Engineer's Daughter

bassoons, flamenco, monks' cowls ... welcome to the new rock underground

Heavymetallers

from the Guardian:
As slow and brooding as compost with a grudge, Wolfmangler are the bridge between pure ritual and "death folk", a hybrid music whose best representatives are probably Austria's Cadaverous Condition. This band began as a black metal act way back when, but have, in recent times, brought forth a delightful acoustic side that no one could have been prepared for. Indeed, the only surviving black metal element in Cadaverous Condition's current performances is the Cookie Monster vocals of singer Wolfgang, whose delivery is performed with such a straight edge that it demands we take him entirely seriously. Once past the initial smirk of discomfort, we find ourselves a party to the hopes, fears and shattered dreams of a loathsome troll destined to live out his days under a haunted bridge awaiting the occasional victim, and singing to himself of how he dreads their piteous cries as he gnaws at their bones.

floccinaucinihilipilification

Juxtapose_WEBSITE

At Embarcadero Automotive - a group show in the GarageGallery.  Literally a SAAB garage and showroom with art on the walls, Embarcadero Automotive was packed last night for its GarageGallery Salon #2.  Live jazz played, Vietnamese sandwiches were doled out, and dogs roamed underfoot.  I really liked Warren Travis's abstractions and Flicka McGurrin's Diebenkornesque paintings, but it was Suzun Hughes's digitally manipulated flora and fauna that especially grabbed me.  Blown up into oversize proportions and shellacked onto wood, her flowers are absolutely luminous.

 

Image

At CELLspace - Grito de la Misión, Rise up! Levantate!: Mission Voices Summer 2006.  While Southern Exposure's space is undergoing its retrofit, the gallery is concentrating mostly on public art and community work, such as this culmination of the Mission Voices summer youth program.  Many of the young artists were on hand last night, talking on cell phones on the sidewalk outside or slumped casually on benches on the CELLspace main floor while a DJ spun hyphy and R&B.  Their work was on display in the front gallery, including a huge fold-out book set up labyrinth-like on the floor as well as etchings, photographs, and works on sheets of transparent plastic on the walls.  My favorite part was where all of the kids had the traced outlines of their bodies overlapping in a colorful montage on the front wall, each figure identified with his or her first name.

Climate change? Don't make me laugh!
Don't worry, global warming isn't real. It's just a hoax concocted by wacky scientists. So says Mark Fiore in his latest animation.

do the hempty hemp

from Grist:
Farmers could legally grow industrial hemp under a bill approved by the state Senate of, obviously, California. But isn't hemp, like, totally marijuana? Didn't Nancy Reagan warn us about this? No, no, says (Republican!) state Sen. Tom McClintock, in the best analogy we've ever heard: Hemp "bears no more resemblance to marijuana than a poodle bears to a wolf." The legislation would require that hemp be tested before harvesting to make sure it has only a trace amount of THC, the intoxicant in marijuana. Hemp-growing is illegal in the U.S., for all kinds of logical reasons we can't think of right now, and the bill would attempt to skirt a federal crackdown by requiring farmers to sell only to California processors. Hemp can be used in clothing, cosmetics, food, paper, rope, jewelry, luggage, sports equipment, toys, and food -- it's high in essential fatty acids, protein, B vitamins, and fiber. But we sacrifice all that, because of the dope thing. It makes sense. If you're high.

source:
San Francisco Chronicle

the few, the proud, the marine reserves

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from Grist:
California wildlife officials voted this week to create 15 distinct marine reserves from Half Moon Bay to Santa Barbara, making about 110 square miles of ocean off-limits to most human activity and giving another 94 square miles or so protection of varying degrees. Backers hope the plan will provide important habitat protection for marine life and give a kick in the, um, fins to a lagging rockfish population. The proposal, an attempt to placate both environmentalists and fisherfolk, took seven years to hash out. And, of course, few are completely pleased -- anglers feel shut out of some prime fishing grounds, while some greens argue that the protected area should be extended and include a ban on squid and salmon fishing. Wildlife commissioner Bob Hattoy called the proposal "a compromise of a compromise," saying, "We had a chance to be historic tonight, and all we were was adequate." Depressingly, the "adequate" proposal is the most ambitious marine-conservation program in the nation.

source:
San Francisco Chronicle

antidisestablishmentarianism

The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male

Max Wolf Valerio

from Modern Times Books:

"Max Wolf Valerio's observations about transitioning from a lesbian to a heterosexual male both challenge and confirm our assumptions about gender. Raw, gripping, and poetic, The Testosterone Files offers a perspective on men and women that only someone who's lived in both skins can speak to with such insight and eloquence."

It was one of those perfect nights in the Mission again last night.  Shopping along Valencia, chicken korma and naan on 16th.  And then Valerio's reading at Modern Times.  Even though he began his transition way back in 1989, this book was written close enough to the event that it really captures the curiosity and excitement he was feeling about the changes in his body.  His previous career as a poet is evident in the flow of his prose, and he has some really insightful things to say about the complexities of becoming a man.

Is your neighborhood a winner?
The Sunlight Foundation has tracked down 1,753 of the total 1,810 earmarks in just one appropriations bill. Click on the map to see if any of the money is reaching your community.

paris hilton, paris hilton

Paris1

from the Guardian:
But as Turn It Up cranks into life, you realise why Hilton felt it necessary to confirm to the Sunday Times that she knew what music was. She sings like a woman who has heard of something called singing, can't be sure of exactly what it might entail, but is fairly certain you do something a bit like this. She sounds both distracted and bored stiff, as if making an album is keeping her from the more serious business of standing around a nightclub in a pair of really enormous sunglasses.

