Stardate 04252003
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
I just talked to Jesus Christ. No, not in my prayers, or in a church, but on the street. He offered me a Becks and some bennies. He was going to give me a dollar. At first he offered to buy a blanket from me. And then he told me Jesus Christ was in jail.
He had wide, wild eyes and curly white hair that stuck out from his head like he'd been electrocuted. He probably had. Amazingly, he was clean.
Naturally, I stopped to listen to him. I'm a sucker for the ramblings of a mad man. I try to figure out what the thread of logic is, if there is one. What are the insane trying to piece together in their head and what are they are trying to communicate? I think this guy just wanted some company, but didn't know how to ask for it, or what to do with it if he got it. I mean, he was clean, so he must have been in a shower today and showers are indoors. He must have belonged to somebody.
Lost: One Crazy Man. Likes Becks.
Earlier today I saw a pile of maggot-infested rotting fungus. Not metaphorically, some lyrical turn of a phrase invented purely for the visceral response to such an image.
A felled tree, fungus growing in the cavity, rotting, infested with maggots.
Not bad for one day. Maggot-infested rotting fungus and Jesus Christ, Schizophrenic.
Speaking of Jesus, I went to church on Easter. The kind of church that celebrates Easter. And I didn’t burst into flames upon setting foot on the sacred grounds. My sister sings in a church choir, so I went to see her be part of the program. The pastor gave a 10-minute sermon, three guys crawled up on crosses, while overhead on a screen was projected the message, “Jesus was guilty of no crime or rebellion.”
The production values were astonishing, but I could see up their sack-cloth tunics from my seat. “I see England, I see France, I see Barrabas’s underpants.”
In spite of the propagandists attempts to encourage the jungen menschen to “trust and obey,” the actual, factual, it’s-right-there-in-the-Bible story is that Jesus was a revolutionary who was crucified BECAUSE he was tearing up the town with this contrariness. But you know, you don’t want to excite the passions of the youth. They may rebel against authority. So you see, you must rebel against authority in order to prevent others from rebelling against you.
On Easter Sunday Morning, while we were getting ready, I played David Cross’s latest CD, SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING BABY, for my niece. I think of it as inoculation. David Cross is an atheist Jew who is annoyed because he can’t not be Jewish because his mother is Jewish. And he tells a story about when he was growing up in the South and spending the night at his friend’s house. The next morning, his friend’s mom asks him if “you all’s people eats Oatmeal. I don’t know much about your people. I DO know that y’all hate Jesus. That, I do know. And that eight Jew bankers control all the money in the world from a bunker a mile under the earth’s surface.”
I didn’t mean to tweak her perception of reality, but I think she discovered the meaning of the word “irony” that Sunday.
I also managed to avoid getting saved. At the end of the service, there was an “altar call” where the music changed keys, got very melancholy and the pastor began to chant, “I know there are some of you out there who are confused. Some of you who are hurting. If there is anyone here who’d like to have one of the deacons pray with you to accept the Lord, raise your hand.”
And then there is really long pause and the Pastor says, “Any adults who want to raise their hand?”
I’m writing this from Prescott Valley, Arizona, about 30 minutes from the energy vortices of Sedona (or so say the White-lighters – for all you BUFFY fans). The last time I was here, just over two years ago, it was still a small, country-western kind of town where the only place to buy clothes was the Tack and Feed. But now, it looks like just about every suburban town. “When they built the mall, young families from Phoenix started moving in,” my sister told me. That’s all it takes to make a place a desirable locale? A mall? There is a Barnes and Noble there now. Literacy has arrived along with hope for the youth.
My 14-year-old niece is discovering punk rock. I’m pretty sure the Internet is responsible. People think I’m out of my mind when I try to explain to them how lightening-fast social attitudes are changing in traditionally provincial places untouched by Wicked Big City Ways™ and how that will effect the legislature in the very near future … so don’t worry so much about that breast-fearing John Ashcroft.
I asked her if she wanted to keep the David Cross CD. “I think my mom would freak if she knew I had it.” “Don’t tell her,” I replied. The lights go on and she gets it. We passed notes in church.
I have it on good authority that I am the Devil.
The night before I left for AZ, I went to the opening party for the San Francisco International Film Festival, Year 46. This year’s festival is being programmed by a Frenchman, Michel Ciment (director of POSITIF film magazine), probably to just be spiteful. The opening night film, THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS (with Denis Leary playing a version of himself), was directed by Alan Rudolph. I spent some time in the VIP room telling Rudolph how my favorite moment in his film, THE MODERNS (1988), was when the camera pans across the patrons, in their 1920s Paris Bohemian Best, as they are gathered around the piano. I saw that movie while on LSD and that moment of the film was like a revelation. Rudolph told me that moment in the film was universally hated.
