Man In A Panic

Scratchy DJ AM

DJ AM, as you can see, has played his fair share of (s)wanky nights.

Imagine my surprise, then, when he chose to play a high-energy dance re-mix of Jimmy Nail's 'Ain't No Doubt' in SF's trendy 'Prive' discoteque.

The 'LA-style-crowd'* was also treated to 'Sweet Dreams', 'Sweet Child Of Mine' and some deadly Poison.

I'm told he was going out with Nicole Ritchie until very recently, so maybe he's not been practising in his bedroom much.  Personally, I wouldn't let him DJ a game of infant school musical chairs (at a special school for deaf-and-spakky-infants, obviously)

*SF girls hate 'LA-style' girls because they don't wear Birkenstocks and shave their armpits.  Glamourpusses v Hairypusses, I suspect.

On Yer Bike Son!

All I wanted to do was buy a bicycle. 

Do you remember the last time you did that?  If you're a British bloke, you were probably a flop-haired 14 year old - and that two wheeler probably served you through school (sideways skid to impress the girls),  University (attempted wheelies and 'endo's while as drunk as a Lord) and is now locked in your parents shed, ready to play at the first squirt of WD40.

There was only one thing that mattered when you - with your parents money -  bought that bike.  Not the brand, not the colour, not even the number of gears (although 24 was a bare minimum for the half mile freewheel to school).  No, the only thing that really mattered was that it wasn't 'unisex'.  The end of the 80's brought recession and poverty to many. But one kid at our school had it worse than most.  One day he started cycling to school on his mum's brown Raleigh Shopper, complete with basket and panniers.  We felt sorry for the kid. But not sorry enough not to take the piss - and so Mark became 'Mumsy' for the next four years. The stupid, mumsy, gay, povvy, basket weaving git.

Anyway, I digress.

San Francisco is surrounded by the best cycling country in the world - Marin, the home of the mountain bike and Lance Armstrong's training ground.

So welcome to Cycling-Nazi-Central.

See, the mountain bikers don't like the road-bikers who don't like the recumbents.  And everyone hates the hybrid which is the bicycle equivalent of bisexuality - not ideal on slicks or knobblies, suited to neither speed nor pain.

I just wanted to buy a bike. A blue one.  But then I got rocket-pedalled into a world of complicated technological decisions.  Aluminium or steel?  Drops or uprights?  Disk brakes, sir?  Suspension fork and thumb shifters?  Bouncy stem and inbred derailleur?  And when, today, I found myself co-erced into 'test-riding' a thousand dollar razor-blade-on-wheels, I decided not to bother at all.  They don't seem safe to me and I feel like a helmet while in the saddle.

I'm now on the look out for a mule.

 

Welcome To Frat-rock

So Damien Marley at the SF Warfield wasn't as irie as I'd hoped.

The warm up act warmed me up all right, a trio of hyperactive rappers in romper suits shouting out The Hip Hop Dictionary - "A hip, a hop, a hipperty hipperty hip hop...hip hop like you don't stop!' they suggested, struggling to stay upright in their enormous sneakers.  And even when coerced to 'wave my hands in the air like I just don't care', there was no shutting this bunch of tits up.

It wasn't Damien's fault that I left early.  He was chugging along nicely but the crowd was unbearable.   I like reggae - most people do - but when buying the tickets, I forgot that the genre has been co-opted by every student subculture the world over.

The night as a whole wasn't awful, it was dreadful.  Full of dreads.  Mostly attached to 17 year old white Californian surfers who think Haile Selassie is code for being spangled - 'Dude, I'm HIGHLY selassie...WOAH!'.  These dudes dig reggae, dude.  Dude, they dig it because they can whoop dude-aciously, drag on rasta cigarettes and do weird up-and-down dude dancing.  And sing along to dude Damien's Dad's songs, like 'War' and 'Exodus'.  Or, at least, mumble along with a puzzled expression when the lyric is...

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola,
In Mozambique,
South Africa
Sub-human bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed -
Well, everywhere is war -
Me say war.

.....before bouncing up and down and punching the air when the chorus (and words they understand) skanks back in.

