By ELIZABETH DRISKO
Staff Writer
“Welcome to the eat healthy, study hard,
exercise often, be depressed, go to Monsour and long for a healthy,
serious relationship semester.” How many of you have said
something very similar to this, maybe with different words, in
the past few weeks: how many of us are searching for fulfillment
and for our own Utopia right here?
Pomona is not a perfect place. A lot of kids are happy, but a
lot of men and women are sad. Most are mixed up somewhere between
the two, wondering if they can keep going and laughing every day.
Maybe they’ll find true love this time, but right now certainly
feels lonely. The mood is sorrowful and frightening in its conflicting
idealisms, but on the other side of the fear are the success stories.
Music always draws people like a moth to the flame or something
equally hypnotizing. I was supposed to go see the hypnotist last
Friday night but never made it past the sitar player. His stage
charisma was too good to leave; he was playing as comfortably
before a waxing crowd of 30 or so students as before a waning
four or five. He had a blanket across his lap and no shoes to
be seen. Every once in a while he’d get so into the music
that he’d wave his head around and make a roaring motion
with his mouth. Whoa! He loved creating a scene with his music,
and he’d try to import with his notes the far away emotional
reality of the east. To titillate the growing crowd he played
a night raga, dragging his brass-knuckled (to make sliding chords)
fingers across the frets; there’s a reason night ragas are
for the night. Holden Caulfield wanted to play a woman like a
violin. This musician played his sitar like a woman.
It was as easy to get lost in the music of this musican as it
wasn’t at Table Manners. The fluorescent-lit first show
of the year consisted of haphazardly-piled speakers and inhibited
kids standing around waiting for the lights to shut off so they
could have some fun. Lots of nodding heads. Not too much dancing.
Late-night hip-hop threw kids expecting electronic music into
confusion trying to figure how to blend the flowing arms with
some shaking.
“There were two completely different styles tonight, and
it felt like they clashed,” one friend said after making
a quick exit. But I have faith in Table Manners. It’s come
a long way since it’s humble Smith Campus Center courtyard
beginnings, and I think that the change will ultimately be a really
interesting one -- definitely worth checking out. Change can be
good. Check it out. A lot of new DJ’s means a lot of new
music invading our safe, narrow little world.
I love Speechwriter’s LLC. The music of the band, consisting
of purely Pomona people, Dave Dervish ’00, Misha Chellam
’04 and Matt Kolsky ’03, creates a strangely uplifting
and at the same time heartbreaking atmosphere. Our beloved local
celebrities inaugurated their 48-state tour (or something just
as impressive) at the Motley by playing to a past-capacity audience
of entranced kids who sat or stood in silence even if they had
come in with a bang (“KOLSKY!” screams a guy who doesn’t
own any of his own socks). The synthesis of Misha’s intensity
and emotional turmoil with Kolsky’s dreadlock-pirate humor
and Dave’s clean-cut intellectual east coast image merge
into an enormous appeal that promises to make their coming months
exciting -- see, real people can be rockstars. ROCKSTARS!
