CONVERSATIONS/MARCH: PREJUDICE III

It Seems to be Down to Poverty

(Image: Frank Gorshin as Bele on Star Trek)

Exactly! It's about the economy, stupid, it's about the classes, it IS about class warfare, but the bastards don't want us to believe that. So here we are, again. I swear, we could have talked about prejudice any month we wanted and there would have been some totally worthless piece of violent hatred perpetrated against someone here in these United States. And it's not going to change any time soon. To think that some of us actually believed we were progressing after the civil rights struggle 60 years ago! Vigilance must be never ending.

So on this final post for March, I have to admit that I'm filled with trepidation because of my own prejudice and an upcoming social obligation. If you've been following one of TV's greatest current shows, "Justified", based on an Elmore Leonard story, you realize that Harlan County, Kentucky is filled with oxycontin dealing semi-crazy power hungry cracker halfwits, the kind of people who don't think twice about serving up a healthy beat down or worse to anyone who might be crazy enough to think differently than them, disrupt their business, or upset the Dixie Mafia (do they go into Arkansas?) in any way. They don't take kindly to outsiders, especially the kind of toities who wander in from one of the coasts or any big city for that matter. And of course, this depiction must spread to the whole damn South, right?

Well in a coupla weeks, for the first time, I'm heading to a very small town in Arkansas for a family wedding. Despite my ability to blend in physically with the locals, I only hope certain beliefs and or comments can be contained for the duration of my stay. From what I've seen of the South portrayed in Justified, I'll be one step shy of an ass-whoopin' at any given moment. Wish me well and keep me in your heart.

Conversations/March: Prejudice II

Is it Not so for You?
(see end of previous post)

(Image: The Hate Monger by Jack Kirby)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, from one Italian-Irish-American to anyone reading this!

Somewhere in the mid-nineties, while working at The Sacramento Bee, we were obligated to take a two-day diversity training course. This particular course was unlike any I have ever taken. The trainer was Asian, and I wish I could remember his name. It was a hugely eye-opening experience, probably best summarized by an exercise he administered within the first couple of hours. My class was hugely diversified, which represented The Bee at that time. My own department, Customer Service, where I was one of the people responsible for hiring, probably had a 45% "minority" workforce. The newspaper in general was pretty mixed, perhaps with the exception of the news room and the very white (and male) members of upper management (what a surprise, right?) I suppose my "willingness" to hire all types of people had its roots with my parents, as these things usually do. Despite growing up in such a very white neighborhood, I don't remember either one of them ever making a "racist" statement in my presence, and while we disagreed about many things, civil rights wasn't one of them. (I think I was also "lucky" to have spent my 9th thru 12th grades in a VERY mixed student population.) The racial diversity of people in my department also spilled over to how they chose to present themselves. At first, one of my managers was dead set against tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, etc., but luckily for many of our staff, I was able to convince him that these "peculiar" fashion choices did not necessarily indicate a poor employee. By the time I left the paper, the department looked more like a collection of record store employees than a white collar call center.

Anyway, back to that exercise in our diversity class. As I recall, there were about 25 of us in the class, close to half were black, and all of us from a very mixed bag of jobs/pay scales/etc. The Asian instructor was incredible in that he managed to convince most of us that we could freely speak in the class about some of the most sensitive issues that had shaped our lives. He asked the class for a show of hands for who had been stopped, at some time in their life, in a car or on foot, by the police. Just about everybody raised their hand. Then he asked how many people felt "frightened/intimidated" (he probably used a different word) when that happened. Virtually everyone who was not black pulled their hand down. He then went to each of the people with their hand still in the air and asked them to discuss their perspectives on this issue, and it was a real eye opener. Their stories about the police and that person's relationship to them, and their family's relationship to them, were quite a surprise to the non-black "students". And this was how the whole class proceeded, as he skillfully got us to "reveal" the cultural events that shaped our perspectives, and it was amazing how different the various "races" in that class looked at things.

