The premise emerges that the man in the love story asks his now two-years-on girlfriend (Monica Bellucci, nowhere near as sensuous as you would like, see example to left) to move in with him to New York, and she jumps up and is like TTYL. He's like, Uh, well? No answer.
Notably, we get some glimpses of Bohringer's impressive boobies at 55 minutes in and a couple more times (see Total Eclipse for more of that, trust me, as in the example at right) but never get to ogle Bellucci's bare bangin' bod. I can't remember where that is more available, but I bet you can find it.
“I was born into and grew up in apartheid South Africa,” he says. “A large number in that country were excluded from participating in a trained workforce. That was in many ways the Achilles’ heel of the country. South Africa still has a long way to go [to train nonwhites] to be able to fully engage in industry and commerce, and to have careers.
“I have a deep concern about, as a society, how we advance and how we compete nationally and internationally, absent a fully trained workforce."
Derbes vies with chains such as Walgreens and CVS by offering flu shots, shingles and pneumonia vaccinations, and a quick customer response despite being a compound-prescription pharmacy, meaning his technicians mix medicines by hand.
He says customers drop off orders and then zip down to shop at Walmart, where they chide friends who wait an hour for medication that takes 15 to 20 minutes to get at Derbes’ store, despite the old-fashioned preparation method.
“They see friends and say: ‘Well, you’re a fool. What are you doing that for?’” Derbes says with a laugh. “We’ve been very fortunate. Business has grown very well.”
Talk about a back-handed welcome: Here's some liberal loon from way down South, enjoy; we couldn't get Palin.
Speaking of whom, Carville mentioned that Sarah Palin's memoir "Going Rogue" is due out soon, while Joe Biden is still working on his autobiography -- "Going Rogaine."
Carville teaches political science at Tulane University. The lunch was sponsored by the Istrouma Area Council Boy Scouts.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now makes a big noise when it pops into new cities, vowing to help low-income residents get better traffic safety, cleaner streets and more overall attention from local governments.
Sometimes the group is welcomed as a refreshing voice of the people, many of whom wouldn't otherwise join the public debate. Other times, ACORN stirs the pot so much that it becomes the center of attention instead of the problems it highlights.
In Daly City, the group is being checked into by police after some residents complained to the City Council about door-to-door soliciting for new members. Mayor Maggie Gomez said she worried about the group signing up members to have a minimum $10 a month deducted automatically from their accounts.
"Seniors easily give their credit cards over and what have you," she said. "We're concerned about our citizens, you know, we just have to make sure our citizens aren't taken to the cleaners."
David Sharples, an organizer for the San Francisco-based nonprofit that is looking for office space in South City, likened the membership fees to union dues or church-group donations.
"We're not committing elder abuse," Sharples said. "We're bringing people together in the community to get power in numbers in order to win real improvements in their neighborhoods."
Gomez said some of the issues ACORN has raised are already on the radar of local homeowner associations. A push by the group for a new Bayshore supermarket is beside the point because the city has been planning to build exactly that near the Cow Palace for years, she said.
"They're reinventing the wheel is what they're doing," Gomez said, adding that she plans to meet with Sharples soon to clarify the group's mission. "Why would citizens have to pay dues to voice something they can come to the City Council and speak freely about?"
One recent ACORN push that didn't work out was a campaign in San Bruno for a new traffic light at Sixth and San Bruno avenues. City staffers said a pricey new light is not warranted three blocks from an existing light at Third Avenue and two blocks from the Highway 101 interchange.
City Manager Connie Jackson said allegations by residents of cars going 90 mph on San Bruno Avenue and claims of high accident rates there were unsubstantiated. But she said the city will consider other traffic-safety measures besides a new light in the vicinity.
ACORN garnered criticism last year from local officials who felt ambushed by the group, known for collecting $10-a-month fees from members and charging ahead with protests instead of exploring all the options with local governments.
"I feel that if you are an activist, you learn the rules first, and then you respect them," said longtime San Bruno activist and ACORN member Alice Barnes. "I feel that ACORN is learning how to move into City Hall and deal face-to-face with officials rather than bushwhacking them on the street."
