Notes from the evening. First, a bulletin: Buster's, the coffeehouse in South Pasadena on Mission not far from Fair Oaks, appears to be in deep shit. Catherine and I showed up there at a reasonable hour (9:00 and change) on a Friday evening and we were the only ones there. The guy at the counter was talking about closing early.

This is simply not acceptable, folks. Buster's has been one of the area's best coffeehouses for years now. It can't be threatened with closing. They have a huge range of complicated drinks including Italian sodas and chai (the latter of which I found very nice when sampling it for the first time tonight). They also have a nice range of baked goods. The staff are cute! The atmosphere is totally unbelievable, with brilliant-colored walls, lots of crazy mosaic tilework, and good local art. I will grant you that to some extent it is a shadow of its former self-- they have removed all the comfortable seating upstairs, there is no longer anything of note to read (the Pasadena Weekly is a fine paper, sure -- FOR ME TO POOP ON!), the games are gone, and the lack of live music tonight was somewhat baffling. Still, though, still still still, this is a coffeehouse with much to recommend it. What the hell is going on? Would someone familiar with the area like to enlighten me?

Onward. On the way home KCRW piped up with something Fela or Femi Kuti which I identified to Catherine at around the junction of Fair Oaks and the 110. I was feeling good, you know? A car to drive, a stomach full of good chai, good conversation with an old friend, and here's Fela Kuti on the radio at 11:00 at night to remind me that I'm back where my life makes some kind of sense. I drive by my high school and Caltech and my mom's old house and I'm thinking about what Catherine said in the context of our prep school history, and about KCRW in the context of my orientation towards American pop culture, and thinking about what kind of job I might have out here, and thinking to myself My life means something here. I'm not just some interchangeable white B.A.-carrying girl for the publishing industry to chew up and spit out; I'm a person who knows the city and what its individual streets mean and who its individual families are and where it is racist and why that doesn't show so much and how we do and don't manage to be a multicultural community.

That Kuti song didn't end until after I'd gotten past the Vons on Allen north of Washington, and I thought, Damn, that's a long song, it must have been close to fifteen minutes; I knew this because South Pasadena to almost Altadena is a fifteen-minute drive. Which begged the question, How wrong is it to be measuring a Fela Kuti song by the distances between two whitey-whitebread bedroom burghs of Los Angeles? I don't mean like Kuti has no right to be in Pasadena; it's just he sings about prisons and corrupt governments and it seems a disservice to his memory to count him out in $300,000 bungalows and manicured lawns.

It reminded me how weird it is that KCRW is an LA station and there's nothing like it in New York (well, WFUV has its moments of greatness, but please). I feel guilty burning my fossil fuels through sleeping silent Pasadena and savoring those sweet, totally African guitar riffs. How do I explain this?

It reminds me of the Multicultural Days we used to have in junior high, when everyone was called upon to do a dance or sing a song or bring in a dish which says something about Their Culture. Like, This is The Day when we do Your Culture. Our terms dictate one day, only, and that Your Culture is something outside of what we normally do. Tomorrow we put our noses back to the grindstone so we can't see anything but the next test and the next and then a college education which will hopefully help us to continue living the two-houses-housekeepers-Beemers-and-prep-school lifestyle enjoyed by the alpha children in any given class.

What I'm trying to say is that I've finally become aware that you can't have a real multicultural discussion on the terms of the white mainstream. (I'm sure any number of people reading this are going "Oh great, another white kid's 'discovered' the 'New World'...") I think Carmie Rodriguez and the gang should give up on Multicultural Day and funnel all of Poly's resources and energy into, I don't know, sending every single kid abroad regardless of their ability to pay for AFS? Taking a whole year to go work in an impoverished community someplace? Something that will force these kids to play by someone else's rules.

I also don't think you can have a really eye-opening discussion without taking off the white kid gloves. I don't think I learned much about other cultures until I was in New York in the middle of this melee of people making anti-Semitic comments instead of censoring themselves, and calling each other nigger and monkey and Paki, and making fake Asian eyes at each other, and touching each other's hair and talking about each others' shapes and skin colors because we were all so close to each other we almost couldn't help it. Southern California is too goddamn genteel; it might as well be south of Strom.

(Yeah yeah, Kim and co., your diatribes about how racist LA is have finally penetrated. It wasn't going to happen just by talking at me, though; it happened when I was working with ethnic papers and in the Bronx.)

Anyway. While I was composing that diatribe I went to look up Fela Kuti and found a big ol' discography of various African artists, hosted by a biochem student in Japan... Sometimes my inability to think of new ways to find music really alarms me. I should have done more research a long time ago.