July 16, 2007
Ace Auto
Yes, I know I’m supposed to talk about Pedal Monster. Yahoo, what a show, and what a weekend, and I’m aware I’d be a tease to hype something up for days on end and then not follow through with some sort of juicy blow-by-blow of the spectacle’s sordid events.
In fact, it’s what I used to do for a living: Be the person who wrote down everything that happened in certain events thrown by the City’s divergent subcultures, to report it back to the attendees so they could re-live things, either because they were too wasted to remember stuff in their brown-outs, or they were elsewhere in the room viewing some other life-altering razzle-dazzle while I was clawing frantically at pad, pen, and camera in front of the other one.
It was madness much of the while, trying to observe the melee I know to be of future-retrospective-style historical significance while participating in it at the same time — eventually participating enough to where I could be convinced that I was not a poser or a hanger-on. Not being the critic who just writes because they can’t do something themselves — but the critic that became the person who did. Eventually, I was swallowed up by the gravitational pull.
These days, I’m confident that I’ve accrued enough punk points to spare some leftovers to hook up any housewife with a one-way ticket to Plasmatics-ville. I have become fully “embedded” — not that I was ever a journalist anyway, as much as a person who got paid to tell people the stuff I liked or hated and why I liked or hated it.
So I always hype these events now, the ones I’m helping throw, and for some reason, I can’t bring myself follow through on the gossip reports in any substantial way. I think the Internet crutch has allowed me to feel spiritually OK about this, as most information will be out there anyway, whether I myself report it or not. With pictures, too. Also, it’s harder to divulge personal and potentially incriminatory tidbits of information about one’s best friends. Now, as a fully active member of Cyclecide — i.e., Patti Hearsted and unable to find any real time to attend events by other artists in the City I know I should be supporting — I don’t really have much to say the day after a show. Or the day after that.
As it stands now, yesterday, on the Day After Pedal Monster, after wrangling money and clipboards and costume changes and happy cycle-freak drunks until dawn, I got my first full night’s sleep and woke up at 4pm. Then I went to the Drunkyard to help strike everything, and cleaned the shaving-cream-and-flour “pie” bits from the yard, and the broken glass from the BB gun shooting range, and the whippet containers and wilted beer cans kicked behind every pallet and 50-gallon drum on our modern-day Sanford and Son fantasy-lot …
Then we crushed the other end of the car under the 2-ton bank safe under the Mousetrap’s 30-foot crane, and then the car still started after that — when we didn’t have any ether so we poured Tic Tac, the national drink of El Salvador, in the carburetor — and we rode it on idle all around Ace’s strangely-clean pavement and then smashed the windshield with sledgehammers and Texas Toothpicks. And then had more Pabst and hot dogs for dinner, naturally. And pushed my own dead-battery car out to the middle of the street so we could jump it with Mark’s car and drive me home to unpack the gypsy tinsel and all the other stuff and put away the Dead Babies’ guest beds and finally take an epsom salt bath.
Just another weekend, really. How am I supposed to be a reporter about that?
