Casing the Promised Land

My mind veers over to the freeway today. Could be hallucinations beginning to set in after five days of looking at the same walls, staircases, hardwood floors and furniture.

In two days, I'll be hitting the six-lane blacktop with Michael Shaw (who some of you may know as the lead guitarist for erstwhile Bay Area rockers Petrol and The Aktion) down to the high desert, out to Joshua Tree and Coachella. As one might expect, there is much mischief and regrettable rock 'n roll behavior in the works.

So today I have music running through my head non-stop. Road songs. The Louvin Brothers' Cash on the Barrelhead, Gram Parsons' Return of the Grievous Angel, Modern Lovers' Roadrunner and Ride On Down the Highway, Hank Williams' Lost Highway and Ramblin' Man, hell, even the Allman Brothers' Ramblin' Man. Townes Van Zandt's Pancho and Lefty, Tom Waits' Ol' 55 and several of the songs off of The Heart of Saturday Night, Springsteen's Thunder Road, Little Feat's Willin' and Truckstop Girl, The Rolling Stones' Moonlight Mile and No Expectations and their version of Route 66. Alex Chilton and The Box Tops doing The Letter, Marvin Gaye's Hitch Hike, Doug Sahm's Is Anybody Going to San Antone?, Clarence White's flatpick guitar version of I Am a Pilgrim and Steve Earle's version too. Deep Purple's Highway Star, The Edgar Winter Group's Free Ride, Talking Heads' Road to Nowhere and The Kinks' Life on the Road. And, one of my favorites, Cheri Knight's somebody-else-is-going-on-the-road-song Wagon of Clay.

Brilliant traveling songs all.

Some with brilliantly simple lyrics like those in Roadrunner:

It helps me from being alone late at night/
It helps me from being lonely late at night/
Don't feel so bad now in the car/
Don't feel so alone, got the radio on/
Like the roadrunner/

I've got the world, I've got the turnpike/
I've got the power of the AM/
I've got rock 'n roll late at night/

Or like the poetic strains of Wagon of Clay:

If I could ride, I would follow you now/
My horses would fly overhead/
I'd keep you sewn to a ribbon of road/
Weave you around in the end

Or the astral dreamweaving of Return of the Grievous Angel:

The news I could bring, I met up with The King/
On his head an amphetamine crown/
Talked about unbuckling that old Bible Belt/
And lighted out for some desert town/
Out with the truckers, and the kickers and the cowboy angels/
And a good saloon in every single town/

Or the mock indignation of Ray Davies' Life on the Road:

When I arrived in Euston/
I was little more than a child/
And I didn't know then that the dives and the dens/
Would be so vulgar and wicked and wild/

Or the grease-smudged genius of Springsteen:

Well now, I ain't no hero, that's understood/
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood/
With a chance to make it good somehow/
Hey, what else can we do now?/
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/
Well, the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere/
We got one last chance to make it real/
To trade in these wings on some wheels/
Climb in back, heaven's waiting on down the tracks/
Oh oh, come take my hand/
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land/

And though it's not a road song, at this moment my anxious soul is singing along with Paul Westerberg and The Replacements -- "Anywhere is Better Than Here".

Cabin Fever!

The walls of my formerly spacious apartment are beginning to close in on me. I have only worked two days in the last two weeks and have resorted to relentlessly harassing everyone I know -- people that are far busier than I.

Rock 'N Roll Road Trip(TM) Mach II to Coachella next weekend cannot come soon enough.

But I have been doing a lot of writing lately, though not so much on the blog, as you no doubt have noticed. I may also have found a new writing partner in an old, familiar corner of my world. I've bought my old typewriter back out of hock, dusted it off and oiled the keys (OK, I didn't actually oil the keys...or buy it back out of hock) as it is time to launch a letter writing campaign against Apple. I will not flag nor fail until I have a new iPod. And maybe a few of you will get a long-awaited response to some long-forgotten letter. Rest easy Terrence, I have not forgotten you, old chum. It'll be mai-tais and iTunes as soon as we've seen victory!

From Rags to Bitches

It seems like you can't open up a newspaper or magazine, or click over to your favorite online news source, without running across the increasingly popular article taking a competitor to task. This is a trend that needs to stop. Not only does it seem like so much middle school gossip, but it really does the media consumer very little to no good.

As many of you can tell, I like to read Salon.com, but last week, Salon writer Eric Boehlert felt the need to take it upon himself to critique Time magazine's front-page piece on the unholiest of unholies, Ann Coulter. Sure we all get a little fired up sometimes that a magazine like Time devotes ink to idiots like Ann Coulter, who so clearly thrive on creating hype around themselves, but blowing off that steam is what personal blogs are for -- we need to keep it out of publications like Salon.

