Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Grownup Child Actors

Q: What do you have against Gary Coleman?

A: We have nothing against Gary Coleman[...]we have the utmost respect and admiration for Gary. We love how he knows who he is and knows that people are taking pleasure in his downfall ("Schadenfreude"), and we love that he appears all over the place poking fun at himself and the pitiful downward slide of his acting career. Have you seen him on "The Simpsons"? On "Star Dates"? We love him.

We sort of idolize him too, in a way, because one of the most important themes in Avenue Q is that life isn't as easy as we've been led to believe. Our parents told us we were special; Mr. Rogers wanted to be our friend and neighbor; we thought we could grow up to be anything we wanted to be, from a fireman to President of the United States. Even in college, we thought we were pretty hot shit, ready to set the world on fire. But when we got out of college, we were faced with rent bills and temping and entry level jobs, if we were even lucky enough to get those. It wasn't nearly as easy or nice as we expected it was going to be. We found to our horror that we weren't all that special after all. And who better to symbolize the oh-so-special-as-a-kid/but-not-so-special-as-an-adult thing we all were faced with than Gary Coleman? He's practically the poster child -- we prefer to think of him as the patron saint -- of grown-up reality sucking. We looked around and found it really sucked to be us, and we knew that if our lives sucked, it must really suck to be Gary Coleman.

The Bass Drum Jungle Music

This archive of jungle mixes from 1995-1998 is taking me back to the days of Konkrete Jungle parties at Coney Island High and buying tapes from vendors at the flea market next to Tower Records on Broadway. One of my favorites opened with a jungle version of "Born to Roll" that I wish I had on mp3.

I completely lost interest in drum and bass when it started taking the turn toward Roni Size and LTJ Bukem's whole jazz-inflected armchair jungle thing. Box of yawns, if I want "intelligent" I can read a book. The Mickey Finn/Navigator mix is my favorite because it captures the exact sound of what I heard the first time I ever came across jungle. One reason I know I need to do some serious traveling abroad is that I can't remember a time in the last 10 years where I've been as blindsided and enthralled by something completely new to me, not like the way I was when I wandered into a room at a rave in New Haven at 16 and saw people dancing to this super-fast music that I had absolutely zero prior context for. I still get fascinated, entertained, amused, etc. but that "mindhole: blown" feeling is something I still want and can't quite find now that I often feel like I've seen and done everything. This reminds me why I keep chasing it and that I probably just need to look in different places.

One in the Jungle Archive

gonna make ya sweat til ya BLEED

image: Date Farmers

It's fucking hot finally and I wish it was like this every day. It stretches time out longer and makes things smell stronger and better to me, even burning charcoal becomes a good smell. Summer 2010, let's get on this, more killer less filler. I'll even make an effort to enjoy the street festivals here that Chicago is so obsessed with, despite my failure to understand the appeal of drinking plastic cups of beer penned in with hundreds of people who can't handle their liquor? Summa madness.

Bananarama - Cruel Summer [ysi]

Natural Ingredients - Vilify [ysi]

Gyptian - Hold Yuh [ysi]

I had a dream about someone I knew a long time ago

I met C the first week of college, in that first semester that seemed like an endless game of cultural catch-up. My classmates all seemed to know each other from some summer dance/writing/theater program and would make offhanded references to people like Maya Deren that I now know were anything but offhanded. I'm told I seemed surly back then but underneath it I was just a sponge, hungry to become one of those people who "knew from stuff." C's style was impossibly perfect and our first conversation was about her trouble finding a good dry cleaner near campus. A dry cleaner! I was a raver whose jean bottoms were frayed from scissors and I was flattered that she'd even pretended I might have an opinion on the matter.

C would say the most jaw-dropping things with a wide eyed guilelessness that, it took me four years to realize, wasn’t an affect at all. One time as I was finishing up my lunch she shuffled up to my table and within five minutes she was telling me about her brief stint as a stripper, which ended when the management informed her that she couldn't actually turn down lap dances. "I mean, gross, you know? They can't expect me to do that to those guys, lap dances," she said matter-of-factly in between bites of frozen yogurt. I watched her like television. You didn't hang out with C, she just kind of happened to you from time to time.

She started dating the son of a TV director who was a year ahead of us. He was friendly in that chatty LA way but had the livewire energy of a snake set to strike. They were always together; she would make him give a ride to any student they saw walking down the main avenue lugging bags. Once my friend Laura described how earlier that day she'd seen C sneak up on him on the lawn and how gracefully she had leaped forward and wrapped her arms around him from behind. I remember watching her point a banana at him like a gun, squinting from behind her hand. They were sweet together, and also they were on drugs.

Our last conversation was one of those "we don't hang out enough but we've always been friends, you know?" talks that people have in the weeks before graduating. She died two years later and I still think of her at least once a year. When I do, I get just as sad as I was when I first learned that she’d overdosed — even just writing this makes my stomach feel like it’s full of ice. We were never even particularly close. Isn’t it funny who stays with you? In my half-baked theory about the afterlife, when you die your reward is returning to the primordial soup with absolutely no sense of who you were. You take the love with you, but all of life's slights and your earthly sense of self is totally forgotten. Freedom from the everyday idiocy of pride seems like the greatest gift you could get. I guess that would mean C. doesn't know she's still thought about by me or by anyone. But she is, and what I'm thinking right now is the world is less interesting without her in it and at a certain time in a certain place, she was leading by example.

The Cure - Catch (ysi)

Sonny and the Sunsets - Death Cream (ysi)

[buy Sonny and the Sunsets]