Lost Horizons

New Blog

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:25:08 GMT

Some of you may have noticed that I've not posted here much of late - partially this was due to illness and an excruciating trip back to Virginia for my grandfather's funeral. Mostly, though, it has to do with my having decided to start a new blog, one where I'm trying out a different approach and writing style. Here's the URL:

http://sfscene.blogspot.com

Please come by, check it out, and leave comments. I've been doing a lot of writing there, and right now I have an open thread entitled Why Do We Care?, in which I have invited folks who are DJs, or are into music and write about it, or who throw parties, etc., to explain why it is that they care about something as ephemeral as dance music, club culture, etc. I know there are plenty of folks here who share these interests, so I'd love to see what you all have to say.

New Blog

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:03:46 GMT

Well, through a series of random events I wound up creating a new blog on blogger. Initial reaction is that LJ really does suck as much as I thought it did.

The new blog is sfscene.blogspot.com, and it's a continuation of some things I started here, though I'm working on a new style and voice for the site that's more "journalistic." Best part - if you have an Atom reader, you can get it as a feed, I'll probably continue to post here, when I want to write things that I'm sure will never be seen by people outside my friends list, but sfscene is probably going to become my main blog for posting about music, events, etc. I've been working on it for the past week, come check it out.

The End Up : "Kontrol" w/Derek Plaslaiko

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 06:26:48 GMT

When Jeremy and I were in NY over Thanksgiving one of the highlights was certainly "Bunker" at Sub-Tonic, where we heard Derek Plaslaiko. We chatted him up a bit after his set and told him how much we'd love to hear him come play in San Francisco. This past Saturday we got our wish as Derek took to the decks at the End Up for the latest installment of Kontrol. As always, Kontrol can beat up pretty much any other DJ night in the city, but Derek's set was even better for the blast of techno that it brought to an evening that began to feel ominously like another night of tweaky End Up house.

In our typical can't-wait-to-get-to-the-party early arrival fashion (which is often in preparation for a let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here early departure), we were standing outside the End Up at 10 while Jeremy smoked a cigarette, waiting for the doors to open. Once past the rather intimate pat-down (it's rare that anyone puts a finger down my pocket these days) we had a drink and waited for the arrival of our party companions Mr. J and Mr. T. At that time someone who I think was Nikola Baytalla was on. His first few tracks were completely mesmerizing and brought Jeremy and I around to talking about the relationship between trance and techno, how the kids who were once into the crazy 303 acid lines of trance seemed to have made the shift to techno producers. But then, something happened between drink number two and a trip to the bathroom, a moment when the acid lines dropped, the beats deepened, and we were back in familiar house groove territory. This went on through the arrival of the Mssrs. Consonants and the switch of Craig Kuna. By this time the club had filled up considerably, and as we surveyed the scene on the back porch it once again seemed to be a mix of Mission meets Marina. Mr. T., who had met Mr. MDA earlier in the evening, nonetheless spent most of his time by the periphary of the dance floor, smiling, to be sure, but of the opinion that the music was just "too house" for him to find a groove. Mr. J and his companion Mr. D, meanwhile, were all arms-akimbo on the dancefloor.

Jeremy and I managed to have our fair share of dance floor fun, but the energy wasn't close to what we were expecting. Groovy, yes, and even stimulating, but I had spun through a practice set of Kompakt and Platzhirsch and other related discs before coming, and had been hoping for more of the sawtooth knarz than the mellower sounds of loping house basslines. Mr. J. and Mr. D departed around 2.00, and Jeremy and I waited for Derek's set out on the back porch, where we had an extended conversation about the merits of going out and what we got from it. Derek finally came on at 3, and we could tell that the evening had taken a significant turn. The crowd was smaller than the past two events, but we did run into more of the dedicated techno heads, and if it was less crowded, it was perhaps more spirited, driven as it was by the harder rhythms Derek was pumping through the system. Unfortunately, by 3.30 we were running out of energy, as was Mr. T, despite his earlier ingestion of stimulants, so we walked him back over to his small space, hung out for another hour or so, and then made our way home in the dark, cold, small hours.

I see from the Kontrol website that Alex Under is coming next, and I'll certainly look forward to that. But the Kontrol vibe seems to be undergoing a change, perhaps somewhat from the influence of the End Up's longstanding reputation as the home of San Francisco deep house, and also from the new crowd that comes there looking for what they know, rather than adventures in the land of crazy German techno. I'll continue to mark it on my calendar, and wish the Kontrol kids the best of luck in their new digs, but I hope that they will also find other venues and events where they can connect back to that underground vibe and push harder on the boundaries of San Francisco dance music.

The New Coke

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:22:09 GMT

At The Cinch the other night I was surprised when I was standing next to a younger acquaintance at the trough and he produced a tiny vial of cocaine (and, in clear violation of chewing gum ethics, didn’t offer me any). This was just after a drag performance that involved a bit of comedic miming around a baggie of white powder. Then, the next night, another friend told me about how tired he is of always having to be responsible at parties, how one night he just wanted to get “coked up.” Cocaine seems to be coming back in a huge way on the party scene, and I’ve read that this may have to do with the stepping up of hostilities between the military and guerillas in areas where it’s produced – they need more money, so more is being pushed in the consumer market. Aside from economic factors, though, coke seems to be making a comeback that is also culturally determined.

Among gay party boys you could probably track a shift from E to crystal to coke as the main party drugs. As Jeremy and I were talking about it the other night he made the point that E is a “big deal” drug – you do it, you get hammered, you dance and tell your boyfriend how beautiful he is, you romp around on the bed for a couple hours after coming home, do some bong hits, and then crawl under the sheets for some warm snugglies. E is about the special occasion, because you just can’t keep doing it all weekend (I know, I’ve tried), nor can you do it weekend after weekend without putting yourself in such a state that you cry over allergy medication commercials. Crystal gets you up and going, imparts some of the ego inflation of E, and has the added benefit of being something you can just keep doing, even if it does turn you into a zombie after about 48 hours. With the passing of meth out of fashion recently (meth mouth isn’t something you want to kiss), that only leaves coke for the gay boy party favor of choice. It’s cheap, it doesn’t have nearly the stigma of speed, and it’s even glamorous in an 80s kind of way.

It’s that association with the glam era of gay culture that I think has brought coke back with some force in San Francisco. When you look at the big gay party nights like Double Dutch Disco and Drunk and Horny, they’re all about the days when coke was king of the club drugs, well before E and crystal really even existed (the only people who did speed back in the day were total losers and beatniks, after all). Back some months ago I was at Bus Station John’s Tubesteak Connection at Aunt Charlies with a lil' red bumper in my pocket, and after a trip to the bathroom I came back and found everything to be just fabulous. That’s the whole vibe of that music and that era – weed, booze, coke. When I’m on the dancefloor at Drunk and Horny and I hear “He’s the Greatest Dancer” I flash back to all the usual disco associations, mirror balls and lines cut out on a mirror. Coke has become popular among gay boys in the same way as retro disco, because, I think, both evoke an era and a vibe for which gay boys are nostalgic. E is too much to deal with, crystal is too gross, so let’s do some coke, dance to some disco, and all feel fabulous, just like they did back in the day.

