Snap Judgments

Dan Strachota, Jaimal Yogis, Chris Smith, Sheerly Avni

CD The Coup: Pick A Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)	BOOK Chester Aaron: Symptoms of Terminal Passion (El León Literary Arts)	BLOG Readymade Magazine (www.readymade mag.com/blog)	BOOK Cindy Sheehan: Dear President Bush (City Light Publishers)	TV *Texas Ranch House* (PBS, May 1-4)
Writing good political music is as difficult as getting Paris Hilton to stay in for the night. But ever since the Coup’s 1993 debut, Kill My Landlord, leader Boots Riley has proven adept at it, mainly because he’s both fearless and witty. (Those characteristics have gotten him into trouble: the original cover for the Coup’s last LP, Party Music—scheduled for release just after 9/11—depicted him and DJ Pam the Funkstress blowing up the World Trade Center with a guitar tuner and drumsticks.) On the Oakland hip-hop duo’s fifth LP, Riley is at the top of his game, detailing the complex problems of ghetto fabulousness with misery and mirth. “We like free speech / But we love free cable,” he observes on “We Are the Ones,” while on “The Stand” he notes that “Ecstasy pills don’t stop SBC bills.” Elsewhere he sings the praises of women who resell shoplifted clothing in the hood and soldiers who join the army just to get out of trouble. The Coup’s morality tales wouldn’t be nearly so inviting if it weren’t for the funky, good-time backing tracks, reminiscent of the ’70s work of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Stevie Wonder. As Riley sings, “I’m here to laugh, love, fuck, and drink liquor / And help the damn revolution come quicker.” Everyone should have such lofty goals. A DAN STRACHOTA	Chester Aaron was in a WWII heavy-machine-gun platoon and helped liberate the concentration camp at Dachau. After the war, he worked as an X-ray technician and later as a lit and writing professor at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. Along the way he became an expert on garlic (he raises 92 varieties from 30 countries on his Occidental ranch). He’s also published 20 books. The themes of the seven stories in his latest are familiar: love and loss, old world versus new, war, death, Italian food. But the tales combine aspects of his interesting life in surprising ways. In “Winterswijk,” the sweet awkwardness of reuniting with an old flame in Holland merges with dreamlike memories of the Holocaust. In “The Female of the Species,” tragedy affects the arts of love, bird watching, and bruschetta making. For each passionate tale, Aaron carefully blends complex, seemingly contradictory emotions as if matching a pungent Italian garlic with the perfect Napa Valley varietal. A JAIMAL YOGIS	Blogs are famously DIY affairs, so it’s only natural that ReadyMade, the Berkeley do-it-yourself design magazine, would finally get one of its own. As befits such an outfit, members of the magazine’s popular online forums have been deputized to do most of the writing. Happily, the blog is as likable as the magazine itself, with posts full of offbeat information both useful (“I should make that”) and merely enticing (“I could never make that, but it sure is cool”), written in a breezy tone that blends earnest utopianism and hipster snark in equal measure. You’ll find things to make, like film developer from everyday kitchen ingredients; things to buy, like museum-worthy carafes and vases made from recycled glass bottles; and things to ponder, like the latest trends in biofuels. The amateurism occasionally shows, but the best entries make you want to go out and build that funky shopping-cart chair yourself. A- CHRIS SMITH	Polemics don’t often make for great prose: neither Bill O’Reilly nor Al Franken, their unique virtues notwithstanding, are likely to win any literary awards. Neither will Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville mother who lost one of her sons to the Iraq war and then made headlines with her vigil outside George W. Bush’s ranch last summer. But that’s hardly the point. Rather, Sheehan’s book—a collection of essays, speeches, and interviews on activism, nonviolence, and American politics—is a call to the faithful. Subtle it’s not; the book seethes with rage (she even calls Bush a “motherfucker”), and her geopolitical analysis rarely rises above protesters’ boilerplate. When Sheehan opts for the personal over the global, however, her book is deeply affecting. Remembrances of her son Casey and reflections on her journey from suburban everymom to antiwar icon offer a glimpse of the woman behind the media figure and of the sense of purpose she feels, one born of inconsolable grief. At one point, she says, “When my son was killed, I became something fierce,” and that sums it up. B- CHRIS SMITH	Those of you who loved PBS’s Frontier House, which sent modern-day Americans to live life as 1883 Montana pioneers did, will want to clear your calendars. The new exercise in virtual time travel takes us back to a Texas ranch in 1867. The cast includes the members of San Ramon’s Cooke family (mom, dad, and three teenage daughters), plus an opinionated Stanford student named Maura in the particularly thankless role of servant. Watching them shed their modern comforts and struggle to rope steer, build corrals, milk goats, and fend off flies is part enlightenment, part schadenfreude—not just for the grueling physical challenges but also for the social dynamics, as men and women, boss and servants try to settle into their historical power positions. Seeing Maura fight for her right to wrangle cattle is reason enough to watch the eight-part series. Absorbing and chilling, it should cure you of your romantic cowboy fantasies forever. B+ SHEERLY AVNI