Last fall, I spent two days in Guerneville, a small town an hour outside of San Francisco known as a seasonal resort area for hedonistic gay men. Luckily, autumn was off-season and the only people around were locals… consisting mainly of grey haired hippie ladies and pockmarked meth addicts.
Guerneville sits right on the Russian River. It’s chock full of Northern California rural charm that includes looming red wood trees and a B&B on every corner. Main Street is all of two blocks packed full of antique boutiques, divey gay bars, and tackle/bait shops. Though it has the look and feel of a small conservative Norman Rockwell town, it’s actually a very liberal place with pot smoking skater punks and rusty Ford pickups sporting pro-choice bumper stickers. Also, those pick-up trucks are driven by Lesbians, lots of ‘em.
In the early 1980’s, Dolly Parton was a massive superstar speeding through the pop culture cosmos at a frantic pace. She became an actress, cut a number of award-winning albums, graced major magazine covers, and peddled her image on talk shows around the world. She made boob jokes all the rage and dominated the airwaves in multiple radio formats. Her talent was a force to be reckoned with.
“...You know, you... you make me feel so good inside. I always wanted a girl just like you… such a purity… Pretty Young Thing...”
It’s Christmastime in the city. You have just entered a downtown Old Navy clothing store where you are focused on buying only a new pair of cheap yet quality jeans and perhaps a nice dress shirt. Immediately upon entering you realize that Old Navy is a shopper’s cabaret complete with a full-functioning, three-dimensional musical number featuring helpful headset-wearing employees jumping in every direction to the rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)”.
Buckle yourself down into the sleigh and whip out the eggnog…
It seems like at the beginning of the Christmas season each year more and more people are complaining, “Christmas just keeps creeping up earlier and earlier every year”. Of course they mean ‘creeping up’ in reference to a corporate push to drive consumers into stores all the sooner. I wondered if this was really true so I got an expert opinion on the matter from my grandmother. Apparently everything is just fine. She claims that the infiltration of Christmas is false and that people have been barking about it since Christmas’ conception.
Dara and I browsed through a supermarket busy celebrating National Cake Frosting Month. The store was aglow with front aisle displays of Pillsbury confetti spreads and Betty Crocker’s new buttery whipped gold icing. This new creamy concoction was especially exciting because it was flecked with bits of edible gold sugar granulates that sparkled under the supermarket day-glo.
Dara and I ran carelessly from aisle to aisle, bumping into the carts filled with boxes of cake flour and pints of ready-to-spread frosting. The produce section was located at the back of the store and completely empty with the exception of one lone tangerine. A misty spray of water spat from an overhead pipe. Its purpose was to keep the vegetables glistening and moist but here it served only to make mud from the grim at the bottom portion of the fruit and vegetable bins.
Apple recently updated their iPod product line, which included a new slickly designed video Nano and a touch screen 16GB iPod that mimics the look of the iPhone. The most exciting addition to this family for me has been the iPod Classic with it’s 160GB of drive space. This amount of digital storage is a huge improvement over the mere 60GB on my previous player. For the past several months I’ve been moving tracks from my 120GB laptop to my Mac Mini’s 320GB external hard drive in order to store music I couldn’t use because of limited iPod space. Now that I have the new 160GB iPod, my next plan is to replace my now ancient Mac Mini with a newfangled iMac that has 1TB of external hard drive. (That’s one whole terabyte, 1000 gigabytes!!) It seems that computer life is a never-ending series of upgrades… and for me, the more space available for collecting music, the better.
