xtcian

12/31/02 Day Ten of the

12/31/02

Day Ten of the Virgin River Gorgeous Striated Magma Showdown Road Trip Annus Wonderfullus Baby!

Cedar City, UT to Los Angeles, CA

Okay, let's try a little harder this time.

Tessa tries explaining Aspen to me

I have a natural aversion to self-avowed "resort areas" that many white people in the same place always turns my stomach, and the amount of money being spent on absolute crap could feed 3/4ths of Rwanda, blah blah. But Aspen is a little different. Sure, there's the requisite anorexic 45-year-old women with surgical enhancements and impossibly small jeans - and the early 20something "extreme" contingent who are far too cool for school - but a town that dependent on the weather has an undeniable layer of honesty. Also, skiing is not an easy sport, requiring patience, skill, and a certain amount of endurance in some pretty awful weather conditions. By contrast, any fucking schlub can lay out on the beach, get skin cancer and wade in the tide. I believe this small difference makes a ski resort livable, cultural, and may also foster music festivals (Aspen) and film festivals (Telluride and Sundance).

Well, at the very least it produced Tessa. We went by her old house and her middle school, both nestled in gorgeous mountain nooks, then to "Daughter Earth," an aromatherapeutic apothecary run by her childhood best friend Jen Marcus. I don't take much solace in herbal remedies, since most everything I get requires laser surgery, but I do like smelling all the tinctures and squirting the various fennel seed and myrrh-flavored lotions all over the place. That said, I picked up cranberry pills for my kidneys just in case (while Tessa bought out all the Green Goddess).

Since Aspen Mountain is only for bunnies who have skied since childhood, we went to Buttermilk so I could wait in line with the 8-year-olds and differently-abled folk going down the Hill for Spastics. Having done okay on that one, Tessa and I took the Summit Express to the top of the 10,000 ft. mountain and I managed to ski at times, quite gracefully - three miles down to the lodge. I only wiped out really bad four times, 'cuz I have trouble turning left. I'll get it straight eventually.

two miles into the ionosphere atop Buttermilk Mountain

We left Aspen WAY too late and while Tessa slept, I drove us across the vast, windy expanse of I-70 through Utah in the middle of the night, through a fog as thick as anything I remember from 1977 London. The saving grace, of course, was XM Satellite Radio on channel 8 (the 80s), where they are playing each and every one of Casey Kasem's American Top 40 shows from that decade. During one extremely inspiring stretch, the show from April 11, 1981 came on, and it was astounding. It was perhaps my favorite week in radio history: "I Love You" by the Climax Blues Band, "Living Inside Myself" by Gino Vanelli, "Too Much Time on My Hands" by Styx, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police as well as guilty pleasures "9 to 5," "Morning Train" (Sheena Easton's masterpiece), and even a version of "Mr. Sandman" by Emmylou Harris. Sure, there's crap ("Take It On the Run" by REO Speedwagon, "Her Town Too" by James Taylor) but the sheer variety and complexity of this stuff allows me to say it once and for all: our Top 40 is better than today's Top 40.

Listening to all of the Casey Kasems one after another (they do them randomly; you'll get 1988, then 1985, etc.) you can sense pop music dying right after 1983 not coincidentally, right after the rise of MTV. That fucking station forever chained us to the mediocrity of the physically attractive, pealing the death knell for blue-collar bands like Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon and Foreigner. I mean, those guys had their share of lame songs, but when Steve Perry sang "Don't Stop Believin'" he actually meant it. Nothing remotely as cool as "Urgent" could possibly be dreamed by today's dim-bulb pop artists.

In my (completely objective) experience, pop music swelled to a crest in 1983 with the best releases by Duran Duran, the Police, Michael Jackson; quirky hits like "Too Shy" and "Promises, Promises"; the birth of the Smiths and old school rap and the shooting of "Purple Rain." This wave washed ashore in 1986 with the last masterpieces of the era: XTC ("Skylarking"), Paul Simon ("Graceland"), the Smiths ("The Queen is Dead"), U2 ("The Joshua Tree"), and Peter Gabriel ("So"). Since then, the Top 40 could be described the same way pilots describe flying: years of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Oh yeah, it could be argued that 1983 not only coincided with the rise of MTV, but also my 16th birthday leading to the obvious point that I simply like the music of my youth, and as I grew older, I stopped being able to commiserate. While partially true, I have been desperate for somebody to come along in this era of Top 40 and give me even a millimeter of the gooseflesh I felt from pre-video artists. I keep listening for it, like a democracy-starved Albanian with his ear pressed to Radio Free Europe. I tour the record stores with listening stations, I force myself to listen to Ch. 20 on the satellite, I chain myself - "Clockwork Orange"-style - to the hunk of self-obsessed, vain, vapid, vat of shit currently masquerading as MTV. But I can't help the sneaking suspicion that videos have destroyed pop music. Leaving something so important and transcendent as music up to the moronic banality of beautiful people is like picking novelists from a swimsuit contest. It's horrifying, and something from which I'll probably never recover.

Back to the topic at hand: The motel in Cedar City, Utah was creepy. The owner made me sign the credit card at 4am outside during a blizzard, and even more depressing, I always associate the city with Bruce Riddle, my mom's first husband, who lies in a grave nearby. I don't know how she got through the years 1960-62, and she has never gone into it in much detail. I recently asked her how she survived, and she answered "what choice did I have?"

I promptly lost $20 at the Nevada Landing casino, the sad sack gambling warehouse at the California border for those drivers coming from Los Angeles who simply can't wait another 14 miles to gamble in Las Vegas. I would have doubled my money, but I hit the wrong button on Video Poker.

We rolled into Arcadia, and found ourselves in the 35-year tried-and-true tested position of watching bad network television with my Uncle Chris on his 1.3-mile long living room couch. Auntie Donna was there, along with Aunt Joanie and Uncle Dick, and then Mark showed up with his baby. There was great peanut brittle, I have to say, and good bean dip. With the card games about to start, I felt the familiar familial tugs at my laziness, and I could have splayed out there all night. Instead, we tore ourselves away, off to be with Tessa's best friend Jason for the turning of 2003.

Tessa talks politics, civil rights and gay marriage with Aunt Joanie, Auntie Donna and Uncle Dick

We sat in his living room in Silver Lake, watching the seconds of 2002 tick away, and when midnight struck, I shared a moment with my cutie. 2003 seems a little nicer than 2002, but I also understand we need to be lucky and careful to see the other end. What to think about 2003? The Buddhists don't really believe in the future, or at least the contemplation of it. That's probably the best road. As an optimistic red-blooded artist, I want to believe we will all have tremendous success in the coming year, but I am slowly learning that nothing worth doing comes without a healthy dose of ambivalence. With that, I wish you all a Very New Year.

Posted by at January 1, 2003 3:40 AM