Stardate 05232003
Getting the facts wrong is practically a job requirement for entertainment journalists. So I’m glad that I don’t work for the NEW YORK TIMES. Nor do I run a corrections column, which I should do.
For example, last week I reported that DJ SOULWAX’s CD was really cool. Rather, I editorialized and passed it off with such conviction and lack of emotion that it sounded like reporting. Just like FOX News. In actuality, SOULWAX is not a DJ. It is a mixmastering duo and they have a website, www.soulwax.com, so getting their CD’s wouldn’t be as tricky as you’d think.
Tricky, tricky.
Goodbye, Azrael Abyss
Chris Kattan has left SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. I met Mr. Kattan once in Los Angeles at a sketch comedy show called BAD ACTORS SHOWCASE but now it’s just called THE ACTOR’S SHOWCASE that was running then at the GROUNDLINGS theatre but is now at the Canon theatre in Beverly Hills. Chris Kattan is a Groundlings alum. I’ve been watching SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE with alarming regularity. Thank you, TiVo. Dan Akroyd hosted the night Kattan left the show. It was as if Akroyd was saying, “See, Chris, there is life after SNL.”
Spread wide your wings and fly towards the horizon, there’s a whole world out there waiting for you to fill with your magnificence.
Speaking of ex-SNL’ers, JUST SHOOT ME with David Spade just got canned. Spade played the wise-cracking, surly and slightly clueless Finch. "Wow, for the first time I feel like college isn't just a bunch of dumb educational crap. It's a star machine. Bigger than Hollywood." NBC has a list of “Finchisms” at the JUST SHOOT ME website but they aren’t all that funny when you read them out of context.
The TRACEY ULLMAN SHOW – now THAT was a cool show. It was English enough to be funny, but not so English that Americans wouldn’t get any of the situational humor. I mean, babies on a pool floaty playing with knives and scissors, that’s pure humour. Tracey Ullman now has a show on the Oxygen Network called VISIBLE PANTY LINES (Sundays 8am). It’s a chat show about fashion. It’s an interesting vehicle for Ullman, to say the least. Sundays at 8am is definitely the TiVo hour.
Eric Shclosser, author of FAST FOOD NATION, has a new book, REEFER MADNESS: SEX, DRUGS, AND CHEAP LABOR IN THE AMERICAN BLACK MARKET. The author gave a reading at Cody’s bookstore in Berkeley, California to an enthusiastic crowd. You don’t have to go very far in Berkeley to get a bunch of people to sit around listening to a guy talk about pot. Although, the “head” culture isn’t what it used to be. Cal Berkeley was in the news recently for not allowing summer students from countries most affected by SARS. Asian students are the majority of Cal’s population, so they won’t be lacking for equal opportunity numbers. Although Berkeley, under much fire and controversy, scrapped their equal opportunity admissions program right about the same time they scrapped the use of SAT scores as an admissions factor.
Anyway, Cody’s is a great bookstore and you can order from them online. Support your local, independent booksellers, if there are any left. Which means, also, read a book. The fewer books you read, the more the terrorists win. Think about it. A Smart Country is a Country Impervious to Terrorism. While that may not be true, it’s not any more ludicrous than any other assertion about domestic security being floated around right now and it’s certainly a good place to start. So SMART ‘EM UP, AMERICA AND LET’S KICK IDIOCY, SMALL-MINDEDNESS, XENOPHOBIA, HATRED AND FUNDAMENTALIST PARANOIA RIGHT IN THE SWEET PATOOTIE!
The smarter you are, the safer you are. A book a day keeps the terrorists away. A well-funded public school system reduces crime rates. Arts in the schools graduates fewer fools. Right On!
Who even knows what this column is supposed to be about anymore? It’s chaos. It’s madness. It’s the sweet smell of mental freedom.
Just kidding. There’s a point. Psshaw. As if. Like I’m just sitting here, or rather, my hundred monkeys are sitting here, banging on typewriters while the HAL2000 turns their gibberish (gibbonish?) into … THIS! VOILA! PRESTO MYSTERIOSO!
