Rock Out, Stay Funky

I'm Back!

2009-07-06T00:05:00.008-04:00

Ay ay ay! I haven't posted anything in a terribly long time. I'll get on it, swear. But if anyone actually ever reads this thing, well, here's some stuff I've been writing for JezebelMusic.com, along with a bunch of news that I compile that you can read or not: http://www.jezebelmusic.com/tag/erin-sheehy/

And here's an excellent video of Tina Turner who is my Sixth of July American hero for being a super badass performer with great legs.

Good Rockin' Tonight

2009-05-22T15:02:00.007-04:00

A Moment In Rock Out History

Wynonie Harris looked like he might sell you a lemon or sodomize your daughter. In one of my favorite photos of Wynonie, he’s wearing a light blue suit and a Big Bad Wolf grin and holds his arms outstretched as if to request a dance. Hair-creamed, pencil-mustached and cocking an eyebrow, he’s probably had one drink too many and will surely press too close on the dance floor. But that oozing “come to daddy” smirk of his worked time and time again. By the age of 21, Wynonie Harris had fathered three bastard children with three different women and he sure didn’t stick around to raise them. A carouser, womanizer and master of ribald, Wynonie Harris had one foot in the blues and one foot on the unpaved boulevard of rock n roll.

In the early forties, Harris became known as “Mr. Blues” while playing nightspots like the Club Alabam in LA and the Rhumboogie Club in Chicago. To clarify, Wynonie’s blues were not the ambling, mournful drawl of the Delta blues or the smoky sultry warble of cabaret “city blues.” Wynonie’s were jump blues. Somewhere between boogie-woogie and rock n roll—in both chronology and style—the jump blues were a playful, wiggling wobbling blues, the kind you bounced your shoulders to. In songs like Wynonie’s “Loving Machine,” the bass hopped, the piano danced nimbly, hands clapped on the offbeat, trumpets blared, and saxophones squawked and went hoarse. Wynonie’s party was twinkling fun.

As a frontman, Wynonie Harris was what you’d call a blues shouter, the guy who could really hang with a live band, pushing his vocals over all that percussion and brass. The rasp in his voice sounded more symptomatic than innate…like he had a tickle in his throat, a dry cough or—more probably—he’d been shouting in the nightclub all weekend. He forced tunes up through his throat, but all that effort didn’t translate into emotional thrust: Wynonie didn’t have the chops of a great R&B belter. He’d just get louder. Sometimes by the end of a line like “Don’t roll those bloodshot eyes at me, I can tell you’ve been out on a spree,” Wynonie would half-speak his last couple of words. But this style made him seem offhand and cool, which worked when you sang about sexin’ and boozin’.

Wynonie’s songs were almost all about whiskey and sex, though he made a few memorable tunes about wine as well, (“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” “Drinkin’ Sherry Wine,” and “Drinkin’ By Myself,” to name a few.) Blues lyrics were often liquored up and full of sexual coding, but there was something so overt about tunes like “Don’t Take My Whiskey Away From Me,” or “I Like My Fanny Brown,” that Wynonie became most known for his racy numbers.

Though they were so often about sex, Wynonie’s songs weren’t made for the bedroom. They were bawdy lilts, shared like a good dirty joke. Before singing the blues, Wynonie had been a comedian, a dancer, and a drummer, and you could hear it in his timing. Take the self-penned hit, “Good Morning Judge,” in which Wynonie sang about ending up in the courthouse after every time he’d “bent” the rules:

She’s five foot two with eyes of blue and pretty as a queen,
I didn’t know her pop was a city cop, and she was just fifteen!

Drumbeat. Drumbeat.

Good morning judge! Why do you look so mean, sir?
And Mr. Judge, what can the charges be?

