Ani-Mystic Case Study #5 and #6

Nick-Name: SWANGSTU
Primary Animal: MUSK OX
Traits: Muskoxen are native to the Arctic areas of Canada, Greenland and Alaska. It is thought that the muskox was able to survive the last Ice Age (Wisconsin glaciation) by finding ice free areas away from prehistoric peoples. The Norwegian municipality of Dovre has a muskox in its coat-of-arms.
Secondary Critter: MOUNTAIN GORILLA

Nick-Name: BUDDY / CECIL
Primary Animal: SPIDER MONKEY
Traits: Disproportionately long, spindly limbs inspired this monkey's common name. Males tend to stick together for their whole life. Grooming is not as important to social interaction, due perhaps to a lack of thumbs. On the surface, the Spider Monkey appears simply goofy, but is, in fact, full of wisdom.
Secondary Critter: RIVER OTTER

Kenny Dangerous Takes Gotham

In the flurry of vacation activity, my eldest nephew graced us with his first visit to Brooklyn! Armed with borrowed scarf and gloves (he's from Maine but ain't used to walking in the freezing cold - they have cars up there), we headed out...

Kenny D had a busy weekend: First, we got all the trivial tourist sites out of the way, including Lady Liberty via the free Staten Island Ferry and the view from atop Kong's perch.

Then, the cultural experiment began: The spicy Indian food at Haveli's was good but set fire to the tender New Englander's mild palette. (But he polished off that whole plate!)

The next morning, he tried his first vegetarian dim sum brunch in Chinatown. He sampled all items and liked most of it, despite the lack of a fork (no joke - that stuff can be slippery).

Kenny took in some theatre and eyed some of Stinky Town's most impressive loot: Big collections - like the AMNH. And smaller ones - like the Musee de Pacque-Ratt in our humble apartment. Of all the family clan that we've successfully lured down to Stinky Town, I think Kenny will be the first to return (plus, ODA and I promised him a ride on the Cyclone this summer)!

Escape From New York!

What better way to take advantage of a couple weeks of winter unemployment than head West? ODA and I landed in the Bay Area and began our mini-adventure by visiting our familiar haunts as well as discovering some new spots...

First stop, Ray Bandar's homespun bone palace. This gentle giant has amassed more than 6,000 skulls of marine mammals and other critters since he was a boy. His basement is a museum of carefully cataloged specimens spanning more than 65 years of collecting!

Next, we visit old pal Subburdenite at her big kitty house-sitting gig in the Mission. These stunning Savannah cats, Bo-Bo in particular, run this place - roaring like dwarfed leopards, leaping across furniture, pouncing on unsuspecting beagles and devouring whole chickens!

We decide to house-sit for the house-sitter and visit with one of our favorite felines: Champ. I mean, look at that face...

We take a stroll in lovely, green Golden Gate Park and it's Botanical Gardens (which are free, unlike the ones Stinky Town). On the trek, we discover the dormant powers of super-heroine, Ivy Girl!

The next day, we drove up north to our favorite spot: Point Reyes National Seashore. When we left San Francisco it was drizzly and overcast, but when reached the park the clouds cleared and the sun poked through - so we headed straight for the nearest beach on Drake's Bay! I think ODA filled an entire memory card of pix in under an hour. (Moments before, satellite radio reported it was 21 degrees back in NYC, which made the sunset stroll all the more sweet.)

Before it got dark, we checked into our little winter retreat in Inverness. We had this entire cottage to ourselves...
...complete with outdoor heated tub in the garden!

The next morning, we discovered the amazing view of Tomales Bay from the bathtub perch. (This sure beats the view we have from our Stinky Town tub, which is a windowless wall.)

At the far tip of Pt. Reyes, we visited South Beach and the Elephant Seals near Chimney Rock to the east...

...and beautiful McClure beach further north in the park's Tule Elk reserve. (This vast beach had nobody else on it. We wondered if anyone would ever find us here, living in a makeshift tent, eating beach vegetation, mingling with the hoofed natives?)

