Scissor Sisters - Magic Hour

Just go get the new Scissor Sisters album Magic Hour.

Post Apocalypse Post

Jericho is my new Netflix saga of the moment, but I can't tell whether I like it or not.

I tend to like post-apocalypse type settings for movies, but this one hits very close to home, at least metaphorically. The show is set in a timeline where there have been 23 nuclear detonations in major US cities, where the fictional hamlet of Jericho miraculously survives.

This plot kind of follows the worst-case scenario imaginable, except it's also got an over-arching Lost type of story arc with multiple mysteries and gray areas when it comes to the ethics of the main characters.

If it sounds familiar, it's because it's very similar to the premise of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which started earlier, but ran about the same time. I loved BSG, so I was intrigued by Jericho, but Jericho has not won me over. I am sticking with it because of the mysteries.

I find Jericho much more unsettling than Battlestar Galactica, mainly because of its setting. I almost find it dangerous to imagine such a realistic nuclear apocolypse, because it kind of presents an all-too realistic scenario. However, the acting is mostly good, and I can always picture Skeet Ulrich in Scream to snap me back to reality. I suppose I will finish it, but I may have to watch some cat yodeling to bring me back into the present tense.

Untapping the Glass

As I get older, I realize that there is a lot more to do in a day than there used to be. On a typical day, I wake up, check the weather on my iPhone, get e-mail, get dressed for work, make breakfast and head to the office.

 The fact that the first thing I do in the morning, besides reaching for the snooze bar another time, is to grab my iPhone. A small computer has simply taken over my life in less than a year.

I am not dissatisfied by this turn of events, just surprised. In most ways, my phone makes me more efficient. I  do volunteer work, and it's a breeze to check my e-mails without getting entangled with work items. I get a lot more accomplished in a day, and I am better organized with the calendar feature. I've not missed a doctor's appointment, or a birthday of a family member. I can even send them a digital greeting card with another app.

But there is some unpleasantness. I am constantly looking down at this tiny screen and I realize that I'm taking in too much information. I don't need to skim through 10-12 blogs per day, but I typically do. I don't need to ravenously follow celebrities on Twitter, but I do.

On the flip side, I've been able to be more social. This has led to the pleasant side effect of rediscovering my passion for collecting records and music. I guess it's a mixed bag, but I feel I have learned to temper my taps with real face time, not the Apple-trademarked video chat service, but actual physical presence among other flesh and blood humans.

For now, I will share my latest music sampling, The Black Angels, Phosphene Dream. It's a new-wave psychadelic style band that a real-life human introduced me to.

My maxim for the day, when it comes to my iPhone:

Things won't start looking up until you do. 

Support Your Local Gay? Bar

There is a cliche that no one can go home again. I've come to realize that this applies to one's home away from home as well. Tonight I went to a drag show at Fort Wayne's premier (of two) gay bar, After Dark. Now through my early twenties, After Dark was a great place to go and mingle. A true center of the gay community in this town, and I still have friends who I met there, just hanging out. Now I never engaged in anything untoward in any back room or in the parking lot, but I liked going somewhere that I felt welcome.

Now I'm 35 and have been in a relationship for a very very long time. The Drag Shows on Thursday nights at After Dark just ain't what they used to be. I used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to a drag show, and it was worth it, but nowadays, it's just utterly terrible.

I think that in the intervening years, there has been a tectonic shift in the gay community. People no longer feel the oppression of the straight world like they used to. Gays are everywhere, at PTA meetings, country clubs, watching their kids play soccer, or just picking up the latest project materials at Lowe's and Home Depot.

I was with some friends who were in from out of town, and the idea was to see if and or how drag has changed. The short answer is yes, drag shows have changed and not for the better. Now Fort Wayne drag was never auspicious or highbrow, but it was never brutally tortuous as it was tonight.

The "revue" consisted of exactly two performers, one semi-decent and one terrible. My friends and I stayed for four numbers from each performer, but that was all we could take. I was prepared with singles to tip the performers, but I was not about to encourage such bad behavior.

My friends lamented that the last gay bar in their town closed. That got me thinking, what's the rest of the story?

