Drive By Truckers

I saw the DBT's at the Filmore on Saturday night. They are a band that sounds better live than on their records, and they came out smoking. I guess they had hired a management company from the Bay area three years ago and set as one of their goals a gig at the Filmore. Saturday night was a celebration of their achievment, and the band christened the event by swilling Jack Daniels out of a bottle. I'm not sure if this is typical of any DBT show, but all three guitar players turned up their marshall and fender amps until the fuzz was so thick you could cut it with a trenching tool. The entire Pacific Heights neighborhood experienced a brown out, as the band sucked up two thirds of all available power from the grid. It was messy, but noone dared to complain. Trapped between an increasingly beligerant band and large, inebriated swaying goliaths in the crowd, those of us who were reasonably sober backed toward the door like George Clooney in "From Dusk til Dawn." The blood suckers remained to feast on one another's flesh and pass out in their own excrement.

As I was passing through the shake down that accompanies air travel these days, I was horrified to see three wheelchair-bound elderly women being manhandled in public by drooling male goons from the Transportation Safety Administration. Since wheelchairs are made of metal, they push old people through the sensors, then subject them to the most humiliating invasion of privacy I have witnessed since an ex let herself into my house and screened my answering machine messages. Risking arrest and being labled a terrorist, I yelled "that's enough for Christsake, she's 80 years old," as a TSA employee with a striking resemblence to a young hispanic Willem Dafoe ran his hands up and down one of the horrified ladies support-hosed thighs looking for a thermonuclear device. I know we all have to make sacrafices in this age of increased global tension, but let's put our heads together and figure out a way to get people in wheelchairs through the security screen short of a fricking strip-search. That is all.