art is the new religion

Kings of Leon, revisited

I'm getting my music recommendations from really weird places these days.  I don't listen to the radio or watch TV and rarely check in with music blogs or music magazines.  The promotional CD fairy has flown away since I'm not actively writing about music.  And when I listen to music, it's usually from my own collection or from something I've intentionally sought out on Rhapsody.

So where am I hearing about new stuff?  One source is (non-music) blogs.

I already told you how Alyssa Milano inadvertently alerted me to the new Chad VanGaalen album coming out. That was unexpected.

I've recently, and extraordinarily late in the game, started regularly reading Dooce's very famous blog.  (For my friends who read this blog who are not SF Web 2.0 know-it-alls, Dooce got fired from her job for blogging years ago and now basically feeds her entire family from her blog empire.  The woman's a true pioneer and a phenomenal writer to boot.)  Turns out she's got pretty great taste in music too, even though music is hardly the focus of her blogging.

Dooce tipped me off to Kings of Leon's new single "Sex on Fire" in this post.  Now, I tried to like the toothsome brothers in Kings of Leon when they first came out, but something put such a bad taste in my mouth for them that I have written them off ever since.  Then Dooce's description of the song piqued my curiosity:  "Holy God, this song is so good. One morning last week it came on the satellite radio when I was taking Leta to school, just as we were pulling into the parking lot, and I totally made her sit there in the backseat so I could listen to the whole thing. And she kept rolling her eyes at me AS IF SHE COULD JUST SIT THERE AND IGNORE ITS BRILLIANCE. WHATEVER." and (via her Twitter) "'Sex on Fire' is on the radio in the car right now, and yeah, I'm actually humping the dashboard."

After that recommendation, I had to listen to determine whether I disagreed with Dooce's taste in music or whether KOL had actually recorded a song I could like.  Turns out they recorded a pretty amazing song; it's not going to change my life, but it is phenomenally catchy and passionate, and those brothers sure are growing up to be fine specimens.  Caleb's voice breaks and squeaks in just the right ways, like he's giving you all he's got.

The official video for the song exploits the brothers' attractiveness in a very satisfying way, and is worth watching for that reason, but their ignorant record company has disabled embedding the video (and you know how I feel about that).  But here's a great live version:

There's something kind of retro about this song - it's exuberant and not ironic.  It's straightforward, not trying to be clever.  Reminds me of the sincere delivery and giant choruses of old Pearl Jam.  The chorus - "your sex is on fire" - is dumb as a rock; but isn't that the point sometimes? 

In all those ways, this song - from Only By The Night which was released this week - is a perfect specimen.

Where's your sense of nonsense, Jinksy?

Earlier today I was chatting over IM with my friend Anil, and in reply to a story he told, I wrote "I hate meeces to pieceeeees."  His response was to ask, sincerely, why I hate mice because he knows me as an animal lover.

me: "i was quoting Mr. Jinks"
Anil: "i don't know who that is"

Anyone who knows Anil "seen it." Dash knows it's really hard to stump him, especially when it comes to pop culture references. 

The quote is from Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the late 50's/early 60's.  Mr. Jinks is a cartoon cat whose incredibly entertaining voice sounds as if he's just polished off his fourth martini.  His nemeses are Pixie (blue bow tie) and Dixie (red vest and Southern drawl).

YouTube has a bunch of episodes of the cartoon, but of course I couldn't easily find one with the famous "I hate meeces to pieces" catchphrase.  But here's a great episode that'll give you the gist of their personalities:

Things I love in this episode:

• Old school cartoon sound effects are the greatest.
• "Ahem"
• "Must be somethin' you et."
• Those mice have swank furniture, and they read in their downtime.  Classy.
• "Where's your sense of nonsense, Jinksy?"

Brazilian Girls on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic

Brazilian Girls is one of those bands which I've heard of over the years, listened to once or twice, but never really formed a positive or negative opinion about.  Yesterday I happened to click to watch this live performance from KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, and I was charmed:

Brazilian Girls from http://kcrwmusicnews.vox.com/

The song didn't really grab me in the beginning - her whistling is quite impressive, but I let the song run in the background while I read some other blogs.  But when she began the chorus, I stopped in my tracks. There's a sensory shift from the jaunty, plonky verse as the chorus quiets (ethereal, melancholy) then opens up (arching, angelic).  "Do you like my accent..." she asks, singing foreign words, playing with pronunciations.  Even her body language shifts; she closes her eyes in the denouement, reaches her hands skyward, calls out in that language, words I imagine are endearments, entreaties. I've listened to this song over and over, just for the reward of the chorus.

Then the spell is broken each time with those la-la's.

 

• You can see this performance and more over on the KCRW Music News blog.

Speaking of whiskey...

Saturday night at restaurant paul k in Hayes Valley, a leisurely dinner and great conversation.

I ordered a Zelda cocktail:  Knob Creek (that's whiskey, not whisky), peach bitters, muddled mint, splash water.  It was enough to last me the whole evening.

