn't one big long windy drag from outside to center ice (a phenomenon which, at the Rose Garden, is known as 'The Pneumonia Hole'), but all semis either park by an enormous cargo elevator, or come down a ramp, park on a semi-sized slab of metal which then descends into the floor, allowing all present to offload with ease.
Fergie and myself noted how small the floor was at the Key, also how little in the way there was in the way of catwalks, upstairs. We talked about lots of things. I made plans to stay at Disco Boy's again, but told Ferg I'd be glad to meet up with him later.

And so we did. The Honey Hole, despite its borderline porn name, is a nice joint up on Capitol Hill. They have good food, and the people who work there are not assholes, which is amazing, kind of. Actually, I'm unsure if I can safely generalize about the quality of servers in Seattle vs. Portland. They might just be nicer up there.
Disco Boy and I were immediately beset by a guy with bangs that looked just like mine did in 1986, and another who had done that unfortunate just-growing-out-the-sideburns-to-beard-length thing. They were together, roaring drunk, and were overjoyed to see my friend.

Every few minutes, the one with bangs kept on yelling Disco Boy's name, which caused him finally to say, "It's like I keep sneakin' up on ya'." I had to remind dude of my name five or seven times.
Fergie arrived, looked at the fella with the bangs, looked at me, and stage whispered, "I think your friend is dr-hunnnk..." Eventually the three of us were left to discuss our various lives and fortunes. After this, Disco Boy's regular d.j.ing gig, mellow revelry and more talk of music, in which I sort of said something along the lines of...When you're geeking out on the arcana of music, you're telling the true story of the human race, or...Something. Did I mention the free drinks we got at that bar?

Down south, go see the folks, go see the kid...Strange stories there. Back up the next morning to Seattle.

Finally, a visit to the Convention Center, where I would be getting rid of Tech Ready '09, and where Bill Gates had recently exhibited his eccentric billionaire status by actually releasing a bunch of mosquitoes into the crowd. He reportedly said something along the lines of "poor people shouldn't be the only ones who have to endure this.." and as his employees looked at each other uncomfortably, I imagine he then screamed, "MOSQUITOOOES!" and threw open the fateful trap door. Great. Now we all have malaria. Well, it's a living.

But the people I worked with were very nice to me, and very professional. I actually recieved a compliment that I've been wanting to get for a while; that not only do I clearly know what I'm doing, I also don't spend great amounts of time telling other people (read: especially those senior to me) how to do their jobs. Folks appreciate this combination of attributes, turns out.

Escaped, but not for long: pestholey traffic caused me to crawl at twenty miles per from Seattle to Tacoma, and then again from Fort Lewis to Centralia. This weekend? Just goin' back up there again, for WWE. Wish me luck.

Wrong About Everything

Good lord; it's snowing again. This will give The Oregonian free range (it thinks) to print more letters from jackasses that have "Thanks a lot, Al Gore," as their punchline, failing epically to either be funny or accurate.
It's the kind of thing that makes a person want to hop in their car and go for an educational spin around the block, but probably I won't. Not when there's Chex Mix to be made.

I seem to have a full schedule of Seattle-being-in next week. A physical, to determine whether or not I'm able to actually work (which, if the last test was any indication, will consist of someone asking me if I'm ready to get "physical, physical...You wanna get physical? Let's get into physical..."), then an Orientation...God knows what that'll be. Then, on Friday, a real live gig at the Convention Center.
I'm almost never asked what department I'd like to work for, but I was in this case and said, "Video." We'll see.

Thursday of this week marks the return of the Jeopardy! online test. I've utterly failed to qualify these last two years: maybe this is it. I was in the running for Teen Jeopardy! back in high school, and I think two things were working against me: instead of picking one contestant from each city, they did it by region, and I'm also pretty sure that they didn't put boys with hair down to their ass on the show back then.
One of the other finalists that day was a little guy who came up to my hip. Blue blazer, I knew the type; he'd been forced to compete by his parents, even though he was twelve or something. I asked him, "When you didn't know the answer, what'd you put down?"
"'Green', " he said.
"Mine was 'fish'."


Of course, the snow was almost immediately melted by falling rain, circa noon yesterday. So I go over to The Provost's house to pick him up. After some mediocre sandwiches at the Red Bicycle, we get some errands out of the way and set to talkin' about history, media, things that matter.

