Brunch & Xiu Xiu in a Pantera T-Shirt

Today was a really good day. I stumbled out of bed around 1:00 but it was way to hot to want to put clothes around so I bummed around my house for about an hour in my boxers. My friend Brandi texted me to come have brunch with her, so after getting lost I well, I met up with her and her absolutely adorable daughter at this Restaurant/Bar called The Ramp right on the bay and it was really nice.

Brandi used to work at this place years ago and is still buddies with some of the bartenders and so after we had food, she was drinking bloody marys for free and I was drinking water, trying not to burn up and float away. Even with SPF 50 on I feel a little burnt, but my skin doesn’t look red at all, so who knows. We chilled by the water and her daughter made friends with another little girl and the threw crackers and part of an English muffin at some huge, aggressive geese on this hideous slab of concrete that looks like it sunk halfway into the bay in some earthquake or other.

It was great, but it did keep me from accomplishing one thing I wanted to do today: doing my laundry. It was such a hot day in San Francisco today, so after hanging out in the sun for several hours I was all sweaty but all my clothes were dirty and I didn’t have time to go home and get a shirt to change into before meeting my friend to go to the Xiu Xiu show, so I ended up going to Out of the Closet, a thift store on Church.

I got two pretty amazing shirts. I got a Pantera shirt, which I ended up wearing to the show. This is only half-ironic. I actually do kind of like Pantera’s ridiculous macho posturing bullshit, but that’s a perfect thing to wear to a snooty indie rock show because people won’t be sure whether you are just being ironic or totally don’t belong. It’s awesome to keep people guessing.

The second shirt is apparently an Italian poster for some sweet-looking Issac Hayes blaxsploitation film that I am now going to track down and watch. I don’t know how it can top Black Belt Jones (the movie where the dude with the afro from Enter the Dragon kicks major ass and his karate master is Scatman Crothers of The Shining, Zapped! and the original Transformers cartoon show fame), but it still looks amazing.

This all turned out to be unnecessary since my Pixies shirt was clean and in my backpack for some reason, as I discovered when I put my new shirts into it. But it’s cool, I got two new, cool shirts for under $5 a piece.

I walked down and got my friend Star, and when we got back to my car someone had put a lily under my windshield wiper, which was really sweet and unexpected, but I have a feeling it was placed there by a dude. Maybe someone who saw me leaving the thrift store?

It was one of those days were I just knew I needed to drive really fast and listen to rock music really loud, so we listened to Black Sabbath when Dio was the singer and drove to the Bottom of the Hill for the show.

We were really tired and it was crowded and hot and the opening band was HORRENDOUS. I have never walked out of a band’s performance before, but I did tonight. It was one dude and five girls and it was incredibly obnoxious. Five guitars as “played” by people who had never seen a guitar before. They had no idea how to play a guitar at all. I am not being a jerk. They literally had no idea. They were just banging their hands on the strings. They did not play chords or strum or anything. The guitars were all distorted and they just banged them over this really bad drum loop and sometimes a really irritating siren would blare over it all while this blonde chick named Jennifer would shriek into the mic while acting like little miss cute. I wanted to die.

We went outside and hung in the smoking section and chatted with people. Then we came in for the second band. Don’t know what they were called, but they were pretty good. This chick with really great stage prescence with a decent voice who was decent at playing acoustic guitar, a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer. A little more pop, a little more folk than I usually like, but pretty good and a big improvement over the previous act.

Finally Xiu Xiu was on. I’ve seen Xiu Xiu or earlier permutations of the band countless times. I used to go see IBOPA all the time at the Fishbowl, this teen coffeehouse thing at a bread store in Sunnyvale when I was bratty teenager, and then later Ten in the Swear Jar and Xiu Xiu. It’s probably been ten years since I first saw IBOPA. If you know what Xiu Xiu is like and are curious what IBOPA was like, imagine Xiu Xiu’s art-weirdness mixed with ska mixed with pirate sea shanties.

This was definitely the best Xiu Xiu has ever been. Their new bassist is fantastic and is a huge improvement. They were way more rock than they’ve ever been and especially the song “Clown Town” was rocking and awesome. Yes, they are still artsy and weird, but for the first time, they really fucking rocked, too. The show was really great, and afterwards my friend thanked him for writing her a haiku and I embarassed him by bringing up the IBOPA days. Then we drove to Bagdad Cafe, Dio Sabbath blaring. We ate, and I drove her home.

Quite a good little day. I wonder how long it will be hot for. I can just smell rain coming soon.

Hard-Boiled

So a bunch of my friends came over last night and we watched John Woo’s masterpiece, Hard-Boiled. This movie is totally incoherent and features much gratuitious slow motion and guys jumping backwards and sliding while firing two handguns at once.

This movie doesn’t have time for things like dialogue or character development or a plot. It’s basically five seconds of a cop movie cliche (the tough cop who doesn’t play by the rules, his partner is killed in the line of duty, he doesn’t want a new partner, he has a fight with the chief, and on and on) followed by 20 minutes of gunshots and everything exploding.