So today, I still work in a very diverse work environment, but my friends are mainly white like me. My son married an incredible Hispanic woman. My neighborhood is mixed: it's mainly white, but includes Hispanics, Asians, and has in the past included blacks. About half the households on my block are gay couples, mainly white women. I think it is paramount that for almost anyone to begin to grapple with prejudice, there's gotta be some contact with different types of people. I'm very much for integration, though not so sure about "forced" integration. But if it's not "forced", how can it possibly occur?

Your thoughts?

(Spence replies)



Actually, the "intimidation" factor you relate from the nineties diversity session was an eye-opener for me.


I thought immediately of John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me, and how profiling emerges between then and now. Questions leap out: Does the current Trayvon Martin case reflect an utter lack of change since your session? A CNN piece seems to say so. Would that author's appearance invariably produce a sense of threat in whites, particularly in a dark setting? But, further, what does it mean that most of us probably need to know that the victim was black before we feel like we _really_ know the story? 


Then, locally, why do stories like  this (hooded sweatshirts) and this (Onesto, Reyes...) and this (gang members) provoke such a weary here-we-go-again from the middle class where I live? Are the suspects somehow self-profiling, and have they always been? And what would happen if they got plunked into my neighborhood instead of a dense, decaying, and dark neighborhood near the strawberry fields or the Boardwalk?

And why does the Toulouse gunman Toulouse gunman apparently feel a similar sense of threat, but react to it more terrifyingly? 
Is there somehow a codified relationship between, say, these identifiers these identifiers , turbans, and tattoos that might be seen on the average black or brown NFL or NBA player?


I guess the good news is that, in contrast to Griffin's experience, that intimidation or exclusion is much more likely to be associated with police, as part of semi-sanctioned profiling, than it is to be with a clerk in a store, or a server in a restaurant, or a voting registrar. But even where the "markers" - tattoos, hoodies, shaved heads, even oversized jerseys or head scarves - don't effectively invite the stereotypes, it appears we have a long way to go. And I suspect that enforced integration might not be the answer, simply because it seems to be down to poverty in as many cases as not - the people with those looks just tend not to either be able to afford more racially monolithic middle class neighborhoods, or want nothing to do with them.

CONVERSATONS/MARCH: PREJUDICE

Senior year, high school. I guess nowadays, I should stipulate a very public school. The previous summer, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, my friends decided it would be funny to start calling me a wop. I'm not sure how they knew I was half Italian; my name wouldn't have told them because that particular heritage came from my mother's side. I don't suppose it matters; it wasn't a secret, it wasn't like I tried to keep it from anyone. The taunts weren't constant, but often enough to sting. There was one person in particular who seemed to get a big kick out of it. He was Irish, maybe full Irish from his name, maybe his glee had something to do with the way the Irish had been treated.

In any case, it was a peculiar feeling. When I was in kindergarten and 1st grade, I was fat, not obese, but hefty, and I can remember being made fun of then. The only thing that saved me was a girl in my class who was even bigger, so she got the brunt of the comments. Then in 2nd grade or thereabouts, I slimmed down, and it all stopped, at least for me. I guess we were the main targets people could actually see, as I grew up in a VERY white neighborhood. As a matter of fact, for years there was a clause in the homeowner contracts saying the houses couldn't be sold to blacks. At an elementary school reunion I attended a few years ago, the sole Chinese student in the class told us a few stories about what his family went through growing up in our hood - ugly, despicable stories, all unknown to the rest of us.

When I was in the 9th grade, the lily white junior high school I attended went through a big change. The previous summer, some kids had burned down their own junior high, so the students had to be bussed to various other schools. This caused a huge influx of a new, extremely diverse student population. This turned out to be advantageous, because the high school I was going to attend the following year was one of the most diverse in the city, so this preliminary mixing of the cultures was an introduction to a world I didn't really know or understand. Despite the lack of different cultures in my hood, I guess because of the way I was raised, I never really thought about "looking down" or discriminating against other people. It wasn't unknown to me (this was, after, the Sixties), but I tended to side with underdogs in any case, and definitely sided with the civil rights movement.

