Sometimes, when she rode MUNI on her way to work in early morning fog, she imagined the opening credits of a biopic based on her life and with what they would be soundtracked. If this thought struck her just as the train jumped in to/out of the Sunset Tunnel, the song that picked it’s place was always “Crowd the Pine”.
Tag: San Francisco
Daily Dose: Cat Power Two-for
I found Cat Power in college at a time in my life when I really needed to find Cat Power. At the tender age of 23ish, I was emerging from the wreckage of a 7-year relationship that had found me as a teenager and left me unsure of who I was as an adult. I was adrift, a fact that had its pros and cons, and in search of what I was/am. Somehow I’d gone from a black-clad beatnik in high school to a pink-satin sucker strutting around San Francisco like I was Carrie Bradshaw or something. I needed to get the pink out.
So I lived alone for awhile; I wrote prose poetry, was miserable and lonely, and then I began a period of ill-fated dating in which I said yes to any fella willing to ask this broad out. There’s no faster way to discover who you are than to subject yourself to a flotilla of first dates that have no prayer for seconds. Being a lady, most dates ended with a sweet high-five becuase there is nothing less sexual than a high-five: it requires minimal bodily contact, it’s rife with bro signals, and it creates very visible distance between two people. This caught many men off-guard, angered a few, and often, despite my best efforts, ended in an awkard hug and a deflected, overly moist kiss that (thankfully) landed on my neck and not my mouth.
At a point, I gave up on men and focused my energies on writing and, later, music. Cat Power entered my life via her 2003 album You Are Free. Songs like “Good Woman”, “He War”, and “Free” spoke to me with their fragility, their indie grace, their absolute honesty and intrinsic tragedy. It had highs and lows, just like I did at the time. This was a woman to relate to, this Chan Marshall Cat Power, and she didn’t wear pink. Shy by nature, she was entering a stint in rehab in 2006 to remedy the way she used and abused herself in coping with crippling depression that often masqueraded as stage fright. Luckily I never needed rehab for my misadventures, but I was definitely, shall we say, somewhat pickled at the time so I identified with her demons.
Concurrent to my Cat Power discovery, I met a boy who helped hammer the lid shut on the pink-satin sucker I longed to no longer be. He was a writer, he was a mystery; he echoed the whipser that flowed like ink through my pen, and above all…he silently understood it all because he was my peer. To call it love would be to minimize it in some way since this boy gave me so much more: he gave me the gift of myself. I met his friends, a spectacular group of people pursuing passions, who welcomed me in as one of their own. On many a Thursday night, we drank, drove ourselves mad on conversation, and danced like idiots to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” at a dive bar on Irving Street. In this motley crew I felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, surrounded by like-minded folk, and the comfort of belonging did much to reorient my priorities, help me settle some unfinished business with my previous beau, and, in general, be calm.
This boy and I were not to be the thing we tried to be. Ultimately, it was a classic case of poor timing. Instead we float in and out of each other’s lives now, ironically always at the perfect time, and he remains a sustaining pressure point for my writing, a sort of phonetic accupunture that stills the nerves and let’s the words roll; he is a very good friend. The writing has become habitual to a point where I dare call myself a writer. Cat Power, too, still calls to me. I was fortunate to see her perform at the Warfield in San Francisco a year or so after she successfully completed rehab. She was vibrant, sang and played the piano beautifully, and connected with the audience by handing many of us white tulips at the end. Stage fright conquered, to be sure. And that dive bar on Irving? It’s still there, albeit under new ownership, and I walk by it every morning to grab a latte on my way to work.
On the days that I’m particularly nostalgic, I’ll pause a moment in front of that bar to shift my hot beverage from one hand to another, but really it’s to let the memory of a time when I lived in bars and danced on tables sit for a minute. The past in present, again and again and again.
See & Read: 9/18/2014
Here I AM–
A fake intellectual
trying on a dozen different hats
to plume my tongue;
Looking for a current to connect.
When Lighting Strikes: Czeslaw Milosz
I read for knowledge, I read for clarity, and the perfect paragraph(s) has always had the same impact on me as the perfect song–keeping in mind that perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Often, I’ll select a volume to read from my stacks of dusty books that were purchased and then forgotten for months and years. Why that volume strikes me then, at that particular time, I do not know because it picks me, and then one or two or three chapters in I realize it is the precise book I needed at that moment. The words cut deeply, the plot lines are too relevant, and I leave the book behind a little more determined in my course of action, a bit more comfortable in my world view: an energized person. If music marks moments, then literature (fiction and non-fiction) makes them through contextualization.
This has the case with Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes and every poem I’ve ever read by Charles Bukowski (as messed up as that sounds), and has happened most recently with a book by Czeslaw Milosz titled Visions from San Francisco Bay. In the first chapter, Milosz outlines his intention for the book and it electrified me so I thought I’d share the lighting strike. Hopefully it hits home for you too.
