BUTT LOAD OF GERBILS

Yo.

2006-05-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

Migrating over to jacksongriffith.blogspot.com.

I have been bad Giacomo Sonic

2006-01-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

Back soon with new gibberish.

'S OK, right?

2005-11-15T06:48:00.000-08:00

Two week since last postings on here. Am been very very busy with other wankings, and not have been keepings up with responsibilty of Buttload. Am very very sorry.

Mind have been frying at Mu Morning Jacket show at Fillmore last weekend, and job have been very very busy too with pushing top secrets to various internets.

Must take shower now and going to job. Promising much lucid postys presently.

Is OK. Really. Reminding me to telling storys about giant neon lobster with E-Meter at shoppings mall soon, capisce?

Drilling down, getting granular ...

2005-11-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

Sitting in a meeting, wishing I was in this Eastern Bloc Disney Blooz Bros. knockoff.

Kings lose at their new home (Vegas) to the Lakers

2005-10-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

And they're sportin' those uglyass unis again. That shit's more Gladys Knight than Barry White, and if they persist in donning unfly threads like that, I'm rooting for Kobe and Chief Triangle. Not cool.

(Photo by Ethan Miller @ Getty Images)

Sweep!

2005-10-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Nuthin' against the former Colt 45s, but it sure was nice to see the White Sox break their jinx by beating that Texas team at Enron Field. And where was the so-called First Fan? M.I.A.

Are we not Ngognog Ngogn yet? We are Freenbean!

2005-10-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

I am far too lame to ever be able to record and release my own album, because I am a social retard, and I don't have the foggiest idea how to get along with people long enough to get them to back me up on a project, and I am dirt poor, which means that I cannot buy the help of people who could help me finish an album. So I will most likely never make an album. But if I ever did finish an album, this might be what the cover would look like.

Beats Ashlee Simpson, right?

Um. Yeah.

2005-10-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

Comrades, we must drink more wotka before we attempt to make background vocal ...

We are Celtic band of Irish! Never mind balailaika!

2005-10-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

Um. Yeah.

I have seen the future of Celtic music, and its name is Elroy Jetson.

We are being heaviest metal bands

2005-10-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

We are Gruppa HardMageddon from Nizhni Novgorod. For those about to rocking, we are salute you. And big shouting outs to comrade Giacomo; we wanting you to finishes My Morning Jacket review, but we know you must sleep off many hanging overs from drams of wotka making from old socks of chess playing gentlemens.

Rocking now out!

Wowee, those new Kings unis are totally, insanely gay!

2005-10-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

What is up with those new Kings uniforms? Have the Maloofs totally lost it? I mean, hanging out at their casino in Vegas really must be getting to their heads — because they're coming up with the kind of dumbass decisions you might make after you stick rolled-up $100 bills in your nose to take a powder, then suck down Jell-o shots with the likes of Tara Reid and Paris Hilton. I'm pretty sure Fred Durst is somewhere in that mix, too.

I mean, look at poor Peja Stojakovic. If I were him, my lawyer would be burning up the phone lines around the NBA trying to get me an immediate exit package from any sorry team that would suit up and hit the court wearing gold-lamé disco threads like the ones Peja's sporting, because those unis suck monkey butt.

According to Marcos Bretón's column in today's Sacramento Bee (I nicked the photo by Bee photographer Hector Amezcua from the paper's website, and if the braintrust there objects — not that anyone bothers to read this blog — I'll take it down and I'll say nice things about that police-department publicist in the Hawaiian shirt who writes that below-the-fold Metro section column, too), our beloved Kings will be putting on those gold-lamé unis 14 times this season.

Perhaps the idea is that we cowtown yokel fans will tire of a Kings team that plays like the Clippers and suits up like those guys in the sequel to the Village People's classic Nancy Walker-directed movie Can't Stop the Music — I think it was the 1982 straight to video Joan Rivers-directed masterwork The Village People vs. the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island — and they won't mind one bit when the Maloofs sneak their team to Las Vegas in the middle of the night and heartbroken ol' Sackamenna ends up with the Clippers.

Which might be OK. Just hire me as the GM so I can trade away the team's talent for an over-the-hill Shaquille O'Neal and some inebriated and morbidly obese Lithuanians, and I'll suit 'em all up in eyesore tie-dye unis and change the name to the Sactown Magic Mushrooms, and when Shaq hits the court I'll have 'em blast the Temptations' classic "Psychedelic Shaq," and when Big Diesel fucks with everybody in the paint I'll see to it they crank "Ball of Confusion." Plus, Arco Arena — screw that awl-bidness poop, Sac needs to come up with a name change for that shed, so how 'bout it if I line up Switzerland's Sandoz Laboratories as a sponsor? And Sandoz Arena will serve some mighty fine Kool-Aid.

Come on out to the arena, Sacramento. We're absolutely certain you'll "dig" our product.

Anyway, getting back to those Kings unis: Gay. Totally, insanely fricking gay. And I'm not talking Tom Cruise gay, or Kenny Chesney gay, or even Rock Hudson winking at Doris Day in some 1961 Technicolor movie gay. I'm talking full-on tree full of parrots, high as a kite on wine coolers and singing songs from The Fantasticks at the top of your lungs, Liberace and Siegfried and Roy and Rob Halford re-decorate your living space to look like the Hello Kitty store gay.

(And no offense to gay people; this isn't a rant about sexual orientation, and I fully support the rights of gays to marry or live together and adopt children and do whatever it is that makes them fulfilled and happy; this rant is about aesthetics, and that kind of over-the-top nellyness that's just as silly as, say, a tough-guy Austrian muscleman governor driving a big gas-hog Hummer, and come to think of it, isn't that kinda the same as singing along with Mariah Carey while cruising down K Street past Faces in a hot-pink Chevy SSR pickup?)

Maybe that kind of gold-lamé business passes muster in the "new" Las Vegas, but any assclown who suited up in something like that back in the day would have been hooted out of town by Dino and Frank and the gang. Joey Heatherton would not have approved. Nay, even Wayne Newton would have been repelled by those uniforms, and Don Rickles would be supplied with a lifetime supply of daily insults. And Jerry Tarkanian — Tark would now be cooling his heels in Carson City waiting for Señor Sleepy the Hasta-La-Bye-Bye Needle, because he woulda taken out the whole team if they'da set foot on the hardwood wearing that shit back when the Runnin' Rebels ruled the roost.

But if Tara Reid and Paris Hilton think it's cute, what the hey? Maybe Paris can come up with some hot-pink road unis, too!

Anyway, those new Kings unis are pretty laughable. I sure hope the team plays better than they're gonna look.

Actually, I don't care. See you in Vegas, Maloofs.

Butt Load of Gerbils, explained

2005-10-06T19:33:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you've wondered why this blog is named Butt Load of Gerbils. Or, even more likely, you haven't wasted a moment's thought on why I named this blog Butt Load of Gerbils, and you could care less, and that's all right with me. Or else you think I'm one of the countless Richard Gere imitators out there (which is sad, because poor Richard is a good Buddhist who probably couldn't tell a gerbil from a chinchilla from his own rectum, and he got slagged with this horrible bit of urban mythology in the same way Rod Stewart reportedly inhaled several gallons of jizz, putatively donated by various members of members of the then-Los Angeles Rams, the UCLA Bruins and the USC Trojans, along with the members of John Wayne, Liberace, Siegfried & Roy, Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly and Merv Griffin, which was pumped out of the poor Scotsman's stomach mere moments before he might have expired from toxic splooge syndrome or something), and I named this blog Butt Load of Gerbils in reference to Gere's unfortunate victimization via urban myth. Whish isn't true, either, but if you want to believe it, that's also quite all right with me.

But I digress.

It was sometime in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, when desktop publishing was still rather primitive, and the music magazine where I was then toiling as an editor had purchased some whizbang new software that would allow us to do color composition of pages for publication. I'd been working late one night in our fabulous office suite in an industrial park out by the port, and our computer guy Phil and I got to talking about our mullet-headed national sales manager, who, we believed, was getting zigged to the eyebrows on nastyass Colombian nose candy, whereupon he would go into the publisher's office and scream his head off for up to an hour while the rest of us would cower in our cubicles and think, um, why doesn't the boss just fire this asshole?

The funny thing was that I'd known this sales-manager guy years before, when he ran a record store at a small private college in a northern California town, and I used to go there and buy promos for like 25 cents apiece and hang out with some friends and go burn some umbage occasionally behind the shrubbery before going back in to request some Little Feat or Bob Marley. It was one of those colleges you probably read about if you ever read the letters page (aka "Forum") in Penthouse magazine in the 1970s, which I happened to have read a lot — whenever I wasn't waxing the ol' telescoping bishop while looking at the pictures in said mag. You know what I'm talking about: "I'm a student at a small [Midwestern] [mid-Atlantic] [northern Californian] college, and until this past weekend I'd figured that all your letters were complete bullshit, but then something totally amazing happened to me involving two Swedish flight attendants, a bag of Michoacan's finest, a Barry White album and a family-sized bottle of Wesson salad oil, not to mention several small battery-powered vibrating objects and the neighbor's German shepherd ..."

Again, I digress.

He seemed cool then, and then a few years later I met him again when a woman I'd worked with— who was my good platonic friend even though I'd secretly harbored a massive crush on her — introduced me to this guy as her boyfriend, and I rather jealously noticed he'd morphed into a glad-handing car-salesman mutant. And then he got a job where I worked, and he started lining up all kinds of scummy quid pro quo trade-outs with all the other scummy sales weasels who work out quid pro quo deals from their jobs: "Here, I'll barter you whatever you can steal from your workplace that isn't nailed down for whatever I can beg, borrow or steal here." You know the type.

I think what broke the figurative camel's back was the Christmas party he secretly threw for the Active 20-30 Club in our office one night, which no one — the boss or anyone else at work — had any idea he was throwing, and Phil and I happened to be working late that night, so we got to be inundated by all these young adults who'd gone into culture shock once they'd graduated from college only to realize that there are no fraternities or sororities in the real world so they had to start some bullshit club where they could continue the crappy behavior patterns they'd perfected in college. It was one soupçon of assholes, or put more accurately it was an entire witches' cauldron of assholes, and we vowed we would get even.

Which we did, via the marvels of desktop publishing. The next night, a conversation about what a complete fuckstick the sales manager was soon morphed into a phony magazine cover using his smiling visage in full color, which we'd found because he'd conned one of our design staff into doing some kind of brochure for him for one of his side business ventures and said artist had stupidly left the photo in her in-basket. So we scanned it.

I named the phony magazine BLOG, which was festooned in elegant Bodoni caps over his coke-sweat-beaded forehead, and then over that type, in an italic Bodoni bold, I spelled out butt load of gerbils. As I recall, there were several headlines also, which related to various gerbil-stuffing techniques, making sales calls while having one or more gerbils surreptitiously stuffed up one's rectal cavity, and something else I can't remember now, because we'd been knocking back some brews and I think we may have roasted a bowl or three. It was the kind of lousy thing that you do when a) you've really grown to hate someone you work with because they've devolved into one unmanageably gauche motherfucker, b) you've paralyzed whatever social impulse you might have — which, ordinarily, should keep you from making up stuff like butt load of gerbils magazine — with polio weed and many beers and c) you have the technology to make your bad judgment a reality.