By the time his career started slowing down in the mid-fifties, Wynonie had sunk into the bilge of novelty songs and misogyny, and it became hard to find much wit in a song like “Keep On Churnin’ (Til The Butter Comes.)” But some of those numbers from his heyday, like “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “All She Wants To Do Is Rock”—where the “-ck” clued you in to the real operative word—swung with such an ease, and pushed the limits of “decency” without dissolving into goofy euphemism. Their style would be imitated by future rock n rollers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

“Good Rockin’ Tonight” became Wynonie’s big hit in 1948, when he took it from Roy Brown and sexed it up real good. Brown sang “Good Rockin’ Tonight” like a button-up Jackie Wilson, all hiccuppy but real straight in rhythm and tone, lacking those Wilson slides and falsetto wails. Wynonie made “Good Rockin’ Tonight” sway, the saxes leaning, looping, dragging, and Wynonie singing his smoothest, really hitting the notes. Elvis Presley later sang his own rendition, high-energy and full of teenage growl. But there was a pleading note when Elvis sang “Meet me in the alley behind the barn,” where Wynonie’s ease made it a casual invitation.

Wynonie Harris’ career petered out in the fifties and he spent the last years of his life tending bar in California. He died of esophageal cancer in 1969 because he’d partied too hard and shouted too loud. Most people first stumble upon him when they’re charting Rock N Roll genealogy. He’s a hidden root in the family tree.

Another New Show: Mother's Day Special

2009-05-04T17:16:00.001-04:00

Songs about Mamas!

Click Here: New Episode of Brooklyn Beat!

2009-05-01T19:35:00.003-04:00

CLASSIC RAP THIS TIME AROUND

Click Here to Listen to My New Radio Show: BROOKLYN BEAT!

2009-04-10T21:17:00.007-04:00

(i'm totally corny, but the music rocks)

Rocking Out!

2009-04-08T16:40:00.007-04:00

Hey Hey, Skin I'm In

2009-04-03T13:15:00.007-04:00

Of all the images from the four fashion-related exhibitions currently showing at the International Center of Photography (ICP), one hit me hardest with its flash and brassiness: "Self-Portrait" (1977) by the Cameroonian photographer, Samuel Fosso. Fifteen at the time of the photograph, Fosso—a slim young man in a baby afro and a sailor cap, shiny space cadet shades, high-waisted bells and a button-up with sharp starched lapels like paper airplane noses—stands with his right leg slightly bent and his left hip swayed, just barely, to the side. Fosso’s a little sweaty, posing in front of a drapey backdrop that screams prom night, but he’s got such a composed swagger that he makes that pubescent forehead grease of his look like supermodel gleam. Photography lights are visible in the shot. Set up far in front of the camera, they call attention to Fosso’s process as he creates his own badass character right there in front of us, for us. The whole scene is reminiscent of Jimmy Cliff as Ivan in the 1973 film The Harder They Come: a drug dealer, Ivan poses for photos in pinstripes and leopard print, with shining pistols in his hands, before lunging into his final bullet-wracked crime spree and death. Life is short, so make yourself a legend while you can.

The other 1970s figure that Fosso channels in Self Portrait is Sly Stone. I always picture Sly as a style icon with substance, all fringe and beads and rock star heroism, shirtless but piled high with accessories. There’s a seemingly naked boldness to these guys’ eye-catching “Look at me!” style…then again, Sly and Ivan and Fosso are all cloaking themselves in constructed personae. But isn’t that what adventurous fashion is all about? Putting yourself out into the world, but as you want people to see you?

I finally peeled myself away from Self Portrait to look at the rest of the exhibits, but Sly kept coming back to me. I couldn’t stop humming that track from his 1973 album Fresh: “The Skin I’m In.” The clothes I wear, and the things they dare me to do…hey, hey, skin I’m in.

Skin—its texture, its quality, its sheen—is, for me, key to understanding the differences between the four fashion exhibitions at ICP. In Weird Beauty, the exhibition of contemporary fashion photography, many of the highly stylized, heavily retouched images play with and subvert daily life. (Take, for instance, Steven Klein’s “X-Urbia,” a series from the March 2007 edition of W, wherein fembot-esque models in red and blue wigs languish in a suburban setting, bathing in green paint and OD-ing on Froot Loops.) In the works from this exhibition, the featured clothes are by high-end designers, the people wearing them are models, and everybody’s skin either glistens and shimmers all bronzy or looks flat and matte and pale like paint. Not much realism here—this is weird beauty, odd and angular enough that I can appreciate its aesthetic but feel I’m not even expected to aspire towards it.