Anyway, one beautiful October day around lunchtime during that senior year mentioned above, I had taken one "wop" too many. I was incensed, embarrassed for myself AND my mother AND my grandparents AND I suppose my pride was taking a beating. I wasn't exactly a fighting kind of guy, but I had tried "reasoning" with my tormentor, and he just didn't get it. So I took the pre-packaged pie-like dessert treat out of my sack lunch from home, throwing away the rest of the food. I went into the cafeteria and smeared the thing with katchup. Then I went to the quad where the guy was having lunch with a bunch of friends, most of whom I knew. Without hesitating, I walked toward him; I could see his smile start to turn into something else as he realized he didn't really know what was coming. I smashed the ketchup smeared pie in his face as hard as I could and walked away. I believe the quad suddenly became very quiet, but I didn't really know because I was shaking and too oblivious. From that point on, he left me alone.

So: have you ever been the "victim" of prejudice? Or, conversely, have you ever been the one to perpetrate the prejudice? When did you first realize that prejudice was rampant in this country? And what do you think is the state of race relations now? Can I get any broader with these questions??? Feel free to be as narrowly focused as you wish!

(Spence)

My school experience was almost completely suburban or rural, and running through the high school yearbook it's hard to find someone who seems Jewish or Asian, let alone someone who is black or brown. And the lower grades were much the same; all Anglo, not much sense of the difference of lineage, although people were aware that, for instance, the Sbaffi family in my rural town were perhaps a generation or two out of Italy, I never heard discussion that wasn't in a self-deprecating mode, Mike Sbaffi maybe offering an Italian Joke. 


On the other hand, especially in that town, Polish jokes and Irish jokes were popular, if invariably trumped by some racy or scatological element. And given that I had at that age an unfortunate resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman, it was an advantage to have a stable of jokes to rely on. And given that my father ran a bar, it seemed like jokes were fairly easy to come by. And further, I suppose it's not unlikely that in the midst of the jokes I spouted to curry favor were some that offended someone I may not have even known was Polish, though I would have desisted in humiliation if I had been called on it. I'm pretty sure I offered an Irish joke to a boy with a speech impediment who happened to be Irish and had only me as a friend, and tend to think he didn't feel belittled - partly perhaps because he was too young to drink, and I think they all involved drinking.


A telling episode there, though, was probably my first exposure to actual bigotry. A rumor spread through town one summer that a black family was moving into a decrepit house near the substation. Several people who never came to the bar showed up expressly to advertise their determination to pack up and leave the next day should it be true. It turned out not to be. But I probably noticed from that point that my mother especially tended only to use denigrating, and in today's terms, emphatically politically incorrect terms for almost every possible ethnicity that could be imagined.


It was in college, and not before, that it became a point of contention. I had met a black girl named Ashley, the second black I had spent some time getting to know (the first being an exceedingly tall and scholarly looking boyfriend of one of the gaggle of Catholic school girls that frequented a card-playing group in the cafeteria.) She was cheerful, thoughful and kind, and we talked about music and religious kooks between us and among a group of six or seven who tended to hang out on the quad in good weather. No one at school would have dreamed of saying anything unkind of or to her. But my mention of her to my mother was enough to get a running argument going which was part of the larger narrative of rebellion and disaffection that were the themes of my approach to twenty. It didn't matter that there was no romance involved for her - it just wasn't appropriate. 


But that said, I ended up spending most of my life in almost exclusively white company, and apart from rampant local racial profiling of Latinos based predictably on a continuous parade of stories about gang violence in our county, I have continued to have the sense of bigotry as a remote phenomenon. Something you see on the news.


Is it not so for you?

CONVERSATIONS/FEBRUARY: Presidential Timber

So can a president be "toity"? Many thought Wilson was (I saw a TV series where Robert Vaughn played him to a Toity T.) But it seems like, should one be, the GOP will want nothing to do with him. So I started thinking about how we evaluate presidents in this month featuring birthdays of same, in the month of an election year when a cluster of primaries is as likely as not to put paid to the selection process.


Washington is considered great partly because he served out of a sense of duty, partly because he considered each weighty decision carefully, then decided emphatically, and partly because he was more or less the sole character among the FF's who did not have a classical education, and yet commanded absolute respect for the clarity of his opinions among his high-flown peers. And, of course, for other reasons relating to his military service, and yet others not relating to it.


