After what I can only presume from her posts was a really fun trip to Taiwan, Cindy’s back home!! I was bored without her, but luckily I had Fiza to take me to Jerry Day last weekend, so I can guest-blog about it. It’s this free concert held annually in McLaren Park to celebrate Jerry Garcia’s birthday, and I had an awesome time. The bands, particularly Melvin Seals & the JGB, were pretty good, and I like bluegrass and gospel, so bluegrass/gospel-inspired music was fun for me.

But the real draw was the people watching. The crowd was a strange mixture of college kids, yuppies (who helped along tiny children), and genuine hippies, who had possibly been in the same clothes since the sixties. Why any parent would drag his or her child to the cauldron of pot smoke that Jerry Garcia Amphitheater was sure to become was beyond me. But my heart kind of melted for the tie-dyed, haggard-looking hippie with the bubble machine who spent the concert entertaining the kids, for the older guy holding his son up to the bubbles and asking, “See? Look at the colors!”. For the crazy middle-aged woman dancing with her tiny chihuahua. Here the march of time was apparent and proud, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the counterculture gathered to celebrate their youth, whenever it occurred.

This was by turns funny and scary to me, the sober 21-year-old sitting on the hill who had never heard a Grateful Dead song in her life. Something about the day- either the pot or the shared love of a band- induced a forced equality. The obviously homeless mingled with successful-looking fortysomethings and their kids; when a frightening, angry drunk screamed “I LOVE YOU! SAY IT BACK!” to no one in particular, some actually responded. The Deadheads didn’t understand their differences and didn’t want to; they had simply forgotten that their differences existed.

It’s a hollow equality, but it’s equality. A proud Canadian walked up to the concert’s Obama booth and proclaimed, as if it naturally followed, “You all had better get Obama in the White House after the last four years. Let me tell you what that guy has done- he shipped his politics overseas, and now there’s a war. And now it’s harder to get pot in Canada, so pretty soon we’ll be like you.” Was he talking about the war on drugs? In Iraq? Do Canadians just get grumpier without weed? I looked it up… The 2007 bill he was referring to targeted violence and organized crime associated with the drug trade, so maybe Canadians are just arguing more minus their hash.

Anyway, this amorphous monster of peace, love and understanding did brush up against reality at its edges. I watched as a whacked-out woman in her 40s, dressed in a bell-bottomed, belly-baring nightmare of a Halloween costume, twirled a hula hoop with her hands in an attempt to entertain a little girl. The girl took one look into the woman’s dilated pupils and goofy grin and, with one hand on her father’s leg, began to struggle backwards up the steep hill on which she stood. Somewhere out there is an apple-cheeked two-year-old who will be afraid of hippies and circular things for the rest of her life.

Sadder was when the monster began to bleb off in different directions. At the bus, “Betty, not the other Betty who was with the Dead, but the guy Betty” introduced himself to us and tried to sell us some LSD, which, he stated, he was already on. I silently looked away as three surrounding Deadheads struck up a conversation. Yet on the bus, the gulf between the homeless Betty and the more productive widened with every block, and one by one they began to ignore him as he struggled to get their attention. It was Fiza’s friend Sam who helped Betty find the Muni and get on the train. We all left at the end of the day, but the real lotus-eaters stay stuck on the island.
–Varsha

80s music makes me happy

Oh, you didn’t get to run your fingers through my hair, love me ’til my eyes roll back?

***Thank you, Karen B, for coaxing that photographic lens to lie a bit for me

Among my group of friends, I am known for being “musically retarded.”  Really.  I don’t say “challenged” or “developmentally delayed” because that would be effrontery to the community.  It’s odd.  Ballet, so important to my youth, relies heavily on cues from music.  (But let’s not even get started on my kinesthetic sense!)  In addition, I started out with music theory, classically trained in piano for thirteen years, delved into music history, &c.  I still maintain that music does not come naturally to me.

These days, I listen to whatever is on the radio–set by the last person to listen to it.

• My brother and I drive the same car.  The dial is set to Wild 94.9, which is a nice reminder of all the music the summer staff liked to play when I worked at CTD this past summer.
• When I drive my dad’s car, the dial is usually set to KKSF, a relaxing medley of “Smooth Jazz.”  It is perhaps closest to what an old friend referred to as “sophisticated jazz.”  I’m not particularly sophisticated, but sometimes jazzy, so it’s a good fit.
• In my room, my radio is set to Star 101.3.  Top 40 and the like.

So, really, what do I like?  The easiest answer would be 80s music.  That is, music pertaining to the 1980s.  A dear friend from Loveboat (Oh, the stories from Loveboat!  We must discuss at a later time.) once asked me to created an 80s playlist for her.  Finding it hard to contain my excitement, I did manage to limit it to fourteen songs:

“Come On Eileen” ~Dexy’s Midnight Runners
“Hungry Like the Wolf” ~Duran Duran
“Borderline” ~Madonna
“When the Lights Go Down in the City” ~Journey (it’s about San Francisco!)
“Highway to Hell” ~AC/DC
“Video Killed the Radio Star” ~President of the United States of America
“Where the Streets Have No Name” ~U2
“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” ~Simple Minds
“Dancing in the Dark” ~Bruce Springsteen
“The Promise” ~When in Rome
“Billie Jean” ~Michael Jackson
“Fast Car” ~Tracy Chapman
“I Melt with You” ~Modern English
“Take My Breath Away” ~Berlin

That’s a pretty decent list, if I do say so myself.  Why do I like 80s music?  It’s easy.  People don’t expect too much from it, and by extension, of me.  There is also, of course, the nostalgia factor.  Varsha knows–why else would we celebrate Anne of Green Gables, Grease, and Celine Dion so much?  I also like “ethnic drumming.”  There’s something so viscerally appealing about Polynesian drumming, Taiko, and the like.  My best description is that it gets into your bloodstream.

Lately, I’ve found some musical connections to a friendship I made two years ago, in my first year of college.  One of my friends was taking an American Cultures class in the Music department.  During one of our study breaks, he told me about two of the music forms in his reader (the Lewis dot structures I was studying was much less interesting).

• The corrido.  A handy Wiki article will describe it better than I can, but my rudimentary understanding came in handy recently when I was tutoring a high school student in English.  He moved to the United States about 4 months ago, so we’ve been reading news articles, novels, and textbooks together to bulk up his English comprehension.  A New York Times article on Dec. 18 mentioned narcocorridos.  The linguist in me delighted in recognizing the word roots; the English tutor side found a perfect example of compounding.  My friend from freshman year might be glad to hear that his readings were not about some abstract concepts; I was glad to be able to explain just what the article meant.
• Some people study best to music; others, tranquil silence.  Depending on my mood, I will function with both, and like to look for music to play.  I looked at the “World Zone” category on Yahoo! Music and noticed zydeco.  Another of the reader articles from my friend’s class, zydeco is fun, zany, and twangy.

The title of this overly-wordy entry refers to a specific zydeco song, “Ya Ya,” by Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band.  It is simply delightful, and really–aren’t we all waiting for our ya-yas?