Maybe you're assuming that our Beach N Beer Guide will provide you with tips for sneaking a few brews onto the seashore. Maybe you're hoping that our Beach N Beer Guide will regale you with funny stories of inebriation that all end up with somebody face-down in the sand or scuba diving for Davey Jones' liquor locker. Maybe you're counting on our Beach N Beer Guide for a compendium of things to do on the beach while you're stinkin' drunk. Maybe you're already sitting on the strand, with theWeekly in one hand and a brewski in the other, just waitin' for the high tides and high times to begin.
Well, that would be just great, probably real surreptitious and obnoxious and bust-a-gut outrageous, except maybe you've forgotten the overriding fact of every Beach N Beer Guide, which is that consuming beer or any other alcoholic beverage at the beach is illegal. And we don't do jail real well.
We were reminded of this a couple of weeks ago during a phone call from a Huntington Beach lifeguard who got his trunks in a bunch when he saw an advertising-solicitation post card for the Beach N Beer Guide. We reassured the overwrought Hasselhoff that this issue would be devoted solely to beach stories—with a separate, clearly marked non-beach, beer-story component. He ended our chat with a friendly little, “Okay, but I'm still calling the police department, so you might get another call.”
We haven't yet, but the lifeguard did get us to realize something was sorely missing from our Beach N Beer Guide: evidence of the stupidity of drinking on the beach. “It's not an uncommon thing, unfortunately,” Lieutenant Steve Davidson, a Huntington Beach lifeguard who was not the lifeguard who called before, said of drinking on the beach (or perhaps he was talking about stupidity). “There are times every summer where we have someone out here who is obviously under the influence and tries to go in the water. We have to physically restrain them—sometimes even arrest them—for their own safety.”
You see, alcohol impairs your judgment—causes drunks to stumble and fall, talk loudly, and insist that they are FRIENDS WITH THE FISHES. “It just causes people to get in over their heads out there,” Davidson said, and we like those kinds of puns. “People who don't use normal caution in the ocean can be making a very serious mistake. Alcohol and swimming in the ocean are not a good combination.”
We're with you there, lieutenant. That's why there is not one mention in our Beach N Beer Guide of mixing alcohol and water. No, siree, not a one. (Except for Buddy Seigal's story, which recommends consuming beer and Kentucky sour-mash bourbon in a kiddie pool.)
WALKS ON THE BEACH
I'm as romantic as the next guy trying to get laid, so somebody please, please, please tell me: How do you take a romantic walk on the beach? How is this accomplished? The TV and the movies and the magazines and the greeting cards all tell me this is what it is to be in love in the summer: walking hand in hand with the one you love along the shore, with your shoes off and your pants rolled up above your ankles. Your woman is next to you, carrying her shoes over her shoulder, each of you lost in the other, in the moment, in the beauty of walking in your own little world, so natural.
It's all a crock, of course. It's impossible to take a romantic walk on the beach. For the whole thing to work, for the moment to seem real, it must all seem spontaneous. No one spontaneously appears at a beach. You have to go there. And before you get there, you have to find parking. Parking lots all full? Maybe a meter. No meters? Maybe we can find a spot in the neighborhood. Oh look, there's one; no, it's not too small. IT'S NOT TOO SMALL; I can do this. I can—shit—did I leave a mark? No, don't get out! They'll see you. What? Of course I'm leaving. Hit and run? That's only if you hit a kid. Or a nun.
So forget spontaneity. But let's say you do get there. You're at the beach but not on the shore. Do you walk down to the shore in your shoes and look like a complete idiot, or do you take them off on the boardwalk and look like a complete idiot while announcing to everyone who can see that you depend on Aaron Spelling and Hallmark for all your big romantic moves? Pathetic.
Let's say you've gotten down to the shore, and you've gotten your shoes off, and you've cuffed your pants, and now you're walking. This is supposed to be the time when you walk, lost in reverie, lost in thought, when you discuss everything and nothing. But how do you do this with the Europeans prancing about in their Speedos, playing Frisbee as the sheen of their unbathed back hair catches the sunlight? That'll put you off sex right there. And how are you going to convince your honey to climb into bed when she sees the frazzled mom changing her baby's dirty diapers in the sand? And what about the medical waste? And crabs? And seaweed? And those sharks that can come right up to the shoreline and get a person by the ankle with their teeth and drag them out to the ocean and eat them. No, really, it happens. I know this guy—well, actually, my cousin does—and he says it happens because he knew a guy that it happened to. Really.
