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Awesomesauce.

So, this is woefully incomplete; In fact, it covers only the up-to-the-event story... I almost don't want to post it but I think it's good to get the first part out there. More likely I'll write the rest. I have a few photos which I'll add once I get back to the HC and can get 'em off my camera, and for the latter part of the story I can lean on Stephanie and Andy for graphics. Indeed, the above is an Andy Smith original (some rights reserved). In very brief: I had a great time, and it was actually semi-Important for me to get out of my routine and mix it up. All work and not play is not a pragmatic plan.

Travelling from SFO, Cheney drops me off at the airport, ran into the Girth’s lawyerly friend Eric at the terminal. He’s delayed on the way to San Diego so we have a beer. It’s a little hard to make small talk since we’ve only met a couple times, but there’s basketball, Cavs getting trounced by the Wizards, and that’s en entre, and he’s a good guy so we pass 45 minutes like that.

Flight in to LA is fast. Julia picks me up. New haircut. We talk about the important things first, how our respective love lives are going. You already know my scene (nada). She’s got a man-friend who’s got a moustache he likes to wax (to good effect, IMHO) but also says she’s really mostly interested in “good sex and working on myself.” I tell her that’s very LA, but I also think it’s great, and tell her that too.

We go out to her neighborhood bar for a couple beers and to catch up. It’s the former haunt of the Girth, the Lost and Found. In a strip mall — like all things there — but also dark, mirrored, with old-school-classy leather upholstry and a crowd of semi-feral regulars. Things are good, taking family news and the times, being close to thirty years old and still searching, etc.

I like Los Angeles. It’s popular and easy to hate, and true there’s a lot there to loathe, but this is true of everyplace. I think the thing that gets to people like me is that all the reasons we love LA are difficult to own. They seem cheap, weak, materialistic. The weather is nice. People are beautiful. It pulses with the certain energy and power that only a major global culture node can possess. Reeks of ambition.

Anyway, I sleep on a big old couch, and in the morning we do Starbucks, gossip about college people, and then it’s time to pack up and roll. We do a quick stop for me to get some swim trunks at Ross, then to acquire amazing Italian sandwiches involving a long wait for our number to be called, then pick up Julia’s friend Heather, a shining example of humanity. She has a pink scooter, a vintage 1945 map of the USSR, a tiny tv that she watches infrequently (much to the derision of the TiVo-praising Julia) and is allergic to sunlight and ibuprophen, which is a rough hand to be dealt. She wrangles an office full of world-class architects (Frank Gehry). We discover much common ground on the theories of human organization, power, and the virtues of being houseless “for a time” and living off the fat of the land.

The last stop out of town is Leonardo’s, the afformentioned man-friend. Among many other things, Leonardo drives a FedEx truck so we were picking him up after he wrapped his shift. He’s a LA native, a legitimate Lakers fan, and he really does wax his moustache to give it a jaunty point. The effect his that his face looks a fair bit like the Eric from Vagabond Opera, though as a man he’s less operatic and more folksy in bearing.

Anyway, we all pile in and eat as Julia fights our way through traffic; downtown LA, into the burbs, a million “Babies ‘R’ Us”s, a roadside brushfire, the windmills, and finally into the Greater Indeo Area and the festival scene. Several defining things happen almost immediately:

1) We put on sunscreen. The “group lube session.”

2) We observe egregious and utterly shameless littering on the part of festival-goers.

3) We begin receiving VIP treatment.

These three things encapsulate much of the experience I ended up having for the first couple days.

Comparisons to Burning Man are inevitable to me. It’s pretty brutal out there in the heat of the day, and even though it’s not the Black Rock Desert, and it’s just April, it’s still 90+ degrees and savagely sunny. The desert setting, various ravish overtones, and the presense of several art installations I recognize from the Playa make it all seem familiar. But it’s full of kids (Burning Man skeiws older overall) and has a kind of Spring Break vibe at times, which can be unfortunate. And there’s the massive amount of littering, which is omnipresent and frankly saps my hope for humanity.

