Post-Glamorous

[Yesterday, from out of nowhere, I heard Chris doing his morning ablutions in the fabulous bathroom at Maison le Trou while whistling that catchy instrumental bit from Sheila E.'s "The Glamorous Life." You know: "dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-DAH. DAH. DAHHHH." "Out of nowhere" because C. generally purports to hate all music produced during the Reagan Administration. I commented on his seeming inconsistency in my usual nonjudgmental style, and he said, "Fuck you, Grandma!"]

[I bring this up not go into yet another quotefest from Sid and Nancy or Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing ("...and all that The Glamorous Life implies..."), but to agree with the point he makes about the whole world seeming to go through an '80s fever dream these days. The clothes are very Olivia Newton-John Physical, and the music is like Missing Persons but with better guitar. I keep expecting to turn on the T.V. and see George W. Bush say "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." It's all just a little off. I assume who remember the '60s felt the same way when people like Belinda Carlisle started doing cover-versions of songs like "Band of Gold" in the mid-'80s: the similarities are there, but then again, not the same at all.]

[In addition to the two glamorous nights Chris so helpfully records on his blog, I indulged in the third night in a row of glamour yesterday. See, Sean attended the Academy of Art University in the mid-to-late '90s, back when it called itself a College, and had only begun to take over downtown San Francisco like a malignant octopus. Seriously, you can't do an upper Tenderloin pubcrawl any more without seeing that garish red sign on every third building. If an Academy degree were worth the paper on which it's printed, this would be kind of cool. I like the idea of an urban arts university kind of melding itself with a city; it strikes me as being very East Coast, somehow. But no one I know makes much use of their Academy degree (well, almost; keep reading), and spends all their time crippled by student loan debt, parking cars or similar. At least the Academy (and the food equivalent, the California Culinary Academy) is still open: my own useless-diploma mill shut down a few months ago.]

[Anyway. The friends Sean made at the Academy were the among first people I befriended when I moved to San Francisco in '96, and I've kept in intermittent touch with them over the years. One of them, Brian, just got his journeyman electrician certification, and threw a party to celebrate what will no doubt be the shower of cash that one imagines goes with actually learning a useful skill. The party was at the truly glamorous pad that he and his wife somehow acquired in the heights between Glen Park and City College. I think the neighborhood's called Sunnyside, which is a joke since as far as I know, it's always foggy over there.]

[Sean invited Allen and me to go with him, and even though I was a little frail from the shenanigans of the last two nights, I agreed. The evening didn't start out well: sometimes it can be really hard to get around this city, and if you've been acting a little too glamorous, the exhaustion of yet another missed bus can make you want to turn around and just go home. But I soldiered on, and eventually succeed in making it to the Latin-American Club, a Mission District bar that I've always assumed used to cater to the neighborhood's Latino majority but which got taken over by hipsters circa the dot-com boom. Now, late-thirties/early-forties post-hipsters still hanging on to ambiguous sexual identities go there, and the three of us felt right at home.]

[One of the Latin's shockingly huge margaritas set me right, and we set off for Brian's. Again, it can be really difficult to get around San Francisco's newer (post-WWII) hilly neighborhoods without good directions, and we ended up sweaty and a little pissed off after taking an unnecessary pedestrian detour that really exhausted Sean.]

[It was great to see the folks again. We hung out on their huge deck with a bay-to-ocean view unobscured that night by fog and caught up. As I mentioned, Brian's is now a journeyman electrician and is doing fine. Euan is moving back to S.F. after a decade of ups and downs in L.A., and acted as the kinetic-frenetic host of the evening, making sure everyone was having a good time and had everything they needed. I was like, "sit down for a minute, Euan!" Fred and his wife Ling are thinking about moving to Japan, where he and another Academy-alum who wasn't there did this neighborhood-based photography project that apparently transformed lives. People doing stuff - it was good to be around that.]

[But the party had a certain flavor, that kind of '80s energy that seems to floating about everywhere I go. The music, the catering, a few other things. It's hard to explain, but after 90 minutes, I was ready to leave. I took a really fun cab ride over Diamond Heights and Ashbury Heights home, and understood that enough was enough. So today, especially with the Haight Street Fair already beginning to happen outside my bedroom window (some hippie woman has arrayed handmade crafts that are meant to tempt stoned passersby on a blanket outside my bedroom window), I am post-glamorous. Because it's not 1988, it's 2008, and I'm going to be 39 in two days, not 25. I can feel it everywhere.]

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