I Am An American Man

Note: This is a repost from my private blog, 2006.

I drank 2 20 oz Dr. Peppers, and 1 cup of coffee.
I ate 1 microwave pasta dish, one frozen toaster oven entree, and a double fried lunch of chicken and potatoes.

I watched South Park and a rerun of Saturday Night Live.
I turned off SNL before the news because I have no love for Norm MacDonald.

I burned about 1/10 of a gallon of gas...
...and farted enough to fill up the gallon.

I have a beer belly decorated with tattoos.
I live with a white girl so healthy and pretty that her type doesn't exist in 90% of the world.

I watched lonelygirl15, the most popular girl on youtube.

I have no love for war, but I'm confused as to which ways I support it, which ways I can help stop it, and how to make that decision.

I bought name brand products.
I complained about corporations.

I did something illegal, but not immoral.
Most of what I did today was "immoral" by the "standards" of popular "religion."
I profess to be religious, but not "one of those."

I am a child of advertising.
Although I sincerely believe in and practice equality, I receive the benefits of gender privilege, class privilege, race privilege, and citizenship privilege, none of which I have earned.

I believe in something better, and believe I have the means to achieve it.
I worry that my belief in something better has already been commodified and branded, and that I won't be able to afford it.

I am a revolutionary and a peaceful citizen.
I participate and subvert.
I am publicly generous and privately greedy.
I am very friendly and very obnoxious.

I am an American Man.

Some things I love about America

I'm really American. Mixed-blood, Army family, Eagle Scout. One of the First World gifts my parents gave me is a world-class education. A powerful effect of this education is that I have a sense of the influence my country has had on the world in the past 233 years, and especially in the last 60. All politics aside, some of this influence has been life-affirming and some of it has been destructive. This entry is not about that, because the things I really love about America have about zero to do with politics or global influence.

First, I love the multiculturalism. Even as a middle class white boy I grew up with access to all of the world's music at my fingertips, and a bundle of friends and family in many colors, creeds and styles. My parents and teachers made it very clear from early on that to be American was to treat everybody equally, and respect everybody's freedom. My 8th grade teacher and the current principal of St. Vincent de Paul school in San Francisco, Mrs. Harvey, spent a few weeks teaching us comparative religion. She taught us about Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism and Confucianism. We learned about the basic tenets and practices of each tradition, and where around the world people practice them. Though this was a Catholic school (and quite actively so), there was no judgement in this lesson. I guess one of the perils of teaching our children to think critically is taking the risk that they will question and reject the tradition which taught them how to do so. I rejected the classical tradition in which I was raised for a worldview that is both more inclusive and more individualized than that of my childhood. This is about the most American thing I've ever done, and I am happy to live among millions of people who have done the same thing to varying degrees. I believe our intellectual and spiritual diversity is a great strength, and I celebrate that.

Second, I love the people. I love our culture of loud exuberance, of living our lives with gusto. I love that we root for the underdog and embrace the ugly duckling. I love that we produced Tina Fey, Kurt Vonnegut and Oprah Winfrey. Constant, peaceful changes in power are normal for us, from our local hobby group to our national elections. If there is a barbecue, a rock show or a competition of pretty much any sort going on, we'll be there, screaming "YOU SUCK!" at an arbitrarily-chosen opponent. I love that.

Really, though, it's the land. This place - sea to shining sea and all that - never ceases to amaze me with it's natural wonders. We all have parts of this country that we love, pieces of land and natural formations that remind us of the richness of our lives here. We've settled in some of the lushest parts of the world (hello Pacific Northwest) and some of the most inhospitable (hello Great Salt Lake). I've been lucky enough to see some of the more desolate spots in this country, and my best memories are inexorably tied to the land. My personal mental refuge (my "happy place" if you will) is in the American desert, around a campfire with a friend, which is how I know this place must be in my blood.

No matter how well or poorly our government represents me personally, growing up in a democracy means that I know, in the end, that societal and cultural power comes from the people. We're imperfect, we're fickle, we're impressionable. We work hard, play hard and argue about all of it. My one hope is that we continue to embrace multiculturalism and diversity in an active way, and that we begin to really celebrate our role as citizens of the world. In celebration of how far we've already come along that road, I intend to laugh heartily, sing loudly and get sweaty. I'm really American, and I'm pretty cool with that.