We’re also Very Important People for this thing. Via a connection, we’re rolling in under the auspices of the owners of the festival grounds — the Empire Polo Field, which is exactly what it says it is — and so we park real close and roll in the back way along with a lot of pretty people and Steven Tyler, etc. There’s a general “VIP” area of the festival which just takes a more expensive ticket to access, but has some amenities (couches, liquor in addition to beer for sale, etc), and then there’s a “Tiki Hut Area” which we have special wristbands for, and also backstage etc.

It’s sort of ridiculous. Waiting in a traffic line in the car before we arrive I read aloud the strongly-worded-letter Julia received concerning the access and expected behavior of all parties within the Tiki Hut Area (consistently capitalized as such). Basically they’re saying don’t be an asshole, so we’ve got it covered, but it’s still kind of funny that they have to write that out in a strongly worded letter. The aforementioned Area itself is a big (15’ x 30’ maybe) tiki hut with a thatched roof, and professionally-staffed open bar. This is some kind of clubhouse for the Polo grounds, it seems, and is situated in a garden area featuring several large lilly padded pools, lush grass, shady trees, sculptures, etc. It’s about 7 degrees cooler than everywhere else. The whole thing is behind a gate and several security dudes, and there’s a “viewing area” where you can watch the mainstage, as well as all the people who you are lording it over. Like I said, ridiculous. But definitely nice. This is a feature of the weekend.

We arrive on the scene just in time to catch The Breeders, which Julia’s happy about. It feels sort of trippy, being out in the warmest air I’ve felt in months, big soundsystem going with giant video monitors on the side. There are five big stages there — two outdoor, three ginormous tents — and by 4pm on Friday things are in swing. Partytime.

More to come.

Sometimes I’m sexy, move like a stud
Like kickin’ the stall all night
Sometimes I’m so shy, got to be worked on
Don’t have no bark or bite, alright

That’s all. Thanks Mick.

Flashing through the accumulated images of the past week, it’s a heady mixed bag. Trying to work my way from being a direct-actor to a manager. Trying to get ahead of the curve. Trying to continue my studious avoidance of all feminine diversions. Trying not to get boring as I get old. Trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Trying to communicate. Trying to love. Trying to speak correctly. Trying to listen. Trying.

And a few things occur to me.

In the smear of pint-night down at Everett’s, veterans of the military and Gillman st telling stories early, Kelly and Zya creating interpretive dances to Neil Diamond, then the kids coming in as the evening sets in; there emerges a ray of light in shiny blue tights, sheer brilliance, such as to make me avert my eyes. She looks pretty good at the coffeeshop usually, but this is another level, enough to make a man reexamine his beliefs. It occurs to me that my “my head’s not in it” excuse for studious avoidance of such is a self-fulfilling prophecy with real limits in its utility. Something’s got to change, but for the moment, hey, at least you’ve got a collectable pint glass to duck into.

And from this, a potential remedy for my romantic listlessness, a possible self-concept, an avenue of habitual action. How does “power-dating” sound? It’s more applicable than my retired manslut persona non grata, and it could be useful to get me out there in some way. It ties in with ambition and other shadowy forces that need outlets. I don’t know how it squares with living half-n-half between here and the Bay — where exactly do I set my sites? both? — but it seems worth trying.

The general premise is that, hey, I’m a single successful guy. I’m trying to make something of my life and managing some success. Why shouldn’t I be aiming high, perhaps absurdly and intentionally so, in my pursuit of companionship? Why shouldn’t I try to find someone who wants to be part of a power couple? It’s unlikely that my ambitions are going to cool off anytime soon, and I like powerful women, so why not make that my new thing?

I’m not sure yet, but this still seems like a halfway decent idea in the morning.

Finally, on another note, a chance for adventure. My great friend Julia has some free tickets to Coachella, and I’m going to try and pull off a little last-minute trip action. It’ll be good to get a change of scenery. I’ll take some photos or something.

…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.

