skirblog

family fun blog

The big news in the skirblog family, or should I say the family of skir-produced entertainments, is a brand new addition to our giant corral of talented recording artists, Frank Lloyd Wrong, a solo producer/sound collagist hailing from Zanesville, OH, but currently working out of (my garage in) Oakland, CA. Frank offers us his first release from his upcoming full length, “Running Water,” entitled, “Listen to the Silence.” Frank challenges you to recognize all the samples and post them here on the skirblog. The winner receives a giant cantilevered home somewhere in Pennsylvania.

And while I’m on the subject of our stable… Thousands write in asking about the identity of The Drill, heard exclusively on myspace.com/zadrill. The Drill is actually four people, although I dont' know their genders. I really just send them their royalty checks each month, and did contribute some guest vocals to their first single, “molar” (now taken down from myspace, the bastards), which I recorded via a cell phone from my lair in Oaktown. There four list their instruments as drums, bass, vocals and something called a cuspidor. As far as I know, they are a quartet disgruntled dental hygienists out of Los Angeles, who if they didn’t get their aggressions out with their music would certainly be taking it out on the sensitive gum tissue of their patients. If you can believe their press releases. My intuition tells me they are upstanding professionals who may dip into the doctor’s pharm. closet after hours, yet would never hurt a flea nor extract a gold filling for beer money while you were sedated in a million years. But I’ve never met them in person or while conscious. 

Then there’s my literal family, the family of skir, who were talking one a.m. over breakfast, sitting 'round the family b'fast table, as we are wont to do on the Sunday's, and the kid posited the hypothetical, “what if you were on a desert island, what celebrity would you want with you?” We then expanded this to mean any famous person living or dead mainly because F. wanted to choose Frida Kahlo and Jim Morrison. The kid went for Matt Groening and Leonardo Davinci (he thought maybe Lenardo could build us something to escape with…) while I went for the obvious: Pete Townsend and James Joyce. I know, cliché, but had to be. We then went to the next logical topic, what would we eat, esp. if we could only have two foods? F ruminated a while on various lobster and pasta dishes: lobster fettuccini, lobster ravoli, but settled on just plain lobster then garlic bread as her second. This was strange to me cause I can’t remember seeing her eat lobster too many times in my life, although she does go for the crab (cakes and soft shelled) often and with gusto. The kid chose Jack in the Box Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger and a chocolate fountain – speaks for itself; and I was forced to go with Mineo’s pizza from the 'burgh, and what else? coffee, as long as I could have my Francis Francis X3 with me and milk. Turns out we were allowed to share our food with each other so a great, imaginary feast ensued. But what to listen to? To watch? You could only got one thing on this island and F already had Jim Morrison for various pleasures (damn. I forgot to choose a woman celeb!), so she went with Flight of the Conchords. The kid skipped not a beat choosing The Simpsons, and I went strait for Led Zeppelin.

Led Zeppelin? Well, you read what I had to say about Black Dog a few posts ago. (Didn’tja? Huh, huh?) A ball breaking, ball busting, ballsy bit of music.  Right about that time I read an article about a CD trading website called lala.com. Also about this time I was packing up about 200 frickin’ CDs in a box and thinking about throwing them over one of our beautiful Bay Area bridges as I raced across in my car, ‘cause I never play or look at them any more as they’ve all been ABSORBED into the pod! ‘Cept lala says you can list all your absorbed and lonely CDs on their site, and at them same time, list all the great CDs you’d like to get and absorb, and they’ll send you some prepaid envelopes ala Netflix. This all happens for about $1 a CD, and beats the hell outta heaving them over a bridge or taking them to Amoeba and then having to spend a zillion hours looking around for trades... Plus what? Am I gonna go to Amoeba and actually buy actual Zeppelin CDs? You can bet not. So just like the underwear shopping, I can assuage my guilty pleasures privately, online, and since all my Zep exists as vinyl or the occasional illegal download, I was in hog heaven. Right away "Houses of the Holy" and "Physical Graffiti" (disc 1) show up, and both have been very, very good for skir-morale. Right now its “The Song Remains the Same,” that’s killing me, but you know, Custard Pie, The Rover, Time of Dying are all in there waiting. Trampled Under Foot and Kasmir still pack their wallops but don’t sound so new and fresh to me right now. Funny though, a lot of this Zeppelin sounds raw and wild to my current ear. When I think back to the day, I imagine all the bloated cock-rock was so polished and produced, but the Zep has a lot of raw edges and simple production. The drums are almost refreshingly straight foward and brilliant in many cases, even though Bonham is always shown in photos buried under giant kits of cascading drums and cymbals on all sides. Jones isn’t as good as I remember, Page is beyond any dumb, oldster hyperbole I could offer up here, and Plant is comically, appropriately entertaining. Dude sings like a girl. Actually, hold the phone. I started to notice a lot of similarities between Zeppelin and Deerhoof of all things: crazy high pitched girl singing, hitting impossibly notes; guitar savagery; savant drumming. There you go, Deerhoof are indeed the new Zeppelin.

