We saw Fontaines DC at the Agora on Euclid Avenue two weeks ago. The show was good; I haven’t been to the Agora in years and years. I was trying to remember the last show I saw there; it was either The Black Keys or The Strokes. So it’s been a while.
I had forgotten that the Agora is now owned by the type of company that buys up old venues and scrapes out their guts to make them more palatable and more profitable. Happily, many vestiges of the building’s original 1913 incarnation (as the Metropolitan Theatre, which opened with a performance of Aida and for a time was the home of Cleveland’s Yiddish theater troupe) still remain. It has been the Agora Ballroom since about 1986, at which point I assume they stopped doing things like “updating for fire codes” and “cleaning the restrooms.”
Certainly, the sanitized version (it’s so clean they don’t even accept cash – not at the box office, bars, or coat check) is more palatable to my old ass. The beers are $15 and you pay for them on a touch screen. People still get drunk (on $15 Modelos! In this economy!) and crowd the aisles and smoke weed in the audience but I did find myself wondering if the young people still go to scuzzy clubs to see bands? Is there a Second Jazz Age version of Peabody’s Down Under or Euclid Tavern or the Grog Shop – the old one with the bathrooms that were up on a platform and the stall “doors” were 2-for-$5 shower curtains from Medic Drug Store down the street?
Maybe this is just Cleveland and all the venues in my little city have been gobbled up by private equity or whoever it is that buys these places and installs subway tiles in the bathroom, I don’t know.
Also, I am aware of the type of person who makes this complaint, and that type is: old and cranky, which, guilty as charged! But as I said to my friend Sally: how are the young people doing their drinking these days? Inflation, changing times, blah blah blah, but at $15 a pop how is anyone going to a show and making regrettable decisions, as one should in one’s twenties? Maybe the kids just don’t drink as much, which, good for them I guess. I’m sure the venue would rather sell fewer $15 beers and break up fewer fights or clean up fewer overflowing garbage cans.
I guess the real issue here is my own wistful nostalgia. I like most things about my current life much, much better, but: AH YOUTH. All I can say is that if you are 26 and have joints that feel like they will never betray you, enjoy it.
Last weekend I picked up Tia Levings’ memoir A Well-Trained Wife and when my husband saw the title he said, “Oh! You don’t need this!” I retorted that he might want to think about where he planned on taking that joke! No further cracks were made on the topic, but I guess I am doing independent study in high-control religion now because I am currently waiting on a used copy of Pure by Linda Kay Klein. This dovetails nicely with my interest in cults and will be useful, I suppose, as this nation creeps into its Gilead era.
I am very susceptible to Instagram ads, and say what you will about your information being harvested and used against you but sometimes the algorithm does hit right. My most recently influenced purchase was a pair of Birddogs shorts for my husband, which were tried on and accepted. (Normally I don’t buy my husband clothes because he is very good at doing that on his own. I have never had to tell him how to dress for anything, a great quality in a man!)
Most recently, though, I’ve been getting served a number of ads for a new Logitech keyboard, I’m guessing because I recently purchased a Logitech keyboard (sometimes the algorithm doesn’t hit right). The keyboard does look nice to use, right up until the part where the ad promises “hours and hours of fluid typing.” My good bitch I do not want to be typing for hours and hours. No matter how backlit and clackety your keyboard is!
The good news about me and the Instagram algorithm is that I am getting better at resisting it. Oftentimes, all I have to do is fill a virtual shopping cart with desirable garbage, and the spell is broken. This triggers many emails along the lines of why hast thou forsaken us and this life-changing eyeliner/bra/perfume/notebook? So sorry, but my money is still (temporarily, anyway) safely tucked in some corner of the US financial system (until El*n M*sk downloads it and shoots it to Mars).
In the interest of getting more mileage out of money I’ve already parted with, I finally learned how to hem a pair of pants. I have a sewing machine, after all! Why shouldn’t my pants be the right length? I turned to my friend YouTube and let a woman in one of those silly puffy influencer headbands and too much fake Cartier jewelry teach me how to do a hem. After this 12-minute education, I dove in with pins, ruler, and tailor’s chalk, and hacked four inches off the bottom of my pants. It was a success, mostly, though they could stand to be a bit shorter; I compensated later in the week by hemming another pair just a bit too short. Ah well. It’s not as if Bill Cunningham will be stopping me on the street anytime soon (mostly because he is dead but my reasoning stands).
I hope you will have a good week. For me, it’s another five days of mostly being a hater, followed by a three-day weekend, followed by a four-day week. I have no plans for Memorial Day specifically, but my French tutor has assigned me devoirs including pictures and observations of celebrating this holiday. I will certainly come prepared to explain Memorial Day but I am not sure she will be that enlightened by pictures of me grilling hot dogs. C’est la vie, je suppose! In my lessons, I often feel compelled to explain a lot more about America than is really necessary, which translates to me making fun of it/acting like it’s some abstract joke rather than an ongoing horror movie in which I am a supporting character. I hope my tutor will not glean from my Memorial Day presentation that I am sending a coded SOS message, or maybe I do, or maybe she is well aware already. QUELLE DOMMAGE ÇA.