The unfortunate part of this is something that Jeremy and I also discussed - the fact that coke turns people into reptiles. When that dopamine buzz kicks in one's whole perspective turns inward - it's all about you, babe, and what you can get. For me, it brings out the worst aspects of my calculating, analytical nature, and if I've just gotten a bump from someone I start thinking about where I can get another. It also drives me away from interacting with other people - when I'm high on coke other people are just a distraction from whatever pleasure centers are whirring away deep in my reptile brain. It's all about me, me, me, gimme, gimme, gimme. Nothing could be as diametrically opposed to the loved-up sociability of E as coke.

I cannot take myself as the measure of all men, but I wonder if the shift from E to crystal to coke has changed the nature of how people relate to one another in the club scene. I can remember nights out at The End Up when everybody wanted to talk, hug, hang out, make friends, kiss, etc. Now, wherever I go, I get much more the feeling of people trying to hide or protect something, doling out whatever they have to only a select few. Coke engenders furtiveness and secrets, and the ego boost that goes with it revolves around feelings of power and dominance. It's all about lizard emotions, and at times I have this frightening image of being consumed by giant Komodo Dragons on the dancefloor.

I'm sure that eventually all this too will pass, and I'd say the signs are there already. Personally, I'd love a new drug, a new club, a new nightlife that's actually fun and happy and celebrates the here and now. Meanwhile I guess I'll just wait for those special occasions, and hope that the lizards don't get me first.

England's Rave Renaissance

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:25:48 GMT

According to an article in today's NY Times there's a bit of a "rave renaissance" going on in England right now, but, aside from glowsticks and E, I'm not sure what relationship it has to "raves" as we all knew them, since most of the music seems to be indie rock.

Hope You Saved Your Glowstick: http://tinyurl.com/2gjufu

The King's Holiday

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:50:01 GMT

Long weekends are lovely, especially when you have nothing to do and no place to go. Resisting my usual urges to fill every minute of my spare time with activity, this weekend I helped celebrate the triumphs of America’s greatest civil rights leader by drinking a lot, buying new clothes, and being lazy, lazy, lazy.

On Friday night there was a free party with open bar at Mighty featuring many of the DJs from Kontrol. Originally Jeremy and I had planned on going, but after dinner and drinks with Kitty, and a chance to experience just how cold it was, we opted for fuzzy couple time at home in front of my gas fireplace. This past week we’d had hardly any time to see each other, so it was a nice bit of couple downtime (and such).

Saturday night brought us to Drunk and Horny once again, but this time there was the added treat of a shooting right outside and across the street around midnight. Richard the doorguy saw the whole thing go down and was so rattled by the experience that he could hardly talk at the end of the night. We walked outside to see the whole block taped off. Now that’s hip, baby. Jeremy had a decent night behind the decks, and his tag-team with Jeff went especially well – alternating tracks seems to be the way to go for these guys. Jeff was in rare form for the evening, with some extremely clean mixes. It was once again completely packed, leading me to believe that the decline in November and December was merely temporary. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or regretful of this fact.

Sunday was brunch with Kitty and then off to do a little shopping downtown. Since Jeremy and Kitty were following me around in the underwear department of Macy’s Men’s Store talking about airbrushing cockheads, I decided to return on Monday to do my actual shopping. Some things are best considered in solitary meditation, like whether that sweater makes me look fat, or if those undies will give a nice presentation of my package.

Thanks to iii we had guest list privileges for the End Up’s “Super Soul Sunday” on, well, Sunday. I’ve not been to the End Up on a Sunday in a very long while, probably not since my period of extended unemployment in 2003-2004. It always seemed a bit on the tweaky side to me, being one of the few places available on Sunday night for that inevitable come-down. We got there around 9.30, as the crowd from the t-dance changed out and the househeads came on. It was a pretty high scene from all appearances, with lots of kids looking on the last legs of their epic weekend journey. Scott Wozniak and David Harness were tag-teaming, spinning through pretty conventional house with the huge black lady testifying, lots of tracks that sampled MLK, and then some really crazy tech house from the likes of George Vance (a little unsure of that name, since Jeremy got it from the DJ and then conveyed it to me under conditions in which my hearing was somewhat impaired). It was stuff with huge build-ups and very tweaked out rhythms, and it blew the minds of the dancers, who responded with shouts and whistles.

We left around 12.30 as Jeremy’s tummy began to bother him, and returned home just in time for him to make it to the bathroom, with a repeat performance at 2AM (and I was so grateful, as I toweled up the mess in the bedroom, that I could sleep in the next morning). We decided that the culprit must have been a Sparky’s turkey burger earlier in the day – so much for trying to eat healthy.

Monday I indulged in the updating of my wardrobe – thanks, MLK, for giving us a 40% off sale holiday. Future generations will continue to acknowledge your contribution to consumer capitalism. It’s been a while since I bought any new clothes, and this time it was nice to go out and buy some shirts and “furnishings” knowing I could actually afford it.

This coming weekend is Fur(ther)Con(fusion), though after the debacle of last year Jeremy and I have determined that we are only going down for the afternoon to see out-of-town friends, and then its back home. Last year Jeremy DJed to an empty room while, down the hall, kids were playing the most pedestrian trance and DnB in the world to a packed crowd. The secret? Make sure you’re in with the right clique and have furry social standing. We attempted to have some chemical fun, but I have sworn off hotel room parties and messed up, socially inept, sexually confused boys since then. And besides, there’s always better variety at any San Francisco club night.

Anti-Meth Coffee Campaign

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:48:10 GMT

I don't know why this has gotten me so riled up, but it has. I've sent links to Jeremy's post about speed-related advertising, with emphasis on Meth Coffee being in SF, to the BAR, and the SFWeekly (those losers at the Guardian don't have an email contact). I also sent an email to Cory Doctorow, who first published the article on boingboing - looks like she's helping to promote it. I told her to be ashamed of herself.

So now I want to try and get an actual email campaign going against these people. It's very simple: everybody send them an email, via their contact page (http://www.methcoffee.com/contact.php) that just says "Meth isn't funny." Spread it to your friends and get them to send them as well. If they start getting a bunch of emails with just that message, maybe it will get through to them that there is a group of people who really have a problem with what they're doing. If you send an email, let me know. Next stop, I'm going to find a contact for Tweaker.org and see if they would like to say something to these folks.

Disgusting: Meth Coffee

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:41:59 GMT

Jeremy just forwarded this me:

Meth Coffee
http://methcoffee.com/

This is one of the most disgusting advertising/brand ploys I have seen in a long time. If you agree, please send them an email and let them know. And if anybody wants to hit them with a DOS, you didn't get the idea from me.

