Slouching Towards Euphoria: Radio Bar

After bidding adieu to my corporate job that has sustained me through writing my thesis and acquiring teaching experience, I walked into a local bar to toast my former career and my future one. I had walked by Radio many times to get a morning espresso and wondered what the bar was like. No time like the final time.

Radio is a hipster dive bar. It’s not truly a dive, although it’s made up to look like one. Like hipsters themselves, hipster bars have an ironic self-knowledge. The font of the Radio sign is pseudo-Chinese character. The bar has red hanging lanterns and trays with floral designs hanging of the wall. Radio is close to Oakland’s Chinatown, so the motif works well. It’s also painted black and it’s so dark in there that Dick Cheney could get laid.

The bar is a shotgun shack layout with a loft at the end of the bar. The loft has a chain-link fence, which is a nod to Goths or to piggy sex clubs. A mannequin lies on her side on a walkway above the bar. She wears a long slip and looks to the ceiling, perhaps trying to see how the stars are aligned tonight. The seats at the bar are attached to the ground and swivel around. The seats remind me of the bars from the sixties and seventies, the kind of bar you see in Goodfellas, the kind of bar where Joe Pesci kills a made man. In the middle of the bar is a huge column. Either it’s a load-bearing column or it’s a vent. The bottom part of it is covered in square bits of mirror, like a disco ball.

The have a generous supply of Jack Daniels, Makers Mark, and more vodka than you can shake a piroshki at. The bartender made me an excellent Manhattan. A lone, turned-off TV sat on the walkway. I imagine that when they turn it on, it plays cult movies. The bathroom was truly hideous. The smell curled the paint off in strips. The graffiti must have been there for years, including references to the corporation, whose doors I traveled through for the last time a half hour before.

They have DJs here, but there is nowhere to dance. But at hipster places, dancing is not on the menu. DJs come in many forms. The club DJ is pumping a crowded room full of e-bombed dancers. He or she has a headphone in one ear, while staring intently at the turntables. The wannabe club DJ plays bars, where they blast beats and no one is dancing. They just annoy the drinkers, while the bar tries desperately to be hip. The hipster bar DJ spins indie and old rock songs. No one dances. They just say ahh, this guy knows his old rock and indie stuff. I’m guessing Radio Bar DJs are this way.

I like Radio. It’s an unpretentious place with decent drink prices. Oakland, for some bizarre reason, has expensive drinks, but Radio seems like an exception to the rule. The bartender was cool, and the jukebox was well-stacked with great music. The swivel chairs are comfortable. Just be prepared to be blinded when you walk out in the sunshine. The blinding orb will remind you, that you’ve left the cocoon for the cold, bright world.

Something Wicked This Way Retires

The animated show, American Dad, had a good take on Karl Rove. He is shown as a dark lord, dressed in scarlet robes, his face partially covered, and with a bat on his shoulder. In real life, he looks like an accountant who spends too much time at the bakery. But he definitely has inspired fear and loathing. Winning the first election wasn’t too difficult since the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush, but winning the second election was pretty amazing, even with the voting irregularities in Ohio.

His work in the Whitehouse has been one of embarrassing mistakes, all of them politically motivated. The Plame affair and the attorney fiasco most certainly came from his egg-shaped head. The only decent thing he came up with was the immigration reform, and he couldn't pull together his Republican lackeys to pass that one.

Like the administration that he helped spawn, Rove is full of illusions. He told Paul Gigot that he believes everything will turn out all right, as if he controls fate:

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."

Looking ahead, he adds, "Iraq will be in a better place" as the surge continues. Come the autumn, too, "we'll see in the battle over FISA" -- the wiretapping of foreign terrorists -- "a fissure in the Democratic Party." Also in the fall, "the budget fight will have been fought to our advantage," helping the GOP restore, through a series of presidential vetoes, its brand name on spending restraint and taxes.

As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."

Actually I agree with him that Clinton will be nominated. I think it will be her against Romney. And Rove might be right about her being flawed. She comes across as a little cold on camera, but she is getting better. If she even gets a smidgen of the empathy that her husband emanates, she’ll be our first woman president. But trying to guess the election is a fool’s game.

And as for the rest of Rove’s predictions, my God, man, let me know when the space shuttle lands. Rove may have an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, but he doesn’t know anything about Iraq. That country will end up with us leaving and a bloody civil war happening, and all our troops will have died in vain. Bush will go down as one of our worst presidents, and Rove will be a footnote in the book of shame. And the GOP brand name is all over spending, mostly with Haliburton contracts and Ted Steven’s bridge to nowhere.