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But, you say, couldn't most of this be avoided by taking the romantic walk at night? Walk at night? At the beach? Why not just stick a spotlight on yourself with a bull's eye on your back right above the map highlighting the locations of all your orifices? Do you know who is at the beach at night? Angry loners and fringe religious groups, both of them looking to make acquaintances. You go for a romantic walk, and you come back telling everyone Jesus has returned and his name is Dave and he used to work construction. And whether you take this walk during the day or night, when you walk back to your car, your feet are going to look like you've been working a rice paddy. Filth is crammed between your toes and stuffed under your toenails. Disgusting. And you'll never get rid of it. Not until you go home and scrub and scrub, and even then it will take weeks to get out all the grit. That putting you in the mood, Sparky?
No, young lovers, avoid walks at the beach. They are fraught with disappointment at best and dismemberment and death at the hands of sharks or the ATF at worst. No, a walk on the beach is no walk in the park. Of course, a walk in the park is pretty much a death wish. (Steve Lowery)
SURF MUSIC
It's well-known that while the British Invasion killed OC surf music, it was Jimi Hendrix—with his famous prophecy “You'll never hear surf music again”—who kicked everybody out of the water. Regrettably, there has never been a clear explanation for Hendrix's disdain for the surf sound, but several theories abound. The most interesting of those suggests that Hendrix had a powerful sense of his own mortality; knowing he would die young, he figured that the hegemonic surf sound stood in the way of his completing his electric-guitar mission on planet Earth. My own theory is more elementary: Hendrix couldn't surf. Sure, he could shred on the national anthem—with his teeth!—but I would be willing to bet a brand-new lefty Strat that even on a longboard, Hendrix was a kook. He grew up in Seattle, where walking in the rain constitutes its own kind of daily water sport; more time in the tubes, and Hendrix might literally have changed his tune. To be sure, Hendrix's vexation was not without musicological grounding. Much of the music recorded during the first wave of the OC surf sound is forgettable. Endure a compilation of surf tunes such as Rhino's History of Surf Music, Volume One, or MCA's Revenge of the Surf Instrumentals, and you are bound to wind up hearing more 16-year-old white kid riffing over 12-bar blues than anyone ought to endure. But swim past the inane guitar and sax stomping of ancient local garage bands (consider the Blazers, the Pyramids, or the Lively Ones), and you discover the really deep water, the real legacy of the OC surf sound, music that not only cascades and shimmers but is also brooding, haunting, and surprisingly understated. In these tunes, summer reveals itself one element at a time: Dick Dale's raging “Let's Go Trippin'” invokes the Wedge during a storm, the Ventures' moody “Windy and Warm” conjures up Big Corona in the late afternoon, and the Rumblers' crafty “Boss” brings to mind a night in HB spent pouring contraband alcohol into Coke cans (ah, summer). So here's a theory: rain yields heroin addiction produces violent reaction to instrumental sunlight. If Hendrix had stuck around, he also might have come to appreciate OC's surf music, a tradition that lives in local bands like the Tiki Tones and the Ghastly Ones, music that has come to underpin the mechanics of the Orange County punk sound. Then again, maybe he wouldn't. When one considers that surf reached its nadir in the Beach Boys and that the Beach Boys have been linked to Republican campaigns, it's tempting to think Hendrix was prescient in matters more political than merely personal, predicting not just his own death, but also the death of public life in America. (Tim Meltreger)
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HEROES
Nine years ago, when this bar/restaurant opened, it had seven beers on tap, sawdust on the floor and a crazy array of kitschy artifacts—old bicycles to moose heads—hanging on the wall. The sawdust is gone, but the artifacts still hang about the wall. What's most different about Heroes is the beer: 102 of the sudsy, fermented wonders on tap. Needless to say, this bar has the beer selection in north Orange County, just about anything you want, from the generic domestics to microbrews from across the country and import after import after import. One of our personal favorites is the Belgian Framboise Lambic, a sweetly tinged brew with a serious kick (it's also one of the handful of beers that costs $5 per pint; the rest are in the $3.75 neighborhood). Because it doubles as a restaurant, the place is generally packed to the rafters. So don't waste your time trying to strike up a conversation with a server about which brew is most suited to your uncultivated palate. You're on your own, but with 102 beers to choose from, who's complaining? (As much as we like the fantabulous selection at Heroes, we must report that this is still Fullerton: the most sold beer? Coors Light.) 305 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton, (714) 738-4356. (E. Jacque Mugwamp)