I kept the cover in my desk drawer with all the fake memos I'd made up and faxed to various record companies and trade magazines, most of which had to do with the idea that all the major record labels would eventually merge into one big company that I called MTV Omnivox (which prompted one of my label publicist friends to label me "psychic" years later, but I wasn't really psychic, I was merely kinda buzzed to the point where I could see the inevitability of one big monolithic company putting out nothing but shitty cookie-monster metal band and Ashlee Simpson records), and we would pull the memos and the fake magazine covers out once in a while and chuckle over them while igniting a pipeload.

Years later, when the pop-culture phenomenon "weblog" got shortened to "blog," and I decided to start my own so that I had a post-weekly paper outlet for writing, I remembered our little (actually, large and working on morbidly obese) sales buddy when I was looking for a name for my blog. Ergo, Butt Load of Gerbils.

And, um, as for those lovely ladies pictured above, they have nothing to do with buttloads or gerbils. Apparently they're members of a Byelorussian band called Omega that plays some hotel in Bahrain. If that's what women look like in Belarus, homina homina: I'm hopping on the next flight to Minsk. Yeah, Belarus supposedly has a bellicose dictator running the show there, but he can't be any worse than the one we've got here, right?

Are we not molodoy cheloviks? We are Golfstrim!

2005-10-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Here's another one of my favorite new bands. You can tell these guys are extra wacky because at least two of them are wearing matching Daffy Duck neckties. This must be what KGB agents do to cut loose: put on Warner Bros. cartoon ties and rock the house. I'm going to see if I can find an mp3 link, because if it's anywhere as good as Noviye Ne Russkiye downthread, you know it will be tops.

Whoah, comrade! The Kool-Aid is intense!

2005-10-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

We of The New Not Russians are considering to punk rock your oblast

2005-10-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Another great music act from a place east of Berlin. It's hard to get a handle on what Noviye Ne Russkiye, or the New Not Russians, might sound like, but according to this pub photo, they claim to be an "Israeli National Pop-Punk Group," adding the caveat "Made in Israel" in case you didn't understand that bottom line. (Pointing to some kind of Israeli connection must be a uniquely Russian way of bestowing cred.)

A few other observations: The guy on the left, the one with what appears to be an Uzbek Strat copy, has mastered a new overhand fretting technique; his shirt is one of those great "Hollywood" knockoffs you can find in bazaars in places like Tijuana. Pretty depeche mode.

Even better is his Paul Shaffer-lookalike partner, who appears to be wearing a very cheap and crudely done Bart Simpson bootleg T-shirt, with the word "PUNK" appearing above Bart. The shirt is a hideous flesh-tone shade of pink. And that arm gesture is pretty punk rock, if Celine Dion's recent short Vegas hairdo qualifies her as an arbiter of "punk."

According to a line of type below and to the right of the logo at the top, this act has something to do with "Turdis Records Studio." Not a major selling point in the English-speaking world, comrades.

The track, "Pianist," sounds pretty pop-punk to these ears, if Bill Murray's old lounge singer persona learned Russian and cut some sides with an organ-grinder monkey. It's pretty great. You can download it here to czech it out for yourself.

"George, honey, you need to lay off the Maker's Mark"

2005-10-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

Looks like Preshudent Foshter Brooksh has got a real nice heat on in this photo. I mean, he looks seriously fucked up.

Poor Pickles. It's hard to prop up someone in public who's so obviously blammed. And it's hard work to get that thoroughly scribbled. Wonder if he carries a flask in his suit pocket?

More excellent Halloween costumes

2005-10-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

Attention, Comrade Ho-Dad: We are told there is some very fine surf's up in Simferopol. Rocky hula, baby! Shaking some action on the five year plan!

(Why am I making fun of Russkies? We're the ones with the retarded and corrupt Stalinist government these days.)

It's October 1. You know what that means!

2005-10-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Time to start planning that boffo Halloween costume.

Being a somewhat taciturn Scotsman, I'd been figuring I might cut loose a bit this year by doing the Celtic "Green Man" thang, but then someone reminded me that an electric green six foot seven grizzled Viking lookalike might be mistaken for the Jolly Green Giant by some of you more inebriated Halloween revelers, and if you were hungry for canned green beans or creamed corn, that it might not be the best way for the likes of yours truly to spend an otherwise promising evening, yo ho ho and all that.

So I think I'm gonna be Latvian Keyboard Lothario there instead, because Latvian Keyboard Lotharios get all the coolest chicks. Or so I am told.

Yeah, baby. Wild and crazy. "Vo-laaah-re, whoah oh ..."

Somebody stop me now

2005-09-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

Methinx I'm really starting to lose it with this Russian stuff.

I mean, just look at this guy.

My new favorite band

2005-09-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

Totally.

Imperator.

I mean, fuck yeah.

(More really great and wacky Russian band photos here.)

Now that's what I call folk music!

2005-09-30T15:45:00.000-07:00

Enough with this old funky stereotype of folk- music women with furry armpits warbling paeans to the oppressed workers of the world! The jailbait folk-music babes in Alenushka (at least that's what I think the Cyrillic lettering sez there) look nothing like the acoustic guitar-wielding weenie soft boilers of my youth.

To be painfully honest, my dear friends, this is just a pathetic attempt on my part to make a new post on a Friday afternoon to "freshen" the "content" of my "blog." I have no idea what Alenushka sounds like; for all I know, this may be a Russian version of the old Starland Vocal Band.

Which, of course, this world desperately needs. I know I do.

By the way, I found the photo via your typical happy mistake using the Google image search; it's on this really great webpage that features a bunch of Russian acts. It looks like a uniquely Russian iteration of the esteemed Hall of Douchebags site.

(Actually, now I do know what Alenushka sounds like, and you can download their smash hit here, and Buffy Saint-Marie it ain't.)

Gerbilly strange, podna

2005-09-30T00:29:00.000-07:00

Wow, that's frickin' strange. I went out tonight to see a bunch of acts at Old Ironsides in midtown Sacto, and the opening band, named Two Sheds, really knocked me out. The singer had this really nice sleepy Lucinda Williams thing going on, kinda crossed with the mumbly aspect of early Mikey Stipe from that Rapid Eyeball Movement band, and maybe a bit of a Mark Eitzel thrift store soulful quality, too. Anyway, I got home and after playing some blues tunes to the dog on my guitar, I typed twosheds into the browser, hoping to come up with a nice photo.

What I got instead was this site, which has something to do with strip clubs in Southwest Michigan. I pinched the nifty lapdance graphic from there, and there's an interview with ol' Two Sheds himself, which might have freaked me out if I wasn't so used to offbeat synchronicities, telepathic communication with dogs and flying saucers and all that.

Anyway, Two Sheds the band featured Caitlin Gutenberger on vocals, her hubby John (from Far, Milwaukee and some other cool bands) on bass, and the always amazing Rusty Miller (frontman and songwriter for Jackpot) on some very Gary Young-style drumming, along with a guitarist/keyboard player whose name I didn't catch, but I think might've been Milwaukee's Norm Wolfe. They played intuitively and sensitively, and they were the bee's knees and the cat's meow, and it's late, and I'm mumbling in three-quarters time, and I hadda write something before conking off to dreamland.

Oh, and San Francisco trio Bermuda Triangle Service featuring the lovely Cynthia Wigginton turned in a remarkable performance that ranged from Mekong Delta blues to a soporific cover of Johnny Ramone's "I Wanna Be Sedated," and then this brassy cabaret-folk singer from Victoria B.C. named Carolyn Marks, who broke a string right from jump but wowed the sparse crowd anyway, played, and then came the headliner Victoria Williams, who opened with a version of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" that I swear summoned the spirit of Bobby Burns, and all of them were epiphany-inducing, too, and this sentence is long and rambling and I'm up way past my bedtime so as Eric Cartman might say, "Screw you."

Um, really, this was one of the best across-the-board nights I've seen in a club in a while, and there was little advance press on it, so Jerry kinda took a bath on the gig. Had I known how great this show was going to be, I'da taken the day off, rented a bus, borrowed a stun gun from local law enforcement, and then I would have made the rounds of the local alfresco hipster watering holes, rounding up all those people who sit there and bitch about how there's no good music in town.

Just so y'know, there is. You merely have to get off your arses and find it.

Giacomo's greatest (s)hits, Vol. 2: Tubby the Wine Snob in "A Night on the Town"

2005-09-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

In honor of a certain former boss landing a choice new gig at a chain- owned weekly paper in one of the West Coast's larger burgs, here's a blast of total fiction with characters who may or may not have counterparts in real life, inspired by a miserable workplace experience from Giacomo's sordid past: Tubby the Wine Snob in "A Night on the Town." Enjoy.

@ @ @ @ @

On a recent Second Saturday, I had invited a writer-acquaintance of mine, a Renaissance man cum college instructor-musician named Zoroastrian Lassi, to join me in perambulating the various art galleries in midtown Sacramento, in search of fine art and wine. We were talking story, the language of writers and editors, as I navigated the midtown grid in my svelte Bordeaux red Scandinavian convertible. “Look!” I exclaimed. “There’s the Cocktail Weenies Art Gallery on 20th Street!”

Zoroastrian claimed to be in a hurry to get to some rock and roll concert at a venue called the Whiskey Factory, over on L Street. I, however, insisted upon first examining a large work of art at the Cocktail Weenies Art Gallery. The painting was a 50-yard-long neo-impressionist rendering of a hoagie, or submarine sandwich, done in oils in the style of LeRoy Neiman. Patrons of the gallery could purchase a portion of the painting by positioning a normal-sized picture frame, which the artist would mark, then remove and frame later, after the show had concluded.

I also was intrigued by a collection of airbrushed nudes of young boys, done in the style of Alberto Vargas, by a convicted child molester from Curtis Park.

And, being somewhat the foodie and oeneophile, I desired to sample the gallery’s sumptuous repast of Vienna sausages, not to mention the generous portions of box Chablis it was doling out to the many appreciative patrons.

“Come on, Tubby,” Zoroastrian was whining. “We need to get to the Whiskey Factory right now.”

I still had not selected my section of the submarine sandwich painting that I was going to purchase, however. “You’ll have to wait,” I told him. “I haven’t made my decision yet.” After a few more plastic cups of Chablis and plates of cocktail weenies, I was satisfied, and we left.

@ @ @ @ @

I happen to enjoy the company of Zoroastrian, as we both are creatives and members of the thinking class. That said, Zoroastrian’s taste in bistros remains highly suspect.

The Whiskey Factory was a shabby old dinner house just off the 21st Street commercial strip. Quite clearly, it had seen better days. The establishment thus far had managed to escape the process that has managed to transform other once-shabby dinner houses around the grid into sparkling examples of epicurean bliss, those places where you might find a stretch Hummer or two double-parked out front and, say, an action hero-turned-governor, or a bon vivant-turned-editor of a weekly paper, inside.

