Category: Life in San Francisco

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Jon Lord Has Died

A man very dear to my heart has died. Jon Lord, the keyboardist for Deep Purple died today of heart attack on top of having pancreatic cancer. He was the person who influenced me enough to play the piano and then move on to synthesizers. I still have a program on my keyboard that I made called Jon Lord that specifically reproduced his Hammond B-3 organ with all the grit and distortion. I can still to this day play his solos from Highway Star or the intro to Child in Time. I will miss the fact that he is no longer around to play music, but at 71 he had a good life I hope. He was one of my musical heroes that I unfortunately never got to meet. The following is about him from sfgate.com and the story does him justice.

Jon Lord, the keyboardist of the pioneering British hard-rock band Deep Purple, died Monday in London. He was 71.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said his manager, Bruce Payne. Mr. Lord announced last year that he had cancer.

In songs from the late 1960s and early ’70s like “Smoke on the Water,” “Hush” and the epic “Child in Time,” Deep Purple laid much of the groundwork for heavy metal, drawing a blunter and fiercer sound out of the blues-based riffs common in the British invasion’s first wave.

Mr. Lord’s Hammond B-3 organ – with its signal routed through a Marshall amplifier to give it a distorted tang – was key to Deep Purple’s style. It locked into formation withRitchie Blackmore‘s guitar, Roger Glover‘s bass and Ian Paice‘s drums, forging catchy lines like the four-note motif of “Smoke on the Water” that helped the band sell tens of millions of albums around the world.

But Mr. Lord did more than pound out chords. His fast, wandering solos reflected a lifelong interest in lyrical classical music, and in the band’s early years he composed several large-scale pieces for the group, including “Concerto for Group and Orchestra,” which was recorded with the Royal Philharmonic in London in 1969.

Born in Leicester, England, on June 9, 1941, Mr. Lord studied classical piano from a young age and became a fan of piano rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis as well as jazz organists like Jimmy Smith. After moving to London in 1959, he played in various jazz, blues and pop groups throughout the 1960s, until in 1968 the first incarnation of Deep Purple was formed in Hertford.

After its first singer, Rod Evans, left in 1969, the group recruited Ian Gillan, who had sung in “Jesus Christ Superstar” and had the vocal prowess to match the band. In the early 1970s the group released a string of hit albums, including “Deep Purple in Rock,” “Machine Head” and the live “Made in Japan.”

Mr. Lord remained in the group despite numerous personnel changes until it finally disbanded in 1976. He then formed Paice, Ashton and Lord, a short-lived group with Deep Purple’s drummer and the singer Tony Ashton, and joined an early version of the band Whitesnake. Deep Purple reunited in 1984, and Mr. Lord stayed until 2002; since then he has continued his composing career and collaborated with musicians includingAnni-Frid Lyngstad of Abba.

He is survived by his wife, Vicky, and two daughters, Amy Cherrington and Sara Lord. His first marriage to Judith Feldman ended in divorce.

In a recent interview, Mr. Lord demonstrated how he tailored the organ’s sound for Deep Purple.

“Lovely a sound as it was, it wasn’t quite giving me what I wanted,” he said. “I could hear another sound in my head – something harder, something more throaty.”

“You tap straight in and put it through a straight speaker,” he added, “and you get a beast.”

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Country Captain Chicken

This was a dish my Mom was known for and it was the one dish that was requested the most by friends and family when they would come over. I thought it was an original dish or handed down through the family, which it might have, but apparently it’s a rather common dish in the South coming from British Captains who had spent time in India.

This isn’t the type of Indian food you’ll find today it was an Americanized [re: white bread] version of Indian food cooked as a stew. My Mom always served it with little bowls of coconut, almond, raisins and chopped green onion that you could sprinkle on to your taste, but just went for the chicken and rice. That was enough for me as a kid.

My Mom always liked to spice this dish up a lot and I think she usually added the 2-3 teaspoons of curry using tablespoons. It’s a very tasty dish and something that while it has lots of ingredients isn’t really that hard to prepare.

Country Captain Chicken

1 fryer chicken cut up

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 cup butter

1 medium onion chopped

1 small green pepper chopped

1 clove garlic crushed

2 to 3 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1 can (16 oz) stewed tomatoes

1/4 cup currants or raisins

Hot cooked rice

Toasted blanched almonds

Chutney

Sprinkle chicken on both sides with salt and pepper.  Melt butter in skillet- brown chicken on both sides.  Remove chicken and add onion, green pepper, garlic, curry powder, thyme.  Cook until onion is tender.  Add tomatoes, currants and chicken.  Cook covered until chicken is tender.

