feather2pixels

Guess who stopped by the screen printing studio the other night?  None other than nvSurly/Lonwell Alvier/Sir Lee himself.  The ever-dutiful Trent Reznor scholar since birth, Lonwell had just completed his new master Nine Inch Nails mix and the only thing standing in the way of shipping them off to the far corners of the California–Philly–New York City Corridor was packaging.

Enter the Slushmonger.

I would like to think that I helped motivate our hero towards completion of this much anticipated project, but just as the tides need not the assistance of man in washing up the ocean’s secrets so Lonwell needs no help from any one in making his voice heard.  I might say, though, that he did make this as difficult as possible, designing a multi-color square pattern that required the most precise of registrations–one false move and the spacing between red and black would read as monumentally screwed.

Alas, once again we discovered success together and everything turned out great.  Also, I must say that Mr. Reznor’s work on “The Social Network” soundtrack is exactly what I would expect from him in the year 2010, and I say that not to suggest that it sounds predictable but rather to offer it as the satisfying answer to the question of what would Nine Inch Nails sound like when Trent Reznor was fifty-one years old.  I have been enjoying it. (From what I could tell, the most important answer the film provides is that the social networking website is the most monumental thing to be invented by mankind since the the Polio vaccine).

So instead, I’ll leave you with my five favorite photographs from this weekend.

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Ravi Shankar said an amazing thing at this concert I just attended.  He said “The first time I was in San Francisco to play music was 1933.”

1933!  It seems impossible that the same guy I saw tear it up on sitar last Thursday was doing the same thing in the year that construction started on the Golden Gate Bridge and Hitler came to power in Germany.

Cringe-inducing Fall Out Boy lyric of the week:

“They say the captain
Goes down with the ship
So, when the world ends
Will God go down with it?”

For that matter, cringe-inducing Fall Out Boy song of the week:

What A Catch, Donnie
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Who is Jill?  Been thinking about that one for a while now.   Jill is the path of least resistance on a path that’s too long for the scenic route.  Jill is a steady exercise that builds a stout musculature in the tissues no one will care to notice.  Jill is a reliable intermediate between happy and sad where your headspace is actually completely beside the point.  Jill is an order of chicken tikka masala on a rail car to Delhi.  As you can see, all I’ve come up with are alternate lyrics to the 1995 Alanis Morisette embarrassment, “Ironic.”

I spend half my time trying to be more like Jill and the other half trying to be nothing like Jill.  Sometimes she knows before I even say the word and goddamit if she will always be a part of me.  Whether I like it or not.  She left San Francisco on Friday, possibly forever,  for the greener pastures of Chicago.  This appears to be a large city in the American Midwest.  With a minimum of adverbs (and with Nick T.), we unsentimentally sucked down one final beer at the bottom of Potrero Hill amidst subject-predicate-object conversation.  Jill is the opposite of so many people. All this is why I love Jill.

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I am gonna throw in the last track from the live “Music for Airports.”  I decided it might be as good or even better than that first track.  Takes a few minutes to get going but this one has more of a beginning, middle and end.  Get ready.
Bang on a Can: “2-2”
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I just found a remarkable live version of the song I listened to probably more than any other song in the last five years. Well, not so much a song as it is, um, a composition.

Soap box alert.

In 1978, the British multimedia artist Brian Eno more or less invented ambient music with the release of an album he titled “Ambient 1: Music For Airports.” This was back when experimental music was still hypothesis-driven and, as with much of his work, Eno approached the project with a strong sense of intentionality.  His goal, a recording that would “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” was later famously compared to the effect of visual art, acting on the viewer through many planes of consciousness, often in the background.  It was not to be confused with background music (Muzak), which fixed non-challenging, derivative bullshit in the world’s elevators and supermarkets.

Lots of the so-called ambient music that followed (including plenty of Eno’s own, including plenty from this album) made a poor case for this distinction and it always struck me as ironic that the pinnacle of the art came in the form of the first track of this first ever ambient-with-a-capital-A record. At first listen, the track “1_1” sounds like not much more than a minimal repeating figure (future listens reveal another level of complexity), and what blows me away about this 17 minutes of music is how something so simple can achieve such complete transcendence. The composition isn’t overtly emotional in any one direction (happy, sad, afraid, or mad, as my therapist would have said).  Rather, this is their elusive equilibrium, perfectly modulated for the potential to become anything and to shape any environment. It is the musical equivalent of the stem cell and it is rare.