Both Edward Steichen and Martin Munkacsi, two of the mid-20th century artists whose works are on display as separate exhibitions, photographed mainly celebrities—athletes, actors, politicians—in staged or studio portraits. The photos are glamorous but accessible: mean ol’ Robert Moses glancing dashingly at the camera, the platinum blonde Jean Harlow bent down to catch a drag off her cigarette during a tennis match. Everyone’s shot in soft light, so that Gary Cooper and Paul Robeson and Katherine Hepburn all glow, like angels or pearls. Unlike the models of Weird Beauty—good-looking canvasses for the artistic expression of designers and photographers—these celebrities are meant to embody a style. The assumption is that we know and maybe love these figures: we might even hope to be one of them someday. “Even if you haven’t a photogenic nose or wistful cheekbones, you are still potential material,” reads the 1935 Harper’s Bazaar article, “You’ll Be in Hollywood Yet,” on display in the Munkacsi exhibit. The pliant, nuanced grayscale of these photos similarly invites us to take part in this fantasy.

The illusion of effortless glamour is absent in “This Is Not A Fashion Photograph,” ICP’s collection of photojournalism that “touches on style as a means of personal expression.” Most of the people in these photos look pretty beat: no glimmer or glow to their skin. In Lisette Model’s 1950 photo, “New York,” she’s shot a couple in formalwear—think tuxes and pin curls—looking a little bedraggled. The man’s weary expression, the tensed veins on the woman’s neck, the forehead-creases of a long day and the splotchiness of a night of drink are neither softened by lighting nor edited out. But the imperfections don’t diminish the elegance of the subjects. Rather, they humanize this pair because we see some level of failed effort. For all we know, Kate Hepburn flew out of the womb in a biplane and well-tailored pantsuit, but these two are clearly in costume.

The costumes in This is Not A Fashion Photograph run the gamut. Larry Clark’s 1968 “Acid, Lower East Side,” shows a young man in luchador style face-paint and a fringed poncho, slack-jawed and slouching in the middle of an empty downtown street. From the looks of it, he is tripping pretty hard on acid. The depth of field really dramatizes the shot: far behind this boy, streetlamps burn bleary and the lonely New York street succumbs to shadow. This certainly isn’t a pastel afternoon in Haight-Ashbury, and there’s something so sad about the fact that there’s no one else around, save apparently Mr. Clark, to watch this kid on his psychedelic parade.

Many of the photos in this exhibition are of New Yorkers, from the burly matrons in fur and veils and high contrast lighting on the South Ferry-bound 9th Avenue Local to the dazed and sweaty patrons of Studio 54 in silken white Saturday night gear. These certainly are not fashion photographs: though no less carefully composed than the images in the “artier” exhibits, these photos give the sense of a scene that’s been captured rather than constructed. In This Is Not A Fashion Photograph, the subjects’ connections to time and place are key. Notice George Strock’s inclusion of a small, out-of-focus cluster of men outside the billiard hall in the background of his 1941 portrait, “Satchel Paige waiting for pool hall adversary, Harlem, New York.” One of my favorites is the 1966 Bruce Davidson shot, “High school student smoking a cigarette on East 100th Street.” The kid wears a severe side-part and a funky, stripy modernist sweater. But the article of clothing is not what makes this kid stylish. What makes this kid stylish is the biology book in his right hand and the cigarette and switchblade in his left. What makes this kid exude cool is his scowl. He’s not just wearing an awesome sweater; he’s wearing his version of “high school student on East 100th Street.” And that is why these journalistic photos are so influential on the fashion photography of today, which doesn’t sell clothing so much as persona.