Serve over rice with almonds and chutney

Makes 4 servings

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This Week Will Be About Food

I haven’t written too much about food recently, but I came across a book my wife and I were putting together that was a collection of my Mom’s recipes and I fell in love with food again. For those of you who knew her she was best remembered for her cooking.

I think because she was a stay at home mom that after I started going to school she had time on her hands and spent the time cooking. She would make gallons of bolognese sauce and freeze in old milk cartons, make cookies and cakes every week and all my friends that would come to the house always wanted to come by to taste what she made that day.

When we had parties she’d get up in the morning and start cooking. There would be appetizers like her bourbon barbecue hot dogs, mushroom toast rounds, spinach dip, crab molds. She wouldn’t just put out chips and dip she always went all the way.

Her food was old school compared to what you’d get today. It was pretty homey feeling when you’d eat it though and it made you feel good to take a bite of it. So this week I’ll be sharing some of her recipes that made me feel good as a kid growing up in San Francisco.

The first is one I grew with. It was the only way my Mom could get me to eat mushrooms and you’ll see why when you read the ingredients. I made this for a party once and after the first couple of batches I didn’t have a chance to get them into the oven because people were just spreading it on the bread and eating it up. I think you’ll like this one.

Mushroom Toast Rounds

Slice sour French rolls or onion bagels into thin slices. [I prefer baguettes]  Spread each round with the following mixture:

1/2 cup Best Foods Mayonaise

1/2 Cup Parmesan cheese

6 finely chopped mushrooms

1 teaspoon minced onions (instant) only if using French rolls. [I add a couple of cloves of garlic instead]
Place on baking sheet and broil until bubbly.

Variation: use chopped mushroom stems in above mixture and stuff mushroom caps.  Broil until tender.

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Weather In A San Francisco Summer

Summer is here and it’s time for weird weather. San Francisco has four distinct microclimates, the fog belt [where I live], the banana belt [Mission area and everything East], Wind belt [downtown which is made possible by all the high rises funneling the air and the Marine Belt [just around the Golden Gate Bridge and extending down to the Embarcadero.

I had the chance to travel to the Potrero District [banana belt] this morning. I left the house to overcast foggy 55° weather and hopped in my car and started to drive East. Suddenly I noticed it starting to get brighter. I had to pull out my sunglasses and when I arrived out on Rhode Island street it was perfect blue skies and sunny. As I opened the door to my car I was hit by 73° according to my iPhone. That’s almost a 20° difference within a half hour’s drive.

There are even sub-microclimates, but for people who move to San Francisco they have to learn the city to understand it best. The first thing you need to learn is layers. In the Sunset District my Dad would go out in the backyard on weekends in the morning to work the garden. He’d have a tank top, t-shirt, sweatshirt and jacket on. As the day wore on the clothes would soon start to come off. Then around 3pm he’d have to start putting them all back on again.

While the Sunset has a bit of temperament about it’s weather, it’s not constantly foggy. We’re actually getting more sunny days than we used to, but I remember my brief stint living in the mission and I don’t think I owned a single long sleeved shirt unless it was for work downtown. Sure it will get overcast upon occasion in the Mission and Potrero, but you never see fog like you do in the outer Sunset and Richmond Districts. Now at least I know if I’m in need of some sun on a cold foggy day in San Francisco all I have to do is head East for a few miles.

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Bayview Opera House

My friend Angelina Armani was in town last night and contacted me to tell me that she and her boyfriend Robert Hall would be videotaping a performance by Kevn Kinney of Southern rock band Drivin and Cryin at the Bayview Opera House. That was enough to give me an excuse to check out a piece of San Francisco history few people know about.

The funniest part when I drove up and met everyone was that they were talking about chicken and waffles that they just had for dinner. Apparently, they didn’t know about the Bayview part of town. Kevn greeted me with a hey brother, you from this part of town? The first thing that popped out of my mouth was, you just had chicken and waffles for dinner, do I look like I’m from this part of town? Not being unaware of soul food [yet I still can’t figure out the combination of chicken and waffles] we both ended up having a laugh after my comment.