I wrote a brief article on a press conference on the Employee Free Choice Act for the Baton Rouge Business Report, but the longer version didn't make it to the BRBR Web site, so here it is; the original blurb is here.
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Few takers at anti-union card check press conference
A few local business leaders decided to rally Wednesday against a possible revised Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize and would mandate a government arbitration process.
“It will devastate small business as we know it,” says Patricia Felder, co-owner with her husband of Felder’s Collision Parts and a Baton Rouge Area Chamber board member. “I’m certainly not anti-union. I’m very anti-forced union.”
The event, attended by the Business Report and a local TV news crew, attacked the card-check provision of a federal bill to let organizers gather a majority of signatures from a company’s employees in order to declare a union.
“Everyone is going to know how you voted,” says Jim Patterson with the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, calling the free choice act “a coercion of workers into the union fold.”
Alvin Bargas, president of Associated Builders and Contractors’ Pelican Chapter, agreed, saying, “A person’s vote is his private business. People tend not to put their private business in the public. They may not ‘vote’ their true conscience.”
Julie Cherry, secretary treasurer of the Louisiana AFL-CIO, counters that National Labor Relations Board data shows “there’s been far, far more employer coercion than union intimidation … in all reports and in those deemed to be credible. The person who has the money usually has the most power and the most ability to coerce.”
She says workers already have the right to conduct a majority signup campaign with their employer’s blessing; otherwise they are compelled to do a secret ballot after 30 percent of employees show support for a vote.
Felder says if a federal bureaucrat gets to handle the arbitration in a dispute with workers, then “he makes the decisions. I’ve lost control of my company.”
Further, Patterson says the act would fast-track the process for agreeing to an initial contract between workers and management, giving both sides less time to bargain before arbitrators take over and make a binding agreement that would last two years.
“There’s a lot of fear out there about what that means to the employer,” Cherry says. “We see it as an incentive to sit at the table and bargain reasonably.”
She pointed to the example of Avondale Shipyard near Westwego, where workers won a union vote in the early ’90s but had to “jump through hoops and over hurdles” while the employer allegedly stalled the contract process, appealing the election for six years and taking another year to agree to terms.
Patterson said several times at the rally, which was moved unexpectedly from the Holiday Inn to the Crowne Plaza hotel next door, apparently without notice, that “there will be those out there decrying how business treats workers” during the Labor Day weekend.
Yet Cherry says she only knows of one relevant pro-labor event, a parade Monday from the Piggly Wiggly in Baker, La., to the civic center for a picnic, sponsored by the Baton Rouge Central Labor Council.
She says there are several revisions to the free choice act pending but that there likely will be no timetable on the bill until the health care debate is settled.
Union members canvassed and campaigned for Barack Obama in the fall based on his support for the act at the time.
I got dem swampland blues this evening, yezzir. Welcome to humid, woozy 'Ouisiana.
According to the folks who put on the annual North Beach Jazz Fest, which features a weekend of free outdoor music in the San Francisco 'hood, the event won't take place this summer. Here's part of this week's announcement:
This annual tradition, which has been enjoyed by thousands of music fans from around the world for 14 years, will be taking a one-year hiatus for financial reasons.
The one-year pause will give festival organizers Sunset Promotions the necessary time to reorganize and re-launch the event on a more sustainable model.
The festival has become increasingly more costly since 2005, when the producers changed the configuration in Washington Square Park to appease a minority who opposed alcohol sales.
The new configuration cost an average of 40 percent more to produce, while revenues have not kept pace. In addition, the Recreation and Park Commission has recently increased their fee requirements to meet massive budget deficits.
"It's really heartbreaking that we couldn't find a way to make it happen, especially because this event means so much to so many," said co-director Robert Kowal. "But it's one thing to work for six months to break even, and another to know you are going to get hurt. Last year the balance tipped too far to the negative."