The tragedy seems to be that the gay bar as a business model is built on the perpetually unsustainable social construct of self-segregation. As progress marches on, the clientele for a gay bar typically dries up. People are assimilating into their neighborhoods, having book clubs and wine tasting parties with their suburban neighbors, and trading recipes with the other parents on the sidelines of the soccer field.

So-called "singles" bars are built on the same principle, but there are always more and more people turning 21 and heading to mainstream bars and clubs as the older patrons typically pair up and quit going. And now with a more tolerant and accepting society, gay young people want to spend time in the limelight of the dancefloor at the popular club.

Younger gays seem like they don't want to risk getting cruised and hit on by the much older gay patrons still languishing in the faded glory of the old gay bar.

Part of it may also be the economy, but I think After Dark is taking care of the increasing liquor prices by watering down not just the vodka, but the tonic as well.

So what's to be done with gay bars? I must say that I don't have any answers, but I see some encouraging signs. Babylon, the sister club of After Dark is starting to shake off its image as mostly a gay bar and trying to attract a more mainstream crowd.

And really, isn't that what we've been fighting for over the past 40 some odd years? We want society to accept us, and that in all fairness must be a two-way street. We have to share our spaces with our straight friends, just as they have welcomed us into theirs.

So to the drag queens of After Dark, I say, do what makes you happy. You don't have to panhandle in high heels anymore. This is the twenty-first century. If your dream is to perform, head down to the civic theatre, take voice lessons, whatever. There will probably still be drag queens in twenty years, but there may not be any gay bars in which to sing.

You've got to find your voice, and that's really hard to do when you don't even know how to lip synch to other people's songs.

Scissor Sisters vs Krystal Pepsy - Shady Love

Not Quite 52 Weeks

Okay, I'll hold my hand up. I didn't quite make it 52 consecutive weeks of music. In my defense, I had a major illness, and it was quite difficult to get back in the habit of writing. I'm planning to resume posts, but probably not weekly.

On a side note, here's a very partial list of what I've been listening to a lot lately:

All Day, Girl Talk

Showroom of Compassion, Cake

The Stranger, Billy Joel

I Feel Cream, Peaches

Life'll Kill Ya, Warren Zevon

The Slider, T. Rex

Ben Folds Live, Ben Folds

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Ben Folds

Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, Indigo Girls

Songs About the Golden Girls, Jonny McGovern

Ben Folds Five (eponymous)

Lots of Glee Cast songs from Season 2

I hope to be back to more frequent posts soon, but for now, listen and enjoy.

52 Weeks of Music - Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf

There are some albums that transcend time and space. Bat Out of Hell is one of those albums.

The album came out in 1977, the year after I was born. It is a heavy rock opera filled with love, sex, and heartache. The lyrics and the anthemic crescendos of the instruments bring the listener into the songwriter's world. You will experience spoken word poetry, and powerful guitar riffs, and Meat Loaf singing at all levels of his amazing range.

My favorite song is by far "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." It's all about teens and sex. In the cloistered world of my churchy upbringing, this was essentially audio erotica. Imagine hearing this at 12 or 13 and not being turned on. Of course, by the time I was hearing it, the album was some 10 or 12 years old, and the world had changed. Sex had become taboo, and this song celebrated it, to the point of flaunting.

This was one of the first CDs that I bought, and then at 16, the long awaited sequel came out, featuring "I Would Do Anything for Love (but I Won't Do That.)" Suddenly, everyone was into Meat Loaf all over again, but in the finicky world of 1990s radio, the long song was chopped up to fit into time slots and made into some horrible anemic version of its former self.

I think that's why I started going back to CDs only for my music. The radio was manipulative and sanitized, but the albums on CD in the dozens of plastic jewel cases strewn all over my back seat were uncut and vivid.

Of course, Bat Out of Hell is not without its detractors. Jim Steinman actually wrote the songs, and is barely ever given credit. Of course, he still gets the last laugh as he earns a good many royalties off Meat Loaf, and the anthems he wrote for other artists: "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" by Air Supply, "Total Eclipse of the Heart," by Bonnie Tyler, and "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," by Celine Dion, just to name a few.

If you've never heard Bat Out of Hell, I urge you to go out and get it.

Bat Out of Hell on Wikipedia

Album Link on iTunes