tha crossroads

So, nonexistent readership; what's new? A couple of interesting things, capped off by the official gathering of tax documents to take to the accountants. I had to place my band in a Schiavo-esque vegetative state for a couple of months (although a phone call to clue in bandmates makes it seem like everyone else is independently frustrated with it, so maybe it's for the best).

The big reason for not officially having the free time for such ventures is that I'm working on the campaign of Bill Peduto, mayoral candidate for Pittsburgh. It's kind of been up and down. I'm ostensibly working on the grassroots part of the campaign, which is mostly involved with outreach to the many cynical and disaffected twentysomethings of our fine city. Being myself a slightly disaffected twentysomething myself (at least for the next couple of months), it's both an excellent opportunity to reach out to people I can relate to, and also an excellent reinforcement of how happy I will be to hand in my 20something ID card in five months. The Modey Lemon, Pittsburgh's biggest and most-appropriately lauded band, played a benefit / awareness show a couple of weeks back, which went well for turnout, and went well for the first 95% of Bill's speech before the band kicked it out. The crowd, with lots of the patches-and-piercing crowd in attendance, was actually quiet and respectful untill compared the ML to local patchouli users Rusted Root, which resulted in some uncomfortable laughter and lots of smirking from wiseacres on the internet the next day. A good chunk of the fight is to convince the kids that Bill is not a sleazy politician who is basically attempting to exploit the youth vote...which said misstep kinda builds the perception of. But, in the past two weeks, things seems to have cooled off and Bill is kicking some ass in normal settings. So, that's good. I wrote a little brochure highlighting some of the great things that Bill has done in the past which hopefully will be in print in the near future, which I'm much better at that attempting to chat with strangers. Anyway. The campaign marches on.

Meanwhile, speaking of cashing in the punk point account, I've appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper twice this month, first for a letter criticizing the local crappy public radio station, and once as a small aside in a feature article on punk homeowners (in which it is noted that I am not active in the Scene at present). Not that this is any big shocker; I've been quietly extricating myself for years now, and haven't really considered myself 'punk' in a good number of years. I guess it's been on a downswing since my brief involvement with a certain political punk band and got exposed to the dirtier element of that scene - lots of talk, lots of pointing fingers at others, lots of low level swindling, lots of simplistic thinking. And this article has brought up a lot of the same kind of dumb; lots of tiring questions about what exactly is "punk" (music or lifestyle, or both, or neither). At one point all that stuff seemed the world to me, and now it just makes me tired. To paraphrase an old roommate, it's a great stage to go through, but it's unhealthy to dwell somewhere that you don't feel comfortable anymore.

In more tangible news - the new Beck album is really good! I totally wish he wasn't a scientologist!