TUNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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PASSOUT RECORD SHOP NEW AND IMPROVED GRAND OPENING BAND SCHEDULE! WHOO-HOO! THANKS EVERYONE! IT'S GONNA BE TOPS!

June 3rd & 4th...

BOTH SHOWS ARE FREE.
STORE SHOWS START AT 12PM NOON!
25 MINUTE SETS MAXIMUM. BACKLINE PROVIDED.

SATURDAY DAY. FROM FIRST TO LAST.

12pm
THE DEMANDS
HECKLERS
SMUT
4 DEADLY QUESTIONS
THE SHEMPS
ICU
THE SHOP FRONTS
THE YAMS
LOS BLANKITOS
MEMPHIS MORTICIANS
TAMPOFFS

SUNDAY DAY. FROM FIRST TO LAST.

12pm
THE MERCY KILLERS
WWIX
THE LIVE ONES
LIMOSINE
THE CHOKE
WLWL
GHETTOWAYS
ICU
LITTLE KILLERS
THE CUTS
HIGH STRUNG
MANDYS BLUES SPECTACULAR

Thank God for the Internet

From the Chicago Reader:

The surviving members of Silkworm, bassist Tim Midgett and guitarist Andy Cohen, have just finished mixing the last songs they recorded with drummer Michael Dahlquist before he died in a July 2005 car crash along with fellow musicians Doug Meis and John Glick. Four originals and a rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Wrote a Song for Everyone” were tracked at Electrical Audio last spring; these, along with an old live version of Bob Dylan’s “Spanish Harlem Incident” by the Crust Brothers, Silkworm’s covers project with Stephen Malkmus, will be released as an EP on Gerard Cosloy’s 12XU label, probably in the late fall.

In August the Michigan label Genuflect Records will release a Silkworm tribute, An Idiot to Not Appreciate Your Time, which has been in the planning stages since before Dahlquist’s death. The final track listing isn’t settled yet, but the disc will include at least 20 Silkworm covers by indie acts from around the U.S. and Europe.

Bottomless Pit, Midgett and Cohen’s post-Silkworm band with Chris Manfrin of Seam on drums and Brian Orchard from .22 on bass, will begin recording its first dozen songs in June with engineer Greg Norman. The group has played a handful of shows since debuting quietly last November and is tentatively planning to tour a bit with Magnolia Electric Co. in the fall. On June 14 they’ll share a bill with Portland’s Eux Autres at Schubas

Five Passages From Sabbath's Theater That Breed Hope That Comedy Is Not Dead
"Panties in my pocket at a funeral? That's hope!"

"In therapy...they're handed this version of their lives...The answer to every question is either Prozac or incest."

"You have extracted mental favors from me without my even knowing and against my will! I have been belittled by you! My dick has been belittled by you! Call the dean! My dick has been disempowered!"

"They have got a hundred times more proof of my criminality than could be required by even the most lenient of deans to drive me out of every decent antiphallic educational institution in America. Must I now ejaculate on CNN?"

"The cause of death was suicide, said Rosa Complicata, whom Mr. Sabbath sodomized moments before taking his life... According to Ms. Complicata, he had given her two fifty-dollar bills to perform perverse acts before his jumping out the window. 'But he no have hard prick, said the heavyset spokesperson, in tears."

Lessons learned in Humboldt State Park

Trees are nice
Rain sucks
Gas prices require angry stares at station attendants
Life's a gas
Mojo works on and off
Mexican food is good almost everywhere in norcal
$5.50 for an Oly 12er is not unreasonable
Jerky can be a meal, provided chips and salsa are present
Coors light is not beer

