Steve Earle

He was in San Francisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival... I passed on the dusty crowds in Golden Gate Park and paid my hard-earned dime to hear him last night at a nice but crowded venue on Valencia in the Mission, The Chapel.

Aside from his album with Del McCoury, The Mountain, which is one of my all-time faves, I have not followed Earle closely, but he is a great singer and a wonderful storyteller. I mean a great singer not in the virtuosic Al Green or George Jones fashion, but an expressive pop interpreter in the Dylan or Willie vein. He is also a lefty redneck. I feel no guilt whatsoever enjoying Merle Haggard's jingoism, but if you do, and need an excuse to listen to some good ol' country, check out Steve Earle. He confessed that he could no longer imagine living in Nashville, in his native Tennessee, which is why he now calls Greenwich Village home, and would choose San Francisco if he had to move. Country and roots-rock are great American populist art forms, and why should the left be deprived of the good stuff? Why, populist and progressive used to go together... remember Woody Guthrie and Upton Sinclair?

The first half of Steve's performance was the better half. As the night wore on, he could not resist a little gratuitous Walmart bashing (not my cup of tea, but forgivable) and a little kumbaya (less so), and even worse, he swapped his beautiful 6-string acoustic for an overly jangling 12-string and then even a banjo, which he played badly, and finished with some kind of mando-guitar. But when he opened his mouth, all was forgiven.

The opening act was Steve's son, Justin Townes Earle. The guy plays a mean guitar and has a good strong folk voice. I found his songs and style precious, a bit like Rufus Wainwright channeling, who, maybe Steve Earle? His best song of the night was by Buck Owens. Boy got good taste, at least.

Maybe Boehner's actually a hero!

Here are the arguments, courtesy of James Fallows... and regardless, he sure has lovely eyes.

Russians and mushrooms

Russians and their mushrooms:

“If you are normal, you search for mushrooms,” said Julia Schelkunova, a Moscow-based Russian translator and guide (and owner of a plant nursery), sounding as if she were shrugging her shoulders. “Calling yourself a mushroom hunter is like calling yourself a pizza eater. You just do it.”

 A slice of mushroom pizza would be tasty right about now...

The shutdown

They have been unable to gut or kill Obamacare through constitutional legislative channels, and have thus resorted to extortion. It's really as simple as that. Thankfully it appears that the president has finally taken enough of their crap. Too bad so many have to suffer. But I do hope Boehner is among the sufferers. For a while I felt sorry for him, but he is so deserving.

Vulgar Marxist blogging

Simon Johnson finds the silence of the business elite (i.e. capitalist class) in the face of Republican madness "somewhat shocking." Is it possible that he is simply wrong about where their self-interest lies?

The silence of much of the business and financial elite on the debt ceiling — as well as on the sequester and the government shutdown — is somewhat shocking. This is a group that is usually quite vocal in promoting its self-interest. It benefited greatly from the expansion of the global economy after 1945, and that shifting perception of what business needs was part of the pressure that encouraged the Republican Party to become much more international in its orientation. The trajectory of current fiscal policy will hurt the pocketbooks of this elite.

Breaking Bad, Finis

People will rightly place it up there with that other "greatest TV series of all time," The Wire. The superficial similarities are plain to see: drug dealing, violence, gritty realism, moral relativism, complex bad guy protagonists, and deeply flawed good guys. Great writing, story-telling, acting, and directing... these go without saying. Both series also establish an extraordinary sense of place: the city of Baltimore, and the high desert and sprawl in and around Albuquerque. And sense of place reveals how these two masterpieces could not be more profoundly different. The great subject of The Wire is, ultimately, the city itself. The setting is the story. As the ensemble evolves and the story arcs change from season to season, the character of the city and of its people reveal themselves. Breaking Bad, on the other hand, is a love story. The setting is a metaphor for the psychological terrain on which this story plays itself out. The question that sustains us is, which will win out in the end: Love of the game, or love of the surrogate son? Must we then conclude it is a cop-out when in the end WW gets to have them both?

Marcella Hazan, RIP

I love to cook, and I aspire to cook the way Marcella Hazan instructs me to cook in the three cookbooks of hers that I own. The books are a pleasure to read: clear, mouthwatering, authoritative, and more than a little authoritarian... don't even think about using store-bought noodles in your lasagna. Well, Marcella, mea culpa, but as I opened that pasta box your (literary) voice was there, scolding me. I have also made it with the fresh noodles, and you were right, of course.

Brought to you by climate change... deadly giant hornets!

"A sting from the hornet’s quarter-inch-long stinger feels like a “hot nail through my leg,” according to an entomologist who got too close for comfort. The venom contains an enzyme that can dissolve human tissue, and too much of it can also bring renal failure or death." (source)

On the plus side, maybe they can be trained to take out the NSA drones that are spying on your house.