Hey, I recently took an interesting trip. It wasn’t to anywhere cool like India, Jack Daniel’s home state or San Miguel de Allende — no, it was to the California Pacific Medical Center on California Street, here in San Francisco.
It all started at 3:30 am when I woke up with a slight ache in my stomach. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but by 6:30 it had gotten worse and ejecting my dinner did not help. At 9, I found myself in the waiting room of an urgent care doctor. Unable to pinpoint the problem, she sent me to the biggest crooks in the medical industry, [name of testing place redacted for lawsuit reasons], for the usual rigamarole. From there I was instructed to go to a radiology center for a CT scan. After two hours of increasingly painful waiting for an insurance authorization, I opted to foot the bill myself and had the scan of my abdomen performed. Needless to say, something is wrong with the insurance system if it requires a person in pain to sit and wait while some office drone passes around an authorization form. But I digress.
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Posted in Tripping | 22 June 2010 | by Duncan
In Russia, for some damn reason, they call a restaurant a “pectopah” and a bar a “bap.” But you could certainly argue that the drinking establishment in this St. Petersburg hotel deserves a special name of its own. And maybe it’s “movie,” because that’s what the whole experience feels like.
It’s an epic movie, to be sure, as we hang most nights past 4 a.m. But putting in the hours means we get to see the whole story arc. How the hookers, who don’t look like hookers at all — in the US they’d be the most elegant ladies in the room — periodically shift tables and take turns discreetly trolling the crowd. How the smooth-as-silk manager signals to them with a silent nod that he needs their table and they temporarily move to a seating area in the hall. How every hooker has a rose-colored drink, non-alcoholic, on her table with a straw in it. Some kind of high-class red light maybe, but mostly, I think, to signal the staff.
But enough of my ogling the working girls. What I wanted to tell you about was the gangster part of the movie from last night.
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I have gone insane.
You probably thought the pressures of the down economy had kept me from shopping (and writing about it) of late, but the truth is far scarier. Much has happened, dear reader, since my last post – and I’m now ready to tell all. It began months ago during a routine trip to NY. I had an hour to kill before a lunch meeting at the Hard Rock in Times Square (which rocks, btw), so I decided to use Yelp on my iPhone to find a great shoe store near my hotel. Yelp pointed me to Benedetti Shoes on 34th, near Macy’s, that, according to the reviews, sold “exquisite, Italian hand-made shoes.” Bingo. So I hacked through 10 blocks of sidewalk-fashion-district insanity only to discover that my destination had “relocated,” due to the fact the building was being renovated by some Korean multinational. Destined to be a retail Mecca sometime in the future, no doubt. But for now, there I stood, heartbroken that there was no shoe gold at the end of my rainbow.
Then I noticed Famous Footwear.
Famous Footwear? I know they sell a lot of shoes to a lot of people, but Burke Andrews had never darkened the doorstep of an FF, likely for fear of being spotted slumming by TMZ. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I was in NY with no time to get to 8th street, I freakin’ needed some shoes, bad. So, I sucked it up and jaywalked 34th right in the door of Famous Footwear.
It was as bad as I feared, mobs of be-socked shoppers promiscuously trying on white Reebok high-tops and late-model Timberlands. I scanned the tops of the display shelves looking for something truly interesting. What’s this? A decent looking shoe, in FF? I pulled on the pair of side-zip black boots, with the below-ankle style of a clip-toe cowboy boot. $95? I quickly took a picture with my phone and emailed it to my personal assistant. “What do you think?” No answer. F-it, who cares that I never heard of Zodiac shoes, they look cool, pointy and booty, and I was jonesing. I would have bought a pair of Capezios just to stop the shouting in my head.
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Posted in Tripping | 10 June 2010 | by Duncan
Fluorescents reflecting on the inside of the train windows make it impossible to see out as we pull into the New Delhi station around 10 pm, back from a day-trip to the Taj Mahal. So we have no clue. We file slowly out of the air-conditioned first-class car into the sticky, 100-degree heat and onto a dusty concrete platform that is nothing less than carpeted in humanity: sleeping, sitting, eating, talking, standing, lounging, smoking, cradling, shuffling, cuddling, walking and, frequently, maneuvering a large bundle of belongings, in sandals and saris and ballooning shorts, open shirts and khakis, over every square centimeter. We edge, mostly sideways, through this density toward the pedestrian overpass that will deposit us on the opposite platform that leads outside the station. We hold hands, like we never do anymore, tightly, but functionally. We’ve read about stampedes in those undifferentiated foreign places that seem exotic to gringos. We don’t talk about it. But we’re all pretty sure that one spark and people would die. And maybe some of those people would be us.
