Posts Tagged ‘California’

Caught on Tape: The Day I Didn’t Disappear in Front of George Harrison

460px-George_Harrison_1974[1]It was a day of unmatched California beauty; a startling and fiery sun perched high above in a crystal blue sky and blazed down promise. It was an essential day, a meteorological marvel meant to be stored away for future reference.

“Dude,” a friend would ask the following week, “do you remember how amazing it was last Tuesday?”

And of course you do. Even if the day itself was all you’d been given, that would have been gift enough. But the weather was merely an underscoring for the occasion, a gilded and golden opportunity to spend an hour with George Harrison. You’ll forget how to breathe before you forget this. Simply saying the words out loud (actually you’re reduced to mumbling them sotto voce because you’re afraid that anything above a whisper might reduce the reality to mirage) – “I am hanging with a Beatle” – is enough to render you stupid.

Then you start considering the notion that maybe Harrison himself ordered up the perfect day as an interview-ambience backdrop. We all knew that he spoke with God all the time (and if He was going to listen to anybody, He’s going to find a minute or two for a Beatle). So, anyone who recalls a glorious Tuesday back in 1974, somewhere around May or June perhaps, the presence of just a soupcon of magic embedded in the sunrays, you can thank George and God (though not necessarily in that order).  (more…)

Test of the Boomerang: Izabella, “Drugs and Apple Pie”

Man, I miss California. I really do. I don’t miss paying exorbitantly high rent. I don’t miss the collective panic that sets in whenever it rains and being in a mountain shack without power for ten days. I just miss the West – my ancestral homeland. Feeling that unconscious sense of being where I belong- ocean before me, mountains behind me, and good Mexican food.

Northern California band Izabella do a great job at helping to ease that feeling of displacement. A warm, sweet and heady blend of jam rock, funk, and soul that is totally steeped in the warm vibes and deep roots of the West Coast.

Now with a solidified line-up of Sean Lehe on guitar and vocals, multi-instrumentalist Brian Rogers on percussion, guitar, bass and lead vocals, Murph (no, not that guy!) on bass guitar, Sam Phelps and Jeff Coleman as the four-handed keyboardist and Lucas Carlton on the skins, Izabella is the culmination of years of jamming in the garage with various bands, jazz combos, burgeoning jam units. Juggling the daily obligations like families, day jobs, school while playing out as much as humanly possible. It’s a dedication and a musical relationship that reinforces the band’s groove on record, and is the electric undercurrent in their live performances – over 200 since late 2006. (more…)

Test of the Boomerang: Knockin’ on the Golden Door

No test this week, folks, as I am going out to California to visit friends and family and show off the newest member of our tribe. I’ll be back soon with more kind sounds and commentary. Until then, enjoy these street musicians jamming on “Shakedown Street” in Jerusalem.

DVD Review: “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”

polanskiLike any film student who worships Chinatown and loved The Pianist, I was intrigued by how Roman Polanski, the charismatic film director, would be portrayed in Marina Zenovich’s documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.  Here is a man whose life reads like a Charles Dickens novel: Raised in Poland, his parents were persecuted by the Nazis and his mother died in Auschwitz.  As a child during World War II, he managed to survive the Krakow ghetto with the help of a Polish Catholic farmer.  After the war and reuniting with his father, Polanski went to film school and eventually gained an international reputation as an artist thanks to his film, Knife in the Water.  He went to England in the middle of the swinging ’60s and became the toast of the town.  He went on to make several more movies, including the horror spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers.  It was while making this film that he met and fell in love with actress Sharon Tate; their storybook romance was fodder for the British press and when they married it was a big event.  After Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was an enormous success, he and Tate moved to Los Angeles, where they were able to slip into anonymity, should they please.  But tragedy struck Polanski’s life again when, while he was away working in England, Tate and four friends were murdered by Charles Manson’s ‘family.’

Devastated, Polanski fled California, in part because the tabloids exploited the murder of his beloved wife.  In 1974, he returned to Hollywood to direct Chinatown, the Academy Award-winning film that is considered one of the finest films of the ’70s, if not of all time.  By the late ’70s, though, Polanski’s life unraveled when he committed “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.”  Then 44, Polanski was photographing 13-year-old Samantha (Gailey) Geimer for Vogue.  According to the police reports, he gave her champagne, a Quaalude, and then had sex with her.  When arrested, Polanski was unsure what he had done wrong.

In Roman Polanski: Wanted ad Desired, Zenovich follows the course of the Polanski trial from the initial arrest all the way to the night Polanski boarded an airplane and left the United States, never to return.  For her film, she not only interviews many of Polanski’s friends (who never really defend his actions, but seem to justify what he did as something of a result of his tortured soul), but also Polanski’s defense attorney, Douglas Dalton, speaking for the first time about the infamous case, prosecuting attorney, Roger Gunson (also speaking about the case for the first time), and the victim of the crime, Samantha Geimer. (more…)

Political Culture: Keep Marriage Gay in CA!

On Tuesday, citizens of California will have an opportunity to place our indelible stamp on the forward progress of civil rights in the United States. I’m not talking about the election of Barack Obama as president, though that certainly will result in dramatic and needed advances on all sorts of levels. Instead, I’m talking about Proposition 8, which if passed would amend the state’s constitution to add the simple, elegant, yet contemptible phrase, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

What’s the big deal here? you might ask. After all, voters in 26 states already have written such restrictions into their constitutions – why not California? The difference is this: On Tuesday, for the first time, a state’s voters will be going to the polls with the power to take an existing marriage right away from same-sex couples. That is, Californians will be deciding whether to tell more than 11,000 couples who have exchanged wedding vows since last May that their marriages are no longer legally valid. Each voter’s moral and ethical decision on Prop 8 will not be made in the abstract, as those decisions were in other states, but will have real and immediate consequences.

Whatever happened to “let no man put asunder”?

Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what those consequences will be. Will all those marriages be instantly annulled? Will all those couples have to wait in limbo through years of court challenges? California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown – yes, that Jerry Brown – has said he will argue in court that marriages already performed should not be annulled. But if 11,000 gay couples in the state continue to claim a basic right that has been stripped from millions of other citizens, what will “marriage” mean to anyone anymore? (more…)