After this tour of mother nature, there was only thing to do: find a gourmet dessert shop! Luckily, we had a Yelp elite along who introduced us to Crixa Cakes in Berkeley. I had the amazingly delicious Carmella which was made up of a spongy chocolate cake, injected with caramel and vanilla cream, topped with whipped chocolate mousse! A perfect way to end a little escape from New York.

Stranded, happily!

Our week-long CA vacation has stretched into a 10-day retreat... or more. But unlike some fellow jetBlue travellers, we have no complaints. On Wednesday, when our original return flight was cancelled, weather in Stinky Town was in the teens and the snow was pounding down across the east coast. The forecast in the Bay Area was 60 degrees and partly cloudy. Today our flight was again cancelled and jetBlue informed us we were "stranded" until Saturday. Stranded? Hhhmmmm... let's see here: weather report back home says "22 feels like 8." Temperature here in San Francisco says "64 feels like 64." Back home: gray slush on sidewalk. Here: 68 species of flowers planted along sidewalk right out front. Back home: Angry commuters bundled in 3 layers of wet winter garb crowd onto subway. Here: the mellow workforce cuts out a bit early to stroll in Golden Gate Park or hike along Ocean Beach in their Ts. If this is stranded, I like it. Although we'll be back in NYC in a few days, it's almost impossible to imagine these two places existing simultaneously. I'm with ODA now and my heart aches a little at the thought of being back there in the dead of winter, or summer for that matter. It really isn't any way to live. But for now, we're stranded on the opposite side of reality... hesitantly awaiting our homeward rescue.

Dan's Metal Memory of the Month: 2/07

I hate to pile one metal entry on top of another, but it is that time of the month again. Looking back through my catalog of embarrassing hair bands, I found one of my old favorites from 1986, "Trilogy" by Yngwie Malmsteen. This music video ballad is yet another example of heavy metal musician turned fine actor. Born born Lars Johann Yngve (pronounced "ing-vay") Lannerbäck, this Swedish "shred" guitarist/composer was part of the so-called "Neo-Classical" metal genre. That is, those guys who excelled in classical music in high school but couldn't bare the thought of spending life in the orchestra pit. (Also, his middle name is Johann and his son's name is Antonio Vivaldi... get it yet?) The boy just fell in love with the hard stuff. To quote his website, "The day Jimi Hendrix died, the guitar-playing Yngwie was born". Although he's had guest vocalists on board, he's maintained the star spot in his band since its inception. While he's been nominated for a Grammy, Yngwie has always proven to be just another good 'ol drugged-up headbanger throw-back from the '80s... On tour with his 2005 release "Unleash the Fury," the young Viking chief - that's what 'Yngwie' means, apparently - passed out drunk in an airport and was roused by a woman pouring a jug of ice water on him. Enraged, he jumped up and shouted, "You've unleashed the fucking fury!" You still got it, Yngwie.

A Short History of Sabbath and Myself.

This week, my pal from Nebraska (also a former teen metalhead, hailed from the Northeast), scored two pre-sale Heaven & Hell - a.k.a. Black Sabbath - concert tix. Reuniting with Dio, the band's 1980-83 Ozzy replacement, to promote their new CD box set, "Black Sabbath: The Dio Years," Heaven & Hell recently announced the first leg of their 2007 tour. Before heading off to the heavy metal hot spots of Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria, H&H will offer an exclusive one-night-only solo performance at NYC's Radio City Music Hall. My pal and I have secured orchestra row seats for this March 30th show! (I know, at first I thought playing to a classic fixed seat venue seemed weird for a famous metal band... but Ronnie Dio himself is pushing 65.)

This event will mark another reunion. A Dan Bummer - Black Sabbath reunion... So, I started digging through some old boxes to trace this history...