Organizers plan to relaunch the event next summer. In the meantime, they will host fundraiser concerts with festival mainstay the Rebirth Brass Band on July 24 and 25 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, to offset losses last year. Tickets are here.
This all is a shame, of course, and follows the failure of national magazine JazzTimes in today's economic climate, which I wrote about recently.
A few years back, I interviewed the man behind the North Beach festival, his love of New Orleans brass band music, and the financial challenges facing the fest:
"New Orleans is a perfect storm of culture," said Robbie Kowal, 33, of Sunset Promotions, which puts on the annual celebration of North Beach's Beat-era jazz legacy. "You have this absolutely unique and vibrant jazz-funk scene. Before Katrina, there were 50 brass bands."
Kowal lived in New Orleans for six years, studying at Tulane University and soaking up local culture. He'd catch up to four or five brass band shows a week and eventually helped produce the city's Jazz and Heritage Festival.
"You're talking about bands that were playing in little clubs, little bars on a Sunday afternoon -- neighborhood bands," he said. "It was a very precious and fragile culture. Now that those neighborhoods are destroyed, it's even more precious."
Although they don't compare in scale, problems that North Beach festival organizers dealt with this year threatened the local institution as well.
Facing a budget crunch, San Francisco ratcheted up fees for outdoor events, Kowal said, including a $20,000 jump for police services. The city's Recreation and Park Department also threatened to cut off the sale of alcohol at the free-admission shows, which Kowal said would have ended them.
But an outpouring of support helped sway officials to work with Sunset to make the fest happen. No outside booze is allowed this year, and no hard liquor will be sold -- but the show goes on.
Well, that was then. Hard times got harder, and good times now seem fewer and farther between. The so-called Golden State's unstoppable deflating economy has driven this writer, coincidentally, to the fertile earth that spawned jazz in the first place, Louisiana.
Having been laid off by the Oakland Tribune company a full year ago (they're ready to fire even more reporters, by the way) and relying on sporadic freelance gigs since, I'll be working for the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report to chronicle far better fiscal circumstances, such as a mere $1 billion budget deficit compared with California's $24 billion black hole, and actual job growth. Per the daily paper in Baton Rouge:
In May, Louisiana lost 3,700 jobs -- the third time in five months the state has seen employment losses this year -- and the state now rests 15,700 jobs below a year ago, a further sign that the national recession is affecting the state.
Baton Rouge bucked the downward trend, gaining 300 jobs from April to May, with total employment up 1,300 jobs from a year ago to 376,000. That makes it the only metropolitan area in Louisiana to post both monthly and annual jobs gains.
Or, as my new employer set the scene in a recent column:
While much of the rest of the nation continues to struggle with a tough economy and job losses, Louisiana and its capital city seem blessed. We are bucking the trend seen across the country.
Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret have laid the foundation, reduced taxes, assembled a team, put training programs in place, used the megafund wisely, negotiated with integrity and worked relentlessly to get the job done. And Louisiana and its people are the winners.
That kind of news should make Jindal's likely bid to oust Obama from the White House a sweet story to be in town for. I bet the Republican's recent speaking hiccup will be all but forgot by then.
By the way, if you want to come and visit, there should be plenty to do besides read about business in the land of Louis, including eating delectable crawfish dishes and swinging out to Cajun and zydeco music.
If you don't want to make the trek, though, there's plenty of that to be found in the Bay Area. A calendar of local Cajun-zydeco dances is here, and you can't go wrong with my favorite Louisiana-themed local eateries, Angeline's in Berkeley and CreoLa in San Carlos. Bon temps, y'all.
Further cementing the Louisiana-Bay Area connection is a nonprofit called For the Bayou, which raises awareness of coastal destruction along the Gulf. The group partnered with Sunset Promotions for an event July 19 in North Beach, featuring Swedish expat and New Orleans musician Anders Osborne. Get the lowdown here.
My other blog on Examiner.com has stuff to read as well. Some of it is even different from this blog's goodies.
Everybody who sees a "best pizzas" list immediately decries when their favorite pizza place isn't on the menu. Even when the list in question plainly says something like, "Your favorite pizzeria inevitably will not be on the list, sorry."
