Other Writing
selections of my previously published work.
Death of The Cool
Published in Defenestration, 2008
Parker is my new boss. Sometimes we get along great and I think she approves of my work, it’s almost like we’re friends. We go out together – lunch, coffee, that sort of thing. Occasionally I think she might see it fit to give me a raise if she had the budget.
Then there are the times she screams at me till she’s blue in the face, yelling at the top of her lungs, letting me know that I am, in fact, a failure, and not to bank on even a promotion. She’s a taskmaster, working me late into the night with no regard to the fact that I (used to) have a life.
She’s like that; she can turn on a dime. I think she’s bipolar. She’s six weeks old.
***
Up close and personal with rock legend Ray Davies
Published on salon.com, 2006
![[You really got me]](http://www.salon.com/weekly/davies2960520.gif)
the kinks were one of my favorite bands in high school -- I remember defacing many a spiral notebook cover with the lyrics to "Lola," "Waterloo Sunset" and "Celluloid Heroes" while I was supposed to be learning how to conjugate irregular Spanish verbs in the past perfect tense.
I had a schoolgirl crush on Ray Davies, the band's brilliant leader and songwriter. Didn't matter that he had 20 years on me. Someday we would meet and he wouldn't be able to resist me.
Well, I never did learn those verbs (I eventually switched to French), but I did get the chance to fulfill my adolescent fanstasy of meeting Ray Davies. On a recent Saturday night, Davies responded to an interview request I passed to him at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, where he just concluded a two-week run of his spoken word/unplugged performance piece, "20th Century Man."
The show chronicles his early life growing up in Muswell Hill, district of London, the forming of the Kinks with his brother Dave and his tumultuous relationship with the American entertainment industry. He reads excerpts from "X-Ray," his "unauthorized autobiography," and dips into his extensive archive of songs, playing acoustic guitar and backed by virtuoso blues guitarist Pete Mathison.
Mr. Davies proved to be a gracious, charming, soft-spoken gentleman, who escorted me backstage and pointed out where the microphone on my tape recorder was (it was upside down, I was a little nervous) without the slightest hint of condescension. But a randy rock 'n' roller still lurks beneath the veneer of the "well-respected gentleman." When we embraced after the interview, I felt his hand firmly and affectionately take hold of my left cheek. And I'm not talking about the one on my face.
There is a lot of historical content in your book as well as in the show "20th Century Man." What were you hoping to document for your readers and audiences?
I think it explains what it was like to grow up in a suburb of North London in the late '50s and '60s at a time of great change, and how a person coming from a certain part of society dealt with a world that, until that time, and certainly before the Second World War, had been prohibitive. Lots of playwrights and actors couldn't find their way. There was a minority control over a lot of things -- in the theater especially.
So I think this period was a coming of age for working class people, the middle class breaking down a bit. The book is about what it was like to grow up in the suburbs and to make a name in the music industry at the end of the 20th century, when music took over the world really.
Your brother Dave has written his version of these events, a book called "Kink." Have you read it?
No, I haven't read it.
What is your relationship with Dave like now?
My brother? He's a bit of a concern to me, only in that I think he should find his own way in the world. I always remember him as being... it might sound odd for me to say "remember" him, but I've got no real recollection of him after the band started. He was just somebody I worked with. But my recollection of him as a young person was someone who was a very bright kid and lived life to the full, totally. I think he should find his own way, it's very important for everybody to do their job but also find a little bit of peace inside somehow. I'm reconciled that I'll never be a peaceful person, I know that, but I'm happy to know that. But I think Dave needs to find a little bit of his own fufillment.
In your show and in the book, you talk with considerable bitterness about your early experiences touring the States. How do your feel about your experience this time around?
Obviously now it's years down the line from that first time we came here. I think the bigger cities in America are much more liberal than they were. I think people are much broader, the sense of humor has changed a bit here now. People have got much more of an ability to laugh at themselves, and a sense of irony. I think it's because of TV and all the different channels -- you can get British comedy on and stuff. I think the humor aspect is the thing that has really changed a lot.
With this show, "20th Century Man," you're working in small theater venues. Do you miss the arena shows you played with the Kinks?
Not really, I don't miss it. I can always do it again, it's always there. These smaller shows are great, I love doing this size theater, but the stadium things are good in another way. You know, it's still just as intimate.We've played Madison Square Garden and mangaged to turn it into an intimate gig.
What is the current status of the Kinks?
The Kinks are doing a very big show in Sweden next month in front of about 200,000 people. But I've got no fixed plans on what the Kinks are going to do, I don't know yet. We've got a new CD coming out at the end of this year which is our retrospective, with two new songs on it, a double CD package that will be called "To The Bone".
Any solo projects in the works?
I'm doing a solo record this year and it will be a lot of blues-based stuff because that is the music I came from, sort of the tail end of jazz and into blues.
What kind of music do you listen to when you are kicking back by yourself?
I listen to everything. The best way to describe it is when I go into a record store, I'll look at the alternative section, see what's playing, buy some sort of lo-fi music, then I'll go to the classical section and look for any modern composers that I fancy and then something kind of eclectic, Finnish music, whatever. And I listen to a lot of blues.
What was your most recent record store purchase?
The latest thing I bought was for a friend, an old Eric Satie record, the French composer, and I bought a group called "The Heathens." I think they're either Norweigen or Finnish. They're a folk band but they play kind of Algerian-sounding music.
Are you online?
I've got all the equipment, I just don't have everything plugged in at the moment. There's no point 'cause I'm here. It's something I think I'll find to be quite helpful to me.
