Dave Maass

Last summer, I presented a 5-minute lecture on my experiences riding along on the Dustball 1500 at Ignite NM. The presentation, which covers both the 1,500-mile gimmick rally and how we were able to use social media technology even in the expanse of the American Southwest, is now online:

Ignite is a like PowerPoint slam, where speakers get up and throw down 20 slides in five minutes, usually on a technological issue.

For the cover story that went along with the adventure, click here: Ride.

Tags: dustball, gimmick rally, ignite, social media.

This thrills me: In Gallup, a mayor and a local newspaperman get into a fist fight over stories that indicate the mayor was involved in a 1948 gang rape. Security cam footage, descriptive interviews, a dark back story about politics and investigative journalism. OK, this does make me miss New Mexico just a little.

I know you want to read more. Here’s the report from KRQE.

Tags: fist fights, gallup, new mexico, newspapermen, publishers

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. OK, so I napped for three hours in the afternoon, but that’s only part of the reason for my insomina. The bigger factor was my immediate, manic obsession and fury over the end of the 10th Doctor, David Tennant, and his regeneration into a 27-year-old dough-faced actor by the name of Matt Smith.

No spoilers here. This isn’t a review of Doctor Who: The End of Time, the finale marking the end of Tennant’s Doctor or writer Russell T. Davies’ reign over the franchise, nor is it a prediction for the next season, due in the spring. Instead, here’s why I’m so frackin’ bent out of shape.

OK, so I’m not really a Whovian. I’ve still only ever seen a single episode of the classic Doctor Who TV series, Douglas Adams’ Pirate Planet, so I really am a newcomer to the series. Nevertheless, at this point, I’m immersed in the Whoinverse, mostly because of the news series, but also, through Big Finish Productions’ radio dramatizations, I have become a fan of Doctors five through eight.

I came in midway through season 3, when it was running on the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) channel. I was living in San Antonio, having jumped around from the UK to Ghana to Seattle over the previous few years. I was well-traveled, but lonely. It was just me and, for lack of a better word, my adventures. I’d marched through swamps to lost refugee camps, camped out overnight with strikers at breweries, attended conferences thrown by anti-circumcision activists. In Texas, one day I’d be covering a teen beauty pageant, the next I’d be witnessing an execution. It was (in the words of Christopher Ecceleston’s 9th Doctor) fantastic, but all the moving around, all the engrossing stories, left me isolated. Then came Doctor Who–an inspired but tragic character with whom I could identify. I moved to Santa Fe, then San Diego, and I experienced cross-country road rallies and rescued prairie-dogs and witnessed historical political conventions. Meanwhile, the Doctor would be in his own amazing situations, solving murders, defeating aliens, saving planets and all the while he watched companions enter his life and leave just as abruptly. Me too, I thought, me too.

Since 2006, I’ve grown up a lot and I feel like Tennant’s Doctor helped me mature, helped me cope and understand my place in the world (or universe). I was so, so sad to see him go. All things must pass, sure, and the Doctor’s regenerations mirror how we, as humans, also change over the years, as we become students and workers and lovers and move from one city and situation to the next.

Then I watched the trailer for the next series and I became irate.

I think the reason is simple enough: I don’t know how I’m going to relate to a Doctor that is, at least outwardly, younger than me. It’s not that I doubt Smith’s potential or his acting talent (if the new writer, Steven Moffat, was impressed then that’s enough for me). Rather, I can’t imagine falling in love with a Doctor to whom the world interprets and reacts to as a child rather than a man. I can’t look up to him.

Of course, it’s silly for a grown man to look to a fictional character for guidance. Then again, I’ve always been a creature of fantasy, and I don’t care how silly that sounds. For better or worse, it’s part of who I am and I’ve come to accept that it’s OK to be a fan boy.

Through it all, the stress and the emotional weight of being a writer, Doctor Who has been something to hold on to, something always there to look forward to. I’m not excited about the new season at all and that distresses me. All I’ve got in my head is a mushy-faced kid yelling “Geronimo,” the stupidest catchphrase imaginable.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I wish I could regenerate.

Tags: doctor who, fan boy, nerd, self-centeredness

No illusions here: This top 5 list of 2009 albums is far from comprehensive and not representative of anything but my state of mind. With the exception of a few one-off reviews for the Inlander, music wasn’t really among my beats this year and, as a result, my music selections were at best a crap shoot, at worse, completely accidental. Records that came out early this year are, admittedly, over-represented in this list simply because it can take me months to fully appreciate the intricacies of an album. Furthermore, my music tends to reflect my lifestyle, and you can draw what you will about how this year treated me from what follows. It was a year of walking and scootering, of a major relocation and the breaking (and reassumption) of bad habits. These are the albums that found their way, month after month, in heavy rotation on my 2-gb mp3 player, songs that I found myself singing even without my earbuds in. Now, in no particular order:

Mos Def/The Ecstatic

Without question, this is my pick for album of the year and I say as much in the forthcoming CityBeat staff list. It’s often theorized that music improves when times are painful and I was worried that, with the election of Obama, we’d pass through another period of poor music growth as we experienced in the late 90s under Clinton. Well, I think the economic crash solved that dilemma, but I don’t think Mos Def’s latest is much of an example. Instead, The Ecstatic, to me, marks the end of the Bush, post-9/11/post-Katrina era of anger and lays the groundwork for where hip-hop will go from here: international and unconventional flavors and samples, the type of collages we haven’t seen since the record industry smacked down the Public Enemy model.

