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.
Here are the songs that made up my submission, “Urban(e)”:
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.
[...] 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to the places where they grew up, or went to school, or fell in love, they may not even notice that the Old Navy has been replaced by an Abercrombie, the Fridays by an Olive Garden and the once-fleeting past by an endless present.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.
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.”
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.
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.”
This is a picture I took of a poster promoting then-independent candidate Donald Wooten.
This is
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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