Have we had a modern president who could be described in that way?


Adams, who like Washington was a Federalist or somewhat like a big-government Democrat, was temperamentally a Gingrich of his time, railing against all and sundry for reasons both personal and political, oppressively arrogant and chronically irritable. The FF darling of the GOP, Thomas Jefferson, was milder-mannered and more devious, perhaps more of, perhaps, a Reagan by temperament, somewhat remote, although Reagan didn't live in his brain the way Jefferson appeared to.


Is there a current candidate in the Jefferson mould?


FDR has never ceased being a paragon of all that is not right philosophically to those in the GOP. Mitt Romney keeps on hammering away at the term "cradle-to-grave" when he talks about the government coddling us, and only partially backpedaled when it appeared that his comment that he was "not very concerned about the very poor" had caused political erosion:


"I've said something that is similar to that but quite acceptable for a long time."


Barack Obama had a "poor are always with us" moment at the prayer breakfast, when he implicitly chided his likely opponent:


"It’s also about the biblical call to care for the least of these –- for the poor; for those at the margins of our society."


But for all that, does the President have a clear advantage from the character standpoint for swing voters?


And, if he does, does it not matter given that ideology is on the ascendant right now?

Fuller responds:
In today's climate, it's a mug's game trying to figure out this stuff. Almost everything is corrupt. Prior to the 2000 election, I remember Alexander Cockburn saying it didn't matter whether Gore or Bush won - they were both products of the same monied interests. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but there's a whole lot more people who are saying the same thing today because so much of the Bush era still lives on! Foreign affairs? Obama continues our Never Ending War. Wall Street? Obama stocks his cabinet with banker types. Core freedoms? Assassination by presidential decree without trial, unlimited detention without trial, and so on. No, I wouldn't vote for whichever (Romney) of the Republican goofballs is their candidate, but the Obama disappointment is real, despite his apologists. No, I haven't given up on him, but it sure would have been nice for some grass roots progressive Democrat to have at least tried to take him on.

Obama's pretty toity, a bona fide ivy league egghead, if ever there was one. Don't you remember how "intimidating" that was to so many people back in 2008? Luckily, he started his "let's have a beer and talk this over" approach. Ah, he's just a regular guy after all; now we can all rest easy that he's just like us! But maybe we need a graphic of presidential education, because the vast majority of presidents (all but 10) had a college degree. Let's take a look at the data: In the "modern era", since 1897, when Grover Cleveland left office, ALL presidents have had a (usually highly pedigreed) college education with the exception of Harry Truman. But I guess in this latest political climate, "acting" like it is a liability; Bush (Yale graduate) was a "regular guy" but Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law) isn't.

Who are these "swing voters" you mention? This country is so extremely divided, I can't figure this out. I guess none of 'em live in California. Do they actually exist? Do you know any?

What a mess. Is this historically business "as usual", or are we in fact in some new era of the damned? Is this truly the beginning of the end of the American Dream, or is this hopelessness cyclical? And how do "Millennials" see it? Am I just the product of too many bitter political disappointments? Maybe the younger voter has a fresher, more idealistic outlook ?!


(Spence)
Here are some swing voters NRP talked to:
79-year-old Annita Milani talked to an interviewer, who summed up what she said thus:


"[Annita] was caught up in a wave four years ago captivated by [Obama]...the promise of Obama has turned to ashes. Disillusioned with a Congress she views as corrupt, a health care overhaul she sees as ill-advised... [she] is struggling to choose a Republican alternative."


Bill Mullin, 53, produced this narrative:


"'[Obama] is handcuffed by congress...I need to hear that there's going to be action on lowering the deficit.'... [he] isn't opposed to legal abortion or same-sex marriage."

The Arroyos immigrated decades ago from Puerto Rico, and see the Republicans "knocking each other out" but Obama failing to deliver on promises for a better life for hispanics.


