Thursday, May 27, 2004
Not Named After the Cereal (more’s the pity)
I’d missed every KaBoom for a decade but I wasn’t going to miss this one - Robert Randolph opening for the Waifs at a free waterfront concert. (Train headlined, but I couldn’t stay for them and didn’t much mind. I’m much more into the first two acts.) Although I’d had a trying day and there was much for me to deal with, I blew it off and grabbed a downtown bus in the midafternoon to catch the show.
ITEM: Robert Randolph is the personification of epinephrine - he’s effusive, he gets under your skin, and he makes you get moving. The Waifs, on the other hand, are perfect music for realizing you just drank so much at the campfire that you can’t drive back home by yourself. It was an odd but entertaining pairing.
ITEM: The most popular drink at the venue seemed to be some sort of ice cream smoothie that was served in a long plastic flute with a globe at the bottom and a slightly flared rim. That is to say, these beverages, popular among youths and adults alike, resembled nothing so much as “water pipes” filled with sorbet. I wonder, now, if they actually had the stones to market them under the name “bong pops.”
ITEM: I didn’t understand the dynamics of the group camped out in front of me. There seemed to be at least two moms, a dad in his 50s or 60s, one boy around 12 and a girl around 15 with a lot of makeup and slutty clothes, some other older family friends, a young woman (daughter of one of the moms?) with an outrageously carved and curved body who frequently grabbed her own boobs and squealed, someone who I think was her boyfriend, and some of his friends. I think one of the moms was coming on to the putative boyfriend pretty strong at more than one point. I left before it deteriorated into one of those Jerry Springer moments, but there were a lot of dirty trucker hats and lawn chairs for hurling.
ITEM: The sign guy was there, and I got a chance to copy down a lot of his sign. You can see him most every day walking around the financial district with his matrix shades, sport coat, tired shiny slacks, and his thick head of tidy hair, incessantly and silently pacing the streets with a protest sign held high. Which is both fine and typical for this opinionated city, except his protest sign never makes quite the sense I’d expect. The one he had at KaBoom said, to the best of my ability to copy it down at a distance: “TIMBERLAKE (/) 12 GALAXIES (/) PSYCHOLOGICAL ENTOMOLYGISTS (/) NBC: KATCORUNICAL COVERAGE (/) STILZURUNCICAL (/) (I couldn’t read this line - too many letters, not enough sense to connect them) (/) ENTERPRISES.” I saw him make a decent amount of money getting people to pay for pictures with him. The part I found most entertaining is that, after literally years of doing this kind of work with a ratty old sign that had been revised and re-revised countless times, he’s finally got corporate sponsorship from an actual sign-making company that has its ad on the back of his picket. Finally we see the power behind the power. Sign-o-Graphics, watch out: NBC knows now who you are!
I left after the Waifs’ set to get home and then visit some friends down on the peninsula. I slept very well that night. Since then I’ve been cleaning the house pretty much non-stop till my in-laws arrived last night to stay with us for the long weekend - Mom and Dad, with two sisters-in-law arriving today. The fridge is full of beer and the sky is full of clouds and possibilities. We’ve rented a minivan. This is going to be, once again, a fun weekend.