The Rolling Stones
"Some Girls"
(Rolling Stones Records, 1978)
By LISA CROVO — Salon.com, 2006
Summer of 1978. I was 12 and my brother Dana was 15. Dana had spent countless hours molding me into a Stones fan and it had finally taken hold -- I succumbed to his relentless enthusiasm after about 90 repetitions of the album "Black and Blue" at a volume that damn near broke my poor mother.
Dana debuted his latest music store purchase in the back seat of the family station wagon on the way up to Lake Winnepasaukee. It was "Some Girls," the new Stones album, and it was gritty and nasty and funny and funky. "Go ahead, bite the big apple, don't mind the maggots, uh huh." Before long we knew every word, every beat. It was as if the essence of a hot, muggy adolescent summer night had been distilled into a ten-track cassette tape. Maybe the erratic hormonal surges had something to do with it, but to this day, I can't listen to any song on that album without being psychically transported to those sticky, wild, mosquito-bitten nights on the lake in Meredith, New Hampshire. I can almost taste the flat, tepid mouthful of my first illicit beer.
The raw, raunchy energy behind "Some Girls" was infectious. Dana turned everyone we hung out with that summer onto that record. Even my mother was overheard humming "Beast of Burden" during a weak moment. By the end of the season the tape was warped and the song titles illegible, but Mick continued to warble on in delicious irreverence, thrilling our perverted teenage ears with his declaration that "black girls just want to get fucked all night, I just don't have that much jam."
I had my first kiss that summer. The guy was nothing to write home about, but, then again, I was in love with Keith Richards and what 13-year-old townie could compete with the original Bad Boy of Rock 'n' Roll?
Two years ago I met Keith. I was bartending at an after-hours party for the Stones' crew during their "Voodoo Lounge tour." It was Halloween and I was dressed like a nun. I knew Dana wouldn't let me rest if I didn't get an autograph and as I grabbed a cocktail napkin and made a bee-line for Keith, I remembered I had brought my Bible along as a prop. Keith signed it on Deuteronomy 22: 23, chuckling all the while. "I've never signed a Bible before," he said. I pointed out where my bar was and told him I'd loved him since I was 12 and I'd really like to buy him a drink. He smiled, leaned over and whispered to me, "Maybe I'll come over later and give you my confession."
L.A. to S.F. — A week, a t-top Camaro, and the Pacific Coast Highway
http://www.sfweekly.com/2003-06-25/summer-guide/the-only-way-from-l-a-to-s-f
The American road trip is the stuff of novels, dreams, and notebooks full of song lyrics. It's a Kerouac-inspired montage of ´50s convertibles, flickering neon signs, roadside diner cheeseburgers, cheap souvenirs, and long stretches of dusty highway -- scored by Willie Nelson warbling "Blue Sky" over tinny speakers.
And if most of us aren't Benzedrine-fueled, poetry-writing Beatniks, living here means we are fortunate to be a mere freeway exit from the ultimate Sal Paradise road trip: the Pacific Coast Highway stretching north to Oregon and south to Mexico.
***
Humbolt Pie
http://www.sfweekly.com/2002-06-19/summer-guide/humboldt-pie
Mo Better is wearing a scarlet tutu, white tights, and a sailor cap crown, which is fitting, since she's the reining Rutabaga Queen. Beyond her a 20-ft metal rhino is launched into the Humboldt Bay. Incredibly, the thing doesn't sink. The crew inside pedals furiously and the rhino glides across the water. Behind them, a female crew wearing fuchsia wigs prepares Freedom, a massive pink elephant, for launch. At the end of the dock, a giant squid with bulging eyes sits on top of an orange lobster, and a pit crew adjusts the pontoons.
Acid flashback? Burning Man by the Bay? No, this is the Kinetic Sculpture Race, a whimsical, art-meets-transportation competition that's been a Humboldt County tradition for 34 years. Contestants build human-powered apparatuses and drive them from Arcata to Ferndale over muddy slopes, through sand dunes, and across Humboldt Bay.
***
Deep in the Wine Country Bush
At Safari West, you get oryxes with your chardonnay
Published on June 25, 2003
http://www.sfweekly.com/2003-06-25/summer-guide/deep-in-the-wine-country-bush
A lot of people equate summer at a wine country bed-and-breakfast with a bottle of old vine zin on a sunny veranda, pricey-but-worth-it spa treatments, and a dinner involving Laura Chenel goat cheese and local greens.
But there's another kind of wine country B&B, a place where endangered scimitar-horned oryx mingle among sable antelope, a dromedary camel lumbers lazily behind a journey of stately giraffes, and striking East African cranes bob around the grounds as if they were in African wetlands.
The place is Safari West, and though you can't get a seaweed wrap there, you can take a safari tour around the 400-acre wildlife preserve and get up-close-and-personal with fuzzy ring-tailed lemurs, dazzles of zebras, and ornery ostriches. The chardonnay isn't half bad either.
***
Barrel Fever
Published on August 29, 2001
http://www.sfweekly.com/2001-08-29/restaurants/wine
Your date looks like a Prada model, holds multiple degrees, laughs at your jokes, and generally seems to like you. Or at least has agreed to go to dinner. You settle into a velvet banquette at Fleur de Folie, candles flickering gently, strains of Sarah Vaughn softly audible, and the conversation begins to flow. Then it happens. The sommelier approaches, hands you what looks like Hammurabi's Sanskrit tax record and stares at you, a gleam of challenge in his eye. You are about to be judged.
***
All in La Famiglia
Sergio was kneading dough for the gnocchi when I stopped by. I slipped onto a stool at the bar to wait, the scent of roasted coffee beans thick in the air. Crisp white napkins were folded into "bishop hats" on tables, the obligatory homage to Frank hung on a salmon-colored wall. Waiters and cooks dashed around, prepping for a busy night which included a party in the private Sala Medici dining room.
