Summer on the Berkeley campus is weird. While it’s nice to imagine that most of the students vanish, due to the tuition increases many more of them stick around to take summer classes. Classes are so impacted during fall and spring that a big percentage of undergrads take 5 years to graduate, which has become financially untenable for a lot of people, so they cram a few courses into summer in order to accelerate their escape. And a lot of new students come to campus in the summer to find housing, attempt to understand the illogical campus layout, and buy lots of overpriced Cal branded shirts. Yesterday I was walking from the gym to the library, normally a deserted path around this time of year, when two massive tour groups of incoming freshman in Cal hoodies swooped past me. My initial annoyance with this passed in a couple of moments, because I finally got hit by the phenomenon colleagues have described for years: they looked like babies. I think it was because so many of the guys had Beiber bangs. It was hard to believe they weren’t wearing diapers under their jeans.

I don’t have kids, so this idea that young people look young is a lot different than gradually watching someone grow up. When I see my friends’ kids or my nieces, the experience is more like watching a slide show with missing slides — hey, s/he’s walking! Oh, s/he’s in college! Shit, that happened fast. But when it comes to people older than me, it’s also a blur. I seriously cannot figure out how old people are by looking at them. Everyone between thirty and fifty looks the same age, and past fifty I usually lump everyone into their sixties, only to find out a lot of them are actually in their seventies and eighties. So I frequently underestimate people’s ages by decades, which is flattering, sure, but kind of disconcerting from my end. Having had older parents, grandparents who lived into their late nineties, and older siblings born nearly a decade before me, maybe I’m just used to thinking of older people as my peers. And that’s fine, but this sudden awareness that teenagers look like children after years of thinking they look like adults is really freaking weird. I’m still embarrassed about the time I referred to my iPod as a Walkman in class and my students teased me about it for months. Then again, they were born in the nineties*. Let’s just let that sink in.

*On a related note, a friend recently commented that going to the upcoming Pavement reunion concert was going to mean mingling with balding, pear-shaped peers, and that Berkeley would have a run on babysitters that night. I’m not attending that particular concert, but I drove by the Temescal (Oakland’s Williamsburg) street fair last week and gawked at the number of straw fedora sporting, ironically tattooed moms and dads. Generation X, welcome to the sedate years, now featuring cash-in nostalgia reunions by your favorite bands, who have their own babysitters to pay.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they are crap (and the reason the damn gym has been so crowded lately), but I did think near the end of 2009 that 2010 would be a great year to start wearing more red lipstick. My beauty routine, so to speak, is pretty low key — my hair and makeup take less than ten minutes on work days — but there’s something appealing about red lipstick, which for some reason I stopped wearing in my twenties. It’s one of those classic items everyone looks good in — including glow-in-the-dark-pale, dark haired types like myself. Only once have I ever written an article about makeup, but one of the most enjoyable essays I’ve gotten to work on was about the influence of music on personal style. Fashion writing is boring, but the connection between our creative influences and the way we dress actually interests me quite a bit.

This came to mind the other day when I was observing some of the young hipsters who wander around Wheeler Hall. Back in the 80s and early 90s, when I was wearing the most outrageous sort of shit I will ever wear (ankle length velvet gowns with a motorcycle jacket and a necklace made from human finger bones; flowered 1940′ aprons over torn jeans and under a shawl collared grandpa cardigan that reeked of pipe smoke; blue glitter harem pants with a ripped Iggy Pop tee shirt; 50s shirt dresses with a head scarf wrapped like a turban and so on), another girl of an independent, creative temperament could spot me at 10 paces and know we had something in common. I’m not saying women of my generation dressed better than Gen Y, but in my experience (probably colored by living in Oakland/Berkeley), we took a hell of a lot of risks, and these became a sort of radar for one another, sort of like the faded tattoos and piercing scars we now sport in our 30s and 40s.

I don’t see a lot of outrageous style at Cal. There’s a guy who dresses in head-to-toe purple, and there are a lot of girls who favor the Williamsburg look from two or three years ago (tights as pants, flannels, those lace up dance flats, bedhead), but there aren’t a lot of people taking big risks. Some of this may be a reflection of the blending of subcultures that’s taken for granted now. You can wear Nike Dunks with stovepipe jeans and work the counter at American Apparel; you can wear a cardigan with a dookie chain (or a skinnier version of one) and shop there. Indie rock and hip hop style sit comfortably side by side around here. Guys of all colors started strapping straight leg and skinny jeans down low, hip hop style, a couple of years ago. Girls of all shades wear doorknockers. I spend my weekdays immersed in a population of 18-22 year-olds, and they don’t dress to match their taste in music anymore because they listen to — and like — a little of everything. It’s not that I think we should be matchy-matchy with what we’re listening to (I’ve been listening to Rennaisance motets lately, and I’m not rocking doublets and hose), and I like the fashion mashups people are sporting, but I do wish people would be a little more individualistic, would stop worrying about what people will think and start dressing the way they feel. Even if I look a lot more conventional now, that’s what I still try to do. Now I wonder where my finger bone necklace went, because that would really elevate these damn jeans I keep putting on.