As with music, one's favorite pizza joint tends to be the one he or she remembers fondly from youth. Such heartfelt allegiance doesn't make a pie automatically great cuisine or even universally tasty, though -- it just means we all love recalling those carefree days of scarfing down 'za and buzzing to pop tones of yesteryear.
I'm not the only one who thinks so. A commenter had this to say about a blog review of Pizzeria Bianco, a Chicago-style place in Phoenix (I'll bring this around to Bay Area pies in a minute.):
You are absolutely right when you say, "This is not my favorite style of pizza," but the fact that no other pizza on earth has ingredients of comparable quality should be enough to say that IT IS the very best in the world. If it failed short in that very important factor of reminding you of the pizzas you ate as a child, it's only a reflection of the poor pizzas you used to eat.
Face it, children do not have refined taste in food or instinctively critical palates. They will eat any processed fast-food garbage you put in front of them with enough hot oil, butter, salt and/or sugar to saturate the chow with addictive chemical flavors. Common sense.
That much I'll say in defense of writer Alan Richman's recent GQ article American Pie, ostensibly on the 25 best pizza places in the country.
While Richman visited more than 100 ristorantes and sampled more than 300 pizzas, he could not partake in everyone's favorite local pizza-pasta spot, of course. Instead, with an eye (tongue?) toward nouveau cooking in keeping with the magazine's style-bible mission, he investigated both age-old traditions and provocative trends in the cuisine.
Earning a place on the list were three San Francisco pizza places, likely none of them your favorite local pie maker (perhaps Zachary's in Berkeley or Oakland, or Little Star in the Mission District or Western Addition -- both thriving, Chicago-themed joints).
Richman put Pizzeria Delfina at No. 3 for its "panna pie," a frugal purchase that includes heavy cream in the recipe. As he wrote:
If you think about the Italian evolution of cheese for pizza -- mozzarella becoming fresh mozzarella and then becoming fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella, each one richer and milkier than the one before -- heavy cream is the natural expression of where Italians intend to go.
He put Gialina at No. 14 for its "wild-nettle pie," made with pancetta (unsmoked bacon) and provolone. "My friend said the wild nettles reminded her of newly mown artichokes, a lovely if implausible image," Richman wrote.
He put A16 at No. 17 for its "romana pie," which he seemed conflicted about for its anchovies (chopped are OK, whole are not, apparently) and olives (big ones are bad, French Nicoise are fine).
Of the general pizza trajectory in The City, he said:
In San Francisco, the heartland of innovative toppings, I found fresh thyme instead of dried oregano, Taleggio and Fontina cheeses instead of mozzarella (it’s my belief that getting beyond mozzarella sets a pizzamaker free), and a basil chiffonade instead of basil leaves. A pause here to reflect on the misuse of fresh basil by Italians. They seem to think of it as decorative rather than flavorful, and they spread not nearly enough of it on their fabled-but-flawed Margherita pies.
Also, he noted the phenomenon of "Indian pizza in San Francisco (pretty good, although reheated chicken dries out badly, despite the tikka masala sauce)."
Without fail, people immediately sliced at Richman through various online venues with a metaphoric pizza cutter for, yes, not including their favorite pizza places. I have a feeling many of them didn't even finish the article, instead scanning through the list and quickly firing off angry counter-opinions.
In my hometown of Chicago, where pizza is king (please don't tell me how great East Coast greasy cardboard is compared with Windy City deep-dish), a newspaper blog celebrated North Side spot Great Lake pizzeria's topping the list, opening the door for commenters to complain about mediocre Chicago places such as Gino's being left out.
'Cuse me? Vito & Nicks? Hey? Don't be afraid, Mr. GQ guy, of da South Side! Vito & Nick's ain't pretty -- not GQ pretty-- but their pie is.