What Is Rock? (Part 1)

This post is the first in an ongoing series in which I will explore rock music and it's related culture. I've asked some blogging friends to write a piece on the topic, "What is Rock?" and will post their pieces here. Our first guest is Laura Bee, a tattoo artist in Northern California.

This was not my parents' music.

I believe it was 1975, the year before everything was issued in red, white and blue that I got my first "stereo" for christmas. Until that time, what we all had were "record players" which were turntables with speakers built right into a suitcase-like box with latches to hold the lid on and a handle for carrying. A record player had three speeds, 33, 45 and 78. 78 was real slow and amusing to play songs on for a while, but I've never seen a disk that was intended to play at that speed. 45s are small records with one song on each side, and a much larger hole than the silver nipple that fits perfectly into an album, and requires a plastic disk or careful placement to center perfectly to play. You have to listen to a couple of seconds of scratch silence at the beginning before you get your music, and when you're a kid you're less and less careful with the records, stacking them without their sleeves until the scratches run through the whole tune. As a kid you listened to what your parents bought, and the sound of "California Dreamin'" or "Monday Monday" will still bring back the smell of cooking Creepy Crawlers, a childrens' toy that was used to make rubber bugs. You poured "Goop" into a metal mold and put it into a really hot tray to cook them. That toy would in no way be considered safe or acceptable for kids to play with these days, but the smell was divine and is forever attached to the sound of the Mamas and the Papas weaving harmonies for me.

When Dottie got a modern piece of furniture that was a cross between a dresser and a record player I inherited hers from when she was in high school, two toned blue and smelling like the back seat of my grandmother's red Mercury. I was pretty young then, and would listen to whatever disk was available. Occasionally I would get to choose a new 45 at the store, I remember Michael Jackson's ABC, with some other song on the B side. The B side was never as good on a 45, maybe you played it, maybe you didn't. Little girls had a choice between Donny Osmond and Michael Jackson back then, and I always preferred Michael Jackson, even though he was black and "black music" wasn't supposed to be for us. I liked him when he was black, but don't mourn him today.

My new and modern stereo was molded from white plastic, with cylindrical slotted speakers that were separated from the turn table by wires, and you were supposed to set them as far apart as possible. You pushed a button and it would move the arm automatically to the beginning of the record, instead of having to do it yourself. I also received an album they chose for me. "Deep Purple, Machine Head" because "Laura, we know how much you love purple. This was not my parents music. They had no idea what it wold sound like, they picked it for it's name. Smoke on the Water was the song the radio chose as the big tune from that album, but Lazy, and Highway Star were the two tracks that would transport me, take me to some other place. After smoking some good brown 70s pot I could lay on my back and let the majesty of Lazy roll over me, and I swear I could see the music. Those big dramatic opening notes on the organ, that sound so different when the speakers are as far apart as the cords will allow for, the slow build, the big-rock-finish. Who had ever heard of a song that went for 7 minutes and 19 seconds before? All songs were two minutes and change for me, before that time. I had that one album for the longest time and would listen to it over and over.

The first album I purchased for myself was Smokin', by Humble Pie. I can still remember how the song 30 days in the Hole moved me in a way that music never really had. I was an avid yet indiscriminate audiophile from that minute forward. I'm not even sure music was divided into genre at that point, it was just music you liked and your parents hated. "Turn that down!" became the anthem of all parents everywhere. Kids would all converge on one house with their best albums and playing music WAS what we were doing, not something you did in the background of other activities.

My dad worked at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, and I wasn't allowed to go to concerts for a while, he saw first hand the kinds of things that went on there and there was no way they were letting me anywhere near that. I remember my ninth grade summer when the big concert everyone was going to was Peter Frampton, and I wanted to go so bad... Dottie was leaving another crazy husband and we were stuck in traffic right by the stadium long enough to hear a few songs, and I knew all my friends were in there. How I hated her for her crazy life, how bad I wanted to be in there feeling like Peter felt. I looked at her and declared that next time I was going.

"Next time" was KISS, and I went alright. I went to every other concert that summer, and it's all lumped into one long show. Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, Aerosmith, The Beach Boys and the band that would become my own personal band forever more: Pink Floyd. It was the Animals tour, but they played the whole Dark Side of the Moon album as their second set. I've seen them do Animals, Momentary Lapse of Reason, Division Bell, and the greatest concert of all time The Wall (there were only 17 US tour dates, one of which was in LA on my 18th birthday) I still have the T shirt from that concert, and Molly wants it, and won't get it until I die.

