What I Learned On My Trip To Portland

Any nation that demands its air passengers remove their shoes and confiscates toothpaste relinquishes all claims of greatness.

Nobody drinks on airplanes anymore. I received multiple and repeated angry stares when I ordered my second Heineken, and I could not see anyone in my section with anything stronger than a cranberry juice. Considering I once watched an entire cabin of Finns get filthily blathered on a morning flight to Athens, I assume by 2009 we'll be reading how Finland has surpassed our GNP.

There is a bar every half a block in Portland. A brewpub lies on every corner.

I had fries for three consecutive meals, and each batch was crispy and salty and righteously delicious, and twice I put my head between my legs and cried, Why Barclay's, why not?

I kept noticing a face I never see in the Bay Area, and when I tried to describe it, I couldn't past 'haggard' and 'weather-beaten.' Later, I figured it was not a singular Oregon face, but that the Bay Area lacks a variety of honkies.

What ever happened to the stewardess who got into the job to party?

Side projects suck, but this one doesn't. I don't know why I have such a soft spot for Danny and Dusty's The Lost Weekend, but the two lead singers for Green on Red and The Dream Syndicate got together with members of their own bands and the Long Ryders and made a perfectly endearing party record for your enjoyment. Find it in the fun bin and have yourself a $1.99 time. Just make sure you pull the needle before the obligatory cover of Knockin' On Heaven's Door, that nightmare every troubadour with a pseudodeathwish feels compelled to play to illustrate his edgy stance on death.

Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic is one of the most entertaining and provocative rock books I've ever read. Enter Naomi is a completely different animal. It reads like a love letter to a long lost punk rock crush, with some memories about the good old days of SST tossed in. Naomi Petersen was the photographer who took all of the those great shots of the Minutemen, Blag Flag, Meat Puppets, etc., and if Carducci is right, everybody fell just a little bit in love with her, but nobody really felt like treating her right. She drinks herself to death at 38 in 2005, and nobody notifies the old friends, most notably, Carducci, and so we have this book. It started as an email to get folks to recognize her contribution to that time in music and get her work out there. Thus, this is a plea, not criticism. The tone is far less angry and polemic and far more poignant. The man has lost track of somebody he once loved and now he's lost her, and the words are ways to express the pain and purge the hurt.

The book highlights how hard it was to be a girl in that most masculine of scenes, and it illustrates how completely devoted the SST crew was (if you buy all of it) to the work. Carducci argues that something like that is impossible now. Everything is too easy, when you can download anything for free. The result, is watered down mediocrities and art that falls further and further from the human heart.


At 25 clams, the price for this book is an outrage. Typos rule, the prose is third-rate, and pictures take up close to half the 200 pages. That said, throw the guy a bone. He lived it, he's hurting, and many of those photos are gripping. I was surprised by how badly this was written, but I was strangely moved by it. I've been listening to My War a lot lately, and thinking about what life must have been like in the trenches for a young woman at some of those sausage parties I used to go to at Fender's back in the day. Naomi must have had balls. It's SST from the inside and what happened after, and while the whole thing feels patched together and blended into book form without a whole lot of care, there is poignancy here.

December Reading Roundup
How to be Idle- Tom Hodgkinson- this started promisingly: "There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11:00 in the morning." Subsequent to that, the best this ode to loafing can offer is some fine quotes by other people- the author's insights are minimal, and somewhat hypocritical, considering he edits a magazine and finds time to write a book glorifying the pleasures of doing nothing. I smell a rat.

Babylon's Burning- Clinton Heylin- From the Velvets to the Voidoids, Heylin's earlier tome documenting, well, what the title says it does, was an enlightening and riveting read. I filled in some gaps and even sought out some of the bands the man championed. The new one, sadly, does not continue the tradition. At over 600 pages, it's overstuffed and lacking focus, as the first 400+ pages cover a few years in painstaking detail, and most spend far too much time on the likes of Siouxie and Sid and Joe. Sorry, but the story has been told. Heylin loves Wire and The Buzzcocks and Pere Ubu and Television, so clearly, the artier tip of the punk thang is where he lays his puffed out hat. And that's fine, as he explicitly states he'd like to tell the "real" story of that time, in what appears to be a direct cannon shot at one Simon Reynolds, whose recent Rip It Up and Start Again meticulously captured all things post-punk from 1978-1984. Heylin did not like the man or his take, and this appears to be his riposte. So be it. That said, the problem with all these pages is that if you've been paying attention for the past twenty years, so little here is new. Jon Savage's England's Dreaming does the British punk thing better, and Michael Azzarad's Our Band Could Be Your Life does the 80's indie American with far more understanding and insight. I found myself skimming far too often, and with far too little guilt, as every page seemed to have a lengthy quote from Steve Steverin, the Banshees guitarist. Look kids, that is not a good thing. Take the big pass.

The big winner this month is Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, a can't-put-it-downer, even at a whopping 500+ pages. Weiner's thesis is simple: we shouldn't be shocked by Mr. Tenet's slam dunk- the CIA has been fucking up everything from its inception. The glory of this book is that Weiner does not stuff what should be a magazine piece with analytical filler, the bane of most political books. Instead, he tells stories. Starting with the agency's origins in a world torn asunder by WWII, Weiner walks chronologically through the great foreign policy crises of America's post-war era. The stories are gripping and aggressively depressing. One director after the next desperately tries to remake the agency in his image, protect his own reputation and ego, and lie to the president to protect his turf no matter how much it hurts the country. Allan Dulles is particularly brutalized, but Weiner is ruthless. Fiasco after fiasco illustrates the sickness inherent in the beast, while director after director fuels the public image of the hyper-efficient and mysterious spy service systematically wrecking those who dare cozy up to the Soviet bear. Sadly, the boys kept getting it wrong. This acts as a history review of American foreign policy over the last 60 years, a disheartening dissection of a broken US institution, and a laugh riot for the boys in those Paki caves. Put this one by your bedside, and good luck with those sweet dreams.

I gave up on CNN a long time ago, but you have to turn in somewhere to get your election results, so I found myself occasionally flipping over to Wolf muttering, "The best political team on television." You have to wonder-

Bill Bennett? Didn't his moral crusade go up in a ticker tape shower of video poker losses?

Ralph Reed? Doesn't getting in bed with the dark lord of Abramoff preclude one from pontificating on family values in front of a live television audience?

Soledad Somebody or Other? Get this woman a brown paper bag before she explodes all over your screen.

Bill Schneider? The last poll before New Hampshire had Obama with a 13 point lead, and you still want to giddily cum all over a pie graph delineating the lesbian vote in Carpet County?

Anderson Cooper? Geraldo's heir apparent, the man who never saw a beige flak jacket or a danger photo op he wouldn't throw himself in front of, asked relatively short questions and got out of the way- is Armageddon upon us, Ralph?

John King- always solid

That Cafferty dude- a grouchy liberal- at least he doesn't come straight from central casting

Will somebody explain to me why Donna Brazille gets a spot as the voice of the Democratic Party on every single program ever aired? Does she have dirt on every producer in tv land, or are they just knocking off two 'underrepresented' groups with one body?

Have they finally put Carville out to pasture? Is he consulting for the Clintons, or have they fallen out with each other?

Any night I don't see Mary Matalin is a sign of television progress.

Can anybody recommend a channel for the next one? I tried to turn the sound off and crank up Dead Moon, but the wife was having none of it. Something about the sonorous sounds from David Gergen's trap...