Monday, November 22, 2004

Why Johnny Can't Read (But Boy Can He Shoot) Parents who've had trouble pulling their youngsters fingers from the video Uzi so that they'll do some homework should rejoice. The Scottish firm Traffic Games have developed a unique way to package history and horror that will enable your child to study while piling up combat kills, according to a piece I found this morning at the Aljazeera Website. If that's not enough for you, there's another game out - I can't remember where I saw it - in which the president of the U.S. orders an aircraft career that's hovering 25 miles off the coast of California to pretend that it's way out to sea, so that Mr. Prez - who, in this game is a miserable rich-boy draft-dodger dressed up like a military man - can have a press conference in which he challenges the enemy to "bring it on." posted by TommyT @ 12:25 pm | Permanent link

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Trouble at the Castro Theatre There's nothing more annoying when you're having fun than to find out that what you thought was just fabulous entertainment is actually much more than that. But so it is with San Francisco's Castro Theatre, which for the past couple of decades has contributed an important chapter to what is culturally speaking San Francisco's most important - and in these ill times, most embattled - neighborhood. As Bay Guardian arts editor Johnny Ray Huston writes in this week's edition of the paper, "the Castro has fostered an international reputation by remaining steadfast in its dedication to film as an art." Why does it come up for discussion at this particular moment? Because on October 26, Anita Monga - who's programmed the Castro for the past 16 years - was fired. The implications of her dismissal at the political moment are grim. posted by TommyT @ 11:59 pm | Permanent link

What A Rush Limbaugh The Bay Area has produced a solid handful of fine solo performers in recent years, most prominently Josh Kornbluth, and perhaps most importantly Margo Gomez and Charlie Varon. If there's any silver lining lurking behind the dark cloud that is Rush Limbaugh's continued political existence, despite the fact that he's a lying, hypocritical hate-monger, it's the 10th anniversary return of Varon's Rush Limbaugh In Night School. See Rush enroll incognito in a New School Spanish class, where he falls for a fugitive member of the Weather Underground. See Varon at his best. He is a great talent - funny, smart, and opinionated as hell. Bay Area haters will hate the show - which these days is as good a measure of where a person stands as any. posted by TommyT @ 11:43 pm | Permanent link

Saturday, November 6, 2004

Close Encounters With Carlos Santana I've spent some time with Carlos Santana over the years - it's true, about 20 hours, actually - and you might even say we were friends if you only heard my side of the story. But, in fact, Carlos never remembers me even though the last time we sat down - at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, shortly before the release of Supernatural, I was representing Rolling Stone, and I wore nearly the same clothes I had on the last time he'd seen me officially, when I interviewed him for the S.F. Bay Guardian in the early '90s. Off the record, I said "Sup Carlos" a few months before the Rolling Stone gig poppped up. We were both shopping at the big mall in Corte Madera, over in Marin County, but he must've been pretty involved with what he was doing, because he didn't even hear me. Anyway, he heard me during the Fantasy interview, he just didn't remember me. He also didn't remember to send me the Coltrane videos he had promised, but that's another story. Besides, he gave me a big poster of the Supernatural cover - signed and everything. My son framed it and put it up on his living room wall, where it remained until his girlfriend cut up all his clothes with a scissors and threw most of his stuff out the ninth floor window of the place where they stayed. He left after that, and she got evicted. Some homeless guy took what was left of the poster. The very first time I talked to Santana was the first time I heard his band, at Woodstock - the B.C. installment. We ran into each other backstage, and we both thought each other was someone important so we were really polite until we realized neither of us was all that. Then we both acted aloof, and above it all... except a few minutes later Santana led his band out onstage and delivered a set to half-a-million strangers (no one on the East Coast knew who he was at the time). After that he'd never have to remember my name or any other name. He had people on the payroll to remember names. So why all the memories? So I can tell you about the really great reissue-plus of the first Santana album, called Santana recently released by Columbia/Legacy. The remixed sound just about leaps out of the speakers, and better yet, the second disc has the entire Woodstock set (along with a bunch of not so great early studio work). posted by TommyT @ 1:02 am | Permanent link