Songs I sang: “Quiet Dog Bite Hard,” “Revelations”

Franz Ferdinand/Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

When I first reviewed this album, I wrote it off as indistinguishable from the Glaswegian band’s previous two records. I said Franz Ferdinand “has naught to show for growth.” Nearly a year on, I could smack myself. Sure, it’s not the breakthrough its first album was, but I now consider it their best and most honed. I mean, how many indie bands can seamlessly integrate African rhythms and still maintain the consistency of their sound and style? The addition of the “single organ synthesizer, seemingly locked onto a single glowering Atari setting,” is actually one of the best parts. Garrr. I hate eating my words. Really, though, there was nothing better to have in m’ears as I stomped out of the house every morning.

Songs I sang: “What She Came For,” “No You Girls,” “Live Alone”

Beat Strings/Fang in the Rain

I kept confusing this band with some spin-off of The Raconteurs that I read about and, I confess, it wasn’t until I plugged them into Google for this review that I realized they weren’t. This is straight-up solid rock and roll, with a singer whose rubber lips barely squeeze the lyrics out in any comprehensible way. And it works. The eighties are back, f’sure, and they dive right in, bringing a little blues with em. Keyword dive, as in bar, as in this is an album to create hangovers without every drinking a drop.

Song I sang: “In the Night”

The Bird and the Bee/Ray Guns are not Just the Future

This was another album I reviewed for the Inlander, and at the time, I respected the endeavor, but I said the “the two-member lounge pop act blasting Blue Note Records into the digital age has produced a song for every occasion in the life of the glowing modern girl.” Yes, I wrote it off as an album for girls, with the exception of their ode to David Roth, “Diamond Dave,” which I imagine would be theme when I walked in and out of the girl-listeners’ life. I still kinda feel that way, but ultimately this was an extremely well executed record and I’d be lying if it didn’t bring out my feminine side.

Song I sang: “Police Dance Song.”

Ebony Bones/Bone of My Bones

I was genuinely surprised,that this aggressive samba-influenced British woman wedged her way into my playlist. I put her on the same spectrum as M.I.A. and Santogold, but on the far furious pole. It’s a heart-thumper, an adrenal-squeezer of dance album and I wish more DJs drew from it in their sets.

Song I sang: “Guess we’ll always have NY”

You might well wonder why I only went to five when nearly everybody goes to 10. Well, there are few possible answers. I tend to think that 2009 was a weak year for music. Really, though, the shortness of this list may indicate that I just wasn’t in tune with the rest of music scene. There were several albums that I found myself digging, presented in this list of runners up, but I just don’t think they were place-worthy. Or, I just didn’t have enough to say in a real write up.

Bye Bye Bicycle/Compass - More brilliance from the Gothenburg music scene.

The Marked Men/Ghosts - Got me back into punk rock for the first time since college.

Sparklehorse and Dangermouse/Dark Night of the Soul - No link because this is the best unreleased album of 2009.

DOOM/Born Like This - Disqualified from my top 5 list because of a single, totally inappropriate homophobic track, but otherwise a milestone in hip hop.

Kasabian/West Ryder Lunatic Asylum - Second only to Franz Ferdinand in walking/scootering music, but Kasabian isn’t the British supergroup critics suggest, certainly no second-Oasis–it’s just not original or creative enough to be anything other than an guilty pleasure.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart/ST -  A horrible name (I wish they’d call themselves The Painfully Pure instead), but they totally nail the 80s Manchester sound.

James Pants/Psychik Almanack Volume One - Just a mix, but a fantastic one of 60s and 70s psychedelic, which I find myself more and more digging each year.

Blockhead/Music Scene - I can’t remember who said that Blockhead’s album proves that hip-hop is jazz, but I agree wholeheartedly. UPDATE: Nope, they were talking about DJ Spooky, but I still think it better applies to Blockhead.

Duke Garwood/The Sand That Falls - I like to include an artist that I know and I performed with Garwood at the Spitz in London in 2006. He liked my shit, I loved his shit and his latest experimental album pushes the limits of the lone-man blues further than I thought was possible.