Judging from its menu, the Whiskey Factory appeared to specialize in overcooked cuts of meat, and the wine list was highly disappointing. And when I asked to speak with the restaurant’s sommelier, the thuggish-looking individual manning the door merely grunted.

Once inside, the red carpet, colonial-style chairs and cottage-cheese ceiling triggered a late-1960s flashback. Fortunately, a bar was nearby.

There, I recognized Jerry Perry, the editor and publisher of a local paper that writes about the town’s music scene. “Nice to see you,” I chuckled. “I’m Tubby the Wine Snob, the editor of your competition.

“Your paper sucks,” I could not resist adding, “although it’s not quite as lame as that lefty-left conspiracy-theory rag, Because Facts Don’t Matter. Too bad you don’t have anyone as smart as Jacquie Stewball writing for you.”

I was referring, of course, to my brilliant biweekly political columnist, whose columns typically begin: “I’m a registered Democrat, but I am so sick and tired of the lefty-left conspiracy theorists in my party, so instead here are this week’s Republican Party talking points courtesy of GOP Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy.”

@ @ @ @ @

I left Jerry Perry at the bar and located Zoroastrian outside, in a patio area, deep in conversation with a thin blonde woman with sharp features. “This is Jessica,” he offered as an introduction. “And this is my boss, Tubby.”

I remembered Jessica from one of Zoroastrian’s recent Nightlifer columns:

“I was listening intently to Jessica warble her renditions of atavistic, sepia-tinted Maybelle Carter and Buell Kazee songs at the café where she works,” Zoroastrian wrote in Nightlifer. “She accompanied herself haltingly on a weather-beaten dulcimer. I found myself suddenly transported back to the time of John Sutter, when the historic explorer hacked his way upriver through thick brush along the Gold Rush-era Sacramento River, looking for a site to plant the seeds of a city. And listening to the uncertain nuances in Jessica’s voice while she accompanied herself haltingly on a weather-beaten dulcimer was like plowing through that big river’s tule fog. That big river’s tule fog was coming at me in wisps. Some of those wisps from that big river’s tule fog were vaguely caressing my scrotum, until a state of halfway erect was achieved.”

Zoroastrian soon disappeared, and I went inside to look for him. A comedy troupe was finishing a skit, and I recognized one of the troupe’s members. “We’ll have to talk on Monday,” I said to her as she looked at me, mortified. “Remember what I told you about a journalist’s potential conflicts of interest?”

Then Zoroastrian appeared in the center of the stage area. He had assembled most of this city’s folk-music underbelly, many of them musicians who turn up regularly in his Nightlifer column, to perform the entire 84-song Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, in sequential order from start to finish.

Somehow Zoroastrian had bribed the Whiskey Factory’s armed security personnel to lock the front doors. A few members of the audience did not like the music. They were even more upset that they were not allowed to leave. Nevertheless, I relished the looks of dismay on their faces with particular satisfaction, and their loud but futile protests made me smirk derisively.

I was having considerable trouble locating the narrative arc of the evening, however, and the cocktails were not helping much. I also had partaken of a few puffs from a rustic-looking cigarette that one of Zoroastrian’s musician friends had proffered on the patio. “Try it,” he implored me. “It’s one o’them bona-fide Old Vagina Cheroots, just like from back in them Gold Rush days.”

I am not sure if Mark Twain had access to elephant tranquilizers in his day, but this Old Vagina Cheroot certainly packed a punch. It packed enough of a punch that I found myself examining the Whiskey Factory’s cottage-cheese ceiling from between the turned-wood legs of a colonial-style chair. This was not good.

@ @ @ @ @

According to the two angry men who had just awakened me, I had made somewhat of a spectacle of myself. Apparently, Zoroastrian had invited me on stage to duet with him on the 1927 Dock Boggs hit “Sugar Baby,” and midway through that song, I started barking and drooling. Then I curled up in a fetal position at the feet of a toothless banjo player and wet myself, much to the audience’s amusement.

And now these two men, Prick Tracy and Boy Genius, were reading me the riot act, and it was morning, and the Whiskey Factory was empty except for those two and I.

“Goddammit, Tubby, you’re fucking up the franchise,” Tracy was yelling. He did not make much sense; something about how he sent me to this goddamn cow town to run this crummy weekly into the ground so he could buy it for pennies on the dollar, and why the fuck wasn’t the goddamn newspaper in bankruptcy court yet?

The fat man, Boy Genius, was even worse. “California is an important state for us,” he snarled. “And now you’re fixing to blow the whole operation. Special Agents Weintraub and Walters nutted the rest of those liberal pussies at The Bee, and you can’t even keep a handful of hippie burnouts in line? You’re jeopardizing the important work of our combination.

“And if anything should happen,” he added, “you are sooooo fucked.”

The fat man pressed his face to mine, and I could smell stale egg-salad sandwich on his breath. “We will fuck you like you have never been fucked before,” he hissed.

I should have been scared, but I’m Tubby the Wine Snob, editor, epicurean and all-around brilliant specimen of humanity. And while most people might be ashamed when they wake up with two goons yelling at them and dried vomit on their shirt and a damp crotch, I have to admit I was feeling pretty good. I had a clean shirt hanging in the Saab, along with some cologne, and it was a new morning. And I’d been hearing the Lucky Café puts out a pretty good breakfast, and their venison sausage isn’t bad, and their wine list is fairly decent.

I was feeling lucky, so I walked outside into the morning light.

Life is good.

@ @ @ @ @

Oh, and I wish the guy the best, and nothing but success, happiness and peace. Seriously, I do. Namaste.

Oh. My. Goodness. I think I need Elvis drugs.

2005-09-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

This is just so all wrong it's not even funny.

What is it, you ask? Well, we'll just have to let the text speak for itself, now won't we?

"Granny's White Lightnin" is a country bar where it's raining on all four sides! The waitresses are dressed like Elly May but padded like Dolly Parton. The bartenders are men dressed like Granny who do bottle twirling entertainment like Tom Cruise did in the movie "Cocktail"! The entertainment includes the "fire show" which has the bartenders using Granny's 181 Proof White Lightning drawn from Granny's Still behind the bar to blow (fuel) on flaming torches.

If you've guessed that this might have something to do with the late, great Paul Henning's 1960s CBS sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, take a swig of Granny's rheumatiz' medicine and give yourself a pat on the back. Apparently, Max Baer, Jr., better known as Jethro Bodine on that sitcom, is fixing to open a casino on the site of an abandoned Wal-Mart in Carson City, Nevada. Jethro's Beverly Hills Mansion & Casino is just about the most brain-damaged concept to come down the pike in a long while.

Now, there are plenty of social retards like me who will make the trek at least once, to break bread in "Drysdale's Fancy Eatin's for the Richuns" restaurant, or nosh less formally in "Granny's Vittles & Hog Jowls Coffee Shop." I might even be persuaded to sample a pastry at "Elly May's Buns Bakery." But you'd have to be goddamn scribbled insane on biker bathtub meth, or else willfully retarded from sticking your mouth on the tailpipe of a Plymouth Duster as the result of losing the world's dumbest bar bet, to get yourself and your sweetie hitched at "Granny's Shotgun Weddin' Chapel," where eight video cameras will capture your stupidity for all posterity, good for laughs at those Jagermeister socials at your trailer park rec room for years.

Granted, Northern California and Nevada contain enough yokels, meth burnouts and other television-hypnotized dumbshits to keep a bidness like this afloat for at least a few months, and San Francisco's well-heeled snarky ironics might add a week or two to that number. But this does not seem like a surefire bet for business success.

That said, I've been proved wrong many times. And in an era where Jethro Mussolini plays dress-up dictator in the White House in Washington, perhaps it is unwise to bet against Jethro Bodine. People love this stuff, I am told, and one can look at Bush's election numbers to prove that point.

So, ahem, Mr. Limbaugh, d'ya think you can you spare a few OxyContins? Some Vicodins, perhaps? C'mon, I need a little pharmaceutical help in making sense of this country right now, and I'll bet that powerful drugs will put me in the right neoconservative frame of mind to make that happen.

Lucky 13, one day at a time

2005-09-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

As of today, it's been 13 years off the sauce. And I wasn't a charming, funny guy like that dude in the picture there. I was a wicked, vicious asshole who would get up onstage and start singing Boxcar Willie songs at your gig, or "Volare" in Italian. An idiot. A fool. Bum's rush material.

Anyway, I'm as close to my next cocktail as that guy, except the esteemed National Enquirer sez he might be knocking back the Jim Beam, and I did not drink today (this is not any kind of statement of moral superiority on my part, mind you).

Hell, if I was a president with his dismal performance record, I'd be so kneewalking hammered every night in the White House that everyone would think I'd morphed into Foster Brooks, and I'd probably be praying to the ghost of Abe Lincoln, too. In tongues.

That's probably why I'm not president.

Uh-oh. I think I may be getting censored ...

2005-09-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Can't get the gosh darned B.L.O.G. to load. Looks like this happy camper had better start kissing some major Arbusto ass, like straight away.

Isn't this the most charming bunch of folks you've ever laid your peepers on? I especially adore that fella from the Quaker Oats package there, the one standing the fourth from the right, in the blue. He looks like he might be a nice person to sit around the kitchen and play a few rounds of pinochle with.

The rest of 'em look swell, too, and not all perverted like that Slick Willie character who got that chubby Jewish girl to give him fellatio in the Oval Office, or his twisted sapphic sister of a wife, Hitlery.

Ahem, that Ann Coulter gives this old-school Barry Goldwater conservative some major wood. Whenever I think about her, it's like Pinocchio's in my pants testifying like a member of the Democratic Black Caucus, if you get my driftwood and I think you do. I'd most certainly like to bend that Ann Coulter over, show her a few of my cow-punchin' moves and make her bark like a li'l dogie. "Yee haw!" "Woof! Woof!"

I don't know what those people down in the Gulf Coast are complaining about, by the way. New Orleans will be a lot better place once Mr. Rove recruits Kenny G, the Rippingtons and Spyro Gyra to move down there and provide Grover Norquist-approved entertainment every night for well-oiled party members. The Big Easy is, after all, the Birthplace of Smooth Jazz.

I'd post more, my fellow conservatives, but I've got a Thomas Kinkade exhibit I'm curating down at the local golf and country club that I'd better get cracking on (it's a fundraiser for a very promising young neanderthal we've recruited from one of the local Buick dealerships to take Doris Matsui's seat in Congress).

Say a prayer to Supply-Side Jesus for me, mmkay?

Worse than Marcos

2005-09-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

He’s so frickin’ sorry.

He's soooo frickin' sorry.

This mea culpa ad infinitum from Emperor Chimpoleon oughta go over big with the comedy writers, and it looks like it may very well have done just that.