I used to sneer at people who put very much effort into their clothes and appearance—especially when I lived in Los Angeles, where it seemed that hours of primping left everyone powdered to the same texture and tone—but here in New York I’ve come to love the pageantry of subway fashion. Fur hats and plastic dresses, special edition sneakers and fake eyeglasses; there’s something so human about trying to build one’s own unique character from the little frivolous things in life. And then there’s this contrast between what we’d like to be and what we are: tired-looking, parched by fluorescents and central heating, beaten down by the wind and the double shift and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. So while I love to see the rockabilly girls, in all their glory and red lipstick, dolled up just so and headed out for the night, I’m more touched by the rumpled business suits and wilted hairdos retreating home, defeated. Skin I’m in, hey, and the things I’ll never, never win.

Tiny Chump

2009-03-20T11:47:00.002-04:00

I spend a large chunk of my time studying at Tiny Cup, a coffee shop on Nostrand and Clifton in Bed-Stuy. It’s a real cute spot with inexpensive coffee and food and free wifi, but for some reason I make fun of it all the time. The nickname “Tiny Chump,” given by one of my friends, has caught on pretty well, though “Tiny Virgin Asshole” not so much. It’s true, the name is the first thing I criticize. Not only is Tiny Cup an unenticing name—“Wouldn’t you want to go somewhere for a big cup of coffee?” my roommate always asks—but something about it seems so emasculating, especially for a business trying to establish itself as a Bed-Stuy mainstay. I love Tiny Cup, but I have to admit, I feel like a wimp hanging out there.

I went to study at Tiny Cup yesterday, and was uncharacteristically hesitant when crossing Nostrand Ave. The light hadn’t yet turned, but it was about to, so I waited, figuring the stream of cars would subside quickly. It didn’t, and it looked as though I was gonna have to wait through the whole light. A middle-aged black man across the street started to cross, so I lurched forward too, only to stop midstep because a Mack truck was zooming toward us from less than a block away. The man, who’d seen me chicken out, made it across leisurely, and when our eyes met we both chuckled and shook our heads. “Some people have balls,” he said with a shrug, “and some don’t.”

Hello, Greenpoint

2009-03-19T16:13:00.004-04:00

flyer outside the Greenpoint stop on the G train

Not so long ago, I was talking to a couple of girls from my Literary Foundations course at The New School about life before Eugene Lang College.

“What’d you do on your year off?” the sophomore poetry concentrator asked me.

“Well, I used to live out in California, but I ran away to Brooklyn and decided to stay,” I replied.

“Oh God, why?” asked the blonde, as the miserable icy wind drilled our molars and whipped our hair into our mouths while we lunged forward down 5th avenue.

“Sure it’s cold,” I said, “but I love it.”

* * *

Later that day, walking west on Manhattan Avenue at Huron Street in the bone-chill of Greenpoint in February, I smelled dryer sheets, overripe mango, and liquid bleach, all in about 20 paces. I was headed toward a decrepit hotel at Clay Street with a pocket full of receipts, psyching myself up to strike deals with my landlord. Brightly colored bottles of Polish mineral water lined bodega windows. Two movers crossed my path, carrying a man-sized pane of glass, its corner chipped off. On the other side of the street, a sign painted in the deli window read “POLSKI SMAK,” and at Papacitos, tacos were going for $1.50 a pop from 11 am to 4 pm (dine-in only). And if that isn’t love it’ll have to do, until the real thing comes along.

(Not So) New Kid On The Block

2009-03-18T23:35:00.008-04:00

HERE'S AN ARTICLE I WROTE ABOUT SASHA MASLOV, ONE OF THE ROCKINEST PHOTOGRAPHERS ON THE BLOCK:

Darkness was falling by the time Sasha Maslov bounded up the crumbling steps of the Bed-Stuy apartment, bike over his shoulder, bottle of wine under his arm. He’d been running a little behind all day. “Excuse me,” he said with a grin once he reached my front door, “I’m a little out of it and partially speech-disabled today because I’m still recovering.” The previous night there’d been a party at Loft 910, the artists’ collective where Sasha lived. He and his seven roommates awoke to find glass on the bathroom floor and puke in every sink in the house, but Sasha felt that overall it had been a great party: “Everybody got laid!” Nobody cared that Sasha was late tonight anyway; the dinner was a thank-you for all the help he’d given me when I moved into my new apartment. “Oh it’s nothing,” Sasha said as he uncorked the bottle of wine with a small knife, “these are the kinds of things you sign up for in a friendship. I can’t say I had too many friends until I came to New York and found you guys. And I was so blessed with that.”