The pieces make them seem quite ordinary and familiar to me.
So how do the candidates intend to make sense to them? Here's some aftermath on an Obama photo op:


"As President Obama gave his speech at Master Lock about "insourcing" Wednesday. Newsradio 620 WTMJ's Nick Iannelli had a chance to talk to speak to several Master Lock employees about the recent history of Master Lock.
One Master Lock employee had a telling story. That employee has been at Master Lock for several years and has seen jobs come and go. The man remembers having an office at the company and seeing several hard working employees at the company. Then suddenly, the jobs just left."


And the up-and-comer on the other side of the bird?


"Santorum criticized [Romney]'s record on federal bailouts in particular, although both men opposed the government's decision to rescue the auto industry.
"Gov. Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit. My feeling was that the government should not be involved in bailouts period," Santorum said in an address to the Detroit Economic Club..."


And speaking of him, from his Nevada victory speech:


"Four years ago, candidate Obama came to Nevada, promising to help. But after he was elected, his help was telling people to skip coming here for conventions and meetings. Today, Nevada unemployment is over 12%, home values have plummeted, and Nevada’s foreclosure rate is the highest in the nation."


A cheap shot both because that state was a worst case, and the "telling people to skip" is much overstated...


"We won’t settle for a President who tells us it could be worse. What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that things must be better."


Intended to be a feelgood line, but I suspect those tracking audience response devices didn't move much on this one.


"President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great. Our vision for the future could not be more different than his."


I tend to interpret this as fairly reactionary - it does seem that he believes in both the 50's good old days and the Enlightenment good old days, and neither had government bailouts, same-sex marriage as a public issue, or much regulation of business.
And I just saw this on a chat in the web page gutter as I typed:


" I just have a hard time believing that voters in MI would be dumb enough to vote for Santy..maybe because so many younger voters don't remember Mitt's dad as Governor here...I met Gov. Romney when he visited our catholic school..I was in 4th grade. "


Presumably someone who thought RomneyCare did work.


Do you think any of this adds up to a targeted trajectory to victory? Would Mitt make a difference? Is Santorum after a different kind of "fundamental transformation"? And on the monied interest front, isn't it interesting that (as Time pointed out this week) the president famous for the "Ask not" quote was our wealthiest? And it was a card-carrying patrician who we associate with the resolution with our most dire financial crisis?

Fuller responds:
As February 2012 becomes a memory, nothing seems to have changed. The aberrant elephants left in the room rumble along, trampling everything in sight, but unless things drastically flip, the victory in November will be Obama's. At least I have to tell myself that. Despite my bubbled insularity, as most Californians have to admit being a part of, I refuse to believe this country is made up of more voters who want Santorum or Romney. It just doesn't fly with me. I understand that many Americans have hardly any historical/political memory whatsoever, but I can't leave myself open to the prospect of a country full of people who, in the first place believe John Kennedy said what Santorum said he said, and then want to vomit because of it. And speaking of intestinal weakness, I cannot stomach any possibility that I live in a country where the majority of voters would actually believe Romney has any concern for them in any way except to further his own power lust. I understand the Obama-hate is deep, but surely it's not dominant? I've just recently heard that Obama is the man of the toitys and the have-nots, but that the middle folk can't quite "understand" him. What a bizarre thought, and yet it seems to make some kind of perverse sense. Or maybe not!? In six weeks, I will be visiting Arkansas for the first time. I think it will be quite the fascinating journey. More on that later.

CONVERSATIONS/JANUARY II: THE UNBEARABLE-NESS OF A TAPIOCA-TASTROPHE

You betray yourself immediately by admitting your tapioca panic attack. I don't think most people even like tapioca, and even less realize there are different tapioca "sizes". I hate to break this to you, but I'm afraid your toit rating may be precipitously high. Though it concerns me that I, too, love a good bowl of tapioca, but I must confess I've never obsessed about the size of the pearls or any other relative merit of one brand or "type" versus another. And just where the heck did you get that package? Are you a time traveler?

Thank you for the picture of Duran Duran that you posted.

