philip sherburne

Freedom fries leave the sweetest grease stains

Thanks to the lovely lads at Robotspeak, I've got a new 120 gig external hard drive. What does this mean to you, dear reader? Why, it means that old photographs, consigned for so long to dubiously-labeled CD-Rs and hidden on inaccessible shelves, are finally ripe for the posting. (For a while, I thought that paying $150 for a storage device was kind of silly, when I could just keep burning and deleting, burning and deleting, in order to free up space on my internal hard drive. But when you figure that you'd spend at least that much for, say, a bookshelf from Ikea, which would quickly fill up with burned CD-Rs anyway, this virtual storage isn't such a bad deal after all.)

These photos are from a Trouble party in San Francisco last spring. Back in the halcyon days of spring, 2003, in the U.S., back when our country had backbone and before all those lib'rals started trying to rupture the sanctity of marriage and so on, fries were free and the French were persona non grata (that's French for "real, real bad," I believe). Trouble being a multicultural affair, however, we booked Parisians Ark and Sety to play a special Circus Company edition of the party, which was being held in a former art gallery down in the lower Mission District. In honor of our friends, the party was called "Fuck the French," flyers featured (alternately) puffy poodles or a big greazy box of freedom fries, and the door person wore a George Bush mask, a red-white-and-blue sash, and a sign saying “Americans: $5/ French: not allowed.” Nos amis took it all in good stride. (Not so the Mercedes driver who double parked outside while he ran into the liquor store. I think I scared him off when I approached him, wearing my Bush mask, and asked in a deep Texan drawl, “Say boy, that’s not a German car, is it?” – Germans also being persona nein grata back in those days of moral clarity.)

That’s probably the last truly off the hook party I’ve been to in San Francisco, thanks partly to Ark’s headbanging Atari set, thanks in part to the space – a long, narrow room with avant-garde Czech films projected along the wall, skewed perspective and all, and thanks in part to the inexplicably up-for-it crowd. (Check for Gumby in the photos. Yeah, beats me too.)