Still unpatiently waiting for Physical Graffiti flipping disc 2 to arrive via lala, and of course: Zep III.

Hey m aybe if you get on lala, you’ll be lucky enough to score my copy of the first Neil Young Bridge Benefit CD, where a lot of luminaries bang out the best Neil Young songs ever. Yeah Nick Cave does kind of a predictable "Helpless," but you may like it; and you’ve got your Flaming Lips doing "After the Goldrush" (but before they got good); Dinosaur Jr. and Bongwater puttin’ in some nice efforts; but the real gems are the Pixies doing "Winterlong," Sonic Youth doing "Computer Age," (what a computer age it was back in '89..." and maybe the most inexplicable and wrong cover ever, Psychic TV doing "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," and doing it totally straight and seriously I might add, which makes it all the more eerie and frightening.

Didja know the skirblog has a sister? I told you she was born 1.5 years after me to the day, remember? So she works over at the famous Politics and Prose book shoppe over in Wash, DC. HI SISTER! She tells me that for no possibly good reason, the folks there are friends of the skirblog and perhaps loyal readers. So a big shout out to yinz over there. Sorry you’ve all got nothing better to read, and you've resorted to the s-blog, but there’s your Internet for you, destroying all that used to be good and holy in the world. I welcome you.

fall or fire

The first slanted light of Fall

Today I got that weird Fall feeling for the first time, even though its hot and sunny, the light has changed, the shadows at a slightly different angle, a smoky smell in the air. Fall. Although I just learned today that the smokiness may also be from the out of control wildfire down in San Jose. So much for poetry.

But Fall or Fire brings these street-life observations of my fellow walkers through downtown San Francisco:

So are people now actually listening to their cell phones? I think I’ve actually seen it! How many people do you see talking on cell phones every day? One million? Two?  And how many of them are actually doing the talking? All of them right? Real loud and obnoxiously, their second hand chatter like cancerous smoke.  And yet a normal phone call usually consists of somebody on the other end doing their part of the yakking, right? Yakking which you, if you were really conversing, would need to listen to. Yet you never see somebody with the phone pressed to their ear, or held at arm’s length (the new preferred method) just listening, do you?  Is this because, as I am prone to suspect, most cell phone yakkers aren’t really talking to anybody – just blathering away at some poor slob at the other end, some downtrodden mate or asst. paid for such things; or even more pathetic, nobody at all? Just the need to impress strangers, us, with their business acumen, their 24/7 alpha doggedness; shouting ability? Or just trying not to look so alone. Yet cell phone listening would be a sure sign of a real conversation. Look for it.

I notice a lot of bald guys walking really fast. I don’t know why.