Linda Fiorentino was in that movie, playing a husky-voiced, smoky ingénue. I actually got Rudolph to work with me on a few “candid” photos. One where he is holding a wine-glass up to the lens. But I can’t show them to you because somewhere between my car and my home, I LOST MY CAMERA! I also had pictures of the Oscordian, a man in a gold body stocking playing the according, and one of Robin Tunney looking as disinterested as possible. Peter Coyote was also being a sport and hammed it up for me with his plate of appetizers.
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I also wanted to show you a couple photos of Julie Brand y la Primera Vez. Every corner of the Ferry Building at the Embarcadero in San Francisco had a musical act and Julie Brand was definitely the top draw. The corridors formed a square and most people were perambling endlessly down the halls and ignoring the musical acts but a small group of people were trying to Salsa dance to Julie Brand. La Primera Vez went on a little later in the evening after everyone was able to have a few of the complimentary adult beverages and the confidence to ability ratio was stacked in favor of confidence.
Since it’s the INTERNATIONAL film festival, the acts were trying to be ethnic flavored and the Indonesian bell, drum and dance troupe that were going on after was in the crowd getting their freak on in their “traditional” outfits. I really do mean their freak on and not just a cute way of saying they were out of their element. Bod- rockin’ music defies geo-political boundaries, it seems.
Screw history, I just wanna party.
And now to end with the obligatory upbeat note. I got a better camera to replace the one I lost since the models that were too expensive when I got my old camera have now dropped to half the price. But it has this annoying electronic film-winding sound effect that plays when you take a picture and I can’t figure out how to turn it off.
A festival diary and spate of reviews are starting to flow from Brian McKay at eFilmCritic.com.
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In the Victorian Period and into the early part of the 20th century, lecture societies were a very popular form of entertainment, not only in England, but also in America. Oscar Wilde lectured to packed houses in every city he visited on his American tour. And then he returned home to England where was tried and convicted of homosexuality and sentenced to two years hard labor, which he survived, only to die shortly after release, most likely from a broken heart. His tomb is in Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris and Wilde admirers leave their lipstick prints on the enormous monument along with poems hastily written on scraps of paper and held down by chestnuts and gravel.
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There are few remaining lecture societies. One that still survives in San Francisco is The Commonwealth Club that hosts many business and government leaders and major social figures. The lectures are open to the public and are quite popular among a certain set. The Commonwealth Club recently launched a new program to attract a “young, hip” audience called Inforum. Inforum’s most recent program featured a panel discussion of the “DJ Culture.” Since my room-mate is a DJ who has opened the floor for every single big name international DJ that you’ve ever heard of, and I’m supposed to keep on the “young and hip,” I went.
And I want to say that if there was anything meaningful about the Electronica subculture, there isn’t anymore. I listened to record label owners and musicians spend an hour talking about all the ways they market their music rather than the meaning of the music. The panelists had to be asked at one point by the host, Liam Mayclem, a local broadcast “entertainment and lifestyle reporter,” formerly of Tech TV but now on the KRON 4 morning show, if the scene wasn’t actually “about the music.” (For all you media watchers who read Media Week, KRON 4 was formerly the SF Bay Area NBC affiliate station. Media Week, by the way, as if I couldn’t digress any more, is published by the Haarlem, Netherlands based international media firm VNU which also publishes The Hollywood Reporter.) Apparently, it isn’t anymore at all about the music. There are just “deliverables” and “revenue streams” and savvy investors looking anywhere to make a profit in a “downturned market place” (happy business code speak for sinking ship).
And as if the panelists hadn’t convinced me that the whole scene is completely sold out (and there’s nothing wrong with selling out, but I was hoping against hope that somewhere there was still a warm, fleshy heart beating at the center of the need to support the artists and make the world a more interesting place), the owner of OM Records even made a point to suggest that you should only play “upbeat, happy music” at Raves and to avoid making any kind of social statement or attempt to infuse the experience with any kind of artistry or critical perspective.
In other words, don’t encourage thought, encourage passivity. We want DRONES, dammit. DRONES, YOU HEAR!! I’m pretty sure she must be an agent of John Ashcroft.
Gigi has renamed her apartment, “The Autonomy Zone.” She also calls it the “Factory West.” I like that, “The Autonomy Zone,” where being yourself counts for everything.
The Inforum panel wasn’t all disappointing though. It looks like real time video scratching is starting to become popular at smaller House parties. Take a computer, feed in some footage and mix it in real time. Or take a live video input stream and edit it and project it in almost real time. Multimedia can totally change the whole nightclub experience. Mark Herlihy from the Future Primitive Sound collective, warned about having a video montage that was too interesting. “Everyone was standing around watching the screens instead of dancing.”
Mark got some respect from this jaded vampire for giving props to EBN – The Emergency Broadcast Network , who supplied the opening video of George Bush Sr singing “We Will Rock You” for U2’s orgiastic celebration of consumer excess and spiritual longing, the ZOO TOUR. EBN was then signed to TVT records and put out a VHS called COMMERCIAL ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT. EBN disbanded as an artistic entity in 1998, but Josh Pearson, one of the core members, recently released some “reworked” video footage of the 2000 elections to the Guerilla News Network.
