It's Hot, It's Happening

Holy Shit! Oakland has a new punk rock high brow beer palace. Oxymoron city. 12 ounce jars of 12%ers I kid you not. And within walking distance of The Trappist. And they have a drinking patio with wooden benches. And you can buy top tier shit and open it there and drink it. On a Friday afternoon. Meet new friends. Try new things. In Oakland. Beer Revolution at 464 3rd St. between Broadway and whatever. The Meices are fucking proud.

The Men Will Be Tying off Come Sunday

Jews, Hives and Canadian Manball

Beer: He'Brew: The Chosen Beer- Bittersweet Lenny's RIPA: A Double IPA with Rye Malt-
Drinking with the Jews is a genuine pleasure.

Music: The Hives- Tyrannosaurus Hives- I may be one of the last folks left who still thinks the Hives are fantastic, the last album excepted. They have that extra something in their songs that scrunch up your face in a good way, and they want it all live. Unabashedly ambitious and completely over-the-top, the antidote to embarrassed modern rockers embarrassed to break the cool code. Ignore the last album. Go back. There's gold in them there hills.

Tired: of Lindsay Vonn and the rest of the drama crew. Shins, pinkies and bumped feelings- ladies, take a cue from Dan Boyle- when the Russian serves you injustice, take action on the Russian.

Manball- see Dan Boyle, the Sharks' only hope.

Choke Artist- Nabby. Laying down in the biggest game of the new century does not bode well for Sharks fans. Even Boyle's balls can't save 'em if Nabby is emotional toast.

Boom: if you haven't seen Ovechkin lay out Jagr, get thyself to Youtube. Stay retired, bitch.

Slow: the Giants' entire team. Audrey Huff sounds like a daytime slut, and Timmy looks more like a vampire every day, which may explain a few things.

MIA: Joe Thornton, who looks more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men than the league's perennial leading scorer. Or maybe Lenny from Laverne and Shirley. See: Sharks lose in first round again.

Godhead: Pliny the Younger, the greatest beer I've had in ages. Coming in at a modest 12% and tasting like the end of the world. If you missed it, you have something wonderful to look forward to.

Overrated: at least so far, Wells Tower's first collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which so far reads like minor Thom Jones. With three to go there is time for redemption, but I'm betting on Jones, hoping for Tower.

Disappointing: Soccernomics, which I hoped would spur an early interest in World Cup but offers little of the fun of Moneyball or Freakonomics, the two books that gave these guys a deal. Teams who shoot first in the shootout win 60% of the time- that's the most interesting take so far, unless you count the tidbit that scouts overrate blondes because they stand out on the field.

New Records: Kiss- Double Platinum- three bucks and nay a scratch.

Flamin' Groovies-Slow Death-one bad cassette turned me off these guys for years and it's only lately that I've seen the light. Funny how often timing means everything when it comes to getting a band. Anyway, go Norton, cuz it's one dance party until the Sharks lay down again.

Freedom Isn't Free

Friday I got shot in the ear by my own teammate. Later, my gun jammed and I was hit with a paintball in the groin area. That's my ride in the background. I managed to drink 7 Coors Lights, too.

Repent

Papa, Execs, Russo and Puritans

I loathe Comcast, but let me give them credit for one thing: Chronicle Live. They picked the perfect host in Greg Papa, who generally knows his stuff and aggressively mocks the on-air help, and the show delivers better analysis of Bay Area sports than you'll find in the truncated columns of local papers. Hell, they even have the occasional Sharks piece. Ray Ratto is as bitingly dry as he is in his columns and a joy to behold in his fullest of all chins glory, and players, coaches and local wannabes get the chance to defend their stupidity or fall on their swords. Sure, there are far too many Jaymee Sire (how can that not be a porn name?) parking lot updates on Cable watch, but with the near total disappearance of morning print, this is a welcome diversion from child-rearing.

Fuck NBC. Just fuck 'em up in their sagging corporate asses. I made the sappy boomer mistake of getting my ski-loving children excited about the Olympics, but now I have to put them to bed before the event air. Nope, sorry, Lucas, you can't see the keg-humping Bode Miller try to redeem himself in the downhill. Nope, sorry, Lars, just skip drama queen Lindsay Vonn faking shin injuries and then conquering the mountain to assure herself a daytime talk show. Only NBC, in an era of Tivo, could tape delay Olympic coverage WHEN WE'RE IN THE SAME FUCKING TIME ZONE AS THE HOST COUNTRY. I renounce my former position on the death penalty and call for the summary execution of all television executives who did not work for HBO between The Sopranos and The Wire. I'd like to see this on on Wide World of Asshole Executions immediately after John Boehner gets raped by rhinos in Madison Square Garden.

Richard Russo has a deft pen, and is perhaps the most generous novelist working today. He has total command of his material, but he will not make you work. All plots twists get unraveled, all questions answered. But that is not backhanded criticism, for the man delivers relentlessly sharp observations about human failings, and, even more shockingly, he's consistently funny. Straight Man is a breeze at 400 pages, and yet the characters are richly drawn, the plots plausible, the satire sharp, and the set scenes hilarious. Yea, the dialogue is a tad too quick for real life, but this is what popular fiction ought to be.