This caused me to think yet again about my own sentimental reasons for not wanting to see the "old" forms of media disappear completely. Silly though it might sound, newspapers and network television provide a common context for discussion and human experience. Maybe you haven't paid attention to YouTube or Hulu enough lately to see some clip of some jackass bein' a jackass, but I bet we can all sit around and talk about "Cheers," say. The newspaper too is a place where we can all get together, if perhaps only in shared scorn. It serves a larger purpose; and if the big chains go away (chiefly due to their need to diversify into "new" media, I might add), the small ones will still be around because people need local news, and they won't get it anywhere else.

In short, the 'democratization of information' might actually kinda suck, in some ways. I think it's given lies and babytalk way more cultural cache than they ever had before. Nowadays, you need to apologize for not being a dumb shit.

And the age where a president could say, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country," may be more or less behind us, but I don't know. When World Wrestling Entertainment unveiled the character John Bradshaw Layfield (or 'JBL'), who more or less was a vicious parody of George W. Bush, I said, "If the Republicans have lost WWE, they've lost the country." This was 2004, and while history may suggest otherwise, I still feel that I was right in a larger sense.

It's this overarching theme of how connectedness both makes things quicker and (sometimes) more convenient, but it also makes the possibility of cascade failure more likely. We'll call it the Battlestar Galactica Rule (because one of the first things they noted was that wireless technology is very easy to track, and so returned to dial phones and non-networked computers -sorry, I won't do that again). It's obvious to anyone who's ever observed the basic interaction of bodies in nature, or how bad ideas spread quickly in crowds. Oh, the examples go on and on.

And the easy spread of information (or more accurately, that which could be described as 'information') hasn't made us less partisan, more community-minded. It's caused this enclave mentality that effects me just as much as anyone. I keep noting that I don't necessarily have a realistic take on what the city I live in thinks anymore, as I'm likely to be given a biased impression by what 'information' on the subject is made available, since it's generally made available by interested parties.

There's that 'media bias' argument, again. On one hand, I still say that talking about "the media" is like talking about "society", or "the Native Americans believed...": you're automatically going to be wrong about a great deal due to how simply you're viewing it. Your generalization makes you wrong.
Where from there? Okay, this too: the media is about as liberal as the conservative interests that own it. Bumper sticker. Pretty true, too, but even more so; it will appear whatever way it needs to appear in order to sell the greatest amount of advertising, and only sometimes is a direct expression of the political views of its ownership. Like FOX News, or Conservapedia.

Oh? And does not Wikipedia also censor? Uh, no...They barely do so when ordered to do so by some court of law. Furthermore, they don't tell you what to think, like Conservapedia: they open up the debate to any swingin' dick that wanders in. Truly democratic, in many of the best and a lot of the worst ways.

Brzz. I'm wandering here. I'll tell you how I did at Jeopardy! tonight.

Martin van Buren?

On the night before Obama's inauguration, which was also Martin Luther King Day (or "Black Saint Day", as a friend once called it), I was running a spotlight at a Boyz II Men show.
Well, here's how I summed it up over on Reid's blog:

"You know, yesterday I was working. Boyz II Men was playing Spirit Mountain Casino, and after setting up the stage, lighting, sound, video and band gear, I also ended up running a spotlight during the show.

So, successful black band plays to capacity crowd on MLK Day, one day before the inauguration of the first black president of the United States. Do either of these items get mentioned? No.

On one hand, I appreciate that they had no obligation to talk about either of these things, but they did go on and on about how honored they were to still be doing whatever the hell it is they do after eighteen whole years. It was like it was B2M day, and it was odd to put it lightly."

True. As I also noted, the crowd was largely populated by large white women. These were attended by either reluctant boyfriends or the men they married -possibly to these very tunes. Also: lots of gay men, generally accompany-ing their big, fat lady friends.

This scenario was made even more iffy by the fact that these were brand new bleachers we were standing/sitting on. My co-worker Lord Douchebag pointed out, "They're held together with aluminum crossbars! They're gonna collapse the minute any of these ladies start dancing!"