Kontrol with Audion and Daniel Bell

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:26:04 GMT

First, a Big Announcement: Derek Plaslaiko, the DJ Jeremy and I heard in New York and totally dug, will be spinning at the next Kontrol in February. His groove is deep and progressive, with elements of trance sprinkled around, and it should be an excellent, excellent hour or so on the floor. Come and check it out if you want to hear some really excellent techno stylings from New York.

This past Saturday was the second Kontrol at the End-Up, this time featuring the big names Audion (Matthew Dear) and Daniel Bell, with guest DJ Suz. The event was once again packed, though this time I was less enamored of the crowd and the music, and have begun to wonder if the move to a big club doesn’t threaten the underground vibe that made Kontrol seem special in the first place.

Jeremy was away for the weekend, working on a special project with a friend in Oakland, so our Saturday group was J, Kitty, and myself. Knowing that the night would likely be packed, and that we could get in for free if we got there before 11, we decided on an early departure. We arrived around 10.15 with a line already forming, though I suspect that this was because they had just opened the doors. Passing through security lead to one of the “firsts” I would experience over the course of the evening – being patted down and asked to open the tin of Altoids gum I had in my pocket. Not as demeaning as a frisk at 1015 back in the day, when you could have the lovely experience of a thug running his thumbs around the inside of your underwear waistband, but unsettling nonetheless. I had nothing on me, and could have gotten something in anyway if I’d been determined, but the increasingly intense security, perhaps a result of new management, did leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Inside we had some drinks and listened to an opening tag-team set from Sammy D and Allyand Biyallo. It was a bit of an odd match-up, since Sammy’s tracks tends to be darker and more broken (and sometimes harder to dance to), while Allyand favored more of the big, expansive progressive feel, stuff that seemed to kick the crowd up more and raise the mood of the dancefloor. There were a couple times when I thought the tag-over was a bit rough because of these different styles, and I had a definite sensation of changing mental and kinetic gears. As an audience member I’ve never been too keen on the whole tag-team thing, since it can be very difficult to keep a steady flow happening unless the two DJs are completely in synch with their styles and genres. In this case I would have preferred a good hour of Allyand on his own to get my head in the right space for the rest of the night. I also think that the guys haven’t quite got the hang of the End Up sound system yet; there were moments when the mids and highs were coming out at completely tweaked-out, ear-frying levels, and I had to leave the dancefloor because the sound was making me feel kind of ill.

By 11 the club was showing signs of being completely packed, but the crowd seemed different from last time, more like general clubbers who would come out to the End Up on a Saturday night regardless of the event, and less like the dedicated technoheads I usually see at Kontrol parties. True, it was a rough weekend to motivate the troops, following on the heels of New Year’s, and I was close to staying home with a good video game myself. This was about the time that I had my second first of the evening, which involved having to stand in line for the bathroom because most of the people in the line were girls. In fact, when I skirted around the line for the “girls” bathroom to go into the empty “boy’s” room, I got cussed out by a girl behind me for using the stall to take a pee. “You’re a boy, use the trough,” she hollered at me. Well, tough, I’m pee shy, bitch. Why don’t you squat down over it if you have to go that bad, we’re all friends here.

It was in fact an odd thing that there seemed to be a preponderance of the female gender in the crowd. Coming out of the bathroom I saw one girl up against the wall with another girl rubbing her breasts up against her (evidence that some people were able to get goodies past the door), and then on the dancefloor there was one of those dreaded circles of squealing Marina chicks. Later I noticed what appeared to be a couple dyke couples walking around as well, and a fair smattering of Asian girls in black cocktail dresses. I wondered if this had anything to do with the guest DJ Suz. I didn’t stick around to scope out the floor during her set, though, because her version of techno veered dangerously close to tribal for me, complete with vocals.

Around 12.30 Kitty left us, and then around 1 Matthew Dear came on. I’ve never been that big a fan of Dear, whether in his guise as Audion or producing eponymous tracks. Generally, what I’ve heard of his stuff doesn’t really go anywhere, more like one loop repeated for a while, followed by another. His tracks under Audion have a darker, grittier, fuzzed-out feel, and it’s not something I really feel a groove for when dancing. Part of this may be because, once Dear took to the decks, the dancefloor seemed to go completely dark and there just wasn’t enough alterative sensory stimulation to light up my brain. The End-Up has a huge lighting rig and I was very disappointed that the only apparatus that got used was the strobe, my least favorite lighting effect. Given how successful the night was I hope that the Kontrol kids add a line to the budget for a visuals person (and I in fact know one who is very, very good if anybody would like a recommendation). Seriously, even the underground squat parties I’ve attended had better visuals. This was a problem I had with the Kontrol underground I attended at the SOMA loft space a couple months ago – I hate dancing in a dark box, especially as the night wears on and the need for sleep begins to pull at me. Visuals are just as important to the energy of the party as the music, and I hope that, in the future, the Kontrol crew will put as much effort into the visual stimulation as they do the auditory.

Last call came around 1.30 while we were trying to make space for ourselves on the dancefloor, and around 1.45 we decided to head out before entering that period of the evening known as Taxi Hell. I would have liked to have stayed for Daniel Bell, but both the flesh and the spirit were weak. Their were plenty of people shaking it around, though, and I found myself thinking about how techno is poised to become San Francisco’s Next Big Thing, though I’m concerned that it might degenerate into just another version of Club Noise for Making Out and Getting Fucked Up. In fact, this is my worry for Kontrol; now that it’s made the Big Time, I wonder if it will be able to keep that feeling of an underground, special thing for the techno cogniscotti. Though the RX Gallery was clearly an inadequate space, I still remember standing on the sidewalk, having a smoke and chatting with folks, and thinking that the seedy environs of the Loin did add some special flavor to the evening. It reminded me, as I said then, of when I was in Berlin and you had to go knocking on the right doors to find where the really slammin’ party was happening, full of happy crazy techno kids who obviously loved their music. I’m thrilled that Kontrol is enjoying the success that it is, and that there’s someplace I can go to hear good techno in San Francisco. I also don’t want to get into that scene insularity that completely brought down psytrance. I hope that by scoring a club like the End-Up more people will come to appreciate techno, but I’m also afraid that the masses will regard it as being much the same as other “techno” like house and trance, just background music for their chemical escapades. Next time I’ll stick around longer cuz I’m curious to see how things change after 2AM, whether more of the clubbers take off to be replaced by the heads, whether the groove deepens and takes us off into a special techno dreamland.

Fashion + Malaise = Total Misanthropy

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:28:29 GMT

Note to self: going shopping for clothes while in the midst of an existential malaise can only lead to a deep disgust with the entirety of human folly.

Holidaze II

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:48:03 GMT

As I sit here at my desk drinking my non-fat latte and eating my protein chocolate chip breakfast square I can have little doubt that I have left the suspended animation of the holidays and re-entered into the world of the mundane. I had hoped to face this moment with a sense of rest and release, though at best I could describe my current state as irritable and slightly depressed.