Anyway, I spent many days and nights wandering around San Francisco with this shit on my headphones and it took over a special place in my heart. Eno’s original was arranged using a combination of tape loops and early analog synths, and in 1998 the avant garde chamber music collective Bang on A Can re-recorded the entire album note for note, using classical instruments. That type of bullshit usually makes its way to the novelty discount rack real quick, but these guys have managed to maintain the balance of the original piece while installing it with a new sense of power. And it was recorded live, something Eno could never do. Fucking outstanding. Put it on and go do something else.

Bang on a Can: “1-1”
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Another month, another wedding. Devoted readers will recall feather2pixel’s breaking coverage of ex-Explainer Akiko‘s surprise birthday/marriage proposition party in October. Well, she accepted and nine months later her and eighty of her friends and family were getting drunk at the summit of Pacific Heights on a clear Saturday afternoon. Anna from Germany was there. The mushroom soup was excellent.

I had the opportunity to meet Tilden Park’s famous herd of landscaping goats in the Berkeley Hills. Apparently, they get penned on a swath of land and simply eat their way through until the terrain is clear. It’s basically the same way things work in San Francisco, except instead of goats we use real estate developers. Three new block-sized projects are set to wrap construction within spitting distance of CELLspace this year and I foresee things getting pretty ugly at the Bryant and Mariposa streets Starbucks. Why can’t other people gentrify the way I gentrify?

I saw some really bad art and music last weekend. The art in question was the Bay Area Now exhibition, touted as (T)he seminal showcase of talent in the region, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Seems to me that it works much more successfully as a deconstruction of why it can be hard for the rest of the country and world and me to take the Bay Area seriously. As far as I am concerned, conceptual art has to be pretty fucking amazing to be worth my time: gluing a jiggling laytex vibrator to the wall next to a statement about “paying homage to the sexually compulsive” is not just an unoriginal idea, it’s a poorly executed one.

And the only thing worse than artists doing less with less is artists doing less with more. Between one bassist and two guitarists, I counted no less than twenty-five effects pedals on stage at Cafe Du Nord last night. Curious about how heroically un-dynamic a band could possibly make all that gear sound? Check out Film School from L.A.—in a way, it’s really impressive.

These writings are getting awfully negative. C.W.(formerly unhappily known as Freckles) pointed this out to me on a midnight bike ride to the sea and I think she’s right. Here are some positive thoughts to kick off the last even year of the decade.

-The grilled halibut at our 2008 faculty retreat was excellent.
-The biker I ran over last week insisted on a ride to 24th and Potrero instead of money for his broken foot.
-No class on Tuesday or Thursday this semester.
–CELLspace (where I screen print) is making me a spare key so I can come and go as I please. It could even be ready for the summer.
–The Mountain Goats on three consecutive nights at three different SF venues this winter.
-Ten predicted feet of snow at Tahoe this weekend.
-A too-good-to-be-true Kasper Hauser/Will Franken show at SF Sketchfest this January.
-Chance encounters at the no left turn sign at the intersection of 19th and Church streets.
–Double decker busses, killer tigers, and SPAM maps.
-BYOB with no corkage fee at Tajine. Lamb.
-The excitement back in my fitness goals, with inspiring expert instructors, personalized whole-body workouts, and the greatest outdoors in San Francisco.
-The U.S.P.S. Marvel superhero and America’s superlative stamps.
–Pitt 13 WVU 9
–Pitt 65 Duke 64
-End of semester emails from happy students.
-New neighbors, old penpals, family fans, calls from New York City, afternoons at Vesuvio.
-And of course: The Shanghai Dumpling King.

