It's nine o'clock on a Saturday/The regular crowd shuffles in/There's an old man sitting next to me/Makin' love to his tonic and gin...

These photos are from a couple months ago--okay, it could've been May--so my memory might be a bit hazy. But any time spent at The Alley in the hippish Grand Lake 'hood of Oakland is sure to leave an impression.

Elan broke me in for my first experience there; we got to the bar early so as to score a seat at the piano before the regulars--known locally as the "Alleycats"--shuffled in for the keys master himself, THE piano man: Rod.

Rod has been a fixture at The Alley since 1965 and is said to know something like 10,000 songs. We were told this by one of the oldest Alleycats there that night, who'd been frequenting the legendary bar for 37 years.

It wasn't long before "Jeffrey"--a 30-year regular--sat down next to me. Jeffrey was a large, bespectacled man who walked with a cane and was preparing for a serious operation the next day. I think it was some sort of testicular surgery or something equally as major--I remember Elan and I grimacing and making cooing noises when he told us. But of course now (and several hundred vodka-sodas later), it's difficult to recollect the specifics. Anywho, Jeffrey and I became fast friends when he discovered that I actually knew who H.G. Wells was. Oh, and he did a charming spoken word performance of "The Smoke-Off"--Shel Silverstein's tale about a marijuana rolling (and smoking) contest in San Rafael of all places--a poem that first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1978.

The place--and especially the area surrounding the piano--filled up quickly and the drinks were flowing and the mic made its way around the bar, accompanied gracefully by Rod, and soon there was a rollicking (as if there wouldn't be) crowd-participatory rendition of "Life is a Cabaret." It was awesome. I can't wait to go back.

I love a cabaret.

It's not just an excuse, it's a lifestyle...

Yeah, yeah--the blog's been severely neglected yet again. The reason: been doing a lot of writing and research lately, and it's been awfully fun.

I interviewed an artist, Isabella Kirkland, who was once the only licensed female taxidermist in New York City. Now she does elaborate, life-sized and to scale paintings of large groups of species, sort of like an exhibition in biodiversity. So I met her at her studio which was actually on a houseboat in Sausalito (some of those houseboats are fantastic--like quirky-cool, floating mini-mansions), and was charmed by her clear-eyed intellect and warm humility. The resultant article in the Pacific Sun "Green" issue is in preview of the upcoming Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, which I'll be attending in October--as soon as I can figure out how to be in two places at the same time (the NORML Conference in Berkeley is the same weekend, naturally).

I also did an article in the same issue about enviro-friendly sex, called "Make love, not global warming..."

And I did some stuff for our Fall Arts Preview issue, focusing on performing arts and film, which meant I got to go to this sorta cool press thing/film screening/continental breakfast for the Mill Valley Film Festival at the high-tech Dolby Labs in SF.

But also, for the past couple weeks, I've been interviewing a group of women for an upcoming story, which took me to the San Francisco City Hall--a beautific and surreal structure--amidst a large group of protestors outside, and some happy hetero- and homosexual couples inside getting hitched (the camera crew and group of onlookers are much larger for the same-sex marriages--the hetero couples are largely ignored these days, in SF anyway).

Romance by the sea dot com...

Last weekend, Thespian, his faithful hound Mango, and I drove to Mendocino for our friend's surprise 40th birthday shindig. Our friend's wife set the whole thing up, reserving rooms in a quaint inn overlooking the bay called Mendocino Seaside Cottage. The website made the place look a little, um, cheesy--like a Danielle Steele novel on Viagra. But we were stoked once we arrived and got the tour of the place, noting that our room had the best views and just a short walk into town. It was awesome.

Thespian and I took in the surrounding natural splendor, joined later by friends, and discovered the many wonderful surprises of Mendo at jaunts to the coffee shops--Moody's rocks!--illustrious pubs and taverns, like Patterson's, and a pretty kick-ass French dinner at Cafe Beaujolais.

The last night of our weekend featured a seven-course meal prepared by a personal chef, and supplemented by wine and cannabis pairings, at the gorgeous cliff-side house of a Mendo-friend (an attorney for medical marijuana cases). I'm no stoner but these sophisticated medical marijuana folks are dope.

The sensual beauty of... mmm... meat.

Last Friday, I went to an art opening at a surprisingly cool gallery called Sam the Butcher in the affluent, pristine (read: Stepford Wives-snooty) Marin town of Mill Valley. The opening was for an exhibit called "Abattoir: an exploration of meat through painting" featuring a series of acrylics by local artist Sergio A. Lobato.

The pictures here don't do the paintings justice. But up close and personal, I found the art to be sublimely beautiful--a textural and, indeed, sensual delight. They made me look at, er, beef, in a whole new way, by simultaneously elevating its most basic food-source status to that of abstract art, and transcending the visceral to the almost ethereal, in Lobato's use of light and a rich, multi-hued palette that cast a silken glow over the hanging cow parts and dangling organs and bits of flesh.

It's a play on the beauty of ugliness, or the sublimation of the secular, creating art of matter we deem inconsequential at best or repugnant and unwholesme at worst.

Lobato told me during the opening that he'd received many a stank-eye and tsk-tsk from passersby in Mill Valley, even one perturbed woman who declared the paintings "Disgusting!" as he worked to hang them in the gallery. I wasn't too surprised by the poor reaction he received from "progressive, liberal" Marinites, who most likely drove off in their Lexus SUVs with righteous indignation.

In that, I thought the exhibit captured the not-so-subtle dichotomies of life in Marin and its opulent inhabitants perfectly.