by Mat Honan

It’s a glorious goddamned day in San Francisco right now. The temperature is mild, just warm enough to be comforting; just cool enough to keep you from sweating. The sky so blue it almost looks to have been choked to death. And from where I’m sitting, I can look out my window across the Bay, over to Oakland and Berkeley and the rolling hills of the East Bay. It’s not a bad view.

It’s the kind of day that makes me realize why I’m still here, and why I’ll likely never leave. I arrived a dozen years ago, intending for San Francisco to be but a brief stop on my route to a powerful media career in Manhattan. And yet here I am. Content and happy and looking forward to running through Golden Gate Park this afternoon (which I can see out my other window, when I look to my left).

I’ll run to the ocean and back again, stopping to pause and stare out across the Pacific. Outside my open window, I can hear the ca-clack ca-clak ca-clack of a skateboard passing by, and the requisite drunken hoarse-throated hollering of a fulltime outdoorsman who lives in the park, one block below. On the table before me sits a locally-grown tomato, so round and juicy and perfect that to compare it to a sexual organ would only denigrate its form. It’s fucking beautiful.

And yet. Across that same Bay, in those same hills, lurks a menace. Not just to California, but all of America. Yes, I’m talking about Jerry Brown. Governor Moonbeam. Mr. Call-My-800-Number.¹ Mr. “My $1.8 million house is a sign of my thriftiness.” The never-frowning former governor the Dead Kennedys wrote their only good song about. He’s back.

See, here is the thing about Jerry Brown: He is a dangerous madman bent on destruction. By which I mean, he’s essentially ineffectual.

I have no idea what he accomplished during his tenure as the state’s Attorney General. (Well, okay, he did fight Prop 8. Sort of.) Nor could I tell you what he did for Oakland when he was that city’s mayor from 1999–2007. Oakland is a fucking disaster — from its Brown-run gentrification program, to its shoot-first police force, to its entrenched crime problem to its utterly corrupt city hall — and that it did not burn to the ground or slide into the Bay during his reign is, I suppose, a credit to the man.

What I do know is that if Brown is removed from political office, he loses his physical form, and returns to his natural state: swamp gas. You’ll note that Brown’s last private sector job was hosting a radio show. That was because it was one of the few jobs Brown could find that required no corporeal presence. Brown is a purely political creature so embedded in the status quo of California governance that his election would guarantee that nothing will change in the nation’s most populous state. We need a leader who can unite the splintered partisans who have ground governance to a halt in Sacramento. We need someone who will speak forthrightly about the need to eliminate the property tax-capping Prop 13, and who can call for an entirely new constitution with authority. Someone who will lead the people of not only San Francisco and Los Angeles, but also Yuba City (prune capital of the world!) and Visalia and Susanville and a hundred and one other small towns you have never heard of, but in which millions live.

Jerry Brown is not that governor.

And then there’s Meg Whitman, a power-mad, bullying, shoving, former CEO who, after purchasing the Republican primary, seems poised to buy the general election. Perhaps this is appropriate. After all, she is essentially running on the platform that she is a billionaire, and you are not. But as our nation’s first CEO president proved, experience running a business that runs itself doesn’t translate into effective executive governance. (Although, to be fair, I’m sure she will be just as competent a governor as W. was a president.)

I can’t get sense of Whitman. I don’t know what she wants. She has rarely bothered to vote, which I suppose should only be troubling if you believe that voting is a civic duty. Or that democracy works. Or if you are aware that California is a direct democracy state. Or if you think that a person who wants to manage something should be familiar with how it works, or what it is.

Whitman understands none of this. She has no experience in either government, or politics. And thus she will almost certainly accomplish nothing in Sacramento, at a time California desperately needs action. And so our state government will descend further into chaos.

Yes, California. No matter who wins, our next governor will be a horsefuck of a disaster. But you do not care! You do not live in California, so you do not care! And why should you? Â²

I find it hard to care myself, especially on a day like this. Look! There is the Transamerica Pyramid, and before it Alamo Square Park. I can see a dog running across the grass. From downstairs, I can smell my neighbor’s high-grade, legally-obtained marijuana. I’m ready to cut open this tomato, devour it slice by slice. And I’m pretty sure it’s going to be okay, even if it is not.

¹ Dear Youth of America. This is a reference to Jerry Brown’s failed 1992 presidential bid, during which he used much of his debate time to urge voters to call his 800 number. 800 numbers were the websites of a bygone era, that existed because it once cost extra money to call a phone number located in a different geographical area. People made these calls using phones that were tethered to one location by means of a cable, and could not move them about. I know, it was totally insane! That’s how old this fucking guy who wants to run our state is.