Today was the last teaching day of the semester, as Berkeley enters its first “Reading, Review, Recitation” period, which other schools call “Dead Week”. Normally, we’d have another week of classes ahead of us and wind things up around December 10th, but the RRR period was announced right around the same time the University started furloughing folks, so RRR may really be about the fact that there aren’t enough custodians still employed by UC to keep the classrooms clean. Anyway, my R4B students — the ones in the underground music class — asked me whether I was working on a new book, and I told them something I haven’t told you, dear reader. I am. I’m at the very beginning, just getting my feet wet, not really ready to tell you much about it stage of things. The proposal is mostly done, I’m hoping to knock down another three chapters or so in the bleak midwinter, and I’ll just let you in on a few things:

It’s a genre I swore I’d never mess with.

The people who wrote crappy reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably like it.

The people who wrote good reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably hate it (one of my students astutely observed that this means I am now following Bob Dylan’s career pattern).

It’s nonfiction, will be written in first person, will also involve field research and a lot of mucking about in rarely visited parts of the library, and will bear a closer relationship to much of the writing I did for Kitchen Sink than S&E did.

It will probably offend a lot of people.

More to come…

I really did mean to keep a tour diary here as I whizzed through four events in three states plus multiple radio interviews in less than a week, but the combination of fatigue, problems with my laptop’s wireless, and the sheer weirdness of the series of events I’ve done have all conspired to keep me from filling in the gaps in my blogging. Suffice to say that a pattern has emerged in this lineup of readings: minimal turnout one night, huge turnout the next, minimal turnout again. San Francisco was not really surprising in its small attendance; though the folks at Books Inc are sweet as pie, The Marina is not really an indie friendly neighborhood (though it does have some good restaurants — food is becoming the secondary narrative on this adventure). Pegasus in Berkeley held strong to its tradition of being the only store where I’m guaranteed a massive turnout and good sales because I knew everyone there, we had a live band (Nobody Beats – thanks!), many bottles of two buck Chuck, many kids running around, a priest in attendance and of course the great Pegasus staff (past and present). After waking at 5am after three hours of sleep on Thursday to get to the Oakland airport, Seattle was weird again. Elliott Bay is one of the most beautiful bookstores I’ve ever been to — a hulking big old ship of a store with brick walls and little balconies and a cool reading room lined with $2 oddities and a wonderful staff, especially Greg, who hosted the event. But Michael Jackson up and died and I guess everyone stayed home to mourn, because turnout was once again smallish (okay, small. In case you’re wondering, I don’t take it personally when I do events and only a few people show up. I worked in a bookstore, and we had events by really famous authors with huge reputations and only a handful of people would turn out. It’s a combination of timing, media, and which night of the week you land on. Also celebrity deaths.). Afterwards we ate at a tiny Italian restaurant near Pioneer Square — the name of which escapes me — with cute girls making out at the table next to us and the most enthusiastic waiter ever (seriously, this guys needs to follow me around every day, because after every course he got super excited to see I’d cleaned my plate and said, “Good job! God job!”). And now after a train trip I’m in Portland for the weekend, hanging out at my sister’s place with a snoring dog and the final event at Powell’s tomorrow night (I also did a guest blog for their site on Thursday). Sage and I had our anniversary dinner on Friday at Park Kitchen and after ordering the tasting menu and working our way through six delicious courses and cocktails we had to be airlifted back to the apartment. I seriously think I stretched my stomach to latter day Orson Welles proportions. Like I said, food is the secondary narrative of this trip. Anyway, it’s been fun, and I’ve been so appreciative of my friends and family for helping spread the word, and I would love to see anybody who reads this at Powell’s. I don’t bite, I like entertaining people, and I’m wearing some killer shoes.

In spite of the fact that I wrote a lot about the nineties in this book, I’m of the mind that it’s far too early for nineties nostalgia. The recent revival of gunge fashion (flannels, torn jeans, Doc Martens) seems to be just another move on the part of chains like Urban Outfitters to market something as kitschy to people too young to remember when it wasn’t kitsch. Pearl Jam is headlining the Outside Lands Festival here in San Francisco later this summer (along with the Beastie Boys and Dave Matthews… umm, what the hell?), and someone told me recently that Sub Pop records is trying to make (yet another) comeback. The nineties seem uncomfortably close for me personally ; after all, I finished both college and grad school in the nineties, and that really doesn’t seem that long ago.

I once dated a guy who railed a lot against musical nostalgia,  though like me he had an inordinate fondness for Dylan (Dylan seems to be the exception for lots of people who can’t stand any other boomer era music).  Generally, I tend to agree that we shouldn’t stay musically paralyzed in the past. But since I’m putting together a playlist and watching lots of videos from the books’ central decades of focus (the 60s, 80s, 90s and the current decade), I am feeling a bit of musical nostalgia, much of it Bay Area centric. I found an MP3 of Berkeley band Crimpshrine’s song “Summertime”, which was a personal anthem in my last year of high school (and up to the point of finding it online, I only had it on a compilation of Gilman bands called “The Thing That Ate Floyd”, which I still own on the original vinyl… yes, I am a dork).  I have to admit I got painfully nostalgic for the late 80s and my teen years — normally a time in my life I’d prefer to forget — for a minute there. And then I remembered what my hair looked like back then, and I got embarrassed enough to stop feeling nostalgic. That must be the trick to quashing sentimental feelings about one’s golden years: just take a minute and recall what you were wearing.