2005-08-19 - 10:07 a.m.

looking out on a sea of faux-hawks, giant sequined handbags, lo-rise jeans, metal-studded belts, flipped-up polo shirt collars, and flash tattoos i wondered about the incredible homogeneity and uniform allegiance of my socio-economic strata. every other girl had a leather tuscadero haircut. every other boy was wearing a ratty second-hand tour t-shirt. surely, williamsburg was a ghost town last night, because i was high in the bleachers at the decembrists/death cab for cutie show at summer stage, and every hipster i'd ever seen slouching through the bars on the northside was packed into the rumsey playground. adding salt to the wound, i saw at least three different girls wearing a t-shirt that read 'made in the 80s'. i could almost feel my hair graying.

besides the staggering whiteness of the crowd (and i'm as white as they come), the other thing which stood out for me was the length of the t-shirt/souvenir line. it was consistently longer than the beer line, and not just a little longer, but four or five times as long.

it was an amazingly gorgeous summer evening, and the sun sinking slowly over central park west glazed everyone in a warm golden glow. my friend had to work late and missed the opening band (stars, who were great), but arrived in time to hand me an overpriced rheingold just as colin melloy struck the first chords on his beat-up acoustic guitar. (special to mr. melloy: you can be my secret boyfriend anytime. i think you are dreamy. boys with massive vocabularies make me swoon).

we left in the middle of death cab's set in the interest of adult beverages. i like death cab, but they sound like every other seattle band with a little yo la tengo mixed in for variety. no match at all for the sea shanties and earnest folkiness of the decembrists. what is it about the middle band? we'd seen the sleater-kinney/flaming lips/wilco show on new year's eve and the flaming lips blew the other two bands out of the water.

i balanced myself on the back of his motorbike as we headed back to brooklyn. speeding through times square was a lot like being inside a video game. we repaired to the bar with the flocked wallpaper, slurped martinis, and slouched like there was no tomorrow. practice makes perfect.