Chris Smith’s blog

It wasn’t until I saw Bad Brains at Slim’s last year that I realized I had gotten older. These guys, the black rasta-skaters from DC who almost singlehandedly invented hardcore punk, had gotten back together with their original lineup and gone out on tour. As you might expect for a bunch of now-middle aged punks, they were older and a little fatter. But they still played fast and hard, and songs like “Banned in DC” sounded every bit as heavy, 20 years on, as I wanted them to sound.

I wasn’t prepared for the crowd, though, which probably averaged 35 or so in age. There were pockets of younger people in the audience, each of them doing their mohawked, Discharge-patched best to look like they had beamed in from 1985, but most people looked about like me: jeans, black t-shirt, some gray around the temples. And that’s when it hit me: I’m getting old.

Once upon a time, way back in high school, I sang in a hardcore band. Just like thousands of other teenage basement-bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. This was the Reagan era, after all, and there was plenty to be angry about–the threat of nuclear war, for instance, seemed ever-present back then. And I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which had a scarred, end-of-days feel to it due to the auto industry’s fall and the crack industry’s rise. Trips downtown were bleak: acres of feral high rises, rubble-strewn yards, even the occasional just-burned house, smoldering away under the winter sun.

I had spent the previous few years listening to the most aggressive metal bands I could find, wearing out the grooves in my Motorhead and Venom lps on a crappy turntable in my bedroom. When I discovered hardcore bands like Black Flag, C.O.C., and the Necros, it was a revelation. Faster and harder than anything that had come before, this was brutal, primal-scream stuff, a rumble you felt in your guts. It opened my eyes. (As it turns out, it also politicized me–a formative experience that I somehow forgot until, decades later, I tried to explain how I ended up a lefty journalist in SF as opposed to, say, a Detroit doctor or Charlotte bank manager. The difference was punk.)

But while the politics were important, it was the DIY aspect of punk that really inspired us. Intention and spirit were all; real musical skill was, in some ways, beside the point. Noticing that lots of punk bands sucked, we naturally thought, “Hey, we could suck like that, too!” And so the band was born. After a bit of debate, we chose the most hardcore moniker we could conjure: Moral Decay–a name that I’m both inordinately proud and sort of embarrassed to say that I came up with. As it turned out, there was a far more legit band from California out there by the same name, but with the Internet just a gleam in some tech wonk’s eye, we didn’t know it.

All through the fall of 1986, we spent our Saturdays in A.’s basement in Birmingham, a neighborhood of sheltering oaks and stately colonials. We wrote and practiced songs, recording them in one or two takes on a four-track, then surfaced to make sandwiches and drink Cokes in the kitchen, descending again to cut a few more minute-long tracks. I screamed through an underpowered microphone, imagining myself another Henry Rollins but sounding way less tough. J. and E. switched off playing distorted, warp-speed bass lines on a keyboard. J. played some guitar and was often lost in the mix entirely. It was A., who even at 14 was an accomplished drummer, and R., who actually knew something about the guitar, who really held the songs together. This was important because everything we did tended toward entropy. Each song ended in chaos, collapsing in on itself as people in the background cursed and threw things across the room.

And then there were the lyrics. To call them sophomoric is to insult sophomores the world over. “BBQ Cat.” “Let’s Mug Someone.” “Kill Your Neighbors.” Lots of songs about skating. A few random, comically mean swipes at other, allegedly less-cool ninth graders (sample lyric: “You suck!”). And buried beneath all that silliness, a budding social conscience. “Turn on the News,” for example, was a muddled attempt at media criticism, inspired by a seething dislike for Detroit’s Ted Baxterish, gadfly-anchorman Bill Bonds, who could have been the inspiration for The Simpsons‘ blowhard reporter Kent Brockman. “Cats in trees and dancing bears/Chase away your fears and soothe your cares/ At home you won’t feel all the hate/Turn on the news/Don’t be late.” But mostly it was dumber stuff on our minds, propelled by double-bass drumming and driving guitar lines.

Our ambition, if not our skill level, was pretty much boundless. We quickly recorded a few tapes that we sold via MaximumRockNRoll, the Berkeley-based punk bible. I whipped up an ad featuring a Dario Argento-esque zombie and big, Impact-style letters (think Lolcat fonts) screaming our name. It sold surprisingly well, and for a while there I had a bunch of hardcore pen pals, from Colorado and California, Germany and Japan. At least a few people, it seemed, actually liked our music.