Y'know, I didn’t even bother to watch last week’s speech from Jackson Square in New Orleans' French Quarter; I already knew that it would be more about jabbing an armload of Team Arnold's leftover steroids into Chimpy’s sagging poll numbers that it would be about any humanitarian impulse, and that it would look like it was staged by Leni Riefenstahl, and that the usual gaggle of media chimp fluffers would be wiping fresh ejaculate off their lips from the Lower Primate In Chief and his entourage of flying monkeys afterward. “Masterful,” they would emote. And: “Isn’t this president the greatest of all presidents, and isn’t this Karl Rove-helmed cleanup the Marshall Plan that will make that other quaint Marshall Plan from the mid-20th century look puny and insignificant in comparison?”

As they say at Stalag 13: "Jawohl, Herr Kommandant."

Speaking of Karl Rove, what the fuckety fuck is this Machiavellian Klendathu brain bug doing in charge of the so-called Reconstruction (now there’s a nice companion word to go along with the chimp regime’s Mesopotamian "crusade") of N’Awlins? This nasty little piece of business should tell you all you need to know about the motives of this crew of pirates. Putting a vicious political hatchet man at the helm of what looks to be the largest domestic relief effort in history?

I mean: What? The? Fuck?

John Dean wrote a piece about these assclowns and called it “Worse than Nixon.” But I don’t think you can grasp the sheer corruption that is La Familia Crimina Arbusto with a Nixonian yardstick. One needs to look outside the U.S. borders—to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, to Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, to Jean “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, along with such beacons of democracy in the old Soviet Bloc as Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania and Enver Hoxha in Albania. This current gang of Bush cronies and G.O.P. hacks have buttraped the U.S. Treasury so bad that the smart money says this country will never recover, so why the fuck don’t we just allow Halliburton to annex it as a subsidiary and put Dick Cheney in charge already? I mean, what’s the difference between that and what we have now?

Here's a bunch of crooks that make no bones about who and what they are, aside from a few token ironic references to “democracy” from Bush Jong Il and his claque. That said, where the real tragedy exists—aside from the deaths and ruined lives on America’s Gulf Coast—is in America’s newsrooms. The media in this country have become every bit as laughable as Pravda, Izvestia and TASS were during the Soviet Union’s heyday, and that the announcement that Karl Rove was put in charge of Project New Orleans (read: Project Restored Burnished and Shining Image of Our Glorious Leader) with straight faces and somber reportage, instead of with the hyena laughs, howls of derision and unflinchingly withering commentary it deserved, ought to send you a message lit in neon: The media are not your friends. They work for the dictatorship, and if you buy the load of bullshit they are shoveling in your direction, you deserve to live under the thumb of an authoritarian chimpanzee leader.

This whole sorry episode—a government that plainly didn’t give two shits about poor black people in New Orleans and waited for Mother Nature to do her ethnic cleansing before it moved in to rebuild one of America’s cultural centers in the image of Heritage U.S.A. with frozen daiquiri machines, a negro-free playground for fraternity-lad debaucheries and other drunken Republican antics; a president who couldn’t be bothered to end his brush-clearin' and mountain-bike-ridin' vacation on his photo-op Waco pig farm, then who flew first to Arizona to eat cake with quisling Senator John McCain, then to San Diego to strum his new presidential seal-embossed acoustic gee-tar at a fundraiser with some suburb-and-western nobody, then who instructed his Air Force One pilot to fly low over the Big Uneasy and dip those wings so he could squint and play “count the floaters” on the way back home to Washington where a few of his bolder sycophants summoned up the cojones to tell him: “Um, uh, Mr., um, President, um, this New Orleans, uh, thing might turn out to be, um, a little, uh, problematic for your, um, poll numbers unless you, uh, look like you're, ahem, doing something”; and a media that acted like a real news media might for a few days, until Unka Klendathu Brain Bug Karl put in a few phone calls to the "Bush Ranger" and "Pioneer" poobahs who run General Electric, Viacom, Time Warner, Disney and, of course, that old leathery Australian Nazi windbag Rupert Murdoch, which resulted in plenty of talking heads gleefully wiping more G.O.P.-spewed jism from their collagen-inflated lips—reminded a few astute bloggers of battered-wife syndrome. Me, too. How anyone at this point can listen to anything this monkey-faced motherfucker has to say and take it even remotely seriously is something for the psychiatric community to explain, because it’s totally beyond my ken.

Bush lies. This time it will be different. We get smacked down. More lies. And we keep going back for more, like some pathetic cock-whipped housewife whose drunked-up Monday Night Football-watching fuckstick hubby has clocked her silly for the umpteenth time. I just don’t fucking understand it.

I. Just. Don't.

As for my own apologies down-thread for not writing more, I’m back. I’m making what someone might politely call a transition in my marital status, and the initial shock knocked me off my writing game. So for you one or two readers who check this space, I’ll be posting more regularly. I promise.

And that ain't an empty chimp promise, either, podna.

Impeach Jethro Mussolini

2005-09-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

In the words of Trey Parker and Matt Stone: Fuck yeah.

I'm down with that idea.

I am so deeply sorry

2005-08-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

My personal life took a complete nosedive into one of Dante's rings in the past week. I haven't been in any kind of shape to post anything here. As soon as I can get some kind of handle on my sky-diving emotional state, I will be back.

Namaste.

Jump on it

2005-08-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

Because you can never have enough Fausto Papetti album covers.

Right?

So I lied

2005-08-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Sue me.

Oh, what the hey

2005-08-23T20:44:00.000-07:00

And now for some news of rather great historic import. Found these buried gold plates under some rocks on a grassy knoll out behind my house and beyond the old trucks up on blocks, an accursed place the local rubes call Hill Cumstainah. Me and the pooch were hunting for a moonshine still that Uncle Snuffy must've abandoned when he graduated into making bathtub meth last fall. According to the dog, the plates are engraved in "reformed Egyptian," and according to him (he understands these things), this is what they say:

1 And it came to pass many summers ago that a large family from Provo town at the foot of the Wasatch range in the place formerly called Deseret, a show business family as it were, journeyeth east to Manhattan where it didst meeteth with a theatrical agent of some renown.

2 And it came to pass that the patriarch of the clan pleadeth to the agent for an audition, and the agent didst offer words of encouragement: 'Lo,' he sayeth, 'show me what thou doest well.'

3 And it came to pass that the father doth protesteth, 'Nay, tis not what I doeth solo, but this is an act that involveth mine whole family.'

4 And it came to pass that the agent, after a spell when he frowneth and complaineth about family acts, which he didst nay abide, leaneth back on his throne and sayeth, 'Alrighteth, already. Thou wilt showest me presently.'

5 And it came to pass that the family patriarch reacheth into the trousers of his tuxedo and insideth his holy temple garment and pulleth out a hose-like object, which he calleth his rod of correction, colored in the manner of flesh with a knob that appeareth not unlike a Nazi helmet, which he stroketh and manipulateth to a larger stiffness in the manner of Onan, then he spitteth on the knob before he lifteth up the dress of his young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth, and roughly shoveth aside her prim snow-white panties and buryeth the shaft in her bunghole up unto the hilt.

6 And it came to pass that his young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth squealeth with delight; she grunteth and groaneth and singeth in a loud, bell-like voice: 'I'm a little bit cun-treeeee...'

7 And it came to pass that just then the strapping brother of the young and quite beautiful daughter, who haveth pearly white teeth like his sister, swingeth across the stage in the manner of a jungle chimpanzee on a vine, and naked he was, and a stream of foul diarrhea emitteth from his bunghole in a torrent, whilst from his limp rod squirteth a stream of golden liquid, and from his mouth emitteth a voluminous projectile of reeking vomit, and in between the intermittent pulsations of reeking vomit, he singeth the words, '... and I'm a little bit rock'n'roll.'

8 And it came to pass that elder brothers of the strapping brother of the young and quite beautiful daughter who haveth pearly white teeth like his sister, four of them, emergeth onstage, naked as jaybirds they were, also, and each of them in turn sporteth an erect member, and the first brother slideth through the pooling faeces and urine and vomit and cometh to a stop stage left, and then the second brother flyeth through the air and impaleth his bunghole on the erect rod of the first brother, and then the third brother flyeth through the air and impaleth his bunghole on the erect rod of the second brother, and then the fourth brother flyeth through the air and impaleth his bunghole on the erect rod of the third brother, so that the mass of brothers resembleth a stackable plastic Fisher-Price toy for wee children.

9 And it came to pass that the mother kneeleth naked on all fours like a rutting beast, and then a large cur, of the breed Rottweiler, mounteth her from behind and pumpeth and growleth and drooleth and barketh loudly.

10 And it came to pass that the smallest child crawleth to the center of the stage, and traceth a five-pointed star in the pooling faeces and urine and reeking vomit with his bare fingers, and around that five-pointed star he draweth a circle, and then another around that, and inside those circles he draweth incantations in the letters of the language of the Hebrews, and inside the five-pointed star he draweth the face of a goat named Baphomet.

11 And it came to pass that the family patriarch, whilst he pumpeth the supple bottom of his young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth, and whilst he grabbeth her pert but developing breasts, intoneth an urgent request to the lords of the darkness: 'Summun, Bukmun, Umyun. Gnaubadoo yabadoo oohpoohpahdoo. Ph'nglui mgwl'nafh Cthulhu R'yleh wgah'nagl fhtagn!'

12 And it came to pass that the four brothers uncoupleth from their unholy union, and then they then smeareth faeces on their faces, black-face as in the manner of Al Jolson, and then breaketh into song; with a medley of Mills Brothers numbers they serenedeth the patriarch whilst he pumpeth the supple bottom of his young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth, and whilst he grabbeth her pert but developing breasts: 'Glow Worm,' they singeth, then 'Daddy's Little Girl,' then 'You Always Hurt the One You Love.'

13 And it came to pass that there was a Great Rumble and a Flashing of the Firmaments and a Great Smoke, and out of that Smoke emergeth two personages: A taller one by the name of Joseph, and a shorter one by the name of Brigham.

14 And it came to pass that these holy personages kneeleth on either side of the young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth, and they inserteth their rods of correction, one unto each ear, whilst a large goat-headed man emergeth from the center of the Baphomet circle on the floor, and he inserteth his rod of correction unto the moist mouth of the young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth.

15 And it came to pass that there was a large explosion, and then darkness and smoke, and then when the lights cometh back on, the room and all the personages in it were drencheth in much ejaculated seed and chaotic strings of radiant jism. And it was good.

16 And it came to pass that the agent, after a brief moment of quietude, inquireth, 'What callest thou thine act?'

17 And it came to pass that the family patriarch, his rod of correction still buried hilt-deep in the supple bottom of his young and quite beautiful daughter with the teeth that sparkleth, snappeth his fingers, and uttereth, 'Why, the Aristocrats!'

Oh, what the hey. It was a funny movie. If you haven't seen it, go.

A man walks into his agent's office

2005-08-22T21:41:00.000-07:00

Saw this movie last night with the wife. I laughed. I laughed louder. She got mortified. She moved. I thought she'd left, and missed all the good jokes. Still, I kept laughing.

So today I wrote my own version of the joke. I posted it here. I had second thoughts. I pulled it. I had third thoughts, and posted it upthread.

(Dunno what I was worried about; this blog isn't exactly high traffic.)