Built in 1888, the Bayview Opera House is small in comparison to other opera houses you might find elsewhere.It underwent a refurbishment recently and I can tell you that from walking around the outside and inside that it is definitely a centerpiece to the Bayview-HuntersPoint community. This area was originally considered to be a part of South San Francisco.

The odd part is that while it was called an opera house there was never any operas performed there. Built as part of a Masonic Lodge it was home to vaudeville acts like Pawnee Bill’s Medicine Show and other traveling type of groups, but it was a place that the people of San Francisco would visit for a night out on the town which would make sense since there was a brewery on the opposite corner where they could fuel up for whatever form of entertainment was happening that night. While I can’t find much  more about the history of the place it is today a place that serves the African-American community with arts programs, yoga and helps bring the community together.

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Happy Independence Day!

Welcome to the 4th of July were the U.S.A. celebrates it’s independence from the tyranny of the United Kingdom with a Chinese tradition — fireworks. It’s also the one day of the year where you can have an open beer in your hand before noon and no one looks at you funny. Many of you will be going down to Crissy Field or Fisherman’s Wharf with the thousands of others to be crowded together to watch the fun. I will not.

I did the Crissy Field thing once and while it was fun there were too many people drinking too much to get in a portapotty to give back the beer and afterwards the drive out was so slow that I have to say I have never seen so many people jumping out of their cars and running off to the side of the road to pee. Nope, I’m not going to drive through a river of hot urine just watch some fireworks. There’s plenty of other places to see them minus the urine and drunkards.

The first thing is you need to get high. No I’m not talking about smoking pot, but get as high up in the air as you can. Twin Peaks is a good place as you can see Crissy Field as well as Oakland and Union City’s shows. This place does get a little crowded though so get there early. Oddly enough on a warmish day like today when you go up there at night the heat of the day rises so be prepared to have shorts and tank top handy as San Francisco radiates back all the heat of the day.

Grandview Park is another good place in the Inner Sunset and you only have to walk partly up the steps to see it. This was our usual place, but tonight I think I’m going to try the Northwest corner of the Sunset Reservoir. I’ve heard lots of people recommend it and it’s closer to my house. The parking in all these other places is much easier to get in and out of and they’re also nice if you have kids that are scared by the loud banging.

Fisherman’s Wharf I did one year which is a good place if you want to get closer without being boxed in at Crissy Field. You can even hop on the Metro and enjoy the fireworks from the Embarcadero and if you’re quick you can hop back on to before the rest of the crowd does.

If you want an alternative fireworks festival go down to Ocean Beach. The outer Sunset and Richmond district seem to have a number of pyrophiliacs and while not as big as the Crissy field show there are still some pretty big rockets going up in the air out here. I do remember one year there was an older Chinese man with his granddaughter set up at the school yard of A. P. Gianinni Junior High that was sending up some definitely not safe and sane stuff that was pretty impressive. He was there for over an hour. Local schoolyards seem to be a hit or miss attraction for people. The police generally leave you alone there unless you’re tossing M-80’s around because there isn’t too much to burn on the asphalt play areas. The good old days of driving to Daly City to buy your own fireworks are pretty much gone. I’m not sure if Pacifica is still selling the old Red Devil fireworks of my youth, but at least I’ve given you a few ways to see something tonight while you’re eating your burgers and slugging down too many beers.

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Golden Gate Park Gone Wrong

While everyone seems to be focused on the West end of GGP nobody has noticed what they’ve done to the Eastern side. It turns out that they’ve moved the parking to where the bike lane is and the bike lane to where the parking is. This is bad for a couple of reasons.

First, the bike lane isn’t used that much so leaving it next to area where the cars drive makes sense. If a person on a bike is riding by and the driver of the car opens the door to get out without noticing the bike the rider can move a little to the left to get out of the way. Now with the bike lane blocked in by cars and the curb, if a passenger opens the door without noticing the bike you will have two injured people.

Also pushing the parked cars out makes driving more difficult. I find myself not being able to drive the speed limit in the Eastern part of the park now, because I now have to drive very close to the cars. So far this only affects JFK Drive East of Transverse Drive, but if they think of moving it to other parts of the park it will be a disaster.

I used to enjoy my drives through the park as they were always pretty peaceful, now even driving slow I have to be aware of hitting cars. As you can see from the picture in front of me [that I took after I came to a full stop next to the Rose Garden] The car in front of me is not centered in the lane and veering to the left, practically driving on the divider line to avoid hitting the parked cars on the right. I suspect we will be seeing more car accidents in the future along this part of the park because of the dumb idea they’ve put in place.