Rove’s biggest mark is the one-issue wedge. Gay marriage, abortion, terrorism, and let’s not forget racism (Anybody remember the accusation that McCain had an illegitimate black child?). This served Rove well, but now, not so much:

If some of Mr. Rove’s signature achievements have been eagerly imitated, others — including an emphasis on turning out Republican base voters by focusing on polarizing issues like same-sex marriage — have been discredited by polls suggesting that the base is shrinking in Mr. Bush’s second term.

I hope this is true. If literature teaches us anything, it’s that the world does not revolve around single issues. I am astounded people will vote for inept politicians because they spout platitudes about religion. A lamb may symbolize Jesus, but you don’t have to be a sheep, placidly following your preacher. The people in the bible belt have more children serving in Iraq and are hit harder by tax cuts for the rich, but will still drop their vote so a gay guy can’t have the same rights as them. It boggles the mind.

But I guess it’ll come down to the next presidential elections. If the Republican’s win, it will show the American people have a high tolerance for mediocrity and corruption. But there’s an optimist inside of me that says the Karl Roves of the world will soon be in the dustbin.

Somebody Save Jackie Chan!

In the mid-nineties, I was dragged to an art-house movie theater by a friend to see some Hong Kong Kung Fu films. We sat through Drunken Master II and Super Cop 2. I was blown away. The movies were funny, touching, and had kick-ass (literally) fight scenes. I came out of that theater with a new hero—Jackie Chan.

Oh Jackie, what hath Hollywood done to you? Rush Hour 3 is released today, but I won’t be in line for that stinker. Chan brought a great comic sense to martial arts films. Bruce Lee was the master, and Jet Li does that leg split thing, but only Jackie Chan brought a intentional sense of humor that martial arts films need so badly.

When I saw him all those years ago, I thought, what is Hollywood waiting for? What I forgot was the complete lack of cojones Hollywood has. Let’s look at Chan’s American films: the Rush Hour series, Shanghai Noon, The Tuxedo, and other embarrassments. What is the problem here? The studios are too timid to let Chan man his own film. They pair him up with Chris Tucker, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Love Hewitt?!? Oh the humanity.

He still makes Hong Kong films, and I’m sure they use his talents much more then the American films do. I just wish to God they would write a film that is tailored to his talents. Let’s look at the reviewers say about Rush Hour 3. Here’s the New York Times review:

Given how much pleasure both have provided over the years, especially Mr. Chan, here’s hoping they were paid by the truckload. Mind you, it would be nice if they could find mainstream projects that didn’t insist that the only way an Asian man and an African-American man can hold the screen together is if they engage in mutual abasement and self-humiliation. It would be nicer still if Mr. Chan didn’t have to play the sexual neuter and Mr. Tucker stopped popping his eyeballs.

And here is Salon.com’s review:

But it's frustrating that no Hollywood…has been able to showcase his subtler qualities as a comic performer. Tucker and Chan are a strange mix to begin with, and not just for the dumb, obvious reason: Tucker is an overbearing actor, the kind who'll run off with every big line without even really intending to. Chan is a charming and wonderful comic actor, but he needs room to breathe, and that's the last thing Tucker is capable of giving. So while Tucker grabs laughs with the silliest, most obvious gags -- he woos Genevieve, stroking her skin and murmuring "Jay tam!" and "Voolay voo!" -- Chan is most often left looking as if he doesn't know what movie he has stumbled into. No one has bothered to write a real scene for him, and that's a drag.

That is a drag. Tucker is lucky that Chan is around. Who would pay to see him screech like he does? Chan is getting older. I don’t see how he can do his stunts much longer. If Hollywood is smart, they would scan the world looking for the next Jackie Chan. But in the meantime, let this man star in his own vehicle for the love of sweet and sour Jesus.

Part of the Job

Regardless of the media coverage of young actor’s D.U.I.s, we are fighting a war in Iraq. The main outcome of war is, of course, death mostly. Not that you would know that unless you have a deceased family member or friend. President Bush has yet to attend a military funeral, although he loves to give his speeches in front of military personnel. He has had about 3,680 chances to do so as I type this. The military also refuses to let the media shoot footage of the body bags or the flag-draped coffins coming home to United States burial grounds.