Tags: albums, beat strings, best albums of 2009, block head, ebony bones, franz ferdinand, kasabian, mos def, music, the bird and the bee, the pains of being pure at heart

Watch this interview. But, before you do, let me set the stage.

We all appreciate the civil rights milestone that was the election of Barack Obama. But while the O was campaign, Rachel Maddow was already making history as the first openly gay news host to score a prime-time cable news show. The man on her show tonight is Richard Cohen, a former gay man who is now the leader of the dubious “conversion therapy” movement, which purports to help gay people abandon homosexual behavior through Christian counseling.

Here’s what’s at stake in this interview: Cohen’s movement has been tied to a piece of legislation in Uganda that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, being gay and having HIV would be punishable by death and friends and family of gay people who don’t report them to the authorities could case seven years in prison. Lest you forget your history, that is, without hyperbole, Nazi-level oppression.

Tags: cable news, human rights, lgbt rights, rachel maddow, uganda

Click to enlarge.

Heart of butter lettuce salad* splashed with soy sauce and sesame oil,  shrimp baked** on the skewer in sweet chili sauce***, Thai peanut noodles****, served with a short glass of Tang*****.

* The inside, because that’s all there’s left that’s not wilted

** Read: Defrosted, then toaster-ovened.

*** Disclosure: Thai sweet chili sauce is my ketchup.

**** From a box, instant and microwaved.

***** I only used half a singe-serving packet.

Tags: food

A few years ago, I wrote a brief about the Doctor’s adventures in New Mexico, which pretty much boiled down to a short battle in 1957 with his arch-nemesis, The Master, at a fictional Air Force base. That happened in one of the spin-off books and as far as I know, he’s never had a televised adventure in the Land of Enchantment (which is strange considering NM’s interstellar ambitions and extraterrestrial mania).

Well, in Dreamtime, which ran in five parts last week, the Doctor did not visit New Mexico in the animated flesh. The adventure only starts there with a flying saucer getting shot down by other flying saucers and crashing into the desert outside of Roswell. (Here’s another recent piece I wrote about aliens in NM.)

This isn’t the first time Roswell has come up in Doctor Who and it seems at odds with what Who-nerds call the “canon.” Previously, it was described as a cosmic “fender-bender” by the Doctor and later shrugged off by his companion, Sarah Jane, as only a minor event in human-alien history.

This go around, Doctor Who gets it wrong, big time, as illustrated by the above screen capture. The Roswell crash did not occur on June 13, 1947 but on July 8 of that year. Secondly, as anyone in New Mexico knows: though I-25 bisects the state, it doesn’t come nearly that close to Roswell. And let’s not even delve into the cave-dwelling, bows-and-arrows portrayal of Native Americans.

Spoiler Alert: The “little grays,” as Roswellians call them are from species that was nearly obliterated by a race of giant cockroaches called the Viperox; they had developed a genetic poison capable of exterminating the entire Viperox race from the universe. Obviously, the anti-genocidalist Doctor won’t let that happen, but he does help rescue the shot-down Grays from Area 51–with the help of a diner waitress and a Native American rockabilly–and uses their technology to chase the Viperox out of the solar system before they can savage the Earth.

Dreamland (which you can watch at Life, Universe and Combom), is one of the last adventures of the 10th Doctor, played by David Tennant, who will meet his doom in the two-parter scheduled for Christmas and New Years. It’s a much lighter, kid-oriented serial, compared to the November special, the Waters of Mars (airing in the US on BBC America on Dec 1q), which saw the Doctor pull an Anakin Skywalker and that’s all I’m gonna say.

Cross-posted at SFReeper.com

Tags: doctor who, roswell

Well, it was one of those days where the monk me decided it was time for some penance. I’m buzz-cut, but more importantly, clean-shaven for the first time in years.

Wotcha reckon?

And as a bonus, gratuitous puppy porn: Marlowe in the tub.

Tags: hygiene, Marlowe, shave

So, the idea is to get newsrooms to send books from their review piles to us so we can ship ‘em to Liberia. There, the books will be distributed for free to reporters, probably as prizes for journalistic achievement or as compensation for attending training seminars. Here’s the press release I wrote up:

Inline version of the text also after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Tags: book drive, donations, holidays, journalism, Liberia, newliberian.com, niapele project

Count me among the unimaginative, the uninspired, the unenthused, the Halloween-hating.

This year, as most previous, I’d left my costume (or at least the conceptualization of it) until the day before. For a moment, I thought I could get away with wearing my threadbare hoodie under my stained, fraying, armpit-ripped trench coat and fingerless knitted gloves. I’d go as homeless. Then I realized that, in the age of Twitter—and I would no-doubt post a self-portrait—my colleagues back in Santa Fe would be quick to point out that this was how I dressed every day when I covered the legislature.  Facing my first house party, my social debut, in San Diego, where I’d moved only two weeks ago to take a job as San Diego CityBeat’s staff writer, I realized that I had to, had to, come up with something a little less slapdash, something with a bit of wit and a respectable amount of effort.