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All anyone really wants to know is, “What are they doing in New York City?” San Francisco was a nexus for House music in the early nineties when the scene was dangerously subversive and hard to penetrate from the outside. Adrien Day, the SPIN editor previously mentioned who helped further erode my faith in the possibilities for the future of entertainment journalism, was advocating on behalf of women in the industry and I have to give her props for that.
The music industry, if you didn’t know, is having some hard times. Vivendi (who owns Universal) was selling Universal Music for the amount of one year’s total record sales. That’s an absurdly low market valuation. Piracy has taken the steam out of the music industry. It’s not dead, or even dying, but it has certainly deflated.
The next Inforum panel is going to examine consumer demand for hybrid cars.
On the way back to San Francisco from Arizona, I drove through Mojave and stopped at a place called “Jerry’s Restaurant.” “They have good food,” my dad says. I’m not sure what passes for good in a town that consists of an intersection in the middle of the desert but I go along with it. I already know that everything fresh will have been trucked in yesterday and most everything on the menu would most likely be generic food service pre-made stuff. “Would you rather go to Taco Bell?,” says my dad. Oh man, he’s got me. Even though I’ve got some organic fruit and nuts and even a chocolate bar in the car, I go to Jerry’s for the adventure and I was not disappointed.
“Are you a movie star?”
No, but I play one on TV.
I ordered a tuna sandwich on rye, with cheddar cheese on the side, two biscuits and a piece of apple pie and a coffee. What I get is a tuna sandwich on white with shredded cheddar on the tuna … and that’s it. I remind the waitress about the pie and the biscuits. And then she leaves but before she goes she leaves the bill. And the other waitress takes over our table.
I tell her about the biscuits and the pie and about the rye bread. She brings me back the corrected sandwich. Later that day, I remind her about the biscuits and the pie that we’ve already been billed for. She goes to the chef and puts in an order for biscuits and gravy. “No gravy,” I shout across the deserted restaurant that my dad tells me has been there for about 20 years. I have a revelation. Put in a stage, take out the tables, put in a disco ball and turn the greasy spoon into a theme disco. I imagine jumping on the tables with a bunch of feisty teen-age punk rockers and spray-painting the windows with shocking and disturbing slogans of angst and malfeasance. My fantasy keeps me occupied until the waitress returns with many apologies and my biscuits and then she pours coffee into what is clearly my dad’s cup of hot tea.
As she is pouring my dad reminds her that he is drinking tea. “Oh, shoot,” says our by now befuddled server. She takes the cup away. She comes back later with two slices of apple pie and tells us it’s on the house. My dad asks for a cup of tea. “OH, you wanted a new cup of tea?,” she asks. “Well, yeah, I was still drinking it,” he says. She runs off and brings him a glass of iced-tea.
And then I realize that David Cross is right. You DO find the redneck accent everywhere. “Ah am so sawry ‘bout that,” says our waitress for the 15th time. My dad is banned from choosing the restaurant until forever. While nibbling on our pie we discuss the profit margin on gumballs. I tell him that when he retires he should buy gumballs at wholesale and sell them out of the back of his car at little league fields for a nickel a piece.
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The Rock Bottom Remainders played a charity show
Thursday with special guest Roger McGuinn formerly of The Byrds at the
Fillmore (neither East nor West, if you've been reading Thomas
Wolfe's ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST). The bands CD, STRANGER THAN FICTION has
Stephen King rocking out on several tracks but alas, Mr. King did
not show. Dave Barry (guitar), Scott Turow and Amy Tan were in attendance,
however. Seeing Amy Tan in a bondage outfit saying, "Who's going to eat
the whip?" was just one of the highlights. I got there late, but I heard
Robin Williams made a guest appearance. I spent a few minutes playing
"what's the connection" but was soon distracted by Scott Turow dressed up
as David Byrne singing And She Was by the Talking Heads.
Here's a little secret, if you are in San Francisco, a handful of
Remainders and assorted others get together for a monthly jam session. The
last one I went to was when Nick Hornsby's new novel had just been
published and they were passing it around and several people asked me when
I was going to publish my big important contemporary American novel.
I was flattered they thought I could be a Hornsby or a Chabon. I hardly ever even write fiction. But perhaps someday. And then I’ll get Kendra Hibbert to review my book in FOREST OF DEAD TREES which will cause my novel to shoot to the top of the best-seller list. There will be a fierce bidding war for the movie rights. They won’t let me write the screenplay. It’ll win the Oscar for Best Picture. And there will be a crackling current of electricity charging the air around me and raising the hairs on the back of every financier and media flak in Hollywood and its environs. Can you feel that? It’s called “Buzz.”
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