A Hitchcockian SXSW
I’m going to SXSW! I’m a Southby innocent, but as a journalist, I feel like it’s my induction this year to music festivals, and I’ll also be covering Coachella. I’ve been to Siren and CMJ, all the summer shows in New York, etc, but I’ve never been a music festival person. But these next couple years, I think I’m becoming a Flash Mobs-mentality-loving festival person. I think I’m going to try to hit Art Basel, the Venice Biennale, the Winter Music Conference and/or Austin City Limits this year.
I’m going to be interviewing the likes of the lovely Au Revoir Simone and reviewing favorite new band Lissy Trullie as well as hanging out with some friends in the heat of much-adored ATX. I like to keep my life flavored weird, so Austin rubs me the right way with its laidback attitude, airstream trailers, funky shops, outdoor springs to swim in and good barbecue.
Last time I was in Austin, I stayed with my best friend at the Austin Motel (Motto: “So Close, Yet So Far Out”) for added flavor, and also at a friend’s house in East Austin, and almost got attacked by grackles, the pigeons of Austin. Let’s hope the influx of Bklynites in Austin can be the only invasion this time, preempting a Birds redux.
I’m also thinking about getting tattooed at Mom’s.
I’m prepping for a big whirlwind of events in my life. I’ve been tying up loose ends, cleaning house and prepping for a huge trip. I’m going to (deep breath):
Austin
St. Augustine
Sarasota
New York
London
Paris
Nice
Avignon
Maybe Amsterdam
Maybe Berlin
Maybe Dubai
Maybe Petra
Los Angeles
Protected: i <3
Street Art Fix
Melbourne is well known for being the stencil art capital of the world. Stencil art is easy to throw up quickly, allowing street artists to avoid cops and reproduce their work quickly or build upon certain archetypes easily. It gets dissed some by other graffiti artists as being a lesser form of street art, but I personally really enjoy it. It can be light but it can also be pretty intense and political. I’m only really familiar with what Faile, Swoon, Banksy and Psalm do, but I’m looking forward to someday going to Melbourne and seeing more in person. I used to see a lot of good murals in Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill when I lived there, and have seen some amazing stuff in the Mission of course, but have yet to be taken on an LA tour by the brother.
Also, the brother, he of the mad hip-hop headness and graffiti afficionadoisme, recently sent me a couple issues of Giant Robot, one of which featured street art on Obama and the whole Obama poster movement. I thought it was pretty cool that Kofie One did a piece in Obama’s LA headquarters. I don’t usually dig what I see as propaganda, and I am a bit skeptical of the phrase “Hope” being a man’s entire slogan, but I love the piece he did.
“Graffiti” comes from the Italian word “graffiato” meaning scratch, and can also refer to the type of art in which a veneer is scratched away to reveal something underneath. I guess it’s a good metaphor for the function of political graffiti then as well.
iPod killed the Vending Machine
I was walking through the Oakland airport on my way to the Inland Empire that I’m so ambivalent about, when I came upon this crazy contraption in the Jetblue terminal. I know that Jetblue and Apple lifestyle brand in a way that captures someone like me’s attention, and this sure did. But then, it’s not just the 20-something with disposable cash (or who used to have disposable cash until the recession) who is drawn like a moth experiencing taxis. Two security guards and several middle-aged men stood next to me, gazing longingly at the tech candy. I was transfixed considering the options, and then walked away. I’d like to note that many of the video games were sold out.
The Mason-Dixon Line of Food.
This amusing post pretty much aptly describes the time I had a kimchi soju party at my house and several of my friends called the next day to say that they’d drank entire bottles of the vodka Georgi (also known as gasoline, lighter fluid and Drano) and not felt as bad as they did post-soju. I had warned them to watch out for that innocuous rice liquor, it sneaks up on you… I also have been loving on some Berkeley Sho Chiku Bai recently.
Observations:
- 1. Kimchi is the Mason-Dixon line of fermented foods (trust me, there is funkier/Southerner/saucier in the analogy to fermented foods).
