Stardate 05092003
Turn it up.
I’ve been under the spell of a pernicious little CD, RADIO SOULWAX VOLUME 4. I’m not sure if it’s officially available though and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be publicized so I might be the biggest dick right now for telling the world about it. DJ Soulwax mixed together thirty or so bits of hip-hop and funky dance beats and random samples that add a layer of commentary over the music. You CAN dance your dreams to reality. If you manage to figure out how to get a copy you’ll thank me, preferably with practical items like a hybrid car and a new desktop publishing system.
Toyota and Honda are getting ready to roll out hybrid SUVs. The revolution has finally arrived. Now all those people who bought SUVs because it makes them feel a) more secure and b) more powerful and c) more important, than anyone else on the road, can now get the same sensation while helping to raise the overall fuel economy of the entire world. The average fuel economy in the U.S. right is the lowest it’s been in years, at just 20.4 miles per gallon for all cars. That means that your car, even your 50 mile per gallon hybrid car, really only gets 20.4 miles to the gallon. Because we are all in this together, as much as most people like to think they are this isolated, self-generating, self-sustaining, single cell organisms.
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I did not learn these useful factoids at the Inforum program called “Greening the Automobile” that I mentioned in the last ABOUT TOWN. Arianna Huffington, the author of PIGS AT THE TROUGH who I also mentioned last time, heads a group called The Detroit Project that likes to keep the world informed of such things.
There is a story unfolding here. Not exactly episodic, or perhaps even linear but there is a plot with the kind of elements the evening news loves: intrigue, deception, surprise, novelty and heart.
We love the underdog. What we love even more is when right wins out and society is put back in it’s proper balance. This is how all Shakespeare’s comedies end. That, and a marriage. Why a marriage? For the same reason that all the tragedies end with the protagonist dying. Classical comedy is about restoring balance and wholeness. Classical tragedy is about disorder and disease and the downward spiral to permanent destruction.
The kind of destruction that forces a radical reprioritizing out of which the survivors have the opportunity to do the right thing and restore balance and wholeness and have a wedding. Comedy and Tragedy are the theatrical equivalent of Yin and Yang. They cycle back into and out of each other. The Tao of the Stage. You heard it here first even if you didn’t come here to read any high-blown literary theories.
I’m a product of the public school system. Amazingly, I can read. What can YOU do? I’m having a Mr. Rogers moment. 2,000 people showed up at his official memorial last week. Do you know how many people 2,000 people is? That’s right. A LOT! Have you ever tried to draw 2,000 people? Do you like to fold paper? In Japan, there is an art called ORIGAMI and all ORIGAMI is, is folding paper. Can you imagine that? Imagination is very important.
I’m like Mr. Rogers who is strung out on junk, stays up way past my bedtime and saying “fuck” a lot. But underneath it all, the former Fred and I have a lot in common. (no, I’m not actually a junkie, unless you are talking about love, then yeah, I’m on a bender.) I thought if I got sober I’d be boring, but as you can see, I’m the 4th of July in Washington D.C. after a war. Crowds of people. Hot dogs. Fireworks. All that.
Rock the house, y’all.
The 46th San Francisco International Film Festival (and I’m glad I won’t have to type that for another year) wrapped with a bash at Bimbos 365 Club. The staff photographer from the SF Gate, the internet arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, kept asking me if I had seen any celebrities. I said, “No, but there are lots of people here who made the films that everyone watched this week. Go find them and run their pictures.” I mean, what is a celebrity but someone who people like me keep reminding people like you that they exist.
And we’ve all got our stories.
My friend was in Maui in January for a wedding (secret word of the day, SCREAM!!!) and Courtney Love was staying at the hotel. My friend was sitting around the pool with Sean Fanning, the co-founder of Napster, and piling up money to bet a third guy to attempt to seduce Courtney. When the amount reached 2,000 dollars and guy number three had drank enough, he wandered over to Courtney, who apparently couldn’t do much more than mumble somewhat coherently. Guy 3 explains to Courtney that the guy across the pool is the guy who realized that peer-to-peer file sharing could create a revolutionary new way to distribute music and she should go thank him. Courtney was just all “huh, what? I don’t know who that is.”
I can think of a few record execs and bands that would like to strangle him. METALLICA being one of them. They got the ball rolling on the eventual tragedy of Napster with their lawsuit that claimed that Napster was responsible for the illegal piracy of copyrighted music. Napster says all they did was create the technology and unleashed it on the world. Kind of like what Smith and Wesson did. File sharing technology doesn’t kill the music industry, people do. The Supreme Court felt otherwise and decided that the technology is to blame. But not when you are talking about guns. Guns don’t kill people. I know, I can’t make heads or tails of the apparent contradiction either. And now it is the Napster comedy. The Comedy of Errors. And by errors I mean, Napster forgot to invest in a senator.
