Hi. I have returned from a long satisfying voyage, visiting friends and family in Israel, Berlin, France, Slovenia, and Scotland. I have a lot of work to do on feather2pixels, but for now here are some pictures waiting for your tender mousecliks.
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Another month, another wedding. Devoted readers will recall feather2pixel’s breaking coverage of ex-Explainer Akiko‘s surprise birthday/marriage proposition party in October. Well, she accepted and nine months later her and eighty of her friends and family were getting drunk at the summit of Pacific Heights on a clear Saturday afternoon. Anna from Germany was there. The mushroom soup was excellent.
I had the opportunity to meet Tilden Park’s famous herd of landscaping goats in the Berkeley Hills. Apparently, they get penned on a swath of land and simply eat their way through until the terrain is clear. It’s basically the same way things work in San Francisco, except instead of goats we use real estate developers. Three new block-sized projects are set to wrap construction within spitting distance of CELLspace this year and I foresee things getting pretty ugly at the Bryant and Mariposa streets Starbucks. Why can’t other people gentrify the way I gentrify?
I saw some really bad art and music last weekend. The art in question was the Bay Area Now exhibition, touted as (T)he seminal showcase of talent in the region, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Seems to me that it works much more successfully as a deconstruction of why it can be hard for the rest of the country and world and me to take the Bay Area seriously. As far as I am concerned, conceptual art has to be pretty fucking amazing to be worth my time: gluing a jiggling laytex vibrator to the wall next to a statement about “paying homage to the sexually compulsive” is not just an unoriginal idea, it’s a poorly executed one.
And the only thing worse than artists doing less with less is artists doing less with more. Between one bassist and two guitarists, I counted no less than twenty-five effects pedals on stage at Cafe Du Nord last night. Curious about how heroically un-dynamic a band could possibly make all that gear sound? Check out Film School from L.A.—in a way, it’s really impressive.