Fling Reflections

It wasn't exactly the Mother of All Flings...sort of the second cousin once removed, really. But Street was there. Now, relive the weekend you don't remember.

The only experience stranger than being completely wasted with thousands of other psychotic people during Fling is being completely sober with those thousands of psychotic people. At 1 a.m. on Saturday night, we made our way down Locust Walk, bombarded by screaming, jumping blobs followed by incoherent stragglers who struggled to avoid lampposts and bushes. A boy strode by us, making faces with wide, glazed eyes, and attempted to reclaim the English language. Girls held onto their "really drunk friend" as they made their way to the nearest Pukespot, the anchors themselves looking as if they couldn't decide whether to collapse to the ground or hurl themselves.

And finally we sat in front of Furness and watched the campus begin to calm and become Penn again, save for six uniformed girls marching in unison with their hands on the shoulders in front of them. On any other night it would have just been some sort of initiation ritual, but in the early hours of the last night of the weekend, with four other drunk girls trailing behind them, imitating and mocking them hysterically all the way, it was a surreal sight typical only of Fling.

Thursday midnight at the Red Light Theater District (you can even hear the ladies calling out: "Bobby baby Bobby bubi Robby!").

The cast and crew of the Spring Fling musical "Company" couldn't celebrate Fling the traditional way, but they tried -- as surrealistically as possible. After performing for a drunken audience, they appeased their alcoholism at the Quadramics opening night cast party. Anyone who's anyone in thespian mode was there, with the exception of someone who was doing time in the slammer due to a false accusation by a horrid and corrupt establishment that will remain nameless except for the initials "U.O." But if you weren't incarcerated, you were inebriated. You're not on the wagon, are you? Good. Duck or Mimosa? Maybe just one of each. How about some German beer, made in Bremen and Merna? Whew! It's very drunk out tonight. Jeff Klein and Francis Englert, side by side, had just stuck their faces in a huge bowl of cream. Another vodka stinger? AND ONE FOR MAHLER! (the Mormon has spoken).

Before Saturday, the Lainmeyers and I had never played a show during the sun-lit hours of the a.m. Of course, this also required our breakfasting on Southern Comfort (our traditional pre-show drink), so Saturday morning was certainly, well, peculiar. At 11, I drove Steve's van with all of our equipment down Hamilton Walk. As I pulled into the Upper Quad, the thunderous sound of the Cars' "Just What I Needed" exploding out of huge, spongy speakers reassured all four of us that it would be this obscenely loud sound check and not our (obscenely loud) first song that would awaken the freshmen still toxically divorced from their consciousnesses within the walls of the great fortress.

Fifty minutes later, as the blood finally started to reenter our fingers and our dozen or so friends were joined by a couple other random early Flingers (one of whom was a leather-clad, 40-something chick who interrupted our set to find out that a song of ours she liked was written by -- surprise, surprise -- us) our early morning serenade came to an end. The dozen or so "fans" of ours who were there applauded, seemingly in earnest. Perhaps behind the red brick walls of that great fortress, a dozen or so more people, and maybe even a dozen or so on top of them, lay peacefully in their beds, listened approvingly to our music, and prophesized softly, "People will come, dear Lainmeyers, people will definitely come."

"Things are gonna change, I can feel it."

Spring Fling, a haiku

spring fling in the Quad
not only are they freshmen,
they are all jarheads.

Fling has a tendency to transform the place that I call home into a playground for drunken crowds. Last year it was Upper Quad. The scene was somewhat disturbing, as I watched an endless number of eager Flingers put on puffy "Sumo Wrestling" outfits and struggle in a bloody match with their happy -- and similarly puffy -- partners.

This year, it was Sansom Street on Saturday night. At about nine, I prematurely assumed that the block party was not going to attract anyone because of the weather. At 11, I walked outside to find the street, MY STREET, transformed -- tons of people, all drunk, all joined in a weird race to push their way to another part of the block and then stumble back. So I joined in and cruised the block about 10 times. What a place to schmooze! What a place to be seen! Finally, I "escaped" the Sansom craze in a brief trip to Wawa and Chats, where I inspected the Flinging crowd in much better lighting and supplemented my diet dinner with free and delightful yogurt-covered raisins and an equally free bean burrito.

Saturday, 11:20 a.m. Stumbled to the Quad to catch the Lainmeyers' unique brand of urgent, new wavey pop with a thin-yet-enthusiastic crowd. Our party then went to Allegro's to have breakfast. Doctor Detroit was playing on the TV sets, a telling sign. Afterwards I lugged musical equipment from a friend's room in the Quad and dragged it back home. I returned to campus with the sole intent of returning the car we used but somehow got suckered in to watching more Fling nonsense.

4 p.m. Finally escape the "seductive" clutches of The Sixteen-Year Old Drug Addicted Single Mother Of All Flings to go home and do some work. "Work" becomes putting up a newly acquired poster on my wall and then napping.

9 p.m. I arrive at the barbeque. We wait in line for a few eternities to finally get cold eggplant and lemonade with far too much ice. Out of a sense of obligation, we go to the block party.

11:30 p.m. After one beer and enduring a lame-assed band with a singer who thought he was beautiful (he was not), a friend and I retire to watch a movie at home. Yawn.

Saturday night. A frat house that shall remain nameless. Nature, God bless her, was calling. Friends and I make our way to the (too long) bathroom line.

Girl cuts in front by sweet-talking the shermy man in front of me. I tell her to get back behind us. She grabs my arms, shrieks, "Do you know who I am?", and digs her nails into my arm. Sticks her middle finger up at me. Says, "You're fat," and walks behind me. Glares for awhile. We move onto the dance floor and listen to everyone sing along to the Spice Girls.