- 2. Soju is made by evil dowsers from hell who also own the pharmaceutical company that sells Korea most of its hangover pills (a whole cottage industry of hangover pills exists in Korea).
psychedelia pixellated
Some many years ago now, I had the good fortune to interview two brilliant (I don’t use that word like the Brits, I really mean it) artists, composer/performer Dave Longstreth from the Dirty Projectors and James Sumner, who animated the film to accompany the album The Getty Address. During the interview, there was a strange and somewhat brutal cat mating in the backyard of one of my favorite old haunts, Supercore (Godard in the bathroom, Japanese food at your table - what more could you ask for?), but that somehow seemed apropos for the whole strange atmosphere. I don’t think the interview ever went to press, but I always learn a lot from interviewing and James, who was a swthrt, gave me a copy of the DVD and it is one of the most beautiful animations I’ve ever seen.
If you like the Dirty Projectors vid, you’ll also like MGMT’s Time to Pretend, which you can engage in (and I really mean that, the mouths are quite scary and suck you in) here. It has a similar mythic (anti-)hero’s journey. Try putting on some Vietnam and watching the vid for a truly bizarre experience.
I tend to like psychedelic videos better than clever and charming ones, but if you’ve some spare time, watch the clever and charming works of Vampire Weekend’s Oxford Comma.
And speaking of clever, is there one giant band naming syndicate? Can they break the chain of Wolves, Birds, Monsters/Dinosaurs and Faux City, Preppy School and Dictionary Names, as well as the overusage (abuse, I dare say) of the word Black that plague bands? (Black Kids, you are justified by being so tongue-in-cheek and Black Flag gets a hall pass for how cool an entirely black flag would look, but Black Keys, Black Lips, Black Moth Super Rainbow and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, just imagine your names with the word Pink instead). After all, if any more trexes chase pterodactyls or any more wolves parade into any more winged ilk like black moths or birdy andrews who sing about rushes of blood to the heads of vampires who spend their weekends in montreal and barcelona studying their oxford dictionaries, I might just lose it. Perhaps we could start angling toward ice cream flavors or bizarre pagan musical instruments instead. No more animals!
We are the Third Person Pluriel
Michelle says I need to update more often, and she is right, so here I am. I miss her very much, so I shall comply. It’s good to know someone enjoys reading this besides me.
It’s funny because I’ve actually tried to do this post about six times, on my Google phone and on my friend’s laptop, but been unsuccessful each time. It might be my blog telling me by default that I need to edit, because each time I write it the post is shorter. Compress, compress, compress, until your writing is like a rushing river instead of a lake or stream, my professor used to say. Yes, Professor Gunter (his real name was something else but his long hair and glasses made me think Gunter). Except some of us like streams that are wide and dispersed and all over the place. But most of us like reading rushing rivers more than lackadaisal lakes, that is true.
Anyways, the point of this is that lately I’ve been thinking very philosophically. Perhaps a bit too much. I was hanging out with a couple friends who had masters in philsophy, so you can’t blame me. I think a lot about Pascal’s Wager, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Foucault’s Panopticon and Hegel’s Dialectic (Mlle Michelle, do tell me if this gets boring). Sometimes I think about these things when I’m out partying with friends, nodding and smiling while talking about The Hills or the best place to get a haircut. Sometimes I think about them when I’m walking down the street bobbing my head to the sounds of Girl Talk and CSS. Sometimes I think about them at the gym, at trapeze, or while writing an email about something entirely unrelated, like vegan pesto recipes. The point is, I’m not sure why I think about philosophical and social issues on a wider scale so much, but I do. If some cop looks at me a little funny, I sometimes start to think, he’s focusing his Cyclops laser eye on me and enshrouding me in the panopticon. The judges of normality are everywhere though, not just in some cop, though that’s an obvious sign.
I’ve also developed an obsession with Magritte that has been slowly growing over the past six years since I worked at an art library and would spend my time perusing his monographs. Today I got a haircut in the Castro and then went to Aardvark and bought a beautiful Taschen monograph. This is one of my favorite Magrittes, and exhibits his obsession with murder mysteries. Ceci n’est pas une photo dans un blog.