Senator Palpatine in the back pocket. We WILL rule them all.
The Napster ruling reminds me of the recent RAVE act that was pushed through Congress. R.A.V.E stands for “Reducing Americas Vulnerability to Ecstasy”. The bill, which failed to make it to the table during the 2002 session of Congress was reintroduced in 2003. The bill is actually a reworking of the “crack house statute” HR 718 [the RAVE act] amends the Controlled Substances Act to prohibit knowingly leasing, renting, or using, or intentionally profiting from, any place (as well as opening, maintaining, leasing, or renting any place, as provided under current law), whether permanently or temporarily, for the purpose of manufacturing, storing, distributing, or using a controlled substance. It was then introduced to the senate as the “Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2003, S.226” sponsored by presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman and California senator, Dianne Feinstein (formerly Mayor of San Francisco).
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Interestingly, a letter of support for the bill came from the COALITION OF LICENSED BEVERAGE ASSOCIATION. The literature of the organization reads: “The Coalition of Licensed Beverage Associations (COLBA) is a national association representing the interests of private-sector licensed beverage retailers who sell and serve alcohol beverages. COLBA represents both on-premise and off-premise alcohol beverage licensees. It is dedicated to preserving States' rights to ensure legal sales of alcohol to persons of legal-consumption age to maintaining high standards for the retail sale of alcohol.” COLBA complained that raves are often promoted as alcohol-free events while illicit drug use is rampant. Yeah, lets get those illicit drugs out of there so those who are of legal age can consume the legal ones, preferably in vast quantities (drink responsibly).
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Stop the Ecstasy! Bring in the Booze! I wonder if the reason marijuana isn’t a legal form of intoxication is because the tobacco and alcohol lobbies are so strong. Not that laws stop anyone from smoking pot. John Ashcroft recently raided the warehouses of companies like GRAPHIX known for manufacturing water-pipes for tobacco products and is afraid that legal medical use of marijuana will pave the way for the ultimate legalization of the stank. Well DUH! I’d rather be in a room full of stoned armchair quarterbacks than drunk ones, that’s for sure. I wonder what would happen to the date rape statistic if pot use was more widespread than alcohol abuse (which as you know, is not only rampant, but readily encouraged).
I’m not advocating the use of any kind of narcotics, especially one that is most likely manufactured and sold to fund clandestine military action. War is expensive. Think about it. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently admitted that 3.3 Trillion dollars have just disappeared from the U.S. Treasury. That’s a lot of money to simply vanish. And you’d think it would be all over the news and the topic of heated barbershop debate. I had to find this information on a New Zealand website called Scoop . Today, Scoop ran a story on J-Day in Christchurch where people gathered to have a “smoke-in”, toking on the ganja.
I’ve been paying too much attention to conspiracy theorists who link the drug trade to an untraceable cash resource for U.S. led clandestine military action. `Cuz you know, don’t you, that the U.S. has been involved in military action somewhere in the world since forever. Iraq was just the big number, with jazz hands and all, in the continuing dog and pony show.
Don’t even TRY to figure out. You’ll only go insane. Just look at Woody Harrelson.
Anyway, back to the film festival. There WERE celebrities at select events. Dustin Hoffman had a tribute night and Robert Altman received a lifetime achievement award. While lots of people go to Sundance or Cannes because they either ARE celebrities or want to SEE celebrities, The San Francisco Film Festival is all about the movies. And content is as important as form. A documentary about the Viet Nam era radical activists The Weather Underground, won the best documentary feature award at the Golden Gate Awards ceremony. Sam Green and Bill Siegal took home a 5,000 dollar cash prize and a Final Cut pro system (including Imac) donated by Apple.
Intergalactic Planetary
It was the 60s all over again at this years film festival. Let’s put the puzzle together, together. The Weather Underground used tactics like creating gridlock to protest the Viet Nam, which by the accounts of most of the surviving veterans was “madness.” “It was beyond chaos,” says one Viet Nam vet. “The air was thick with insanity and there hasn’t been a film yet that captures that insanity. APOCALYPSE NOW comes close.”
Damn. “The average of the combat soldier in Viet Nam was 19.” I’m trying to imagine any of the 19 year olds I know with a gun in a jungle shooting at every shadow. George Bush Sr worked for the CIA during the CIA run Viet Nam war which had its most embarrassing moment, the My Lai Massacre (the wholesale slaughter of 300 women, children and elderly, forced into a ditch and rained down on by a hail of machine gun fire) was covered up for the U.S. Government by Colin Powell. After the Viet Nam war, George Bush Sr went on to lead some of the most vicious assassination plots of legitimately elected presidents in Latin America, notably Salvador Allende of Chile who led the people against repressive military governments in South America. Best selling author Isabelle Allende is the niece of the assassinated democratic Marxist president.