My Intention
I am here. Those three words contain all that can be said–you begin with those words and return to them. Here means on this earth, on this continent and no other, in this city and no other and in this epoch I call mine, this century, this year. I was given no other place, no other time, and I touch my desk to defend myself against the feeling that my own body is transient. This is all very fundamental, but, after all, the science of life depends on the gradual discovery of fundamental truths.
I have written on various subjects, and not, for the most part, as I would have wished. Nor will I realize my long standing intention this time. But I am always aware that what I want is impossible to achieve. I would need the ability to communicate my full amazement at ‘being here’ in one unattainable sentence which would simultaneously transmit the smell and texture of my skin, everything stored in my member, and all I now assent to, dissent from. However, in pursuing the impossible, I did learn something. Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks other will understand. There are, however, time when somehow we slowly divest ourselves of the shame and being to speak openly about all the things we do not understand. If I am no wise, then why must I pretend to be? If I am lost, why must I pretend to have ready counsel for my contemporaries? But perhaps the value of communication depends on the acknowledgement of one’s own limits, which, mysteriously, are also limits common to many others; and aren’t these the same limits of a hundred or a thousand years ago? And when the air is filled with the clamor of analysis and conclusion, would it be entirely useless to admit you do not understand?
I have read many books, but to place all those volumes on top of one another and stand on them would not add a cubit to my stature. Their learned terms are of little use when I attempt to seize naked experience, which eludes all accepted ideas. To borrow their language can be helpful in many ways, but it also leads imperceptibly into a self-contained labyrinth, leaving us in alien corridors which allow no exit. And so I must offer assistance, check every moment to be sure I am not departing from what I have actually experience on my own, what I myself have touched. I cannot invent a new language and I use the one I was first taught, but I can distinguish, I hope, between what is mine and what is merely fashionable. I cannot expel from memory the books I have read, their contending theories and philosophies, but I am free to be suspicious and to ask naive questions instead of joining the chorus which affirms and denies.
Intimidation. I am brave and undaunted in the certainty of having something important to say to the world, something no one else will be called to say. Then the feeling of individuality and a unique role begins to weaken and the thought of all people who ever were, are, and ever will be–aspiring, doubting, believing–people superior to me in strength of feeling and depth of mind, robs me of confidence in what I call me ‘I’. The words of a prayer two millennia old, the celestial music created by a composer in a wig and jabot make me ask why I, too, am here, why me? Shouldn’t one evaluate his changes beforehand–either equal the best or say nothing. Right at this moment, as I put these marks to paper, countless others are doing he same, and out books in their brightly colored jackets will be added to that mass of things in which names and titles sink and vanish. No doubt, also at this very moment, someone is standing in a bookstore, and faced with the sight of those splendid and vain ambitions, is making his decisions–silence is better. That single phrase which, were it truly weighed, would suffice as a life’s work. However, here, now, I have the courage to speak, a sort of secondary courage, not blind. Perhaps it is my stubbornness in pursuit of that single sentence. Or perhaps it is my old fearlessness, temperament, fate, a search for a new dodge. In any case, my consolation lies not so much in the role I have been called to play as in the great mosaic-like whole which is composed of fragments of various people’s efforts, whether successfully or not. I am here–and everyone is in some ‘here’–and the only thing we can do is try to communicate with one another.
Thick Red Wine :: Homesick Homecoming
It’s a long holiday weekend. Many people are heading out of town to camp, attend weddings, or maybe they’ve already been raptured to the Playa. For those of us happy to stay in The City, might I suggest kicking off the Labor Day weekend by listening to the labors of THICK RED WINE at DNA Lounge tomorrow night?
The brainchild of San Francisco’s Mike Wojciechowski, THICK RED WINE pairs the intensity of adolescence with the reflection of grown-ass adulthood. Taken at face value, the music is utterly enjoyable with its simple, repetitious chords and middle school nostalgia pushed through gritty, rambling vocals. As with most things in life, however, you get what you put into it and investing in the THICK RED WINE catalog unearths a depth that can be glossed over if you’re impatient. Some of my favorite moments from Wojciechowski’s last album, Never Wanted To Be Cool, come back to back with “If I Had a Shotgun” and “Never Find the Time” which speak to our generation’s paralysis in the face of seemingly limitless options that are tempered by fewer opportunities. We are eager, we are earnest and we just can’t seem to get over.