Another weekend gone, baby, gone

2005-08-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's Sunday night and I'm sitting here listening to Bob Dylan. I've been on kind of a total Bob Dylan tear lately; I figured that it might be good to assimilate the first six studio albums (Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin', Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited) before getting into Blonde on Blonde, the latter of which I own a copy but it's the one with the truncated version of "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" at the end, and I haven't gotten round to picking up the newer, remastered version. Dunno why I'm doing this Dylan intensive; maybe it's the whole Cindy Sheehan in Crawford thing, with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove and the rest of what ol' Bob nailed on "Masters of War" off his third album slithering about the body politic.

At any rate, those albums are great to listen to while riding through suburban streets or on our city's American River bike trail; I have all six of them on my portable mp3 player. I rode up to Fair Oaks yesterday on the trail, and then down to Old Sacramento and over the river to West Sacramento's Raley Field this evening, all the while listening to various Dylan albums.

They're not wholly unfamiliar; I've been listening to Dylan over the years, but I was never all obsessive over Dylan the way I was over the Beach Boys, or the Beatles, or even the Kinks or the Stones. For some weird reason, now it seems important to hear and understand these albums in context, and to imagine what it must have been like for people to hear them for the first time, and to consider their influence and impact. Here we are in the middle of a stupid war again, with servicemen and women coming home in caskets, and a bunch of arrogant pricks who are unwilling to even answer a mother's simple questions: What noble cause did Casey Sheehan die for, Emperor Jethro Mussolini? And if that cause is, as you say, so bloody "noble," why aren't Barbara and Jenna in uniform in Iraq fighting for that noble cause? And why aren't Jeb's boys George and Jeb Jr. and his daughter Nicole over there fighting for that noble cause? And why aren't Rumsfeld's kids or Cheney's kids or any of these other pussyass chickenhawk Republican motherfuckers' kids over there figthing in your noble war?

There's a simple, two-word bumpersticker I'd like to put on my truck, but I haven't been driving it much lately.

REPUBLICAN? ENLIST!

But I digress. I used to be the arts editor at the local weekly, and the current editor, who'd originally hired me then stepped aside when the guy who made my life miserable for four years took the job, reminded me the other day of a story I'd pitched in our Monday meetings last summer: I wanted to drive two counties over to a Solano County town, about a half-hour southwest of here, and write a story on the mother of a dead soldier who was appearing in MoveOn.com's then-new online ad campaign. My editor at the time shot it down, probably because it wasn't in sync with the talking points that we figured he was getting every week from RNC central. The mother's name, of course, was Cindy Sheehan. I'm not sure why I still get pissed off about all the good ideas I had that got shot down by that no-necked jackass, and, believe me, I work and work some more at letting go. But still the vitriol comes up occasionally.

So now I ride my bicycle and listen to lots and lots of Bob Dylan, along with Deathray (whose new album I will be reviewing in this space this week, I promise). The American River is a great place to think this time of year, during that hot, dying part of summer before autumn that the Chinese think of as a fifth season. The artwork above captures it beautifully; it's a landscape in pastels titled American River Summer by a local artist named Terry Pappas that I copied from the website of the Elliot Fouts Gallery in East Sacramento, the gallery that represents Ms. Pappas.

Oh, and no more Fausto Papetti covers, at least for a while.

My semi-ridiculous Fausto Papetti obsession

2005-08-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed some of the album graphics I've used to spice up Butt Load of Gerbils to give it more "pizzazz." You, that is, the one or three people who actually bother to read my daily dispatches, might be thinking that I am kind of obsessed with the covers of albums by a certain Italian sax player from the 1970s and 1980s.

In a way, you would be right. Let me explain.

I used to work for Tower Records, back when that chain stocked mostly vinyl LPs. (I worked in Tower's corporate office for about 15 years after that, editing a monthly mag called Pulse!, and writing a monthly column for it called "Spins.")

When I worked in the record store, I used to order records for the international section. This was before the world-music explosion of the mid-1980s, and most of the albums had really cheesy cover graphics. Some of the cheesiest came from Italy, the the best of those were the Durium label Raccolta series by saxophonist Fausto Papetti and the EMI Italia Sax Club series by saxophonist Gil Ventura.

If I was bored and needed a quick woody to rescue me from my doldrums, I'd venture over to the Italy section and thumb through the records. The covers were a joke among me and my co-workers, and a few of us took to playing them in the store just to piss off the church ladies and angry feminist types:

"You have a picture of a naked woman on display in your store! Please take it down now!"

"I'm sorry; I cannot do that. That record is playing right now, and people need to know what record is playing in case they want to purchase a copy."

Dunno if we ever sold any. The music sounded like porno-soundtrack funk-jazz, with the kind of stinky Euro flavoring (as in limburger) that made it even better. From a utility standpoint, it was probably used to seduce half-drunk and coked-up cocktail waitresses at the end of their shifts by oily Euro-lotharios who couldn't get laid any other way. (There's a Ben Webster record on Verve, Ben With Strings or something like that, that works much better, and not just with coked-up cocktail waitresses.)

So when I started this blog last week, and I needed some images to hang on the wall, I went to my friend Mr. Google and found some of those great Fausto Papetti images I'd remembered. Unfortunately, there are few Gil Ventura images to be found, which is a shame: The most erotic of those featured a naked girl-woman lying in the surf, diddling herself with her hand. She had the most otherworldly, orgasmic expression on her face, too. When I was a young record-store clerk, it would surely give me wood. I'd post it here if I could find it. But Mr. Papetti's fine covers will have to suffice ... for now.

27a Raccolta

2005-08-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sono un pervertito. No, non un pervertito reale, ma se chiedeste un battitore della bibbia sulla via che cosa ha pensato alla mia fissazione con le coperture dell'album di Fausto Papetti, lui vi direbbe che fossi un pervertito.

Le mie scuse per non avere alcun testo scritto all'alberino qui, in modo da io invieremo un'altra costruzione che induce la copertura dell'album di Fausto Papetti preferibilmente. Gradite?

Sir Mix-A-Lot, where are you?

2005-08-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

Nike's new advert campaign for the fall.

Right on, Daddy-O. I can totally get behind that. Can't wait to see that on billboards, and the rear-enders that ensue on the nation's freeways.

Why I am a conservative

2005-08-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

There will be a lengthy and, like, rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly rilly and thoroughly profound explanation of why I'm totally down with Bill O'Falafel and Sean Insanity and Amphetamine Annie Coulter. It's coming, mark my words. I sucked down the entire contents of that vial in the refrigerator from Sandoz Laboratories marked "D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Tartrate (25)," I popped a few OxyContins I got via mail order from the Rush Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, and I knocked back a few shots of black-market absinthe I obtained from some fervent anti-communist confederates in Belarus. I even fired up a Macanudo, hoping that the smell of burning tobacco would ignite the spirits of conservative saints long dead.

As soon as I see a few trails, and definitely when I start hallucinating my butt off, I should be lucid enough to explain why George W. Bush is a genius for our time, why the war in Iraq is a really good idea, why Halliburton should have a blank cheque from the U.S. Treasury, why the Project for a New American Century is a brilliant plan for our future, why global warming is a myth, why God designed and built our universe in six days and on the seventh day He went bike riding with Lance Armstrong, and why Supply-Side Jesus is coming back and boy is He pissed as punch at you liberal malcontents.

When the Vitamin-L kicks in, I'll make modern conservatism really easy for all of you to understand. I promise.

@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @

We were somewhere around Kennebunkport when the Kool-Aid began to take hold. I remember saying something to my sommelier, or maybe it was that Supreme Court Justice I rented at the Party headquarters, and then suddenly the air was filled with the roar of a thousand locusts or bats or perhaps they were demon-seed flying jumbo shrimp spontaneously generated by the tentacles of Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth having wild Old One sex and the flying objects buzzed and sputtered like mutant fireflies. I swatted them away as best I could with what was left of P.J. O'Rourke's latest screed, having used a number of the now-missing pages of it for toilet paper, but I got caught up, like, checking out all the groovy trails, yeah, I mean they were like rilly colourful and arresting and I couldn't stock looping at them and ten eye laws control of the Hummer hum hum off into space, man, space feels really good, like stars and blue black space and become one with the stars and spain portugal espana sverige magyarorszag hrvatska moldova rossiya eesti suomi latvija lituen. Misr.Yisrael. Nippon chuo chew on this, mo. Fo.

Hae the fook was John Galt, anywae?

(To be perfectly honest here, I think labels like "conservative" and "liberal," not to mention defining one's self as one or the other, are unnecessarily limiting and divisive.)

The King is still gone

2005-08-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

It was 28 years ago today that Elvis Aron Presley fell off his toilet in the shag carpeted sanctum sanctorum of his second-floor bathroom at Graceland and achieved immortality.

Actually, that immortality morphed into a kind of pop-culture ignominy: The erstwhile Adonis with a guitar, gone fat and stupid on fried banana sandwiches and prescription painkillers, then squeezed like sausage into a sequined jumpsuit and shoved out onto a stage at the International Hotel (now the Hilton) in Las Vegas in an opiated stupor: "Well. Well well well well well. Well well well. Lemme have a drink of water ..."

But where I come from, we worshiped The King, and we still do. And not just the electrifying Sun sides and the first vivid records he cut for RCA, but even some of the crummy tunes he cut for all those movies in the 1960s, songs with titles like "Rock a-Hula Baby" and "Do the Clam" and "Viva Las Vegas" and "Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce" and "(There's) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car." And a few of us are old enough to recall that NBC special in the late fall of 1968, when The King came out onstage dressed neck to toe in black leather. "If you're looking for trouble," he growled, "you've come to the right place." And he meant it.

Once this writer, in angst over a busted relationship or the looming draft and the Vietnam War or teenage life in general, tried to induce mental retardation in himself by watching as much of a three-day weekend marathon of Elvis movies on KTXL Channel 40. It worked to some degree, as anyone who's ever sat all the way through Harum Scarum or Change of Habit can attest.

Which brings us to that fateful day in the late summer of 1977. I'd been at the dentist getting a root canal, and in preparation for that grim ordeal, I'd given myself a little pharmaceutical cushion. Nothing spectacular, mind you: four or five blue Valiums, a Percodan, a couple of Codienes, a few shots of Jim Beam and a joint of what passed for pretty good weed in the 1970s. Hell, I'd bet money The King would have done the same thing.

My new dentist was pretty cool; he let me come in an hour early and sit in a big chair with a mask that pumped my thobbing skull full of nitrous oxide that, along with all the other stuff I'd ingested, sent me tripping off to a really cool place. I think the girls in the office there felt sorry for me, because my previous dentist had been like that Laurence Olivier character in the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man; he'd hung creepy clown paintings up all over his office that he'd painted himself, and he played Dixieland jazz records really really loud and he didn't use nearly enough anesthetic; imagine your dentist leering at you as he presses the drill through your mouthmeat to your jawbone and you scream "Aaaaaargh! Nooooo! The pain! The pain!" as he cranks the knob on his stereo and snaps his stubby fingers and sez: "Man, that Firehouse Five + Two is a moving outfit, baby!"