Sarah Vowell has a made a name for herself on NPR, but I only listen to KNBR because public radio is a bit like eating your vegetables while the ghost of Andrea Dworkin spanks you with a Modern American Library editon of The Awakening. I have seen her on The Daily Show, though, and despite her high quirk mannerisms and Betty Boop voice, I was intrigued by the premise of her latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, a modern take on ye olde Puritans with the promise of breaking through the stereotypes of finger-wagging and no-fun zones. And she delivers, at least in terms of humanizing the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by illustrating the range of their cowering before god and the intensity of their various forms of self-denial. Her hero is Roger Williams, a man so devout that even the Puritans found him a self-righteous prick and kicked him out of the colony. Vowell also finds him a bit of a madman but appreciates his pluck and his unwillingness to compromise on principle. One could argue that kind of rigidity is what gets us into so many problems on so many occasions, but Vowell argues that his precepts tend to favor the everyman (and even womyn) and lend themselves to religious tolerance in the here and now, convinced as he is that his enemies will soon be doing star turns in Dante's deepest circles. Vowell relies a tad too heavily on translating the events and ideas of the time into snappy modern jargon, but overall it's a nice refresher on our founders, the ones who did not dig barbecue, hookers or Schlitz Malt Liquor.

Didn't see you at the 6 AM load in....

Fucking amazing. People from Japan, France and all over the US. Seriously big turnout. Probably 300 people when I left and approximately three were women. I was among four men with a full head of hair. Serious ageing record geek scene with lots of chatter about past shows in NY and Holland.

Product tilted heavily toward 60s psych, vintage soul and 70s obscuro rock. I managed to pick up original copies of CCR's Green River, Led Zep II, Stones' Emotional Rescue, Stray Cats' first ($4!) and in a nod to St. Valentine, The Style Council's first with Your the Best Thing That Ever Happened (1st song, side 2). I played it for my wife when I got home. She asked me if I was gay.

No seriously, she dug it. And then asked if I was going to buy her something really nice for Valentine's. Like a Duran Duran import. Some people, you know?

Anyways, I think I'm going to go to all of the KUSF shows seeing as I live here, wanna support college radio and dig coming home with a bunch of dusty old vinyl. Plus the people watching is priceless.

Follow up: WTF????

'Fatwa' forbids Muslims going through full-body scanners
Muslim-American groups are supporting a "fatwa" issued this week forbidding Muslims to go through full body scanners because it violates Islamic rules on modesty, the Detroit Free Press reports.Free Press reporter Niraj Warikoo writes that the Fiqh Council of North America – a body of Islamic scholars – issued the religious ruling this week.The fatwa says:"It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women. Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of faith. The Quran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations also endorses the ruling, the newspaper says.In a statement, the Transportation Security Administration emphasizes that body scanners are optional to all passengers. Those who turn them down, the TSA says, will receive "equivalent screening," which may include a physical pat-down, hand-wanding and other technologies.The TSA also says the body scanners "do not produce photos, but images that look like chalk outlines."

Wanted: Tastemaker, Art Lover, and Fan

Sometimes stuff just shows up on my doorstep that I've forgotten I ordered. So it was with Mayor of Sunset Strip. This sad, even voyeuristic documentary on the aging man boy Rodney Bingenheimer made me realize something: We need more people like him. In this age of internet fragmentation, who will sort all the stuff out there for us? This is true for music, movies, books, and, of course, porn.

No seriously, though.....I can't help but feel like Rodney needs to be plucked from KROQ and given his own show on a station that isn't trying to convince people the Dashboard Confessionals are the shit. He needs an audience who shares his enthusiasm for his type of music, but doesn't have the time (or stories) like Rodney and people like him.

I wish I had the $ to create a platform which would allow professional fans to do their thing and get paid for it. We need these folks. Without them, we are left fumbling through cyber space alone trying to find something new and exciting. And that's hard, cold, lonely work.

KUSF Rock n Swap, are you ready???

Sunday February 14

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Regular Admission: (10a-3p) is $3
University of San Francisco students get in FREE!
Early Bird Shopping Special: (6am-10a) is $20.00 (includes bagels and coffee)
Location: McLaren Hall on the University of San Francisco campus

Minaret Minuet

In the 1950s, most western European nations, with large chunks of their workforce wiped out by the war, actively recruited cheap labor elsewhere. There was a tacit understanding, a unilateral one as it turns out, that these transient laborers from Turkey and Suriname and Morocco and elsewhere would come, put in their hours in moribund industries, and then once the economies stabilized, go home. It didn't work out that way. Not only did many of these workers stick around, they brought their families over. And they brought friends. Europe, in a moral crisis after the atrocities of WWII and less confident in its core values (I know this a gross generalization, suggesting that Europeans have core values, but time constraints eliminate qualifications), did little to stop the flow. A combination of factors in subsequent decades kept the steady stream of immigrants coming: hefty welfare benefits (come to our country and we'll pay you to hate us), established immigrant subcultures making language less a problem, a European assumption that immigration was inherently good (good for the immigrants or for the host country is a question best left unasked), a paralyzing political correctness in the wake of the Holocaust that made any objector to liberal immigration policies a racist, and economic policies that did not force assimilation, as the multitude of government freebies made adopting to the culture of the host country in order to prosper in its economic system unnecessary. The list could go on.

