Notion Building

By pure accident, I ended up hanging out with Damian Kulash from OK Go the day after he had finished shooting the treadmill video for Here it Goes Again.  “It’s really cool,” he told me, “better than the last one – you’ll love it.”

This was in the summer of 2006 at the Beverly Hills Hotel where the Nation Institute was throwing one of those weird celebratory memorials that organizations sometimes throw for their graying colleagues – really, a wake for the undead designed for the gleeful heaping of  praise and adulation, instead of dirt and sobbing, upon somebody, in this case expert hellraiser and veteran columnist, Robert Scheer, while he is still warm and breathing and capable of attracting paying donors instead of freeloading mourners.

The other organizing principle of the night, of course, beyond the lifetime achievements of Bob Scheer, was the contempt with which the Fourth Estate had, for the previous 3 years in particular, viewed the Bush Administration, which often spoke openly of how despicable free speech and progressive ideals such as those upheld by the Nation Institute were to the leaders of the republic.

I had arrived to the Beverly Hills Hotel early, before the room could fill up completely with boozy little cliques I’d find impossible to penetrate later, and I noticed who I’d assumed to be the grandson of one of the event organizers or attendees, loitering around looking somewhat shy and boyish and stylishly unkempt.  I didn’t recognize him.  He was with a girl and I was with my wife and, being the only youngsters invited to the event, we eventually ended up chatting with one another outside on an adjacent patio like children seeking camaraderie at a wedding.

“I have to say,” I said, “that those trousers might be about the best I’ve seen on anybody since the cancellation of the Brady Kids cartoon series, I mean it.”  And I did.  The material was a pinstriped rusty orange, like something Johnny Bravo might’ve had upholstered onto an ottoman in his attic bedroom – something you could easily imagine being heavily Marsha-stained and endlessly caressed by the goopy light of lava lamps and candles.

“Thanks,” he said, looking down at himself.  “That’s the best thing about being in a band and moving to Los Angeles:   I get to have my own tailor.”

“Well, the tapering is divine,” I said, resentfully, thinking about the shitty tapering job my older brother always used to do on my pants before we had a show, using our grandmother’s 40-year-old sewing machine and the bizarre and ever-repeating misconception that my left leg was footless and only as thick as a soda can.  “What’s the name of your band?” I asked.

He told me.  He then asked me the name of my band.  As it turned out, his tailor and my tailor didn’t know each other and would probably not be able to talk shop had they met.  Luckily, though, there would always be heroes like Robert Scheer and assholes like George W. around to inspire impossible meetings and to give complete strangers reason to embrace each others company in deference to the mismatched fabric of a society so often separated by naked rage.

(Note:  I’d originally begun this post as a review of OK Go’s new record, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, which came out today, but I never got around to it.  I think my mistake was trying to listen to the songs while simultaneously trying to reflect on them, which is like trying to remember the nuances of something that you’re anticipating – can’t be done.  Sorry about that.)