We never really made it out of the basement, though. I was the only one in the group who actually liked hardcore, and the rest of the band got bored with always playing as fast as possible. Our last recording sessions featured a shambolic cover of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes,” an oddly catchy take on the ’70s-sleazy theme song to the Barney Miller show, and a discoesque original called “Nuclear Destruction.” There was also, as A. reminded me recently, one final blast of fury entitled “Dicks.” That was our swan song.

So winter came, and the band drifted apart, each of us more interested in hanging out with girls or drinking beer than making marginal music that few people would ever hear. As the years passed, most of us lost our copies of the Moral Decay demo. I left my last copy at an ex’s house in Ann Arbor in the 1990s, collateral damage from my last-chopper-out-of-Saigon exit from the relationship.

Out of the blue a few weeks ago, J., one of the keyboard players, got in touch and mailed me a copy of that 22-year-old tape, transferred to CD. I blushed when I put it on for the first time, even though I was by myself. It wasn’t easy to place all the feelings: sadness and nostalgia, pride and self-consciousness. But mostly wonder: I can’t believe how young I sound.

Last year, I spent a good amount of time following Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums around, for a story on his promise to turn his troubled hometown into a “model city,” a progressive light unto the nations. It was–and remains, despite the troubles he’s encountered since then–inspiring stuff, and his candidacy had an air of destiny about it, a sense of uplift that his opponents simply couldn’t match.

Dellums, of course, seemed well aware of this dynamic. At a public health event last summer, the mayor stood outside City Hall, his suit immaculate, and told a story to a group of nonprofit workers. Growing up in West Oakland, he said, he sometimes went kite flying. One day, the wind lofted that kite high into the air, leading him out of deep West Oakland, across the train tracks, and all the way downtown. Pausing to catch his breath, the young Dellums looked up: his kite was flying above the City Hall cupola. Beaming, the mayor paused for effect, letting the image sink in. “And now here you are!” an admirer responded breathlessly.

As political founding myths go, you’ll never hear better. But you have to wonder if Dellums, facing Bushian approval levels, scandals, and a tanking economy, wishes that kite had taken him somewhere–anywhere–else. In the new issue of San Francisco magazine, I check in with a few of the mayor’s strongest supporters, to see how they feel about the first two years of the Dellums era in Oakland.

(Previously: “Here’s hoping for the politics of hope,” October 2007.)

So I just voted, across Haight Street in somebody’s garage. It was 10 am or so, a bright, crisp November morning, and still kind of busy, with a short line of people waiting for the half-dozen or so voting booths that had been set up. There were a few people I recognized from the coffee shop, and a woman voted with her baby slung across her shoulder. I had heard about the lines outside City Hall during early voting last weekend, but there were even lines outside my polling place, in the righteous-lefty but extremely transient Lower Haight. I’ve never seen a line around here. San Francisco, of course, is typical of exactly nothing in these United States (except maybe Berkeley, across the bay), so I won’t draw too many conclusions from my experience. But the poll worker told me that it had been so busy that they had already run out of ballots once. The atmosphere was festive, with neighbors shooting the shit, and nobody seemed in a rush to get out of there and back to work. I’d guess that everybody else was feeling a bit like I was, savoring the vote we were about to cast for Barack Obama. As someone who writes about politics regularly, I can be pretty cynical about our process, and I’m sure I’ll revert to form later on, no matter what happens. But I couldn’t feel cynical this morning.

When war between Russia and its tiny neighbor, Georgia, broke out last summer, you’d be forgiven for thinking it came out of nowhere, a fully formed international crisis. Georgia, after all, is a long way away from the United States and, all belligerent campaign posturing aside, just isn’t that high on people’s radar.

That’s a shame, because Georgia is one of the most interesting places on the planet. I learned a bit about the place on a reporting trip back in 2004 (stories here and here, a few photos here). Besides the country’s natural beauty–banana trees on the subtropical coast, snowcapped mountains and lush valleys in the interior–Georgia hosts two on-again, off-again civil wars; near-constant meddling from its former imperial overlord, Russia; an oil pipeline that puts it on the world strategic map; and an American-educated president who chews his tie when the cameras are rolling. It also has some of the world’s most lunatic drivers. (In particular, I’m thinking of a high-speed midnight tow, via a frayed old rope, down a winding mountain road, by a carload of drunks. We lived, so I can laugh.)

