A NEW YEAR’S EVE OF LOVE AND JOY AND SEX AND DREAMS … OH, AND A BIGOT
By Rebecca Schoenkopf
[Rebecca Schoenkopf is the former editor-in-chief of LA CityBeat and former senior editor at OC Weekly, where she wrote about art, music, politics and more. She taught political science at UC Irvine and was an Annenberg Fellow at USC, receiving her master's in Specialized Journalism focusing on urban policy in May 2011. She lives with her son in a neighborhood we'll just call Hancock Park-adjacent. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/commiegirl1.rebecca@fourstory.org]
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“Hey lady in the hotpants!” I shouted. “YOU LOOK FANTASTIC!” She was already down the street a ways, and her friend had to tap her to look back. Once she realized random strange women were complimenting her and her legs and her peach-like ass, she was very happy indeed, and punched her boyfriend and said, “SEE?”
Stupid boyfriend!
New Year’s Eve in Santa Barbara, and I haven’t been with a crowd more unifyingly happy since Election Night 2008. It was love and joy and sex and dreams and all that vintage Mick Jagger nonsense, and men and women were effusively yelling at strangers about their roiling gorgeousness. Men dressed in kilts and tuxedos; women in spangles and fur. Even I, whose resolution this year is “more heels and makeup, and less like a goddamned PTA mom,” and yet somehow I still only managed to pull on a New Year’s Eve costume of a T-shirt and jeans with that makeup and high heels—even I was complimented effusively by strange men at the restaurant Roy, and after they glanced sidelong at my date to determine his level of possessiveness, they told me I was drop-dead gorgeous and tried to kiss me on my mouth. Aw, thanks, strange men! The year of our lord 2011 was a stupid year, and everybody seemed to be looking deliriously forward to a year that would maybe not be so glum and morose? (Matt Yglesias says the economy is about to start not to suck, and he is a wonk, so I say we believe him!) Hooray!
I was sitting on a bench on State Street, and as it was midnight Oklahoma time, I’d called my mama on the phone, and a group of gorgeousness came sauntering northward. “Here’s the fashion report from Santa Barbara!” I told my mama as they walked by. “The girls are all wearing very short sequined skirts, and they all look fantastic!” And the very short sequined skirt who was walking by at the moment said, “You’re making fun of us? Thanks.” And I would have jumped up and punched her in the face, but I found a sorrowful exclamation that in fact I was not making fun of her to be much more effective at making her understand what a dick she was—although she still had to be goaded into dropping it and spitting “thank you” by her mortified friend—and also, better approved by Miss Manners. But she was not the bigot I met. She was just the only person in town who had not been visited by the happiness elf. I bet she had her period.
New Year’s Eve was perfectly perfect—even that jerky gidiot (I have just coined the term “gidiot,” for “girl idiot,” and you are welcome!) just offered a frisson of excitement to cut the pure heady revelry—and after a night of middle-aged fun on State Street, where we avoided the date-rapier bars and stuck to the ones with no line and no cover, we headed home to our perfectly okay hotel and slept the sleep of the perfectly drunk.
DON’T WORRY, I AM GETTING TO THE BIGOT!
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Citizen Journalist Quotes of the Day — Above and Beyond All Words (Part One)
“Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.” — Paul Simon
“A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” — Benny Green
“Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.” — Robert G. Ingersoll
“The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life… the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril.” — Richard Baker
“Country music is three chords and the truth.” — Harlan Howard
“A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?” — Charles Ives
“Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.” — John Philip Sousa
“Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.” — William Green
“Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.” — Robert Benchley
(Source: quotegarden.com)
Citizen Journalist Quotes of the Day –- Above and Beyond All Words (Part Two)
“Music is an outburst of the soul.” — Frederick Delius
“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” — Leopold Stokowski
“Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” — Ludwig van Beethoven
“What we provide is an atmosphere… of orchestrated pulse which works on people in a subliminal way. Under its influence I’ve seen shy debs and severe dowagers kick off their shoes and raise some wholesome hell.” — Meyer Davis
“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” — Charlie Parker
“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” — Maya Angelou
“If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.” — Doménico Cieri Estrada
(Source: quotegarden.com)