 

honorificabilitudinity

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At the Instituto Italiano di Cultura - Giovanna Martinelli: Ombre.  I stopped by Friday after work in the midst of some major brain-wrangling, and standing in front of Martinelli's beautiful etchings helped soothe my tired mind.  My favorites were the squiggles in color, but her black-and-white-and-grey pieces are also evocative.  Martinelli is absolutely not interested in representation, but rather for the search for light in her work.  The show also includes a few of her paintings and more recent sculptures.

Final Fantasy_He Poos Clouds_01_The Arctic Circle

Final Fantasy

Friday night, Bottom of the Hill:
Final Fantasy
Bob Wiseman
Curtains

This was a grouping of music that can only be described as quirky.  The Curtains, featuring Chris from Deerhoof and Nedelle, got things going with sweet and off-kilter pop.  I was just pleased whenever Nedelle was singing.  Bob Wiseman was up next, a one-man dynamo with acoustic guitar, accordian, and self-deprecating wit.  He hung a sheet on one side of the stage and projected his own films onto it, narrating them by song or by accordian.  I think when he mentioned Carmaig de Forest I was one of three people there who knew who he was talking about.  And last but definitely not least, Final Fantasy, aka Owen Pallett, took the stage with his violin.  Another one-man show, he would set up layers of sound with his violin loops and then sing and play some more on top.  The effect was absolutely hypnotic, and many in the audience stood with their eyes closed and blissful smiles on their faces.  He was also damn funny, and when he did a brilliant cover of Mariah Carey's Fantasy towards the end of his set he reminded the hipster crowd, "Remember, you begged for that!"

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At Jack Hanley Gallery - Anna Von Mertens: As the Stars Go By.  Von Mertens sews the path of stars onto her quilts.  Looking at them is like being able to feel the turn of the earth, with her astral trails glimmering in white and pale yellow and green.  I stopped by this show late Saturday afternoon, and have a feeling it will suck me in again if I find myself anywhere near the gallery before the beginning of September.

After a brief detour for Vietnamese BBQ pork of the gods in Little Saigon, I headed back to the Mission to celebrate San Francisco Home Movie Day at the SF Media Archive.  It was the first time I'd ever been in the Archive, and it is a thing to behold, a huge warehouse space with rows and rows of shelves stacked floor to ceiling with canisters of film.  And I get the feeling the guy who runs the place actually knows where everything is, too.  He pulled a few home movies for us to view, the first of a 1969 protest on the SFSU campus complete with arrests and riot police in full gear, followed on the same reel by a naked woman frolicking in a field in what looked like Marin.  We also watched footage from the '20s of quake damage in Long Beach, and a film made by an American abroad in India and Thailand in about 1948.  I adore home movies, and as a special added bonus I now know where the "REASONS" half of the old 17 Reasons sign lives too.

Science interns do it better:
From the Federation of American Scientists comes ReallyReady.org —created by a FAS intern to highlight major errors in the federal government's disaster preparedness website, Ready.gov.

Pf68

Ten Incarnations of Vishnu: Kalamkari painting on cotton, India.

sheet happens...faster

Mn_greenland_glacier

from Grist:
We hate to give you bad news without some good, so here goes. The bad news from a study published this week in Science is that, by comparing satellite data from 2002-2005 to earlier data, researchers have determined that Greenland's ice sheet is melting about three times faster than it was five years ago. Put another way, about 57 cubic miles of ice melts there each year, enough to cause an annual 0.02 inch sea-level rise. The good news: in time, Greenland may be less of a misnomer. (There, don't you feel better?) Meanwhile, the other side of the world is also going the way of the Wicked Witch: according to recent research, between 2002 and 2005, at least 36 cubic miles of Antarctic ice melted annually. Computer projections had suggested that warmer temps in the region would lead to greater precipitation, compensating for the melt. But another study in this week's Science determined that in the past 50 years, there's been no real increase in Antarctica's precipitation. We've gotta stop reading that rag.

sources:
The Washington Post
National Geographic News
BBC News
San Francisco Chronicle

salon 8/25/06

Salon!

Thinking

when: Fri 8.25, 7pm onwards (show up anytime)
where: my place
topic: Thinking

Is the voice that chatters incessantly in our heads real thinking? How can our thinking become more intentional? What is the proper role of thinking in our spiritual practice (if we even have a spiritual practice)?

If you need directions or more info, please email me: veritatem at gmail dot com

I hope to see you then!

internationalization

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At the Oakland Art Gallery - the group show Inscape.  Fortified by a gorgeous B.L.T. panini (with summery heirloom tomatoes as the T!), I shlepped on over to Oakland City Center to check out this exhibition yesterday.  Heather Kessinger's photographs are so dark that you can just barely make out the suggestion of a tree or a blade of grass or a smear of stars in them, but it's exactly their mysterious nature which makes them so wonderful.  Jill Sylvia uses ledger paper and other blank documents as her medium, cutting into them and arranging them so that they become transformed into hypnotic sculpture.  And Mel Davis creates single-color paintings that he then arranges in series, the tones separate yet blending together peacefully.  The whole feel of the show seemed very meditative to me, its quiet pieces seeming to invite me to spend some more time with them.  Really lovely stuff.

The Daily Show gets color:
The Daily Show welcomes their new Middle Eastern Affairs correspondent, Aasif Mandvi, who reminds us that, as President Bush says, the current crisis is also an opportunity.