Freaky Friday

Today was certainly an unusual school day. I guess the power went off around 10:15. I was teaching in the Art Room, with the lights off as usual. And of course there's no clock in there either. Since the bells have been totally unreliable, it was no surprise that that there wasn't a sound at 10:15, but then we heard all the yelling out in the hallway. We had no idea what was going on, so we looked into the lunch room and saw all the lights were out. I have no idea when they go power back on. I hope it was soon, because I left a tuna sandwich in the refrigerator.

So I wanted to write more about music. I've been known in the past to show some disdain for what the kids call music these days. It's not that it's bad. It's boring. Who's really good out there? Beyonce? All her songs have exactly the same beat, the same beat almost every song has now. And she's probably the best of the lot. All the rest of the top 20 songs have one of the following messages:

1. You are good-looking
2. I want to have sex with you
3. You know you would enjoy having sex with me
4. I'm good at sex
5. You look like you would be fun to have sex with

It's possible I'm missing one or two, but probably not. Of course, there's nothing wrong with consenting adults having sex, and I'm not saying that sex itself is boring, but it just doesn't make for a very interesting topic. The fact that a majority of the top songs are all about this admirable but ultimately boring subject, not only makes everything repetitive, but it lowers the bar for anything that sounds even remotely different. That's why a dreary, repetitive song like "How to Save a Life" sounds so good- because it's actually about something interesting. And of course, there's the "Beautiful Girls" phenomenon, which could be good it people actually go and listen to "Stand By Me" and "Under The Boardwalk" to hear the original songs that Sean Kingston is ripping off.

The flip side of this is that there's a tremendous surge of great indy music out there, because it's become so easy to make and distribute a CD. Do yourself a favor and listen to bands like The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band, The New Pornographers (my personal favorite), Rilo Kelly, TV on the Radio, Tegan and Sara, Fountains of Wayne, or The Go! Team. Or, if you have the bucks, drop a couple of thousand for the Hannah Montana show. Floor seats are on StubHub starting at $507 and topping out at $3334. For 12th row! Row 21 in Atlantic City is $3570. I wonder what a first row seat would be worth? Your best bet is to fly to Kansas City, where you can score two 9th row tickets for $650 per.

Allow me to wax nostalgic for a moment. When I lived in New York in the early 80's, all the concerts were promoted by a guy named Ron Delsener. He had a club where you paid a couple of hundred dollars a year in exchange for the right to reserve the absolute best tickets to every concert he had, which was every important show in NYC and Long Island. You'd go to his office on East 67th street and pick up the tickets from Ron's sister Harriet. The worst seats I ever got from there was 11th row floor.

But my favorite were his concerts on the Hudson River Pier, just south of where the Intrepid was (is it back yet?). These were general admission, and they'd have a riot if they let the club members go in the main gate before the long line, so they had an ingenious solution. For crowd control purposes, you entered on the street side of the pier (obviously), walked down through a fenced in area for about 100 yards to the end of the pier, then turned a corner and came back toward the street end, where the stage was. Club member had a special gate where we didn't have to walk through that area. We just entered right next to the stage. So we could stroll in, take our seats wherever we pleased, then sit and watch the others run, push and scramble (this was New York, after all) all the way down the pier and all the way back again. It was really fun, sort of like going through the E-Z Pass when there's a long line to pay the toll, except that at the end you saw a concert instead of driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.