Happy New Year! Get It On!

Wake me when the rain stops or a child is born. I found a liquid cure for my land locked blues...

How God Punishes the Wicked at Christmas Time
I got a nasty fucking cold last night, right before the pagan rites weekend

Merry Christmas! Drink up, and send me the bill (I'll throw it in the trash)! See you all (blog-wise) in the New Year!

Best 15 New Records I Heard in 2005
1. King Khan and BBQ Show
2. Reigning Sound- Home For Orphans
3. Black Lips- Let It Bloom
4. Deadly Snakes- Porcella
5. Blank Its- demo
6. Lamps- S/T
7. A-Frames- Black Forest
8. Feelers- Learn to Hate the Feelers
9. Demon’s Claws- S/T
10. Vic Chesnutt- Ghetto Bells
11. Human Eye- S/T
12. Turpentine Brothers- We Don’t Care About Your Good Times
13. Kajun SS- Wop Bop Bam Bam
14. Tearjerkers- Don’t Throw Your Love Away
15. Pissed Jeans-Shallow

French Pop Nirvana
Histoire de Melody Nelson is hands down the best thing created by a Frenchman in my lifetime (notwithstanding a Houellebecq sex scene or two). The beats are 70's soul, and the tunes amazing. En Melody is both hilarious and fun and will have you wondering "does anybody remember laughter" in a completely better context. Oh, and if you haven't read this, we can no longer communicate.

Hey, you can now post images from your files. Just click the image button on the new post box. You can select the layout too. No more linking, no more blurs, no more down time. Christmas comes early this year. How 'bout those last second kings/warriors wins last night! How 'bout bardot before she hit the wall! How 'bout that golf swing! How 'bout that pout!

After John Banville won the Booker for The Sea, he modestly said that it was about time a work of art won the award. Having just finished it, I’m sad to say I can’t deliver the snark, because he may just be right. Maybe The Believer will have me.

Of course, one man’s art is another’s relentless whining, and because we have no linear narrative structure, no likeable protagonist and no relief from long descriptive passages, you might find this pretentious and bloated, even at 195 pages. I occasionally did. That said, the last thirty pages close a novel more powerfully than any I’ve read in ages. You have to wade through a ponderous middle, in which our recently widowed narrator, a self-described art dilettante, weaves back and forth between self-pity and reminiscences from his seaside childhood holidays. After his wife’s death, he returns to that ocean town, and the memories pour fast, fragmented and furious. It all comes together at the end, and whether that’s enough to forgive our narrator for the endless moaning about his plight and the human race will be the test of your patience and generosity. The prose, however, may be without peer. To simply luxuriate in the man’s language is a pleasure, but don't expect Hemingway. Let the adjectives fly where they may, and let the plot sit comfortably on the shelf.

I had 12 at the coon tonight. I am drunk as a skunk. I love beer. See you in 2 weeks. You are all good Germans although some of you I suspect maybe Austrians. bastards. T Money

Aint that pretty
Cute huddling lesbians failed to halt last night's execution. One who is pro life in all matters is bemused by the state's operation, but when moron Jon Carroll, who stated in his column we have executed innocent people, is on my side, along with Jesse Jackson, who rhymed injection death with last breath, I'm looking for a soft sand head burial, and a trial by my peers in the Netherlands. Keats and Yeats are on your side...

Death Pool

Recall the rule of 3. We need to decide the third celeb/bigwig that'll kick the bucket before week's end. Winner gets to skip a round on 12/22. Limit 8 picks each.

Best of 2005: Review Rewind

Burning For You

The Great Fire concerns Aldred Leith, 33, son of a novelist, WWII hero who traveled through China on a gig post war and is now in Hiroshima to record the effects of the Bomb. He boards up at the compound of the region's medical administrator who is an ego-mad prick with 2 kids he ignores. Helen Driscoll, his 17 year old daughter, and Ben, the son with a freak disease that is deforming and killing him. The bro and sis are inseparable, have spent their lives as a twosome, and spend their time reading the classics. Leith comes around and falls for the girl and their romance, in letters and meetings and departures and separations by thousands of miles, makes up the heart of The Great Fire.