On Tuesday morning on the way to work I saw two women holding beautiful bouquets of fresh flowers, and frowning quite intensely. Were the flowers unwanted? I guess it would be kind of embarrassing to stand there holding a giant bouquet of flowers that you didn’t want. Kind of like when a guy needs to hold his woman’s purse.  No easy way to do this. A few comics have great routines on this subject. Seinfeld I think has one which illustrates the different poses I guy can assume to hold the purse, ie: the football hold; the dangling nuclear waste hold, etc. This is also akin to bringing flowers home for the missus as I did on (I admit a rare occasion, sorry, damn it I am not as romantic as I really should be) a recent rare occasions and I purchased a giant spray of enormous sunflowers, uncut and wrapped, were like carrying an armful of rifles through the streets of San Francisco. Do you carry it like a loaf of French bread? Cradled like a baby? Tucked under your arm, aimed menacingly at passersby? These flowers were so beautiful that random people (women) stopped to tell me that and looked longingly at them. I couldn’t wait to get them in my car and out of public scrutiny and home were they belonged and were much appreciated I should do it more often.

I’ve also been seeing a lot of people reading books while they walk. Is this even possible? Seems to be there’d be a lot of jiggling of the page and headaches involved.  Is reading time so limited that walking to or from the bus is the only time you can squeeze it in?  Or is walking so booooring that you’ve got to read to make it bearable at all? I dunno.

Another until now unknown uncomfortable situation: buying underwear in the big dept store. Men’s underwear mind you, I guess if I were buying women’s underwear it would be a whole different class of discomfort.  Normally I’d buy underwear during a short jaunt to Marshalls or the Gap or a place like that. Not a big deal, right?  But last week I had spare time at lunch and was feeling like my old Gap underwear were underperforming to say the least.  So there I am in the nexus of conspicuous consumption, downtown SF, and thought, surely I can browse from the widest, most comprehensive selection of men’s underwear available.  But I have to report: beware the men’s underwear section of Macy’s or Bloomingdales, unless you are prepared for an all out homoerotic frenzy of male bodies and packages on display, duplicated row upon row in brazen and package-accentuating poses worthy of any similar jaunt to the Castro’s gay soft core porn shoppes.  At first one like myself, (uptight for sure, biased against the male body as an object of arousal or beauty, actually kind of put off by eroticizations of said bodies, sorry but its true.  And no, I’m going to argue that this admittedly misguided revulsion is not a sublimated nor repressed homosexual tendency.  I’m pretty comfortable in my admiration and lust for the female form in all its many beautiful occurrences, as I am put off by dudes, dude!  And I am also totally comfortable when the reverse is true for a person.  As Freud probably never said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”) can maintain an interested disinterest in the front cover photography and focus on the wares, right?  Where is my “style” and size and preferred brand?  Go directly there and purchase without too much cringing or rigmarole.  Yet this time I was kind of looking for a new style and brand, and that meant some serious browsing and god help me I had no idea of what a *ahem” snake pit I’d fallen into. I gave up fairly quickly and thought, this is exactly what the Internet was created for.

And these uh, blogs of course too, right?

Lemme get on to another probably embarrassing admission: I’m totally into the new Kanye West single “Stronger,” which I only heard because the kid was playing it on YouTube. You’ll be hearing it more and more I’m sure, and probably have already. It is based largely on a Daft Punk tune, so much so that West credits them as songwriters and not just unwitting sample-ees. West has improved the Daft Punk song immeasurably and adding some pretty funny lyrics of his own (“I have to ask, ‘cause I’m not sure, does anybody make real shit anymore?”)

