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foetal foetish
Monday, September 1 2008
Today there was a WKZE "parlor session" for a band called Donna the Buffalo at the station's newish studios in Red Hook, and Gretchen wanted to go. Had the weather been rainy, the session would have been indoors and admission restricted to just those (like Gretchen) with invitations, but since the day was beautiful, it was outside and open to the public. And so there we were. Back when I used to do semi-volunteer computer work for WKZE, they were located in a beautiful Victorian house in downtown Sharon, Connecticut. Now their offices look to be in an old factory made of primitive concrete blocks. Next to the office is a lawn large enough for a couple hundred people to sit on the grass and watch a show. We found some shade on the south side of stage and sat down with our dogs, eating leftover vegan pizza.
As for the music, it was suitable for an outdoor event like this, though it wasn't the sort of thing I would normally listen to. It seems Donna the Buffalo is a member of the "Jam Band" genre, though I wouldn't say their music is a standout even in that context. The least impressive musician was definitely the drummer, who came from the boom-chet-boom-chet school. The lead male vocalist had a charismatically droll stage presence, and there was also a lead female vocalist rocking the inaccessible aging cowgirl look. She played a wide variety of instruments, including electric fiddle, acoustic guitar, accordion, and even the wearable washboard.
There was actually free beer at the event, provided in tiny cups by local brewer Keegan Ales. Unfortunately, though, they hadn't brought any Hurricane Kitty, the only of their three flavors that I love.
The crowd was heavy on the aging hippie demographic, and there were a good many children. Counting ours, there were at least five dogs there as well. Our dogs were huge hits among the people nearby on the lawn, particularly the children. There was one lad there with special needs who wouldn't get out of Sally's grill. Both she and Eleanor were extremely indulgent of the relentless sticky/stinky-fingered groping.
After the show, we took a leisurely drive on tiny roads to Poet's Walk, which was mobbed with people. For some reason the only dogs one ever encounters at Poet's Walk are complete psychos, so we did our best to avoid other dogs and people. Somehow, though, another lad with special needs took an unusual interest in our dogs and pinned us down from a distance with his outdoor voice.
One of the farms adjacent to Poet's Walk had set up a little stand to sell vegetables, flowers, and teeshirts(!?), so Gretchen bought a bag of green beans.
We tried to go to the China Rose in Rhinecliff, but the place was closed for Labor Day.
Back at the house, I immediately went to my computer to get an update on Hurricane Gustav, which had been poised to destroy what little remains of New Orleans. I was a little relieved to see it had weekend and wouldn't be providing presidential candidate John McCain much of an opportunity to demonstrate his compassionate maverickyness. Still, it had wrecked the first day of the Republican convention, a concentration in time and space of all that is embarrassing, boneheaded, and misguided in American society.
As anyone who has studied Spanish knows, "embarrassing" has an etymological connection with pregnancy, and I was delighted to find that Gustav had been completely eclipsed by a pregnancy story that had broken while I'd been watching Donna the Buffalo. It turns out that Sarah Palin, McCain's vice presidential pick, has an unmarried seventeen year old daughter named Bristol who is with child. Now this would be totally awesome and auspicious if she were a virgin and her womb housed the second coming of Christ Jesus. Sadly, though, this is not the case, and not even the propagandists of the McCain campaign (the ones telling us Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska has international frontiers) are making such a claim. It seems Bristol Palin is no longer a virgin, though at some point she absorbed some of those one and a half billion tax dollars spent on abstinence education. She was knocked up by a hunky douchebag with a MySpace page reading:
"I'm a f - - -in' redneck...I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s- - - and just f - - -in' chillin' I guess." "Ya f - - - with me I'll kick [your] ass,"
This reads like a less-literate version of the opening of my Trenchcoat Mafia parody website. Incredible though this may seem, this nasty clump of white trash just floated to the surface of American politics and has a real chance of taking power and running the only superpower in the known universe.
Feminists have to be appalled that once the media focus turned to Sarah Palin, the machinations of her uterus (and those of her daughters) became the most salient thing about her. It's as if McCain was trying to demonstrate why it is that women can't be put into positions of authority. Their damn plumbing just keeps getting in the way!
Though I'm repelled by rampant child production, I can't avert my eyes. The more one looks at Sarah Palin, the weirder and weirder her procreative habits appear. It's as if I've just pulled up a rotten log and am looking down at an incestuous colony of Naked Mole Rats having a babymaking orgy. While Palin might be wildly popular with the foetal foetish crazies of the religious right, I have to believe that most people will find the wild improvised procreation of her family repulsive. Damn, Sarah Palin, quit being a moron and go the fuck home and raise your goddamn kids! And maybe pick up a book at some point. We can't really be a nation of complete fucktards.
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