High expectations, see? Still, well worth it overall. They’re touring forever and I’ll bet next friday’s Portland show will be a real winner. I’d be really curious to see what a home-town Carolina crowd is like:

I attended with LGD, the designated-driving Lande-man, and another sociologist friend of theirs, a pretty lady from Mexico headed to a Cambodian/Vietnamese border town this summer on a grant, getting the kids together via soccer. Pretty neat. They swung by the office to pick me up which is the first time I’ve been able to show it off to any of my friends, which I found myself kind of proud to do. We had Hardnox (soulfood) and then SparksPLUS (dangerbooze) out behind the loading dock before heading to the show; a pretty pitch-perfect evening in the dogpatch if you ask me.

After the concert, me and the boys retired to the Cornell Club, where Lande and Luke played guitar while I tried to stay lucid in the living room. I feel like I aught to learn to sing some songs. I’m not likely to pick up a very good instrument other than maybe the tambourine, but I want to participate in the whole music thing when my friends get into it. I’m no Sinatra, but I had enough training to front some folk tunes. Even if I’d known some, Friday night probably wasn’t going to work out owing to the late hour, etc, but in general it’s something that I could probably do a decent job at.

After staying up until around 4:30am with the guitar and shenanigans, Saturday’s sun was a harsh wake-up call five hours later. I try to resist the narrative of aging, quarterlife crisis (will I live to 116?), or whatever you like to call it, but there’s nothing that brings it down on you harder than realizing you’re totally spent after only one night out on the town. You grows up and you grows up and you grows up, I suppose.

The Girth is gone at a wedding this weekend, so it’s just me and LGD. We got it together for Yemeni coffee from our spot around the corner — good stuff from bright eyed smiley guys with awesome beards — talking about various strategies for meeting pretty ladies, etc. This is something I’ve lately been trying not to think about, seeing if the “watched pot never boils” adage might work in reverse. As an antidote to overthinking everything, I’ve been letting myself get carried away with work, tipping down the parabolic descent into what looks to be a very busy couple of months.

That’s probably a poor tactic (as opposed to, say, hanging around the Berkeley campus more, which is what I suggested to my man) but my hope is that there’s some kind of crucible to be had, that maybe I’ll emerge on the other side with a new brand of mojo. I feel that a confident and loving perception of self is a vital component to any romantic success, and being into it with the job — as opposed to grudging or beat-down — is a step in the right direction, even if it does put me at the particularly American risk of conflating career with life.

In keeping with that, after Yemeni coffee, I rallied with the Zacker and we did some handyman work at the office. Our big goal was to patch a hole in our bathroom wall which was made when we tied into the water/drain lines to add a kitchen sink on the other side. It wasn’t huge, but it was vaguely of peeping-tom-ish, which nobody really wants. Victory achieved: fiberglass tape and spackle are a powerful combination. We also cleaned up the network and the conference room. Ready to start adding more people now.

Upon returning to the East Bay it became readily apparent that Saturday night would be a mellow one, grand schemes for getting out on the scene notwithstanding. We watched Talladega Nights, which I thought was kind of amazing. Adam McKay and Will Farrel learned some lessons from Anchorman, it seems. The writing here is vastly less self-indulgent (if still fairly undisciplined) and aims much higher. At it’s best it achieves a kind of highbrow/lowbrow synthesis that’s rarely attempted and hard to pull off, but highly rewarding when achieved. I’m not sure how it was taken by racing fans, but the parody here seemed both respectful and deep, which is in keeping with the overall idea. I had relatively low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised. Compare and contrast, yaknow?

Anyway, that and an early bedtime was Saturday. Sunday is now, and the week begins again. I’ll probably spend most of the day nerding-out, maybe watch some basketball, get set for the days to come.

There’s trouble on every corner
I need a place to hide
the bad things follow us down
I want you by my side

Do we ever really know why
why the bad things come our way?
Do we ever really know
this is where we’re headed
this is were we’re going?

So, this is a lot darker than I actually feel. It’s good music though, and the “do we ever really know” question seems prescient.

