" 'Why'd you bring me here?' I asked the Conductor as we were leaving the water. 'You don't even know me.'
'I took one look at you, and I knew this was your kind of thing,' he said.
'How could you tell?'
'Nobody chases a conductor down the platform to ask him why he's happy,' the Conductor said. 'People chase a conductor to chew his ass. So, girl, you surprised me. I owed you something special. Simple.'
If I'd delivered something special to everyone I probably owed it to, I'd be busy for a long time. Maybe, though, I could try to deliver a little more from here on out."
-- from 'The Year of Yes' by Maria Dahvana Headley
One of the best aspects of living in San Francisco is being surrounded by the amazing quality and selection of food around here. Northern California provides the perfect soil and weather to grow a variety of succulent fruits and veggies, and slow food/organic/culinary visionaries have elevated clean, simple, tasty food preparation to a high art.
Organic food often gets a bad rap for being too expensive, and in cases like the $8 nectarine at Zuni, I agree. But for the most part I'm happy to pay a premium price for premium food, because I'm ingesting it. It's going inside my body! Half the high-price complainers I hear are strutting around in $150 boots or driving $30,000 cars. Sure, you could get conventionally-grown bananas for a lot cheaper, but at what price? I see organic eating as a long term investment -- check back with me in a decade or so and we'll see how good I look and feel.
But there's a short term payoff in eating organic fruits and veggies: the taste. Any time someone starts complaining about the uselessness of buying organic, I wish I had a portable taste-test station with me. All I would need to do is have them taste a conventionally grown strawberry, followed by an organic strawberry. I remember tasting my very first organic strawberry about 8 years ago at a farmers market in Manhattan's Upper West Side. "This tastes like candy!!" I thought to myself, and ecstatically bought two basket to take home. Later on, I realized why I'd compared it to "wild strawberry" candy -- because fruit is meant to taste that way. Ever since conventional growers began cultivating the biggest (bigger is better, right?), brightest (it's all about looks in this country) and heartiest specimens (able to sustain traveling long distances) to meet the demands of the big box grocery stores, most of us have forgotten that fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste good. You know how when you cut open your conventionally-grown strawberry it's mostly white inside? Organic strawberries are a deep, tasty, dark red throughout, and the smallest ones are often the best.
This weekend San Francisco is hosting the inaugural Slow Food Nation event, billed as an opportunity to "celebrate, learn and act to build a food system that is sustainable, just and delicious." My mouth was watering at the thought of strolling and sampling my way through the Taste Pavilions (coffee! chocolate! beer!) but the tasting tours are completely sold out. And as much as I agree that Slow Food Rocks, I don't see the connection between great produce and Gnarls Barkley, especially not at 60 bucks a ticket.
In lieu of attending Slow Food Nation this weekend, I'll make my regular Saturday morning visit to the best Taste Pavilion in the US: the Ferry Building farmers market. I get amazing produce, coffee, prepared foods and flowers there every week, and it's the main reason I eat so well.
All these thoughts were inspired by my breakfast this morning. I ate candy stripe figs, black mission figs, golden raspberries and blackberries with granola and yogurt. A typical beautiful breakfast for me.
* Special thanks to my iPhone for the distorted image.
Yesterday afternoon I was leafing through my albums, looking for the right record to lift my mood. I settled on Crowded House's eponymous debut from 1986, the one with their biggest U.S. hit "Don't Dream It's Over".
I know every single word to this record, and being able to sing along to it was part of the reason why I put it on. It's also a fantastic record from start to finish, and it began my love affair with Neil Finn's voice and songwriting skills.
What occurred to me for the first time yesterday is how morbid the lyrics are across the entire album. Here is a sampling of the dark topics found on this melodic and upbeat(-sounding) pop masterpiece:
Mean To Me: "now her parents are divorced and her friend's committing suicide... I was thinking of a padded cell"
World Where You Live: "friends come round you might remember and be sad behind their eyes is unfamiliar"
Hole in the River: "Theres a hole in the river where my auntie lies From the land of the living to the air and sky Left her car by the river left her shoes beside... We were touched by a cold wind, my father and I The sound of desperate breathing her fear inside us all She was coming to see him but something changed her mind Drove her down to the river There is no return"
I Walk Away: "Reveal whatever you desire To you it may be death defying Black day In the coldness of winter Black words Slipping off my tongue I say forget it - its over As a dark cloud covered up the sun"
That's What I Call Love: "Feeling devastated Thats what I call Hangin on and fallin over Thats what I call Tired and deflated Thats what I call Love... I got a little room The air's still pretty bad I die tonight"
I would love to know what Neil was going through when he wrote these songs. As a lyricist he consistently valued creativity over cliche, but I don't recall many of his other albums being quite this dark. If you just listen to the music and his buoyant voice, you'd never know he wasn't going along, feeling just fine.
Let's watch some Crowded House videos from this era.
A live version of "Mean To Me" from '87:
Surely you've seen this video for "Don't Dream It's Over". Speaking of his creativity as a lyricist, I love the thought of millions of people singing along to lines like "try to catch the deluge in a paper cup..." This is such a beautiful song:
Uno mas. The video for "World Where You Live" is pretty great. This song describes a whole genre of people I've known in my life:
"Tell me, I don't know where you go. Do you climb into space? To the world where you live."