So in my nitrous haze, I heard something about "Elvis" and "drugs" jump out of a news report on the radio, but I was so far into the ozone that it really didn't register.

I'd forgotten that I had to go to work, which my then-girlfriend reminded me when I poured into the passenger seat of her car when she picked me up at the dentist's office and mumbled, "Uh, get me home in time for Ultraman." At the time, I was clerking at Tower Records in Stockton, California, and my shift was supposed to start at three, and I was a half-hour late. When I walked in the door, or stumbled as it were, the person behind the counter bluntly told me that I was on cash-register duty until six, then high-tailed it out the door.

I soon learned why. The store seemed a bit packed, and there was something strange going on. I focused my eyes on the people standing at the counter, and they all seemed like they had some form of Down's Syndrome, and they were all tightly clutching Elvis records. "Love Me Tender" was playing softly in the background. I took a quick visual scan around the store, and everyone there seemed to be, well, mentally retarded, to be politically incorrect about it, and many of them were weeping rather loudly and disconsolately. I asked the guy in front of me, whose Elvis soundtrack to Clambake I was about to ring up, what the heck was going on.

"Elvis is dead!" he barked.

The following three days were a blur. We got cleaned out of Elvis records rather quickly, and I remember patiently explaining that just because a person dies, that doesn't mean you can't buy their records anymore; that most likely the RCA factory in Indianapolis was working around the clock to press new Elvis records to meet demand, because the Colonel was not about to miss out on this big-ass payday. At one point a couple of us took Victor Elvis, a serious fan who used to hang out in the store and demand that we pay homage to The King by playing nothing but Elvis, down to Dok Shoons, a local Armenian hot-dog joint, and we bought him a foot-long and talked with him. It was hard to console a fan whose love for The King ran that deeply. But we understood.

It was a month or so later that I knew that Victor was going to be OK. He came into the store wearing new white Angel's Flights, and he insisted we hoist his five-foot, 250-pound frame up on the counter and that we put on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever and turn it up so he could disco down and show everybody his new moves.

Then came the years of Elvis as laughingstock. The King soon became the butt of jokes for every terminally unfunny, limp-dicked comic who ever shamed a stage at a Ramada Inn lounge trolling drunken fertilizer salesmen for cheap laughs, and his name was invoked by morning zoo morons on chain-operated radio stations across the country. "Lemme have 'nutha sammich," the fools would slur, too stupid to realize that it was a revolution started in Memphis by the very hepcat they ridiculed that made it possible for them to spout their inanities in the first place. Of course, being in radio, they were way too intellectually hampered to comprehend the irony.

Funny thing, but I still think about The King, even today. It's pretty convenient to snark on him like he was some stupid hillbilly who got famous for no reason, but if you go back and watch old footage of Elvis, especially from his Sun Records days, you can figure out pretty quickly what all the hoopla was about. The man had the moment. He grabbed those bolts of lightning from Zeus on the mountain and hurled them at us lowly mortals down on the plain. He wasn't some bullshit creation of a bunch of bored record-company flacks and radio weasels and marketing monkeys. No, Elvis was the real deal.

It's easy in 2005 to forget that fact, because Elvis made a bunch of spectacularly crappy movies, then after a brief Indian summer comeback of Memphis-style secular gospel, he got fat and stoned and he fell off his potty upstairs at Graceland reading a book of Kama Sutra positions while trying to squeeze out an honest dump, which I'm told is hard for serious abusers of opiates.

Elvis died alone. Nevertheless, what was great about him still lives. Rest in peace, King.

Giacomo's greatest (s)hits, vol. 1

2005-08-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

It's taking me a little longer than I thought it would to get up to speed. Last week I launched this blog to try to get back into practice as a writer, figuring the discipline of posting every day might get me back into a solid Jimmy Smith groove. Unfortunately, it's been an exercise akin to turning the engine over in an old car with half a crankcase of oil on a cold morning.

So here's a blast from the past. I used to be the arts editor at a weekly paper, and at one point I'd tossed off a bunch of ideas for TV shows I'd like to see, thinking maybe I'd pimp it into a cover story. Unfortunately, the paper's former editor in chief, a man whom some of us used to like to cruelly refer to as "Tubby the Wine Snob" behind his back (if you'da had to deal with him on a day-to-day basis, you'd have been making up mean nicknames for him, too), no doubt would have bowdlerized my piece, so rather than go through the ego-destroying ordeal of a King Tubby edit that would have resulted in something about as funny as, oh, a Jill Stewart hagiography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I filed it away.

Some of these items will be a bit dated, but here they are, anyway ...

If I could program a network, this would be what you would see:

Kinda Like, Um, Legal, Y’Know? When Olson twins Mary-Kate and Ashley turn 18, mentor Paris Hilton hooks up with them on camera to teach them the ins-and-outs of La Dolce vita, B-list style. Camera crews follow them along a champagne-fueled, wreckage-strewn path through the various haunts of the idle rich, from Beverly Hills to the French Riviera, while les filles Olson learn the nuances of celebrity dissipation and conspicuous consumption, with guest appearances by Tara Reid and Christina Aguilera. The girls also deal with the lecherous advances of Tommy Lee, Kid Rock and other jailbait poachers from the buttrock pantheon. “Yo! Em-Kay! Ashley! Let’s have a three-way!” Shannen Doherty’s ex-hubby guests as a freelance cinematographer.

Strung-Out Eye for the Straight Guy A rotating cast, including Keith Richards, Scott Weiland and Courtney Love, with an occasional guest spot from Mr. Talent on Loan From OxyContin himself, Rush Limbaugh, tip clueless straight males off to the finer points of scoring, um, prescription painkillers in downmarket areas of town, juggling the various Dr. Feelgood-types and maintaining that massive buzz while in the presence of “the man.” Salient aspects of junkie cool are stressed, from the deadpan detachment of the late William S. Burroughs to the charming but rambling incoherence of Keef to the euphoric ebullience of Limbaugh’s recent radio performances—which these days often sound like Robin Williams on a speedball high channeling the Looney Tunes spirit of Mel Blanc.

Emo Survivor MTV’s The Real World meets Survivor with a new wrinkle. Stranding a bunch of craven social climbers on a desert island is so passé; this show posits that might be far cooler to lock two competing tribes, made up of postmodern crybaby singer-songwriters, together in a suburban McMansion. When they’re not foisting horrible songs on each other, cast members tend to be curled up in a fetal position in one of the bathrooms or busy burning mix CDs for ex-girlfriends on one of the conspicuously placed Apple computers. Various members are voted off each week in an angst-ridden tribal meeting; when a final four members are left, they compete for $1 million in an open mic night of the damned.

Cadillac: Breakdance Hip-hop entrepreneurs get busy on a marketing campaign to remake—or “remix”—the General Motors flagship marque’s image from its currently effective but cluelessly Caucasian Led Zeppelin-driven “Breakthrough” campaign to something with more serious bling, sicker beats and doper visuals. It’s MTV Cribs on wheels, with guest commentary from P. Diddy, Shaq, Rasheed Wallace, Snoop Dawg and others, who expound on everything from the deep cultural semiotics of the Caddy crest as a universal symbol of upwardly mobile aspiration to the design of Cadillac’s top-selling Escalade SUV. At the end of each episode, key executives from various German luxury automakers harshly critique their efforts.

It’s Not Crossfire, It’s Happy Hour! Right-wing shoutfests may be a staple of cable news channels, but once you’ve seen Chris Matthews spraying spittle in a moment of Howard Dean-induced apoplexy while the usual administration tools serve up the latest PNAC talking points, it’s all downhill. Happy Hour freshens the formula with a twist of lemon, adding copious amounts of top-shelf alcoholic beverages into the mix. Policy wonks from Washington think tanks get lubed up and start barking and snarling at each other; the action ultimately devolves into fistfights and projectile vomiting. Meanwhile, a miniskirt-clad pundit with long blonde hair and a prominent Adam’s apple gets an erection and chases pasty bowtie-wearing administration mouthpieces into a nearby broom closet.

Thrift-Store Roadshow A traveling troupe of flamboyant appraisers goes from town to town, and people show up to learn the inherent fabulousness of various knickknacks, tchotchkes and gewgaws they’ve acquired at thrift stores, garage sales and such freestyle-retail lodestones as Jim Denio’s Farmers Market in Roseville, Calif. The show’s trajectory from week to week is difficult to predict; while big cities with a prominent media presence tend to attract a snarkily urbane audience with an arch appreciation of low kitsch, the cultural backwaters lure in an uncanny number of methamphetamine-damaged casualties pushing shopping carts loaded with old Squirt bottles and Franklin Mint items ordered from ads in supermarket tabloids.

Assholes! Sitcom based in a Vegas coffeehouse where it’s Frank and Dino’s world and everybody else just lives in it. Think Friends meets Swingers, which is to say that instead of two trios—one made up of slightly anorexic/neurotic women and the other of borderline doofy guys—playing mix ’n’ match, the women here hew to a slightly more buxom and less intellectual stereotype along the lines of Anna Nicole Smith, while the men exude the beery frat-boy insouciance of Jimmy Kimmel. Dynamic tension exists as a pull between Ocean’s Eleven, the apotheosis of Vegas “hep” culture, and a more rococo Sin City aesthetic as popularly expressed by the late Liberace, Siegfried & Roy and Michael Jackson.

¡Mi codo está loco como una langosta apasionada! Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell hosts an English-language version of the popular Mexican surrealist variety show, whose title translates roughly as “My Elbow Is Crazy Like a Passionate Lobster.” Barely coherent L.A. scenesters compete to lick motor oil and barbecue sauce off specialist undergarment-clad strippers in a sandbox crawling with live scorpions, while marginally competent community theater actors recreate highlights from old ABC Afterschool Specials and a clown taunts the audience with a Sousaphone. When everything flies apart, which is often, the show falls back on a comedic formula developed by Mexican showbiz icon Colina del Benny (known north of the border as Benny Hill), which essentially consists of titas grandes, titas más grandes y titas más enormes.

Politically Incorrect SportsCenter with Michael Savage Slipping dedicated conservative commentators into established sports shows is often a recipe for fiasco. But there exists a sizable contingent of sporting enthusiasts and other couch potatoes who don’t want any liberal media types messing with their enjoyment of sports; who, in fact, would like to hear their color commentary flavored with plenty of megaditto-worthy spice. On P.I. SportsCenter, conservative sports fans can tune in to 100-percent red meat, liberal-pussy-free commentary. Here, noted radio pundits from the right wing of the dial can say stuff like “Look at that mud monkey go!” without fear of repercussion, and can speculate freely on a number of previously verboten topics: Like, who are the major homos in sport, and are the Mogambo smart enough to coach or play quarterback in the NFL?

