Long Time No See

I've been away from the blog and a good deal from my keyboard in the last month preparing for some big news that a lot of you are already aware of -- I'm moving back to Chicago in May! There's been a lot to do to get ready for the move, but now it's starting to actually feel real. Things in Boston have changed radically over the past three years -- friends have come and left, bands have formed, reformed, and dissolved, and I have a stack of new songs to hopefully form into a first album once I've replanted myself in Chicago. But for the most part, my life in Chicago is very similar to how I left it -- almost as if there were two books I started after college, and the one about Chicago I kept on re-reading the first 100 pages of while the one about Boston I read straight through to the end.

Well, I'm still quite a few pages from the end of the Boston book. For one thing, I'm playing two more shows, so I hope you can make it out to at least one of them so I can see everyone before I leave. I'll be playing Skybar on Friday, April 20th -- I'm on first, so you can either go to bed early if that's your cup of fun for a Friday night, or you'll have hours and hours to burn at the other music joints in SoCa. My very last show in Boston (for the foreseeable future) is going to be at Kennedy's on Wednesday, May 9th, about six days before we tranquilize the cat and drive away.

Um... that sounded a little sinister. The cat's coming with us. She just needs to calm down for the car ride.

More details on the shows are on my calendar. Next time on the blog: Spring Awakening, a new musical by Duncan Sheik, has jumped about ten years forward in musical developmental time and brought chamber pop/rock to Broadway.

And was Jerusalem builded...um, here?

My alma mater has sold its summer usage rights to American Idol for "Idol Camp."

Some necessary background:

The prep school I attended closed one of its campuses a few years ago out of financial urgency. The Northfield closing was unpopular among alumni of that campus for obvious sentimental reasons, and since then, Alumni Relations has continually tried to revive nostalgia (and revive its fundraising) by promising that the historical legacy of the campus -- i.e., precious memories!! -- be preserved. Communications with alumni are dipped in the same candy-coated shell of Dead Poets Society, A Separate Peace, and other constructions of the New England Prep School Mythos.

This was a savvy move to be sure. For multigenerational alumni, the common fundraising message in education is the state of the present and future school. For a campus without a present or future, the only common message can be the past, which is easily made mythic in the realm of private schools -- a mention of exams here, a reference to some campus landmark there, and the gradual reconstruction of the image that was once sold to our parents in oversized viewbooks so many years ago.

Enter Idol Camp, owned and operated by the same company that produces "American Idol," complete with its own artificially-enhanced mythology of rock stardom and the neon design palette to match. Idol looks incongruous when cheaply Photoshopped onto my library, onto my dorm, onto my music building. I felt oddly cheapened but knew that was an irrational reaction.

Obviously I wouldn't expect a school to turn down this much money, but it's put the campus in an interesting situation. Northfield doesn't currently have a new full-time owner, which left Idol the opportunity/negotiated rights to rebrand the campus as "Idol Campus." But it's only a partial rebranding, as their campus map leaves intact all of the original building names as opposed to having new names like "Paula Abdul Music Hall," "Kelly Clarkson Gymnasium," or maybe "Clay Aiken House." It's almost as if Idol sought to create this weird palimpsest of a landscape, where parents who once sent their kids into the most prestigious private schools to get into college can now become manager-parents virtually overnight.

I suppose the difference is slight if you compare myth to myth, logo to logo. I doubt the real experience of these little Idol kids is going to be much different from mine as a student. Some of them will gain ten pounds on ever-abundant cafeteria ice cream, and some of them will have crushes on their roommates (it's a performing arts camp, people!). But then, that's all part of the myth of summer camp.

If you can tell I'm getting a little sentimental here, it's because it's hard to let go of certain mythologies no matter how obvious the artifice is. A mythology contextualizes you--your people, or your lineage, that is--in a better, grander history than the one that actually happened. It's rare to see two different mythologies fighting for attention in the same picture. Zeus becomes Jupiter, Ares becomes Mars, Uptown becomes Andersonville. And then you realize how ridiculous that story was in the first place, about Athena popping out of her dad's head like an aneurysm in a kevlar jacket.