Born to be Wild
The Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival revealed a more complete lineup this week, one that rivals Rothbury in terms of bands I would travel to see perform. The previously announced headliners of Radiohead, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and Jack Johnson will be joined by Primus, Beck, Widespread Panic, Wilco, Manu Chao, Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, Steve Winwood, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, and dozens more artists for the August 22-24 gathering at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Three-day passes are going to run $225 before fees and shipping but the fine print says “pending availability single day tickets may be released at a later date” so I’m going to hope for that and just go for part of the weekend. Tuesday means new music in stores and Cavalera Conspiracy’s debut album Inflikted is a tiger unleashed. Brothers Max and Igor Cavalera, founding members from Brazilian metal legend Sepultura, have mended fences following over 10 years apart and recorded a relentless, pummeling, discordant, and crushingly heavy collection with Marc Rizzo of Soulfly on guitar and Joe Duplantier of Gojira on bass. Their tour starts this summer in Europe with no US dates scheduled yet, though hopefully some will be added soon. If you get a hold of the CD, hold on tight because these sonic attacks can just about take your head off at first listen.
It took until overtime in Oakland but the Los Angeles Lakers earned a split in the second game of a back-to-back against the Golden State Warriors, 123-119. The two games were a potential first-round playoff preview, as LA is this close to the #1 seed in the West while the Warriors are currently eighth. After Sunday’s rousing 26-point comeback but eventual 115-111 loss, Purple and Gold were hungry for a win heading up to the Bay Area. An 11-point halftime deficit was overcome when LA turned up the jets in the third quarter to tie the score. Kobe Bryant’s 30 points led the team, who kept pace with a speedy Golden State squad right to the end before Lamar Odom delivered the knockout blow in OT after Derek Fisher and Sasha Vujacic volleyed a barrage of three-pointers. The Lake Show now enjoys a five game homestand through April 4th starting with two lesser opponents in the Charlotte Bobcats and Memphis Grizzlies before welcoming the playoff-bound Washington Wizards this weekend. I’ll be at Sunday’s contest, my final Lakers’ regular-season home game of the year, and was hoping to see guard Gilbert Arenas face off against Kobe, but it looks unlikely he’ll be back from his knee injury for this one. Without the head-to-head match up to look forward to, I’ll be perfectly content with a good display from Wizards’ scoring leaders Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler en route to a Lakers victory.
About midway through Wild Hogs, which can be seen this month on Starz On Demand, I realized what kind of movie I was watching. It’s a moderately amusing comedy starring John Travolta, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence, and Tim Allen as four middle-aged suburban motorcycle enthusiasts whose cross-country road trip runs them afoul of a real biker gang led by Ray Liotta and the subsequent brawls and hi-jinks that ensue. The broad slapstick comedy seen here transcends generational gaps and is racially independent, the kind of film that can be enjoyed by ages 5 to 85 and subtitled with any language to be easily understood in foreign cultures. While the film has found an incredible balance in terms of its intended audience, I can say with unequivocal certainty that Wild Hogs, for all its good intentions only succeeds in living up to its name as an utter bore.
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