I'm sick of listing all these shows. It's boring. I'm not going to do it anymore.

This article about Tricia Rose (courtesy of Julianne Shepard's blog) really got me thinking, specifically Rose's ideas about "aggressive space" and "unfettered whiteness." Maybe part of the reason why I was never really comfortable in high school is that I went from the overwhelmingly black environment of Baltimore City (even though it was diluted by the whiteness of my family and schooling) to the overwhelmingly white environment of suburban Ellicott City. Seems like most people who only experienced this suburban unfettered whiteness for their entire lives (like most of the people I knew in high school and college) are entirely comfortable in this environment, even if they move to large cities later, as many of them do. I can get sort of antsy around all that. It doesn't feel quite right. And it especially didn't feel right through high school and college. The only place in high school where I really did feel comfortable was in the crustyish punk subculture, which is largely based on the fetishization of its own white suburban middle-class guilt. I think I feel this guilt more acutely than most of the people I've known in the past ten years. And I think this puts me at a weird life advantage. I'm happy that I can't get too comfortable. I'm attracted to the idea of the white-bohemian ghetto/utopia (it's how I imagine Olympia, where I've never been), but I don't know if I could ever really live in a place like that. This whole unfettered whiteness thing might also be what annoys me so much about certain strains of indie-rock. I've never heard the Decemberists or Broken Social Scene, but I just can't imagine liking them. All that shit just seems so - twee isn't the word - comfortable. Lazy and comfortable. Fat and lazy.