SEX ON THE BEACH
(seks-on-the-beech) Not the drink, but the act itself, perhaps first suggested in Western art in Botticelli's Birth of Venus (wherein the goddess appears naked in a clam shell, her hair swirling about her like a current) but reaching its pop-culture zenith in From Here to Eternity (1953), in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr make mad love on the shores of Oahu. Right-wing conservatives suborned by the film's use of actual combat footage have concluded the film is a documentary; eager for a rematch with Japan, they assert that the attack on Pearl Harbor depicted in the film made it impossible for Kerr to climax. But in recent experiments conducted by the OC Weekly DataLab, evidence emerged that Kerr would have had difficulty finishing even without coitus interruptus japonesis. “We paired off eight Weekly staffers and had them drink heavily, strip and make love on the beach at Little Corona,” says DataLab research chief Zven Golly. The results: “Not one of them even achieved a pleasant pre-coital state,” Golly says. According to Golly, subsequent exams indicated that salt, sand and water combined to act as a cleanser, turning free-flowing bodily fluids into friction agents, decreasing lubricity and increasing drag and viscosity. Golly compared the resulting feeling to “rubbing sandpaper on your privates—a moment of extreme, even wondrous pleasure followed by excruciating pain.” Powerful waves generated by a storm off the coast of Quatras Casas in central Baja didn't help. “We lost an editor to the rip tide,” Golly admitted; another subject found that a painful “venereal” condition that erupted shortly after the experiment cleared up when doctors removed a particle of sand lodged in his urethra—apparently during testing. Golly's conclusion: sex on the beach is dangerous, and “Japanese pilots did not—repeat, did not—impede Deborah Kerr from finishing.” (Todd Mathews)
VOICES AT THE BEACH
“Don't even say anything about this fuckin' faggot shirt—I was cold.”
—Unknown man speaking to another unknown man outside my apartment, summer 1998
Sometimes when I'm alone in my apartment, I hear voices. They're always fragmentary—disjointed pieces of conversations that when heard in isolation, make almost no sense. They're clearest and greatest in number during June, July and August. And there's nothing I can do about them.
It would be easy if they were just schizophrenic hallucinations or restless ghosts—I could get help for those. But these voices come from something far more plentiful and far, far more insidious.
Tourists.
It's all because I live in an apartment. All people who live in apartments hear their neighbors showering and talking on the phone and doing all those dreary things we spend most of our lives doing. It's something people who live in apartments accept. And get used to.
But I live at the beach—Balboa Beach. And not in one of those big gated complexes either, where grass lawns and trees separate the apartment rows from the world. I live in one of the quaint bungalows on Balboa Boulevard—a big, four-lane road that's heavily traveled by cars and pedestrians. All that separates my bedroom from the endless rows of tourists, bikes, skateboards, Miatas and SUVs that line Balboa Boulevard are three inches of plaster, stucco and fiberglass insulation.
So I hear stuff. Like that midnight last July when I couldn't sleep. My neighbor (who has since moved) apparently couldn't sleep either, so he and his buddy were yakking up a storm outside my window. That is, until some girl and her dog walked by. That's when I realized my neighbor was an idiot:
Him:That's a nice-looking dog. Her:Thanks. Him:You're not so bad yourself. Her:[ . . .] After a while, it all becomes background clutter. You hear it, but you're not listening. For most of the year, this isn't a problem. The days are cool, so the sidewalks are barren. But then the heat turns up in June. Then the bikes start racing by day and night. Imagine a quiet moment concentrating on a Dodgers game momentarily interrupted by a couple of middle-aged men on bikes, one breathlessly informing the other that “it felt worse than what happened when it was paralyzed.” Or the last moments of consciousness after a long day's work broken by a teen yelling to his friend as they jump the curb by my front door, “When I turned around, she grabbed my ankle!” Many of the conversations, or snatches of conversations, or whatever is smaller than a snatch, rise to me Dopplered into meaninglessness. The conversations of the thousands of meandering pedestrians who swarm down Balboa Boulevard in the summer arrive like a passing train. First, there's the incoherent but unmistakable rumbling of conversation. Then a word or two—”mom,” “Drano,” “colon,” “tomato.” Then an entire sentence to consider: “I'm 33 years old, and it's time to start making some money.” “Sunday morning, I was in Arizona, and I got supersick this morning.” “Well, guess what, Liz? You have to ride with me in the trunk!” And then the words turn to aural mush, and I'm left wondering what the hell they were talking about. And I'll never know because they weren't talking