The odd part of Hazzard's structure comes with her dealings of the characters that intersect these three mains. She rounds all encounters out; for example, just when Leith has returned from a dinner with a woman we are back with that woman and her thoughts on the meeting. This happens in almost every chapter. It's an odd narrative interjection, and I think it's what threw me the first time through the book. I wanted to not like the book because of this device, but now knowing the book better I can't believe she pulled it off, and how well and unobtrusive and important it finally is.

Hazzard's characters are alive and scared and reckless with emotions. It didn't hit me until after finishing the book that Leith knew more dead and dying people than living. In The Great Fire war is everywhere (after VJ Day the allies thought the US and USSR were going tussle), in the fear people have when departing or greeting one another, knowing they've done these things before and people have gone forever. The book is alas a romance, and since I don't think I've ever set out to read one it's the best I've read.

RIP RICHARD PRYOR AND EUGENE MCCARTHY

I can't stand New Order and I'm mixed on Joy Division, but pre-JD Warsaw is the shit. Punkier than Wire but still filled with hooks and big anthemic choruses, there is a 17 song download with your name on it. Go now.

USA draw means no second round. Discuss Internet rumors that the draw was fixed to punish the US because we are a very evil country.

Best of 2005: American Philosophy

There are no surprises, unless it's illness or accident or death. Security is nice, but I imagine death is "nice" too.

Frankly Mr Shankly...

If you're in the mood to read the words of a blowhard moron, feel free. I prefer the words of a much better writer and man. Lastly, some intersting thoughts from a realist political leader. Odds on that reactor getting taken out in 2006? I'll take 2-1 on the slide. Go Jews!

Fish Fight

Nice McHugh piece on the doctor's favorite fish. If yer looking for a good winter day trip, head up to Samuel Taylor SP and check out Lagunitas Creek. You can't fish there but you can gander as the buggers make there way upstream to ball. The coffee cake at Lagunitas Grocery is the best in the world.

Is Soulseek the best or worst thing ever to happen to me?

Night Air Smoking Arguments

Can it get fucking colder?
Are four shirts enough?
Considering Serge divorced Jane, is there any hope?
Will Saddam win his day in court?
Any anagrams possible with the word cunt?
Odds of December 22 resulting in a fistfight?
Should the Supreme Court change its name to The Supremes?
When are Rilo Kiley coming to town?
Why aren’t women dressing better in the East Bay?
Where’s the sun?
Doing anything for the troops this Christmas?
Why am I anticipating my quasi brother-in-laws annual gift of 20 year old McCallans?
Will I attend the nedelle show Friday night and not feel guilty?
Will red meat and fowl ever be appealing again?
Why is my arm hurting?
What’s the best way to get blood out of a t-shirt?
What’s left to soulseek?
Where are the bars with large fireplaces and comfortable chairs?
If Brad Pitt adopts black children, will Jennifer Anniston adopt lepers?
Ever successfully smoked in the shower?
Remember Tracy Scoggins?
Who wrote the following? “How is it indeed possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.”
What is the age limit to skateboard to the market?
If we pull out of Iraq, will we towel off before going in again?
What’s the dating age-range/ridiculous-appearing quotient for a 35 year old man?
Isn’t Dexter supposed to play this time of year?
Who will fix the Kings?
Was that the worst New Yorker issue ever?
Is art worth it?
Planned your drum circle for the winter solstice?
Where’s the shock of the new, the thrill of surprise?
Anyone seen my lighter?

