He thinks it's not kosher

"What's more rock than to take it where it doesn't belong?" That's the singer's rationale for taking Oakland rock band Heavenly States to Libya this weekend. I'm not sure they're going to get your 70s pop-culture references, mister ex-Fluke Starbucker member, but good luck.


Song now playing: The Byrds' "You Ain't Going Nowhere"

Metal circus

"The diacritical mark of the beast."

Not to be confused with the one found in barcodes.


Song now playing: The Mississippi Sheiks' "I've Got Blood In My Eyes For You"

It is time for stormy weather

Tough day for this weatherman. (Said to have taken place in Athens, Ohio. I am told that it is real.)


Song now playing: Django Reinhardt's "Lambeth Walk"

Sitting on top of the world

Now oil companies have an incentive to actually support global warming, rather than simply pretend it's not happening.

"We're very excited. There is great potential for increasing trade between North America and the Russian sphere," says the man responsible for expanding a port on Hudson Bay that accepts Russian crude destined for American cars, via newly ice-free Arctic shipping lanes.


Song now playing: Duke Ellington's 1940 recording of "Ko-Ko," one of the all-time great recordings. His piano part, commenting from underneath the horn section about 1:10 into the piece, is dastardly.

Ice cream every day

Matt calls it an earworm -- the song that you just can't get out of your head. But to Mister Softee scion James Conway Jr., it's the sound of money jingling in the till. And now, it is the subject of noise complaints, in the face of which even Mister Softee himself admits that his song gets annoying after awhile.

A New York city councilman told Commissioner David Tweedy: "You and the mayor are very bold taking on Mister Softee. You're going to traumatize a lot of children in this city."


Song now playing: The Oranges Band's "All That Money (You'll Get Over It)"

Turning garbage into gold

As the first-ever fight evolves in the Fort Miley comments section (and by all means, please do keep the barbs a'flyin'), allow me to post this postscript to this morning's trashy discussion.

What I wouldn't have given to own the Underwear of Modesty.


Songs playing: Yo La Tengo's acoustic version of "Tom Courtenay", the Stones' "Casino Boogie"

Got to bag it up

In between "F--- you, Jake"s, the Board of Supervisors will soon hear arguments for and against a city tax of 17 cents on grocery bags.

I've been re-using bags for some time. I haven't gone canvas yet, but I feel wasteful chucking -- or even recycling -- plastic or paper bags right after I use them for the first and only time. It'd be great to encourage people to do likewise.

Still, I wonder: Why does this only apply to grocery bags? I've stopped accepting bags at Amoeba Records, and I occasionally bring one into the store. And I'd like to know if they've considered a cash-return policy, similar to the aluminum-can deposit plan, on bags found in the trash. I realize Sunset Scavenger/Norcal doesn't recycle plastic bags, but it's still a back-end motivation to keep more plastic out of the landfill. And it'd amount to something useful that homeless people could do for a little bit of money, for one thing.

Some stores give you a credit if you bring your own bag. That does seem like a saner way to accomplish the same thing.

Last month's Harper's Index says that four-fifths of British trash ends up in landfills, but only two-fifths of German trash does. And this article says Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan and Ireland tax new grocery bags.

Speaking of recycling, dig (through) this. More here.

Meanwhile, you can't smoke in Golden Gate Park or any other city park anymore. Golf courses are exempt, a provision Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi suggests has "an undertone of elitism." More than an undertone, I'd say, although people behave very differently on City-owned golf courses than they do at, say, Big Rec.

Now if only they could do something about the dogs that leave presents for outfielders chasing fly balls. And the people who own those dogs, too.


Song now playing: Coleman Hawkins' "I Surrender, Dear"

Supervise this

Wish I'd seen this confrontation between Supervisor Chris Daly and my Supervisor, Jake McGoldrick.

Song now playing: The Gourds' "January 6"

But will they race Priuses at Daytona?

I'm sure we're still a long way from seeing Texans give up their trucks, but it's comforting to know that some Republicans have started behaving like Greens for geopolitical reasons. It's a sign that reduced dependence on foreign energy sources -- on energy sources, period -- is becoming an American imperative rather than an environmentalists' cause.

Now if only we could get "liberal" San Franciscans to stop driving Hummers.


Song now playing: The Flying Burrito Bros.' "Juanita"

My tires were slashed and I almost crashed

No, it doesn't quite match systematic disenfranchisement in Florida (and maybe Ohio). But I can't quite hear the chorus of outrage from left-wing bloggers about the injustice done here. You can bet that if it were the children of a Republican Congressman and a Republican big-city mayor, Daily Kos would be apoplectic. Wrong is wrong.

Song now playing: The Jayhawks' "Nevada, California"

Life on Mars

As a postscript to my post about New Yorkers' opinions of the city's Golden Age, let me share George Gurley's tale of boozing on the Lower East Side at the nastiest bar he could find.

San Francisco has a Mars Bar too (actually Cafe Mars), but it's pretty tame compared to this one. I'm pretty sure I engaged in a bit of debauchery during my only visit there though.... ah, never mind.

When the lights go down on the City

The Golden Gate Bridge's overseers are mighty pissed that someone lied his way into filming the bridge around the clock to capture suicides on film. Seems he owned up to his strategy when he requested interviews with Bridge workers and executives. At least one Bridge employee thought it was obvious what he was up to all along.

Those upset about the Bridge being a "magnet for suicides" surely weren't happy with Tad Friend's piece about this awhile back. (Friend writes that "[a]lmost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped," which isn't true at all. I do know one guy who's threatened out loud to jump from the GGB many times, however. He never mentioned the Bay Bridge.)

