Engineer's Daughter

here's to being here

It was Canada night at the Great American Music Hall tonight, with Winnipeg band the Weakerthans and Toronto homeboy Jason Collett.  The Weakerthans do perfectly solid intelligent indie rock and get my stamp of approval for having once used Marcel Dzama art for an album cover, but really I was there for Jason Collett.  On this expedition it was just him and his acoustic guitar and his voice pouring sweet melancholy into my ear.  He does the personal and the political equally well in his lyrics, and I laughed at his occasional droll comments in between songs.  But most of all he sings his heart out, and the passion really comes through.  Beautiful beautiful music.

visit poetry

Poets and poetry lovers were out in full force in Kerouac Alley this evening for the kick-off party for the second San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and this despite the chilly fog that was hanging low over the city tonight.  Former SF poet laureate Jack Hirschman emceed the affair and formally introduced each of the participating poets, who have traveled from five different continents to share their work, and then as a special treat Jonathan Richman materialized at the end to play a couple songs.  There will be free readings throughout the weekend at the Palace of Fine Arts and at branch libraries around the city, all culminating in a North Beach poetry crawl and party in Washington Square Park on Sunday.  Having fully enjoyed the inaugural festival in 2007, I cannot recommend highly enough this chance to hear the poets read their work in their native tongues.

glover's mistake

If Nick Laird looked a little bit apprehensive at the beginning of his reading tonight at Moe's, he quickly explained that his reading in L.A. the previous night had not gone well at all in terms of attendance.  "This room looks like Carnegie Hall compared to last night," he quipped, before launching into two passages from his new novel Glover's Mistake that were so engaging they just whetted my appetite for more.  One of the trio of main characters in the book is an artist, and during the Q&A I complimented Laird on his description of one of her works and asked if he had invented it or if it had been inspired by something he'd seen in real life.  He said he had completely made up that piece of art, but that he had been thinking about artist Mai-Thu Perret and her manufactured artifacts of an imaginary feminist utopia (recently shown at SFMOMA).  He also talked about how he occasionally recycles lines from his poetry directly into his fiction, and he then proceeded to recite by heart one particularly evocative passage from Glover's Mistake about the London sky at night that made me feel like I was back on the Thames.  The man has a serious way with words.

microvibraciones

Because I've been well-trained to arrive at shows minimum one hour past their posted start time I totally missed the first band playing at Mama Buzz tonight, Hot Summer.  That'll learn me.  There was still plenty of good noisy fun to be had, however, as Rank/Xerox were going strong when I got there.  And Mexican duo XYX had flown up from Monterrey to school us in their most excellent psych-punk ways.  Strong female vocals and a beat you can dance to.  That's what I'm talking about.  I think the only reason the steamy-packed gallery was at all subdued during their set was that we were afraid of knocking the art off the walls if we thrashed around too much.

assiduous

J.G. Posada: Rare Case! A Woman Gives Birth to Three Children and Four Animals, c.1900 (Mexico).  José Guadalupe Posada is probably best known for his calaveras, the skeleton illustrations that he meant as religious and political satire and that have since come to be identified with Día de los Muertos.  But his work was also used to illustrate the tabloids of his day, in which he would depict disasters and other unusual occurrences.  The image at right is taken from Redstone Press's book J.G. Posada: Messenger of Mortality, but the University of New Mexico also has a huge collection of his work which you can view online here.

touch the gear

Right on Capp, between 20th and 21st Streets in the Mission, there is a vine-covered arch that leads back from the sidewalk to the idyllic patio of the San Francisco Community Center, home this week to Outsound New Music Summit.  Before last night I didn't even know the Center existed, but I was happy to stumble in for the Summit's kick-off event, a hands-on expo called "Touch the Gear".  A full roster of sonic artists had set up their instruments in the concert hall, and visitors were warmly invited to interact with them.  Not just ordinary guitars and drums, mind you, but rather amplified hand-cranks, textured boards meant to be played with plastic combs, and the like.  I plucked a pine cone attached to a contact mic, made swirling swoopy sounds on Amar Chaudhary's amazing tablet-based controller, and played a dustpan percussion duet with my coworker Alex.  The Summit continues at the Center through this Saturday and features an impressive line-up, including performances by the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Bonfire Madigan, and Jess Rowland with the Dreamland Puppet Theater.  Pick a show; scratch that avant-garde musical itch.

show 132

playlist

renegade

I'm DJing tomorrow:
9am - noon PST, Sunday, July 19
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm

I haven't been to a Renegade Craft Fair since I stumbled onto it in Chicago's Wicker Park one glorious morning several years back and proceeded to spend way too much money on a pile of Maryink tees that still remain among my most-worn items of clothing.  The Fair started out there in Chicago and has proved so popular that it now has satellites in a number of other cities, including in our fair San Francisco where it is inhabiting the entire Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason this weekend.  I was happy to see Maryink there, as well as a ton of other uber-cool vendors:

• Owly Shadow Puppets - My hands-down most joy-filled discovery of the entire Fair, and judging by the business she was doing I wasn't the only one who was enchanted.
• Mat Daly - Particularly eye-catching posters, including an excellent series for Renegade Craft Fairs all over the country.
• Sonnenzimmer - More standout concert posters, with serious art and design chops.
• Poster List - "Keep Calm and Rock On"
• Vital Industries - It's not on their Web site, but they had a blowfish scarf that destroyed me.  Their bike stuff is pretty awesome too.
• 3 Fish Studios - Loved Annie Galvin's Kilgallenesque paintings of girls and the San Francisco 49 Mile Scenic Drive sign.
• Campfire - Their Great Lakes tee remains one of the best things ever.
• Berkley Illustration - Well-dressed animals.  I'll take one of each.
• Mateo Ilasco - Gorgeous wee terrariums, printed goods, design objects.
• Lisa Congdon - Just one of my favorite local artist/illustrator/shop owners.

chuen jik sat sau

For sheer Hong Kong action-movie exhilaration it's hard to beat a Johnnie To film, and 2001's Fulltime Killer is no exception.  The movie opens in a graveyard where a memorial service is taking place, and suddenly we are diving with the camera into the grave, straight through both the coffin and the recently-deceased and into another more secretive burial spot beneath the first one.  We do eventually find out whose carefully-wrapped body that is, but first we are introduced to rival assassins O (Takashi Sorimachi), the quiet one, and Tok (Andy Lau), the flamboyant one who models his hits after his own adored action flicks like Desperado and Point Break.  The references come hard and fast, all spun into pure over-the-top cinema crack by To that certainly doesn't bother sticking to any linear narrative.  Lau proves once again why he is one of my favorite actors, whether his character here is seducing a video store clerk or suffering a poorly-timed epileptic fit or two.  Don't bother trying to make too much sense of the plot; just enjoy the ride.

who's to say what's obscene?

People were literally lined up the stairs that lead to the Poetry Room at City Lights for Paul Krassner's reading tonight.  The original Yippie and Merry Prankster now walks with a cane but his mind is livelier than ever, as evidenced in his new book Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today (published by City Lights itself).  Krassner read snippets that covered everything from the famous Disneyland Memorial Orgy image he created with Wally Wood to Mort Sahl's razor-sharp wit to the incarceration of Tommy Chong, all the while cracking hilarious jokes and interspersing free-ranging tangents about the current headlines.  Seriously, the man's cultural intake makes me look like a rank amateur.