The New/Old Busch Stadium

"We just got back from playing a show in St. Louis...man, that is NOT a rocknroll town."-- a friend in a band.

Went to the new Busch Stadium over the weekend. If the inside had even 1/2 of the baseball/St. Louis heritage it has on the outside, it will be decent enough. It's still a work in progress, as evidenced by the gaping city-block sized hole visible from our upper deck seats on the other side of the stadium where the old Busch used to be. Had they waited 10 years or so, the old Busch Stadium would have been "retro," and I'm convinced that around 2015, one of these teams will build a "retro" replica of the Astrodome, and that'll be popular with the fans and therefore all the teams will follow suit and tear down the "retro" stadiums they have now. I miss the old Busch, and I don't give a damn if it was cookie cutter or not. Something about it also makes me think of when I went to Disney World as a kid, and how now, ironically enough, their vision of the future, a sterile tourist trap with every move preplanned by corporate visionaries, was more accurate than any of us could have ever envisioned.

I like St. Louis. I was born there and I have a lot of family there. However, I've always felt very much like an outsider looking in, probably more so than anyplace I've ever visited. They tell me it's parochial. The cynic in me sees most of the people who live there as being like the mutant strain of the Master Race: ubermensch Aryans who let themselves go to seed from too many Budweisers. Busch Stadium by the 7th inning is the kind of uniquely American puritanically decadent scene only Ralph Steadman or Mac Blackout could accurately convey through pen and paper.

Punk rock never quite took hold here as far as I can tell; Little Feat and Rush can still fill arenas. There's an inscrutability about it that I've never been able to quite crack...like it's Winesburg, Ohio writ large...or like it's everything Sinclair Lewis ever wrote about: right there, in your face.

You never see any punk rockers--even Hot Topic types--like you do in similar-sized cities. That's not a bad thing (after almost 10 years in and around Wicker Park, I welcome any respite from "indie"-anything), but I remember something HST said about St. Louis, that it's one of those places people leave as soon as they're old enough to do it: Quintron, T.S. Eliot, Burroughs.

But you can drive around the city, and the neighborhood's aren't getting torn to shreds like they are in Chicago. The pizza's fantastic. The Hill has some of the best Italian restaurants anywhere. The people, for the most part, are friendly, although I almost got in a fight with the guy behind me at the game for yelling "Down in front!" at my sister and girlfriend. (Luckily, my dirty looks are very very dirty, bordering on psychotic, and people tend to assuage their dipshittiness when they see them.) It's Middle America, and it is what is; the problems of St. Louis are the problems of America, and unlike many cities, St. Louis has yet to have that rebirth of people flocking back...the suburbs are pushing out further and further...some even 60 miles away.

I'm always glad to visit, but always glad to leave. If I moved there, I'd end up as one of those middle-aged guys with a basement where he keeps his old drums, his old records, his old fliers, his old memories, and nobody would find it the least bit interesting. Especially me.

But who knows...maybe St. Louis will experience a kind of renaissance with relatively affordable city housing and vacuums just waiting to be filled. The potentiality is there, moreso than similar Midwestern cities. You can see it when you look west from the new Busch Stadium, out over the abandoned industrial buildings and empty downtown streets...all the way to the mountains at the end of the horizon promising something more out there somewhere. Baseball, and then some.