The holidays started off well enough with a trip to visit Jeremy’s parents and friends in Seattle. We took off on the morning of the 22nd and spent Christmas there, returning on the 26th. Fortunately I have met Jeremy’s parents before and we all get along well, and this time I also went armed with a potent eggnog recipe that made everyone feel quite merry. On this trip I also met Jeremy’s younger sister, Megan, for the first time, as well as the extended family of his stepmother’s mother, and his mother’s stepmother (yes, it’s all quite complicated). In the former case, as we pulled up to the doublewide in the rural environs of Tacoma I was a little worried, but as soon as we stepped through the door and I spotted an 1836 Springfield rifle hanging above someone’s Union Army discharge papers, I had a conversational opening. After that, the eggnog took effect and all was well.

Going to Seattle has this tendency to activate a strong nesting instinct in both of us; for Jeremy there is of course the association with home, the familiar, and the easy, while both of us are stunned by how much less expensive the housing market is there. The rentals our friends there have would easily run for double the price in the SF market, and prices for single family homes in Tacoma seem to run about $400 a square foot; of course, that is in Tacoma, neighbor to the meth capital of the world in Spannaway, but it is nonetheless striking when you’re used to $1000 a square foot for a tiny condo in San Francisco. We left with a strong conviction that a move to Seattle is probably in our future, but at some extended date years from now when we’re really ready for it; neither of us feels any strong compulsion to leave the track we’ve started upon right now, but would rather see how things play out over the next two years or so.

Coming back to San Francisco I was looking forward to three days of rest and relaxation before Aaron’s NYE party, but things didn’t work out quite as I expected; instead of lazing and loafing I wound up running numerous errands and cleaning the apartment. I had many things in mind to do, and wound up accomplishing about half of them (though I did get my first real haircut in over a year, which at least improved my outer self-image a bit). Almost before I realized it Saturday evening had arrived, and with it Jeremy’s return to DJing at Drunk and Horny.

We had expected a slow evening at DnH, but instead it turned out to be packed. For a change I had a very good time, and even remembered a little bit of what I enjoyed about going out clubbing and dancing – at least, while Jeremy was DJing. This was confused a bit later in the evening when Michael Rodriguez, who had been substituting for Jeff while he was off with Gary on a Mexican sojourn, told Jeremy that he should change it up to “funky and familiar.” This is a bit funny, since months ago Rodriguez and I had had a long conversation about how much better the music was when Jeff wasn’t DJing, and how the whole 70s thing was over, but he seems to have had a DJ pulpit epiphany; after the party, over a rather drunken, stoned, coked-out conversation about DJ philosophy that took place upstairs, he said that his great revelation had come when he was playing some hip-hop and someone asked him if could play “some 70s.” That apparently lit a lightbulb for him, and now he considers himself to be an expert on the night’s vibe. Jeremy’s response to his “funky but familiar” line was to flip him off, which is exactly what I would have done. During that upstairs conversation Jeremy opened his burning question of how his music fit into the vibe of the night. Rodriguez’s response was to try and push him into playing what Jeff plays, while Jeff tried to make a politic, and somewhat backhanded complimentary, argument that there were people who liked what Jeremy played, and people who liked what he played, and that Jeremy had a particularly difficult slot as the opener (though I’ve never heard Jeff suggest that maybe they could switch up some time so Jeremy could have the peak hour). My own take on it is that the quality of the music is probably much more important to Jeremy and I and then anyone else involved, and that that the rest of the crew concerned really don’t respect what Jeremy does (or, less graciously, that they feel threatened by it). In any case, it seems likely that one of Jeremy’s big goals for the new year will be to find more opportunities for DJing where he can get into what he does and feel good about it, rather than trying to appeal the lowest-common-denominator tastes of Castro fags.

Sunday didn’t find us up and about until almost 2PM, so there was little time to pull ourselves together before heading over to Aaron’s at 5. We got a ride over and worked on getting ourselves into a party mood, but Jeremy was still exhausted from the night before. I had promised myself that this party was going to be a chance for me to let go a bit and even be somewhat self-indulgent, and to a degree I followed through on that, chemically speaking, but I never quite got myself into the headspace I was seeking. I had expected the party to be bigger, but instead it turned out to be a clot of my friends, and a clot of furry boys, and, given the general social ineptitude of the latter group, this meant one group of people sitting around the food, and another group playing “guitar hero” on the TV in the living room. I mostly found myself hanging out by myself in the music room, but this was pretty unsatisfying. Finally, around three we got a ride home with DJ Mak, which turned into the most torturous 45 minutes I have even spent in a car. Riding the freeway around Oakland, when you are convinced you are headed in the wrong direction, is no place to be peaking. We finally made it home around 4 and Jeremy and I got to have some nice time together before he finally succumbed, leaving me on my own to come down until about 5.30. This was when things turned especially dark for me, and I came to muse upon the way that certain of my drives tend to lead me into situations where I feel isolated from others, especially when they concern certain aspects of my sexuality. Earlier in the week a friend had confessed a secret meth habit to me, the second such friend in the last month, and this had lead into thoughts about how there is this close association between pleasure and shame for so many of us, that the things that give us pleasure in a primal way are also things that, for whatever reason, fill us with deep shame, and so they lead us into this split life, where we want to enjoy that pleasure but feel that we need to keep it secret from others. In turn we become more inwardly focused and isolated, and this only reinforces the pleasure/shame bond. All these thoughts were circling through my head when I finally laid down on Monday morning, but the one thing that brought me out of it was being able to turn over and snuggle up to Jeremy. As crazy as we both are, there is a way in which he is able to bring me out of myself and give me a ground upon which to stand. If I came away from New Year’s with anything, it was a sense of how much I really am in love with Jeremy, and how desperately I need him to keep me from becoming completely lost in the labyrinth of my own mind.

Monday at noon was not a happy time for us; I had barely slept, and we discovered that Jeremy had left both his cellphone and wallet at Aaron's. The only solution was to get a car and head back over (though in hindsight we could have taken BART as well and saved ourselves both some pain), but this turned out to be the perfect tonic for my mood. The furry boys were just leaving as we arrived, and we wound up drinking beer and having conversation with Aaron, Jody, and their two friends from down the street for a couple hours. We returned home to showers, X-Men 3 (terrible, but just about the right level of mental challenge), and pizza before making an early bedtime.

When the alarm went off at 8AM this morning I had a strong desire to call in sick and just spend the day snuggling up to my boy, especially after a night of dreams that involved numerous anxieties filtered through the lens of my academic experience (I’m failing all my classes, I completely forgot to go to the one on Thursday nights!) including an emotional breakdown in a counselor’s office (nothing is real, nothing is worthwhile, it’s all absurd). But some part of myself that likes to think of itself as responsible got my ass up and into the shower, then on the MUNI and here I am. Fortunately, my co-worker and I have agreed upon a day of very little effort, a gradual re-entry into the world of whatever the hell it is that we do.