Eric Schlosser’s FAST FOOD NATION was an eye-opening exposé on the meat industry. You read it not because you are a vegetarian, but because if you willingly blind yourself to reality, reality will eventually come around and bite you in the ass. Hard. You’ll maybe even bleed. And then you’ll be all, “What happened?” Just like what happened in Germany under Hitler. So be warned. Food companies are coming to “cleanse” you. Although, it’s not a good strategy for a disease to kill its host, but with a rapidly reproducing host, the disease has no worries about it’s own survival.
Just Shut Up Already
REEFER MADNESS isn’t as much about pot as it is an examination of the market forces organized around our secret, illicit desires. America is weird in that way. We have all these things that are totally ubiquitous in our society yet we keep them hidden behind a curtain and pretend that they either don’t exist or that only other people are interested in them. For example, Marijuana, Pornography and Public Sex. At least we’ve brought domestic violence and hate violence out into the open. That’s progress.
On Sunday June 15 at 7pm PST, HBO is premiering the first of five documentaries in the series called PANDEMIC: FACING AIDS. Narrated by Elton John, the documentaries explore the very personal impact of HIV/AIDS in Russia, Brazil, Thailand, India and Uganda. I went to the premiere of the Uganda episode and was devastated by the number of AIDS orphans left in the wake of HIV/AIDS which is associated primarily with heterosexuals in so-called “undeveloped” nations. Uganda, however, is a success story in reducing HIV transmission rates through an aggressive education campaign. Other countries, like South Africa, won’t even admit there is an HIV crisis in their country.
There was a panel discussion after the film and among the participants was Ambassador Jack Chow M.D. who is Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Special Representative for HIV/AIDS. I asked Mr. Chow at the reception how Secretary of State Powell manages to make space in the State Department to address AIDS issues given the overwhelming priority of security issues under the Bush administration and in the face of the Bush administrations lack of interest in AIDS issues. Mr. Chow replied that Colin Powell feels AIDS is a security issue, a “disease of mass destruction” and has, from the start of his appointment, led the charge to aggressively address HIV/AIDS policy and funding issues.
And now, a civics lesson. Laws can be passed and policy developed independent of there being any money to administer new laws or policies. In order to get funding to administer new laws or policies, the House and Senate appropriations committees must give budget approval. You are now well on your way to being a Congressperson.
You can learn a lot of interesting things by just paying attention to the where the money is going. For example, Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida, the “voting trouble” state, and brother of the infamous George Bush, currently at-large as President of the United States of America was criticized by the House Appropriations committee for signing into law SB626 (Senate Bill 626) which extends pollution limits and delays clean-up of the Florida everglades. This bill is perfectly in step with the Bush Family’s lack of concern for the environment and their short-sighted interested in economic gain versus sustainability of natural resources, upon which our survival as a species depends. But what can you expect from an oil and weapons family – two industries that taste great together. What, a war in Iraq – oil AND guns. DAMN DIDDLY WE’RE GONNA MAKE A FORTUNE.
The most telling part of the statement issued by the House Appropriations Committee is this in the very first sentence which translates to, “I’m a Bush. We do what we want when we want. What have the Florida Everglades ever done for me? Nothing! And I expect to do nothing for it, either. Hell, I’m a Bush. My brother’s the President. Woo Hee. I can’t believe we pulled that one off. Way to go Papa Bush. Damn Diddly. What do 3000 people in some stupid office building in Manhattan matter when it’s my billions of dollars of dirty money gained through the creation of war that I need to protect. Osama Bin Who? Damn, they oughta be looking for Osama Bin Bush.”
Here is the undefiled criticism from the US House of Representatives. Just in case you bought into the whole unilateral support, high-approval-rating lie.
“The State bill signed by the Governor today does not represent collaboration or consensus with the Federal partners or the environmental groups. We need to maintain an open, transparent process with all stakeholders at the table. While it is premature to detail what specific impact this action will have on federal funding for the Everglades, it could have a serious effect on the allocation of funds for the project.”