It's a Dog-Lick-Dog World It’s no secret in the strange world of pet worship that there’s a seriously Sapphic side to dog ownership. And when lesbian dog owners come into conflict with the type of hair-trigger, tinfoil-hat conservatives who own kennels and breed pit-bull terriers and Rottweilers, you know the result will be laughs and fun for the whole family. In the first episode, when dog-trainer Bob claims that Camille’s Portuguese water pooch has a predilection for “licking tuna,” framing it as “if you know what I mean and I think you do,” Camille’s response, involving a large-caliber firearm, surprises everyone. So it goes with this swell new offering. Melissa Etheridge and Rosie O’Donnell do cameos as an English sheepdog and bull mastiff, respectively.

A Volvoload of Liberals A bicycle-riding political columnist at an alternative weekly paper gets into a rhubarb with his co-housing mates after he whips up a Central American peasant dish that contains lard in cookware the house has specially designated as vegan. An inverted-roles couple patiently explains to their teenaged sociopath son that a neighbor’s child is differently abled and intellectually challenged, not a “drooling retard,” while the son ignores them and masturbates to pictures in a laddie magazine. A group meeting to decide how the community members should properly integrate celebrations of Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and the Pagan Winter Solstice deteriorates into flying mugs of herbal tea and plates of tofu cake, while Robert’s Rules of Order is denounced as patriarchal balderdash. Do you find this sort of thing funny? This should be your kind of show.

Ken Burns’ Smooth Jazz A seven-part narrative arc traces the development of this important musical genre, as only documentary filmmaker Ken Burns can. From the form’s seminal era in the 1970s, when musicians parlayed recording sessions on Steely Dan cuts into major-label license to cut water-treading two-star funk records, to the current crop of blow-dried smooth jazz stars, Burns gets the lowdown on what makes business jazz, or bizjazz, so darned smooth. An entire installment is devoted to the Church of Scientology and its avatar L. Ron Hubbard, a major influence on the genre who developed the tone scale so important to bizjazzers. Barry Manilow, whose 1988 Swing Street album pointed the way to the place “where the jazz cats hang out,” is interviewed on the genius of Kenny G, and the sparks of inspiration behind such core genre acts as Spyro Gyra, the Rippingtons and others are also explored.

America’s Dumbest Cops Anyone who’s seen the Fox shows Cops and America’s Dumbest Criminals has probably asked this question at some point: What’s the difference? This very funny show delineates the often-subtle gradations between the two. To be fair, most cops are consummate professionals who deal gracefully with stressful situations every day. But not every backwoods sheriff’s department has the resources to hire these reasonably intelligent professionals, and so a number of fundamentally stupid, ignorant and/or completely psychotic subhumans manage to make the cut. Put a pistol in their holster, pin a badge to their chest and put them behind the wheel of an obese American-made sedan with a large-displacement V8, and you have the makings of trouble—and a highly entertaining “reality TV” series. Donuts not included.

Baby Got Back! Nothin’ but butts, butts and mo’ butts on this celebration of the female gluteus maximus and its influence on popular culture. From thousands of gratuitous butt shots to bootylicious jamz on a funk tip (including plenty of Miami bass joints) to interviews with posterior-minded laddies and segments on the derriere-influenced design sense that shaped the rear ends of bulbous 1950s cars, Baby Got Back! is upfront about one thing: It’s what’s in the boot that counts. Even such august characters as California’s current governor give a hearty thumb’s up to fine tush: “Jawohl,” he said, “I haff alvays been an ass man!” Dig it: must-see TV for serious butt fans.

VH-1 Heroes of Dixieland, starring Beck Rock artist Beck Hansen, grandson of 1960s Fluxus artist Al Hansen, approaches the ongoing revival of traditional jazz forms as a situationist prank. A continuum is established, from the music’s “whorehouse” and “gin mill” origins with Kid Ory, Bix Beiderbecke and, of course, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, to such latter-day “mouldy fig” expressionists as Peanuts Hucko, Turk Murphy, Wild Bill Davison and assorted Caucasian dentist ensembles from Pasadena. A fundamental existential question is posed: Why would the least rhythmic members of a society attempt to recreate music whose sophisticated syncopation demands much more than the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time: Ergo, an informed “prankster” thesis.

Wingnutz! Program director Chuck Lunchable is a man with a mission: To forge a fresh, exciting programming mix at his charge, KKRP in Sacramento, the new Clear Channel analogue to WKRP in Cincinnati—where “crossover”-minded country music is served up with right-thinking political commentary and stock-car race results. He lives and breathes the format, but a nasty divorce settlement has forced Chuck into a roommate situation with Joshua Bonger, a Green Party organizer from Humboldt County whose idea of comedy is affixing a “global warmer” bumper sticker to KKRP’s new Hummer. When a famished Chuck mistakenly chows down on an entire pan of Joshua’s famous brownies before an important GOP fundraiser, all heck breaks loose.

Talk of the Raider Nation Public affairs programming gets a startling makeover when America’s most cognitively impaired sports fans weigh in on current events, scientific innovation and popular culture. You think the smackdowns on Hardball and Crossfire are gauche? Watch what happens when Raider Fan gets a chance to cross-examine such guests as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. See Rumsfeld visibly boil over when Raider Fan calls him a “total pussy” for not nuking Baghdad. Hear two Raider fans grapple with concepts beyond their ken, like gravity, or breathing. Watch Sen. Ken Stabler (R-NASCAR) cold-cock Ann Coulter for interrupting him while he’s explaining the concept of “whupass.” The surprise smash hit of the Sunday-morning chatfests.

Bulent Ecevit Is Alive and Living in the Restroom of an Istanbul Taco Bell What happens when a 78-year-old prime minister of a large secular republic in the Middle East is run out of office by Islamic fanatics? In this case, he makes a run for the border—the Taco Bell border, that is. Yes, the deposed prime minister in the bathroom of the fast-food restaurant is a common fall-back for comedy writers who cannot come up with anything more original, and this is nothing more than a slightly more exotic knockoff of last season’s surprise hit, Tony Blair Is Alive and Hanging Out in the Loo at Wimpy’s. Nevertheless, the series may be the first Turkish comedy to be aired on American network TV, and that has to be good for something.

Cable-Access Idol With Brian Dunkelman It was a sad day in TV when major co-host talent Dunkelman got booted off the Fox hit foisting mechanism American Idol after one season. The brilliantly talented host needed a new venue to showcase his rapier-like wit, and this show—where a team of disgruntled software engineers drink beer all day and monitor local cable-access talent shows looking for tomorrow’s stars—seemed like a better fit than the new Texas Prison Lottery game show Wheel of Misfortune. The assorted mutants who make it onto the show are vastly more entertaining than the karaoke androids of American Idol, anyway. English producer/convicted lad molester Jonathan King, disco singer Evelyn “Champagne” King and schlock producer Walter “no one alive can produce my name” Afanasieff are the judges.

Ooh! That Was Pretty Funny, Eh? Parental warning: Canadian content ahead. Yes, it’s “humour,” as only our lovable Canuck friends can deliver it, in this weekly collection of home video shorts from the Great White North. See drunken Canadians meet certain death while attempting old Roddy Piper moves on unamused grizzlies. Watch inebriated Canadians heckle a pathetic buttrock band for botching cover versions of forgotten Triumph and Bachman-Turner Overdrive hits in dive Calgary saloons, and observe the buttrock band’s drummer attempt to settle the score with a hockey stick. Listen to two sloshed Canadians berate each other at closing time: “You thought you were going to get laid tonight but you’re not, eh?” “Ya, well, screw you too, eh?” Legendary Canadian country singer Stompin’ Tom Connors hosts.

The General Electric Propaganda Hour with Jay Leno After Ol’ Lantern Jaw blew his credibility as a nonpartisan talk-show host by openly shilling for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s opportunistic run for governor of California, network bosses were in a quandary. What to do? Fortunately, Tim Russert had been opening some Bush-Cheney “Pioneer” fundraisers with his wild stand-up comedy act, so moving him into the old Johnny Carson chair was a natural. Doritos pitchman Leno was slotted into a new Sunday-morning program, on which Bush administration and Republican Party officials can present important information to the American public without any critical journalistic filters. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to guest as the Ed McMahon-style sidekick when his new job will allow him to get away.

Ibn Hueghin’s Heroes That wacky gang at Guantanamo Bay is up to no good—hijinks, that is! Pity poor Sgt. Toby Keith Doltz, a morbidly obese guard from Texas, who is charged to guard the motley crew in Freedom Stalag 13. Hassan ibn Hueghin, a colonel in the Iraqi Republican Guard, emerges as the leader of this cool crew of hashish-peddling, game-running, whore-mongering infidels, which includes an Algerian ballistics expert named Frenchy, a Newark, N.J. liquor store owner named Dixon Ali and a goofball Pakistani pimp named Khartour Khan. Various Bush administration officials appear in cameo roles as General Burkholtzer, Major Hochstetter and others.

Beats Happening Two nondescript computer nerds, hired by a new office complex to install and fine tune a fully automated foreground sonic environment, begin tinkering with the house mix. At first, the vestigial beats and subliminal Clintonian exhortations to “free your ass and your mind will follow” slip by the strait-laced business types, although a few cube farmers begin to catch wise. Then, during a bold Friday gambit in which the office water coolers are spiked with MDMA, the duo emerges as MC Toasty Toast and DJ Butt Scientist, and a thoroughly weird and libertine new office culture begins to flower. Corporate efficiency experts are not amused, but the drones seem to like it. Much mirth and furtive under-cubicle sexual escapades follow.

Dude! Sammy Hagar Wants to Sell You a New Pontiac! The absolute bottom of the barrel in cheap reality-show programming. Former Montrose and Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar lands a gig selling Pontiacs. Every week, the camera catches Hagar laying an extreme hard sell on some poor unsuspecting customer, and each new episode features a different guest guitarist. “Dude! If Steve Vai pops out of the back of this Aztek and plays a rippin’ solo right now, can I get you to sign the paperwork?” From such well-known fretboard wankers as Vai, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen and Ronnie Montrose to lesser-known stars from the Odin-worshiping Norwegian and Swedish black-metal underground acts, Dude! is set up to function as a full-employment act for displaced heavy-metal riff merchants.

(Oh, and any of you high-powered film or TV execs who read this and like it and want to pay me biggum bux to scribble my high concepts on cocktail napkins, you can contact me through this blog.)

Sorry, I'm totally lazy

2005-08-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

Nothing today. Acted as a judge at a battle of the teen bands (20 of 'em; at least 10 had cookie-monster vocals) and came home and ate some chicken fried rice. Didn't even read the paper or watch TV. Ergo, me = toast.

Smell the C-Love. Okay, don't!

2005-08-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

You know, you really don't want to find yourself downwind of that. Imagine going fishing, getting drunk, falling asleep on the dock and then waking up and realizing that the blistering sun has evaporated almost all of the water in your bucket of clams and that there's a miasma of rotting marine animal flesh emanating from your bucket and you're feeling slightly nauseous. Yeppers, a bit disgusting. But that's what this wonderful photo brings to mind. Love the Jethro Mussolini hand gesture, too. Gee, what an utterly charming woman.