I’d like to think that the experiences of this holiday, from playing dominoes and drinking eggnog with Jeremy’s parents on Christmas eve, to my moment of dancefloor bliss at DnH, to the stupid-ass discussion that followed, to my abortive attempt to leave earthly bonds only to sink ever more deeply into them, to loving my boy with all to my soul, to my slightly bloody nose today, will serve as guides for the coming year. I feel that I have certainly learned some things, though whether I will find the wherewithal to act upon them is something else entirely.

Froehliche Weinachten, Y'all

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 19:10:12 GMT

And boy, is the eggnog good this year :)

Rhythm Society: "Luscious"

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:12:40 GMT

This past Saturday Jeremy and I were fortunate enough to swing two invitations to the Rhythm Society’s quarterly party, this one entitled Luscious, as the Unitarian Universalist Church on Franklin Street. The brief review is, if you ever get the chance, be sure to go, as it’s the closest thing to an old-skool rave that I’ve experienced in a long while.

The Rhythm Society (http://www.rhythm.org) used to be known as The Saint John the Divine’s Rhythm Society and was previously affiliated with The Episcopal Church of St. John the Divine until 2003, when some bonehead fell out on G at one of their events in the church bathroom. The ensuring controversy cost the then-pastor, Rev. Kevin Pearson, his job. It’s been around since the early 1990s, and has a pretty select membership; you have to be sponsored by a member to become a “friend,” and once you’ve become a member you get six invitations to hand out to folks for each event. Our friends Slacker and Haydee got two from us from their friend Carrie, who turned out to be good friends with someone I worked with back in the day at Netcentives.

We had some anxiety going to the event, though it was more on Jeremy’s part than mine; the fact that it was held in a church, that the doors closed at 11.30, and that there was an opening ceremony, led him to wonder if perhaps we were being sucked into some cult practice, or if everybody else would turn out to be vampires who were there to feast on newbie blood. I tried to re-assure him that all of this was part of what I had experienced with warehouse parties back in the day, but having never had those experiences, he didn’t have much in the way of reference. I was a little unsure of what to expect myself; there wasn’t any DJ listing for the party, I had no idea what the space would be like, or even what to wear – should I go all blacklight candy crazy, or would that be considered too “ravey?”

We got to the church around 10.30 and my first reaction was that it looked like Burning Man without the dust –same people, same kinds of costumes, and generally fairly groovy downtempo music. The fact that it was in a church social hall, that there were round folding tables set up with tablecloths, and women in faintly formal looking playa wear led Jeremy to make the comparison to a prom. I’ve not been to a prom that had a chill room with mattresses on the floor, though. Aside from the main room setup, there were two chill rooms, one red, the other blue, set up in wood-paneled room with a fireplace and a giant concrete cylinder, respectively. For much of that time when we first arrived we were taken in trying to figure out the church’s architecture, which, true to Unitarianism, was an interesting blend of Japanese framing, Gothic stone slabs and concrete, and pagan “nature.” The Sanctuary was truly magnificent, with an organ loft and seating for several hundred. The slogan “God is Within You” was in big gold letters under the round stained-glass window on the right side of the altar area, and it seemed very appropriate for this event to be held in a building where the congregation regularly meditated on this idea.

It took us about an hour to finally hook up with the people we had expected to meet there, but in the meantime we also met up with several unexpected party-goers, including Jacob, a young guy who has the studio next to my apartment, and Jared, a co-worker of Jeremy’s who was candy-raverlicious and “very happy” later in the evening. It was an interesting scene, to say the least, but it took us a while to get into because of some tension over what we were going to “do” for the evening. We wound up fueling ourselves on the hot tea and coffee that was provided, and by the time our other friends showed up and we got down with some decent breaks after the midnight ceremony, all was good.

As Jeremy commented, all the music we heard (all breaks, which now seems to be the new trance) was generally good, more of the funky breaks variety than being very deep or progressive. The crowd was a decent mix of straight and gay, with plenty of people dressed to show and shake their booties. By 2AM my general comment was “people be high,” but it was interesting that, earlier in the evening, I think there was more of a “family crowd” in attendance that probably didn’t get into anything stronger than the tea. My impression was that it was a generally more “adult” crowd of late 20-somethings on up to some folks with plenty of snow on the roof. When we first came in we heard a woman say “I have to go downstairs now and put my daughter to bed,” and we saw two boys, probably about 11, dancing on the main floor and then crashed out in the chill room later, along with a little girl who must have been about 8, who wandered in and out of the main dance area the whole time we were there.

Luscious was more reminiscent of an old-skool rave than anything I’ve attended in a long time, and we are already letting people know we’d like to go again. For a change we were able to dance to music we enjoyed without having to go through the usual problems of dealing with the club crowd, without having to fight for space on the dancefloor, without really having to worry too much about whether or not we were in the right space at the right time. Aside from the tension brought about by our being unsure about the nature of the event before we came, it was the most relaxed dance environment I’ve experienced in a long time, and it felt like you could do whatever you wanted, so long as you stayed in control of yourself and didn’t cause problems for other people. In short, you could rave until the coming of the dawn, something we all should probably do on at least a quarterly basis.

Premiere of Kontrol at the End-Up

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:40:23 GMT

This past weekend Jeremy, J, Kitty and I slogged off after Jeremy’s Drunk and Horny set to an event I’ve been anticipating for weeks and weeks – the debut of Kontrol at The End-Up. Though I was drunk as a skunk and capable of nothing beyond losing myself on the dance floor, it was easily one of the best nights out I’ve had at that club.

We arrived around 11.45 and the place was already jumpin.’ I think it was Craig Kuna on the decks at that point, though my vision was sufficiently impaired, and I was far back enough on the dance floor, looking through the dancing throng, that I could have been mistaken. We nursed some fresh drinks on the patio before we made it inside for the majority of Kooky Scientist’s set, which I found a bit, um, dull. The tracks themselves were okay, though a bit droney. He was mixing on a laptop (I suspect Ableton Live was the program of choice) and everything went together very smoothly, but there was no excitement to his mixing – it reminded me of when I’m simultaneously at my best and worst. The tracks bled one into another, and there were several times when I found myself coming to a near stop, wondering when it would pick back up again. As Jeremy said (within earshot of Sammy D., who moved away afterwards and caused Jeremy much anguish over having committed a social faux pas), it was the most boring Ableton Live set ever. With that kind of potential control, I would expect a lot more slice-and-dice.

Not so for [A]pendics.Shuffle, who took over the main decks immediately thereafter. Cutting up, shuffling around, pushing the mids on that system to their tweaky limit, [A]pendics.Shuffle brought a substantial charge of energy to the dancefloor that looked ready to carry through to the wee hours. We, however, were not. Most of the evening was a dancefloor haze for me, and I was surprised when we arrived home and it was after 3.