As for your questions:
1) I can't remember exactly when I first heard of S-K, but I was non-plussed from day one. It wasn't an active, itchy sort of dislike, more of an annoyed, "here we go again" kind of response. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said you thought they sounded like Patti Smith and The Clash, etc. Don't get me wrong, these are fine people to emulate, but doesn't everyone? Now if a band can pull it off, more power to them, but it's "difficult" (you and I should know): The Clash wrote incredible SONGS, and let's not forget that the definition of a good song is one that can be played in the most naked of ways, like one instrument and a vocal, and still sound great. And of course Patti Smith is a wordsmith like few others. See, the problem with people like you and me, besides any suspected toit-tosity, is that we were around when these artists were in their heyday, and there have been sooooo many copycats, not to mention at this point the preponderance of the copycat copycats, that it gets harder and harder to find the real deal. That being said, I like a LOT of new music. But S-K isn't in that particular mix. (Though I must admit I've heard a song by Wild Flag that has me interested in more.)
2) I went through a looooong period (this Nineties) where I had a really hard time finding new music, but those days are over, of course: the inter-tubes have all the recommendations you could want, and probably more than you can handle. For my Americana/country fix, I usually check out The Real Big Rock Candy Mountain. For a general source of recommendations, I regularly check out Metacritic. There's several others. I try to find sites that, obviously, aren't too "mainstream", but also that don't go in the opposite direction: a lot of places I end up are recommending stuff that is too obscure. Some people really like extremely "lo-fi" efforts; I guess I wanna hear at least a little bit of experience/musicianship. But then something will come along that defies all my "categories"; I try not to be too limiting, but also have a new interest in wasting less of my time. And then there's my other problem: I'm still old school enough to want a physical product. Every now and then I buy a song from a site, but I'm still interested in lp's or cd's.
3) I went on a hunt for hipsters of the Sacramento variety, but couldn't find any, perhaps because I was searching during daylight hours. If I sight any, I'll be sure to let you know.

So I want to start sending out 15 or 20 song playlists/"radio shows". What's the best way to do it? Whaddya think of Spotify?

Would that take care of my needs?

Ok, let's see...

--Where the heck did you get that package?

That would be Shopper's Corner, a Santa Cruz institution, in the historical photo in the last post. Now this *was* several years ago...

--Thank you for the picture of Duran Duran that you posted.

Uh, thanks, I guess, but it's hard to tell whether the The Backstreet Boys will be flattered or insulted..

...there have been sooooo many copycats,...

Oh, amen to that - I confess that I sank into a been-there-done-that as I listened to both of those groups...

... I had a really hard time finding new music, but those days are over...

- and to that! Pandora alone is a remarkable "suggestion box", and has gotten better and better at its version of stochastic tastemaking. As an experiment, I put in "Cream" as the seed, then immediately added "David Wilcox" for variety, and got the famous live "Crossroads" (before the varietization applied), Zep's "Good Times Bad Times", then some Hendrix rock, then the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" - then a recent Wilcox release - this starts to look like a trajectory - then an artist I hadn't heard called Bebo Norman in the Wilcox vein, then another previously unknown folkie, Howie Day before I was tapped on the shoulder by Pandora for too much skipping. Wouldn't it be interesting to have it just spit out lists?


Then there's allmusic.com - I just jumped in to a tag called "punk revival", hit The Donnas, who I'd heard a little, then hit under their "Moods" list the term "campy", then ended up at "Ziggy Stardust" - next to which can be found Small Faces' "Lazy Sunday". The problem here is that starting in this vast compendium produces for me a sense of surfeit, a negative commitment. But if you start with a desire for very specific comparisons, it can be kind of great - have you used it much?


And even the anarchic associations of YouTube serve as a reasonable conduit, since the right gutter almost invariable represents someone's predictable taste. (Side note: at this point, that Pandora station I just created has dumped me into War's "Low Rider"; maybe I was a little *too* divergent in my seeding.) Was YT too frustrating for you?

-- I'm still old school enough to want a physical product.

It's funny, a CD never quite seemed to me as real as an LP, simply because the canvas of a 12" cover and sleeve already seemed like a fulfilled promise - and so I've more or less ceased to care.

--Would [Spotify] take care of my needs?

I was going to say Mog based on recent reviews, but I see they require a Facebook account; go Spotify! And this posting shows an interesting graph comparing top hits there vs. Rdio, an up-and-comer. I might be able to live without "Say Say Say" by going that direction.

