Mission Mission

Tomorrow night (12/8) at El Rio from 6:30-8pm Mike Speigler and company challenge you to drunken yourself up and try to spell a bunch of words. Why is this happening? They explain:

Have a consonant craving to avenge a childhood loss suffered during a duel with words? Do you use the English language daily, but rarely find yourself with the freedom to spell when imbibing booze?? Do you even know what a shot of Extenze male enhancement drink tastes like??? If any of these queries needs an answer then come to El Rio on Wednesday December 8th to take part in the first ever Drunken Spelling Bee!!

What is Extenze? Check out this site if you care, but a warning, while you’re trying to figure out how to click on the links, someone will come up behind you and start making a bunch of stale jokes about your supposed shortcomings. Then you’ll whip around and pretend to throw hot coffee in their face but the lid will “accidentally” come off and actually drench them. Now whose performance is in question??

The Facebook event page is here.

El Rio is at 3158 Mission near Cesar Chavez.

I get it. Sometimes it’s tough to trudge that extra couple blocks. Sometimes you just need a burrito in your face NOW.

[Cartoon by Tika Hall]

In case you missed soon-to-be Orange County punk legends Cat Party a few weeks ago at Bender’s, Andy Miller (who last brought us the supremely metaphysical “Women on the Women’s Building“) has you covered here with a quick and dirty interview interwoven with some of their best tunes.  Singer and guitarist Ryan Nichols has a lot to say about everything from San Francisco vs. Orange County to fast vs. slow songs.

If you like what you see, they’re playing again on New Year’s Eve Eve (December 30th) at the Hemlock along with the frenetic Face the Rail and (once again) my band, La Corde.  Stick that in your planner!

In case you wanted to know, Maxfield’s House of Caffeine at 17th/Dolores is now your go-to place for all “analog text message” cheesecake conventions. Commenter A should have done their homework, but we’ll forgive them because the analog message boards of yesteryear regrettably don’t come with Google built-in.

So how do you feel about digital cheesecake?

Mission Local just made its first foray into comedy. It’s a little overlong, but I give them props for trying to find humor in some pretty dark subject matter. Watch it now.

Girls and wild animals are just two facets of photographer Ryan McGinley’s many-faceted new show, on now at Ratio 3. Also addressed are boys, forests, fireworks, train tracks, domesticated animals, and other stuff too probably. The show closes this coming Saturday, so get it while you can.

SF native and hip hop artist Dregs One just started a series of videos called “The Wake Up Report“. The first subject? Mission and Fillmore gentrification. Oh boy, here we go again.

Nothing too new here: he drops the H-Bomb a couple of times, there is a cameo by the Bay Area Derailleurs, and some extremely awkward interviews with inarticulate folks in Dolores Park. He doesn’t get too nasty towards transplants, but it seems like his big beef is that the new folks don’t really make an effort to integrate into the community or learn it’s history. I assume opening your fancy restaurant on Valencia street doesn’t count as integrating and debating which Taqueria invented the Mission burrito doesn’t count as history.

He says he’s been skating the streets of the Mission every night for the last seven years, although this is the first time that I’ve ever seen him.  Nonetheless, he’s definitely on to something, just like those rollerblade soccer players that you sometimes see at Sunday Streets (or in North Beach).

He told me to go long for a hail mary, but after I had sprinted half a block in a perfect deep route, he pulled a Michael Vick and just tucked the ball for a quarterback sneak.  Hopefully he managed to avoid being sacked by the Muni bus in hot pursuit.

At Benders.

“Oh why oh why the PBR?” moans a comment on this new work by Hayley Cassatt, ”Seems a little low-brow for such a sleek & elegant animal!”

I say that comment seems a little snooty for such a punk rock blog. PABST FERRET!