Another imageless post, but via Atrios check it out: The Eagles are also disintermediating record labels.

Building on early work by Prince, and several upstart indie successes, it looks like more and more established acts are taking this route. Look for a new kind of helper company to emerge that can do online distribution, fan-club stuff, and booking for tours.

My old buddy Robin Jacksaphone is blowing through with his traveling band, the Vagabond Opera. They’ve been doing a west-coast circuit for the past couple years, and are getting really tight. There’s some great musical virtuosity and showmanship on display. Highlights include Skip the judo master of the Cello and the opera battles (really!) between Eric and Leslie. Everyone’s got zazz.

Watching their show last night reminded me what talent really means, and how performance can be a transcendent act. You look at someone differently after seeing that kind of thing transpire; the rockstar effect. There were parts in this show where I would involuntarily/incredulously drop my jaw, that made the top of my head tingle. And now I have a teenage schoolgirl band crush on Leslie, of course. She sings some songs in French!

Anyway, this was the opening night of their tour, so things just get better. The rest of the dates are:

• September 27th: Petaluma, CA
• September 28th: Sutter Creek, CA
• September 29th: Santa Cruz, CA
• October 1st: Monterey, CA
• October 2nd: Los Angeles, CA
• October 4th: Alta Dena, CA (Los Angeles)
• October 5th: Santa Monica, CA
• October 6th: San Diego, CA
• October 7th: San Francisco, CA
• October 9th: Berkeley, CA
• October 10th: Ashland, OR
• October 12th: Portland, OR

Details on their website. I strongly recommend the SF show, which will be at Amnesia, which will be a great venue for them.

At a higher level, as my friends and cohorts move on through their paths in life — careers, PhDs, families, etc — it’s really amazing to see the wonderful things people get into. It makes me want to step my own scene up a notch.

Last night went out to a kick-ass rock show at the Logger Bar in Blue Lake. It was fantastic in many ways.

First of all, the music was good! The headlining group was Orange Sunshine, from the Netherlands:

The problem with music in the late 60’s was the hippy shit, right? The goddamn peace and love stuff, the acoustic folkies, the going-to-San-Francisco-with-flowers-in-yr-hair.
But what if the 60’s were as wildly murderous a time as these strange days? What if it was ALL Charlie Manson and napalm and muddy drugfreak people and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker? Well, then, there’d only be, like, 5 bands left standing- the Stooges, the MC5, Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and Orange Sunshine.

They were well supported by Ghengis Khan from Oakland (no link, sorry) and notable locals The Ravens. It was all good loud, driving, rock and roll. Orange Sunshine and Ghengis Khan featured singing drummers (always a strong configuration when it works), and the Ravens frontwoman Melissa Medina is channeling some serious shit.

The Logger Bar is also a great place to have a show. It’s big enough to actually have a show in, but small enough that it feels full even when 1/2 the crowd hasn’t shown up yet. It’s also covered with ancient logging paraphernalia, like giant esoteric chainsaws and pickaxes. They serve 24oz cans of Pabst and although the two sturdy women behind the bar could have used a barback, it worked out ok.

And finally, everyone was there. It had the feeling of public life that I’ve been craving, and there were also girls (hooray, girls!).

Yeah, so a good time was had by all. My neck is sore today. Kudos to Kelly B for doing such a great job of organizing it. Hopefully this will happen more often.

So, I saw this somewhat amusing documentary called Dig!, about the Dandy Warhols (old Portland band, made it big w/European ringtones) and The Brian Jonestown Massacre (junkies from California). It’s an interesting time capsule of 1990s Americana, which we watched back on Vagabender in Tuscon. We’re making fun of it in this audio dispatch with the “You’re out of the band!” and “I can play 400 instruments!” lines.

In it, main ego-man from BJM comes off like a borderline messianic kook, which is by other accounts more or less accurate.

The thing you don’t really get from the documentary is how fucking good his music is. Clearly overblown sense of self? Yes. Also a sonic genius. Since I don’t have to deal with the personality, I enjoy the product.