Faced

A recent company event feature a performance by San Jose's own Smash Mouth. Here are a few pix I took during the concert.

Happy Frickin' Holidays

You're a mean one Mr. Grinch

Futurballa begins a 2 week vacation on Friday. Enjoy the holidays, however you may celebrate.

Rick

The Spy Who Came in from the Old

James Wolcott reminds us that the iconic TV shows of our childhood don't often hold up so well when you buy the box set dvd collection. Case in point, The Man From Uncle.

Wolcott compares and contrasts TMFU with the original Mission Impossible series, that while also somewhat low budget and cheesy, and dealing with similar Cold War espionage in similarly exotic locales, never descended into camp. The show of the era that he fails to mention that actually filmed on location, was smart, and rarely camp, was I Spy.

The always hip, Robert Culp as undercover agent / tennis bum Kelly Robinson, and his inter-racial heterosexual life partner Alexander Scott, played with great charm by a young Bill Cosby before he became the paterfamilias of the Huxtable clan and started pimping Jello, jet-setted about the globe chasing woman and foiling foreign agents. Truly one of the best spy genre shows on TV and though I haven't seen it in many years, I doubt that it would come off as dated and cheesy as TMFU.

Chabad Boys

Getting into the Chanukah spirit, friend George posted a video of Peter Himmelman, Harry Dean Stanton and Bob Dylan on harmonica performing Hava Nagila at the Chabad telethon back in 1989.

Just to join in the spirit, I found a version of the same traditional folksong performed by a Beatles tribute band.



And of course, the all time classic Chanukah song.

Official (Scary) Holiday Season Kick-Off

Since Thanksgiving has been and gone, it is now acceptable to post our traditional Christmas season posting of the Carol of the Old Ones. The very scary version of the very scary Carol of the Bells.




Cthulhu themed ringtones and MP3s can be found here.

And don't miss the Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu!

Photoshop: Before and After

Via escapegrace comes this very interesting retrospective on photo doctoring from Lincoln to Today. Photoshop has only made it more accessible, but Stalin new how to do it quite well.

J. Paul Ferlinghetti

I have returned from my vacation to LA. Weston at the Getty, Dali at LACMA, fine dining in Pasadena and West Hollywood and escaped before the fires got too bad. A great trip had by all.

Here are some images from the J. Paul Getty museum grounds.

Coming into Los Angeles

The town is like an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination...
~Christopher Isherwood

Heading south for a Museum weekend. I wonder if I'll run into this guy?


The May Company Department Store - Ansel Adams

HOWL

" I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked..."

So begins the iconic poem of the Beat Generation, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg's Beat-era poem "Howl" was not obscene. And on that 50 year anniversary, a New York public radio station has buckled to fear of the FCC and decided not to air a reading of Ginsberg's poem. You can read about the whole silly mess here.

In honor of the anniversary, Pacifica.org will post audio of a reading. Or you can read it for yourself here.

It is a sad time when fear of censorship does the censor's job for him.

I speak of the pompatus of love

What is a pompatus anyways? Well there is a Wikipedia entry to explain.

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls!

Miatapalooza 2007

Couple of firsts. I took the "none more black" MX-5 to my first car show this weekend, Miatapalooza at Monster Park in San Francico (formerly Candlestick) and posted my first self made video to YouTube.

Jewish Sports Legends

Salon has a ranking of the best 18 Jewish baseball players of all time. The top 3 are pretty predictable, but it's a fun read.

And the author also provides a link to one of the funniest moments in baseball commentary ever. Where are you now, Mel Gibson?

There is no joy in Mudville

DVD Journal is shutting their doors.

This has been the go to site for what's new on the street, upcoming releases and reviews of the latest films on DVD. Sadly the proprietors have decided to cease publication. Hopefully someone else will take up the mantel.

Life Imitates Caddyshack

Bill Murray stopped in Stockholm, Sweden for driving a golf cart under the influence.

Pancho & Lefty

The greatest lefty of all time...

Death Knocks

What a day yesterday, we lost Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder and Bill Walsh. I was hoping to find a youtube posting of Dan Akroyd's great Tom Snyder skits, but nothing came up on my search. I did however find this wonderful Bergman parody featuring the film debut of Madeline Kahn. De Duva.

The faux Swedish might be the inspiration for the opening credits of Holy Grail.

