friends

Baby pictures are in: Frank Edward Robbins VI; aka “Freddy”

Farsheed makes music!

Awesomesauce.

Joe Felice is blowin’ up bigtime. This was on the frontpage of youtube.com, and is smart and clever to boot. Go Joe!

It’s on.

I suppose the natural follow up to a wave of weddings is a wave of babies. Trinity County Outlaws faceman Shamus just had his, The Mordecais report “Epidural and hard contractions now,” and Frank Robbins VI will be upon the world soon.

Pretty neat! Congratz to all and sundry. I look forward to more opportunities to play non-blood-relation uncle (ala “Uncle Beefcakes” to the magic rollertots).

Very good times here in Portland. Only way it would be better is if I was actually on some kind of vacation now and could stick around for a few days and see the people (e.g. I don’t even get to visit w/my dang sister, let alone any of the ultrahot girls I not-so-secretly admire up this way). It is the way of these things for the time to be compressed, for a half-hour stomping around a gravel yard and bonfire screaming along with The Eastern — a.k.a. our lovely friend Jess and her giant tattoodled marmite-savoring redbeard hombre Adam from New Zeland — serving in place of lengthy dinner conversation.

This is human, to engage in such rituals. We are all here together. It’s a celebration of life.

Sadly the sun also rises, and yesterday was spent mostly fighting off the blood-thirsty death-panther hangover and then putting in a mild six-hour workday trying to scramble back in front of some deadlines. I assume at some point my life will return to a more equalized state, but for now chugging away the afternoon in Beulahland ain’t so bad.

And so I’ve gotta roll, waiting now for my ride to tearass through town from Tacoma. It’s another insane week ahead. I’m planning to make it back here in August, work and time and transport permitting. That’ll be good. For now there is but one thing to do: ride the fuckin’ lightning, bitches.

Soon the sassy bastard will be mine: squid w/monocle. Want your own? Talk to the boss-lady

Bonus pic!

So, this is woefully incomplete; In fact, it covers only the up-to-the-event story... I almost don't want to post it but I think it's good to get the first part out there. More likely I'll write the rest. I have a few photos which I'll add once I get back to the HC and can get 'em off my camera, and for the latter part of the story I can lean on Stephanie and Andy for graphics. Indeed, the above is an Andy Smith original (some rights reserved). In very brief: I had a great time, and it was actually semi-Important for me to get out of my routine and mix it up. All work and not play is not a pragmatic plan.

Travelling from SFO, Cheney drops me off at the airport, ran into the Girth’s lawyerly friend Eric at the terminal. He’s delayed on the way to San Diego so we have a beer. It’s a little hard to make small talk since we’ve only met a couple times, but there’s basketball, Cavs getting trounced by the Wizards, and that’s en entre, and he’s a good guy so we pass 45 minutes like that.

Flight in to LA is fast. Julia picks me up. New haircut. We talk about the important things first, how our respective love lives are going. You already know my scene (nada). She’s got a man-friend who’s got a moustache he likes to wax (to good effect, IMHO) but also says she’s really mostly interested in “good sex and working on myself.” I tell her that’s very LA, but I also think it’s great, and tell her that too.

We go out to her neighborhood bar for a couple beers and to catch up. It’s the former haunt of the Girth, the Lost and Found. In a strip mall — like all things there — but also dark, mirrored, with old-school-classy leather upholstry and a crowd of semi-feral regulars. Things are good, taking family news and the times, being close to thirty years old and still searching, etc.

I like Los Angeles. It’s popular and easy to hate, and true there’s a lot there to loathe, but this is true of everyplace. I think the thing that gets to people like me is that all the reasons we love LA are difficult to own. They seem cheap, weak, materialistic. The weather is nice. People are beautiful. It pulses with the certain energy and power that only a major global culture node can possess. Reeks of ambition.

Anyway, I sleep on a big old couch, and in the morning we do Starbucks, gossip about college people, and then it’s time to pack up and roll. We do a quick stop for me to get some swim trunks at Ross, then to acquire amazing Italian sandwiches involving a long wait for our number to be called, then pick up Julia’s friend Heather, a shining example of humanity. She has a pink scooter, a vintage 1945 map of the USSR, a tiny tv that she watches infrequently (much to the derision of the TiVo-praising Julia) and is allergic to sunlight and ibuprophen, which is a rough hand to be dealt. She wrangles an office full of world-class architects (Frank Gehry). We discover much common ground on the theories of human organization, power, and the virtues of being houseless “for a time” and living off the fat of the land.

The last stop out of town is Leonardo’s, the afformentioned man-friend. Among many other things, Leonardo drives a FedEx truck so we were picking him up after he wrapped his shift. He’s a LA native, a legitimate Lakers fan, and he really does wax his moustache to give it a jaunty point. The effect his that his face looks a fair bit like the Eric from Vagabond Opera, though as a man he’s less operatic and more folksy in bearing.

Anyway, we all pile in and eat as Julia fights our way through traffic; downtown LA, into the burbs, a million “Babies ‘R’ Us”s, a roadside brushfire, the windmills, and finally into the Greater Indeo Area and the festival scene. Several defining things happen almost immediately:

1) We put on sunscreen. The “group lube session.”

2) We observe egregious and utterly shameless littering on the part of festival-goers.

3) We begin receiving VIP treatment.

These three things encapsulate much of the experience I ended up having for the first couple days.

Comparisons to Burning Man are inevitable to me. It’s pretty brutal out there in the heat of the day, and even though it’s not the Black Rock Desert, and it’s just April, it’s still 90+ degrees and savagely sunny. The desert setting, various ravish overtones, and the presense of several art installations I recognize from the Playa make it all seem familiar. But it’s full of kids (Burning Man skeiws older overall) and has a kind of Spring Break vibe at times, which can be unfortunate. And there’s the massive amount of littering, which is omnipresent and frankly saps my hope for humanity.