Hand-Me-Downs: I think my path to bad music started when I was about 13. An older cousin had given me the vinyl of his youth, including Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Deep Purple and Sabbath records. By 14, this lead me to '80s metal bands like Scorpions, Iron Maiden and Dio. When I realized that Ronnie James Dio had once been the frontman for Rainbow and Black Sabbath, I quickly consumed this discography, too. At first, I recall pouring over the strange (now embarrassing) lyrics of songs like "Sign of the Southern Cross," "Children of the Sea," or "Voo-Doo." Rather than focus on my homework at night, I'd spend hours illustrating each track in pen and ink (as a student I failed miserably at math, but excelled in art - see above drawing from age 15). Looking back at these bizarre renditions, I question why my parents or art teachers never sent me to a therapist.

True Love Always: It was in this period that I left my dark little room and discovered girls... particularly girls who shared a love for loud hair bands. That seemed to be the main prerequisite for both parties. In the image above, one of my first girlfriends thanks me for purchasing her a Dio concert T in celebration of her birthday. (Notice we also share the same haircut, known as the pre-headbanger mullet.)

Blackout: By 16, habitual use of select depressants and hallucinogenics took hold and made concert-going a forgetful experience, but I did manage to save most of the ticket stubs as proof. This time around, I hope to soak up the full experience missed in my hazy youth: the big hair of my fellow music lovers (of course, all those headbanger's manes have probably thinned out significantly by now), the thick, cloudy mixture of smoke in the air (wait - there's no smoking permitted in concerts anymore), and Geezer Butler's thundering bass (Oh, I have to remember to bring earplugs this time - it gets really loud in those rock shows). In any case, it is meant to be. Above, notice that my last Black Sabbath show date was on "March 30, 1986." Is it chance that the reunion concert is March 30, 2007? 21 years to the day later? I think not. The stars (or rainbows, or whatever) must be aligned for a grand night.

Reunited: How I managed to survive my teen years, I'll never really know. Did Sabbath's silly lyrics and ominous music corrode my adolescent mind or help me see through the fog of rural teendom? The photo above is the last remaining artifact of my former life as a metalhead. Shortly after this picture was taken, I cut off my mop and slowly replaced my Slayer and Motorhead albums with Throwing Muses and The Smiths CDs (the '80s were coming to a close, so I had a lot of musical catching up to do). Even my subject matter for art evolved from overly literal Satanic metaphors on paper. As stated in an earlier entry, it's only recently that I've begun to un-earth (even embrace) my own heavy metal history. I think this process of mining one's past for clues to the present is healthy. Who you were then made you who you are now, right? Otherwise, wasn't it all just a waste of time?

Il buono, il brutto & il cattivo (Movie Review #3)

The good: Notes on a Scandal is probably the best film I saw in 2006... at minimum, it holds the finest performance of the year (Judi Dench as the delightfully evil, aging high school teacher Barbara Covett). While most movies that use a character's narration to thread the film together have little effect, Covett's VO is crucial. You thought Dan was a Bummer? Just wait until you witness Dench's character slide from mere sarcasm into pure darkness. As good as watching Liz Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The bad: The Joy of Life, a documentary about suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge (no, not the one that documents poor souls taking the dreaded leap), starts out promising and then commits a sort of suicide of its own. Roughly in three acts, the first is a steady but long reading of a butch diary over beautiful, ghostly static shots of San Francisco. You sort of hanker down and settle into this running narration, mainly because you assume there's a pay-off in the end. It's foreign, terribly personal, and vulnerable, which is another reason you listen in. The second act is a VO film analysis. The third act is a report of the filmmaker's study of the bridge's history of attracting jumpers, told in a manner 180 degrees different than the opening narration - both in tone and content. This Sundance pic from '05 wasn't "ugly," just bad. I ended up feeling really ripped away from what what I was promised in the open. Not a great ride. The ugly: Children of Men. While based on an intriguing premise, the film version never really goes anywhere. A looooooong chase and many deaths throughout a bleak landscape (impressive art direction) of the not-so-distant future UK. There were a few nice touches: Clive Owen's un-masculine flip-flops, the un-American-ness of it all, and the odd jarring moments of action were nicely handled. Otherwise, save it for a rental.