The result is that Western Europe now has millions of Muslims who have not assimilated and do not plan to, at least if you believe Christopher Caldwell. In his recent book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Caldwell argues that in this meeting between two cultures, Islam is the stronger, in an obvious demagraphic and less obvious philosophical way. He states that when an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture (see: Europe) meets an anchored, confident culture strengthened by common doctines (see: Islam) it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter. His analysis does not provide any shining lights out of Europe's quandary of changing demographics and cultural shifts that nearly five decades of unimpeded immigration has wrought. He does provide, however, a refreshingly direct look at the problem, hitting all the most famous touchstones along the way: the Danish cartoon uproar, the French riots, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, the head scarf controversy, etc. I thought he overstated his case too often and made too many statements without enough evidence, but I also found myself regularly nodding along. I'm curious how a book like his would be received in Europe, as Caldwell is an American and many of his statements would get him thrown out of the best cocktail parties in Amsterdam, Munich or Madrid. My guess is, though, that there is a silent and growing segment of many European countries that might also nod along as they turn the pages, many of whom are merely hard-headed realists, not racists. One of political correctness's many virtues is that it kills political discussion dead. It subverts free speech by making "opponents" bad people rather than defeating them with arguments. With, you know, like, evidence. Maybe honest debate about this stuff is going on behind closed doors in the big halls of power, but you don't see it much in the media. Caldwell's book is intentionally provocative, and I 'd love to see him in one of those florid halls debating some German minister. That the chat would have to take place in English only underscores the Hessians multicultural street cred.

Caldwell believes that safety net expenditures will no longer be sustainable, but his emphasis is on culture. Will Europeans demand assimilation, or will they expect that immigrants only abide by the law? To what extent can a worldview predicated on individual liberties preclude the public practice of a religion that is aggressively homophobic and relegates women to the private sphere? Does tolerance mean that subcultures can live parallel to the mainstream culture without ever trying to merge? There are dozens of tough questions, and Caldwell argues that unless European nations are willing to honestly and openly address them, their native cultures may bend so far that like that those drunken faces in the funhouse mirror, you can't quite place 'em anymore.

White Light, Gene Clark

In my advancing years, I embrace my obsessions, often bred from bios or biopics. Shakey led to hours of Neil Young bin digging, and listening to On the Beach in the black hours of the evening kept the shadows on the walls, in a high, lonesome kind of way. The TVZ documentary, Be Here to Love Me, sent me tumbling into that Houston/Nashville nexus for almost two years, fiendishly checking ebay for record deals and mildly disappointed when Fat Possum came through, ending the search, and, like Soulseek, making it all too easy. The last year and a half it's been Gene Clark, and because he's the latest, he sounds like the answer to all our secular prayers. Well, he's clearly the best singer of the three, but you could clear taverns arguing over which one is the greatest songwriter. Clark, though, is the most relentlessly directed to a particular sound and tone, with a few notable exceptions. Neil Young is obviously famous for many reasons, but one is his willingness to change styles. No genre is safe while the man breathes. Townes, known mostly as the bearer of very bad tidings, is fucking hilarious when he wants to be. He'll do tongue-in-cheek and he'll do slapstick, even tell stupid jokes between songs. He'll do blues, country and western, and even those folk fellas are generally in his sights. Gene Clark is dead serious, man, and that is not an attack point. He wrote the best Byrds songs when they were IT, and his move toward country with Doug Dillard preceded Gram Parsons' more celebrated embrace of the genre that Hollywood could not initially abide. In the early 1970s, he hit, in my most humblest of opinions, his finest stride, producing one of the great three record strings in rock history with White Light, Roadmaster and No Other. His voice on these records is almost alien in its emotional impact. I cannot think of another singer who can hit listeners' sweet spots as precisely as this man, and coupled with the care and craft of the writing, the damn three-minute pop songs (with the exception of No Other, where he stretches things out and thickens the production) pack a wallop that transcends just about anything I've ever heard. There is an indefinable depth to the man's work that resonates on the deepest emotional levels, which I know sounds shrill but tell that to the stains on my couch. I've been married a long time, but I bet if I heard "Why Not Your Baby" during a vulnerable period in my single days, I'd have simply exploded, reducing the world's subsequent pain ever so slightly. I'd recommend the biography from Jon Einarson if you're a fan, as it delivers on the details even when it lacks the soul of something like Shakey. More importantly, if you haven't heard the man beyond the Byrds, get on it. Everyone needs a new late-night companion in terror.