Golden Gate Conspiracies

Our contact in San Francisco was Symptom’s uncle, who we came to know as Uncle Shoegaze. It seems Symptom has an aunt or uncle in every state – last summer we stayed with his aunt in Georgia. Uncle Shoegaze was a kind-hearted man with a wife and a son. He owns a vineyard, like many Californians, and had worked on preliminary animation on several classic Pixar films. Perhaps most impressively, he did preliminary special effects on Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which easily makes my list of Top 1,000 Movies of All Time. I regret that I didn’t ask him about Jar Jar or Boss Nass, my favorite Star Wars character, but perhaps knowing behind-the-scenes information could have taken away the magic of the film (I am still convinced that Jar Jar Binks was not a CGI realization, but an actual living, breathing amphibious hominid!). I remember when my parents took Piss and I to Boston Market then the movies to see what we thought would be Toy Story 2 for a second time. Instead, the screen flashed, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” and my life flashed before my eyes. Jar Jar was my best friend, Lord Maul was my nemesis, and Qui-Gonn was my dear fatherly mentor. I soaked in the film like an ancient sponge. I got a Jar Jar action figure for my birthday and sucked its head until the decorative pink paint had all but faded. To meet Uncle Shoegaze was likely as humbling an experience as it would be for a low-profile priest to play backgammon with Joseph (from the Bible). 

After the kind man let us sleep, we ventured to Crissy Beach in San Francisco. We had heard the SF beaches were cold, sparse, and ultimately unworthy representations of the Pacific Ocean’s majesty, but Kid Gone Crazy is only ever truly, completely happy when fully submerged in salt water. He once said that he could spend his entire adult life within the sea. We were happy to oblige, and the beach’s water was dubbed by Yes-Yes as “the coldest water.” In the distance, we could see the looming red Golden Gate Bridge embedded in low white clouds, the site of so many dramatic suicides. The beach also had several slow-moving windmills to fulfill Yes-Yes’s mad desire to control. We made a quick trip to the Full House house, which seemed to have diminished in quality in the years since the introductory theme to the classic 1990s situational comedy was filmed. There were two shadowy figures peering at us from their frighteningly old car. We mused that perhaps they were drug dealing criminals that had overtaken the house – the neighborhood is not as nice today as it appeared on the shows decades prior – but that was a bold judgment based on very little fact, so it is more likely that they were simply peering disapprovingly at the strangers taking dozens of photographs in front of their home. 

We played at the Sub Mission with an adventurous band that night, Adventures, which is best known as Code Orange Kids’ side project. Aleutia, Leer, Indian Taker, and another band played. Half of the bands played on the floor, but Ages, Adventures, Aleutia, and we played on the stage. Cruelster is less comfortable and overall less appealing on a stage. The large audience stood many yards away from the stage. (I must reiterate: Yes-Yes is always, always more afraid of you than you are of him. He will not engage you. He will not harm you. He simply wants to play. He’s only a boy.) The audience did not seem to recognize our cover of Black Flag’s “Wasted”; it was our first time playing the song together as a band, and I literally felt drunk and high while we played it. Behind each band was a large projection of one of the most creative, interesting cartoons I’d ever viewed – “Paper Rad Trash Talking”; it was about an hour long, and it was repeated many times throughout the night. My favorite part was when a noseless, large-eyelidded young man named Horace sat in front of a television set with several silent friends, and the television began playing a video of Horace and his friends watching another television set, and the sequence repeated until the screen exploded, and an entirely new segment featuring entirely new but equally interesting characters began. 

At one point during this show, I went to the bathroom, and a security guard watched me closely as I entered that shadowed, private room. After spending several minutes in the room, the security guard flung open the door, stared at me while I pulled up my pants, and closed the door. I was deeply bothered by this intrusion, so I asked him, “Why did you open the door on me while I was in the bathroom? You watched me go in.” He replied in broken English, telling me he did not entirely understand what I was saying. Based on what my well-tuned ears could infer, the man’s accent seemed to imply that his primary language was Spanish. I wished at that moment that I knew his language so that we could properly discuss the issue of his deranged intrusion. 

Before the show, we walked the densely populated area surrounding the venue and discovered many shops selling refurbished electronics, tacos, and t-shirts. It was hot, sweat-inducing, and uneventful. I pretended to steal Timebomb’s beloved Chrome bag and he expressed a great deal of anger toward me. 

I will soon discuss the terror of Yosemite National Park, playing in an empty pool, and a seven-person pile-up in a suburban SoCal garage, but the next immediate blog post will discuss the music we have been listening to and the materials we have been reading. If this does not interest you, please do not read it, but please read the post after it.