Driver Has 18 Times Legal Alcohol Limit
VILNIUS, Lithuania - Lithuanian police were so astonished by a breath test that registered 18 times the legal alcohol limit, they thought their device must be broken. It wasn't.
Police said Tuesday 41-year-old Vidmantas Sungaila registered 7.27 grams per liter of alcohol in his blood repeatedly on different devices after he was pulled over Saturday for driving his truck down the center of a two-lane highway 60 miles from the capital, Vilnius.
Lithuania's legal limit is 0.4 grams per liter.
"This guy should have been lying dead, but he was still driving. It must be an unofficial national record," Saulius Skvernelis, director of the national police traffic control service, told the AP. "He was of high spirits and grinning the whole time he was questioned."
Medical experts say anything above 3.5 grams per liter of alcohol in the blood is lethal for most people.
"A person this intoxicated should be in an intensive care unit, not behind the wheel," said Tautvydas Zikaras, head of the dependence illness center in the country's second-largest city, Kaunas. Zikaras said he had never heard or read of someone being so drunk.
Sungaila, who was slapped with a $1,110 fine and the loss of his license for up to three years, told police he had been drinking the night before and tried to freshen up by downing a pint of beer for breakfast.
Lithuania has one of the worst road safety records in the

European Union. Last year, 760 people died in traffic accidents in this country of 3.5 million residents. Most were alcohol-related.

Like The Country Teasers, The Electric Eels are a band I reappreciate every year or so, so here's a celebratory nod to their jaguar ride.

A crappy link to start the day

Five Records To Rock Tuna on the Train so I Don't Keep Weeping Over the Sharks' Total Collapse
Electric Eels- The Eyeball of Hell
Bottles and Skulls- any
American Nightmare- Background Music- raging fucking hardcore
Fe Fi Fo Fums- Shake All Night- stupid rock breeding loads of party fun
Headache City- S/T- it's organ-driven garage pop with big hooks and just enough bite

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Following are the results. (and following those are my snippy, without-thought comments)

THE WINNER:
Beloved
Toni Morrison- I've read it three times, twice with the aim to teach it, and it certainly has the verisimilitude of greatness, but then why can't I reach out and call it great? Too many ghosts- too self-aware in its attempts at grandness, too many pointing moral fingers

THE RUNNERS-UP:
Underworld- wow, I love a lot of DeLillo, but I wouldn't put this in his top five- wildly inconsistent
Don DeLillo

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy- clearly, this should have been the winner- I have two colleagues who think he ruins things through his "adolescent obsession" with extreme violence- to which I can only respond, "You just don't get it."

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
John Updike- I couldn't make it past fifty of the first one, and I loathe his non-fiction.

American Pastoral
Philip Roth- after I finish The Counterlife, this is next.

THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole- I'm a sucker for Ignatius, but this is silly given the question asked.

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson- I appreciated the creepy southern gothic eerie mood but I did not undertand this book at all.

Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin- have not read- do not want to read a Republican speechwriter's fiction because I commodify people by placing them into narrow categories based on tiny pieces of information.

White Noise
Don DeLillo- his best? Arguable, but certainly a more coherent and enjoyable read than the slog that was Underworld. How come nobody ever talks about Ratner's Star?

The Counterlife
Philip Roth- I'm rereading this right now, and it's fantastic, even if you're not a Jew who's cheating on his wife.

Libra
Don DeLillo- what speculative historical fiction ought to be.

Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver- aren't you glad the cult of Carver wave has crested and run off to the sewers of the 80s? OK, that's cheap, but for crying out loud, the best of the past 25 years?

The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien- I've read this one over 15 times and loved it each time. It's no Blood Meridian in terms of literary quality, but it is wonderfully compelling and it makes me cry, sappy bitch that I am.

Mating
Norman Rush- have not read

Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson- my favorite Johnson and a fine read, but absurd for this question. He also has to be one of the most overrated writers in America.

Operation Shylock
Philip Roth- have not read

Independence Day
Richard Ford- I loved The Sportswriter and loathed this one. This novel did to me what Jon Carroll seems to do to Tuna (where is that bitch, by the way?), which is to make my skin crawl with its male oversensitivity.

Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth- man do they love Roth- often brilliant but erratic and over-the-top- still, this one is alive and I need to reread it.

Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy- lesser McCarthy, and I thought The Crossing was a yawnfest, but I've taught Horses a number of times now and have come to appreciate it. Will have to reread Cities someday. Anyone tried to read all three straight through?

The Human Stain
Philip Roth- more Roth I have not read

The Known World
Edward P. Jones- I appreciated the quality but did not enjoy this at all. Must all slavery books be overpraised?