about anything I could possibly know. People talk about intimate personal stuff while walking down the street. I guess they figure no one's listening. Well, I'm not listening. Why would I want to listen to two women standing outside my window as one asks the other, “Is that my car?” What could I gain from hearing a little boy ask his father, “Is Mom going to get another tattoo?” Should I lie awake at night speculating on the old man's answer, since he uttered it out of my earshot? People, I don't want to hear about it! I don't care! So why do I put up with living so close to a major street at the beach during the summer? Lots of reasons, really, like the fact that many of the voices belong to beautiful women in string bikinis. And their dogs aren't bad, either. I love living at the beach. (Anthony Pignataro) NO HOLIDAY FROM HOLIDAYSBetween May 31 (the forgettable Memorial Day) and Sept. 6 (the always meaningless Labor Day), summer is a time of holiday tedium. Memorial Day is remarkable today only because it drops the flag on summer in many places—or “Opening Day,” as it is called in the county's wealthy communities, which mark the day with well-policed carnivals, food frenzies and yachting—and because of the tedious Indy 500. Its origins and trajectory are captured perfectly in Irvine Park (which is not in Irvine), where county officials long ago set up a broken-down Civil War-era cannon (its barrel stuffed with plastic cups, earth and a Surge can) and an obelisk to Orange Countians who gave their lives in the Spanish-American War. Memorial Day is a day on which few Americans remember much, except that summer is upon us. Labor Day is more bizarre still: in most countries, it takes place on May 1, a holiday established by the lefty Second International (Paris, 1889) to mark the bloodshed leading up to Chicago's Haymarket Massacre of 1886. Such a holiday was too radical for the U.S.; eight years after the event, Congress set aside the first Monday in September—a safe distance from May—to honor American workers. Congress would not even approve an eight-hour day for the workers it so honored until 1917, when the possibility of a national railroad strike threatened to hamstring the nation's participation in World War I. In Orange County's wealthy communities, Labor Day is sometimes called Closing Day, and it is marked with well-policed carnivals, food frenzies and yachting. Bookended by these holidays are days to honor military achievement (including not one but two Atomic Bomb days, July 16 and Aug. 6), flags (which conflicts with our own celebration of the storming of the Bastille on July 14), and our fathers (June 20). There is, of course, July 4, a day on which the sun seems so close to planet Earth that it nearly sets vast parts of the republic afire, but which is not yet so hot that many, many fools won't go ahead and burn down their own homes anyhow with an assortment of fireworks, the majority of which are made in a communist country in which the very notion of freedom is considered seditious. There are lesser summer holidays (Boone Day on June 7; Juneteenth on June 19, but only in Texas; Moon Day on July 20, celebrated perhaps only on the moon; Friendship Day, Aug. 3, and, so far as our researchers could discover, celebrated nowhere) and historical occasions (D-Day on June 6 and Elvis' death on Aug. 16). Perhaps the real postmodern purpose of summer holidays is to remind us of the world we have lost, a world in which the public celebration of collective agonies and victories has been gradually eroded by private entertainments. (Will Swaim) TAXI'SDrinking alone in the bathtub is preferable to Main Street's relentless procession of tropical-themed bars, teeming with enthusiastic HB youth shouting “wooo” at any young woman who happens to pass by. But Taxi's—close to the others but satisfyingly short on Hawaiian memorabilia, Rollerblades and indiscreet romantic coupling—is a notable exception. Despite the stylish manufactured dilapidation (exposed ceiling beams, brick posts and other quasi-industrial touches), it still feels like a neighborhood dive. A muscular man in a peach tank top proclaiming himself a member of the Bad Boy Club; a surly-looking biker; a rockabilly gal with perplexing drawn-on eyebrows; and a bespectacled woman in khakis. All play pool and giggle like schoolgirls. No one is annoyed. More important, no one is annoying. Taxi's serves an average selection of average-priced beer. But the camaraderie there, unusual for a bar in a high-profile location, makes it a pleasant place to get drunk. 