The news media has given some attention to our soldiers. The News Hour on PBS ends each broadcast with pictures of the deceased soldiers with no music. The silence is deafening as the pictures of young men and women never to resume their civilian lives come to the screen. Nightline had a special called “The Fallen” where they read the names and showed photos of the 900 dead at that point in the war. A conservative owner decided not to show that Nightline because he thought it would “focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq.” I think if you are going to have a war, you have to see the effects. And you have to honor those people who died in it. Nightline would need about four hours of advertising-free airtime to honor the dead at this juncture.

I bring all this up because of an article on the funeral of Brenton Thomas Gray, a military contractor who died in Iraq from a car bomb. If the soldier’s deaths are being ignored, what about military contractor’s deaths? There are 125,000 contractors in Iraq right now and 1,001 have died. The New York Times article on Gray is the only contractor funeral coverage I’ve seen.

Gray seems like a lot a military guys that I know: a warrior in blood and bone.

“Yeah, you can make a buck,” said Wayne Colombo, a white-haired warrant officer who, well before he worked with Mr. Gray, served with a Special Forces A-team in Vietnam. “But you’re also back with guys you know, doing what you can — and doing what you know.”

Putting aside the problems of a private and unregulated army financed by our government, I have nothing but understanding for contractors. The army doesn’t pay that well and as Walter Reed has shown us, doesn’t take care of them medically. Why not get paid well for the dangerous labor that you do? Contractors can make up to $18,000 a month. That kind of money makes the danger worth it, and you get to do what you love to do.

The downside of course is the loss of life. Dying is hard but the death of a friend or family member is where the real pain is. The funeral’s eulogies were spoken at the cemetery and at a pub:

No one goes dry on the anniversary of a contractor’s death. The party moved from the graveyard to a tavern near the railroad tracks. Your money wasn’t good there. Mr. Gray’s favorite drink, a gin and tonic, was placed beside his portrait on the bar.

While the ritual of burial was honored at the cemetery, the real eulogizing, the shared memories could only be done at the pub. The detail of the railroad tracks also shows who is bearing the cost of the war: the lower and middle class. The reporter has a deft touch and shows the insular world of the military and the stoic grief of the families:

The room seemed physically to stiffen as Mr. Gray’s teammates from Iraq walked in, a tight-knit group that installed itself at the bar. One of them set out the portrait of Mr. Gray with the smoky circle of an ammunition detonation rising in a halo at his head.

“How long did you know my son?” Mr. Gray’s mother asked.

The team leader said about two years.

Mrs. Gray touched another picture of her son, in a photo album lying on the bar.

“That’s my fair-haired boy,” she said. And both of them walked away.

At the end of the article, two Special Forces soldiers walk to their Harleys and sheath the American flag. All the political posturing in the world cannot match this simple act. I’d like to drink a toast to Mr. Gray. I’d like to drink a toast to all who have died, but that would put me in a coma. All I can do is give my sympathies to all those families and hope for something better, anything better that what we have now.

The Dark Tower Bummeth

San Francisco is a living entity, constantly in flux, and being made over by the little worker ants that swarm her body. She is like an actor with hairdressers and makeup artists and cosmetic surgeons fluttering about her, turning her into a vision. But sometimes that vision isn’t so good. Have you seen the older actors with the tight faces, faces that resemble plastic masks more than flesh?

By the Bay Bridge, a looming tower, called One Rincon, greets you as you drive in to the city. I get a dark feeling, much like Browning’s Childe Roland as he approaches the dark tower. San Francisco’s manhattanization began in the seventies and is really taking off lately. On Monday, three proposals were made for a train terminal. None of them are really distinctive. Tall glass buildings are rarely interesting. These buildings will be the tallest buildings on the West coast if built:

The three proposals range in height from 1,200 feet to 1,375 feet - each extending well past the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid, the tallest tower in San Francisco.

These buildings will be as tall as the Empire State Building. Why do we need such tall buildings here? Their answer:

In the early planning for the new terminal, it was assumed that any tower alongside it would climb no higher than 550 feet. Now, though, public officials say the extra height is merited - not just to boost the land sales, but to show that San Francisco continues to measure itself against other cities of global status that are seeing super tall towers proposed or built.

