The Chinese New Year’s Treasure Hunt is yet another official-unofficial Cacophony Society production. It could also be classified as a prototypical UrbEx project — a movement Cacophony helped pioneer with events like these.
Dilettante 38: Grand National car show
There are millions of ways Californians spend time to alter vehicles. Home of the desert biker movie, this place has suburbs and suburbs filled with gearheads.
Dilettante 37: Reefer Madness at the Werepad ’99
Repertory cinema houses. That’s another thing the Internet pretty much took out.
Dilettante 36: Southern women
In early summer, azaleas come to bloom in the Deep South, as well as honeysuckle, hydrangeas, magnolias, and bougainvillea.
Dilettante 35: Marina drinking
Boozing with the future white collar criminals of the world in their natural habitat is no fun; that’s what this writer found out one night at the turn of the last century.
Dilettante 34: Landfill art
Let me tell you about my friend Dana Albany, who makes beautiful sculptures out of junk. Every year I see her and her man Flash when we go to San Francisco to help run her dragon through the Financial District during the Chinese New Year’s Parade.
Dilettante 33: Motley Crue show, 1998
Ok hey we’re just a rock band alright? We mean yeah, we culturally appropriated punk, leatherdaddy, and ’80s women’s fashion to try to get famous during the Great American Satanic Panic – but we toned it down and became 100% straight dudes. In a rock’n’roll way of course, with more neutral makeup tones. Ironically that’s when the Dark Lord let us be on the radio.
Dilettante 32: Buy Nothing Day
The weirdo portion of America’s Gen-Xers grew up shopping in thrift stores and we love that The Kids are doing the same. We loathed the national urge to voraciously acquire “new” things. We could hear the rumble — the oncoming avalanche of consumer waste.
Dilettante 31: Retro club nights
It feels really good to spit fire, especially in print, at a corporation clumsily trying to target-market your generation with pablum.
Dilettante 30: Rodeo at the Cow Palace
When it’s 1998, and it’s your literal job that day to tailgate in a truck down six-lane Geneva Avenue surrounded by horned cattle, horses, their riders, sheepdogs, and a real rodeo princess, you can get a little stoked on your life.