The next Kontrol is January 6 with the legendery Daniel Bell (who first re-configured “bleeps” and “blips” into the repetitive rhythms we’ve come to expect form Ritchie Hawtin and his brethren) and a live set from Audion (Matthew Dear’s super-gritty techno alias). It’s a testimony to Kontrol’s emerging reputation that they can pull in names of this stature, and in their new monthly residence they promise to become one of the major music events in San Francisco, offering the possibility of re-awakening interest in new electronic music for this otherwise moribund scene.

New York Whirlwind

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:15:02 GMT

Five nights and sorta six days in New York adds up to a lot of stuff, and it’s gonna be pretty hard to summarize it all, so instead this will largely be about the daily blow-by-blow. However, a few overall observations:

• Manhattan isn’t very wide, but it sure is tall
• Fixed gears are an exotic species crowded out by the humble pizza delivery cruiser
• Nobody in New York smokes pot, or at least are much more discreet about it than Friscans
• Aside from the outrageous sums people pay for a place to sleep every night, it’s really not more expensive than San Francisco

Thursday
We arrived in the dark and the rain, our plane touching down at JFK around 4.30. I had a town car reserved to pick us up, and we were at the hotel by six. After a room service meal we picked up umbrellas and headed out and North to explore through Chelsea, making it as far as Macy’s and 34th Street before we felt too soaked to continue. We stopped off in a bar, The Rawhide, on our way back and were pleased that even a dumpy hole-in-the-wall gay bar had better music, even if strangely mixed, than we would find in San Francisco. This, however, would not turn out to be a consistent thing.

Friday
Black Friday dawned warm and clear, and we spent most of the day wandering around SoHo and Greenwich Village, where Jeremy bought a pair of oh-so-sexy black engineer boots. These would prove to be his undoing later, when we confronted the gibbering monstrosity in its Great White Way guise, but they definitely lent him a rock star quality. We didn’t make it to Times Square until after dark, but the full force of the American capitalistic Christmas orgy was on display, and we even bought some CDs from a coupla rapper dudes who were selling them outside the subway. We gazed upon ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, smelled the dead pine aroma of the RC Christmas tree, and then made our way back to the hotel, with a stop for moleskin at the drug store, and a couple drinks at the Hell’s Kitchen bar Therapy, before venturing out for a night of crazy, crazy techno at the Sub-Tonic lounge in the East Village. Oh, how we danced, how we drank, how we exchanged greetings with the local natives. We met a fellow from Berlin who was in NY for the first time and I assaulted him with some mangled, drunken German, another fellow on the dance floor asked us in a very friendly way if we were fags (cuz his brother, who would be there later, was a big ol’ fag), and of course we had to sing the DJ’s praises to him once he was off the decks, complete with promises to hook him up here in the city with the Kontrol crew. The music, it was deep, and groovy, it was techno like I haven’t heard since I lived in Berlin, and when we left at 3AM we felt like it had come as a revelation. Upon our return to the hotel we were amazed that there were still people lined up to get into the rooftop bar and pay $14 for a drink with an hour to go until closing, but we did enjoy being able to walk past them and the doormen with a simple statement of “we’re residents of the hotel.”

Saturday
Sometime after the complimentary breakfast was well over we managed to haul ourselves out of bed and drag our bodies into the street for a hangover breakfast at what appeared to be a dingy neighborhood greasy spoon diner. Then we noticed that there were pictures of celebrities all over the wall, most of them taken within the diner. At a table by the front window three older men were joined by a fourth in a black leather trenchcoat, which lead to some kind of argument in which he proclaimed “No, no, really, I apologize, I’m the asshole!” Just when we thought somebody was going to get whacked he sat down, and from there the discussion veered off into plot developments for what was either a play or television show (“fuck that, that’s as interesting as watching paint dry”). Then it was off to the Met, the only museum in which I’ve every gotten lost. On Friday we saw all those places that we’d only seen previously in movies, and at the Met we saw all those great works of modern art that we’d previously only seen in books. We finally found the Glitter and Doom exhibition of Weimar portraits by Georg Grosz (appropriately rhymes with gross), Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, and spent a good hour being simultaneously amazed and revolted. Then it was off to the café, followed by a tour through Robert Polidori’s photos of post-Katrina New Orleans (mold is such a beautiful aesthetic element in all its blue-green variety), and then once more back to the hotel for naps and refreshment before our night of gay clubbing. Whew.

It was at this point that I sincerely wished I had found a magical source of some disco dust, because I needed a bit more fabulous energy. I know why New York is the city that never sleeps, and it’s not because of caffeine. We arrived at Mr. Black’s in SoHo around 11 and stayed for two drinks before we decided that, musically and socially, it was roughly the equivalent of The Café on Market Street. There wasn’t a pop diva that DJ Tekshur didn’t love, all the way down to Christian Aguillera, and the boys who looked like they were having the most fun were the skinny, almost naked go-gos who kept disappearing into the bathroom together, or off into the curtained-off back area. Determined to find the vibe we set off toward Chelsea, stopping off at XES, where the DJ was playing THE EXACT SAME MUSIC, then Barracuda, which was way too crowded. The clock ticking toward 3AM, my knees starting to ache, we called it a night on gay New York.

Sunday
We rolled out of bed to a phone call from one of my former UVa students who, along with his fiancé, was meeting us for brunch. We chowed on French toast and bloody marys at the Paris Commune while they told us war stories of living rent-free in apartments that rental agencies had forgotten about, sleeping on sofas, driving vans for movie production companies, and other tales of the young and under-employed struggling to take their bite out of the Big Apple. I tried to convince my student, Stuart, that all this was better than law school, but he seems as determined, and as lost, as me in trying to make “something” of himself.

After brunch it was time for more culture at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where Jeremy wanted to see a show by sculptor Ron Buehl, who makes photorealistic sculptures of people (mostly naked) at either Titan or below-life sized. They were among the most eerie things I’ve seen in a while. Back across to the island we were woefully mistimed in arriving at The Eagle, where we expected to find a beer bust in full swing but instead the bar was just opening. We went around the corner for fabulous Italian in a very un-fabulous and project-blighted neighborhood, then returned as the action was getting underway. On the rooftop deck we talked with some young fellows who graciously provided me with a roach when we asked whether anyone in New York smoked pot, but by 10PM, our food, sleep, and party rhythms completely out of whack, we went back to the area of the hotel for dessert, Cartoon Network, and restless, restless sleep.

Monday
Monday was the day of the epic trek, the long march of lower Manhatten, from SoHo up to the Battery down, then back around up the Bowery and through SoHo again. We saw the WTC site, which is no more remarkable at this point than any other construction site, wandered through a crew filming Sex in the City, and admired the Stature of Liberty from a distance. Jeremy tried on some great coats at G-Star that were far more suited to winter in New York than San Francisco, then it was back to the hotel for a swim (for Jeremy) and a drink (for me) in the fabled Hotel Gansevoort rooftop bar and pool with its lovely view of Hoboken. We met our friend Olga for dinner up by the Empire State building and talked about the state of the world (she being a Master’s candidate in International Affairs at CUNY) and I got to feel very smart. Then it was back down to the Lower East Side for drinks at Eastern Bloc, where Sam, the quite cute bartender with curly blond surferboy locks, introduced us to an older man who he said “could tell you all about down here.” That is, if he had been sober enough to hold a conversation. He did, however, have the most versatile use of the word “fuck” I have encountered in while. Needing to escape from this Burroughs-like character we had a walk around Tompkins Square Park and found two boys smoking outside the bar who promised to give us cover while we made our way back in. Drinks flowed, we contemplated our ability to be in a city like New York, what our futures were, and then, one last time, it was back to the hotel.