Yuck. I don’t care to have my city look like Kuala Lumpur or Dallas. But at least there will be a park built along with it. The new buildings show a shrinking of neighborhoods and a growing of condominium canyons. One Rincon, the dark tower, will be very expensive to live in:

One Rincon is not affordable housing -- the minimum price is estimated at $500,000 for a "junior one-bedroom" place, an apartment of only 613 square feet. Top of the line, top of the building will be a dozen three-bedroom deluxe condos, 1,967 square feet with drop-dead views. The estimated price: $2 million.

So you can pay half a million dollars for a view of frustrated commuters trying to get into the city. Of course, the higher paying deluxe condos will have stunning views, while they block out the sun for a whole lot of other people. Not to mention blocking the view of the Bay Bridge. There will be no affordable housing in the behemoth, but they did grease some palms:

"Who is going to live at One Rincon Hill? People who can afford it," Kriozere said. His firm -- Urban West Associates of San Diego -- was required to make a $20 million contribution to the mayor's affordable housing fund and $18 million into a Rincon Hill community improvement fund as a condition for building the project. The cost, of course, is passed on down the line. "Basically it is a tax," Kriozere said. "A tax on the people who buy the condos."

How about a pox on the people who buy the condos? Such bullshit. No doubt the city is giving them tax breaks to build the eyesore. We have a housing crisis, but the very rich have no problem securing housing, so this does not help.

The old San Francisco of middle-class and working-class families is vanishing, replaced in part by a city of more wealthy residents. Some of the new residents are only part-time San Franciscans, who reside elsewhere and have second homes in the city.

So Rincon Hill is going to be the second home to some asshole jetsetter? Great. San Francisco will be the play land for the super wealthy, a place where the elite meet and sleep with each other. We already have bars that have guest lists and velvet ropes. We have Tommy Lee opening a L.A. style lounge so he can spin records. We have spatially-challenged Hummers trying to find parking spaces. We have jerkoff supervisors who barely pretend to live in the neighborhood they represent. We have it all and only at a small cost to you.

Amo Inglés

Sometimes two articles can comment on each other even though they are about two separate things. In the New York Times Magazine, there is an article about small town immigration issues and a mea culpa about the Iraq War.

In the immigration story, a small town in Illinois called Carpentersville has elected two officials on an anti-immigration ticket. The two officials, Judy Sigwalt and Paul Humpfer give some strange reasons for being anti-immigration:

A restaurant owner and his family, who were Hispanic, [Ed.—Were Hispanic? Did they stop being Hispanic?] had been abducted from their nearby village to a home in Carpentersville. The six kidnappers, all members of a street gang, believed the restaurateur had a stash of drugs or cash, which they wanted. Everyone was eventually freed safely, but in the aftermath the newspapers reported that one of the kidnappers was here illegally. “It scares you,” Humpfer told me. “It’s just a matter of time before it ends up in my neighborhood.” Around this time, Humpfer also learned that the village was having little success in collecting $372,000 in ambulance fees. The collection agencies hired by the village were unable to locate many of the individuals with outstanding bills. A number of them had Spanish surnames, Humpfer said, and he concluded that many gave false addresses because they were without documents and so feared deportation.

But mostly they feel unease because they didn’t like hearing Spanish spoken at grocery stores and other public venues. So they put up some English only referendums and some other laws. They called themselves the All American Team, and they handed out this flyer:

Are you tired of waiting to pay for your groceries while Illegal Aliens pay with food stamps and then go outside and get in a $40,000 car?
Are you tired of paying taxes when Illegal Aliens pay NONE!
Are you tired of reading that another Illegal Alien was arrested for drug dealing?
Are you tired of having to punch 1 for English?
Are you tired of seeing multiple families in our homes?
Are you tired of not being able to use Carpenter Park on the weekend, because it is over run by Illegal Aliens?
Are you tired of seeing the Mexican Flag flown above our Flag?
If you are as tired as me then let’s get out and Vote for the: All American Team ... Finally a team that will help us take back our town!

Yeah, punching 1 for English is exhausting. I usually have to take a nap after punching a single button. And the part of the park being overrun by Mexicans, I mean Illegal Aliens, is truly hostile racism. And as far as the multiple families, what are about this news story of a white Bible Belt family that has 17 kids? Who wants to live next to them?

Although they couldn’t get the English-only law to pass, the All American Team did win a majority on the Board of Supervisors. A lot of politicians get a lot of mileage out of this racism. Lou Dobbs has built a second career out of it. To paint a group as the other that will do you harm always wins points.

