rue-madame's Diaryland Diary

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Shot Through the Heart

Last night I went to a friend�s birthday celebration at a karaoke bar.

I don�t enjoy karaoke very much.

Oh sure, I�m a great audience member for, like, the first two hours. I applaud, I hoot and holler. After that two hour window, I get bored and restless. And despondent. I know there�s a healthy dose of irony in everybody�s renditions of soft rock classics and 70s/80s power ballads, but those songs totally bum me out! Why? Because they are so very, very bad! Unfunny bad! And singing bad songs badly, loudly and amplified, only makes me sadder and sadder for humanity. Quarterflash? Lita Ford? Kim Carnes? Dinosaur rock needs to go the way of the, well, dinosaurs!

Terence and I were the only people who had no idea what the songs were. And the thing is, most of the songs people chose were from the 80s. I�m from the 80s and I�d never heard half the shit people were warbling! It was totally weird!

There was an old woman who sang something called �Friends� and it was tragic. Later on, she offered her rendition of Twist and Shout--but I don�t think she really knew the song. She half-sang, half-read the monitor so that in the end, she just sounded like Lou Reed and people were laughing. And not with her. And that�s just cruel.

The rest of the crowd was young and hip in that �I live in LA and can�t afford a fashion misstep� way. Ergo, lots of newsboy caps, stovepipe jeans, starch-deprived anorexia. (which reminds me: I read an article about the latest trends in dieting, and one rabidly Atkinsian woman stated that bread is a slippery slope to perdition. What she actually said was this: �Bread begets bread.� How about: Moderation begets moderation. Or even better, stupidity begets stupidity?)

Anyway.

I�m sure you�ll all be fascinated by my observations on the geocultural differences between karaoke in Los Angeles and karaoke in San Francisco.

Here they are. In LA, it�s all about being ON, using your feably-trained voice in an act of shameless audition because you never know when you�re going to be discovered. There�s a lot of self-awareness involved in every performance.

In San Francisco, it�s a brazenly rough and tumble, shambolic experience. People don�t care how they sing, don�t care what they look like, they make asses of themselves, and dress in whatever. It�s like a freakin� be-in or something.

As they say in Freedom: voila, voila.

I have a facial appointment at the uber-fancy Ona Day Spa next week. I will report my findings.

3:25 p.m. - 2003-05-21

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