Posted by: Jake Braekes
The very best pizza..... wait for it.................. Are the ones you MAKE AT HOME!!! We've been perfecting our recipe for 4 years now. We can make a whole pie for about $5.00. you use that thing in your kitchen that gets hot when you turn the knobs on the front. (Plus no 10% stroger/daley tax)
Posted by: ryan greene
Being a native Chicagoan, I have a warm place in my heart for Lou Malnati's deep-dish pizza, which I get shipped frozen to my door in California but that honestly isn't that fantastic, and Wayne's Pizza, a truly typical takeout spot that simply was close to home and became a tradition out of convenience.
Gotta love those stubby corner pieces, though (a sprawling pie is cut in a grid pattern rather than in long, triangular slices, so you wind up with four crispy edge-bits and a lot of gooey squares).
My dad preferred Jake's Pizza in the next town over, but that's just more of the same cookie-cutter, thin-crust stuff.
By the way, Richman had some ambivalence about Arizona pizza, where coincidentally a high school acquaintance of mine set up a Chicago-style pizza/Italian beef/etc. emporium called Gabio's.
As the GQ article said, regarding the so-called seven types of U.S. pizza:
Finally and most wonderfully comes the American pie, actually a recent phenomenon, probably invented by and certainly popularized by Chris Bianco, the godfather of American pizza, who opened Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix in 1994. The pie he prepares and that others emulate is as much about bread-baking as it is about crust-making ... identified by two vital, distinct, and non-Italian elements: a golden glow and a chewy yet velvety interior.
On the other hand, Richman wrote:
Pizza has become the gourmet food of the recession, and the men who create these pies consider themselves artists -- narcissistic, reclusive artists, at that. These guys find multiple ways of being annoying. At Pizzeria Bianco, a friend and I ordered four pies that we shared with the people who had stood in line with us for more than an hour. Still hungry, I tried to order a fifth, but I was cut off like a roaring drunk in an American Legion hall, told that I had reached my limit.
Most brutally, he said:
I traveled to 10 American cities, the ones I knew had a lot of pizzerias or a lot of Italians. They seem to go together, although less so anymore. Phoenix was easy -- there's precisely one pizzeria, Bianco, that anybody recognizes as worth visiting. I would happily have broken my rule and gone to any other personal favorite -- but nobody had one.
Technically, my high school bud Andy Sidell set up pizza shop in Scottsdale, but that's a harsh indictment of Arizona 'za, right? Here's Sidell's response to the smackdown, summarizing many East Coast pizza fans' feelings:
As Pizzeria Bianco is concerned, it isn't "real" pizza. I call it "foo foo" pizza. More closely related to a California Pizza Kitchen-type pizza or pie.
Pizza in my mind, and I think I can vouch for a lot of Chicagoans and New Yorkers, should be loaded with cheese, meats, some veggies or any combination of the three. Pizzas with goat cheese or "Buffalo cheese," as in the article, would be shunned by people from the two big pizza "empires" (Chicago and N.Y.).
Arizona offers a wide variety of pizzerias that produce an incredible pizza that makes people feel like they are back home. I have had several customers tell me that my pizza is better than some of the pizzerias in Chicago.
The way you make the product, and the ingredients you use, help to create an "authentic" Chicago-style or N.Y.-style pizza.
Oh, snap, so-called style magazine. Take dat dere.
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My blog on Examiner.com is another fount of wisdom.
In trying to integrate my punk rock past with my culture warrior blogging present, I've chatted here a bit about bygone alt-rock geniuses such as Smashing Pumpkins and the Replacements.
Next on my list is the legendary Jesus Lizard, whom I enjoyed or endured not just in 1993 in Austin, Texas, as I first thought but -- according to ticket-stub evidence in my CD insert for Lash -- late in 1994 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
Back then, I would have recently broken up with a motorcycle mama whom I met after moving to the Bay from Chicago, where the Lizard hatched, shed its drum-machine scales and rose to fearsome foursome infamy.
Extant from '89 to '99, the Lizard recently reunited and will set siege to the Bay Area in October at the Fillmore. Tour details are on LiveDaily.com. And lo and behold, opening for the band in a super-hip double bill is fellow travelers Killdozer. More on dem guys later.