CONVERSATIONS/JANUARY: AVERTING A TOIT-TASTROPHE

William Fuller: Whilst taking a stroll through midtown late last year, on the way to my weekly Society for the Blind recording, I came upon musician/producer/engineer supreme Chris Woodhouse. He seemed to be in a somewhat giddy daze. He said that he had recently engineered Wild Flag's new album here in Sacra, and that he just found out it had received a very rave review from music blog Pitchfork. Wild Flag is a coming together of four indie musicians from well known, at least in that world, rock bands. One of the four is Carrie Brownstein, whose last band, Sleater-Kinney, is probably the best known of the various represented bands.

(He also talked about trying to learn Capt. Beefheart's "One Red Rose that I Mean" from LICK MY DECALS OFF BABY. I asked him if he was going to learn "Peon", but he gravitated toward "Rose" because it's a solo piece. I'm still waiting for a promised recording when he masters it.)

At any rate, I didn't realize till yesterday, when I was recording the latest New Yorker at the Society, that Carrie Brownstein is the lead, along with Fred Armisen, of the TV show Portlandia. They're just starting season two this month. I endured one episode last year. It's basically a snarky, perhaps somewhat affectionate, look at the pretentious miasma that is part of Portland, complete with vegans, lesbian bookstores, and music snobs (not that there's anything wrong with any these!) It's a look at the hipsters who populate any decent sized city, but seem to proliferate in that particular American Northwest city (I'm lookin' at you, Colin Meloy - even though I love ya!) One usually equates hoity-toityness with money, but as you watch the show you realize it can span all income levels, and as you watch the show, if you're honest with yourself, you have to ask, in between condescending laughter: am I actually one of these people? Of course not in all ways, but in some? (Maybe that's why I stopped watching after one episode.)

So today my wife sent me to the grocery store and a local specialty German meat market. I went to the grocery store first, and of course didn't purchase any of the required meat, because my wife demands a certain high quality that most grocery chains, of course, just can't achieve. But when I got to the specialty shop, alas, it was closed for their annual winter vacation! What to do?!? Not just any old ground beef and ham would do; it had to be "special"! I was facing a full scale toit-tastrophe, i.e., a knotty, perplexing challenge that only a certain kind of true snob will have to face.

I live in a pretty diverse part of town, and at this point I was in the low rent section. As I drove down the boulevard thinking about where I might go, I realized I was fast approaching Mercado Loco, an independent Mexican grocery store with a very decent butcher section if you were interested in carnitas or carne asada or buche (pig stomach). So I stopped there. Unfortunately, the dish in question was not one that required any of these items, and the quality ground beef and ham that I needed just wasn't in evidence. I had to leave empty-handed, a cold sweat starting to bead up on my face.

Luckily, ANOTHER independent grocer about a half mile away popped into my mind, one that catered to the "foodie", the discriminating, the discerning. Expensive? Yes, but of course worth it! That's where I went and I wasn't sorry. My nightmare was over.

So to my fellow blogger Spence:
1) Do you have any recent tales of a toit-tastrophe?
2) Have you ever heard Wild Flag or Sleater-Kinney?
3) Have you ever watched Portlandia?
4) Do you think you could learn One Red Rose that I Mean?


Well, in the case of 1), no, I don't think I've had one of those, gastronomic or otherwise, anytime recently. Although I spent awhile looking for giant tapioca, and that before ever sampling bubble tea at a Pho house. But white tapioca pudding made with extra-large spheres of starch doesn't somehow feel toity. In any case, what came to my rescue was

who carried in a black box said product, which however now looks like

-and will provide any tapioca hound with the appropriate slimy chewiness.


As to 2) Wild Flag and Sleater-Kinney, the first was an unknown and the second my daughter's recommendation from awhile ago. I listened to a couple of agreeable rockers that sounded like they have influence from The Clash, Patti Smith, and no doubt many others, but didn't go back for no particular reason - though I did wonder at the time how the Olympia Public Works Dep't keeps up with what must be a chronic disappearance factor for

not to mention a couple of sizeable offramp signs. A quick refresher and intro to Wild Flag convince me I'd better dive in a bit as a new year's res.