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth- clearly, I have some Roth catching up to do

Explain what the fuck...

is going on with the Sharks?

Still #1

I wrote a very long retrospective of Nick Hornby's books and then the computer ate it. Such is the life of Optimator ingestors. Let me sparknote it- His first three books did a gently insightful job of capturing the emotional retardation of the middle age man due to football fandom, music obsession, and commitment fear. I'm happy to have read each and every one. His last two books have been utter tripe because he's delving into areas he doesn't have the synaptic power to explore in enough complexity- ethics and the existential dilemma of finding meaning in an uncaring universe. His newest novel, A Long Way Down, is particularly bad, because he never gets past the blatantly contrived set up- 4 folks meet on a London rooftop, each intending to jump until they kinda sorta intervene. From there, we get the answer that we got in the previous work- folks muddle through the best they can, and that's about the best we can expect. Suicidal? Wait a season and maybe you'll feel just a tad better and can settle for meaningless work and a spot of sherry and the quiz show down at the pub. His "answers" are that banal. And while I suppose you could argue for realism in the smallness of each failed suicide's response to that suicidal failure, the aftermath lies flatter than a Nicole pancake, the Dutch variety that fails to measure width on any ruler I've ever seen.

Nick, go back to depressed middle-aged dudes. Continue to explore their longings and their failures. You don't have the intellectual chops to enter the philosophical arena. Really. But you have given us compelling stories about shallow men who can't quite get it through their heads that domestic bliss is better than a World Cup victory or a transcendent concert. We know those dudes. We like 'em while we cringe at them. It's OK. Write what you know, they say. Write what you know.

This...

List is crap, but the chat room text below is not...

bloodninja: Ok baby, we got to hurry, I don't know how long I can keep it ready for you.
j_gurli3: thats ok. ok i'm a japanese schoolgirl, what r u.
bloodninja: A Rhinocerus. Well, hung like one, thats for sure.
j_gurli3: haha, ok lets go.
j_gurli3: i put my hand through ur hair, and kiss u on the neck.
bloodninja: I stomp the ground, and snort, to alert you that you are in my breeding territory.
j_gurli3: haha, ok, u know that turns me on.
j_gurli3: i start unbuttoning ur shirt.
bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't wear shirts.
j_gurli3: No, ur not really a Rhinocerus silly, it's just part of the game.
bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't play games. They f*cking charge your ass.
j_gurli3: stop, cmon be serious.
bloodninja: It doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinocerus about to charge your ass.
bloodninja: I stomp my feet, the dust stirs around my tough skinned feet.
j_gurli3: thats it.
bloodninja: Nostrils flaring, I lower my head. My horn, like some phallic symbol of my potent virility, is the last thing you see as skulls collide and mine remains the victor. You are now a bloody red ragdoll suspended in the air on my mighty horn.
bloodninja: Goddam am I hard now.

Bring On Game 3
Tonight
7:00
At Rexall Place, Edmonton, Canada
Sharks lead series, 2-0

What Barry Should Say Into the Mike After Hitting 715 at PacBell
"The people at MLB don't want to honor this."
"The folks around the country don't want to honor this."
"But this is for the people of San Francisco, because you're the only ones I care about anyway."

Just because

I'm getting sick of looking at that fish and seeing that 2 on the comments so consider this an electric prod in the complacent side of that slushy drink you're sipping while you try to avoid pseudo-life and have real experiences and feel the life-affirming sun beat down on your thinning scalp instead of bunkering down in front of the dumb dumb machines, letting others do things firsthand so you can take the cheap thrillride to vicarious city, getting carpal tunnel from keyboards and beer bottles, numb to direct experience and forgetting how it's done, how it is supposed to feel, determined by habit and routine, bound by duty, sworn to discipline but with time running out, always out, patting the backs of the listcheckers while the nolistmakers have all the fun, spouting the lines about responsibility but using them as justifications for inaction, living in bad faith and pretending freedom does not exist, playing the role of the good citizen against every instinct screaming for mercy in that rotting, decaying body filling with slowly expanding toxins radiating carcinogenic cells just dying to sprout and put a focus on things for those who can't do it for themselves.