Which brings me to the other article. Political professor, Canadian politician and pundit, Michael Ignatieff says how a politician has to walk the line between being bold and being pragmatic, the gist being the Iraq debacle suffers from too much boldness and not enough pragmatism. Ignatieff makes an interesting point of bad policy that is popular with the people:

In my political-science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgment meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed. Resisting the popular isn’t easy, because resisting the popular isn’t always wise. Good judgment in politics is messy. It means balancing policy and politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy — often yourself.

The English-only laws are popular but pointless in the end. To get anywhere in America you need to be fluent in English. Even in the world, English is the lingua franca of both science and business. First generation immigrants can get along without learning the language but their children do assimilate and learn English fluently. Third generation children are American as apple pie, and probably vote for English-only laws.

We need to overhaul our immigration policy, but it seems to me that much of the anti-immigration is racism that hardly helps our country. The Latino immigrants that I have met work hard, and I think getting them amnesty and making them contribute to the country is better then sending them back home. And to be a humanist about it, should we try and help Mexico anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to have a stable and prosperous neighbor to the south instead of instable one? Is it better to help thy neighbor instead of building a wall?

But that’s not popular politics.

Bloody Battles in the Comment's Section

The New York Times Dining & Wine section had a humorous article on people getting drunk at expensive high-class restaurants. There were examples of stripping, throwing up, passing out and singing. The article was light and funny and made the top ten emailed story list with ease. Not much of a gloss can be put on the article, but what was really interesting was the comment’s section.

With newspapers being on the internet, people can comment on a story right after reading it. This makes news reporting immediate and interactive. No more waiting for the letters to the editor. Now you can read the reactions in their raw, unspellchecked glory.

The reactions fell into distinct categories. The most popular response was people’s own stories of dealing with drunks at restaurants or their own confessions of drinking a bit too much before dinner arrived. They’re actually pretty boring so I won’t reprint any of those.

Besides the stories, most comments were arguments. The ex-drunks and nags got up on their soap box:

Why is it acceptable to poison oneself with alchol [sic] for any reason?

And this:

Wasn’t the same kind of thing happening in Rome just before it fell?

Yeah, that’s right America is on the decline because people get soused in restaurants. Here’s a guy who was driven from civilization due to these brutes:

I recall similarly creepy scenes at a number of 4-star restaurants, and … This was one reason I lost my taste for those restaurants and hotels — and for that matter gave in to my natural reclusiveness and retired to a hut in the woods!

Perhaps that is for the best for all of us. Hopefully you won’t be making bombs. And then there is the pothead who is far superior by his choice of inebriation:

Alcohol is a legal but deadly drug. As this excellent article clearly shows, judgement [sic] goes right out the window when some people get drunk…At the same time, the far less dangerous drug pot should be legal and therefore provide a safer alternative.

This guy points out alternatives:

If you drink to reduce stress, their are other ways to achieve, including meditation, marshal arts, [sic] sex, sports, nature walks, or RX medications and psychotherapy.

Marshall arts? Sounds like paintings of sheriffs. Of course, there are the smart asses who love to rile people:

Any fool can drive home sober, but it takes real genius to get there safely while drunk.

And this:

I have dined at the finest five-star restaurants the world over. Boorish and drunken behavior are not unique to the corner tavern. After all, alcohol still is the best way to wash down all the pills.

And then there are the deluded, ugly-American arguments:

Public drunkenness among the young, usually a result of binge drinking, is newly epidemic in university towns in France, but drunkenness in good restaurants is in my experience almost unheard of. Middle class French people drink and eat judiciously…More than that, French people think (and I think they are right in this), and you might as well be dining at McDonald’s; [sic] after the third glass the wine drinks the man or woman. Moreover, it is not thought polite to be drunk in public in France. That, they think, is for Brits and Americans.

I’ve encountered many publicly drunk French in France. The French might think being drunk in public impolite, but that doesn’t stop them anymore than it stops us.

Thankfully, most of the comments were for having fun in restaurants. I’ll leave you with this gentleman’s thoughts:

With apologies to all of you who are apalled [sic] at the sight of several inebriates in “your” fine restaurant, I have to say that intoxication is an essential part of the fine dining experience. Vomiting, acting out, and some of the other behavior described here has no place in a fine restaurant, but getting drunk and slightly boisterous does. Simply put, fine meals are a celebration of the ideal of hedonism- if you’re shovelling foie gras [sic] down your gob and chasing it with a rack of lamb, you don’t have the moral high ground from which to condemn those who also like to imbibe fine wines and maybe break out into a song or two.