BEST REASON TAMPA IS ON THE MAP
Skatepark of Tampa
Lord only knows why the guys at SPOT now have themselves a little art gallery, considering they were convinced my colleagues at the Weekly Planet were all a bunch of "art fags." But, whatever. Tampa is on the map not because of those silly Bucs and their tough-guy posturing, but because Brian Schaefer, Ryan Clements, Rob Meronek, and Barak Wiser run a great park and have for decades now. Well, one decade. But in skateboarding, which has been said to have a memory of six months, one decade can seem like a lot more. The annual amateur and pro contests are still among the most-respected competitions in skateboarding. They're now running contests in other cities; they do it so well, in their Damn Am series. If Tampa is on the come up — and sitting here in Bend, Overagain, every other city in the U.S. seems like it's not just on the verge but deep in the thick of verge — it's because all kids skateboard. Even if it's just a passing fancy (like an art gallery at a skatepark), every little shit and his shitty little brother at one time or another stands on four wheels. And as we all know from watching MTV, youth drive American Culture. Well, yes, X Games and NBC and Fox have usurped skateboarding and other so-called extreme sports for their nefarious purposes. They've done so in order to market Mountain Dew and Doritos to kids, but in relatively recent history, both skateboarding and SPOT had "edge." Hey, I think I just figured out why SPOT installed a spot for art installations. Just wait till ESPN and the like start putting nods to art in its broadcasts: "When we return, 'Gyotaku Painting Your Surfboard.' And don't miss tomorrow's feature on 'The Feng Shui of Your Halfpipe.'" Man, the kids will think it's soooo lame, quit watching, and ABC and NBC and all those bozos will drop skateboarding like a smoking-hot turd. Thanks, SPOT!
Skatepark of Tampa, 4215 E. Columbus Drive, Tampa, 813-621-6793 or www.skateparkoftampa.com.
BEST REASON TO HUG AN EDITOR
And a pack mule I became
Anyone who liked ol' Davey Jasper's tell-it-like-it-seemed-like-it-was observational reportage and self-deprecating twittering would be wise to call up editors at random newspapers around Florida, even the Panhandle (I'm that desperate), and beg me a job. I say this because Oregon is weird. I don't have the space to explain why I must flee, but I think this story encapsulates the small-town repression and general atmosphere. A band from Boise — don't laugh, after Portland, it's the next-closest "real" city to Bend — was playing its Dave Matthews stem cell music at the Bend Spring Festival. (Festivals are huge in the West; there's a festival for every season here, even though winter is pretty much the only season that seems to really take hold.) The singer guy said, "This next song is called 'Drug.'" Now, in Florida — like I need to tell YOU this — there'd be that balding dude with a mullet, the attire appropriate to a career as a meth lab technician and a skin-cancer-baiting sunburn who would whoop: "Hyyyyooooo! Yeah!" upon hearing that the next song is called — can you fuckin' believe it? — "Drug." But no one did. I couldn't — I had my wife and three kids in tow. In fact, one was strapped to my body in a "Snugly." And I'm the Arts and Entertainment Reporter for the local daily. I couldn't very well yell "Hyyyyooooo! YEAH!" I looked around, eyes and hopes raised, only to be disappointed by all the goddamned yuppies with kids and big dogs — mountain people love their stupid dogs. No one said anything. Nothing. At a festival. This is not your Eugene or Portland, Oregon. Humor? Irony? Doesn't exist here. It's one disappointment after another. The only halfway cool band that's been here in the last six months is maybe Coldplay. (The hottest band was Rev. Horton Heat.) Snider warned me. He said, "You'll be a pack mule at a daily." And a pack mule I became. (Who the hell listens to Snider?) Goodbye to in-depth cover stories and slack deadlines. Goodbye to being a stylist (in the writing sense — and the beauty salon sense, for that matter). Hello to five stories a week. Hello to being a generalist. To that letter writer in Tampa who was enraged after I reviewed a Phish CD without talking about the music (which sucked an assload of shit, by the way): You'll be happy to know that I have interviewed a Grateful Dead cover band. Even trippier: I wrote about a kids' production of the stage classic Velveteen Rabbit, like, my second week here. You try to wrangle quotes from media-retarded eighth graders in a small city in Oregon. Me, I'm over it. If I buy a big dog before you land me a Florida gig, someone please shoot me.
BEST REASON TO STAY IN TAMPA
Air Conditioning
Believe it or not, there are places right within America's well-guarded, Homeland Security Act-protected borders where air-conditioning is still a novelty found only in movie theaters and the homes of affluent rich fucks. Bend, Oregon, is one such place. Because it gets down into the 40s and 50s at night, even in the summer, no one seems to mind that it gets up into the 90s during the day. (And whoever came up with that dry-heat-is-awesome stuff needs to go jump in a dry lake. Dry heat only sucks half the dick humidity sucks, but guess what? It's still a big dick.) So we sweat in our homes every bit as much as we do outside. During the day, that is. Then in the evening we throw open our windows and hope it starts cooling off by about 10 p.m. Crime is low here, so you take your chances leaving the windows open, though it'd be just my luck that some psycho-serial-mass-killing murderer would start his or her crime spree right at our house. By 2 or 3 a.m. the house feels like the inside of the refrigerator, or at least it's starting to. By 6 or 7 a.m. you throw open the few windows you kept locked — you know, to fool the potential criminals into thinking all of them were locked — and let in the last of the cool morning air. By about noon it's getting into the 90s, so you shut windows and blinds and hope you can seal in the cool air, which works if you consider 84-degree air cool. Oh, and about three weeks after the last snowfall, fire season starts, adding so much smoke to the atmosphere that you can look at the sun. So you escape to an air-conditioned business. But even the businesses that have A/C don't do anything but add a little undercurrent of cool air to the hot air. You want to walk in and, like Tampa's finest raiding one of Nebraska Avenue's honky-tonk-meets-'80s-hair-metal strip establishments, yell "TURN THAT SHIT DOWN!" People say that dry air dries out the skin and ages you faster, but it really happens because the West doesn't have that deep-freeze, crank-the-thermostat-to-60 mentality that preserves the skin.
BEST REASON TO LEAVE TAMPA FOR BEND, OVERAGAINNo one in Bend, Overagain, has ever even heard of Bubba the Love Sponge and his sophomoric, bigoted, macho, cool-guy, tired, uninspired, unfunny lame-ass brand of radio. So in that regard it has a lot going for it. Really, it's no wonder Lex and Terry are kicking his ass in Jacksonville, right?
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2003.