Flea Market Fantasy

Chain Reaction: for years now, the Anaheim temple for many a sad emo boy, hardened hardcore soul and geeky-proud indie-rock aficionado—you can read the club's history by just gawking at the T-shirts that plaster the walls. It's nicely established itself as the OC room where you can glimpse tomorrow's hot bands today, and, for those who care (youth-culture marketing department alert!), also one of the best places outside a high school campus to see what “the kids” are accessorizing themselves with these days. To sort of mirror their trend-setting prominence, the club will hold its first-ever swap meet Sunday—but, says Chain booker Jon Halperin, you won't find the usual swap meet crap. Instead, local clothing labels like To Die For, Lucky 13 and Cardboard Robot will be selling off their current lines, either at wholesale prices or at very low cost, and local record imprints like Revelation, the Militia Group, Drive Thru and Hopeless will also be hawking their catalogues of CDs and vinyl. “It's just something for the kids, like a community thing,” Halperin says. “They'll get great deals, we'll have music all day—not a live band, though, that didn't work out—and if it all goes well and everyone has a good time and the companies get rid of stuff, we'll do it again.” Like any swap meet, the best deals are sure to be had the earlier you get there, which could create bizarre scenes of black-clad hardcore girls playing tug-of-war over a T-shirt at the swap's ungodly 10 a.m. start time. Bring camera phones!

Dylan
Photo by Don Hunstein/
Columbia Records

HARD RAIN
If you thought there was a great hue-and-cry a year ago when Bob Dylan licensed his song “Love Sick” for a Victoria's Secret commercial—he even appeared in one of the spots—then the hubbub over Dylan's latest business venture is certain to raise an even bigger stink: “The Times They Are A-Changin'” used to push the utter fabulousness of Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations. Naturally, as an HMO with over 8 million members, Kaiser is a lightning rod for controversy. In June, the California Department of Managed Health Care fined Oakland-based Kaiser $200,000 for disclosing the private medical records of approximately 150 patients, which had been posted on a publicly viewable web site. In 1999, Kaiser was successfully sued by several groups over its “In the Hands of Doctors” advertising campaign, which gave the false impression that Kaiser doctors were in full control of patient health decisions, and not a Kaiser corporate boardroom. In 1997, a California Supreme Court investigation found Kaiser's complex patient complaint procedure unfair, a ruling that stemmed from the case of Wilfredo Engalla, who claimed that Kaiser doctors misdiagnosed him with colds and allergies for years before finally informing him he had terminal lung cancer (Engalla died the day after the arbitration process was completed). Kaiser also took part in an experimental measles vaccine program from 1989 to 1991, during which over 700 mostly minority Los Angeles babies were treated as de facto guinea pigs, inoculated with medicine that in other countries had caused the deaths of infants after the vaccine suppressed their immune systems. We doubt that Dylan knows about any of this—he may like his women (or hell, himself) dressing down in lace Victoria's Secret panties, but he's rich enough to not have to bother with common everyman annoyances like the lack of affordable health insurance and the appalling state of public health care, despite the heart condition he was hospitalized for in 1997 or his famous 1966 motorcycle crash. And the hypocrisy hits us hard (we would have asked ol' Zimmy, but he never seems to return our phone calls anymore—not that he ever did). But it's also a tough call as to what's worse—that duplicity, or the fact that “The Times They Are A-Changin'”—pretty much the most defining song of the 1960s—is now a jingle? (A protest of the Dylan ad has been launched on the web—check it out at kaiserthrive.org/volunteer.htm.)