Shakespeare’s tragedies always had a villain in the midst, sometimes a person, sometimes a force, such as jealousy, or madness, that led to undoing of the leadership of the society (In Elizabethan times, they were all kings and queens and those who wanted to BE kings and queens) and only after the final bloodbath did the innocent realize what was unfolding in their midst. Some less capable, yet untouched by scandal, person then had to step up to wear that terribly heavy crown and grow into leadership and power and avoid the tragic mistakes of the previous power structure.
Sam Green who pieced together the Weather Underground footage, is from Flint, Michigan, which you may know is the hometown of Michael Moore. And then there was Dave Thomas’ (not the Wendy’s founder who passed away last year) MC5 * A TRUE TESTIMONIAL about a working class band from Detroit who wanted change the world through music. Thomas refined the idealism of the 60’s counterculture and its message of freedom, equality and revolution through the documentary. MC5 helped created The White Panthers, which was basically a Caucasian Black Panthers (which was a group of African-American radical liberationists). The DIXIE CHICKS are teeny, tiny potatoes compared to contrarian energy that gathered momentum during the Nixon/Viet Nam era.
Madonna dons the black beret for the cover of AMERICAN LIFE evoking Che Guevara, who is now less a symbol of Fidel Castro’s communist idealism as he is a symbol of the revolutionary spirit. And Marin resident, Peter Coyote (ET – The Extra Terrestrial, Erin Brokovich), who helped created the San Francisco group known as “The Diggers” was around during the festival. Coyote has long since had a career film and entertainment, which seems to be a long way from his momentous Haight-Ashbury past.
The Diggers gathered food for all the lost kids trying to find themselves in the Haight-Ashbury and putting on teach-ins about health education. They are also well-known for their guerilla street theatre “happenings” which was something started by the Fluxus Group in 50’s and taken to a new level of engagement by the Diggers. The Diggers anti-commerce philosophy motivated them to open up a “Free Store” in the Haight. An experiment that ultimately failed but I bet they had fun trying. You can read all about the Diggers in THE HAIGHT-ASHBURY, A HISTORY by Charles Perry (ISBN 0394741447).
Mouncey Ferguson III, the director of one of the shorts nominated for Bay Area Narrative Short, STRAIGHT SEX, told me that he got the idea for his film from having sex. “I was thinking, ‘this is pretty fucking weird looking.’” The whole film is close-ups of people’s faces ostensibly during sexual congress. Eddie Murphy did a whole bit about fuck faces in DELERIOUS.. How Eddie Murphy ever made the leap from Ralph Cramden and Mr. T having gay buttsex to the family entertainment of DADDY DAY CARE shall be one of those mysteries, like the eye and the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill, that will be forever sealed in the tomb of history.
Anyway, back to METALLICA. They played a “free” concert at San Quentin. The band used the inmates and guards as extras during the filming of a video. Does that mean some of the inmates can now get their SAG card? And more importantly, did they let Charles Manson out into the yard? I wonder if the prisoners had to sign release forms or if, while incarcerated, they are technically wards of the state and the state has the power to make all legal or contractual decisions for the inmates. Do prisoners have rights? And can people in the military be ordered by their commanding officer who to vote for?
I wish a book of answers would just fall out of the sky. But not on anybody in particular. Maybe on a pillow or something, so it wouldn’t get damaged when it hit. Because a lot of people would probably want to read it.
METALLICA’s fan club is a post office box just down the road from me in San Rafael, California. San Quentin is also in San Rafael, in case you wondered. George Lucas, Sean Penn, Charles Manson and the METALLICA Fan Club all live here within a few miles of each other. What mysterious force has brought all these people to the same place on the planet in the same moment in time and for what reason?
Wanna be in the METALLICA fan club? I’m pretty sure Sean Fanning doesn’t want to be. METALLICA is the subject of an upcoming ICON on M-Television, airing this weekend (check your cable guide for show times).
The Metallica Club
PMB #194 369-B Third Street
San Rafael, CA 94901-3581
USA
Fax: (415) 458 1752
God is sending me mixed messages again. The doctor said the medication would help.
I shouldn’t kid about that. Some people DO rely on their medication to keep the voices from God at bay. I hear that our President hears from God now and again. I know that God likes to talk to John Ashcroft. God tells John … fags are bad, mmmmkay? Who was that senator that just came out with his inflammatory anti-gay remarks, Rick Santorum or something. I guess these people haven’t heard the news yet. God is gay. Or at least mine is. A sweaty, hot, dark, sexy God. “Get down on your knees and pray.” Yes, SIR!!
