Kids

Photo by OCW staffMy generation has offered to history the dot-com and bleached-blond hair on men. Neither will look pretty for posterity. You think later generations scoffed at tangerine leisure suits? Wait'll the grandkids get a gander at our goateed men in shiny purple disco shirts. And pleather.

When I was in high school, if you wanted to be an Individual, you had to wear a cape (although Goth Jenna opted for the Hitchcockian black veil). Capes were fun, if only because they gave the jocks, with their devil-may-care untied high-tops, epilepsy.

But the kids! The kids these days! Aren't they so pretty you could scream, with their little waif hair-flips and their good skin and their wittily underachieving outfits that are purposely raggedy and counterintuitively expensive?

They show us up merrily, with their effortless skinny individualism and the insouciant hair-sprayed knobbies on their heads. I'm mesmerized by these children—especially those among these children who happen to be Japanese because Japanese girls are totally hot! They were the first to discover Paul Frank, and they're so poised and comfortable they even look good in that awful new denim with the Bad Ass and Thigh Fade, which is almost as icky as our treasured acid wash, though still sans Ug boots. Oh, well. At least we can take credit for Shonen Knife.

Hoping to watch little hipsters shop, we ventured Friday night to South Coast Plaza for its chock-full-o'-street-cred Block Party. How does the world's sickest Bulgari emporium maintain street cred with anti-establishment hipsters? I haven't the faintest idea. It's up there with the perennially unsolved mystery of how OC manages to churn out punk rock Republicans. Explain it, and I will give you a dollar.

And the children were darling, pouring into Diesel, where they refused to buy anything—especially the $139 bondage belt over which several Weekly folk were snickering—to drink free imported beers and watch a mopy shoegazing band. The kids look terrific, but their music is balls. And when did emo become so loud?

Over at Miss Sixty, Red Bull was the drink of choice, while three go-go girls shimmied in the window and people took pictures of one another with cameras that were monolithically digital. How very poor people with film must feel these days! Quel embarrassing! At Puma, they had breakdancers; at Traffic, they had cute, homey little Chinese hooded sweaters in sunshiney yellow for a mere $368; at Hugo, Hugo Boss, they had cheese, cheese; and at Air de Paris, they had a $20 sales rack and a guy looking to bribe us. Sold! And outside on the landscaped bridge, the cute Japanese girls gathered, and we all tried not to stare.

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Among the many, many great bands that have nothing whatsoever to do with the little kids of the county? Long Beach supergroup The Dibs, with 12's Brett Bixby, Mickey's Big Mouth's Mickey, Chris Hanlin (formerly of Bourbon Jones and The Fauntleroys), and some other guys. Of course, though their hard-rocking roots music should knock the guitars from the hands of any kids considering a slouch to the stage, most of them could take a lesson from those same tykes about keeping one's hair clean and shampooed. Speaking of which, do you think Scott Spezio has seen a shower yet?

And, true to thesis, they were followed onstage at Lake Forest's Gypsy Lounge by Maxine—a group of the darlingest barely postpubescent boys this side of Saved By the Bell. We weren't going to stay, but the cats from the Dibs talked us into it. “Do you like The Police?” they asked. Well, as a girl who was 13 in 1986 and who went to bed with visions of Sting dancing through her head (back before he looked like William of Occam embalmed with corn syrup), um, yes. But wouldn't you know it? The kids only looked like the Police—the cutie singer was even wearing a striped jersey straight out of Quadrophenia. How did they sound? I don't remember. For the record, that's a bad thing.

Luckily, OO Soul has grooves that will ring around your head for weeks. Playing Saturday night at Costa Mesa's Detroit, the Brotherhood had various chic Newport legal secretaries shaking their Cosmopolitans all over one another. It's amazing how very many drinks a Newport babe can spill.

And Sunday, the littlestkids were having Hula-Hoop contests and getting their faces painted and playing a Foosball-like hockey game that should by all rights have ended in bloody fisticuffs—you know, like croquet!—at Disney's pre-Ducks-game fanathon in the Pond parking lot. It was terribly family values, and atrociously un-Disney—i.e., nobody had dead mothers, THERE WERE NO ASS REFERENCES, and it was free.

And wouldn't you know it? The goateed bald guy in Beyond 7—the band that played despite the fact that the Radio Disney van didn't have the decency to turn off its broadcast of all Michelle Branch, all the time during 7's set—wore a shiny purple disco shirt. And pleather.

VOICE OF A NEW GENERATION: CO**********@HO*****.COM.