Well?

It's On, Motherfuckers, Round 2
If you've been sleeping in a teenage cave (you know who you are), you might have missed the mysterious circumstances of the NHL Western Conference first round playoffs- Seeds 1-4 lost to seeds 5-8, which makes the Sharks the number 1 seed in the second round, which means home ice for any remaining Western Conference playoff series, which obviously meant absolutely nothing in the first round.

Game 1- Edmonton Oilers vs. San Jose Sharks
Sunday, May 7, 2006
5:00 PDT

Ok, so I've been getting pretty heavily into brewsnobbery, slopping down one or two large bottles of high-powered northwestern sloogie each night under the auspices of hobby but knowing it's pretext for highage. Anyway, in my quest for the perfect beer (read: tastiest brew with the highest ABV), I picked up an old guide that lists 1500 brouhahas on a 0-5 scale and lands just one with 4.8 or higher: the Rogue Imperial Stout. Cut to today, Tuesday, May 2, the year of the Apocalypse 2006, and Hedonist Beer Jive informs me that Rogue has a local affiliate, situated here, here in the heart of the enemy-

Rogue Ales Public House - Newport
673 Union Street, SF, CA

and I'm thinking that in my current way too many littl'uns NO ROAD TRIP STATUS, perhaps bridge roadage is all I'm good for. I'm thinking that afternoons are the perfect time for new flavors, and that nothing says I love me like a few tasty hours on a new barstool with the world's greatest stout. I call on one and I call on all to join me in sampling and then slugging this so-called world's greatest beer in the middle of some May afternoon when all the good people are biking or rollerblading or having their Escalades detailed. I'm calling on a death to habit, to routine, to mummifying couch trips filled with nothing more than munching newfangled Mexican spice chips and staring at Tiger's frustrated face in the native fescue. This is a call to urban adventure, to middle-age romance, to cheap, meaningless excuses to get loaded under the highbrow umbrella of all the other bullshit reasons I'm spouting. Somebone get toasty with me on Imperial Stout before the Lamb comes for the Chosen, leaving my skeleton burning on a flaming stool.

Here we go!

Finally some new news...

Everyman
by Philip Roth
The Disappearing Novel
A Review by Joseph O'Neill (from The Atlantic)
Following the historical panoramas of his recent work, Roth's new novel -- a novella, really -- is a transfixing summary biography of a seventy-one-year-old mortal from Elizabeth, New Jersey: "He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story."
Thus the personal history of this "average human being" is reduced almost to a surgical history: hernia trouble as a boy; a burst appendix and peritonitis in his thirties; and, in his fifties and sixties, disastrously recurrent cardiac difficulties that clutter him with six stents and a defibrillator. The vocabulary of heart disease hurled at the reader -- angiogram, anterior descending artery, ejection fraction, fatal cardiac arrhythmia -- is supplemented by the back braces, strokes, cancers, and migraines that plague our hero's nearest and dearest. The whole "onslaught" is horribly aggravated by his memories of carnal exaltation and bungled marriages and the beloved dead, not to mention by the awful truth that "there was nothing to be done. No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it as long as it lasts."
Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece. Whereas Roth's prize-laden recent fictions are a tad manipulative, in Everyman there is never any sense of a novelist trying to write a novel. Every sentence is urgent, essential, almost nonfictional. The sophistication and indirection forced on practically every writer are replaced by a straightforwardness of, yes, masterly authority. The text so thoroughly embodies, rather than displays, expertise that only after I'd finished reading did I realize that the protagonist's name had been withheld. Everyman is therefore that rarest of literary achievements: a novel that disappears as it progresses, leaving in one's hands only the matters of life and death it describes.

hyperlink

Put the a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com" word /a like this...

put the <> signs aroud the bold instructions and it will look like this when done...

Put the word like this...

If you haven't seen Colbert doing his thing at the correspondents thang, go here and check it out. Funny in a meta-funny way, as you're first struck dumb that the man is getting away with what he's saying, then you realize the jokes aren't all that great but you can't believe he actually has the cajones to do this, and you start bursting out not at the content but the context. Got it?