This one doesn't have too much to do with music, but seems related to me.
I live in an old port city near the Canadian border that had three big industries in its early days, mining, fishing and logging. It grew together as a conglomerate of I think four or five other towns. Now it's grown into a bustling college town, with a decent music scene. But it's not just dominated by college students, it's got retirees, tourists, and small business owners up the wazoo. Not to mention a stupid number of visual artists and writers. There are all sorts of political factions and divides, the major one being between land developers and people who've lived here a long time and liked it the way it was in the sixties. There are old hippy communes, and community gardens, and dojos, and poetry circles, and boat people... Basically, it's a complicated place with a big history.
One day, I heard a college student saying, "If you live in Bellingham, you're either a 'scenester' or a 'whitehat.'"
...
If "whitehat" means what I think it means, in Bellingham, even the whitehats are scenesters! Whatever the heck "scenester" means...
OK, I'll go take this rant down to the bus depot now, where it'll fit in better with the mental patients displaced by Ronald Reagan's administration....