One more important thing to know about Georgia: it makes some damn good wine. I’m happy to report that the new issue of San Francisco magazine has a short piece of mine (“From Georgia, with love”) on a local wine entrepreneur named Chris Terrell. Like me, Terrell fell in love with the place when he visited, and he recently launched a Georgian wine importing business here in the city. Wine, you must understand, is serious business in Georgia.

We huddle around a small table in a wood-paneled restaurant in Tbilisi’s old town, the detritus of a supra, or feast, surrounding us. Plates of eggplant, spare ribs, and Georgian pastries litter the table. A waitress brings jug after jug of strong, red Georgian wine, a variety known as Saperavi – literally, “pigment,” for its staining effect on the teeth and lips. Shota, a rugby-playing 28-year-old who sells mineral water for a living, raises his glass in a toast to “Mother Georgia.”

…

By tradition, no one drinks wine without making a toast. The toasts are elaborate affairs — mini-speeches, really — and fall into definable categories: There are toasts to parents, to siblings, to the dead, to love and to peace, global and local. Nationalist toasts like Shota’s are common, too, and understandably so: In a place with this much history and this much pain, the past is very much alive.

All of that is just a roundabout way of saying I’m pleased to offer up something Georgia-related that isn’t about war. Because the war reporting isn’t going away anytime soon. I still remember sitting around a cafe table in Tbilisi with a refugee from one of those civil wars, an ethnic Georgian whose family was run out of South Ossetia during the initial conflict in the early 1990s. He was an engineering student, a 20-year-old who grew up during the worst of the fighting–he told us that things got so bad at one point that militiamen stole his toys–and he planned to retake his family’s home from the Ossetians who commandeered it. As we talked, a little boy in head-to-toe camouflage stalked the cafe tables with an M-16. The gun made a “clack-clack-clack” sound, sparks jumping from its mouth.

It’s perhaps fitting that as Halloween approaches, the sounds of metal are in the air. On Monday, I saw Oaktown heroes High on Fire (aka the heaviest band on God’s green earth, as I described them in a piece earlier this year), who opened for Opeth, a proggy Swedish metal band that I could take or leave. (To paraphrase a friend: I want my metal to take its cues from Motorhead, not Yes). As always, High on Fire killed it, but they only played for an hour or so. Tonight, the Sword, an Austin, Texas, doom rock act, headlines at Slim’s. These guys hew to the old Black Sabbath playbook–sludgy riffs, a surprisingly swinging rhythm section, and a singer with an (ahem) untraditional voice–and it works. The lyrics, though, are the icing on the cake. A fantasy world of wizards, frost giants, and “fire lances of the ancient hyperzephyrians,” the words are delivered with the utmost seriousness, with the deadpan of a high-stakes poker player. As a palate cleanser, here’s the Sword’s live version of the old ZZ Top burner, “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings.”

You might not know it, but a few conservatives do indeed call our 49 square miles home. With that in mind, here are a couple of stories I’ve written recently on this rare and (for SF, anyway, exotic) breed of political animal.

Back in August, I spent an evening with some McCain supporters at a Potrero Hill house party. Two months on, the McCain campaign sign hanging on the host’s window is still the only one I’ve seen in the city outside of St. Francis Wood, a solidly Republican garrison out west. A few months ago, with their man near-even in the polls, these McCain supporters were hopeful, maybe even confident. I wonder what they’re thinking now.

“The Loneliest Republicans in the World.”

The Pacific Rod and Gun Club, squatting on a spit of land overlooking Lake Merced, is another Republican preserve. The club has been around since the 1930s, and it was once a regular stopover for Hollywood stars and city pols, but times are changing. The city, at the direction of a welter of nonprofits and neighborhood groups, is sprucing up the lake, which for years seemed better suited for dumping bodies than for recreation. And the gun club, which has leased a prime site at the lake, may get the boot. Skeet shooting, lots of people will tell you, just might not be compatible with day hikers, boaters, and kids’ field trips–not to mention the neighborhoods that have sprung up around the lake in the last half-century. The guys at the gun club see it as a conspiracy, a plot to get rid of them. Others just told me it was a sign of the times.