I get skeptical when a book is described as “deceptively simple,” because that sounds like a pretty good excuse for not delivering on the complexity of the premise. Kazuo Ishiguro’s <em>Never Let Me Go certainly delivers the simple, but it’s the deceptive part that remains an open question. Yet another in the seemingly endless line of older narrators looking back, Kathy’s narration is straightforward and childlike, and her story is plainly told. There is your simple. It’s what's left off the page- those issues dealing with the fact that Kathy is a clone whose sole purpose is to donate her organs when the time comes before “completing”- that determines how deceptive the novel is or how simple it remains. What works about the simplicity of Kathy’s narration is its creepiness- her tone has an otherworldly naivete that conveys a fundamental decency, but also an ignorance about her plight that generates so much of the story’s pathos. Ishiguro is not interested in laying out explicit arguments about the immorality of harvesting organs. He is all show, no tell, and he allows the reader to fill in the blanks with his own internal debate about the ethical issues the story raises. The simple narration is a tool to illustrate the exploitation of the innocent, to show how clones become means and not ends. I may be putting too much faith in Ishiguro, but maybe I'm just reciprocating his faith in the reader. Never Let Me Go will not light up the sky with rhetorical pyrotechnics, but it may deliver more with humble sparklers.

Thank God For MD's Publicity Machine

A good bit of news this dire holiday season. What's next? Funyuns cure cancer? Patchouli wards off evil thoughts? Random sex partners eliminate acid reflux? Yoga causes stupidity? I've got documentation.

Rose City, Oh So Pretty

I think we can finally stop the Portland debate. After reading this, I'm in.

Gadnium Overture



The second album the young doctor purchased, after going 1 for 1 with Styx's Paradise Theater, was Blue Oyster Cult's Fire of Unknown Origin. I remember a couple things about this lp. It was heavily advertised and talked up on 97.3 KRQR (the rocker!). I don't think co.'s advertise records anymore, at least not rock. They had this swami kid from the Sinbad: Eye of the Tiger movie doing the voice pitch. Burnin For You became a huge hit, but I still like the title track, Vengance, Soul Survivor, Psychic Wars, and Joan Crawford is the band's most ironic tune - I'm counting Godzilla. At school we drew the BOC cross on our hands and binders. The record's enjoyable and will still make you stupid.

The Top Ten Vic Chesnutt Lyrics This Fine Saturday Morning
10. "Christian charity is a doily over my death boner"
9. "...even her freakish nipples are akimbo."
8."florida, that redneck riviera...it's a perfect place to retire from life."
7. "when I ran off and left her, she wasn't holding a baby, she was holding a bottle, and a big grudge against me."
6. "...just a general freak that is boiling in me, and I'm terrified what it is gonna dislodge...i bent over backwards to misbehave, it's a holy wonder i didn't just flip over into an early grave...i guess it's time for me to get the fuck out of dodge."
5. "i'm so sorry you had to kick my ass, you said i ruined your life, i didn't mean to do that"
4. "imports and altercations, my faculties on a shoe-string vacation, i settle down on a hurt as big as robert mitchum, and listen to lucinda williams."
3. "i am barely alive, ever since my daddy died, i've been searching for my own little babies, to misbehave and betray me."
2. "it's funny how i alienated those who I was trying just so-so hard to impress, now half those fuckers hate me and I'm just a fool to all the rest, why do I insist on drinking myself to the grave, why do i dream about a cozy coffin? I had all these plans of great things to accomplish but I end up purely pathetic more than often."
1. "so all you observers in your scrutiny, don't count my scars like tree rings, my jigsaw disposition, it's piecemeal properties, are either smoked or honey cured, by the panic pure."

Happy Friday from King Khan and BBQ!

USF says good Knight and good luck



I'm taking all reasonable action on tomorrow night's USF/Texas Tech thrilla. Lay it out here before the tip-off and we're good.

Psych Ward



David Roback and Kendra Smith parted ways at the end of the eighties allowing Roback to form Mazzy Star. Happy Nightmare Baby, the only full length Opal record while the band was a band, is a good listen. Kendra is no Hope, but the music is Mazzy spacey and enough to make you realize the 80s weren't all that bad, provided you turned off the John Hughes soundtracks for some quality mushrooms.

