Drinks With Doug

Drinks With Doug Reviews: #1

Saturday's weather: Sharp blue sky and clear cumulus clouds, dry and pleasant, mabye about 73 today.
Saturday's drink: McDonald's coffee, as it's morning and the coffee-pot has died.
Saturday's interest: the movie "Hunger", recently playing to big boffo at Cannes. Admittedly, leaning toward the IRA over the English in the Troubles. But timely, given what we have not been discussing regarding rendition, Guantanamo, and our never-ending troubles.

Drinks With Doug is, at its best moments, a chronicle of the thousand events that, together, comprise the events of a life. Or my life, specifically. Part of that life is food I make. Part of it is the work I do, the soap I use, the smell of my dog in the morning, the progress of my herbs, and the events I attend. Today I start DWD Reviews!, exclamation point included. My first stabs at thoughts on events/experiences I've had here that you can have where-ever you are. Movies, concerts, magazine articles, sex toys; it's all fair game. Except the sex toys.

Concert: "Drive - By Truckers" at DC's 930 Club, Saturday May 10.
DWD Rating: two Southern Comforts and a mess o' beers (out of five possible drinks.)
My friend DE suggested this a while back. I've been hearing D and J talk about the Drive By Truckers, and their songs, and their rock opera Southern Rock Opera for years...feeling at times a little left out of the loop of the 70's experience of southern rock concerts, weed, beer, long hair, Stars-n-Bars tees, and all the other whatnot that, I assume, accounts for the bulk of what we may call "southern culture." OK, I'm a little tight-assed Square-head; but the whole Doobie-rock thing always eluded me. Time to give it a try.
Glad I did. Although frankly, I'm not sure when I'll try it again. DBT hit the stage around 11:30pm; much too late for an old man like me. In the words of my friend D: "I love having gone out, I just hate going out." I agree. The opening act was meh, but DBT hit the stage hard and didn't let go until 1am. And that was BEFORE the encore, which lasted well into the wee hours.
At first the songs hit you in the gut - good rock!, you say. Light and dark, good riffs, swampy feel. And, looking around, I think I've never been less intimidated by a concert crowd in my life. On the other side, after a while their tunes meld one into the other. Swamp seeps into swamp, and it becomes a little bit of an endurance contest: you and the guys (and gal) actually making the music.
In the end they won my respect my sheer force (on their part) to make me like them. But they didn't win my icy northern heart.

DVD: "Primer"
DWD Rating: three gin and tonics, and a splash more of Hendricks
"Primer", henceforth referred to without quotes, is the 2004 sci-fi tech-punk mind-fuck that you'll never understand, and wish you did. The work of the intriguing Shane Carruth (he wrote, produced, directed and acted - one more than Orson Welles OR Ed Wood!), Primer charts the totally mundane discover of something shockingly new, and powerfully corrupting, in science. I'll leave it there...mostly because I don't really understand what or how or why or...well, yeah. It's pretty dense - but not in the David Lynch way of weirdness and incomprehensibility for its own sake way. In that 'I don't understand this, but it has enough coherence and internal consistency that I believe I could understand this' way.
Beyond the tech-blather and weed-hungering questions, it also charts the break-down of a very close friendship: something we've all experienced. Worth several viewings.

Concert: "X" 13X31 Tour, Wednesday May 21 at the aforementioned awesome 930 Club.
DWD Rating: four straight scotch (and whatever you can find on the floor.)
What can be said that hasn't been of X over its history? Four amazing musicians - who we know not just by name or face or style but by expression - who together welded the mayhem of LA's punk scene into lasting fierce on-your-fucking-toes musical cocaine. (Not that I know what cocaine is like. Ahem.) C, our friend G and I went, passing (now regrettably) on the Detroit-based opener The Detroit Cobras. Billy Zoom (Paxil-man), Exene (former of King Aragon!), DJ Bonebreak and the aging-but-ageless John Doe: as a set they are history. My history, American music history, our history. I can't say enough.

Event: Art-O-Matic, Friday May 23
DWD Rating: Two sloppy martinis. That's it.
AOM is a somewhat yearly event that I fully support. Heck, I leap up and down at. Hurrah! Art-O-Matic!
It's an un-judged, non-judgemental collection of DC artists' work - often taking over abandoned office buildings and/or intimidating neighborhoods to display the creative output of our area.
No tsk-tsks. No smug chin-scrubbing. No art talk.
It's sappy and sassy and dirty and goofy and provocative in every way creation should be (see previous post!) Walk one floor or eight. Stare or breeze. Laugh - please - and mull. Be yourself.
Art-O-Matic. Why didn't I thing of this?