318 Main St., Huntington Beach. (714) 374-4448. (Marcia Simmons) THE LAST SUMMER EVERNostradamus, the 16th-century physician, astrologer and seer, predicted this will be one helluva summer: “In the seventh month of the year 1999, a great king of terror [the Antichrist?] will come from the sky.” Modern astrologers and Bible-thumping Christians, rare bedfellows at best, are wondering if the terror could be a close encounter with the plutonium-laden Cassini space probe, a rogue meteor or a dastardly Darth Vader ancestor. Or will Marilyn Manson descend onto the stage at Woodstock 3? The full-moon chart for Memorial Day weekend, the official start of summer, has Neptune (ruler of the beach scene, music, movies and mind-altering substances) rising in the Southland in weird and wonderful Aquarius—the most auspicious time for a beach party. Overhead, in the midheaven, we have a moon-Pluto conjunction that might transform a depraved Plutonic public (represented by the moon) into Sagittarian seers. Below, on the nadir, the rumor-driven sun-Mercury conjunction in Gemini says, “Go, man, go.” But where to? Irvine Meadows? We can't avoid the “solar eclipse of the century,” the much-heralded doomsday eclipse on Aug. 11, but can an R.E.M. concert save us? Or should we rely on 'N Sync? They play on Aug. 19, when the Grand Cross (a.k.a. the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), the aspect that spooked Nostradamus, dominates the heavens. Hot stuff. Hot shows. Hot time. Summer in the city. (Rockie Gardiner writes the Rockie Horoscope column for theWeekly.) TANNINGI spent a year of my life working at a tanning salon, wiping other people's sweat from their singed flesh, handling the whining of people who were (perhaps predictably) so vain that nothing else mattered but the chance to bake, swearing at me when they didn't get the bed they wanted, or when they couldn't get in without an appointment, or when they had to wait two minutes to bake. Some days, the salon would serve more than 200 people. I hated that job more than any other—even the job slopping cafeteria food for gray-haired wrinklies while wearing an atrocious nurse-like uniform. I hated my boss. Hated the overly obsessed customers. Hated the smell—hated the way I smelled when I got home from work everyday: smelling like other people's sweat. The tanning world ultimately turned me into the hateful person I am today. I blame them. What amazed me most was the variety:mothers, fathers, bikers, cowboys, grocery store clerks, mechanics, tattoo artists, jocks, musicians, businessmen, cops, African-Americans, Hispanics, bodybuilders, truck drivers, 80-year-old men and women—the vanity of men and women is as wondrous as Tibet. But the fact is I grew up smack in the middle of the madness. My mother's No. 1 priority was her tan; in memory, my childhood summers are characterized by her unrelenting, undifferentiated quest for the perfect tan. We spent the entire day at the beach or in the back yard by the pool. We had a TV in the back yard so she could watch her soaps. My lunches were appropriately sun-oriented—guacamole, chips and fruit. Not that I was complaining—it was like a dream, including my mom's dreamy heritage: part Swedish, part Native American, she was the perfect beach babe. Her bleached-blond hair made her dark-brown skin look shockingly darker. Her preference for crochet-string bikinis kept the male neighbors from complaining. I grew up emulating her looks, her tan, her perfect beach-girl image. This was the trail to the tanning salon. She taught me at an early age to blend baby oil and iodine for a suntan lotion. And sunscreen—what's that? That would be like adding water to vodka. Forget it—the redder the better. I still remember the summer during high school when I came back from a vacation at the Colorado River, burned and gradually fading to a tawny glow. All of a sudden, I had teenage boys chasing me down the street as if I were Princess Leia in the gold bikini. In her mid-30s, Mom's life's passion fizzled after she heard two words—those would be “skin” and “cancer.” My mother, the tannest woman around, soon became the palest woman around. She fell into a depression and entertained weird body-image problems. The tan had become part of her identity. Now it was gone. Or she would die getting it back. You could say she has recovered—there've been no more terrifying, life-ending melanomas. But years later, like an addict, she still sneaks off to the tanning salon for a quick fix when she's feeling down. (Arrissia Owen) ZINEFESTIf your reality is buried somewhere between the LA Times and The Orange County Register, the Santa Barbara Zinefest is as good an occasion as any to stay the hell away from Santa Barbara. But if you're sick to death of media spin and focus-group news stories about mothers and the daughters they love and the dogs their daughters love when they're not loving a quilt, make sure you're in Santa Barbara next month. On June 5, Santa Barbara welcomes a literary and artistic circus with a ring for everyone, whether you're into S&M journals (WHAP!, a.k.a. Women Who Administer Punishment), washing dishes around the country (Dishwasher), or caffeine-induced ranting about tumbleweeds and racist encounters (Java Turtle). Many independent-comic artists will also be present, including “El Swanky One,” Mike Tolento of Empty Life. There will be zine raffles and giveaways, refreshments, comix workshops and zine forums. If you have a zine or comic of your own, you can have a space to show off your wares for $15 per half-table. Plus, there will be an animation screening and after-fest party (after talking with all these weird people, you can throw up with them, too!)