Tuesday
With the car scheduled to pick us up at 12.30 there wasn’t time for much when we finally finished packing aside from a stroll to find coffee and take in the sights, sounds, and smells one last time. We left knowing we would be back, and that our ambitions had been set one notch higher, but all I could think was that coming into work on Thursday would be a hard adjustment from the too-brief experience of New York’s myriad possibilities. At least I would have Wednesday off to sleep and let my knees heal.

Holidaze

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:48:06 GMT

I love being at work on the day before a major holiday, when not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. My colleague Chris and I have agreed that a missive must have come down from on high letting us leave at 1PM, but since our immediate supervisor is out and unable to relay it to us, we're just going to go ahead and pretend like we got it.

Tomorrow Jeremy and I are off for a well-deserved vacation in New York. It will be the first vacation we've taken with just the two of us, and I'm thrilled about it (and no, Burning Man is *not* a vacation). It came to me on a whim at the end of September, when I decided it was time to do something fun with the windfall I had received in my severance from LoanSoft. I hesitated a bit too long in making a hotel decision, though, and wound up with a choice between expensive and dingy, or really expensive and boutique, so I went with really expensive (though, after shopping on CheapTickets.com, it would up being only a bit more expensive than the Chelsea Hotel, my first choice, where we would have had to sleep in seperate double beds). So, around dinner time tomorrow we will be checking into the Hotel Gansevoort in the meatpacking district, dead between Chelsea and SoHo and a walk into the Village. Among the amenities: a rooftop outdoor heated pool with piped-in underwater music, so you can submerge yourself in views of the skyline and the chic ennui of Massive Attack at the same time. Apparently the poolside bar is also a good place to hang out and ogle celebs while having $14 house specials. I think, however, we are more likely to spend our drink money in the Lower East Side and SoHo than here, since the whole upscale thing is a bit intimidating to me. I've found a promising techno night on Friday at Tonic, the club owned by composer John Zorn, and on Saturday a club called Mr. Black in SoHo is home to a party hosted by the Gay Pimp himself, Johnny McGovern. It looks remarkably like Drunk and Horny, though Jeremy, having listened to a mix by the resident DJ, says that musically it's far better than anything ever heard at DnH.

Both of us are looking forward to this as an opportunity to get some new input and, I hope, inspiration. With the general Winter blahs descending San Francisco seems sleepier than ever, and I have returned to my typical existential ruminations on the meaning of life and what the hell I'm doing with it. I've reached one of those points where it's possible to see everything just moving along in a smooth and inconsequential way, with a steady rhythm of work, going out, watching TV on Sunday evening, repeat, all the way to the grave. Having anchored myself a job, I need to start plotting a new course or run the risk of becoming permanently moored - and being a technical writer is certainly *not* what I want to reflect back upon as my life's work (one of the most depressing things I found recently, off a tech writer society's website, was a list of "famous" technical writers. That someone felt the need to make this list as some form of validation for the profession speaks volumes). I'm considering (shudder) the necessity of going back to school to provide myself with opportunities for advancement, since there are essentially two kinds of people in the tech industry: business guys with MBAs, and geeks with mad technical skills. Being neither of those types it's difficult for me to see how I can advance in this industry. Among my considerations is getting a Master's in library and information science (MLIS) from San Jose State, or getting some kind of MBA/Master's in IT Management. I must say, though, that neither of those presents future opportunities that I find particularly appealing; the chance to become "an expert" or the chance to become "a manager." As an "expert" there is always the consulting route, though how many times you can do the same job is always an issue, and as a "manager" I don't think I would fit in very well with the culture I have observed prevailing among upper management types (it really, really helps to be a straight white guy with a wife and kids who likes to play golf and talk about sports).

I don't know if going to New York will help me figure all this out, but I do hope that being among a greater *variety* of people will open new horizons. One problem of living in SF, at least for me, is that it's become a much less diverse city in terms of the *kinds* of things people are engaged in doing. If you look at the gay scene, it's all pretty much the same, with a small handful of people running the show. If you look at the professional world, it seems to all be IT, medical, law, finance. The chances of running into a person or situation from which something new and different emerges seems very low to me (though, admittedly, I probably don't get out and about as much as I should). San Francisco, in other words, is starting to feel very small-town to me, and I'm not sure of how to go about stimulating my own growth in this environment. I will admit that I also feel a bit of middle-aged complacency creeping over me, this idea that I'm now pretty much where I'm going to wind up and a strong inclination to just go with it, to do my thing, make my money and find ways to increase my personal contentment. If I could accept that this is an OK thing to do, I'd probably be much happier, but I have always been way too ambitious for that (there's nothing like a SuperEgo that keeps saying "really, you can do better, can't you? Or are you just a lazy stoner?"). In the past these moments have usually preceded some transformation that takes years to unfold, so I'm hoping that New York will serve as the catalyst for one of these periods.

In other middle-aged man news, I've made my first forays into stock investing. Now that I've got immediate savings covered, I figured it was time to do something with the surplus. My goal is to beat the 5% I would make on a saving account (after taxes and fees) and invest only in companies who have a business model I understand. Right now my holdings are Apple (I got in just before the last earnings release, yay), The9 Ltd (NCTY) which runs World of Warcraft in China, and Omniture (OMTR) which recently went public and does Web analytics. Big business, medium business, small business, all three in the technology/Internet space (a no-no, but I have a hard time putting bucks into financials, retail, big pharma, and all the rest). So far I'm making my goal, but the idea is to hang onto everything for three to five years. I'll let you know how it all turns out in 2012, by which time the world will come to an end anyway. At least it gives me something exciting to check out when I open My Yahoo! every morning.

I'm taking the iBook with me to NY (yay for free wi-fi) so in between our adventures I may post up a few NY impressions. See you all when we return (if we do).

A Weekend Worth Writing About

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:28:43 GMT

It’s nice when you finally have a weekend that’s worth writing about. This past one included getting sloppy over Tiki drinks, bowling with the dead in Colma, witnessing rituals of gay life past, and getting down with the Techno spirit of the present.

Thursday night was a surprise engagement party for our friends Matt and Lisa at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant on Geary. We missed the dinner portion but arrived just in time to help finish off the pitchers of margheritas everyone else had been sucking down for the previous two hours. Then those who was still able to lurch up the street went to Trad’r Sams, where scorpion bowls were ordered, drunk, and occasionally spilled on other hapless drinkers who were urged to lap it up without benefit of a straw (though we did discover that Jeremy can get about a dozen straws in his mouth at once). I managed to escape with most of my dignity, but I think there were some calls into work the next morning with the medical excuse of having been stung by a scorpion.

