San Francisco Mixtape Society

February 1st, 2010 by George

I saw the SFist article, so I went Sunday afternoon to the Make-Out Room for the inaugural meetup of the San Francisco Mixtape Society. Amy Gahran came with me, offering witty commentary and sound last-minute playlist advice at reasonable rates. I ran into and said hello to one of the society’s founders, Annie Lin.

"Urban(e)"

Here are the songs that made up my submission, “Urban(e)”:

Get Out Of The City – Ivy

Hideous Towns – The Sundays

No Cities Left – The Dears

Other Towns & Cities – Camera Obscura

City Rain, City Streets – Ryan Adams

Little Side Of Town – TraLaLa

City of Smoke and Flame – Morgan Geist

Going To A Town – Rufus Wainwright

The Canals Of Our City – Beirut

Dry Town – Miranda Lambert

City People – Cibelle

Get Out Of Town – Caetano Veloso

Leaving The City – Roisin Murphy

Streets Of Your Town – Ivy

Leave This City – The Sundays

Remembering Brad Graham

January 4th, 2010 by George

Sign on table

Brad Graham reading at Fray Cafe

Brad Graham

  • stltoday.com: Blog Zone: Culture Club: Repertory Theatre’s Brad Graham dies
  • MeTa: Remembering our friend Brad
  • Brad’s pictures of me at Fray Cafe at South by Southwest 2003 and at Break Bread With Brad in 2004
  • Songwriters Sunday at Yoshi’s San Francisco

    January 3rd, 2010 by George

    Songwriters Sunday: Ziva Hadar

    http://www.zivamusic.com

    Songwriters Sunday: Paul Manousos

    http://www.paulmanousos.com/

    Songwriter Sundays: Tom Luce

    http://www.lucemusic.com/

    More bands, more shows? Go here: http://www.myspace.com/bayvibes

    Season to taste

    January 1st, 2010 by George

    Salad and black eyed pea gumbo

    Seems like everybody’s Twittering that G.K. Chesterton quote today: “The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.”

    Tomorrow is New Year’s Day for someone too — even me, and maybe even you.

    Champagne for my real friends

    December 31st, 2009 by George

    Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!

    [...] When they remember the Starbucks where they met the one they married or the Gap where they lost the one they didn’t, they will be marinating in memories that happened everywhere but not somewhere, reliving experiences that are located in time but dislocated in space. And when they return to the places where they grew up, or went to school, or fell in love, they may not even notice that the Old Navy has been replaced by an Abercrombie, the Fridays by an Olive Garden and the once-fleeting past by an endless present.

    Ours may be the last generation of Americans to suffer for return — to remember events that took place when place still mattered. So tonight let us revel in our nostalgia, and long for the days when longing was easy.

    But those were the days when longing was dumb. But now we have the technology. Blogs, still cameras, video cameras, search engines, streaming video on our cell phones, social networks. All can gather or display data as we choose, all may be tagged and aggregated, all can help establish the context that makes memory meaningful, useful, not merely a source of pain but one of purpose. Fight the good and necessary fight when it comes to the brandification of the landscape, of course, but keep in mind what else we have, what else we can do with it.

    I said I’ve heard that title before

    November 9th, 2009 by George

    Amy Gahran used (with my permission and approval) my song “Mixed Up Zombie” in her Oakland Local video for last Thursday’s reading at Diesel Books in Oakland by illustrator Chris Lane for “Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection.”

    The way we saw each other at 7 o’clock this morning

    October 30th, 2009 by George

    Somewhere between the birth of Yahoo and TMZ, “news” became “content” and information became entertainment. Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck and the bloggers on Red State and Daily Kos are part of the same media sphere as the cops reporter at The Daily Such and Such. They just run in frequently colliding orbits.

    Even if you wanted to, you could not escape “the media.”

    It seems to me there are basically four types of “media” types these days: Actors, providers, commentators and sideliners. Here’s a rough description of the four categories: [...]

    “We are all the media,” Chuck Raasch, USA Today, October 29, 2009

    Brian Johnson: Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us… In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…
    Andrew Clark: …and an athlete…
    Allison Reynolds: …and a basket case…
    Claire Standish: …a princess…
    John Bender: …and a criminal…
    Brian Johnson: Does that answer your question?… Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

    Memorable quotes, “The Breakfast Club,” IMDB.com

    More light than heat

    October 21st, 2009 by George

    Karim, as usual, bless him, had asked me if I had some music lying around. I did, as it turned out: “Sullenberger,” which you hear in the video, is a straighter, less-synthed-up version of a song I’m calling, for now, “Peacock Tattoo.”

    The future starts here

    September 11th, 2009 by George

    091101ny08

    This is a picture I took of a poster promoting then-independent candidate Donald Wooten.

    Curtola overpass from eastbound Highway 24 (vi)

    This is

    Up in the woods

    September 8th, 2009 by George

    Muir Woods National Monument Muir Woods National Monument

    Every now and then, we’ll get the urge to do something nutty like driving to Marin County to explore a bit of nature. A couple of Memorial Days ago, that meant Point Reyes. Over this Labor Day weekend, it meant Muir Woods.


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