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, “exactly in the middle of that dark spot on your world map where you think you know where it is but you really don't,” Sasha landed in Brooklyn last November, by way of Cincinnati, to pursue his passion for photography.
Sasha is six-foot-four and rail thin, with big dark eyes, black hair buzzed real short, and silver braces that run across his front four lower teeth. If it weren’t for his polo shirts, Sasha could pass for a pirate: not a grizzled and debauched captain, but one of the young guys scrambling up a rope ladder or perched on a mast, tying knots in a storm. He even has a tiny silver hoop in his left ear. He got it on a bet with his Serbian friend from Cincinnati. “He had an earring,” Sasha explained, “and I said it was gay, I think, you know, just joking around, and he said, ‘Jealous?’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’ And he said, ‘I bet you fifty bucks you won’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay lets go to one of those malls right now and get me an earring.’ And we got me an earring and I liked it from that point. And I think it was less than fifty bucks.”

Despite all of the grins and the goofy stories of his soccer hooligan days that Sasha shares with friends, he remains, to many who know him, a bit of an enigma. When he’s not blasting The Who or The Kinks and reorganizing the workshop area of the converted warehouse he lives in, Sasha tends to hole up in his room, working on his portfolio. He is diligent, and he often likes to work alone. Sasha doesn’t go to punk shows anymore, (“too rowdy”) but he’s still big into ska and “Oi!” He spent months trying to convince his roommates to see The English Beat with him on February 6. Nobody joined, so he went alone. Only after the fact did he mention that February 6 was his 25th birthday.

“I don’t think my life is boring, but I don’t think I can present it in a way that can be presented,” Sasha said as he poured the wine he’d brought into ceramic mugs. “I can’t put three words together!” he added, “Partly the thing with taking pictures is you’re just telling the story in a different way.”

Sasha’s documentary photos of Ukraine are muted, sometimes dreamlike. Here are five black shirts and a black pair of pants hanging on a clothesline, swastika graffiti on a yellow phone booth…a rusted bicycle. But his most arresting photos are those of people: two baby faced soldiers, all in white, walking through the snow, a saggy man with tattoos on his chest and bicep, drinking beers on the beach. Even the browns and grays of the penal colony where Sasha shot a prisoner-staged production of a Jonathan Swift play have a warmth to them, in their yellowish glow, but also in the careful attention paid to everyone’s face.

“Ukraine is some sort of wonderland for me,” reads the text below the photo series on Sasha’s website. “I saw weird forms of society transformations, changing the laws and the ways of living. I felt this insane amount of absurdity on my own skin…I am attached to it more than anything…” it begins. At dinner, Sasha continued…