The Buzzy Bumble Sweater comes from Mr Soft Top's Etsy shop. I have to commend Mr Soft Top's choices in models. If I can't fulfill my dream of someday getting a French bulldog, I would gladly take a Brussels Griffon as a second runner-up.
Cheers to my girl Cate Sevilla on her recent launch of BitchBuzz. Please hop on over to check it out for smart, funny posts on everything from lists of snorgly dog sweaters to love advice to tech talk from a female perspective (and not in that "I'm talking about tech to get attention from dudes" kind of way). My favorite posts are currently coming from the BitchBuzz Style page. Great work, Cate!!
Aside from being an astounding vocalist and quite a showperson (she really knew how to put together a band), Teena Marie also wrote and produced many of her biggest hits. (You can tell she's serious-business by how high she wears her Strat.) She also made inroads for recording artists. After a nasty legal battle with Motown Records, courts passed what is known as "The Teena Marie Law" which prevents labels from keeping an artist under contract without
putting out an album by him or her.
Teena Marie is for the real.
"Lovergirl" has been in my head all day. Crank it:
I need your love and I won't bring no pain
A little birdie told me that you feel the same
I'm for the real and for you I'm true blue
Let's make a deal, sugar, all I want to do is be your one and only lover
I just want to be your lovergirl
I just want to rock your world
Hey...hey...hey...
This is a tale about Powell's Books, and how I went from a curious supporter to a lifelong fan of a terrific independent book store in Portland, Oregon.
I've heard about Powell's for many years. In almost every conversation I have with a friend or acquaintance about Portland, they say, "Have you been to Powell's?!?" before describing the store's grandeur. Many of my touring musician friends tell me it's a required stop for them any time they roll through Portland. Being a book lover myself, I've always wanted to go to see what the fuss is about.
Knowing I don't have any trips to Portland planned any time soon, I figured I could satisfy my curiosity in the meantime by joining Powell's subscription club a few months ago through Powells.com. I got my second shipment last week and wrote a blog post about it, complete with photos of each item that came in the subscription box.
Among the comments to that post was a note from Beth, offering to send me some "thank you swag". Firstly, all bloggers love to get comments, especially positive comments. But to be contacted by the person/company you're writing about is pretty incredible. This has happened to me a few times over the years I've been blogging, and it's always a great feeling.
My phone insists on making the back of the shirt look purple, which it is not. It's brown and yellow, actually, like the photo above.
I will wear/sip from my Powell's swag with pride, and will always have my little story to tell about them. I applaud Powell's for speaking to me, just one of their many customers, in a friendly, personable way and taking the extra steps to do something nice for me. Plus, any company or person who treats bloggers well is one of the good guys in my book. They have a new fan for life.
Even if you don't live in Portland, Oregon, Powells.com will take care of all your bookish needs!
Today, the company I work for launched a really cool new website at http://www.blogs.com**. A team of editors is curating lists and picks of the best of the blogosphere, so you can go there to discover new blogs to read.
One of the coolest features is a bunch of Top 10 Blogs lists created by web personalities and a few celebrities. I couldn't resist clicking on Alyssa Milano's 10 Favorite Blogs, and I was shocked to find amongst her recommendations a link to a blog post I really wanted to read:
I love Chad VanGaalen, so I clicked right over to 3Hive and found a link to the song "Willow Tree" off his forthcoming album Soft Airplane out on September 9th on Flemish Eye Records.
VanGaalen can careen stylistically from fuzzed out lo-fi punk to lullaby-worthy ballads, and this song lands in his underwater-y Neil Young-ish milieu, which we've heard on his prior two albums. In a short description of the forthcoming album, his label references his characteristic genre-hopping and even the rare gem that is Neil Young's On the Beach. But you can't get a read on a VanGaalen record from a handful of words or with just this one song. I'm very much looking forward to buying this record -- on vinyl as it'll have two bonus tracks -- as soon as it's released.
And now for some Chad VanGaalen appreciation videos:
CVG animates some of his own videos. Here's a great one:
CVG performs live from his basement, when he couldn't get across the US-Canada border to play at SXSW last year:
**I promise this isn't a thinly veiled promotion for Blogs.com, because I make it a point to keep my work blogging and personal blogging separate. This is just me marveling at how Alyssa Milano inadvertently led me to a new Chad VanGaalen mp3. Who would have thought?
I've taken five dance classes in three days. I'm tired, but the soundtrack in my head is keeping me awake.
To add to yesterday's r&b mini mix, here are two more dance class warmup songs I'm totally obsessed with:
Morgan Page feat. Lissie "The Longest Road (Deadmau5 Remix) - We start out on this song doing 20 pushups, but other than that it's a lot of fun stretching and doing situps to it. The version we work out to is 7+ minutes long, but unfortunately this video only gives you about four minutes:
Black Spade's "Actioneer" - This track reminds me of something TV on the Radio might make. I definitely want to check out the rest of this album when I have time.
Who still has cassette tapes anymore?
Keep the dream alive: send a photo of yourself holding a cassette tape to kteeger AT yahoo and I'll add it to the gallery.
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