Century of Fakers

Did you see this column mentioning blogging in the Bay Guardian? It was written by Vivian Host, who used to be a KALX DJ. She was known for playing lots of drum'n'bass and never showing up on time for her shows -- sometimes not showing up at all. Anyway, she's writing about the Hipster of the Year contest at the Arrow Bar. And of course Moustache was there.

You have to see Moustache to understand how annoying he is. And why he's called Moustache. Look. Rusz and Eric and I thought we were the only people who called him that, but apparently it is widespread. Things you should know about Mr. M: 4 out of 5 of his F'ster pics are in black and white; he thinks he's a '40s movie villian; he once stole a woman from Eric at a Beauty Bar afterparty for the Fall, but Eric didn't care because he got to meet his idol, Mark E Smith. (It went something like this: "Hey, I'm Eric." "Hey-a, I'm-a Mark-eh, strannngglllecattsuuuhhh.") He's in a band called Evening, which is too pretentious to use an article and would be halfway decent if they didn't think they were way better than decent; he's one of those lame-os who won't admit to knowing what a "TV" is; he reads Doestyevsky, Hesse, and Thompson (yawn), and calls Bukowski "Chinaski" (ooh!); he likes music that's tasteful, you know, like Melt Banana. (Truth be told, I like a lot of the same music.)

OK, so I see this isn't getting at how annoying he is. You have to stand next to him at a crowded party and listen to him try to pick up chicks. That should do it. I'll see if I can invite him to our next party. You've been warned.

Hokay, here's the second Friday 5:

1. "Growin' a Beard." Tim rented this documentary about the town of Shamrock, TX, which has a Donigal-beard growing contest every year from Jan 1 to March 17. Soundtrack by the Gourds, beards by God. The green-haired leprechaun guy was totally robbed.

2. Diary of a Teenage Girl, Phoebe Gloeckner. Illustrated "diary" of a 15-year-old girl growing up in SF, sleeping with her mother's boyfriend, and wearing really bad haircuts. Kinda repetitive and depressing, like most teenagers' diaries, but also totally gripping, like most teenagers' diaries.

3. Fiji Mermaid. Mysterious SF chanteuse with a new cd. Sounds like Azalia Snail or Joanna Newsom, if they'd been trapped in a small room for 73 hours with only a parakeet to keep them company.

4. "Rapbeth (Foul Is Fair)" by MC Lars Horris. Shakespeare as a rap song, by a Stanford dude. So stupid! Kinda funny!

5. Princess Superstar at 111 Minna last week. Some really obvious mashups to get the heshers headbanging, then a great set of sped up rap/techno mixes, including an inspired version of Khia's "My Neck, My Back (Lick It)." Even one of the Donnas was digging it.

Only Brent will probably get the bad NBA joke.

I found the ultimate tour rider on Mark Eitzel's web site. Here's the original version, by the band EGZ, which apparently doesn't exist yet. I can really get behind the 15 warmed donuts, the huge amount of pens (and no paper), the bacon space (with uncooked bacon on the southward side), the odor of hamster essence, the Shah of Iran, and the shouting and soup rooms. I'm also looking forward to the future, when they say food will taste, on average, 16% better than usual.

I think mine would include Emmanuelle Beart, homemade brownies, George W. Bush to be beaten with sticks (work the groin!), a ping-pong table, phate the phony pate, the Orgasmatron from Sleeper, a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, and that delightful Billy Crystal (work the groin!).

I've been thinking about threesomes lately. Did you see this article in Vice? Like most articles in that mag, it's concerned with puncturing societal beliefs, i.e. the threesome isn't as hottt an activity as everyone thinks it is.

I can't really tell you if it's true. I've only had a couple sort-of threesomes, both of which were in the same night. I went to a sex orgy last year and fooled around with one couple and then a guy and the girl I came with. It was pretty hottt, but we never actually boned. (Ha ha, boned. Now I feel like I'm writing to Penthouse Forum.)

But Grant Stoddard seems to have had a good time with his threesome. Grant's my hero. He writes these funny pieces for Nerve.com in which he tries odd sexual experiences. I can't believe they actually happen; maybe they don't. How one man gets in so many lucky situations is beyond me. I don't necessarily want to do everything he does (like have sex with a virgin or cross dress) but other ones (nude photography, take photos of a couple shagging) are spot on.