The Chron article just barely touches on the notion that the filmmaker represented a security risk. I wonder how this fellow could have been pointing things at the middle of the Bridge, virtually unsupervised around the clock, in an era when National Guardsmen have sat in watch at both ends of the span 24 hours a day.

That said, it looks like it might be a morbidly fascinating film.

No, not that Jack Johnson

(UPDATED WEDNESDAY AM) - The second part of the Jack Johnson film was mostly about persecution, early 20th-century social and racial mores, and freedom vs. intolerance. Very little was about boxing. That's fine with me, mostly, except that I felt that Burns rushed through Johnson's loss to Willard in 1915. (Holy God, they fought 25+ rounds then? Outdoors in over-100-degree Cuban heat?)

I faintly mistrusted Burns during the part about Johnson's defeat. Since so little of the documentary's second half dealt with Johnson in the ring, it seemed like he should have spent more time on the actual fight. It seemed like Burns may not have wanted Johnson's decline as a pugilist to overshadow his persecution by Federal authorities. Furthermore, though he denied that Johnson threw the fight, he didn't really support that contention with any evidence or anecdotes. It's worth questioning because Burns had already noted that Johnson -- a man whose personal integrity is crucial to the film -- had taken direction during an earlier fight. (Tangential to this: Nick Tosches' portrayal of Charles "Sonny" Liston, who certainly took a dive as his career was ending, is totally enthralling and easy to find for cheap at Green Apple and elsewhere.)

A tribute to Jack Johnson

I spent two very worthwhile hours last evening watching the first half of Ken Burns' four-hour film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. The first installment portrays Johnson's struggle for an opportunity to fight for the heavyweight championship during the arguable nadir of black America's post-bellum circumstance, and characterizes Johnson as stylish, terrifying, beautiful and unbeatable. The fighter is also shown taking criticism from all sides while doing exactly what he wanted -- for example, "justifying" his predilection for white women with the memorable words "I am not a slave."

Burns remains prone to colossal overstatement at times -- was John L. Sullivan's mustachioed portrait really in "every saloon in America"? -- but the copious film footage is riveting, the narrative is engaging and the commentary from historians, writers and other figures fleshes out Burns's story nicely. As with Burns' Jazz a couple of years ago, there's almost nothing Burns could say that would make me not want to watch his awesome archival footage. I only hope that when Part Two drops tonight, it's better than Side Two of Miles Davis's album with the same title as this posting. Davis's sidelong "Yesternow" is an unfortunate letdown after the brilliance of Side One's "Right Off."

Check this out: the Los Angeles Times expresses regret for its 1910 coverage (pdf) of the Johnson-Jeffries title fight in Reno. The editorial also supports Burns's drive to obtain a Presidential pardon for Johnson.

Bad timing

Did anyone call Jenny Toomey about this?

Maybe they could've given these guys a jingle too.

Wait till they hear about the gerbil

"I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters Wednesday.

"We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron."

Let the golden age begin

I've been watching a bunch of films about the dirty, violent 70s New York lately -- Serpico, The French Connection, even Saturday Night Fever -- so it's appropriate to note that four of the 14 persons interviewed in Sunday's Times said that New York experienced a "golden age" in the 1970s.

I wonder how many of them had just moved there at that time, or came of age during their chosen era. Cities are usually most enchanting when they're new to you, especially after months of anticipating your move there. The San Francisco in which I arrived in 1999 was deeply conflicted: while the champagne glasses clinked on tech company rooftops and 22-year-olds straight out of college landed $75,000-a-year jobs playing foosball, nearly everyone else lamented the loss of everything that made San Francisco cool. (I saw a t-shirt that had the name of the city with "1965-1999" beneath it.) People had to wave their freak flags higher, but some folks just took them up to Portland instead.

Yet the time was undeniably golden, in its way. Jobs were plentiful. In the workplace, you were not told what to do so much as asked which one of the many tasks at hand you would like to do, because they were about to hire somebody new who would do whatever you didn't pick. Creative restaurants were opening everywhere. Our new ballpark appeared, financed privately with boomtime money. Bright people left New York, or wherever, and came here. And although most of the businesses around town were doing really frivolous work, the tech industry made something great and world-changing too.

Blue-collar families suffered hard during this time. Rents were exorbitant; people had to leave. Cultural institutions couldn't afford to stay here either. Dance studios closed, rock bands went elsewhere. The place threatened to become a one-industry town, like Hartford or Detroit. For a lot of people, the golden age sucked hard. For my part, I had a foot in both worlds: covering it as a journalist (sort of), rocking out at night, scrambling for rent as my share spiraled up almost 50% in my first two years here.

I take offense at Daniel Henninger's response to the Times piece, which implies in its final statement that artists who fondly remember the roughness of New York in the 70s need to grow up. (He, or his editor, also needs to rethink putting "artists" in quotation marks in the deck above the story.) There is nothing childish about trading a little cleanliness and safety for a more interesting city. (I doubt it would sway Henninger's opinion to note that what he terms the "funkless outer boroughs" gave us the biggest thing that's happened in music during the last 25 years, which is indeed a funky thing.)

I consider myself fortunate to say that most days in San Francisco still make me feel like I'm on vacation. Even today, as I rise to face an unending winter rainstorm, I can't help thinking how lucky I am to be living and working here. The title of this blog refers to geography, and my sensitivity to my environment is the main reason. There is such a huge variety of human circumstance out there, and there are very, very few people with whom I'd trade places, in time or place.