The other thing that is puzzling me is how packed with cars the park is now. I took the picture above in the middle of the week at somewhere around 2pm. Why are all those cars there or were they there before, but I just didn’t realize them because they were farther away from me? From Transverse Drive all the way up to the Conservatory of Flowers was completely packed with cars and I have no idea why.

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The Manly Art of Shaving: Part 3

I’ve been going for sometime trying to switch back to the old ways of shaving using double edged blades because they were cheaper and shaving soap, also because it’s cheaper and I’ve finally come to a decision: I’ll have to do a modified form for our modern times.

The double edged blades worked, but I was getting nicks sometimes and they also took me a long time to shave and prep, so I’ll have to put the double edged blades aside. The shaving soap will stay because it’s actually a rather pleasant feeling to put on your face and there’s very little difference between the soap and canned shaving creme except cost.

Now I have the dilemma of what blade to use since while I’ve become used to the five blade Fusion blades I can’t stand paying close to $5/blade for a blade that lasts me almost a month. That was until I came across an ad on Facebook that I actually clicked on. Dorco USA that also makes the first double edged blade I tried also makes a pretty close duplicate of the Gilette Fusion blades only these have six blades and cost less than a dollar a blade.

I purchased the starter set of holder and two blades for $4.75 at their website. I really didn’t notice a difference between the Fusion and the Dorco. So now I can shave for about $12 per year instead of around $60/year and the best part is it’s faster with the multi blades.

I’ve also found I don’t have shave right after I get out of the shower in the morning so let me share my technique with you.

1. Take a washcloth and turn on the hot water and make the water as hot as you can stand. Drop your brush in the water and run some water over the soap.

2. Take the hot wet cloth and run it all over your face for about a minute. If water is dripping off your face you’ve done it right.

3. Grab the brush and start working it in circles in the soap until you’ve got a good foam up.

4. Cover your face in the foam which should also now be hot to warm. Badger brushes tend to hold more water than boar brushes so you’ll get your face wet and lubricated better.

5. I like to run the blade under some hot water as well to warm it up and then start shaving.

6. While people tell you not to do this, I always shave against the grain and start with my throat and move to the cheeks then do the chin and mustache area. I do it in this order because the chin and mustache area are always the hardest to shave and you want the water to soak in a lot.

7. Once you’re finished rub around your face to see if there’s any place that need a little more work. You should still have enough of the soap left over that you can do the clean up just fine.

8. Once you’re finished splash your face with witch hazel and then water.

9. Rub off any water left with your hands then apply a suitable aftershave moisturizer.

By doing this I only have to shave every other day and when I’m finished I’ve got baby’s butt smooth skin. Try it and see how it works and let me know.

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Robert “Fleetwood” Bowden of KPOO

Yesterday I was invited down to KPOO 85.9 FM radio to talk with Robert Bowden of the Fleetwood Report show. This was one bad dude. His Dad was king of heroin dealing in the Bay Area and he emulated his Dad and from the age of 12 spent the next 17 years of his life in and out of prison for pimping, drug dealing, you get the picture. This could have been a lot worse, but this is a guy who has turned his life around and now writes books about it and runs organizations to get ex cons back on their feet.

When I got there I sat in with him while he was doing a few voiceovers for his show which runs from 12pm-9pm Monday through Friday. I first saw him and he reached out and shook my hand and smiled at me and I kind of took the smile as one of those, I’m going to eat you alive type of things, but I realized after we sat down and talked that I totally got it wrong.

He’s actually a pretty good guy who’s written five books in addition to doing his radio show and is also reaching out to people though cable TV in many cities around the nation. He’s been at KPOO for about five years and has been out of jail since 1997. He runs a group call the homeboyhotline.org to help ex cons to keep from going back to jail. He told me that when you get released from jail you’re given $200 which will last you about 72 hours and then you’re back to doing what you did which ends up putting you back in jail again.

This is a guy who’s had a hard life and the fact that he could turn himself around and help other people who’ve gone through what he’s gone through and turn them into better people is a good thing in my book. I recorded my interview so what you hear it very raw, like he is and he didn’t hold back at all. I was glad that he did that because I’ve watched a bunch of the scared straight shows and this little chat did more to make me to want to keep myself straight than any TV show.