I feel this intimately, and Thomas Wolfe’s words “you can’t go home again” often rattle around my brain. Thankfully, THICK RED WINE provides an antidote to the depression Wolfe can trigger. No, we can’t go home again…but we can sure as hell remember it fondly, and we’ll always have our friends. In the last song on Never Wanted To Be Cool, Wojciechowski drops an impressive Marquis de Sade reference (brilliant) and provides a fantastic summary of his music: “I guess the moral to the story is you can’t hope to explain just what it means to be human or grow up or be sane…So I steal pennies from the dirty fountains of my checkered youth, hopin’ someday all these words I write will mean something to you.”
If this last album is any indication, I expect his forthcoming EP–Homesick–will mean much to me (this is, after all, a blog based on nostalgia), and I’m excited to announce Wojciechowski has agreed to be part of the Nostos Algos oral history project, Soundbyte. Tomorrow’s official release of “Marathon”, his first Homesick song, is hosted by Mutiny Radio and is a Bourgeois Productions joint. I will be there, and I will be in it to win it.
A Phono del Sol Playlist
Couldn’t make the Bay Bridge + Tiny Telephone production Phono del Sol today? Not to worry, Nostos Algos has you covered. Here are some festival favorites for you to view in the pantsless privacy of your apartment, so crack that craft brew, microvave those Chinese leftovers and let this visual playlist be your Saturday highlight.
Wye Oak, an everlasting gobstopper-esque addicition.
Much love for the throwback sound of San Francisco State University alum, Nick Waterhouse.
The Tambo Rays, purveyors of one of the best damn shows I’ve seen all year.
Always a woman of her own means, the ever-ready Thao & The Get Down Stay Down.
Tony Molina. Tony (freaking) Molina.
Daily Dose: Amy LaVere, “Killing Him”
In honor of her show at the Hotel Utah tonight, today’s Daily Dose is dedicated to Amy LaVere:
Daily Dose: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Beat The Devil’s Tattoo”
Must See: Jesus Sons
If you love good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll as much as this little lady, then mark your calendars: Jesus Sons plays Brick & Mortar Music Hall on Friday, June 13. Already have plans? Cancel them.
Originally formed in San Francisco, the band is fronted by Brandon Wurtz (former bassist of the Spyrals) who relocated to Los Angeles with his new band after his employer–Charlie’s Place, an SF motorcycle shop–headed for greener pastures in the southern part of the state. While this could make him persona non grata to many Bay Area die hards, he explained the move in an interivew with LA Canvas as a reaction to “the SF government and the pirates” who have radically changed the fabric of our fair city. I’m thinking not many in our musical community would argue with that assessment of the Tech Boom, but this is fodder for a separate article (and something I could talk about for days).
While many bands have embraced a vintage 60’s psych-garage sound, Brandon and the boys are the real deal–not merely emulating motorcycle culture for the coolness of it all, but instilling their music with the motorcylce sludge that pumps through their veins. Their addictive first full-length album, eponymously named, was recorded at Fuzz City in Oakland on glorious 1/4 inch reel to reel tape. The album is rowdy, the music muscular yet spiritual like a prayer thrust into the wind pumped out of a carburetor–textured with grit, and the sweet sweat of the blues.
As much as this San Franciscan is loathe to admit it, Los Angeles–with its dirty desert heat, and hundreds of paved miles–may be an ideal fit for these American journeymen. After all, Rock ‘n’ roll hungers for the heat. Luckily the highway brought them home for one more show.
White Rose For a Day
Working as an archivist, I spend most of my days secluded in a windowless, cold brick building working with materials that speak volumes but rarely say a word. I love my work dearly, but when given the chance to step out of this (Hollinger) box…I jump at it. This is why I always say yes when the lovely ladies of White Rose Collective ask me to moonlight as “model” for a day.
The love-child of Andrea Donoghue and Teddi Cranford, White Rose Collective is comprised of professional stylists and make up artists who bring high-fashion concepts to those of us who spend more time walking office hallways than we do runways. In addition to wedding prep, Andrea and Teddi leave their Manhattan-base to offer educational seminars hosted by salons in various U.S. cities.
After “modelling” for them last year, Andrea asked for my assistance on March 30th at Borrow Salon in San Francisco; I was only too happy to oblige. I emerged from the prior gig at Edo Salon sporting a sultry Dolce and Gabbana-inspired up-do, so I was giddy to see what the WRC team had in store for me that sunny Sunday. I was assigned to a wonderful stylist by the name of Julio Hernandez, an Aveda master stylist who hails from Southern California and has been in the biz for over 12 years. This handsome gent was a delight, and before I knew it my hair was whipped into a soft multi-extension dream.
While my normal photographer had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t accompany me (damn you, band practice!!), the fellows at Glass Coat Photo Booth were kind enough to let me the use images you see from a booth they installed in the salon for the day. The whole day was a hoot, and I highly suggest you consider this Collective for your next event or even just to treat yo self.
Nostos Algos 