The arugula salad was paltry, especially after I asked them to take out the prosciutto bacon, but the Greek fries (oregano, manouri cheese, harissa ketchup) were a salty miracle.  I wrapped things up with the bittersweet chocolate fudge cake with cardamom creme anglaise, which was yum, of course, but too rich to finish.

The service was friendly if a bit slow, and the food was tasty if a bit overpriced.  Not a bad place to go in the neighborhood, but I'd sooner recommend (and return to) Bar Jules.

Speaking of forks on plates, when I was at Cafe Was last weekend, the friendly mustachioed waiter behind the bar swooped in to take away the salad he'd just served me, the one I'd barely made a dent in. 

"Wait, I'm not finished - "

"Oh, your fork was placed at three o'clock, so I assumed you were."

Three o'clock?  Fork signals!  I had no idea.  Have you ever heard of positioning your fork strategically to send secret messages to the waiter?  What else can my cutlery communicate on my behalf?

Menomena @ the Independent tonight

As much as I love Menomena, it's a shame I'm not going to make it out to their show at the Independent here in San Francisco tonight.

Let's watch their video for "Evil Bee" off of Friend and Foe:

While we're at it, let's watch the Muppets' "Menomena" song, because it really never gets old:

Doo-doo, doo doo doo.

gray is the new obsession

I don't usually get obsessed with a particular color, but I'm kind of obsessed with gray right now.  I've gone so far as to purchase the following gray accessories for winter.

 

 

Bring on the fog and cold, I'm ready for the gray days.

Why I love Amazon mp3's Twitter account

The subject of how businesses are using Twitter in a smart way is one that's near and dear to my heart.  I can count on my fingers the number of times I've ever clicked on an online ad, yet as a consumer I'm voluntarily following a few Twitter accounts used by companies to promote their products.  Yeah, it's surprising to me too.

One of my favorites is Amazon mp3's Twitter account.  They tweet once a day in the form of a Daily Deal.  Each tweet lists an artist and album title, the regular price of that mp3 download, a one-day-only sale price, followed by the link to buy.  Genius!

Their tweets put the title of an album in front of my eyes each day (a bonus for someone who is busy but obsessed with music), then give me incentive to buy right away.  And what a tremendous promotion for the artist!  The albums are often older ones, so I'm not sure how many artists pay for this kind of promotion, or whether labels are cutting deals with Amazon to promote their artists.  Either way, it's a win-win-win: for artists & their labels, for Amazon mp3's business and for mp3 buyers.

I rarely purchase music these days - my Rhapsody subscription pretty much has me covered - but today's deal inspired me to grab Dolly Parton's Little Sparrow, a spare, bluegrass-inspired release from 2001 that features some interesting covers, including Restless Heart's "Tender Lie".

The people who are using Twitter creatively and successfully right now in these companies are true pioneers.  I can just hear their higher ups, both in corporations and even in independent businesses, questioning the benefit of using Twitter and threatening at any moment to pull the plug on their "experiment".  Right now only 5,487 people are following Amazon mp3's Twitter account, but if the plug isn't pulled, that number will only grow as more people inevitably catch on to Twitter.  I hope they don't give up, because their efforts actually are influencing my purchases.

Related reading:

• I follow Powell's Books' Twitter account (read about why I love Powell's)
• My post about Restless Heart
• My post about why I love Rhapsody
• Follow Amazon mp3 on Twitter

Blue Bottle expansion at the Ferry Building

This just in!

I wish the folks at Blue Bottle had a blog.  If you google them you'll find two abandoned ones.  Sad.

Trip to LA Part 2: Fossilized Mammoths

I'm about to tell you about the second half of my LA trip. Catch up on Part 1 of the trip if you missed it.

Laurie and I kicked off Saturday evening in LA by meeting up with my friend Kene at an art opening at the Lawrence Asher Gallery.  Joe Davidson makes some truly impressive art out of scotch tape.  Says Joe:

"My repetitive and seemingly meaningless actions are explored symbolically as reflections of the passage of time, emotional isolation, and escapist fantasy.  The compulsive or obsessive acts required to create the pieces necessitate the omission of other perhaps more traditionally meaningful or useful activities.  The viewer is asked to contemplate this notion of what has been lost through the time consuming details of the piece."

This particularly interesting piece represented all the alcohol he drank with his friends over the period of, if I recall correctly, one month.  All rendered in scotch tape.

As we walked out of the gallery, Kene asked us if we'd ever visited the La Brea Tar Pits which were right across the street.  Neither of us had.  I've heard the phrase "La Brea Tar Pits" many times, but I had no idea what they were;  in fact, I pictured them as a stinky, desolate wasteland where no one would ever voluntarily visit.

Turns out the La Brea Tar Pits are pretty fascinating!  Kene acted as our tour guide as he led us around the grounds, pointing out fun facts about this cluster of pits where tar has seeped up from the ground for tens of thousands of years.