Thought I’d seen it all dept:  I felt a little shanghaied they other day when F. so strongly suggested that the kid and I visit a coffee shoppe over in Albany, CA called Central Perk. “Nay,” said I.  “I cannot frequent a place named so.” And yet F. persisted, as she is known to do (HI F! I love you!) and blindly the little dude and myself managed to find the place (F. is also known to give kind of uh, general directions to a place: “… yeah, its up there on Solano, or San Pablo, one of those, near a movie theater, or a gas station…”  (still love ya baby!). The difference between San Pablo and Solano are great, and I’d almost given up when we saw it.  Looked pretty innocuous from the outside. But…
holy mother of god. And when I say god I mean the god of Cool Toys. This place is a wild display of fantastic toys and collectables from the recent past to an almost obscene degree. Whole sections devoted to the Simpsons, Nightmare Before Christmas, Star Wars, Pez, Bobble Heads, lunch boxes, and some extremely impressive old jacks in the boxes, to just name a few. And good coffee and food and free wifi and comfy chairs and areas to sit and why wouldn’t you just camp out here like permanently? Like make this the new place? The new Roma writing spot?  Couldn’t do it.  I’d be goggled the whole time. Way too distracted by it all to sit there typing, plus I try to avoid the free wifi if I can for the same reasons of distraction. (Roma steadfastly refuses to offer the free wifi. You can buy it for the day for $6 if you really need it, but who needs the Internet that bad for six freakin dollars? That’s almost a whole Latte and I aint’ gonna be underwear shopping in Roma neither I can tell you…) Anyway, thanks F for that tip and for not giving away the very pleasant surprise.

Two other pleasant surprises were the books I’ve been reading: one a *gasp* non-fiction title called the History of the World in Six Glasses, about the six beverages which helped shape civilization as we know it: Beer, Wine, Tea, Coffee, Distilled Spirits and Coca Cola. Well written and fascinating foodie anthropologic study.  A lot I didn’t know about all of them six important bevs.  To be sure I’m on a huge iced tea jag right now. For a while it was orange juice I couldn’t get enough of, but now its iced tea.  Liptons is the preferred brew, esp. this “cold brew” stuff they have where you can make a gallon in just a few minutes, and I found we were going through gallons a day over at skir-central. I mix Earl Grey in with it, no not as an homage to Capt. Picard, but due to the bergamot, an extremely pleasant flavoring and a word which easily gets stuck in my head.

Another enjoyable, not too cumbersome nor taxing read was Christopher Moore’s latest, A Dirty Job, which seems to be right up our alley, about a poor slob who right after his lovely wife dies in childbirth, finds out he’s like the Grim Reaper, or one of the Grim Reapers, or one of a class of humans who for unknown reasons have been recruited to collect the souls of the recently departed. So, yeah, it’s a comedy!  A funny assed book, and full of dark humor, macabre humor (my ol buddy in high school used to say Mack A Bray!), death humor, gallows humor, uh… even mentions those newspaper death notices which are so near and undear to my heart. And it all takes place in dear ol’ SF, so I feels a connection. Big time bonus, the cover freakin’ glows in the dark, which I only discovered after nearly nodding off one evening and seeing this odd glowing from the ol’ nightstand, and nearly having a weird, sleepy heart attack. WTF! I thought and froze in semi conscious fear. But it was only that trickster Chris Moore glowing at me. Book reminded me a lot of the wacked out Illuminatus trilogy by wasshisname Robt. Anton Wilson. Just as silly, sprawling, engaging and often way off the mark and unfinished, but very much entertaining and worth the read.

Speaking of the kinda sorta newspaper I kinda sorta work for, I was appalled last week while reading Kenneth Baker’s story about how the new DeYoung museum is perceived in the community, to read a nasty, unsupported, condescending little line about our boy, Dale Chihuly, who has a show scheduled there and is apparently a glaring example of the depths to which this once-fine institution has sunk: “Chihuly … whom most critics regard as an interior decorator.” What a fabulous double-edged smack down of both Chihuly and interior decorators. Are Baker and his ilk (all these “most critics,” ie, crusty old white dudes) clearly have no room in their heads for an artist working in glass? Haven’t we risen above this sort of non-issue long ago? It is so old and boring of course I’d never waste time going over it here. We discussed the transformative Chihuly show we saw in Pittsburgh back here, and if that’s the kind of non-art the DeYoung hoping to attract I say, finally! To Ken Baker and his sort of cheap shot, unfounded snobbery? I say you pissed me off damn it, and it goes back to my point about museums being inaccessible to the everyday person who would get a great kick of  seeing interesting new work, especially by artists (or brilliant interior decorators) like Chihuly who are showing us something beautiful and new.