Uh-Oh

I've got a bachelor party this weekend for a close buddy from high school. About 10-15 of my oldest, dearest friends are gonna be there. It was supposed to be an all-day thing, starting tomorrow at 9:00 am. There's a ferry boat to Angel Island, and something about a bocce ball tournament. That's the basics. Then I got an email at work today, that they're coming into the city for the prelims tonight, and want to come by my friend's bar, the girl I met a few weeks ago on my birthday, the one who serenaded me with her violin. Then a second email came in, and Sunday is now set aside for the Fillmore Jazz Festival. It all sounds great. But I also know that, despite the assurances to my mom, things tend to get rowdy when the boys come to the city for a little fun. Regardless, all of us together is going to be a blast, and if things get a bit out of hand, so be it. That's how these things go.

Anyway, haven't been keeping up with the site the past ten days. Work's busy, and I've been running fast. I do have some new pictures coming soon. I also have a new image on the home page, a redesigned layout with the left nav bar, and new bio and favorites sections. Check them out if you have the time.

Also, here are some new links, all of them cool and inspiring in their own right:
Rodolph Simeon Photography
Laura Laine Illustrations
Steven Knodel Designer
Daniel Cascone Digital Life
Submarine Chanel Title Sequences
Colin Pantall Photography
Dan Zoubeck Photography

Cheers!

Where It's At

I. Ed Jew is not a Jew!
Supervisor Ed Jew is in hot water over his legal residence. This led to the headline of the week on the front page of yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle :

"Mayor to Jew: Prove it."

(Note that in the web version linked above, the Supervisor's first name {Ed} was listed in the headline, but in the print version it was omitted, hence the humor in the Mayor demanding that he drop his drawers and prove that he's been circumcised. That is what he's demanding, right?)

II. Overhead on Haight Street.
A yuppie family walks out of a smoke shop last Sunday, the junior high-age son carrying a fresh pack of incense. The mother, smiling, says to him:

"Now I know what you've been doing at Johnny's house when his parents are away!"

III. Jerome's in the house.
This is still classic.

IV. The Cave Singers Part II.
Well Matador didn't like that I linked an MP3 from their site, despite the fact that they offer it free, and all I did was promote one of their artists. Oh well. They still are an awesome label. Here are a few additional tracks, ideal for hungover Sunday mornings with your first cup of black coffee, as you lament where all the time has gone.

Cave Singers

This is a beautiful song by the Cave Singers, who are playing Bottom of the Hill June 27th, if you're in SF. For the rest of their west coast tour, click here.

Another One Goes By

While I didn't tell a soul that it was my birthday yesterday, preferring to be under the radar, secretly I planned on having a fun day. Luckily, I choose a good time to take off, in that the weather was gorgeous - like 80 degrees and sunny - and we were coming off a show Saturday night, so there was naturally a bit of a letdown at the gallery, a changing of the gears, if you will, as we transition into the next exhibit. My plan was to get up early, read the paper at the cafe around the corner, and then come home and finish a story I've been working on forever, one that's four weeks late and driving me insane. I figured I could do this in three hours.

Unfortunately, I was feeling good, and just didn't want to ruin things by trying to write, so I instead made some design changes here and listened to A.) The Best of Blur B.) Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Show Your Bones c.) the 2nd side of The Kinks' Ultimate Collection (all three in their entirety) which had me in a upbeat mood, visual work and good music having this effect on me.

Around 1:00 pm I took off for the SFMOMA, thinking the Bruce Nauman exhibit was still up. (Don’t ask me why I didn't look this information up beforehand.) However, I decided about half way there to stop for a drink, just to kick start the afternoon. For some reason I was drawn to this dive bar that I had once spent a New Year's at, probably twelve years ago now, where my buddy was shooting dice with the bartender for fifteen-dollar shots, and he got struck, bad - I mean he ended up dropping a hundred bucks in less than a half-hour - and stumbled out of there as faded as I've ever seen someone (she felt guilty for taking his money so every time he bought her a drink she reciprocated and gave him a free one), where he then proceeded to find a shopping cart and, before we knew what happened, hop inside and drive down Powell (one of the steepest streets in the city), weaving in and out of traffic at like forty miles an hour, in a fuckin' shopping cart, and man, from where we were standing I thought he was done for.