But, of course, Salon is not the only rag guilty of such behavior. SF Weekly loves to rag on The Bay Guardian, the Bay Guardian loves to rag on the Chron, Fox News loves to rag on the New York Times, The New York Post loves to rag on the Times. The list goes on and on. Can't these publications assert their superiority to their competitors by, say, using that energy and column space to run tough, well-researched investigative pieces on corporate criminals or government malfeasance? Or maybe run an extra interview with an up-and-coming local band, playwright or author?

The writer on Time's Ann Coulter story had little troubling rebutting many of Eric Boehlert's accusations in a letter to the editor, found here. After reading both the article and the writer's response AND Eric Boehlert's lame response to the writer's response: 'I stand by my story.' I felt like I had wasted twenty minutes of my life watching some stupid playground fight. We can do better, people.

P.S. You may need to get a Salon Day Pass to access both links in this post. But come on, all you have to do is watch a quick commercial. You can pretend you're Jeff Gannon -- the King of the Day Pass.

You make-a me soooo mad!

My iPod honeymoon's over. The other day it slipped out of my hands and -- crack! -- the LCD screen broke on my hardwood floor. Now I can just see enough to execute the shuffle function. Turns out, they don't have such good warranties on these things! In fact, as far as I can tell, there's no way to get accidental damage coverage. And Apple charges hundreds of dollars for LCD repair (just about the price of a new iPod). Damn you Apple!!

A quick google search reveals no shortage of user complaints about Apple's warranty, service and customer service -- and, yes, a class-action suit.

Maybe I've found my next big case.

Bossman at One with The Cosmos

For the last two mornings, I've woken literally seconds before my alarm was set to go off. This must mean something. I like to think it means I am at one with the cosmos, firing on all cylinders. In any case, I am rolling.

It was a beautiful thing watching the A's roll to a 9-0 victory at Camden Yards yesterday. Fifth starter Kirk Saarloos hurled six innings of one-hit ball and Eric Chavez and Nick Swisher launched homers. To top it off, rookie Huston Street made Sammy Sosa his first strikeout victim. Maybe the A's stars are aligned for a long overdue playoff run -- despite the loss of Hudson and Mulder. Or maybe I'm feeling just a little too heady lately. We'll see when I wake up tomorrow morning.

Bossman, Attorney At Law

Bossman 1, Downtown Lawyers 0.

Yesterday I received a check in the mail for $1286, what is left of my severance from The Industry Standard after the suits and the IRS took their share. A three-and-a-half-year wait and the day has finally come -- after a bit of bullshitting, some cloak-and-dagger shit and a whole lot of patience.

It's got me so fired up, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do: anyone who mentions this post while in my company at a bar will receive the drink of their choice*, on me. Don't say reading The Bossman Cometh never did you any good. And anyone who mentions this post while in my presence, and the presence of a coke dealer, gets a gram of coke, on The Boss**. It's time to celebrate our small victories over The Man!

Meanwhile, I'm gonna get to hanging my shingle: Bossman, Attorney At Law. And in case you were wondering, I learned a lot of Latin phrases while researching my legal brief, but 'pro bono' was not one of those phrases.


*If the liquor bottle is on a shelf that stands higher off the ground than Claire Torchia, forget about it. Except you Claire, you can have whatever you want. Limit one drink per household. Employees of The Bossman Cometh definitely not excluded.

**The Boss, in this instance, is definitely not Jeff P$#^&%@ (named blacked out for security purposes).

Taxonomize Your Revolution!

The pre-launch party for Al Gore's new media project, IndTV, was billed as a revolution in televised media, the creation of a station for the people by the people, where the youth of America would be able to raise its voice to the rafters without the pesky influence of corporate sponsorship or big-money power-jockeying. And if you thought that last sentence was was a run-on, you should have heard some of the breathless ramblings of the night's speakers and poets.

Grating poet Aya de Leon spoke of the youth finally getting a voice, and how that could change the course of history -- as if the same things weren't said by many of their parents (now running the hated mainstream media) 30 years before in the very same city.

Michael Franti said the launch didn't need a corporate sponsor, that it was sponsored by "the good people of San Francisco". Moments later, Mos Def asked the crowd to check out a collaboration between the nascent IndTV and Google, apparently not considered a corporation. A young woman on the screen wowed the crowd with such revolutionary tidbits as the top ten most searched for movies on Google and the top ten searches that start with the word 'illegal'. A few punks in their early teens heckled the video from a parking garage above the crowd.

Meanwhile, Mos Def (why Mos!?, why!?) moved to the other stage where he began by confusing the hometown of the painter he introduced as one of his favorites. Then the big moment: the emergence of a chubby-looking Al Gore, an even chubbier-looking Leonardo DiCaprio and the relatively svelte-looking San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, whom Mos Def seemed to confuse with chubby actor/celebrijournalist Sean Penn.

At this point, I too became confused as to what I was doing here when 24 was on in an hour.