My family was all in Kharkiv. Tanks, tractors…there’s a lot of heavy manufacturing there, like airplane engines. The town was totally ruined during WWII, and it was like rebuilt with—well social realism was in fashion at this point, and all the buildings are sort of scary-looking massive structures. Kharkiv is a really interesting crossing-path, right next to Russia. It’s like a customs town. The majority of people in Kharkiv are speaking Russian. Now, in some parts of the country, especially West parts of the country, you may speak to someone in Russian and they will not serve you, for example. After Soviet Union crashed, there was this kind of wave of patriotism.
I was seven when Soviet Union crashed. We were in a resort kind of thing, in the woods. It was cabins, where families go and just kind of camp out. I remember my parents were watching TV and it was like, “Okay. Well, the country doesn’t exist anymore.” We really didn’t know what to do. I remember the absence of any groceries in the stores for some times, because the imports stopped.
That was the time when my father was moving to US. He had an exhibition in Cincinnati, and Cincinnati was a sister city to Kharkiv so it was like a cultural exchange. United States and Soviet Union were trying to show everyone that they love each other very much.
So my father was a photographer and he moved to U.S. completely in ‘92, but before that he was traveling here and back. He was trying to get out really hard. Things with my mom wasn’t working out well, and it was like, so fucking terrible to live in Ukraine. It was really weird. You don’t really know life when you’re seven. I remember I was afraid to use terms like, “My Dad,” anymore. I remember he came back from US first time with huge set of little soldiers I’d never seen before. I was so excited. These were like, really precisely painted future soldiers. There was like a white and a black group of twenty-two soldiers each. And like everyone had a different weapon. It was totally cool.
So Kharkiv was real city with a subway and a lot of craziness, and I lived there in apartment with my grandmother and mother. I didn’t really take school that seriously. Just kind of stretching it to the bitter end. The funny thing is like, there’s no such a thing as a fourth year of school. From third year of school people usually jump to fifth year of school. It was totally normal for me because it was there from the beginning. It’s like, why people call Richard “Dick?” This is more weird for me than absence of fourth grade.
I had my first camera when I was like seven because my father gave it to me. It was something called Agat. It was like a tiny spy camera—film was 35 mm but you could take like either 50 or 60 pictures on it, so the frames were really small. But when my father moved away I kind of lost interest in that. I got in it again when I started going to this club of interest where kids would go two times a week just to take pictures and hang out. What inspires me most? People! In all their glory…
First time I came to Cincinnati I was 16 and I got a job at Frisch’s Big Boy. It’s like a midwestern fast food café. It was really bad sandwiches. I learned English so fucking fast. It was like two weeks and I was speaking. But it wasn’t that kind of English like my father wanted me to know. It was like, “Bitch I ain’t washing no dishes!”
I worked as a lifeguard in Cincinnati once. And I did some construction. I had to work for a construction guy who was so fucking dumb—like absolutely absence of any sort of intelligence. And he would listen to the Christian radio all day long and it was like a turnaround of 15 songs. By the end of second week I could sing all of them. I remember there was a line: “The savior will come” and it was like repeated 15 times. And just for fun because I had nothing better to do than to put nails down and listen to this shit, I was like counting every time the line was sung, like, “two more, one more…” And my main attraction during that time was to go to the portable toilet and smoke.
Part of the plan in moving to Cincinnati was to reconnect with the father. It didn’t work out that well. Both of us have really conflicting personalities. Sometimes it would be really absurd things, for example, taking the electric socket out, like you know, if you use toaster, take the socket out, phone charger, anything. But I’d planned to come to New York anyway. You read any biography of any photographer and its like, ‘Born in Paris, lives in New York. Born in London, lives in New York. Born in Sidney, lives in New York’. Such a high concentration of people who mean something in modern photography are here right now and so you can meet those guys and be part of the club.
I expected it to be, you know, tough, but I didn’t know there was twenty thousand photographers in the city and fifty thousand more who have cameras and think they’re photographers. When Avedon and those guys were beginning, there was like, you know, no industry, no rules. Now the industry has this set of rules that you have to follow…you just have to play with them a little.
In Ukraine the market is so fresh after fall of Soviet Union. There’s a lot of really young guys, like our age you know, twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-seven, that are already like managers of some corporations. There’s not enough professionals so they’re filling the seats with asses they have. But here when I’m trying to speak with some magazines no one is taking me seriously. It’s either like I’m a messenger or an assistant. Really, so I gotta be 35 to put in a portfolio? I feel like I’ve been here for two years instead of three months. Things are happening so much faster here.

Indeed. The wine was already finished and Sasha had to hurry home.