I am bleeding.

Fling, a surreal experience by definition, never reckoned with sorority girls.

Saturday, 8:30 pm. A curious individual with brilliant blue hair was noted ascending the stairs to the upper lobby of High Rise East. In his hand he clutched a bulging bag from Taco Bell which he proudly displayed, Statue of Liberty style, to everyone present. In an effort to emphasize the importance of his gesture, he placed one foot on the railing of the stairs and proceeded to sing, presumably in a foreign language (maybe the benefit-of-the-doubt idea is too generous,) a stanza of some song, repeatedly until his friends generously took him away. Alcoholic buzz or amphetamines in the Border's taco meat? Maybe it was just that fiesty "Fling" feeling.

11:30 pm, Friday.

I must be the only person west of 30th Street who's still sober right now, but that'll be taken care of soon enough. Oh great; looks like we're going to be stopped on the walk by a friend-of-a-friend. Can't we just get to the damn party? Whoa. Friend-of-a-friend's got a friend! I like Ms. friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend very much, and like I said, I'm still sober. So I stare at her eyes, shining with fairy dust or maybe the first effects of her liquor. I listen to her conversation. I enter into it when I have no real right to be talking to her. Arrgh! She's from Wisconsin! I'll never track her down! Wait! Don't go yet! I can't hang out with friend-of-a-friend all night just to be with his friend! Come back! Please?

And like that -- she's gone.

The Toasters

by doree shafrir

Imagine, if you will, a day long long ago. A day before Gwen Stefani invaded both the airwaves and our television screens with the brand of midriff-baring, bleached-blond music she called ska. A time when it was still about two-tone and skanking to the infectious sounds of the English Beat and the Specials and when the words "punk" and "ska" were not necessarily synonymous.

The year is 1983. The place? New York's Lower East Side. A man, Buck Hingley, who names his new band after an old Jamaican ska dance move called "toasting." The same year, Hingley starts an all-ska record company, Moon Records, which is currently the longest-running ska label in the United States. And today, nearly 15 years later, the Toasters have released six full-length albums -- their latest, Hard Band for Dead, came out last June -- and are known as one of the most innovative and critically acclaimed ska bands in the world.

While the Toasters have never enjoyed the commercial success of their newer, brasher contemporaries, they nonetheless managed to impress a Spring Fling crowd with their upbeat, yet intense set. Street caught up with Buck after the show, just as the band was heading off to Providence, R.I.

Street: Can you tell me how the band has evolved through the years?

Buck: First we were dinosaurs who died and sank down into the depths, and then we fossilized, and it's still going strong after all these years. I don't know quite how that happens, but there's always something that comes along that keeps us willing to do it.

Street: What do you attribute that to? Have the band members been together for a long time, or have different musicians come in and out?

Buck: Well, I'm the only original member left, but most of this lineup you saw tonight has actually been playing together for about four years. It was hard in the beginning, when we weren't making any money, because not everyone was quite the fanatic that I was, I suppose.

Street: For a ska band that's been around for so long, you guys are pretty successful now.

Buck: Yeah, we're doing okay. We're not really enjoying commercial success, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing actually.

Street: I don't know if you want to call it a revival, but it seems like people have suddenly "discovered" ska, whether it's No Doubt or other bands like that.

Buck: I think it's more of a rediscovery than a revival, because in order for it to revive, you'd have to assume that it was dead, which it wasn't -- I think it just kind of went underneath the radar screen. But there's a lot of bands out there now that are called ska music that people who really understand ska wouldn't call ska at all.

Street: More hard-core, or pop?

Buck: Hard-core influences, yeah. But if that's what the industry wants to call it now, well, whatever.

Street: Why do you think it's suddenly becoming popular?

Buck: Two reasons. One, because it's genuinely good music. Second, because the majors have kind of run out of things to exploit, so they're looking at ska music as being some sort of ready-made musical form that they can just pop in and cook to their own recipe in three minutes. Hopefully, that won't be the case.

Street: You guys seem pretty consistent, though.

Buck: Yeah, that's one of the secrets to our longevity. If you keep doing the same thing, sooner or later it's gonna be right.

Street: Are you influenced by first-wave ska, or do you consider yourselves more third-wave?

Buck: We don't really consider ourselves anything like that. I think those kinds of labels are for people who don't really understand the music. We're just kind of throwbacks to the early '80s, when the two-tone thing was still rocking -- the English Beat, the Specials, Madness, Selecter. That's a lot of my influences; that's basically where we're coming from.

Street: The band came onto the bill rather recently.

Buck: It was pretty late-breaking. I don't think it was until like a week or two weeks ago that we had it confirmed.

Street: And how did you feel about playing tonight?

Buck: It was fun. It's always a test going in front of a lot of an audience that's not really yours. It's kind of good -- I think they liked it.

Street: I think you won over a lot of people tonight.

Buck: Good. That's the point.

Street: When's your next album coming out? And what are your long-term plans for the future?

Buck: Well, we're starting work on our next album now, so hopefully it'll be out sometime before the end of the year. But I feel the best plan is not to have one.

Street: Is there anything else you think people should know about the band or about ska in general?

Buck: If people want to find out more about ska music, they can write or call Moon Records [P.O. Box 1412, New York, NY 10276; (212) 673-5538]. They'll send you down some information so you can plug in to the network.

Now among the old-timers in the ska music business, the Toasters have the luxury of looking back on their years in the industry and relishing the fact that they have influenced bands ranging from the Bosstones to the Pietasters to Rancid. But the Toasters remain a band that is not about the Billboard chart or crowd-surfing or hot pink mohawks -- simply high-quality ska music. Skank on!

Please E-mail StreetWeb@dp.upenn.edu with any questions or comments.