A Public Space

I have seen the kindest hearts reduced to irrational, fist wielding primates over parking spaces. Although it may seem negligible, parking lots have strongly influenced the course of architecture, sports, and rock and roll. While there is much to be said about “tail-gating” outside of a Judas Priest show or losing your virginity in the back seat of a Honda Civic after your junior prom, parking lots have a more subtle, and profound influence on our lives. They are a cultural and economic nexus where there is no written law governing order or etiquette; the way we act in parking lots is just who we are.
Parking lots have been pivotal in the development of the man that I have become. My parents are divorced. Until I was 18 my mother possessed primary custody of me. My parents talked through lawyers, fax machines and me (though they swear it was never their intention). Parking lots were neutral zones where my parents were contractually obligated to be civil. These desolate, disregarded chunks of land are set aside with the purpose of putting the things one needs (car, trailer, boat) when one doesn’t need them. For me however, this was the only place where I could see the things I needed (my family) in an important context; the dad world, the mom world and the kid world all at once. We had to stop the cars to do this and we had to put the cars somewhere where when they were stopped. When they stopped our worlds collided.
Weekly, my Dad would drive the 60 miles up the coast to have dinner with me. We would inevitably end up in a well-lit empty asphalt car lot. Homework was done, Frisbees were thrown, and important life talks were had. The only reason I graduated high school was because my Dad and I sat in his pickup in a parking lot every night for the last week of school as I did the work I blew off my senior year of high school.
As a skateboarder, I saw parking lots as a series of opportunities—a blank canvas. Every parking block and speed bump is another shade that could be used to in my picture. As a surfer, parking lots are a locker room where we strip off socioeconomic hierarchy, wrap in a towel and a wet suit and become the same kind of bohemians.
I can’t support Wal-Mart’s politics, labor policies or their heartless monopolization of small town economies, but I can’t say that the world would be better off with out them. On the road, parking lots take on a completely different form, for a broke band, the parking lot is a temporary home, a place to sleep, to eat and to recharge. The parking lot of a Wal-Mart super center at 4a.m. to a touring band is sweeter than any kind of deli platter guarantee a venue can offer. While I support their business practices, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Harris Teeter have the most inhospitable and difficult parking situations that I have ever seen. No one looks twice when they see shirtless road-worn musicians hanging out of a tour van eating a cold can of Chef Boyardee outside of Wal-Mart, but security would certainly be called just about anywhere else.
As we begin to wise up to the greater impact of car culture on the environment, it is easy to forget the carbon footprints imbedded in our hearts. Its easy to resent all things associated with a car driving world because of the trouble it got us in, but we should also remember the fun we had before we got caught.
Frank Lloyd Wright had to rethink his understanding of human habitation as cars began to move into family’s everyday life. People began looking at his designs and asking, “It’s beautiful, but where do we put our car?” Wright went on to design some of the most famous and copied gas stations and parking lots the world has ever known. A world with fewer cars is beautiful, but where will we put our hearts?

But Burnout Sounds So Much Worse Than Fade Away

Waste deep in a blistering, fleeting summer tour my old band had two days off in New York City to see the sights on a punk rock budget. We jumped turn styles, drank $.99 Arizona iced tea tallboys and slept in the destitute McCibons lofts. This was six months before CBGS’s lost it’s lease and stories about its closing were making fount page print in the New York Times. For me, there was nothing more important to see.
America is an ignorant teenager in many ways, our leaders are actors, our actors are our leaders. All but few of our landmarks are more than some pop culture nexus. In Hollywood one goes to Man’s Chinese Theater and puts there hands in the bacteria bath handprints of the stars. In Nashville you go to the Grand Old Opry and buy a cowboy hat and an engraved flask. In Vegas you get married and buy a shot glass. Even our historical land marks are more notable for the celebrity events that took place there; the Alamo was where Ozzy was arrested for urinating in public, Bourbon Street is where they shoot Girls Gone Wild.
Taping into my hardcore sensibilities, I walked across half of the city refusing to pay for the subway. This was essentially a pilgrimage my teenage Mecca. Growing up, I watched the Filth and the Furry a few times a month, my room was wallpapered with a hand made Ramones collage, and although I listened primarily to contemporary hard-core I knew that the music I loved and wanted to play would never have come about without this edifice to defiance.
New York is mean; the only kind of place where a club like C.B.G.B.’s could survive. In all honesty, and I was a coy tourist, asking strangers for directions and getting lost in a big scary city.
I have done this other places and I’m ok with looking out of place in foreign countries, fumbling with unfamiliar syllables, usually resorting to the international sign language of point and nod. I have had unreasonable expectations of the beauty that I had traveled to see and been disappointed by the pile of rocks that was supposed to hold some profound spiritual significance.
In the end the culture of the new people I am encountering has so much more intrinsic worth than the picture taken of me in front of said pile of rocks, therefore the trip is worth it.
But this is New York, and New York is mean, and I had in fact traveled to see something that was the antithesis of beautiful.
As I turned the last corner my hands were clenched balls of anticipation. I was wearing my ugliest, most apathetic scowl prepared to encounter an army of syringe thin, spike studded crust punks talking about class war in an apathetic yet relevant way. I expected to see a loaded marquee and a road worn band loading in. I expected to smell piss, aggression, body odor and beer. I broke the cardinal rule of punk rock tourism; I expected what I had seen in the pictures.
Instead I was assaulted by consumerism; anarchy symbols turned dollar signs. From a block off every boutique and storefront was selling nock off chunks of punk rock memorabilia, CBGB’s coffee mugs, and New York Dolls shot glasses. Of course there is much to be said about the all out lack of sincerity in punk rock (that was the point rite?), but this was just kind of pretty, well organized and pleasant.