—one at a Mexican restaurant and another later at the incredible Mercury Lounge (imagine the Gypsy Den as a bar). Come one, come all, zines optional, but open minds required. Best of all, it's free! Santa Barbara Zinefest in the Goleta Valley Community Center, 5679 Hollister Ave., Goleta; www.aznet.net/~lorax/jt/. June 5, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Angela Meiss) BALLET PACIFICAThe beginning of summer is a kind of dancer's Advent: Ballet Pacifica's annual Choreographic Project, an eclectic, bare bones, workshop-style performance of four new pieces that includes a Q&A with the choreographers. Each summer, artistic director Molly Lynch invites four American choreographers to come and play Dr. Frankenstein with her Ballet Pacifica. The dancemakers converge for three weeks of intense converse with the muse, armed with ideas and images, music and movement, all to create new pieces that will test and stretch the limits and move the dancers into uncharted terrain. Lynch can't say yet who's coming (rumors say there are heavy hitters on the list), but repertory works from previous participants include gems like Todd Williams' sculptural, light-filled Wake, Yet Wake and the hip elegance of Trey McIntyre's neo-classical Poulenc Variations. Ballet Pacifica's Choreographic Project '99 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa, (949) 851-9930. July 24, 8 p.m. $10. (Pam Diamond) SUMMER OF GOREIn his psychobabble P.C. epic Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore said saving planet Earth from global warming must become “the central organizing principle for civilization.” That's one bold atmospheric statement for Bill Clinton's heir apparent. And now, as Gore's presidential crunch time looms, he'll need record-breaking heat to convince chary voters that the Earth is afire. The hotter we get, the smarter Gore looks and the more likely his success. But if the summer's cool, well, Al will be, too. The need for heat in the Gore campaign sets the stage for a pre-primary election scandal more cynical than Reagan's arms-for-hostages deal, more cosmic than Nixon's Watergate break-in. Don't put anything past Clinton Democrats. The Democratic National Committee wants Gore in office. The fix is in: in an attempt to blow a hole in the ozone—thereby increasing Gore's electability—Clinton and his cronies have been running their auto air conditioners and old refrigerators since the 1970s. (Nathan Callahan) FULLERTON BEER GARDEN Not much beer here—one light and one dark, usually of the microbrew variety and served out of a couple of small mini-kegs that invariably run out around 7:30 each night. But the setting is one of the coolest in the northern part of the county: The Fullerton Market. This intimate weekly gathering of vendors selling everything from produce and homemade clothing to bread and jewelry meets every Thursday night in downtown Fullerton from the middle of May through October. The beer garden is set up outside the Fullerton Museum Center, directly across from a stage where a wide variety of bands ranging from silly '60s cover bands to kind of cool alternative types perform (although the first two weeks of this year's market have been noticeably band-free. Whuzzup?). Again, the beer here isn't the point: it's the location. Outside drinking, sunset watching, cool-breeze feeling. All that and raw honey, home-made bread and incense, too. It's the closest Orange County gets to the Midwest (and we can all thank our personal God for that). Fullerton Beer Garden at the Fullerton Market, between Lemon N Pomona on Wilshire Ave. Thursdays, 4-8 p.m. (E. Jacque Mugwamp) HOORAY FOR SANDY BOTTOMS! From Seal Beach to Newport, the ocean's sucking sand from beaches like a giant Hoover. And it's not easy to put the stuff back. In recent years, Seal Beach has spent $1.1 million to import 110,000 tons of desert sand by train; city officials watched the high-priced grains slip away during last year's El Nio storms. Every few years, Surfside pumps dredge offshore sediment onto its beach. Cost in 1997 alone: $7.7 million. Seal Beach and Surfside are critical to beaches further south; they're called “feeder” beaches. Ocean currents are supposed to carry their sand southward, making deposits on silicon-starved Sunset, Bolsa Chica, Huntington and Newport beaches. Sand used to arrive at Orange County beaches more naturally and cheaply. For eons, it was delivered from the San Gabriel Mountains courtesy of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers. Now, two LA County organizations have a plan to make the sand flow again. The Watershed Council comprises many environmental group leaders and government officials who have developed Vision 2025, a plan that calls for restoring the rivers to a clean, natural state. It'll take some doing. Most people don't even know the hundred-plus miles of waterways are rivers. Over the past 50 years, the LA and San Gabriel have been ensconced in concrete, reduced to vast storm drains. Watershed managers say paving the rivers was bad news for the rivers and beaches, and part of the council's strategy calls for busting the pavement up and exposing the sediment again. “Man is rediscovering that sandy-bottomed rivers bring a wealth of benefits,” says council president Dorothy Green. “They naturally filter pollution. They replenish groundwater. They preserve and restore habitat. And they