The less you take this seriously and the more you drink the better this movie becomes. If you try to watch it as an actual movie you will hate it, but if you approach it as a documentary on a world where everything is made of explodium, you will probably enjoy it.

Show Disaster

My band played a show last night which I was all excited about, but I got a cold and the show was a last minute fill-in gig. It seemed like everything was coming together, though. My cold went away JUST in time and we were there early and everything, but the sound guy would not let us do a soundcheck before the show “because [he] would lose the settings when he soundchecked the first band”, so he rushed us through soundcheck after they played and basically ruined the show. I could not hear anything really, nor could my bassist, so we both kept getting lost. Sometimes it was okay, but a lot of the time it was not. And I kept pointing at my monitor and pointing up and putting my head against the monitor but the guy never fixed it and it was basically a huge disaster.

So San Francisco is buried under thousands of gallons of water, also chunks of trees.

There was a big storm last night, and since I live near Golden Gate Park, my whole  neighborhood is covered in bits of tree. My power has been going down more than a cheap hooker. When I got up for work there was a tree chunk almost as big as my car on the street right behind it. I really wish I hadn’t parked next to the park last night, but at least it didn’t fall on my car.

I woke up and discovered my alarm clock had not worked.  I was late to work but no one seemed to notice.

It’s probably not as bad further from the coast but I was like, “HMM THE OCEAN LOOKS ANGRY THIS MORNING.” Then again, I heard on the radio a whole bunch of streets were closed in the city due to flooding or debris, including part of MARKET street, so that was interesting.

Getting to work was really hard because so many streets were closed.

The Richmond-San Rafael bridge is closed following FOUR TRUCKS blowing over.

I’m from Michigan. I have seen some damn rain. However, Michigan is not next to THE OCEAN and I’ve never really seen angry wall of water slowly climbing my street or REDWOODS FALLING ON MY CAR.

The latest:

• 384,000 people with no power
• 30 miles of power lines damaged
• 91 power poles damaged
• 34 transformers damaged

According to the news/PG&E.

Awesome, a cop car pulled a guy over and then some other guy crashed into them on the side of the road.

I’ve certainly seen much worse weather in my life. I remember ice storms in Michigan when the entire world was covered in ice when I woke up. But I didn’t have the ocean lapping at me heels and this is still exciting new weather for me living in San Francisco. I’m sure everything will be back to normal soon, but it will probably take a week for the parks people to clean up Golden Gate Park.

Blade Runner 5 DVD Boxset

Picked up my Blade Runner Voight-Kampff briefcase from the post office this morning on the way to work. So the VK test box thing is pretty cool looking.

It comes with a plastic origami unicorn that is kind of silly (I was somehow expecting actual origami) and a plastic spinner car which is neat. It’s a little bit bigger than a Hot Wheels car, but around that size, and pretty much all plastic, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t give it to a kid to play with or anything, but it certainly looks like a spinner. Pretty cool.

It also comes with a little folder of conceptual art which makes me appreciate Syd Mead a lot more. Damn, they did a fucking FINE job converting his drawings into reality in that movie. Wow. Impressed.

There’s also this chunk of plastic with one of those lenticular pictures in it, you know where, where you move your head to a different angle and the picture changes? Cool, I guess, but doesn’t really add much.

There’s also a little plastic sheet over the DVD box and spinner and unicorn that has a letter from Ridley Scott promising that the Final Cut is for reals his final version of the movie and that it’s really really the director’s cut this time. Really. He swears.

HOLY FUCK. I JUST WATCHED THE DELETED/ALTERNATES SCENES. THIS SHIT IS GOLD.

They explained things that have bothered me for years. And holy shit, ALTERNATE ENDINGS. My god, why didn’t they use the, “If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me” ending?! It’s just perfectly ambiguous where he could be a replicant or not. Why on earth didn’t they use this ending? I can’t wait to watch the workprint. I wonder if it has a fourth ending.

Update: No new ending in the workprint. It just has the elevator doors closing. Damn. Well, Richter Route is my favorite ending that was actually filmed. The “Deckard shoots Rachel” ending is my favorite over all,  but too bad it was never filmed.

The extras on this five disc set are positively sprawling, including a 3 hour documentary.

This is totally worth the 50-something dollars it cost to preorder on Amazon. There’s very few movies I would be willing to shell out 50 bucks for, but Blade Runner is one of them.

A world where women are in charge and men are marginalized.

For Christmas my mom got me the DVD set of the first two seasons of Sliders, a show I used to watch when I was like 13. It’s about people who travel to alternate dimensions (though the stories thus far always take place in alternate universe San Francisco) where there’s usually some clever twist.

In one episode, they went to an earth were women ran the world after an uprising a couple of hundred years ago because women were sick of men killing each other and making life miserable.

Today, men aren’t allowed in any positions of power because they are too unstable and while women have their period once a month, men “cycle every half an hour” or something like that.

It was pretty interesting and I have to admit, it kind of turned me on. But I also discovered that I think the one female character in the main characters, Wade Wells, is super hot, which is not something I remember thinking when I watched this as a teenager.

