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.
Dilettante 29: Mexican Bus
A “party bus” may not be the most original idea, but 20 years ago it sort of was. Especially when done like this. Trust anyone who says San Francisco’s Mexican Bus has represented for and even preserved Latinx culture in the Citay. And fashionably.
Dilettante 25-28: New Time Religion
View PostDilettante 24: How to DJ
Ever laid hands on real vinyl records, on two real turntables, and beat-matched two songs together? Sounds pedantic and geeky but it’s power. Real power in your hands.
Dilettante 23: Ringling Brothers circus
Welp, it’s 20 years since this Bay Guardian feature about the Ringling Brothers circus coming to San Francisco, and … after 146 years, the Big Top just shut down for good in 2017.
Dilettante 22: Outer Mission bars
Here’s an opinion I espouse now that wasn’t even on my radar 20 years ago this week when I wrote this column: Drinking is a stupid waste of time, especially in lowlife bars.
My 20-years-younger self would be shocked to read that, but my skin, hair, liver, and general health thank me now. Ladies, it’s not cute after a certain age, that’s all.
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