On the contact page of Sasha Maslov’s website is a scanned copy of a Notice of Violation from the New York City Transit Authority, dated December 4, 2008. It really does include his information, in loopy ballpoint policewoman handwriting: Oleksandr Maslov, 910 Bedford Ave, Bklyn, NY 11205. The violation itself appears at the bottom of the faded yellow sheet: @ TPO PO observed resp riding bike through mezzanine w/o permission/authority to do so, causing hazard cond. It seems that Sasha, always a stickler for efficiency, was riding his bike from the 4 train to the L line at Union Square Station when he ran into Officer Roslyn Blackwell. Barely in town a month, and Sasha was already making a name for himself.

www.sashamaslov.com

Burrito Truck Ex-Pats

2009-03-18T22:24:00.004-04:00

(Carmyarmyofme-flickr)

When Laura's mom visited, she brought us four bags of Peet's coffee, two pounds of See's Candy, a huge box of pan dulce, a package of flour tortillas, a package of corn tortillas, a recipe book called 101 Things To Do With A Tortilla and a sewing machine. Yesterday, while eating a piece of chocolate cake and drinking a cup of Peet's Italian Roast, I felt pretty damn lucky to be from California.

After every visit to my parents in Berkeley, California, I return with a frozen, vacuum-sealed burrito for a friend, either a homesick Californian or a New Yorker who's never had "the privilege." I can't imagine that a tightly packed brick of soggy carnitas tastes better than anything you can get at the Red Hook Ball Fields, but my effort in delivery and the knowledge that this is food of the Homeland gives a mystique to these burritos, and to the devourer, total satisfaction. I've been told these burritos have healing properties. Gordo's Burritos helped Nora from Glendale get over the death of a friend, and rubbed the dangerous gleam of hot August in the LES from the eye of my buddy Dwayne.

We Californians are quite attached to our Mexican food. Our Mexican food, not Mexican Mexican food. (Though we love to talk about authenticity.) We have a set of knowledge out west that I'm not sure exists here: you know by your teens whether you're a pinto bean kid or a black bean kid, and you know that as you get closer to the border the rice disappears. Ask any kid from California about taco trucks - they are a basic part of our adolescent memories. They're the cutting class spots, the places you end up after Friday night's foiled plans. You've got your personal geography too: there's the burrito truck in the parking lot of the abandoned lumberyard on Central Ave. in El Cerrito, La Raza on 23rd Street in Richmond, where if you make an effort to speak Spanish they'll hook it up, and there are the taco trucks in East Oakland, the ones you have to scour with an expert because they're either dynamite or...dynamite.

But it's more than burritos. Berkeleyans of my generation are foodies by birthright. Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse in 1971 and from the hinterland of Shattuck Avenue sprung the Gourmet Ghetto. Now when I ask visitors to my hometown how they enjoyed their stay, I'm apt to hear, "Oh, the fresh baked bread! And the tiny cheeses! And oh man, the produce - there are so many farmers' markets!" San Francisco skyline? Balmy weather and mystic fog? That ghostly patchouli oil residue of the sixties? Nope. Tiny cheeses.

New York's pizza is legendary, but I know two men in Bushwick who carry half-baked Zachary's Chicago Style Pizzas - made in California - on their laps whenever they make the six-hour flight from Oakland to JFK. It's those fresh ingredients, they say.

My friend from California had a bit of a meltdown while we ate Bergen Bagels on the lawn at Pratt Institute one summer. "I know Brooklyn bagels are supposed to be the best, but eating this just makes me miss Noah's on Telegraph Ave. so much!" he exclaimed. "It's their, it's their cream cheese, the fluffy cream cheese! The cream cheese here makes me feel so heavy. How do they even get it so fluffy out there?"

On one return trip I padded a duffel bag with six loaves of Semifreddi's Cinnamon Challah Bread and four pounds of freshly ground Peet's coffee. My brother and I concealed the challah from our roommates and at least two loaves molded before we got to them.

When I really dig somebody, I bring them back a pound of Peet's. Nothing spells devotion like waiting for the airport shuttle in seventy-degree Long Beach weather, sweating in your overcoat and reeking of "Major Dickason's Blend" low acidity, five origin dark roast.

It's not just West Coasters who tell tales of California's legendary cuisine: my boss, from Stuyvesant Town, ate In-N-Out burgers "like seven times" on his last visit to California, and it's the first thing he mentions when he speaks of returning.