My main fascination was asking what it’s like to be on the inside. Again, he didn’t hold back. The food is awful, the guards are predators on the prisoners and their main goal is to break you down and destroy you. I could understand that if they were breaking down the bad side of you that caused you to be there, but it seemed more like they were breaking you down to destroy your self respect. Fleetwood managed to use spirituality to keep himself together. I don’t normally like to go in that direction, but Fleetwood was really speaking from his heart and he’s someone that isn’t a criminal anymore.

If you listen to the recording, please remember that while Fleetwood is talking from the heart, he will say something’s that will shock you, but he’s a good guy and he taught me a lot while I talked to him.

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Morrissey Elected As Egypt’s LGBT President

I have been sick for the last week with a cold, but I don’t turn into the typical whiney bitch that most guys do with a cold, I turn into more of a zombie. Add to this that I have to get up at 6:20am to get my daughter out the door to school only makes it worse. So I hear things wrong. There’s a lot going on in San Francisco that I want to write about, but I’ve been having a bit of trouble keeping my thoughts straight. So what have I learned this past week after being in a fog without the help of any drugs?

1. Morrissey was elected as Egypt’s President: Well, I never liked his hair style or music, but I suppose they could have done a lot worse. I never knew the Brit was an Islamic extremist. You wouldn’t know from looking at him.

2. San Francisco had a really Gay White Pride parade. I guess I’ll spend a little more time on this because that was an actual twitter post I saw this weekend. It seemed funny until I actually saw footage of the parade. Even the non-White people in the parade looked White. Wille Brown was the most ethnic of all in a raisin in a glass of milk kind of way driving by in an old yellow cadillac convertible. The most diversity I saw was in a shot from a group holding up #OCCUPYPRIDE signs which i couldn’t figure out. The whole occupy [insert large corporation here] has become kind of meaningless when bringing down the man means bring down the man on man relationships. Yet there were tons of gay people there cheering them on. I guess they wanted to be occupied if you know what I mean and I think you do.

The trannies and drag queens did such a good job because I actually thought they were women. I had to look up Carmen Carrera after watching her drive by to realize that she actually was a man. I was trying to figure out how a nice straight looking couple with a daughter driving by fit in with Gay Pride and had to use google to find out they weren’t a straight couple. Science has definitely taken a step forward for the cross dressers and transgendered community. Similarly the Dykes on Bikes that start the parade looked butcher than many Hell’s Angels I’ve seen.

Sarah Silverman was also on hand because she can’t do a stand up routine without making a butt joke, so that must have been her tie in with gay pride. I have many friends that are gay, but I’ve never attended one of the parades. I don’t do well in overly crowded places and I probably wouldn’t do well in places that were overly crowded with fabulous people. Besides that I wouldn’t want to be spreading my cold around. I do want to go one day and take my daughter and wife just to see how many of our friends we’ll see. The problem I’m seeing from the footage is that the rainbow flag got dropped in bleach somewhere down the line.

Gay pride has become rather homogenized like milk, which is white. I was attacked for my article on why people hate the Marina by someone who said it’s too white. Well, it’s not too white, but it’s very Americanized. Too white is what I was seeing at the Gay Pride Parade. When Mayor Lee walks with the Golden State Warriors and all you see are bunch of tall white guys walking with a short Asian mayor something’s not right. A basketball team and there isn’t a single brother to be seen? Oh wait there’s the police driving by and waving and hey, there’s a person of color waving…from the back of the police car.

The you had the tag alongs and I’m not speaking about the Filipino language [inside joke], but the groups that really didn’t have anything to do with Gay Pride, like  the ACLU and Immigrants rights. Sure I bet there are some who are gay, but the whole parade is about celebrating being gay. Not about unions [which the last time they had a parade I believe the police were envolved and it wasn’t pretty] or letting immigrants into San Francisco [which is a standard practice depending on where you walk in the city]. Sarah Silverman was quoted as saying she supports pride day because it’s about being bad for a day. Uhm, OK, now it’s just pride day and not about gay pride? Hell Muni did it better by having all the busses displaying EQUALITY FOR ALL over the weekend.

I’m totally in favor of legalized gay marriage because with disposable income San Francisco’s Wedding planners would make tons of money. I honestly don’t care what type of person you’re attracted to. It’s not what’s between your legs, but what’s in your head. My head still isn’t right after being sick for a week, but at least I survived my zombie apocalypse without eating anyones face off. So I apologize if this story sounds like I was rambling, because I am.

And to finish off, Morrissey is gayer than the Gay Pride parade.