To be very unhip in retrospect, I would opine that one of Jesus Lizard's best albums was their latter-day major label disc Blue, although it's their early indie records that gave them cool cachet. The song that most sticks in my head is "Puss" from the disc Liar:
The band's success didn't just hinge on the Lizard's sombre, Sabbath-y groove and scalding, metallic guitar work. What gave another dimension to the group's hype was singer Dave Yow's NSFW stage maneuver dubbed the tight and shiny. But that's really a gimmicky aside to the potent brew of sonic angst the band spewed at audiences.
Yow has a pretty out-of-control reputation, although from what I know, it comes mostly from slurring words and performing without a shirt. He seems to be pretty incisive guy after all, as exemplified by his words of wisdom in Magnet magazine on leading a band:
The worst thing a frontman can do is be Dullsville. Sometimes, you get the toe-tappers. On the other hand, there are people who try too hard.
I remember one band from Tennessee called the Diarrhea Of Anne Frank. I was impressed with the name, but they were just trying so hard to be as wacky and offensive as they could—wearing diapers or whatever—that they just came off like dumb clowns.
I think there has to be a fair degree of honesty in it. It’s got to come from inside you instead of coming from an idea you act out.
But back to the Lizard. As memory crystallizes from the fog of the '90s, I realize I saw the band again in Mountain View when they were on the Lollapalooza bill, a then-mind-numbing coup of coolness for a supremely alt-rock band. Looking back, we can only wonder, what the f*** happened to the scene after it finally achieved world domination? (I like to think I played a small role in all that as a college radio DJ, by the way.)
In retrospect, Palo Alto's ingenius Ramones-meet-Runaways replica The Donnas were pretty much an also-ran in rock history, instead of the biggest thing to emerge from the Bay Area since the aforementioned Green Day. The San Francisco-based Melvins never reached escape velocity from cult status, either, while local yokels Painless Martha and Mother Hips are likely just memories to aging hipsters rather than household words among today's emo kids.
In a nutshell, it seems that alt-rock morphed into Limp Bizkit, which begat System of a Down which, somehow, begat the Jonas Brothers. So much for all that Pavement that '90s record-buyers laid in order for "math rock" to steal the spotlight from the Motley Crues and Poisons of the world -- who of course are now back on top like grunge never happened.
That budding, hopeful '90s San Francisco scene seems as far away now as the fabled Barbary Coast, a limitless world where rapscallion art was bursting at the edges of everyday culture. Where we saw posters on light poles for hot upcoming gigs, now you would look for blogs and tweets promoting concerts, I guess.
There is a brilliant passage In Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that I bet resonates with every generation, about the rise of underground culture up to a popular, almost transcendant point, and then the slow, inelegant backslide to zero:
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Start over, next wave. Remake the wheel again.
In the end, I'm sure it's I who changed, not the world. We all grow older, get tired, leave the muck of rock rebellion to younger, faster cats to give it their own inspired spin. I hope too many don't succumb to the horrors of running naked in the streets, howling for a fix, this time around.
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Visit my other blog on Examiner.com for more dis-and-dat commentaries an' such.
Make one wisecrack about a randomly referenced band, and this is what happens. A commenter on my identical post on Examiner.com complained that I had no clue the briefly mentioned band Killdozer is still a driving force in music (yuk).
I see Killdozer did perform some reunion shows last year, as evidenced by this blog post. So yeah, they too transcended the faded glory of pre-Nirvana underground scene. (Both Killdozer and Kurt Cobain's band were recorded by Madison, Wisc., producer Butch Vig, of course.)
I'm glad to learn the ur-grungy Killdozer are back. Most of those turn-of-the-decade '80s/'90s bands seem to fit in the "where are they now?" category, so the conversation typically takes a retro direction, hence my ignorance of their comeback.
It also seems that Killdozer will be playing a high-profile, hometown show in September -- and with legendary So-Cal punks The Urinals at that!
Grab your hardhats and plungers. Thanks for the awakening comment, Dan.
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