The last thing I’ve been thinking about is how much we use the third person online these days, on Twitter and Facebook. “Jim is tired and stressed” is a common one. “Ann wants a chocolate bar.” It kind of allows us to spontaneously vent these very instinctual feelings - my Facebook updates are seldom very intellectual or go beyond basic desires - there isn’t that much space anyways. But I find it sort of strange. It’s like you’re hovering above your own self, watching the narrative of what’s going on play out. Sort of a mind-body disconnect, if you ask me. I don’t know if I want to watch the narrative of my own life play out, but the systems don’t really allow you to take possession of the first person and say “I” so it’s sort of like reading a very disjointed diary novel of yourself over time.
“(YOUR NAME) is polishing (HER/HIS) friend’s toenails with “Meet Me Under the Miss-All-Toes” and wishing (SHE/HE) was the person who got to name nail polish colors for a living, unless (SHE/HE) had to smell them all first.” That objectification of self through third person pronouns is sort of strange (not to mention it’s strange you’re polishing your friend’s toenails, what were you thinking???)
Sleep Deficit Mirrors Economic Deficit.
After I moved from New York to San Francisco, I slept (or somnabulised through all my non-sleeping actions) for about two days straight. The reason for this is illustrated well by Greg Hathaway’s photo:
Greg Hathaway's Photo
SF has more than seven hills.
This city is full of hills. They exist even where you have the best of intentions to ignore them, or deny their existential rights.
I spent yesterday biking to the bike shop, biking to the gym, biking to work, biking to the fantastic California Academy of Sciences (which has seven hills of soil and plants on its Living Roof to represent the legendary seven San Francisco hills), biking around the park and biking back home. I am exhausted and in pain from crisscrossing the city so many times and from my bicep and shoulder workout for trapeze. I am now lying on the above sofa and nursing my tired, aching muscles with heat and soon, the gym sauna.
From the photo above, you can see what I see every night - windy Lombard street, the curliest street in San Francisco. It’s made of brick and truly fun to walk down (but not up!). I’d like to paint it yellow gold some evening in a spate of performance art, but will refrain til I have bail money. At night, the headlights coming down Lombard’s ribbon curls look like snail’s antennae, slowly inching down and around each curve. Those are the kind of hill grades I don’t even attempt to walk or ride up.
You can use this amarpai.com bike route planner to help you avoid some of the hills and keep the incline at a certain level, but sooner or later, one of them is going to get you. Mine was at Alamo Square. You know when you’re going so slow uphill it looks like you’re almost moving backwards in a zoetrope?
Riding home in the dark through Golden Gate Park, my light obsessively and annoyingly blinking its tri-fab pattern that tells drivers to back off, I felt incredibly relaxed and yet alert, the cool air whooshing around me as I cruised onto the Panhandle and past plenty of other bikers. I’m never happier than when I’m on a bike.
It’s off to the Inner Sunset, petite Asie j’y viens! I think I’ll ride a lovely cable car (I regularly commute by them when I’m going over Nob Hill, that’s a whole other promised post because the cable cars are so interesting and the conductors so funny) to get down to the MUNI today, I’m too tired to remember the Alamo.
For the Love of Arugula, Community and Slow Food.
I love arugula. There you go, I’ve said it. Cue the ”latte-drinking health nut liberals.”
Call it rocket, call it roquette, call it rucola, call it rabbit feed, call me crazy for the amounts of peppery, fragrant goodness I consume, just don’t take it away from my farmers markets or grocery stores.
I was in Italy the first time I really learned to appreciate it, but American tourists seemed befuddled by the ever present use of this strange plant known to botanists as eruca sativa in their Italian food. Translated as rocket on the menus because that is the British interpretation, when we would order it, the occasional befuddled American tourist couple would lean over to us and whisper loudly, What is rocket? We would giggle a little bit and explain, That’s for the benefit of the British tourists, and they think you understand what that means since technically, Americans and Brits inhabit the same language zone. When it came out sauteed with pasta, they were even more confused. In America, arugula is often sort of an exotic afterthought, or side garnish, a nice thing to put on a pretty catering menu to instantly class it up, or an easy salad mix when tempered by other, less aggressive greens.