Quality of life is all in how you define it. Hedonism has a different flavor out West, a brie-like softness: tenderly cultivated wines and marijuanas and - hey, I deserve it! - deep tissue massages. There's a leisure and a regenerative element to this philosophy of pleasure that's missing in the good-coke-and-rough-sex way of life out here.

When you tell friends and family that you've moved to New York City they'll tell you that they don't know how you can stand it but As Long As You're Happy...they'll ask about the freezing winter and if you curse too often they might make some snide remark about how you're some tough New Yorker now. But if you stick with the conversation long enough, they'll get to what's really on their mind: "I heard there's like, no Mexican food out there."

Funked-Up Feets

2009-03-18T19:13:00.005-04:00

I was on one of those old-school style C trains today, looking behind myself out the window to see if the G was across the platform at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, when I accidentally kicked some lady in the shin. Really I just nudged her with my foot. My legs don't seem to fold together nicely when I cross them, so the top one, my right leg, was sticking out into the aisle, and I was sort of twirling my foot absentmindedly when this woman in a business suit ran into it. I apologized, and she didn't seem upset, but I later noticed her take a tissue and wipe down her slacks as she leaned against the metal doors of the train. Then she threw the tissue on the floor beside her.

I don't mean to brag about how stained and torn all my clothes are, but at that moment it occurred to me that I would never think to clean my clothes right after someone touched them with their feet. I just don't own anything that nice.

Over the weekend, while walking up the stairs from the G train at Metropolitan, a guy behind me got upset because someone had stepped on the back of his sneaker. "I don't see why it's such a big deal," said one of the girls who I was walking with. "Well you guys don't care because you're wearing raggedy-ass shoes," he replied, "no disrespect." He was right. My boots are raggedy-ass hand-me-downs. I'm not even sure they're hand-me-downs so much as they are on extended loan from my roommate who at this point, I think, does not want them back. They're worn-in light brown leather boots with a thick one-inch rubber heel: they're comfortable as hell and at one point I think they were quite stylish. But the tannish wear on the toes and heels that came mainly from dancing all night and enduring one rain-soaked evening has now turned to graphite scuffs and tar-colored scars. My favorite boots look rather chewed. The toe of the right foot has completely separated from the sole - "They talk!" exclaimed Elisa, the deputy news editor for my school paper - and the first layer of rubber on the heel flaps forward. In the past week alone my boots have been trampled and scraped in a sweaty mosh pit and and have skidded through strawberry-colored vomit and half-frozen dog shit. I would like to call these boots well-loved, but I guess they are just hurt.

"That lady was shit-talking us," my friend Christa whispered on the 6 train, just one day after my boots had been proclaimed raggedy. The lady had said, in Spanish, that we were wearing ugly boots. "Jeez, they're dirty," I said, "but not ugly. I like them!"

Back on the C train, as I was thinking about how weird it would be to rock out in silk and cashmere and tweed, a man in a business suit hurried into my car, sidestepping daintily past my outstretched boot.

Mama Funk's (First Ever!) Snowday Playlist

2009-03-03T09:23:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was my first snow day ever!
Here's my snow day playlist - loosely related tracks. In no way is it a comprehensive wintertime list, but it's what I listened to yesterday while reading about Russian Formalism in my pajamas.

It's Cold Outside - The Choir
Where Did My Spring Go? - The Kinks
Cities Make The Country Cold - The Explosive
Winter Song - Nico
Coldblooded - James Brown
A Little Bit of Sunlight - The Kinks
Cold Hands - Black Lips
Frozen Ghetto - Martial Canterel
Ice Age - Joy Division
Cold Sweat - James Brown
Warm Baby - Ronnie Rice & the Gents

FOUND: LEXINGTON AVE, BK

2009-03-02T08:03:00.011-05:00

The boys across the street were
out playing basketball yesterday
as the snowstorm approached,
and this dead pigeon was slowly freezing.

This, Really, Is What It's All About

2009-02-27T17:23:00.001-05:00

FOUND: CORNER OF FRANKLIN AND QUINCY

2009-02-27T16:30:00.000-05:00