Update: I guess it is open season on arthouse directors. I just read that Michelangelo Antonioni passed away as well.

Adventures in Cambria

Or a rare bit of Welsh Skunk....

This past weekend found team Gonzo meeting in the wilds of Cambria, California. A quaint coastal town in the middle of the state. A bit busy and touristy indeed, as it is just five miles from San Simeon, home of Hearst Castle, and it is a gateway to the Paso Robles wine region, where we tasted some very fine potions indeed.

L'Aventure is producing some amazing blends in the Rhone style. A bottle of their Optimus blend accompanied me home. And Windward is doing some very nice Pinots. Fucking Merlots were not to be found, but some delicious Viogniers and Rousannes were also sampled.

While walking along the bluffs near our hotel after a tasty dinner, we saw something posing on the beach side of the path. At first glance it appeared to be a statue or totem of some kind, but when it moved we realized that it was a skunk with tail in the air. In proper Pythonian fashion, we yelled "run away" and ran in search of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (as seen in scene 21).

Sunday found us doing the touristy thing and visiting Hearst Castle. Well worth a visit. A fun tour and some interesting history. The legend has been cleaned up, as the Hearst family still owns the actual house and the State Park system's tour guides seem to leave out some of the darker parts of the Hearst saga.

The drive from San Jose along Highway 1 is one of the most spectacular roads in the world and other than a Winnebago driver that did not understand the concept of turnouts, the none more black MX-5 was a delight to drive along the twisties south of Big Sur.


Big Sur coast line.


Elephant Seals at play?


Along the bluffs near Cambria.


The view back towards the village.


Hearst's pool.


Antiquities.


Hearst's other pool.

Bialy you can be

From Wikipedia's entry on Robert Heinlein is a link to the Google satellite photo of his circular house that he and his wife Ginny built in Bonny Doon, California.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is probably the most subversive children's books ever written, being largely about sexual awakening and atheism. Now they are coming to the big screen beginning this winter with The Golden Compass. See the spectacular trailer here.

This has been mentioned by two of my blogroll regulars recently, Escapegrace and Tony Pierce; LAist has begun a series on LA Neighborhoods beginning with Little Armenia. My old neighborhood, which could be termed little Brooklyn, around Fairfax and Beverly used to stretch to at least Pico, but much of the southern portion is now Little Ethiopia. Nice to see a series like this.

In spite of Ms. Stein's famous quote that "there is no there there", there is indeed many theres there, you just need to know where there is.





Fairfax district of Los Angeles aka Kosher Canyon according to Wikipedia, though growing up there, I never heard it called that.

And for more info on thing Jewish in LA, there's the LA Jewish Guide.

Roadtrip this weekend down the coast in the none more black MX-5, hopefully some photos to share next week.

Jesus of Cool

A short interview with one of the greatest music producers and writers of great pop songs, Nick Lowe, over at the Onion AV Club.

I especially enjoyed his assessment of Punks who pretended to be bad musicians.

Well The Damned were really good, and Elvis was Elvis. Ian Dury and The Blockheads were really, really great. You know, the actual punk music, I didn't care for at all. I thought it was all rubbish, really. It was the attitude, the way that things were being shaken up, that excited me more. I still liked people who were good, you know? Who could actually play. Even though The Damned were a punk group, they played great. As did Elvis, and as did Ian. They were the ones who interested me. Not some of those daft punkers, especially the ones who had people who were actually pretty good musicians sort of pretending to play badly. That was just so stupid, and missed the point completely, I thought. So it was the people who were true to themselves, I think, that were the exciting ones.

Cruel to be kind, indeed.

Ah, synesthesia

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco is presenting Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings. A kaleidoscope like installation of evolutionary art by the ambient one.

Eno says of this show, "They are living an independent life, and they keep doing things that still surprise me. I've watched this program now for thousands of hours, because I have it running in my studio, normally, when I'm working there, and occasionally I'll look up and I'll see something really completely unlike anything I've ever seen before and think, 'Bloody hell!' I know all of the elements in the piece, of course, because I made them all, so you would think that I wouldn't be particularly surprised by any of the combinations of them, but I'm very surprised, actually."

More can be read at SFGate.com.

77 Million Paintings: Flat-screen installation by Brian Eno. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (Sunday show at 7 p.m. is for members of the Long Now Foundation) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. Tickets $20-$25. Call (415) 978-2787 or visit www.longnow.org.