I was certainly worried about it, since I also had had a hand in constructing the entirely makeshift and improvised spot platform. It was sitting uncomfortably atop a number of folded-down seats, with legs propped up by tiny wooden shims in front, resting on four-by-fours in back.

"Just shove some poker chips under there!" I yelled. Someone came back with, "I know where we can get some!"

Later, during showtime, I'm trying like hell to keep a hold on this enormous piece of lighting equipment, which is swaying back and forth along with the entire bleacher. The lady seated immediately in front of my feet (and who, if things go terribly wrong, will have a hundred or so pounds of fine lighting equipment landing on her head) at first had some resentment about our presence back there, but noticed our headphones and indicated "ears" to her boyfriend. They got headphones. This is official.

Luckily, the lighting director didn't count on us knowing the artist's names, which I appreciated. "Spot Two, you got The Bald Guy..." he had said. This was nice, as earlier in the day we had been unable to name a single song that they had done. "I Wanna Sex You Up", for instance, is by Color Me Badd. I knew this. But these guys?

So yeah. They kept on acting like something far more profound than what they are, and the audience followed suit. The buffet food made our business agent violently ill, and gave some rather serious runs to another one of the stagehands. I, who had two servings of shrimp n' bay scallops in butter sauce at lunch, was just fine.

The next morning, I got up and went to Seattle. I listened to the inaugural speech until the southern-most reaches of Cowlitz County, when I lost OPB on the radio. Seemed good. I liked the fact that Obama made it a point to basically say, Hey, we've been childish shitheads for too long. Let's do something about that, and maybe for a few minutes, the resta you assholes should shut up and let the grownups talk.

That's what I got from it, anyway. The NPR folks, too. I rolled into Seattle nine minutes before my appointment with the folks at McCaw hall, which gave me scarcely little time to both find a parking space and figure out where the hell in the thirty or so buildings that comprise Seattle Center which one was McCaw hall.

I paid for parking, and received eighteen dollar coins in change. Idly, I wondered, so who's on that coin these days? I mean, from Ike to Susan B. to Sacajawea for chrissakes...Who could possibly...I didn't have time, and rushed over to the theater.

I was greeted by a number of happy Seattle Center employees who were overjoyed that I, the last testee of the day, was there. I am already an extra with IATSE Local 15, which enables me to do theatrical work in King County proper, but to work in the many venues incorporated in Seattle Center, you need a City Card.

So the two people ahead of me were quickly run through the process. The one before me was a young lady dressed for a job interview were she -say- looking into becoming a receptionist at a law office. It was pretty clear that she didn't completely understand what she was wandering into, or perhaps was recently graduated from college with a degree in Theater, and had quickly figured out that there were no jobs for her anywhere else.

People continued to be so happy to see me, as I represented the last one of the day. After me, they could go home. The deck manager was a nice man who came right out and said it: "This is really just to weed out people who honestly don't know what the fuck they're doing at all. Climb this ladder."

And I...Climbed the ladder. Then I helped him put away some cables. Pass.

I went up to the lighting bridge after this. I encountered a guy up there who was with the secretary-lookin' one from earlier. He wasn't testing her skills; he was telling her how to hang and focus a light. He asked what my knowledge level was in this area. I said, "Well, I've been with IA for two years. Before that, I was LD on a local television show, did a year at a local rock venue, I'm house AV at Nike, and was at the art museum before that..."

"Fine," he said, "I just wanted to know if you've ever done this before."

"Yup," I said. Then we got talking about an older guy we both know, although it took a few minutes while we confirmed that we were talking about the same guy. "In his late seventies? Number one on the list in Phoenix? He once threw Ronald Reagan into a river on a film shoot in the Fifties?"

"Yeah! That's him! He loves that story!"

"If only he'd stayed in the river..." If I were the secretary-lookin' lady at that moment, I would've been saying: goddamn it. It was two techs being all chummy. Later, up on the loading bridge, he basically let my sloppy knots go, and her complete lack of knot-tying skills go. He also did not test our skills as far as loading bricks. He just showed us how, including the perhaps unfortunate use of the phrase "yes you can," to the lady, who was black.

After that, a visit with the stage manager, who assured me that the Seattle local is entirely okay with answering questions, not just bark bark..."You know, a lot of the Portland guys..." I said.

"I know," he said.