By the way, the royal We are sooooo glad to see ol' Grandma Grunge is taking her ongoing court-ordered drug abstinence so seriously. I mean, in this shot from Sunday night's Pamela Anderson celebrity roast on Comedy Central, GG looks pretty stone-cold clean and sober, um, right? Hey, I'd certainly let her drive my kids around town in that condition. Wheeeee! Watch out for low-flying aircraft, baby!

And, uh, I'm kinda forgetting what the nickname of Oregon State University's team is. Ducks? No, that can't be it. Um, Marsupials? Rodents With Big Teeth That Like to Chew Logs and Build Dams? Help me out here. Anyway, for some reason Courtney Love is reminding me of Oregon State, and I'm not sure exactly why.

As far as celebrity roasts go, aren't we slipping a bit here? Too bad Don Rickles is too fucking senile to give Pamela Anderson the proper Friar's Club-style respect she most assuredly deserves. But just having Courtney Love show up is kinda the same thing; Courtney's panties serve the same function as Don Rickles' jokes, and they're a whole lot more, ahem, postmodern, as our friends at Hits magazine might put it.

Yeah, that's the ducat.

(My apology for the stupid post, but I hadda post something. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the Blogosphere is waiting with bated breath for my every timely dispensation, and I cannot disappoint.)

We fell asleep inside a halfway house for dreaming

2005-08-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

No, I didn't write that line; it comes from a tune on the new Deathray album Believe Me. I've really liked these guys since Dana Gumbiner, the band's singer, gave me a cassette demo of some new tunes they were recording back in the summer of 1998, and I played it incessantly ... until my girlfiend (now my wife) borrowed it and played it for somebody, whose cassette deck destroyed it. (Finally, after a few requests, Dana graciously put those tunes on a CD for me, which cleared up a considerable amount of music-deprivation angst.) Most of those songs surfaced on the self-titled album Deathray, which was released in early 2000 after several delays.

Deathray had signed with Capricorn Records, the Atlanta-based label that made a name in the 1970s with the Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band and a bunch of other Southern rock acts. Then it went out of business, and then it was revived in the 1980s as a Warner Bros. custom label, and then it went to Relativity Entertainment Distribution, the indie arm of Sony Music, and then it signed a deal with Mercury Records. One of the acts that found success on the revived Capricorn label was Cake, led by the mercurial frontman/songwriter John McCrea. When Cake's guitarist Greg Brown and bassist Victor Damiani left that band to start their own project, they also signed with Capricorn. So, in one of those unfortunate turns of events, PolyGram, the parent company of Capricorn's distributor Mercury, got acquired by MCA around the time that MCA was changing its name to Universal; the resulting clusterfuck, a division of the Canadian booze empire House of Seagram, was subsequently acquired by a French house of cards called Vivendi.

To compound the problem, Doug Morris, the head of the aforementioned MCA-PolyGram zaibatsu, kairetsu or whatever the Japanese call the corporate equivalent of the Gojira-monster now known as Universal Music, had it in for Danny Goldberg, the head of Mercury (and current head of the American Civil Liberties Union) from their days together at Atlantic Records, and in one of those "fuck you, eat shit" gestures common to certain Sicilian-American business groups in and around Chicago and the five boroughs of New York along with the entire Bush Administration, Morris not only fired Goldberg, but he eliminated Mercury Records altogether, except as a Nashville-based imprint for Shania Twain's new albums, mashing the whole New York-based Mercury collection of labels into something called the Island Def Jam Music Group. (Capricorn was orphaned, and subsequently was acquired by Volcano, a label owned by Zomba Music, whose Jive Records label put out all those great Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and NSync records you know you love; Zomba is now part of the newly created leviathan Sony BMG Music.)

The above, of course, is a long-winded explanation of why the album Deathray got noticed by a few lucky people, but ultimately fell into that particular void reserved for great records that the larger world never gets to hear. (It's still available, by the way; you can buy it through the band's website.

Deathray was produced by Eric Valentine, a record producer who'd whipped up radio-ready confections for bands like Smash Mouth and Third Eye Blind. It included a bunch of great songs, like "What Would You Do," "Someone After You," "Scott," "10:15," "Legionnaires in Doubt," Only Lies" ... really a topnotch debut. I seem to recall the band being somewhat put off by the polished metallic and muscular nature of the album's sonics at the time, which were like the hard coating of a candied apple; it was like they were embarrassed that they had made such a commercial-sounding record. They followed with a much-lower-key EP that they recorded in their Brighton Sound studio.

So it came as a surprise that Deathray elected to work with Valentine again on Believe Me. I haven't decided if I like the new one better than the debut yet, but there is something less immediate but more nuanced and evolved about it. There are a couple of real standout tracks, "Where Does the Time Go?" (whose opening line I nicked for the headline above) and "Days Gone By"; both of them were penned by Greg Brown, who's become one of my favorite rock songwriters, along the lines of an American Ray Davies. Dana Gumbiner wrote two other standouts, "Let's Be Friends," an earworm of a rocker with a swirling, phase-shifted guitar part courtesy of Brown, and the concert showstopper "Please"; Gumbiner also contributed a couple of downbeat, nicely atmospheric numbers, too: "Prolly Not," which has the enervated feel of his EP Kandi's Rad from last year, and the album's closer, "Goodnight, Goodnight." All told, there are 13 songs, and there really isn't a clinker in the bunch. And Victor Damiani even gets a song credit with "Edge of the World."

Believe Me was made with the idea that it would be released by a new Columbia Records-affiliated record label that Valentine had set up with a couple of music-biz veterans, but then one of the other partners "wasn't feeling it," or some such retarded rot ("not feeling it" tends to be record-weaselese for the kind of "uh-oh, these guys are over 25" ageist bullshit that has afflicted the music biz for way too long), so the band ended up putting it out on its own label and selling it through its website. I don't even know if this record has distribution, outside of the band's website and consignment in a few Sacramento record stores. The grim prospect that not one but two excellent Deathray albums could fall into the void while a new Ashlee Simpson record would be released by Geffen Records soon and most likely will sell a shitload (even though she should have been exiled permanantly to Branson, Missouri, after that lip-synching, mutant Michael Flatley clog-dancing debacle on Saturday Night Live followed by that half-time disaster at the Orange Bowl) motivated this writer (um, me) to quixotically fire off a couple of fervent e-mails to Merge Records in North Carolina, which will most likely file them in the "block sender" nitwit file but you can't fault a person for trying, right? I got to thinking that that excellent indie pop label might be a good company to help Deathray connect with the larger world and help right this sorry imbalance. I mean, why do complete assholes and no-talents keep getting second and third and tenth chances, and bands like Deathray can't get their brilliant music before what would surely be an adoring public? Why is George W. Bush the leader of the free world? Why?

A person could go crazy trying to answer those questions. Fortunately, there's plenty of good tunes to help numb the pain. So support Deathray and help save the world, or at least a small part of it.

I am not Domenico Modugno.

2005-08-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

Nel blu, dipinto di blu. Felice di stare lassu!

Flat tires suck

2005-08-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here now with my feet propped up, sucking down a big cold Trader Joe's limeade, with the family pooch snoozing under my chair. Which to say, life is all right. An hour ago, life was not all right.

Yeah, another flat tire on the bicycle, the third one this summer and second in under two weeks.

One thing nice about having that smirky old dictator Jethro Mussolini in the White House, with his henchman Snarly McCrashcart orchestrating the house bust-out or smash'n'grab for the big contributors, is that I got so priced out of commuting that I parked the truck and began riding to work and back on my bicycle. It's a pretty cool one, something halfway between a road bike and a mountain bike called a Marin Sausalito. I bought it a few years ago after my old RockHopper burned up in our great house fire of 2001, with the idea that I'd become one of those environmentally conscious bike commuters. Never got there until this year, though.

Anyway, lately I've really become enamored with riding, especially now that iPods and other mp3 players (like the Rio Carbon I use) make it so easy to listen to music anywhere. Which is to say that I've gotten thoroughly enamored with all three Big Star albums (#1 Record and Radio City, sold together, and Third/Sister Lovers, sold separately) in a way I didn't think possible, along with the complete Doug Sahm recordings for Smash, Philips and Mercury, not to mention Buena Vista Social Club (which makes for an exquisite riding experience on our fair city's 31-mile American River Parkway Bike Trail), plus a ton of cuts I downloaded at Salon.com.

Today I was listening to Deathray, a Sacramento band that just released its second album Believe Me, which is a fine slice of Kinks-meets-Cars hard-candy pop-slash-rock that's really growing on me me me. I took a spin on the bike trail at lunch and listened to some choice cuts (e.g. "Days Gone By," "Please" and "Where Does the Time Go"), and then stopped at a bike shop and put some air in a tire that seemed a bit low, ate a sandwich (pesto 'n' cheese on a baguette at La Bou, if you must know), read the green sheet in the San Francisco Chronicle (which hasn't been green for a long, long time) about that idiot sports-talk guy at KNBR who got fired for referring to some of the Giants (which undeniably suck) as "brain-dead Caribbean hitters" (a not-so-smart move on a radio station, unless it's one of those sieg-heil outfits that broadcast J. Fred Mugabe's latest talking points via ruling-class clown Rush "Pilonidal Cyst" Blimpblob and modern-day Rudolf Hess analogue Sean Insanity to all the knuckle draggers out there in candy-apple red Kool-Aid-drinking Bushistan) and accused Giants manager Felipe Alou as having Cream of Wheat for brains (he coulda gone for the racist asshole trifecta if he'd tossed Aunt Jemima pancake mix and Uncle Ben's converted rice into the mix, too). Hasta la bye-bye, Larry Krueger; maybe Salem Broadcasting has a spot for you somewhere. Then I hopped on my bike and went back to the office, to the soundtrack of more great Deathray tunes.

And I was all set up to listen to even more, when I discovered (much to my chagrin) that I had a flat, a tire patch kit, those little plastic levers that separate the tire from the rim, but no pump. Boo hoo. Fortunately, my lovely wife came and picked me me me up. (Yeah, yeah, this "look what I just pulled out of my asshole, isn't it interesting" first-person Kindergarten slop is starting to blow hard chunks here, but bear with me, because I, uh, um ...)

Fuck it. More about Deathray later. I've got supper to make and a flat tire to fix. And I swear to Mothra that I'll go way easier on the personal pronouns from here on out.

Go Cindy Sheehan!

I am here and open for bidness

2005-08-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

Friends, seen and unseen. To you that is riding along in yo' auto mobile, to you that is sitting around the table, I greet you with the holy word: Peace. Yes, I am what I am, and that's all I am, and I am it. For my mind is your mind and your mind is my mind and I am sendin' out my Christ mind to you, you and you. And I am able to draw whatsever i want into my immediately surroundings.

More later, when time permits. Basically, this will be a bunch of wanky rockcrit-style musings, with a few political and pop-culture observations. Yeah, just what the world needs, right?

Mm-hmm. And for a courtesy move, for a right-now move, be sure to get yo' fix of Butt Load of Gerbils daily.

(This message have been brought to you by the Shipp Moving Company. Now, they located out on Old Ashland City Highway, they been in bidness since 19 and fifty-fo', and they specialize in moving fine furniture, yo' furniture, which is fine furniture.)