I didn’t go to WONDERCON. I usually do, every single year. I spent the weekend instead out in Wine Country with an exotic cat breeder. I got to help feed the ocelots. They even had a unicorn. This guy, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, figured out how to get a goat to grow a single horn. He sold the patent to The Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus and used the money to travel the world searching for mermaids. In some far off island country, he found that some men mate with a certain sea mammal. Could this be the source of mermaids? Zell-Ravenheart is a well-known name in the modern pagan movement as the sculptor of the Millenial Gaia. I’m not sure if all pagans are that adventurous. I found out recently, much to my amazement, that Wicca is the fastest growing religion. I always thought it was a secret religion. I guess the secret’s out.
I wonder what constitutes a bona-fide religion. In a recent survey in Sweden, there was a broad attempt to add the Jedi religion to the list of official religions by people claiming to practice the Jedi religion. Viva Democracy!
And now, all the space that will ever be devoted to the subject – there is a Da Vinci show at the Legion of Honor museum. The Queen of England has the largest collection of Da Vincis. She owns his notebooks, some of which are on display at the British Museum in London, England. The English, if you recall, are our allies. At least Tony Blair is. For the very short time remaining in his prime Minster-ship. Parliamentary elections in England can be called at any time after the Prime Minister formally dissolves parliament. The reigning Monarch is then formally appealed to and since he/she as a figurehead who has no real political power, generally acquiesces to the request.
Margaret Thatcher would always call an election when her numbers were highest in the polls, which is the advantage that this method gives to the incumbent. The Bush’s don’t even NEED an election to get into the Whitehouse. It’s a little known constitutional amendment recently snuck in after John Ashcroft recently rewrote the cornerstone of our democracy. That and a proposed constitutional amendment permanently banning the possibility of legal, gay marriages.
Thunderbirds Are Go
Gay marriage has been legal in all the Scandinavian countries for years now. Those godless, heathen countries where the very fabric of society has unraveled and it’s all chaos and alcoholism because the of the “collapse” of the “family.” I’m sure you’ve heard about the roaming bands of pedophiles insane with lust raping your sons and daughters while their school teachers look on in approval? Because that is what will happen if gay marriage moves from being a social reality to being a legal reality. Yup. That’s what will happen all right in the ultra-conservative, paranoid world-view of John Ashcroft, Attorney General. How many more years until we can elect a liberal democrat? (If it is still possible that the person you vote for will actually receive the vote.) Start marking your calendars. November 2, 2004, this nightmare can finally end. Stock up on the champagne, the whole world is going to celebrate.
“Roam if you want to, roam around the world.” – The B-52’s. This is not a segway.
Last Thursday I was in an entertainment pickle. THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS were playing a show. ANNIE LENNOX was touring her new album BARE and The Golden Gate Awards were all happening the same night. I was in a quandary but the Golden Gate Awards won out. I didn’t arrange in time to get any concert photos of the other two events.
Annie Lennox has said that BARE represents “a significant turning point” in her stellar career. I love Annie Lennox’s relentless creativity and the striking characters she creates for her videos, which are all like archetypal aspects of the multi-faceted Annie. I bought my first EURYTHMICS cassette (way back when) during a summer at my grandparents. They kept farming me out to the neighbors for yard work to keep me busy. My Papa asked if I’d rather go the rodeo than buy a EURYTHMICS tape. No, no I wouldn’t. That same year I started coming out to my friends. I was 14 and it wasn’t much of an issue. I moved away and later heard that a guy who was my friend in 6th grade decided in 9th grade he no longer liked me ever since I “turned gay.”
You know, I don’t even care where that guy is now. Probably living with his boyfriend in South Beach, Florida.
Comedy Central’s GARY AND MIKE had a “Gay” episode where Mike’s Marine Corps father is convinced Mike is gay and wants to alternately cure him and kill him. There was a spoof of a 1950’s era mental hygiene film starring Peter the Pansy. The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard (Hollywood, CA) recently hosted a mini-festival of those once-ubiquitous and now rare films attempting to cure a host of social maladies by addressing topics such as shyness, snobbery, throwing a party and dating.
I know what helps to make a good party. GOOD CAKE! Gigi baked a “low fat” chocolate birthday cake made with 4 pounds of chocolate and 2 quarts of heavy whipping cream. Just licking the spoon… and the bowl … and the beaters, was chocolate overload. The chocolate cake layers were filled with chocolate mousse and chocolate ganache. And then she wrapped the whole thing in a hard chocolate shell. If she had a couple of oompa-loompas helping her out, she might have been spared having to clean the chocolate off the curtains. Instead, she had me helping her out. The chocolate was possessed of an alien intelligence, crawled out of the bowl and fought a psionic war with us until together we were able to subdue it and remind the mousse that it’s primary role in assisting us with our evolution is to be a stimulating pleasure in moderate amounts. The Latin name for chocolate, theobroma, translates as “food of the gods.” Mmmmm. Chocolicious.
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Thought of the week: The suburban homestead is not infinitely reproduceable.
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