I saw the Rolling Stones "Some Girls" tour in 1978, with Prince, but I took too much acid and was just slightly embarrassed for everyone and thought the whole stadium was looking at me.

This was music your parents hated, music to get high to, music that always needed to be turned up as loud as possible, but was always met with demands to "turn it down, for God's sake that's not even music!" It was perfect. Joy Power was the Led Zeplin expert at my school, and one christmas I asked my dad for every 8 track they had ever put out. 8 track was cool and portable, if a little less accurate for finding exact songs, like four parallel universes and you had to learn that if this song was playing on track two the one you wanted would be starting on track 4. Or you could put one on, and it would play for as many days as you let it until you changed it to something else. He also bought me a battery operated portable player called a DynoMITE! which looked like the thing you would use to set off an explosion with, plunger to change tracks. I carried all those 8 tracks and that big bulky player in a backpack with me every where I went, and it was the summer of LSD and Led Zeplin for me. Molly laughs so hard when I tell her that story, she with her 32G iPod that holds more songs than we ever knew existed.

It seems to me now that the method for playing music would expand how much different music was in my life with each jump in technology. Cassette tapes were even smaller than 8 tracks, and then Molly's dad played me my first music on CD, which sounded clearer and more immediate than any other delivery system. I skipped the entire 80s in music, I was wearing denim and Birkenstocks, and having babies at home; breast-feeding and eating vegetarian. There was no Duran Duran for me, or Depeche Mode, and I thought everything on MTV was stupid.

I remember one day working as a bar-tender on the afternoon shift when the busboy Philip brought in this cassette, already cued up to a song, and said "There's no one but you and me here, put this on and turn it up, WAY up." The first soaring notes of Guns and Roses "Sweet Child of Mine" rolled out of the bar speakers and time stopped. I had a definite GnR period of my life, and Molly was conceived to one of their songs, although I couldn't tell you exactly which one.

I also remember the first listen of Nirvana "Smells like Teen Spirit" affecting me the same way. Molly had the poster from that, the naked baby in the pool over her bed when she was really little, she loved that picture, she could see his pee pee. I remember one day my friend Jaima's daughter Ryanda looked under her bed and asked "Mom, what are all those big black CDs under your bed for?"

When I was serving my tattoo apprenticeship almost 20 years ago this girl I worked with named Deana had a cassette of this guy talking. I thought he was so funny and intelligent and I would listen to it over and over. His name was Henry Rollins* and it wasn't till years later I found out he had been in a band called Black Flag and then moved on to his own Rollins Band. I was angry and hating my marriage to a die-hard James Taylor/John denver/Dan Foglegerg musician, and Rollins Band was the perfect sound track for my discontent.

I am no music historian, you know, one of those people who knows every musician and every album, and what year this guitar player joined the band and the year that drummer died. For me Rock is a way to remember where I was in my life, and is somehow also connected to the way we listened to it. The album, 8 track, cassette, CD and digital periods of my life.

I haven't been in a music store for years now, I go to iTunes and download the tracks I want, or sometimes whole albums, which are still called albums even if they no longer appear on vinyl. It also marks my own aging, because it has moved beyond me in a way. My son Paul loves Swedish Black Death Metal, and the stuff he writes and plays on his guitar, while amazing is just hardly music and more of a display of skill to me. I often wish he'd turn it down.

Music is the sound track and a timeline for my life, and often a certain song reminds me of exactly where I was when I heard it for the first time, or listened to it regularly, or what was my favorite drug right then. Andrew swears you can tell the values and desires of any culture or sub-culture by listening to the lyrics of it's music. I think for the majority of my era of learning to love music the message was "I reject your values, I am rebellion personnified , I want to rock and roll all night, and party every day."

Now that I'm old, you'll find me at an Indigo Girls concert (I AM the third Indigo Girl, by the way) or playing the shit out of Lilith Fair 98, or I did until it was taken away from me for over-play. Rock has moved beyond me and I like pretty things. It's a natural progression I suppose, but I'm not so sure how much I like the idea. I hate hearing my mother's words come out of my mouth:

"Could you turn that down?"

*Henry was born in the same week of the same year as me, and for a long time I was sure we were soul mates, destined to be together forever. When I finally met him, he not only didn't love me, he didn't even like me. I'm still getting over it to this day. I took Michael to see him do spoken word, but had already explained our relationship to him, so he wasn't jealous.