Things you never got to do that you can't do now...

Best of 2005: Books of the Year

2005 was a horrendous year for narrative. McCarthy published a new novel, yet I never think of it. Doctorow’s The March is awful, and the ass kissing he received from critics feels like an elegy; can’t cut it old man? Feel sorry for ya; here’s Michiko to move a few copies off the shelves. I still need to read that Ishiguro, and Vollmann may have something with his prize winner, but I aint got the stomach for it, not yet anyway. Remember that pledge I made a year ago to read Mason & Dixon? Didn’t happen. I blame soulseek and the vegetarian diet.

This year’s redeeming lit quality came in the form of neglected authors, and it was a treat to burn through Maugham, Forster, Scott Spencer, Pete Dexter, Jennifer Egan, Michel Houellebecq and Richard Yates.

Had some fun with reference books, namely Thompson’s film encyclopedia, and the Trouser Press Record Guide, which needs an update. Stienstra’s CA fishing guide is indispensable, and might even appeal to non-fisherman types who want to know the record steelhead weight (37.8, Smith River – I’m on the hunt).

Books pissed me off. O’Hara’s ancient Appointment in Sammara sucked hard, and save for the epigraph wasn’t worth the nickel I paid. EM Forster’s first book was so shitty I forgot the title. I read the terrible Looking For Moe by Daniel Duane, but he was somewhat redeemed by his non-fiction book Caught Inside, about a year of surfing Santa Cruz. He has a new novel out called A Mouth Like Yours. Good title, but I’m the smut king in Santa Cruz until the police tell me otherwise. Then there was Housekeeping. Goddam I hate it when I can’t stop reading a book that makes me angrier with every page. I really want to meet a person who enjoyed this Robinson lady, because I think she’s crap and I can prove it. She won an award for Gilead, which I wont let make me angry.

Genre was hit and miss. Caleb Carr tried to reintroduce Sherlock Holmes, and no one gave a shit. Andrew Taylor’s An Unpardonable Crime still rings sound and is light years better than any Da Vinci Code oriented airport crap.

Women let us down this year. Sittenfeld’s Prep was unreadable, Elizabeth McKenzie’s Stop That Girl fell flat. Katherine Mosby followed the excellent The Season of Lillian Dawes with a poor sequel, Twilight. Zadie Smith? Never read her. Cute in a patchouli kinda way. Naomi Wolf had a new book about her father, or was it about Harold Bloom’s sweaty palms? I’ll never know.

The book of the year is Freakonomics. No, that’s just me kidding ya. No fucking way will the nod go to a piece of non-fiction hubris that all of blue America raved about. Since it’s so good, have you done one thing different in your life because of it? Hell no. Some authors teach you important lessons, like the right amount of drinks you need before propositioning a chick. Freakonomics can F off.

I read 6 nonfiction books, which is 6 more than I’ve read in the last decade. I still don’t know dick about Scott Fitzgerald, crime rates, Neil Young, Sam Cooke, Ben Franklin, or surfing, but if the fiction output is forcing me to the NF section, I’m in a world of hurt.

I’m left with the true and tested, and it comes down to this: the best time I had with a book this year was Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, because it’s a flawed wonder, and because you need to know that the perfect way to reclaim yourself after you have balled a twenty-three year old film starlet behind your wife’s back is this; walk around a bit, get some sun, hit a few bars, then hit a few hotel bars; sit down and order more drinks and dance with the prettiest girl in the hotel ballroom, then insult her; go outside for more air and punch a taxi driver; when they haul you into jail, insult everyone and punch an undercover police officer; sit back and yell out while the other members of the force pound and kick you bloody.

