Beauts

Away from the City and into a county with no traffic signals we went this weekend, in order to send off our amigo into the world of wedded bliss. He'll make it official in a few weeks, but this was effectively our last chance to party in style before his big day. Photos are here.

This bachelor weekend was light on debauchery, but definitely memorable in other ways. In between delicious meals, ping-pong matches and Scrabble throwdowns, we managed to climb the Sierra Buttes, a mammoth escarpment in a fairly remote area of the Sierra Nevada. (This person has a good photo. The fire lookout, where we enjoyed lunch, is just to the right of the little notch in the top-center of the photo. You can see it here too.)

The only thing I wish I'd remembered to photograph was the rock at the peak of the Buttes, etched with the names of early Gold Rush-era adventurers who scaled the peak without the benefit of well-maintained trails (or metal stairs, up by the top!). Flickr came up empty on this one too, unfortunately. How mindblowing to think of what it would have taken to get up there in 1880. Wish I'd thought to take that snapshot.

Other memorable things from the past few days:
∙Old Potrero Hotaling's Whiskey
∙Pork ribs, barbecued chicken, succotash, lox, cobbler, soufflé....
∙Surely the only Negronis poured in Sierra County all weekend
∙Pro karaoke in the street after midnight. There was, um, a guest apperance.
∙Clamper doins along the river in our backyard
∙The astonishingly homely local woman who, upon hearing that I had driven up from San Francisco, said, "Well I don't mean to offend you, but... are ya gay?"


FMFM: The incredible Curtis, a varied tour de force from 1970. I mean, I had no idea what I was missing all these years. A knockout.

Goodbye, Pluto

It must be lonely out there.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody.... All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn’t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

Hey, you. I know you. I know you.

Men's synchronized swimming is a reality. Nearly.

Can this sport ever recover from Harry Shearer's little film?

Five years, my brain hurts a lot

It's been five years since I lost my last job.

Some of you may remember the story. We all knew the company was in trouble, but few employees figured we'd be completely out of business so soon. As the story goes, we'd set the all-time record for advertising pages in a magazine during 2000, and had posted revenues of $200 million that year; how the heck could we be out of business eight months into 2001? Sure, we catered to dot-coms, but most of them were going out of business because they weren't making any money. But we were making money... weren't we?

What killed our company, then? It was the other same old story -- we grew too fast and expected too much. Commercial real estate in downtown San Francisco was going for $85 a square foot in those days. We signed up for enough office space to support 500 employees. After our advertisers started going out of business, we had something like 180 employees. Who was going to sublet that space from us? No one, which is the biggest reason of many why we fell so far back into the red. (The notorious CRM initiative didn't help either.)

We had been sent on mandatory vacation during the week it all hit the fan. (I know, the writing was on the wall, right?) As a result, we all found out in different ways that our careers had stalled that Thursday afternoon. Apart from the handful of top management who were privy to all the details, the first employees to find out happened to be in the office that day. A Wall Street Journal story tipped them off, and then the phone tree started going nuts. My editor called me at 2:45, but....

I was somewhere between Jackpot and Wells, Nevada, when I tuned in an AM station out of Salt Lake City that had CNN's news feed. It was 4:00 Mountain time, but 3:00 Pacific (the time zone which I'd just crossed into, southbound from Idaho), when the announcer said it. "This just in from San Francisco: Famous for its rooftop parties...."

I'd left West Yellowstone, Montana at about 9:30 MDT that morning, and had taken a fairly leisurely drive through Idaho, stopping in thrift stores and checking out little towns along the way. The road south into Nevada is open desert, with only one "town" -- Jackpot, a sad little outpost which exists only to service Idaho residents who like to gamble -- along the way, so I was at my most isolated point in the entire trip when I got the news. The middle of nowhere doesn't afford much comfort in a dark hour, I'm afraid. (I wonder what Ray Manzarek would think.)

I'd booked a Best Western in north central Nevada for that night, but I realized that staying there would turn out to be a mistake. (What was I going to do, pace around my $75 hotel room all night trying to figure out why I wasn't still driving? Tell my stupid dot-com sob story to a bunch of copper miners? Forget it.) And so it went: Seventeen and a half hours after leaving Montana, I was unwinding at home, reading the papers online and trying to figure out how it all happened.

