culture

Starting to settle into the new groove. I took the temperature of the neighborhood last night, a little solo wandering. I haven't lived in the Mission for nigh on five years, and it's definitely changed. Gentrification was well underway when I arrived in '03, and has continued apace in my absence.

For instance, there are coteries of "pretty people" who I don't really think are all that pretty, but do make me feel underdressed. This reminds me of North Brooklyn in its heyday, and in the way of all NYC-to-SF comparisons feels a bit like being sent back to the minor leagues, but on the other hand this is where most of the good art comes from so you have to take the lumps with the cream.

Somewhat less pretentiously you can run into this action at a sidewalk cafe:

This band is really good live, reaffirms faith in humanity via Korg and wail, etc.

I've been tracking these efforts for a while. It's going to shake things up. A lot.

Fun times ahead.

I twittered about this, and posted a video in my last post, but I have to say I'm just blown away by the latest release from The Kleptones. These guys are the shit. They evolved from making ultra-clever — and still totally listenable — album-based mashups (Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots and A Night at the Hip-Hopera, which will make your head asplode with Queen+KRS) and have moved fully into the realm of Art.

I've listened to Uptime/Downtime several times though, and it takes the more free-form explorations of the 24-hours double-album to the next level. Plus they're using the dirty beats now too. It's just great to see post-postmodernism at work.

People of PDX and SF can unlock the magic LIVE this weekend...

Live fast, die old.

Um yeah. Ultra-cheezy title. Ultra-questionable premise.

Ultra-awesome show.

See, you get good actors and a decent budget, and give the creative types (writers, directors, etc) enough room to be dangerous, all of a sudden something worthwhile might happen. It won't likely be a mega hit, but it will likely be good. And that should recoup a decent budget. And then you make money and produce quality culture. Win!

(Also, wikipedia informs us that the original working title was Forever Sam Crow, further confirming that marketing douchebags are generally worthless; had they stuck with that I'd have had to come up with a different counter-positive to lead off my post.)

...But I'd give up my soul for just one of them now...

It's been a packed week down in the Bay. Wheeling and dealing, painting and sanding, whooping and shouting; the whole nine yards.

Went and saw The Avett Brothers on Friday night. They're pretty great showmen as expected, and I got me a t-shirt -- a much more effective way of supporting working musicians than paying for their music, btw -- but I felt the concert could have been more. Slims is not my favorite place to see a show, and the crowd vibe was a little off. That and I had great expectations, which is generally unfair and I try not to do for the sake of giving artists a chance, but c'est la vie. That's what you get for being real good.

They were touring on 2007's _Emotionalism_, which is a great album, the first one I heard -- coming via Pickathon and Chelsea late last summer -- and probably the most natural cultural fit for SF. But having been exposed to their entire catalog, I celebrate the mo' twangy stuff a bit more fully than that which leans indie. The crowd was on the other side of that leaning, didn't seem to know a lot of the other/older stuff, and just wasn't as lively as I'd hoped.

I suppose I was looking for something really wild and free, like when we saw The Devil Makes Three at the Starry Plough last month. That was hot and packed and foot-stomping scream-along-singing until you got light in the head and then another song would start up that was even better and more worth jumping around to; lather-rinse-repeat. By contrast, the crowd's energy at this gig made it tough to even break a sweat. I also felt the encore was a bit too scripted, and there wasn't sufficient demand in the room to draw out a spontaneous second round.

Kellymundo succeeded in getting me to watch a few consecutive episodes of _The West Wing_ on DVD the other day, and as someone who's been steeped in politics over the past five years, it leaves an interesting impression. If _24_ is the Dark Side of the contemporary political debate, _The West Wing_ represents something of the sunny side.

The stuff I've seen is from Season two, which is something of a historical time-capsule, having been made prior to both the onset of the Bush Administration, and of course 9/11. It's totally enjoyable, but also strikes me as anachronistically sanguine, a grown-up Schoolhouse Rock but with the benefit of excellent production values. The cast is strong, and the writing is excellent from a literary standpoint. On substance, though, I think the text reflects all too well the hazy miasma that surrounds our allegedly elite political discourse.

Two quick examples from the three or four episodes I've seen:

I've been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper's, I've digested a few books, which I'll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

*Air Guitar*
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled "Essays on Art & Democracy," this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don't know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn't really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey's prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper's recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the "retreat into criticism" and the "politics of infinite demands." It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who's an art critic and not a "Critical Theorist," but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I've ever read.

One of the shows I've been enjoying over the past couple months (thanks eztv!) is AMC's Mad Men, a stylish serial drama full of moral ambiguity set in the NYC advertising industry (Madison Avenue, hence the title) circa 1960. Aside from just generally being smart and well-executed, I'm occasionally actually _inspired_ by the marketing presentations that the protagonist Don Draper gives.

They remind me of the best of Larry Lessig's powerpoints, but because the whole point is that Draper is being brutally emotionally manipulative -- both in the context of presenting a modern marketing strategy, and also in the sense that he's _closing the deal_ with a client -- they resonate with my artistic side even more. Truly the greatest performance work I've done has been essentially along the same lines: stacking up rhetoric with music and stage-imagery to seduce the audience in one way or another.

There's something you can definitely _feel_ as a performer when this is working, when the crowd is in your pocket. I've felt the same thing in business meetings and selling vacuum cleaners door to door, the energy of control when another human will folds itself into your own. It's probably the rawest power I've ever experienced, and mostly since I've used it for good, it's been a good thing. Lot of responsibility though.

Anyway, the season finale of the show had a particularly great sequence like this, and it's got me mentally cutting up the music I listen to, looking for theme-clips, thinking of images, ways of explaining. Explaining what exactly is an open question. Hopefully we'll find out.