Interestingly enough for remention here if you were somehow able to resist clicking on the enticing latte link above, la rucola, mi amici, has become a class emblem in America, its innocuous, tender shoots somehow finding themselves embroiled in a famous presidential hullabaloo in which Obama asked Iowa farmers if they had seen the high price of arugula in a Whole Foods lately, followed by an Obama- and arugula-bashing backlash conflating the two as elitist snobbery from conservatives. Arugula has come to be the standard bearer for elitist foodie culture, somehow. How did this Mediterranean beauty bearing small white flowers come to be the emblem of gourmet eating? You’ll have to pledge allegiance to reading The United States of Arugula to find out. Your author here hasn’t read it yet, but is reserving it from the local library.
I’m lucky - I live in San Francisco, where it’s fairly easy to be a “locavore” (I still shudder a little bit every time I say that word, and prefer to keep the “l” in local or just say “I try to eat local, sustainable, organic foods” but for the purpose of this post, the 2007 Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year serves its purpose as a link to Bay Area local foods). I have year round farmer’s markets at my disposal and a flood of organic and non-organic local-grown foods. My folks live near LA, where produce is even more abundant year round, and my mother has a large garden and orchard in her backyard (I like to call it the Funny Farm because it raised us, and it’s larger than the house) that sprouts all kinds of eggplants, squash, tomatoes and peppers, Korean vegetables American folks have never even seen or tasted that she’s carefully reseeded to replant over the years, persimmons, dates, pomegranates, figs, lemons, oranges, etc etc. But when I was living in New York, it was often a struggle to try to eat locally and much easier to eat Organic Apple from New Zealand First, waxy Washington Non-Organics Second, Local New York Apples Non-Existent, despite believing in Local First, Organic Second.
I’ve been doing a lot of food writing in the past year, despite a notoriously unreliable laptop/Internet access situation. Last night I found myself expounding on these pieces on the sudden glut of small, local pickle companies, the production of tofu, the Korean fried chicken cult classic spawning restaurants, the development of a food business on an intentional community (and the successes and conflicts there), for a group of fantastic folks with whom I am planning the counterPULSE Slow Food Feast of Fools and Friends. Chris Carlsson, the founder and also one of the original founders of Critical Mass, hosted us at his wonderful abode with friends, delicious tortilla lasagna and salad and wine, and plenty of good talk and ideas. It will be a fantastic night of revelry, dance, music, food and kinship that will honor the philosophy and actuality of slow food and the people who plant it, harvest it, distribute it, cook it, eat it, share it and form bonds around it.
If you’d told me even a few weeks ago as I attended Slow Food Nation that my mother was the first Slow Foodist in my life, that she says similar things to Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, who all spoke at Slow Food Nation, that she inspires community politics the way Winona LaDuke, one of my heroes, has, I wouldn’t have believed you. I never realised it or thought it because she never talked about it “that” way, with any sense of lingo or production. But she was, and she still is, my primary source for Slow Food love and belief in community as our most important asset and future of survival. Growing up in restaurants and cafes and in her kitchen, I learned that food is not elitist. Food is and should be for everyone, food connects us, food is worth obsessing over and paying tribute to, the earth is valuable and when you share your food you share your community.
So, if you fancy, throw that arugula in the pan with some friends and some mushrooms, onions and pasta, or roll it up real quick in some wraps with sauteed delicata, yellow pepper, sprouts and eggplant (or aubergine or baba ghanoush), or you can start a supper club in your area and advertise it at your local coop, or do some work with your local sustainable agriculture, WWOOF farm, CSA, greenmarkets or Food Not Bombs. In the meantime, I’m off to find myself some rucolino, a peppery Italian digestif made from arugula that sounds just about perfect to me.