Thence over to the home of Disco Boy and Girly-Girl, for brisket and endless conversation. It's interesting to note that One A.M. is wayyy past bedtime for both of us, now. The next day, even though both of us really shouldn't do this, we went record shoppin'.

For me: Queen's first album, which I can't find here at all, and Brian Eno's Music For Films, which I've had a very hard time finding. For the lady: Excene Czervenka's one-off project Auntie Christ: Life Could Be A Dream.

And -would you believe- who's on the dollar coin? Martin van Buren, who certainly was a controversial figure of his time, and a political genius of sorts if I read him correctly...But hardly a president that anyone has thus far felt any serious need to commemorate.

Ah, matter o' fact, I have a number of presidential history type stuff I'd like to talk about, but I gotta get up in the mornin' n' do somethin' stupid. I'll be back.

When A Man Loves A Book Premise

Whenever I find myself reading Anthony Bourdain, I think the same thing that plenty of other people have clearly already thought and have acted on: if I were to write a tell-all about the profession I work in, how would I deal with the question of "names changed to protect the innocent/guilty"?
Having crammed much of my ouvre into the writing of blogs for the last three years, I'm operating under a guideline of my own. To wit:
The circumstances under which I will use actual names of people is when a) they are dead, b) they are crooks, and deserve infamy, c) they already use their actual name on the internet [ala George], and d) they are famous.

So that being said, I would still want to reward to the good and humiliate the bad, were I to write a Backstage Confidential, but I probably wouldn't. There's such thing as lawsuits.
And uh, 'Backstage Confidential'? Too many books use this construction in their titles. Were I to write a confessional about being a stagehand, so many titles suggest themselves from the highly ritualized argot used by the hands themselves:

What, are ya' New?
A Day at Dimmer Beach
Heavy Things in High Places
Subs, Socas and Cheeseboroughs
You vs. Gravity
Breaking A Leg
Show Blacks
When A Roadie and A Stagehand Love Each Other Very Much...
Yer Killin' Me

Actually, all the above strike me as decent chapter names, not book titles. I'm tempted, as usual, to use Gore Vidal's To Do Well What Should Not Be Done At All, but I don't know about that. I could use Wheels to Jesus, which as I've noted before is a MySpace page for a guy who -it turns out- lives here and was my boss for much of this last summer. Perhaps my own There's Plenty of Businesses Like Show Business (which I think I got off of a bathroom wall, actually), would suffice.
The fun thing is that really, I could just copy much of what I have already written here. The last three years mark my transition from guy-who-occasionally-does-stagehanding-shit to year-round stagehand, and it's an intoxicating saga: a journey into one man's soul.

It'd make a great reality show too, I've always thought.

Or 'unscripted series', to use a description I prefer for reality shows that are actually documentaries. You know, as opposed to The Hills or something, where all that's happening is a bunch of idiots who are aware that they're on teevee sit there and live out their not-especially-interesting lives whilst being manipulated by producers.
Shows like Axe Men, The Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers and...(Whatever the one about oil field workers is) are my favorites because despite the obvious presence of cameras, the subjects are all too busy doing their jobs (and trying not to get killed) to dissemble.

Oddly, all of those are about industries that are directly affecting the health of our planet in terrible, terrible ways. Hmm.

So I was standing stage right -'dimmer beach'- at the Carrie Underwood show the other night, and found myself wondering yet again why the Guns n' Roses song "Paradise City" has become everyone's property, somehow. I did note that the song, like Pat Benatar's immortal "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", is on the top ten list of Drunk Girl's Karaoke Greatest Hits, generally performed by a lineup of shamefully smashed women just prior to bar close.
I couldn't keep her name straight, with my mind heading to 'Carrie Bradshaw' or 'Kelly Clarkson' every time I tried to utter it that day. She's really boring, but again, the place was packed to the rafters.

I even could have written a pretty good book about restaurants, having worked in all aspects of that industry (and some time in catering, as well) for roughly ten years. But so many people have, and well...
Besides, we already have M. Bourdain, who is above all else a good writer. Even his crime novels certainly have their moments, and his monograph on Typhoid Mary is fascinating.
Could I do the same, with historical overview, for my profession? Yes, yes I think I could.

But I gotta finish those other three books I'm writing first.