Joe’s gone. Before he left, Nowell, him, and I enjoyed a fancy civic center dude evening with the Kronos Quartet at the never comfortable Herbst Theater (has it always been hot as hell in there?). After checking in with the wives, we headed down to the bars south of Cesar Chavez, which are slowly becoming my favorite places to drink in the Mission: the courtyard at El Rio is downright charming, the photo booth at The Knockout is second to none, and for good measure there’s even a Taqueria Can-cun in the area. Even the Argus lounge makes up for an overall lack of inspiration with free shots of vodka gimlet and projected Kubrick films.

It was good to have a night out drinking. The moon was high and brilliant. Mission Street felt like a loving old relative with questionable hygiene. The city glowed. Joe is a believer in the well-timed sentiment and so we spilled lots of beer over locked-eye toasts as we made our way through the rounds. Each new drink comes with a small slug of intensity and that’s how drinking with Nowell and Joe is. Later, Joe learned that on this side of the Cascades, ordering a “carne asada” gets you a plate, not a buritto. Nowell successfully ordered a chorizo burrito (every time Nowell gets chorizo, it seems to generate a new inside joke) and I got my secret weapon: cheese quesadilla.

A few days later, I found myself south of Cesar Chavez again, with Adrienne to watch her boyfriend’s band play the Knockout on a Monday night. Spontaneity! Plus a chance to revisit the photo booth! Adrienne remind me of me. Since starting graduate school, she’s been constantly embattled, yet she’s full of plans for displaying our crafts to the world. Thank goodness somebody is.

I ended up accepting Indy Sarah’s press pass to the Shins show and so on a cold Wednesday night I found myself eastward bound in a taxi down Market Street with her. I was excited; the Shins are good and the Shins are popular, but I had never seen them play and thus couldn’t fully commit to liking them.

We arrived in the middle of the first song, which according to band policy, meant that I had two and a half songs left during which to take pictures via my photo badge. They passed in approximately twenty seconds.

It was about then that I realized I have no idea who these musicians are, much less what they look like. It was a truly disappointing moment. Not that the performance was bad in any way, but it made me realize that all that I know about this music, which I supposedly like, is recordings–just another way to suck the experience out of life. Lots of people before me have expressed that sentiment at concerts but it’s my big thing now and maybe the experience of being behind the cameras cast it in full relief. Anyways, in addition to the digital, I also managed to lug the Polaroid along and by luck snapped this remarkable shot of James Mercer in what looks to be the bowels of hell.

So the verdict: The Shins’ are good performers and their music is intelligent and well-balanced, the logical result of a natural selection process operating on a sea of shitty indie bands, weeding out the undesirable characteristics in a lucky few. The problem is the Shins don’t move me. Until the encore, that is, when they came onstage, harmonicas in hand, and played old shit lithe way Neil Young would have. And sometimes two songs can make a show.

Then I accidentally let Indy Sarah use my chapstick and she gave me a virus.

I just came home from the Independent, which is a funny little club in the neighborhood that SF hipsters are shamelessly trying to rename NoPa (NOrth of the PAnhadle). “Western Addition” is apparently much too black. Anyways, I went to see John Darnielle, independent rock’s everyman, and it was a really excellent show.

He made me ponder the rarity of hearing lyrics at a rock show. Sometimes inaudible vocals are well and good (Brightblack Morning Light immediately comes to mind) and sometimes it’s a matter of poor acoustics, but I often get the impression that I can’t hear what performers are saying because they aren’t great performers. This dude knows how to play a show. He knows exactly when to sing loud, when to whisper, when to yell off-mic, and it’s fucking inspirational (So…many…similes….). And all I can think to do with all this inspiration is blog. Awesome show.

Two years after winning it, I finally replaced the chain and sprocket on my bicycle. A near death experience involving the disengagement of my transmission system on Valenica Street necessitated it. I would prefer to spend $60 on tacos, but this is for the best. Besides, there is something deeply satisfying about wearing out a piece of stainless steel under your own power over the course of several years. And although I am sad that I forgot keep my old wearied gear–it would have been great blog material–the thought of my bike dust scattered throughout San Francisco comforts me like a cup of black tea on a rainy day, mixed with milk and sugar. And look: The Mountain Goats have me talking in comparisons, which means it’s time for bed.