A couple of weeks later, the planes hit the buildings and we all (most of us, anyway) got our priorities straight. I freelanced for awhile, took another road trip through the Southwest, and came home to a successful job interview in February 2002. I can't argue with the results since then -- I'm a decent journalist now, with a fairly stable job (cross fingers) and an excellent work-at-home situation. It's not bad. But still, what was my best job ever? Probably the one that took me from the mailroom to a weekly column in six months, handed me a glass of top-shelf bourbon every Friday, and taught me how to be a pro at this. I'll drink on the roof to that.

He is here tonight. Mr. Magnificent one is here.

At the risk of letting this space devolve into either a YouTube repository or a Steely Dan news site, I just have to pass along this item. I believe either my brother or I owned a 45 rpm record with a live version of Steely Dan's "Bodhisattva" on the flip side, performed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Far more memorable than the guitar solo was the lengthy introduction, delivered in a drunken drawl by a roadie. Dan fans, naturally, tend to think it's one of the funniest things ever. And now, someone has used the power of YouTube to distribute this delightful re-creation:



In night vision, naturally.


FMFM: Ellington's first jazz symphony, Black, Brown & Beige, performed onstage in Carnegie Hall in 1943. I believe this is the only complete recorded version (though it incorporates a section recorded elsewhere, due to technical troubles that night in New York). Another wax transfer I'll be enjoying in a digital version.

Twins

Here's Joe Cocker singing "Feelin' Alright?" on Saturday Night Live, with a little help from his friend. I have no reason to doubt the person in the comments section who says the band includes Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Cornell Dupree, and more great players. Enjoy.

Bummer in the summer

You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here
And it's so for real, to touch
To smell, to feel, to know where you are here

So long, old man.

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die

One of the most powerful moments I've ever seen onstage took place a few years ago when Arthur Lee re-created the Forever Changes album at the Fillmore, with a full horn and string section. As fans of that mindblowing record know, one of its creepiest passages is the coda to "The Red Telephone." Lee, fresh out of the state penitentiary at Coalinga following a three-strikes conviction, froze the crowd with the icy refrain, "They're locking him up today/They're throwing away the key/I wonder who it'll be tomorrow/You or me?" And I'll never forget how it felt when he followed it up with the sound of the other shoe dropping: "We're all normal when we want our freedom."

I'll feel much better on the other side
I'll thumb a ride

Good luck, fella. I know you didn't get the happiest of turns down here, but I think it's the only one you're gonna get. I'm glad you got to spend those last few years on the outside.


FMFM: wild guess

Shakey shake... levitate me

This one just rolled through the house a few minutes ago. Really, it was just a quick shot, but big enough to make me forget what I was doing. The chandelier was swinging for a few moments too, but the neighbors downstairs said they didn't notice it at all. (Interactive map here.)

I think it's the fourth one I've felt in seven years, and I don't think it's the largest.


FMFM: Ellington's "New Black & Tan Fantasy," a 1938 reworking of one of his first masterpieces. Barney Bigard's clarinet glissando is spine-tingling. I've been having fun with my new method of transferring vinyl to digital files on the PC -- involving freeware and a MiniDisc player -- and burning a few wax-only favorites onto CDs.

Hotter than July

A few weeks ago I posted something here about the fire in Pioneertown, the Old West movie set built by Roy Rogers in 1946 that has turned into a desert haven for artists and musicians. Today I turned up someone's Flickr photoset displaying the fire's immediate aftermath. Apparently that's the real color of the sky, with the sun obscured by smoke -- and apparently that's what happens when an Airstream melts. Good god.


FMFM: Mingus At Antibes, a hard-blowing live date that revisits past works. Dolphy, as always, sounds great, but I can't quite say this one is essential. Most of the original versions are a little better, and the recording quality isn't quite up to Tom Dowd's studio standards. Still very worthwhile though.

We can't rewind, we've gone too far

Watching the film of MTV's debut and clips from its early days, I can't help but feel the brash optimism of its approach. As much as I might've preferred a world without rock videos, where music was strictly for the ears, they sure were onto something. What a shame it wound up being all about dating shows and crappy reality TV.

The Buggles song is incredibly prescient, despite the glaring misstep of using the forgotten acronym "VTR". Still very admirable, especially considering that the guy from Yes was involved.