I was surprised that Damien played so much of his Dad's stuff. I was also surprised that his threads were so preppy, all blazer and expensive jeans (with a supersized topping of dreadlocks).  It was like watching a genetic tribute band - he did it really well but it was bizarre all the same.  And I might have been slightly 'woah-duded' by the cloud of ganja smoke inside, but I swear I spotted Bunny Wailer bopping up and down at the side of the stage.

Best of all was Damien's decision to find his own Bez whose talent (pictured above) extended to stalking the stage looking wild-eyed and waving the Ethiopian flag.  I'm not being flippant - he was compelling to watch.

Rastafarianism perplexes me, especially after talking to a few Ethiopians about it .  Apparently, the first time Haile Selassie went to Jamaica in the 1960s, 200,000 Rastas (who believed he was God incarnate) turned up to greet him and he refused to get off the plane.  Some God.  They could have picked P.Diddy.  But maybe Haile heard some 'WHOOPING' and a 'HIPPIDY HIPPIDY HIP HOP!' and decided he wanted to go home.  Don't blame him.

All Aboard

Having chosen to live in an 'up and coming' area, I have the thrill of riding the Number 5 bus to work every morning.  Some would say that the buses in 'Frisco are 'socially inclusive'.  And that my bus is very 'special' indeed.  I, on the other hand, would say that it's rammed to the roof every morning with criminals and mentalists, half of them on their way to court, the other half to the loony hospital...it's the Noah's Ark of human deviancy.

Like all buses, there are signs up front imploring passengers to give up seats for the 'elderly and disabled'.  A tricky business when bipedal activity is a rarity for everyone on board.  Every morning, there's a geriatric dance as passengers try to out-mental each other in a bid to sit down.  I usually win - having four able limbs and a stupid accent is enough to convince them that I'm the biggest freak of all.

Incidentally, Davis in Central Valley has some brilliant buses.  They're easy on the eye and you can hop on and off them at your convenience:

Not a bad idea for London really.  Bendy brained bendy bus bastards. The only Londoner I've met who supported the decision to get rid of the Routemaster buses had been run over by one.  And you know what?  I reckon she deserved it.

Stinson Beach

Another tough Saturday afternoon in mid-February.

Dodging those rip-tides and Great Whites is hard work.  And then there's the ardous 40 minute drive back to the city again.

Bummer.

Musical

Menopause (the Musical) 'The Hilarious Celebration Of Women & The Change!'

Bloody hell.  In every way.

Oh, and then there's this.

Sky High

OK, so this is a cheap blog entry.  But I flew to Chicago on Monday and was bewitched by the Skymall catalogue, a Pandora's box of absurd gadgets and inventive idiocy. 

The 'Skyrest' above is my favourite - I mean, this bloke's dodgy moustache and grave-dodging-Hawaiian-shirt would have me grinding my teeth anyway.  But can you imagine if he inflated this hovercraft in the seat next to you?

Of course, an hour later he'd awake from his slumber with an urgent need to empty his colostomy bag.  What happens next, folks?  Just how exactly is he going to squeeze past with an inflatable iceberg taking up half the plane?  You'd end up holding it, a streak of dribble inching its way onto your lap while the old git clambers over your face to get to the aisle.

At which point, you'd notice his LED Belt-Buckle winking at you, like a Xmas tree fairy for his Viagra-fuelled loins. 

Incidentally, I was in Chicago to meet a potential new client - not actually IN Chicago, of course, but in some miserable industrial park 30 miles from the city.  He was a marketing everyman, The Man With No Appearance.  However intently I l stared at him, I couldn't see what he looked like.  I'm sure he did have a face but I couldn't retain a single feature of it - every time I blinked, I'd have to start scanning him afresh when my eyes reopened. 

Two days later, I have no image or memory of him at all....his only legacy in my life is the new column on the right - "Words from Planet Marketing"...and I swear that these are verbatims from Mr.Invisible.

How do people do these Dilbert jobs?  I can barely live with myself when I wake up every morning to discover that I'm not Johnny Rotten.  This anoymous man would have made a great spy had he not devoted his life to shelf-space for meat-based spreadables.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" (Mary Oliver)