So, the threesome. See, after that orgy, the guy gave us his number and said he'd like the three of us to get together sometime. And those digits have been sitting on my dresser for months. Waiting. It's like someone's baked a pie and left it on my porch. I could take it in and eat it, but it might taste like rat poison.

Maybe I should leave it out there a while longer.

Oh yeah, and I just saw The Same River Twice. It's the documentary that follows a bunch of hippies during a 1978 river-rafting trip and then again 20 years later. There's lots of nudity and lots of beards. One guy even says something like "You had to have a reason to wear clothes rather than not wear them. Same with our beards. You had to have a reason not to have one."

But mostly it just shows them living normal lives now. Which was rather depressing. It's one of those movies that is more thought-provoking than interesting. Let's all discuss what we're doing with our lives. Or aren't. Perhaps we should be doing more than blogging. Or reading blogs. If we really applied ourselves, we could be mayor of Ashland. Or Placerville. Hmm...

So anyway, earlier today I saw this funny thing on the internet...

Last Wednesday I cooked a Thai pork dish. And I had some meat left over. Every night afterward I would look at the meat and think, "I'd better cook it tonight or else it'll go bad." And every night I would have somewhere to go or something to do, so the meat sat and sat.

So tonight I finally stayed in and I figured I'd cook that pork. But it smelled a bit funny. Still, I figured I'd just fire it up extra hot like, and it'd be fine. Toss it in the wok with garlic, hot peppers, soy, onions, some of that Thai sugar. The perfect crime.

Only, it tasted kinda funny after I cooked it. I tried a few different pieces. No good. Not wanting to die quite yet -- or even get really ill -- I decided to throw out the meat. But I didn't want to toss out the rest, so I added some thick noodles and proceeded to eat it.

Now I sit here, wondering if I will start vomiting soon. Or have bad diarrhea, the kind that's so bad that your stomach clenches like a bully's fist. How many pieces of spoiled pork does it take to get salmonella? How bad is it to eat the sauce that surrounds the pork? What are all those purple butterflies doing eating my eyelashes?

I don't really like the rain. It's not purty, like snow. It falls at weird angles and gets your pants all wet, and then you have to sit at work or the movies or the cafe, getting cold and clammy and soggy. And that feeling of it dripping on your head? It's like Chinese water torture.

But yesterday, when I was riding BART over to the East Bay for my KALX show, it was raining little pieces of heaven. As I came out of the tunnel, with the sun fiercely trying to shine through the haze, all the urban sprawl and citified gunk looked magnificent. Like a giant beaver that had gotten caught in an oil slick.

I leaned over to my neighbor, an elderly Asian woman, and said, "Hey, doesn't West Oakland look like a beaver?"

She didn't agree.

What is the deal with America the Stupid? Can't a woman show her hilariously pierced boob in public anymore? OK, so this was the Superbowl halftime show, and it was a ridiculous ploy for publicity, and it is a really strange piece of metal she has there. (I apologize for linking to the Drudge Report. Now go take a shower.) But this is the Jackson family! What the hell did you expect?

I find it truly hilarious that an organization like the NFL, which bases itself on the belief that it's okay to take gallons of anabolic steroids and then rip the head off your neighbor, should try to come off all high and mighty. Once again, the rest of the world will laugh at our freaky US morality. You want another reason to wish Howard Dean were still the front runner for the Dems? He's bright enough to see that the FCC should have better things to do than investigate mammaries.

Here's the real question: How come no one's complaining about the hideously ugly Clockwork Orange-meets-Cabaret-in-a-Ratt-video fashions? What kind of signal does that send to the youth of today? Droogs are sexy? Anarchy's okay as long as you keep your tits in a leather D cup? The Liza Minnelli revival is right around the corner?

And just who are all these people who stand around the halftime stage and cheer wildly for the tepid performances? Out of work actors? Starving mimes? The employees of Euro Disney?

One last thing: Can the Patriots return to their old helmet design, with the crouching player? It was far more menacing, and, um, homoerotic. Thanks.