We’re also Very Important People for this thing. Via a connection, we’re rolling in under the auspices of the owners of the festival grounds — the Empire Polo Field, which is exactly what it says it is — and so we park real close and roll in the back way along with a lot of pretty people and Steven Tyler, etc. There’s a general “VIP” area of the festival which just takes a more expensive ticket to access, but has some amenities (couches, liquor in addition to beer for sale, etc), and then there’s a “Tiki Hut Area” which we have special wristbands for, and also backstage etc.

It’s sort of ridiculous. Waiting in a traffic line in the car before we arrive I read aloud the strongly-worded-letter Julia received concerning the access and expected behavior of all parties within the Tiki Hut Area (consistently capitalized as such). Basically they’re saying don’t be an asshole, so we’ve got it covered, but it’s still kind of funny that they have to write that out in a strongly worded letter. The aforementioned Area itself is a big (15’ x 30’ maybe) tiki hut with a thatched roof, and professionally-staffed open bar. This is some kind of clubhouse for the Polo grounds, it seems, and is situated in a garden area featuring several large lilly padded pools, lush grass, shady trees, sculptures, etc. It’s about 7 degrees cooler than everywhere else. The whole thing is behind a gate and several security dudes, and there’s a “viewing area” where you can watch the mainstage, as well as all the people who you are lording it over. Like I said, ridiculous. But definitely nice. This is a feature of the weekend.

We arrive on the scene just in time to catch The Breeders, which Julia’s happy about. It feels sort of trippy, being out in the warmest air I’ve felt in months, big soundsystem going with giant video monitors on the side. There are five big stages there — two outdoor, three ginormous tents — and by 4pm on Friday things are in swing. Partytime.

More to come.

I have a lot of stuff to write, but I may or may not get it all written, and so I quickly wanted to alert everyone to a new good thing to read if you’re looking for something to tickle your brain. My friend Anna (or Anita, the first girl I ever slow-danced with) is a real live professional Artist, and is currently spending some time in rural Estonia doing an artist-in-residence thing. She’s writing about it. It’s good! For instance:

I was already surprised to be speaking with my mom on skype- with me in Mooste, Estonia & her in Eugene, Oregon- then it got even more exciting- when Marcel, my younger brother calls my mom from Prison, in Umatilla, Oregon & she puts him on speaker phone and we are all three speaking to each other as though we are in the same room, only thousands of miles apart and each with completely different circumstances. Marcel could ask me about Mooste and I could ask him about how his parenting class is going & other such matters and my mom could intervene at any moment. If only i could have recorded our conversation it would have been an art piece in and of itself- a sound piece. I guess it was recorded through the prison- as they monitor and record all telephone calls- Now to get a copy!

Check it out y’all: A May in Mooste

Also, in one of the best examples I’ve yet found of how other parts of the world are starting to seriously kick our ass in internet access, this village of 500 has total WiFi, as did the bus she drove to get there. Which is what makes this possible. The assumption that US Citizens lead the best life becomes more and more faulty over time, it seems….

We billed our housewarming party as an opportunity to join us in “staging the end of our youth.” The crowd was smallish but high quality, and packed dense enough to make the occupied rooms seem full. Mix in a little SparksPlus, and it felt just about right.

Most importantly, a representative social network sample was achieved: academics from Berkeley, drupal developers from the Mission, lawyers from all over, Sixto, friends from Humboldt county and Oregon, and perhaps best of all Nick’s cousin in a positively outlandish basketball outfit rolling in and supervising the cooking of much bacon. Serious meatboxing. The mix works, and there will be dinner parties to come in the same vein.

Later in the evening, when things got whittled down to the inner circle, the truly regressive behavior began to emerge. There was some unsupervised mixed-martial arts in the living room, and in the back yard the great ritual of “cutting beers in half with a machete.” What started as a feat of immaturity is one cycle away from tradition.

I don’t know what our neighbors thought about this, especially as it was 3am and things eventually moved on from cans to bottles, which is a lot less safe and a lot more messy; but we cleaned things up good in the morning, and it probably won’t happen again soon. Hopefully there are no hard feelings.

I did a riff on Ken Kesey for my outfit, and my friend Molly Keogh came through with an amazing hat for me: the classic pinstripe train engineer number (which Kesey rocked, and has been appropriated and evolved by hipsters everywhere) with a “Software Engineer” emblem on it. Amazing! I’m still wearing it now. LGD dressed as one of the Kingsmen and the Girth simply hicked it up with an Oregon license plate around his neck, Flavor-flav’ style. A surprising number of others heeded our “Oregonian costume” suggestion, and it seemed to be fun.

The final hours were a long drunken singalong — me popping in between brushing and flossing for the chorus of Easy Money — culminating with The Wild Rover:

And it’s no, nay, never! No, nay, never, no more, will I play the wild rover. No never no more!

It’s been ten years of shenanigans with these guys. I wouldn’t take any of it back, and I hardly think it’s true that we’re through. Not even close. People dip into various pools of nostalgia from time to time, and growing up happens whether you like it or not — tomorrow’s adventures will be different than those of yesterday, for sure — but I’m a big believer in Fun of the Now, inconsistent practitioner though I may be. The best has yet to come.

My man Mike “Smiley” Connery wrote a book! It’s pretty exciting. He’ll be going on tour and doing the whole deal. It’s a natural continuation of the work we started at Music For America, and I’m looking forward to reading the final copy.

There’s more Mike at Future Majority.