naturally deliver sediment to the sea.” Unfortunately, the rivers can only get the sand to Long Beach, since that's where they empty. Part two of the dilemma, then, is that manmade jetties and breakwaters—including the one at Long Beach—block the sand's natural journey southward. The question is: Are all the barriers really needed? The Long Beach Breakwater Task Force (LBBTF) thinks not. A coalition of Long Beach environmental and neighborhood groups, they plan to sink the 50-year-old Long Beach Breakwater. This 73-foot-high, 2.6-mile-long structure was built to protect navy ships from Japanese torpedoes during World War II. But it also blocks waves. “The breakwater basically turned Long Beach waters into a stagnant cesspool,” says LBBTF chairman Mike Murphy. “The Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers dump 110,000 tons of sewage, chemicals and garbage here every year. Without natural wave action for mixing and dilution, it all just sits. That's why nobody goes to the beach in Long Beach.” LBBTF's breakwater reconfiguration plan was even studied at Harvard College last year by Kalon Morris, originally a Seal Beach native. Morris' thesis showed that the breakwater reduced water circulation and wave energy approaching Long Beach by 94 percent. Equally important, he found that it trapped vast quantities of southbound sand. “In Southern California, the persistent swell from the northwest strikes beaches at an angle,” says Morris. “This causes a net transport of sand south and east. Under natural conditions with no breakwater, this sand would be transported along the coast and would migrate to Orange County beaches.” In other words, engineering caused the beach-erosion crisis; de-engineering is the way to solve it. That message is clearly gaining momentum. Three thousand people have lined up behind LBBTF's sink-the-breakwater plan. The Watershed Council's Vision 2025 was signed off on by a diverse group of two dozen city, county, state and environmental representatives. In the meantime, Orange County's beach cities are circling the wagons. Last year, they formed the Orange County Coastal Coalition to lobby for state and federal aid. They're also looking to the Army Corps of Engineers for answers. Call that irony: it was the corps that cooked up the breakwaters and jetties and concretized the rivers to begin with. (Bill Light) FEETThat feet are bowel-clenchingly disgusting to behold is beyond debate. Bony, red-tipped talons. Flat and lacking plops of batter. Callused feet. Feet with bunions. Feet with the second toe longer than the big toe. Feet with kiwi-sized big toes. Feet with crusted dirt smeared between toes, feet with dirt hard-packed under unkempt nails. Hammer toes. Sideways pinkie toes. Pinkie toes lacking nails, pinkie toes with only the stalest crumb of nail, pinkie toes that don't reach the ground, pinkie toes that barely reach the base of the toe that precedes it. Pinkie toes, period. Toes that carry on independent of the rest of the body, rubbing, preening, grooming as 10 independent, serpentine and unmistakably evil creatures. Animal feet, pungent, perspiring, contorted feet. Feet that prove Darwin right. Nasty, neglected, gnarled and gnarly feet. Degenerate, deflowered, defamatory, nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty, NASSS-TEEE feet. Let me just say that, as tools of motion and balance, feet are fine. In function, the foot is laudable—yes, even beautiful. So is the colon. But we do not expose our colons to the world adorned in head-shop-quality jewelry, bits of paint and $80 leather pieces from Brass Plum, do we? That would be inappropriate. Even the Bible is clear when weighing in on this one. Verily: “How beautiful are thy feet with shoes,” (emphasis added) says the Song of Solomon, 7:1. And yet this kind of behavior is not only tolerated in regards to feet but also encouraged and profited from every day, only growing worse in summer months. Baerbel Fehlhaber, a Corona del Mar pedicurist, says her business easily doubles during the summer. And though she's been in the business 23 years and though she went to school and passed a state licensing exam and though she is at ground zero, up to her arms in feet, as it were, and though she sees great possibilities for the foot, she allows that most of the lot look horrible. “Oh, totally,” she says. “Calluses and just not well taken care of. I'm always amazed how much time and effort people put into what they're wearing on top and then they show their feet and they just haven't been taken any care of. We have a saying. 