“Gunning for the Status Quo.”

Josh Tenge, ambassador

The first time I went sandboarding was more than a decade ago. I was in Swakopmund, a surreal town of Bavarian-style gingerbread architecture on Namibia’s desolate, windswept coast. The boards back then were just modified snowboards, and the riding was slow going–not altogether different from a sunny, sludgy day in Tahoe. You could carve big, slow-motion turns, pretending you’re Jake Burton or something, then head off to the local beer garden.

The next time I tried sandboarding was earlier this year, in Florence, Oregon. Florence is a weird place, the sort of hippie-redneck hybrid you only really find on the Pacific coast, and it might very well be the monster-truck capital of the West, owing to the massive dunefields looming over the ocean here. It is also the sandboarding capital of the country, with a fully developed local scene. I went out with Josh Tenge, four-time world sandboard champ, and he showed me how far the sport has come in a decade. The boards have changed: small and edgeless, fast and incredibly responsive, and mercilessly unforgiving when you leaned too far into a turn (my punishment: a sore back and sand that was still lodged in my ears days later). And Josh, with his ever-expanding arsenal of tricks and visions of sandboarding safaris, has become the sport’s roving ambassador. Sandboarding is beginning to come into its own.

All that’s to introduce the piece I wrote (and shot) for this fall’s Men’s Book. It’s a clunky interface, but do check it out. The story starts on page 40. You’ll find more of my sandboarding shots here.

Livingstone, Zambia

Funny where procrastinating will get you. I’ve recently discovered the weird, wild, world of African MP3 blogs–old and new, afrobeat, high-life, and juju, from Angolan electronica to heavy West African funk. That’s how I came across Amanaz, a psych-rock band from northern Zambia, circa 1973. As far as I can tell they only put out one album, called Africa, but it’s a hell of an album. The sound is all fuzzed-out guitars and stoned-sounding lyrics–an African cousin of Cream, as the press release so aptly puts it. Interestingly, they weren’t as sui generis as the idea of an “African Cream” might sound today. They were part of a scene: there’s a recognized Zam-rock sound, with lots of the bands (like The W.I.T.C.H.) hailing from the copperbelt, an area most visitors to Zambia don’t visit (I never got anywhere near there, alas). Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find out much more about them online. Thirty-five years is a long time; who knows where they are now?

A few months after I first heard Amanaz, I found a reissue of Africa while grazing in Amoeba in the Upper Haight–it’s an lp, and it has that satisfying heft of 180-gram vinyl when you plop it down on the turntable. The lps are part of a really limited run, and hand-numbered; mine reads 445/450. Needless to say, it sounds fantastic.

For a taste, check out “Khala My Friend,” hosted on the Gorilla vs. Bear blog.

Everybody knows that DNA doesn’t lie, right? That’s what CSI has taught us: Just “follow the evidence,” as Gus Grissom says, and you’ll find your perp. Well, what if the statistics we use to convict suspects (those one-in-a-million odds we hear in the courtroom) are off by orders of magnitude? What if some DNA “matches” are nowhere near as airtight as we’ve come to believe? Bicka Barlow, a San Francisco defense attorney, is asking just these questions–and the government is stonewalling her. I explore these questions in “DNA’s Identity Crisis,” a story that took me months to report and write, in the latest issue of San Francisco magazine.

Plus: “Anatomy of a DNA Match: Why finding a criminal through DNA testing is a much dicier process than you’d think.”

Last week, Mother Jones ran an old photo of mine, one I made in 2002 of a Zimbabwean immigrant (or economic refugee, if you prefer) in his apartment in downtown Johannesburg.

“As their nation slipped into chaos under the rule of longtime dictator Robert Mugabe, millions of Zimbabweans flooded into neighboring South Africa in search of work. Many ended up in Johannesburg, Southern Africa’s de facto capital, scratching out a living on the streets and sharing rooms in decaying apartment blocks in the city’s rundown core.

I made this photo in 2002, and things have only gone downhill since then, the years marked by spiraling inflation, stolen elections, and state-sponsored thuggery against the democratic opposition. Even if current power-sharing negotiations manage to loosen Mugabe’s grip on the country, Zimbabwe will need to be rebuilt, more or less, from the ground up.”