In lazy Halloweens past,  I disguised myself as a Republican, using the “Proud of Texas” ball cap from Rick Perry’s 2006 gubernatorial reelection bid I had leftover from a piece in which I reviewed campaign shwag in Texas. Last week, the “Tea Party Express” kicked off  its second national tour in San Diego and, light bulb, I had it.

Tea bagger.

Using as my starting pont William Kostric, the protester who made national headlines when he turned up strapped and carrying a “IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY” sign to an anti-Obama rally, I clodhopped over to the army surplus store behind the office to assemble the other elements. The shop declared itself in handwritten letters “Halloween Headquarters,” which really is only accurate for those planning on dressing up as a Swiss military…or as right-wing extremists.

The T-shirt was easy; the clearance rack overflowed with far-right propaganda and I decided that “Peace through Superior Firepower” was too cliche, whereas “The Strong Survive” was pitch perfect for my satirization. Right-wingers were surely oblivious to the downright Darwinistic implications of the slogan.

I needed a gun, something hand held and automatic that I could strap to my calf as Kostric did. For some reason, wearing the gun down there feels so much more militia than a belt holster. I dropped $16 on an “UZI Rescue Force” kit—body armor, handcuffs, gas mask, whistle and “light and sound” Uzi,

Frightening thing #1: The whole kit was sized to fit a five year old.

Now, what’s a tea bagger with an outrageous sign? After great thought and Googling, I combined some of the most ridiculous (and common) tea-bagger catchphrases into this single sentence: “THE LIBERTREE IS THIRSTY FOR THE BLOOD OF ISLAMO-SOCIALISTS.” I picked out the Castellar font because, to me, it looked most like the one used on American currency, the great symbol of capitalism.  Next to the words, taped together like a kidnapper’s note, I mounted the ubiquitous Obama-as-Heath Ledger’s Joke image: yet another intentional jab at tea-bagger gullibility. As the LA Times reported, The image was created by a Dennis Kucinich supporter screwing around with automatic image-transformation software.

On the reverse side, I taped the full Obama’s Kenyan certificate of live birth, itself a hoax design to punk the birthers.  Above it, I affixed  a Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck 2012 bumper sticker I found through Google images. I attached it all to the short side of plank stolen from canvas frame, pointed on both ends.

I needed a visual cue, something that would spell out the costume for the confused. So, using tape and the strap from my dog’s airplane carrier, I manufactured a tea-bag bullet sash.

Frightening thing #2: My roommate had no idea what a tea-bagger was.

A coworker and her husband picked me up and brought me to the party. The two-story house was fantastic, each room decorated in its own theme: heads on stakes in a blood-filled tub in the bathroom; a Big Bad Wolf munching on a decapitated Red Riding Hood in the guest room; a full homemade haunted house ride in the yard powered by a double-wide motorized wheelchair. The costumes were also incredible: a young woman in curlers and a grill, lugging a blue baby on an umbilical cord, represented one of the reenactors from Discovery Channel’s “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant,” a man who claimed to operate an oil platform for Chevron off the coast of Alaska wore a museum-replica of Henry VIII’s robes.

Early on, an African-American guest—wearing a horse codpiece attached to his neck by a noose (figure it out yourself)—told me he was offended. He later said he was joking, but it made me realize that even though there wasn’t anything to indicate racism, no swastika, no ape-in-a-turban stuffed animal, the elements were all there: Obama in white face, the Kenyan birth certificate, the secessionist implications of the hat, the selective survival shirt.

I slowly realized that I was dressed a white supremacist.  I felt like Prince Harry learning too late that a Nazi uniform wasn’t appropriate for any circumstance, not even a costume ball. What was worse: the whole costume wasn’t as obviously satirical as I had intended. I looked like the real deal. Guests eyed me uncomfortably, read my sign and smiled nervously. Fact is, I should’ve known better. I’d written about white nationalists infiltrating tea parties only a couple of months ago.

I lost the get-up gradually over the night; I set aside the sign, then put the Uzi in my pocket, stashed away the tea bag sash (potent Yogi tea was all I had at home and it was making me sneeze).

Frightening Thing #3: I zipped up my black jacket…and that made it even worse. I caught myself in the mirror; between the cargo pants, the short hair and the steel-toed boots, I’d transformed into a skinhead.

I put the tea-bag sash back on.

They say that a Halloween costume speaks loads about one’s true self. The girl who dresses as a nun, with a habit that hangs to her toes, is self-conscious. A man who rolls in drag is comfortable with his sexuality. The skeleton t-shirt exposes the slacker.

I guess mine revealed how much I HATE Halloween.

Tags: costume, halloween, san diego, tea bagger, tea partier