'On top, hooey. On bottom, phooey.'” She pauses, then adds with Wagnerian understatement, “I'm from Germany. We have a different outlook.” Which could also be said of people with foot fetishes. Jared Griffith works at Ipso Facto, a Fullerton boutique specializing in fetish items, and he allows that one of the aspects that draw people to their perverse and unholy worship of the foot is the element of taboo, i.e. “you know, that disgusting aspect that they smell sometimes and corns and, you know.” Yes, we do. Griffith adds that one of the biggest foot fetish trends is guys who enjoy watching tall women step on things, “you know, squishy things or bugs,” a practice that I can say without fear of hyperbole sounds a thousand times worse than necrophilia. Just as bad in Fehlhaber's book are people who do a poor job of maintaining their feet but attempt to gloss over their problems with a few coats of polish. “Like slapping some paint on an old rusty car,” she says. “Single guys are always telling me, 'Eeeeww, it's awful.' Their dates take off their shoes and their foots are horrible. They look so horrible they want to run away. I tell people, 'Wouldn't you like to have a pretty foot that your boyfriend or husband could take a hold of and say, 'What a pretty foot'? If a foot is not taken care of, it's gross, you can lose friends.” Fehlhaber obviously takes her profession very seriously, and while she agrees with me about most feet, we differ on the foot's possibility for aesthetic redemption. She believes regular maintenance can achieve that. I believe that while a non-cared-for foot may scream of neglect, a pampered foot speaks of decadence and soft living, of the kind of person who has to climb into their Range Rover every time they need to pick up a few half gallons of milk to bathe in. And Fehlhaber says her business is only growing, since every day men are becoming more comfortable with getting pedicures. All different types of men, because all different types of men are showing their feet, especially in sandals. Yes, it's not just the hairy toes of deluded and foul-smelling Cal State Long Beach English literature professors hanging over the leading edge of a broken-down Birkenstock anymore. No indeed, not just those pseudointellectuals with an overinflated view of their own pornographic prose who enjoy nothing more than poking their fingers in the chests of the students they envy, who they well know are their betters—yeah, I'm talking about you, dickweed! What does it all mean? Wear shoes. God wants you to. No debate, just do it. (Steve Lowery) STEELHEAD BREWERYBeer ought to always be black as hell, thick as the tongue on a drunk date, and sweet as an angel, or so we figure after five tumblers of Steelhead's brews, including a saucy, dark little number called Showtime Oatmeal Stout, which we figure is so named because after a glassful, the lights go on and everybody looks beautiful. 4175 Campus Dr., Irvine, (949) 856-2227. (Todd Mathews) LITTLE SAIGON SUMMERIt has been a few months since outrage over video-store owner Truong Van Tran's shrine to Vietnamese communism sparked massive demonstrations in Little Saigon, but a few dozen protesters in front of the restaurant owned by Westminster Mayor Pro Tem Tony Lam are still pissed-off. Headed by Ky Ngo, the small faction of anti-Lam activists is demanding that Lam, the nation's first Vietnamese-American elected official, be tossed from office. Unhappy with Lam's “soft” approach to Tran's Ho Chi Minh promotion, this tiny group has decided to spend their summer at his Little Saigon restaurant. A full day of ridding the Westminster City Council of evil communist conspirators can burn calories and leach precious bodily fluids. To break the monotony, weary protesters can march 10 minutes north and rest their picket signs at Pho 79, one of the finest rice-noodle soup joints in the county. Start with the pho dac biet (rice-noodle soup with a yummy combination of rare and well-cooked beef, beef tendon and tripe), the restaurant's specialty, and keep cool with a tra Thai (wonderfully sweet and milky Thai iced tea). For those of larger girth, supersize your order by asking for the pho dac biet xe lua. Literally translated, “xe lua” means “railroad trains,” so don't be startled when it takes three waiters to deliver the bathtub-sized soup bowl to your table. For the protester brave enough to cross the picket line to eat on the enemy's turf, why not try Lam's restaurant, Vien Dong? Specializing in Northern Vietnamese cuisine, Vien Dong is famous for its bun (angel-hair-pasta-sized rice noodles). The cha ca thanh long (grilled red snapper slathered in dill and onions) is Lam's most popular form of bun cookery and is highly recommended. Demonstrators have to unwind after a long day, so why not stop off for an iced java at Cheers Caf? Located just minutes south of the protest epicenter, Cheers has combined the best aspects of French and Asian culture by integrating a classic caf atmosphere with 800 watts of karaoke bliss. There's nothing more relaxing than listening to Quoc belt out a classic like Barry Manilow's “Copacabana” while sipping on your caf sua da (iced coffee with sweet milk) in the middle of a hazy, hot-as-Saigon afternoon. If singing the night away isn't enough and you don't want to share the spotlight, stop by Tektronic, which is conveniently located next door to Cheers. Not only can you pick up the latest in karaoke equipment, laser discs and CDs, but you can also show your commitment to the cause and shake your booty to the protest-friendly video Democracy for Vietnam. And when the daily grind of protesting finally gets to be too much and you want to take a day off, go ahead and lie around, drink some sugar-cane juice and kick up your feet; just make sure not to rent pirated movies from local video stores. (Vu Nguyen) Summer Beach N Beer Guide, Part 2