We meet Dick Diver and his wife Nicole in Book 1, which is the midpoint of his marriage. Book 2 takes us back to Dick and Nicole’s beginning, and Book 3 ties things extremely messy, which is the only way these people can be tied. Dick and Nicole and their circle are introduced as idle dilettantes living the high life on the French Riviera. The opening book is extremely uneven; this is done as effect, because until the subsequent books are read one cannot find the center of the novel, let alone a reason to care about these folks.

Book 2 is clearly the heart of the book; we get Nicole in the sanitarium and her letters to Dr. Dick, and later, her diary entries where she exhibits a step out of her illness, which Dick cannot and does not want to see. He needs Nicole somewhat damaged to justify his relations with Rosemary Hoyt (the film girl) and his lack of work ethic. Nicole is extremely wealthy, and Dick’s attempts to counter her cash are met with opulence that he can’t ignore, nor does he want to. Nicole’s recovery is timed and parallel to Dick’s demise, and it’s sad to watch him disintegrate.

The prose in Tender proves Fitzgerald was a fucking genius, and there’s a heatstroke quality to the writing that’s warm, charged, and dangerous. Scott gets in his quips (When you’re sober you don’t want anyone around, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you; Don’t you know there’s nothing you can do about people?; I never understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems; there’s a quick trick or else I don’t know bridge), but because none have the singular bite of Gatsby’s line about Mrs. Tom Buchannan’s voice, critics have either panned this book or grossly elevated it.

I heard one critic-idiot say Gatsby was a flawed warmup act to Tender, and luckily I don’t know what he looks like because I would deck him if we met. Others want to dismiss everything Scott wrote besides Gatsby (some don’t like Gatsby either; retards), and I was once in that camp. Tender took me three distinct tries to crack, and I made it. Rewards are sonic booming for the patient.

Cop-out you say? Sure, I'll take the heat. But if you can honestly look at this list and find one book that will be read in ten years time, I'm buying. Banville old man, hats off. You're the first neglected author of 2006.

Will Tear Us Apart?



Explain this record to me. Is it great? Is it good? Is it a Joel Selvin wet dream? I don't get it, and I'm back to Jailbreak, missin' my Camaro, crimping irons, and hickeys.

Loving You For Hating Me



1981. We’re at T’s Tahoe summer house; it’s the brown house right next to Sunnyside. Bill brought his aluminum skiff with outboard, and we hauled it in at night, mosquitoes going crazy. Bill was astern at the motor, T and Donny midship; I was in the bow with the boom box; navigating and manning the volume control. We had one tape that summer; Pleasure Victim. When we weren’t on the lake we were at the market near Sunnyside. We had a half-day dare session of who would go in and try to buy a copy of Oui. Bill finally got it. After he got it I asked him to get me cigarettes. He refused until the next summer. So we’d spend the nights pouring over the mag and wondering if T’s older sister’s friends would do this sort of stuff with us. We’d calm down at the lake, but it wasn’t gonna last, not with Terri Nunn asking us to fuck her at the end of Sex (I’m A…). Everyone remembers The Metro, but the music wanes while the lyrics stand. Masquerade is the real ace track here, about as flawless as Berlin got.

Big In Iraq



Forgive a guy a little sentiment. 20 years ago the young doctor fell in love at summer sports camp. We snogged, broke out after lights out to explore the Santa Cruz highlands, smoked cigarettes, and played three tennis matches a day. Last Dance was a big affair, and having the best looking girl in state on my arm was a big deal. I remember everything about that summer, and the soundtrack is Alphaville. My camp roommate suggested Forever Young’s title track was an anti-nuclear rant. I don’t remember being that deconstructive then, but there ya have Josh, currently a Navy Seal making it safe for us to nosh funyuns and hot pockets. The record is a hoot. Big in Japan is great, and all the synthetic percussion and horns, now made more ‘genuine’ by modern technology, sound rather warm. The production is tops for the era, so give it a whirl. I’m gonna wax nostalgic only one more time, soon as Pleasure Victim finishes downloading, and I’ll try to do it without pictures of Jamie Gertz in my head.