The sticky pools created by the seeping tar could be mistaken for bodies of water, and many animals were trapped in them and fossilized.  Excavations have yielded fossilized plants and animals dating back to the last ice age.

New fossils are still being discovered, including dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, bison, ground sloths and mammoths! 
 

Next time I'm in LA, I'll be sure to stop by the tar pits during normal business hours so I can get a better look at everything.

We departed the tar pits in search of dinner.  Going off a recommendation from someone who knew we were vegetarians, we ended up at The Hungry Cat.  "Where would you like to sit?" asked the hostess.  "Just not near that giant bowl of seafood," I responded, gesturing to the jaunty display of ocean life by the open kitchen.  She scowled at me and seated us at the bar, where we perused the menu of dishes that all contained seafood.  Since when does "I'm a vegetarian" mean "I eat all kinds of fish!"  It seems that our restaurant-recommender did not realize there is a difference.

We vacated The Hungry Cat and walked right around the corner to the next place we saw, Cafe Was, where we sat at the bar, talked to the friendly bartender and waitstaff, ate decent food and were serenaded by a guy at a rotating piano in the center of the restaurant.  He made the best of the presumably "only play covers" gig by at least keeping the covers unusual: I recognized "Miss Ohio" by Gillian Welch, and he also ran a Nirvana song through his Neil Diamond-meets-Billy Joel filter, interpreting the music beautifully on piano.  If that description intrigues you, listen to Corey Landis on MySpace.  (Note to Corey if he googles and finds this:  describing your new album as creating "a new ground zero for (your) work" is maybe not the image you were going for?)

Apparently Cafe Was just opened recently.  I recognized owner Ivan Kane from watching some reality show that ran on Bravo about his burlesque club Forty Deuce. (This is why I don't own a TV anymore, because when I did, I wasted precious moments of my life watching shows like that.)  I asked one of the waiters sporting an ironic moustache for the story behind the restaurant's name.  Turns out Kane was looking for an old cafe sign, and when he found it the letters of "always open" were burned out to spell "was." 

Just as we finished our dinner, our dear friend Fil joined us!  Fil, Laurie and I spent many nights together running around the Lower East Side drinking drinks and listening to music.  Actually, it was often Fil onstage playing the music and Laurie and me in the audience drinking the drinks.  Until he was done and would join us in the drinking drinks part.  I love Fil and Laurie.

On Sunday morning, Laurie and I stopped by the real Hollywood farmers market which we loved, and not only because I got to swoon in the proximity of dreamboat Eric Stoltz.  Our last stop before I had to leave for the airport was the flea market on Melrose and Fairfax, where we ate food and shopped.  Kene met us there with his new dog Charlie.

Isn't Charlie cute?

Trip to LA Part 1: Kiss Pez

This past weekend, I flew down to Los Angeles to visit my dear friend Laurie.  She lives in Brooklyn and I haven't seen her in about two years, so when she told me she'd be in LA for business I jumped at the chance to go see her.

We checked in late Friday night to the Farmer's Daughter hotel.  After a late night dinner and survey of the strange scene at Canter's, we called it a night.

On Saturday we woke up early to visit the "Farmers Market" at the Grove, which was right across the street from the hotel.  I put quotes around it because it wasn't the kind of farmers market I was expecting - it was more like an overgrown food court at a county fair (they had funnel cakes!), with a few stalls of produce of unknown origins that appeared to be there year-round.  When I complained to an LA acquaintance about calling it a farmers market when it wasn't really one, he replied, defensively: "Well the Castro isn't really a Castro."  Indeed.

After brunch at the hotel, we drove around a bit and went shopping.  For no good reason at all, I got kind of excited when we passed by High Voltage Tattoo.

Uncle Jer's is one of Laurie's favorite stores.  They sell tiny scooter shirts for the kids:

At Uncle Jer's I finally bought two sets of chopsticks, per the advice of my friend Case, who prefers to eat his salads with them.

One of the coolest stores we visited was Zanzabelle in Silverlake.  They sell toys and food and clever, functional art like punk rock pillows:
 

And custom-crafted Ramones Pez dispensers:

And some amazing Kiss Pez dispensers:

Now, you'd think that the enterprising Gene Simmons would have made Official Kiss Pez dispensers aeons ago, but apparently all this time if you've really wanted Kiss Pez dispensers you've had to make your own.  About a month ago, there was announcement that Kiss was finally releasing their own Pez candies, but the dispensers will only have album art on them, not the likenesses of the band.  Considering the vast array of custom merchandise they've churned out over the decades, it seems like Kiss really missed an opportunity with creating their own Pez dispensers. 

Or, maybe the Pez company is just afraid of rock n' roll?

All this information makes these custom Kiss dispensers at Zanzabelle even more attractive.  I shoulda bought them.

Now that I look closely, Gene appears to be fashioned out of a Pebbles Flintstone dispenser, and Peter is secretly Lucy from Peanuts.  My guess is that Paul and Ace and all the Ramones used to be Wonder Woman. 

Sounds like a fun weekend project!