The stairs are impassable. But somehow as you lift your foot to the first step you find a toehold that you didn’t see a moment before or that wasn’t there. Like some gelatin river, the crowd haltingly, imperceptibly flows around you, even when the crowd is not moving, and you flow around the crowd. You make it to the overpass and glance back down the stairs to see who you’ve lost, maybe forever. Where’s your friend from Australia? Where’s the Indian account executive who’s been assigned as your guide? No time to do anything about it. You have to hold that hand and keep flowing.
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Posted in Tripping | 23 October 2009 | by Faye
“You’re from California, and you came to Nashville for vacation???”
Why, yes. Yes, I did. The cashier at the coffee shop asked that with a note of disbelief. But it’s true. This year vacation took me to Tennessee, namely Nashville, Memphis and whatever towns happened to separate the two (I do remember seeing a sign to turn off for Oakland, and wondered momentarily whether it was all just a dream).
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Posted in Noise | 29 September 2009 | by Duncan
I’ll show you mine in a minute. But, first, show me yours.
And you’re not allowed to say Clay Aiken, Miley Cyrus or something silly like that. Even Vanilla Ice. Those guys don’t count. They’re awful. But they’re not really music. They’re just hula hoops. Some unholy combo of popcult ephemera and music-biz corruption. No, a worst band ever has to be something someone else thinks is meaningful. They have to be part of the actual musico-historical conversation. Gotta have, well, gravitas, even if they suck.
My son, a music scribe in his own right (and inspirer of this idea), nominates the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just to start the fire (speaking of good candidates for worst – Billy Joel). Even if I don’t entirely agree, the Peppers seem like an exemplary choice: a band that many revere, that are credited with innovation and with chops and cool and that seem to have ascended to the rock ’n’ roll canon, if not yet the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (a goldmine, I would submit, of worstness – especially in 2010) (and, late-breaking news, now including the Chili Peppers!).
But that doesn’t mean your pick has to be an old band – though you’re going to have a hard time making a case for an artist with less than ten years of output, because some of these guys wind up redeeming youthful excrescence with breakthrough work in their maturity (Justin Timberlake, anyone?). And it’s not enough to name the name, you also have to make the case. Give us a sentence or two. Help us fully grok their true awfulness.
So, nominate your all-time worst band, email your pick to worstband@duncanchannon.com before November 1, 2009. We’ll publish the top ten disses and send each winning correspondent a FREE, USED CD of Celine Dion’s My Love – Ultimate Essential Collection!!! Now for mine – except it’s too damn hard to pick just one:
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Can someone tell me what makes a shoe a sneaker?
Wikipedia says “a term used in American English for a casual athletic shoe”; while Dictionary.com (from my iPhone) defines it as “a high or low shoe, usually of fabric such as canvas, with a rubber or synthetic sole.” Um, I’m feeling like I can drive a bus through those definitions. Maybe I’m better off asking what isn’t a sneaker. Anyway, whatever the true definition is, I’m going to talk about sneakers, ’cause my latest pair of shoes is what I call sneakers.
They aren’t the trendy, classic sneakers. I’m not really a fan of classic sneaks. I’ve never been able to sport the Top Sider, Chuck Taylor, or Jack Purcell with any conviction. And I never thought they were even remotely comfortable. Their thin waffle soles made me feel like I was walking on a real waffle – spongy and soggy with zero support. Back in the day I did love me some Stan Smiths though, and they were classics. Went through six or eight pairs as a kid. I loved the look and they were cushy and comfortable. I especially loved their weird sole pattern, like someone cut a thin slice off a wad of rubbery spaghetti noodles and glued all the little bits to the bottom of the shoe. They gripped like crazy and left the coolest print in the playground sand. Pretty sure you can still get them. But white sneakers on a guy in his 40s is a sign you still live with your mother.
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Posted in Tripping | 9 July 2009 | by Duncan
You know those folks who take long vacations and feel the need to explain that it’s their first vacation in five years/ten years/since I can’t remember when/since I started working here/since I got married/since I had kids/since I moved to California/since I moved back to New York. (Or, as the Hold Steady put it in “Chill Out Tent”: “…it was his first day off in forever, man.”)
Well, I won’t put you through that. I was away from the office for two weeks. And fuck it.
I also won’t try to explain that the vacation actually started out as work. Because you’d never believe that attending Hard Rock’s concert series in Hyde Park is work. Certainly not if you were there, what with the amazing VIP tent and free food, booze and service all day, not to mention guys named Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and the Killers onstage. Not to mention the after-parties.
Yeah, I won’t even try. It was work. It was fun. And it rapidly devolved into pure, stout-soaked sloth.
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