My New Guilty Pleasure

It has been 17 years since Beverly Hills 90210 first aired and Aaron Spelling set a new standard for teen drama. And now thanks to Amazon.com I can watch a series that redefines the genre for the millennium. "South of Nowhere" is much racier and post-gay than its predecessor, though begins with a similar premise. Spencer, Glen, and Clay Carlin have moved to LA from middle America and must navigate a new social milleau of spoiled, hedonistic, and troubled rich kids.

Clay, the adopted African-American of the family, is introduced to urban concepts such as racial profiling. Glen, the white all-American, is the basketball star of the family and picks fights with his team rival. However, Mommy and Daddy Carlin's biggest concern appears to be their daughter Spencer's new friendship with a lesbian. Spencer's hot friend Ashley is the daughter of a rock musician and seems drawn to the Carlin family's stability. However, Mrs. Carlin catches on quickly and insists that Ashley sleep on the sofa when she spends the night, thus closing a convenient loophole in teenage same-sex romance.

I don't recall my high school being full of lesbians who looked like Spencer and Ashley (or Spashley, as they are referred to in numerous You Tube fan videos) but then again, brother Glen's reaction, when informed that Ashley had "switched teams," reminded me of the response from one of the assholes in my physics class when advised that the hottest female in our senior class was into women--it was a mixture of shock and disbelief that most evolved males are too cool to display in this day and age.

The relationship trajectory of Spashley is not smooth however. First, they have a season of appearing to compete for the attention of a handsome male while the romantic tension builds between them. Season 2 is when they hook up and unleash more drama. I was able to purchase the whole first season on Amazon Unbox, and will probably need to score season 2 very soon. Since the episodes are only 24 minutes, they are delightful petite fours of TV viewing that are quickly consumed.

It's Hard Work!

I am taking my first week's vacation since January of 2005. Instead of going somewhere exciting I am spring cleaning in Silver Spring!

As many of you know, after college until age 29 I lived in a succession of band houses. After that, I lived with 2 musicians who were enormously talented but messy. And I am not a tidy person myself so I went with the flow. At any rate, I have accumulated enough audio and midi cables to circle the earth several times. Actually I have a lot of stuff, period, and I obviously don't use most of it because it has been sitting in closets since i moved into my own apartment almost 5 years ago.

Today I am cleaning out the closet in the music/living room--the one that is an avalanche waiting to happen whenever I have to find a mic cable.

Some of the more interesting items recovered:

1) a wind-up toy depicting felatio that my ex-husband/lead singer left me (gee thanks!)

2) A cybeko (I was the only 30 year old I knew who had one)

3) An ash tray reportedly used in the British House of Commons

4) 15 Canadian dollars (WTF?!?)

5) An issue of the Blade from 2001 that I kept because it had an article on Lisa and me. It also explains the infamous Jerry Brown lesbian joke as told by Bob Kerrey in the 1992 election. I had always wondered what the lesbian/Jerry Brown joke was (I am sure it was funnier at the time) and now that I have read the abridged version I can get on with my cleaning!!


Things I am keeping for no discernable reason:

1) a sewing needle that was surgically removed from Arthur in 1994.

2) boxes of Blank Christmas cards from years past

The cats are even bored by this task and are wisely staying out of the way.

Monday: 9 pm

The closet looks lovely. I can walk in it, and I can even see that it needs to be vacuumed, a fact that has been concealed from me until now by equipment cases and instrument stands stacked on top of one another. I am working now on the music room. And it is very obvious I did not pack with much scrutiny when fleeing my previous residence. But it has been entertaining going through old papers. I do keep a lot of my bad lyrics and old band promo stuff so I can see what a pretentious twit I was in my youth and how much I have matured (HA!). Curiously I found a sheet of paper on which I wrote down chemically-induced "deep-thoughts" -- a practice that eventually led me to drastically curtail my vices. Here is a choice one: "if you worry about forgetting, you won't come up with anything worth remembering." Yes, indeed.

I ended up streaming netflix movies while organizing CDs and watched Karla -- a flic about Karla Homolka, half of a Canadian husband and wife serial-killing duo. Now I remember where that $15 Canadian dollars came from! Lisa and I went there for a couple of her gigs and we stayed at a scary place the Canadians jokingly referred to as Scarberia, which turns out to be where Karla's husband did some of his raping. In the film, as in real life, the line between battered spouse and sociopath is not clear.

Tuesday: 6pm

I have cleaned the music room. It took over 7 solid hours of dedication and focus today. The power strip jungle is no more, largely in part to those octopus power strip thingies. I think the only person who will notice is my friend Fred.