Anyway, for some reason I decided to go to this same bar, planning just one cocktail, but low and behold, the most adorable Filipino girl was behind the counter, and there were only like two or three other people in there, so right away we started talking and hitting it off, and when she learned it was my birthday she started buying me shots, and then I started buying her shots, just because her smile was so adorable, and before long she had busted out her fiddle and was playing these old Irish folk songs for me, and at a certain point it felt like we were in a Scorsese soundtrack, and I was so touched and inspired and stoked. It was that nice of a moment.

To make a long story short, I didn't leave until 5:00 pm and had just enough time to see the lame Matisse sculptures at the MOMA, wander through the same old permanent collection I've seen at least a dozen times now, and then leave in disgust a half-hour later, really only jazzed about the CCA design posters on the 2^nd floor, which was partially out of pride for having gone there.

So instead of my big day writing, an afternoon relaxing at the MOMA, a late lunch at the Embarcadero with some Chicken Katsu, and then a screening of Ocean's Thirteen, which was the list I had written out the night before, I ended up drinking most of the day, making a new friend in the process, and then stumbling home for a Royal Tenenbaums / BottleRocket double-feature in bed, where I was most comfortable, and where the absurdity of failing at every task hadn’t fully registered yet.

Now that I think about it, though, it was a fun day - I can't argue that - and if there's a pattern in my life it's this: nothing ever goes as expected, and when it does, I don't know how to recognize it anyway.

But you know what? I wouldn't change a thing.

(Well, that's a lie, but it sounded good, so please pretend that's how this piece ended.)

Automatic Art and Design

I really dig this studio's work.

Insignificance

I don't have the answers. Most of my students used to find this refreshing, just because they had spent their whole childhood being told things by people, as if they were experts, as if their way was the only one, and then suddenly they're eighteen or nineteen (or whatever age those kids were) and here comes this guy, just a few years older, an authority figure no less, and he says, what the fuck do I know, and more importantly, what they fuck do the rest of them know?

It's always empowering to realize our own insignificance, don't you think?

I say all this because, there seems to be a lot of people in my life who are sad or miserable or unstable in some way, and constantly there's a crisis that's not really a crisis, an emergency that's really something that the rest of us just have to deal with (it's called life), and yet, they seem to think I can solve their problems. Of course, I get it on some level, and even like it in some respects - it’s flattering, you know? - but on a day-to-day basis, it's a heavy burden. No, I don't know why bad things always seem to happen to you. Although, if pressed, I'd look at the perception itself, and study how that factors into things, because, deep down, on a day-to-day basis, there's nobody fucking with you. There are smart choices and there are dumb ones, and a lot of space in between, and quite often it's our own decisions that affect how successful or happy we are. Most people don't like hearing this (I certainly don't). We just want to be assured that we're right, even when it's obvious we're wrong.

My favorite character in one of my favorite movies is Max Fisher from Rushmore. When Herman Blume, the millionaire, asks him what the secret to life is, Max says, "I don't know. I guess you've just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore."

That's it. I'm not trying to be insensitive. I'm not trying to say, I told you so. Sometimes life deals us a cruel hand, but nobody owns the copyright on misery. Some people are more fortunate than others. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. It sucks, it really does, but I don't know why any of this happens, and neither does anybody else.

Deal with it. That’s the only choice we have, until the time comes when we’re not aware that there are any choices. And that time will come. Sooner than you think.

One-Hand Clapping

This is so great. It's one of many reasons why I like Gehry. He has a great sense of humor.

Last Forever

It's 12:41 am, I'm sitting in nothing but my boxers, it's warmer than it's been in three weeks and yet it rained on my walk home, and I just had the pleasure of seeing Pretty Girls Make Graves play their last show ever in San Francisco, at the best venue in the city, the Great American Music Hall. It was exhilarating and glorious and spectacular, and they rocked, and I don't want the night to end.

"Tell them to wear white and come when I call."

I'm a connoisseur of documentaries, I mean I devour three or four a week, and I have to say, Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple has to be far and away one of the most fascinating, dark, disturbing, powerful films I've seen in quite some time. The conclusion, as you can probably imagine, is just chilling, and they literally have footage, both visual and audio-wise, that captures the entire scene.