My daughter also mentioned 3) Portlandia, but on that score as well I remain ignorant. She has been educating us on "hipsters" in the wild

at least on her Seattle context, and said that Portland, in perhaps the throes of Seattle-wannabe, exhibits similar plumage. Notwithstanding the hoodies, much of hipsterism has changed little since our band scenemaking days before 1980; black leather never quite goes away, ditto laddered stockings, wayfarers, elaborately torn jeans with or without duct tape (we went to get a calendar at a local office supply, and duct tape was an entire aisle; apparently silver is for the classicists, since they have plaid, stripes, dots, stars - do middle schoolers duct tape their backpacks with stars? do younger kids apply duct tape strips to everything instead of collecting stickers?), and spiked hair even is not quite gone. Although there are those hats...


And finally, in a final sign of resignation, I confess I probably never will learn 4) "One Red Rose That I Mean", even after an intrepid soul rendered clear all of its mysteries

because probably a) I like "Peon" better, even given that it requires someone on bass and b) it's probably just too hard, although I have no doubt I could dial it in.


So the questions of the moment: 1) Do you remember how or when you first heard or heard about Wild Flag and Sleater-Kinney? 2) (this one from both daughter and father) How does that exposure relate to your history of ways of being exposed to, becoming enthusiastic about, various albums and artists - or put another way, what's the new deejay and new-releases-auditioning mechanism for our era? and 3) what do hipsters wear in Sacramento? 

Halcyon Venues

I was a performer at a company holiday party recently, and in the aftermath was talking to people about having been in a band , and what sort of "wild" (or not) things we did and saw. And it made me want to see what I could find about our late-seventies musical context.

As we moved to a sort of pivotal era in Sacramento in 1978, our manager, utterly in character here:

- got us a gig, amazingly, opening for Talking Heads, who on a support tour for their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, agreed to play at a club called Cassidy's, and moreover, to charge a mere dollar for entry. Now Talking Heads '77 was not a debut album to catapult the band into a limelight much greater than, say, Was/Not Was (who? you might say), who had a debut at about the same time. But we thought they were phenomenal, or at the very least a couple of us did, and not just because of the somewhat specialty-tunish "Psycho Killer", this in particular still amazes me, not least because it wasn't on the record:

This is the sort of song that would have been played on Shake Some Action, a show on the Davis, California radio campus station KDVS at that time which featured "new wave" or punk new releases. And that show was influenced by what was happening at the Davis Coffee House, a single-story campus venue with a concrete floor accommodating perhaps an audience of 300, which became a concert venue casting a long shadow; on the SSA blog there's a recounting of some of the interesting events at the time:

"The Ramone's[sic] had tilted at the windmill of Sacramento's turgid rock scene at Slick Willy's in 1976. Sacramento bands like the Twinkeyz, Ozzie and Permanent Wave appeared on the scene the following year...A local bar named Cassidy's had made an effort to bring in some Bay Area talent....
And then the great coup! [Local impresario Peter] Afterman booked Elvis Costello & the Attractions to perform Feb. 8th, 1978 ... The tix were a pricey (for the time) $5.75! ...In the next year and a half [there and at the Davis Coffee House], Afterman brought in a slew of other top-level performers into the tiny venue: George Thorogood & the Destroyers, The Greg Kihn Band,.. Devo (which sold out almost a month in advance with tix only $2.50), Dave Edmunds and Rockpile (w/ Nick Lowe); "

And the list of influentials continues for the Coffee House, including XTC (supporting Drums and Wires) and The Police on the heels of their hit first album. It was impossible to see some of these acts as a performer and remain unchanged, and we were lucky to have tickets to many of them, particularly those who enjoyed multi-decade careers, for they continue to influence millenials. And, wonder of wonders, that chaotic 1976 gig of three local bands included something of a future star in a guest capacity, Kendra Smith of The Suspects:

When my quick researches were done, I found myself wondering whether there are still 300-seaters hosting soon-to-be legends. Sure hope so.