But a woman just whistles at one of the main character dudes when he is begging on the street, takes him him, lies to him about how she will get him meetings with record producers, fucks him, and then tells him to make her dinner. It was awesome.

One thing I thought was very bizarre about the episode was that the mayor of San Francisco was a woman and it was super outlandish when the professor ran against her for mayor, and women are in all the positions of power, all the CEOs et cetera, yet women are going around wearing skirts and high heels and these kept boys are wearing suits and making them coffee, all covered up. Wouldn’t the women be wearing like pants and the dudes be wearing something sexier? Or am I over thinking things?

What kind of social policies do you think a world run by women would have? I thought it was interesting that the show said there were no more wars, yet someone tried to assassinate the professor for being a man and running for mayor.

I don’t really buy that there would be no more war if women were in charge. What do you think? I mean, look at Maggie Thatcher. She’s kind of the poster girl for angry, violent right wing women.

While this is probably not what it would really be like if contemporary America were run by women, it does bring up interesting issues. Still, it was pretty hot when that woman picked up Remmy.

Observations About San Francisco

Some things I have noticed living in the city:

• Kids dress up in their scene clothes to go grocery shopping
• The Vietnamese/Italian restaurant by my house has good Vietnamese food and terrible Italian food
• Cops are way nicer to me here than the ever were in San Jose… is it because I am older than I was when I was hanging out in San Jose all the time, or because I look like a white dude? When I got a fix it ticket for having a headlight out, the cop at the station didn’t even bother to look at my car. He just took my word for it that I fixed it.
• It’s fucking impossible to park in the Haight, even in the middle of the fucking night on a week night. There goes my theory that it was only because I was there on weekends.
• Driving down the coast every day has not lost its novelty.
• It seems like there’s a lot of power outages here.
• It is SO nice being able to go home in 15 minutes or less from a show just about anywhere in the city. I do not miss my 40 or so minute drive back to the east bay at all.
• Being the one with the car makes you popular in a city where nobody drives.
• My street is a tsunami evacuation route. That makes me feel comfortable!

I’ve been sick for daaaaays.

This is my third day staying home for work and I have slept for at least 12 hours ever day. Thank you mom, for giving your awful cold in exchange for going to see you perform in an opera.

“Oh, it’s not a bad cold at all!” you say.

Sure, it wasn’t a bad cold for the first day. And then the next day I had a fever of 102.

I wish someone would come take care of me instead of me dragging myself out of bed at 8 AM to go make myself some soup and then fall asleep watching Power Rangers. I’m totally in little kid mode.

I have been watching sequels to Scanners because I have really bad taste, and have been making myself a bowl of soup every 6 hours or so. I ODing on multivitamins and sleeping through the day, but still it will not die. Three days of this!

Holiday in Handcuffs, starring CLARISSA AND A.C. SLATER.

This is not some fantasy of mine, this is REAL. LOOK. Does anyone have ABC Family?! Someone PLEASE record this for me and mail it to me or rip it and put it on the interwebs for me. I will give you dollars. I NEED TO SEE THIS. It is a Christmas themed holiday movie where Melissa Joan Hart of Clarissa and Sabrina: The Teenage Witch fame kidnaps Mario Lopez of Saved by the Bell fame and forces him to pretend to be her boyfriend so her family doesn’t think she’s a crazy old maid at Christmas dinner or something.

JESUS CHRIST HOW CAN YOU NOT BE BLOWN AWAY BY THIS? This is like the psychotic crossover of my two favorite shows when I was in middle school that I never imagined, but imagine if I did! Mario Lopez. Melissa Joan Hart. She KIDNAPS HIM. This is lightning in a bottle, baby! Someone tape this for me!

This reminds me of the time I saw a Lifetime original movie starring Elizabeth Berkeley where she was a teacher and one of her students tried to rape her and he claimed she molested him and she got kicked out, but sued and won. Very uplifting. Barf.

Can I be crude for a moment? I would totally do Melissa Joan Hart under almost any circumstance.

Blade Runner Again

I just saw Blade Runner yet again, this time in Palo Alto.

When I saw it last Friday in San Francisco it was totally packed and we had to sit up super close and kind of off to a side, craning our necks all weird. This time the theatre was half empty and being the first ones there was totally pointless. Odd.

I saw it the Friday before last at 10 PM at the Landmark Theatre at the Embarcadero and then last Friday (uh, last night) at 9:45 at the Aquarius Theatre (also Landmark actually) in Palo Alto.

It was my friend David’s birthday. He’s a big fan of the comic book Iron Man, so I got him this direct to DVD Iron Man animated movie. We me up with my friend Geoff and his girlfriend in downtown Palo Alto, bought David sushi dinner, and then went over to the movie.

Geoff’s girlfriend was another first timer with Blade Runner. She said she liked it, it was really pretty to look at, but kind of confusing. She complained that a lot of the dialogue was mumbled and hard to hear and that she didn’t understand the unicorn dream.

I wonder if she would have appreciated the theatrical cut more?