There was nothing on the marquee and the club was closed. However, the CBGB’s art gallery/coffee shop/gift store next door was open and it appeared to have a long list of “CBGB’s like” events in the coming week including book signings, wine tasting and poetry readings.
This was diet punk, the walls of the place looked like a low-budget Hard Rock Café. I didn’t buy a tee shirt or take a picture of me standing in front of a smashed guitar.

In order to motivate myself to finish the tour and to keep up the steal toe lifestyle I had entertained since I was a teenager I needed to remember this landmark as what it should have been, and not what it was. That is part of the beauty of America, our history my not be accurate, but since most of it was written by the same sweaty palms that built the entertainment industry (a business of putting a price on creativity) it certainly is cinematic enough to enjoy with some popcorn and ignorance.

Green Is The New Indy Is The New Alt Is The New Yuppie

Neck deep in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market with my trendy reusable grocery bag filled with organic, overpriced local produce, drinking filtered tap water out of my reusable nalgine bottle, I began to feel a little guilty for carpooling with family and girlfriend instead of taking public transportation. Looking around my insecurities were rising; my bag was a generic black mesh instead of the fashionable “I heart my planet,” or the ironic Magritte throw back “I’m not a plastic bag,” I was wearing my organic bleach free converse made from recycled materials but they just didn’t seem as cool as the Toms slip-on’s (a company that donates a pare of shoes to a child in a third word country for every pair purchased) that everyone else was wearing. When did this happen? When did green become the new Yuppie? The cultural evolution of the hipster although seemingly convoluted, is essentially as predictable as a passive aggressive teenager home alone with a new a guitar amp and dime bag. Hippnes until lately has been comprised of a generalized disdain for authority and mainstream media while maintaining an ironic, slightly leftist moral matrix.God, how I have longed to be a hipster, even in the days when I was living in the breast of the beast touring the country in an independent hardcore band, desperately on the brink of obscurity. Like the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment, the struggle to be hip made me eternally not. It is not something you can study for or win. It is something that you are, and I am not There is hope however for those of us on the edge, recently things have begun to change for the hipster. Political awareness has swum its way up the main-sub-stream, faster than heroin in the 90’s. At any given time at least one article on the Vice magazine’s home page is about a global warming related topic. The Onion can be found sprawled across just as many coffee shop tables as Juxtapoz and Chuck Palahniuk. Most of the political information I used for this post in fact I found on pitchforkmedia.com. Most shockingly perhaps is that the hipster has a presidential candidate this year that isn’t Ralph Nader. Barack Obama has officially earned his white belt and Roy Orbison shades. In fact street artist Shepard Fairey of Obey fame has created a pro Obama poster that is selling for $2400 on eBay. Wilco, Superchunk, and The Arcade Fire have all played free shows promoting voter registration paid for by the Obama campaign. Barack even spoke at a Decemberists show in Portland Oregon.
I missed the age when my generation was strong with Beavis and Butthead logic and Kurt Cobain indifference, but it looks as though I may get a second chance just as I was getting the hang of pretending that I didn’t read the newspaper. I guess I need to buy a new bumper sticker for my Vespa, “smart, it’s the new cynical.”