Nutrition Facts

The other day at an art opening in LA, I ran into this girl whom I've met before. She's very pretty and smart. We struck up a conversation about the pieces on the walls, the music, the almost mandatory LA swill they provide encased in oh so sweet silver bullet cans. We chatted about the important things (in a very passive and petty manner) and how life in LA can be strange. To reinforce the fact, an almost nude old man with garters holding up his socks strode past us, obviously looking for someone(something?).

We laughed at this and decided to go outside and check out the rest of the crowd. It was what you'd expect at an art opening in LA. If you haven't been to one yet, allow me some sparse words to help illustrate the situation I found myself in: poseurs (notice the spelling, for complete and utter haughtiness on my part), scenesters, art groupies, junkies, freaks and geeks.

I absolutely love this scene.

For the next five minutes. Then I loathe it.

I decided to focus on my almost new-found friend and try to find something really interesting to talk about, or at least push the conversation past the petty (listen to me, am I really that snobbish? Tonight I was). We went on about music as that's a pretty safe platform to work from. Everyone likes some kind of music. Her taste was attuned to mine, and it went fairly well. Then she went and marred the artfully ballistic conversation that was taking place. It slowed to a crawl. Then I think it died. It went like this:

Me Oh yeah, I mean like about anything else, I can't sit through his albums when they're on their twenty seventh loop.

laughter

Her Yeah. So, basically you're like folky. And your friend is like more, rock?

She distilled all of me into "folky". I was cured, preserved and stuck in a can, labeled and made easily accessible for the consumer. It really was just like a switch. I swear the lights got dimmer and the colors leaked away into dull greys. I don't know about you, but I haven't been tagged with labels since I was in high school. It promptly stopped when I left. Or at least I stopped paying attention. Somehow I filtered out all those taglines and labels my friends used to attach to people? Or had they become a bit more complex, fitting into pseudo-intellectual college banther a lot more seamlessly than "skater" "bro" "jock" "prep" or "folky"?

That was the end of my night. I said I had to get home to work on a painting, which is kind of true. I didn't exactly 'have' to, but it was the easiest excuse to grasp and pluck out of the dark. I walked to my car, got in and threw my folky CD into the player.