² At $1.85 trillion, California has the largest economy of any state, and the eighth largest economy in the world. One out of every nine people in the United States lives in California. We make your movies, and wine, and search engines and avocados. Oh, God, no! Not the avocados!

Mat Honan is a Wired magazine contributing editor. He lives in California.

Photo by The Nickster, from Flickr.

Happy July 1! It’s now only 365 days until the Mets start paying Bobby Bonilla his deferred compensation package, which consists of him being paid $1.2 million every July 1 from 2011 through 2035 because the Mets didn’t want to give him the $5.9 million they owed him in 2000! I have cut and pasted five or six different bits of this Wall Street Journal piece on exactly why and how this fiasco happened for inclusion here, because they’re all just so cringe/facepalm-worthy. But you should go read the whole thing, because at the very least, it’s a nice primer for any future labor negotiations you might have! [Image via]

“Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.”
— Steve Jobs (or someone claiming to be him?) tries to soothe an iPhone 4 user who is, shall we say, agitated about the device’s issue with dropping calls when it isn’t held in the proper way. Is Jobs’ response indicative of a new “be chill, bro” marketing technique coming from Apple, or is this simply the response of someone who doesn’t have to pay AT&T; for lousy service and is thus more Zen about the whole idea of a somewhat expensive device actually working? Either way, it’s kind of amazing how low our expectations are for the reliability of phone service these days, isn’t it?

Here’s a video for a new remix of Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope.” In it, we don’t get to watch her dance quite as wonderfully as she did in the original, but even when we can’t see her feet, she moves like they’re gliding on vaseline. And whether she’s singing or rhyming or just looking at the camera, she absolutely erases anyone else on screen. That’s bad news, in this case, for rappers B.o.B. and Lupe Fiasco, who pale in her presence. Meanwhile, Monae’s mentor Big Boi has released another video for a song from his upcoming, so-far-so-totally-great solo album Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Return of Chico Dusty.

(I try not to dwell on the heartbreaking omission of the tracks with his OutKast partner, Dre, which is not his fault.) For a moment, though, it seems like maybe “Follow Us” is Leftfoot’s first misstep-in that Georgia rock band Vonnegutt look sort of like Sugar-Ray-style doofuses, and emote a bit muchly on the chorus. (And their other music is awful.) On repeat listenings, though, it sounds less bad and more good and starts to win me over. (But then, I ended up actually kind of liking Sugar Ray’s latter-career hit “Every Morning.” So I maybe not be entirely reliable in this area.)

“S.E.O. is a way for your website to manipulate and seduce search engines into wanting them, kind of like the tricks in Neil Strauss’ The Game, but with Google replacing party girls.”
–Understanding the Internet.

Will Leitch, author of Are We Winning? and editor emeritus of the glorious Deadspin, enters the dangerous studio of Cooking the Books, where he finds Emily Gould wearing some sort of sports outfit? Sexiness ensues. Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier.

A local importer of high-end, hand-made axes from Maine, who then paints them and sells them for $180, is concerned about being perceived as, he said, “just some design hipster kicking it old-school selling some chic tools to a handful of other hipsters.” How so? Whatever do you mean? Tom Scocca notes that “his website also sells a $165 leather sling for wearing an ax on one’s back and a $35 metal whistle.”

This news story about a kitten who got hit by a car, then trapped itself in its rescuee’s car’s dashboard pretty much ensures that the Dayton Daily News’ site is en route to having one of its most highly trafficked days ever. Is anyone working on a movie treatment for this story yet?

On March 1, 1994, Beck’s major-label debut Mellow Gold — you know, the one with “Loser” — was released. Another album that came out that day? The Greek multi-instrumentalist Yanni’s Live At The Acropolis, which sold more than four million copies and brought the genre “New Age” to many a suburban living room. The alt-rock icon celebrated this coincidence by covering the album in its entirety as part of his Record Club, during which he and a bunch of his pals recreate old albums over the course of a day. The first track on Acropolis, “Santorini,” is recreated in the above clip; Beck drafted Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to provide semi-babbley lyrics for the track, since in its original form it was an instrumental. The kind of amazing thing about this cover? It’s not as baffling as it seems like it might be on paper! Especially in the context of that Dirty Projectors/Björk collaboration about whales that conjured up the word “Enya” when I first heard it yesterday. [Via

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Because I am old and look back fondly on my days of harder rocking, I have spent the last two days looking for the YouTube video that best displays just how glorious Guided by Voices concerts were in between 1993 and 1996-the era of the classic line-up that is reuniting for the first time since then to play Matador Records 21st anniversary party in Las Vegas this October. (Excuse me, Rocktober.) People are excited about this show for lots of reasons but this should be everyone’s main one. Watch this bit of a 1994 concert in the band’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Look at Robert Pollard’s sweater!