OK, I went back and edited my original draft of this entry. I am really tired today, and hungover, and nothing I wrote made any sense. Still doesn't, but maybe it's a little clearer.

If you've been quite under a rock and haven't seen them, their deal is to write songs inspired by slides that they've bought from estate sales. They project the slides onstage, and do their thang. And their drummer is the 9-year-old daughter of the songwriter and the projectionist.

The songs are good, and the whole shebang is fun, and funny...and also slightly disturbing. Other people's snapshots are grotesque because we don't know the story behind them...we don't feel love for these people in the slides and so they seem freakish and ugly and lampoonable. I don't think the T-family are making fun of these people outright, but there is something a little mocking or smug about the enterprise.

Anyway, I think I had that response to them cuz I was kinda drunk (two beers is all I need these days to get completely scrambled) and slid into that state of mind where everything seems slightly tainted and rotten, and where I think that every thought I have must be true because alcohol has dissolved the filter.

Also, the setting of Williamsburg brings out the wistfulness in me. The first layer of that wistfulness is superficial, the mild irritation of being surrounded by young hipsters...a sort of outsider's disgust at so many other outsiders converging and becoming the majority. I suppose mixed in to that is a dollop of youth envy.

But there is a deeper response, triggered by the row houses and Christmas lights and little streets. It's such a quaint little neighborhood. Not pretty, but quaint--belonging to the era of my grandparents. It looks like the places my grandparents used to live, where we would visit for Sunday dinners and holidays. It looks like the neighborhoods that they grew up in, and talked about, and showed us pictures of. Williamsburg, and neighborhoods like it, are the last connection I have to that generation, and it's not even a personal connection, but a vague, impressionistic one. Hence: vague longing.