Bush has recently promised 15 billion dollars towards AIDS prevention in Africa and when asked, twice, about how that promise will turn into actual money, Dr. Chow deftly avoided the question. Apropos of nothing other than thematic unity, Dr. Chow has degrees from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF – the medical school of the UC system) and Cal Berkeley aka UC Berkeley.
Gigi’s apartment, “The Factory, West” is starting to look like an abattoir. She’s been working with pig intestines so she has big vats of the things soaking and drying all over her apartment. She’s got this fiber arts class so she’s experimenting with all kinds of material. She’s been sewing photographs printed on vellum onto the stretched and dried pig intestines and making mobiles out of them. Her latest wonky creation is a vase and a bowl made from dried pig intestine. I told her to tell people that the bowl is really a dried human cranial membrane, the thing that ensheaths the brain. If they ask her how she got it, she should tap her forehead and say, “You don’t want to know HOW difficult it was.”
Now, I can’t really say “I was there,” so allow me to pull a Jayson Blair and write about the recent bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Associated Press reported a little reprinted fact that brings this whole thing into perspective and in some ways invalidates Tom Ridge’s recent escalation of our FREAK OUT ALERT SYSTEM, the bombers real “American” target in Saudi Arabia, are employees of the Vinnell Corporation, which was owned until 1997 by the Carlyle Group – the infamously secretive company run in part by George Bush Sr. The Vinnell Corporation trains Saudi military personnel and sells weapons. The true target of Al Qaeda is NOT America or the “Western Way of Life.”
Most proponents of a religious state under the head of a single Male deity (the god known as “God” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are against secular, humanistic societies and seek to create a “pure” religious state, a theocracy defined by the word of “God” as it is interpreted by His worshippers. Although, Al Qaeda’s political or social agenda isn’t discussed much outside of “THEY WANT TO KILL US ALL!” Outside of the manic devotion to simply “destroying the enemy,” if the Al Qaeda still remember what it was they first started fighting for before their ideals shifted to simply being about the fight, what was their ideological platform, their vision for reform, that got them started in the first place?
Maybe the Buddha is right about these things. Taoism gives us a way to understand change and appreciate the moment but Buddhism, with it’s DHARMA, gives us a framework for right action, much like the humanitarian lessons of Jesus of Nazareth and the idea of “The Christ” as a fully enlightened human being, at one with God as loving creator. The idea that you are God but you don’t how to see it yet. Which as you know, is the first temptation of Eve in the Garden in the myth about “The Fall of Humankind.” Eat the apple and you shall be as a god. And yet, God says, well, not for a great many millennia later, “Thou shalt have no other God’s before me.” But he DID say, “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree.” See, (SPOILER ALERT) as the MATRIX RELOADED posits, that choice is the flaw in the system of control known as the Matrix. Choice, not truth, is what makes you free. So the fall of humankind in that Garden of Eden myth is really a myth of liberation, not a myth of separation. Eat the Apple.
The true target of the Al Qaeda is and always has been the Saudi royal family. A family that the Bush family is very, very cozy with. See Vinnell Corporation above.
However, if your friends control a major media company, you two can shape the message any way you want. Look how much smarter we’ve gotten in just 1000 words.
I’ve been busy packing and getting things tidied up before I move back to Los Angeles so I haven’t been able to go scout out the good stuff as much. This is, in fact, my last ABOUT TOWN report from San Francisco. That means in the coming months you should see more celebs, more Sunset Strip nonsense and the possibility for a chance encounter with Pamela Anderson. I’ve been trying to clean out all the stuff I’ve magically accumulated this past 8 months or however long I’ve been up here in San Francisco but I ended up engaging in heavy trading instead. I mostly managed to take all my big, clunky stuff and turn it into small, elegant things that I still don’t need. Every good garage sale begins with sentimentality and ends with pizza.
While doing all this cleaning and reorganizing, I found some photos that never made it into ABOUT TOWN so here’s a photo retrospective I’m going to call, “Things I Would Have Remembered Doing if I Wasn’t So Stoned So It’s a Good Thing I Got A Picture.”
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