So I went out to lunch on Friday with the editor of a glossy city magazine that I was hoping to do some writing for. But I'm not so sure how much I can offer them, considering how their readership is mostly 40-45 and makes an average of $120,000 per household (an amount that is just outside of my household's yearly intake, after you've combined my pay with Ruzx and Zac's).

Really, going to lunch was like stepping into another world. First of all, the guy drove from North Beach to Union Square. And he didn't for a second consider looking for parking -- it was straight from garage to garage. In his 70s Mercedes convertible.

Then there was his outfit. I consider myself aware of fashion to a certain degree. I notice that people are still wearing their trucker hats at a cockeyed angle (please stop) and everyone's buying wool-lined "sherpa" jackets. But this guy was sporting an ensemble. And it was made up of stuff we all wear -- t-shirt, jeans, sneakers -- made so much more fashionable by the addition of a long scarf and a velvet blazer and sunglasses. He was so very put together.

At lunch, he complained that S.F. writers were lacking because they all were writing novels and performing dance pieces and starting bands, instead of concentrating on their journalism. They weren't interested in writing about big business icons or true crime stories; instead they wanted to write about quirky 73-year-old skateboarding grandmas. He suggested that when people from small towns decided to move somewhere they had three choices: The beautiful ones moved to LA, the ambitious ones headed to NY, and the freaks and slackers came here. All of which sounded true, but who wants to hear it from someone making $120,000 a year?

Then he laid the bombshell. He said that, for gay arts professionals, SF was as barren as the lunar surface. What? Wasn't SF the gay mecca to which all bowed in deference? Apparently not. He explained -- in that way that people who move here from NY do -- that he'd been reduced to hanging out with gay lawyers and doctors and (gasp!) bond traders, whereas in NY everyone around him was in the arts world.

I felt bad for him. But not nearly as bad as when his lunch came. He'd ordered a burger and I'd gotten the pasta, and when they arrived he seemed to have a change of heart. "I should've gotten the pasta," he said. "Boy, that looks good," he said. "Man, that smells good," he said. Now, I haven't been to many of these free lunches, and I didn't know the protocol. Was I supposed to offer him some of my pasta, as I would a friend? Did I stand a better chance of getting hired if I shared my meal? Or would I seem too familiar if I suggested he take some?

I decided to keep my mouth shut. Or to open it only enough to let the pasta slide in.

Man, that was some good pasta.

I was going to do this on Friday, but I had a job interview type thing that went late. And then the weekend went late. But I promise to do this on Fridays in the future -- unless editors continue to ask me out for lunch.

Friday 5s started on SF Indie years ago as a way for music nerds to tell each other what they were listening to. Over time, it evolved into something else, a random list of the banal and non-rock related. There was one period when it got really annoying, with every guy telling the 1000 strangers on the list how much they loved their girlfriends (yes, most all these posters were guys). No matter how much I loved my girlfriend I refused to play this game -- in fact, I posted a satirical take on their messages and got in trouble with my ex-girlfriend, who thought I was talking smack about her.

Anyway, instead of posting on SF Indie, I figured I'd put stuff here. Welcome to the first Friday 5:

1. The Rezillos - "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures" - from Rhino's No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion box set. Essential, even for people who don't think they like punk.
2. Cristina - "What's a Girl to Do?" Cheeseball 80s electro-pop, from Ladytron's Softcore Jukebox mix-cd.
3. Sean Hayes, Alabama Chicken. At first this guy annoyed the hell out of me, with his shabby chic duds and quavering voice and poetic lyrics. But after listening to the album 53 times, it sounds just about perfect for the sad little moments of life.
4. My Robot Friend - "Why Won't You Call Me Back?". This may be the first cd-r I've ever bought over the internet. Look at me! I'm living futuristic! Some of the album is annoying, but this track is Stupids-worthy, a goofball novelty number with a huge hook.
5. Foxy Brown - "Whatcha Gonna Do." Foxy gets out of jail and has some fun, natural fun. And to think I always thought the Tom Tom Club was having "nasty" fun.

+1. Eve Arden in "The Unfaithful," at the Castro's Noir City retrospective. A kind of lame noir, made palatable by the dialogue chewing and spitting of Ms. Arden, who you might recall as the principal in Grease.