Chris Smith’s blog

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.”

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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.