Friday was Jeremy’s birthday, and we had plans to go to the Sea Bowl in Pacifica for a night of “cosmic bowling.” However, Jeremy had actually made the reservation at Serra Bowl (Sea Bowl, Serra Bowl, it’s all kinda the same), mere steps from the Colma BART station. Jeremy was disappointed that we wound up at what seemed to be the most happening place in Colma for wannabe Asian thugz and their beeyatches, but our disappointment was mitigated when we learned that our lane rental special also included $4 pitchers of Miller beer. Besides, we had three lanes with 16 gay boys, and if anybody had tried to start anything, we would have been on them like the Sharks on the Jets – as I pointed out, we were the ones, after all, who went to the gym. Wacky photos of the event will no doubt materialize soon.

Saturday we went to the investiture of our friend Chickpea as the Diamond Disco Duke of San Francisco at the LGBT Center. The theme was “Disco 1978,” but neither Jeremy nor I felt we could really engage with that theme, so I wore an old Twilo baseball jersey and pretended to be a raver boy once again, and Jeremy wore, well, a t-shirt. This was the 34th investiture of the royal court of San Francisco, and, looking around at the Dukes and Duchesses of the Bay Area, I got the feeling that they had last been in a disco was right around 1973. I can imagine that, in 1973, five years after the Stonewall riots, when the gay movement was enjoying its first moments of success and pride, the court system had an important role to play in the life of the gay community, doing fundraising, promoting events, etc. However, today, it’s hard to see it as being much more than anything beyond yet another system for creating status, mostly for draq queens, that has been created by gay men, just like the leather scene, or circuit parties, or anything else. It’s true that these organizations continue to raise money, but it’s hard to see what their relevancy is to today’s gay community. In fact, most of the people who were at the event were other people involved with the court system. I’ve made the offer to Chickpea and our local prince, also a friend of ours from our Burning Man camp, to help them put on a real dance event sometime, but the whole thing seems more like an excuse for draq queens out of their prime to wear sparkly formal wear than an occasion for throwing down a real party.

Fortunately, at the last minute on Saturday afternoon I got an email flyer for an underground party being thrown by the Kontrol kids, with ModeSelektor playing fresh from their performance at 1015 the night before. At $5 to get in if you were wearing a white t-shirt, the price couldn’t be beat. We arrived with our friend J and Jeremy’s friend Matt from work right around 10.30 and were the first folks there. It was a great old-style loft, and the only criticism I could possibly make is that if you’re going to have people wear white t-shirts, you really should hook up some black lights in the dance area. Jeremy got in a few words with the ModeSelektor guys, in which they were generally dismissive of the vibe at 1015 (they said it was like playing for a crowd of Russians, what with the go-go girls and all).

This was the best party I’ve been to in a very long time, if not all year long. Craig Kuna was, I believe, the first up, and we spent most of his set just hanging out in the front room and waiting for ice to arrive for the drinks (I was gratified to hear at least one track I own being played). Then Sammy D came on and we had a great tour on the dance floor, and by midnight it was getting crowded enough that we were backed up against the wall. We alternated between the front room, where the crowd was quite friendly and fun (though not so friendly that the boys sitting behind Jeremy and J, who I was giving the eyeball, were willing to share their disco dust with us). ModeSelektor went on around 2.00, and by 2.30 it was so packed and smoked out in the entire space we decided to hit the pavement. Down on the street we waited for a few minutes while Jeremy went back in to see if he’d mislaid his cellphone, and we saw some very fashionista kids actually be turned away, while one of the hostesses informed everyone standing around that it was very rude to be there making noise and attracting the attention of the cops. We lurked silently in the shadows until Jeremy returned, and then went home pretty well exhausted. I can hardly wait until next month when these guys start their monthly at The End-Up. It was funny to think that earlier in the evening we had gone to an event that was supposed to be about reliving a high point in gay and club culture, and yet it wasn’t until later in the evening, in a smoky, semi-evolved loft space populated with hipsters, that we really got a taste of what the disco was about. More evidence, I think, that the gay community needs to stop waxing nostalgic and actually get out and down with what’s happening today.

Afterburn

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 23:31:11 GMT

It’s now been almost two weeks since my return from The Burn. I started my new job at CNET the Tuesday after our return, and it’s taken this long for the thoughts to settle in my head and for me to find the time and mental energy to write them down. Instead of the long, chronological series of posts I started last year (and never finished), this time I’m going to try and get down more to the essence of the experience.

Society of the Spectacle
Before I left I wrote up a typically cynical and suspicious post about the nature of Burning Man. I have not returned with a newfound fascination for the event, nor am I quite as critical of it as a whole as I was when I left. Instead, I have learned to look at Burning Man as a true city, one that presents as much spectacle, and as much quiet beauty, as any other.

Last year the spectacle of Friday night sent me running for the shadows and quiet spaces, and this year it had the same effect on both Jeremy and myself. We had started out watching the fireworks at the Serpent Mother (accompanied by the most incongruous smooth jazz chanteuse I could have imagined) before gathering around the Space Cowboys Unimog. We lasted there for about a half an hour before something about the hugeness of the crowd sent us off, along with J and Kitty, in search of other entertainment. We went and looked at some of the sculptures (the War of the Worlds tripod with its willing captives was particularly spooky and fun), but it wasn’t long before we were heading back to the tent. After some chillage and some deep breathing I convinced Jeremy that we should all go for a walk, and there, among the small sights and random interactions, we finally found the Burning Man that we had come to experience. Off in the distance the phasing and intermodulations of the sound systems made me think of a gibbering monstrosity being summoned from the Abyss, but among our friends it was like we were in a different world. For me, what was happening out around the Man was spectacle for the masses, a money sieve like Las Vegas or Reno, but one that was there to help finance this grassroots world we were exploring – all those people who had paid whatever exorbitant amount at the gate had made it possible, after all, for people like Jeremy to come on scholarship tickets. Later, as Jeremy and I walked onto the deep playa to watch the sunrise, he said that the art cars hovering around were the beasts that had been summoned, and on Saturday, as they circled around The Man for the burn, it was like the ritual was about to be performed that would send them back.

The burn itself provided a moment in which I fully realized how little interest I had for the big spectacle. After a long 24 hours of psychedelic experimentation we wound up at the burn behind a dickhead in a stupid wide-brimmed hat (at night) who had mounted a digital video camera on a tiripod, completely blocking the view of everyone behind him. Despite attempts to get other people to sit down, and despite our making it obvious that we all thought he was being a dickhead, he and his thuggy friend continued to fuck with our experience. My remonstration was “stop filming and start watching,” but obviously getting his shot was far more important than the experience of anyone around him. So much for “no spectators allowed.” I was so angry and strung out that I almos started a fight with him, but then, afterwards, we went back to camp and had a great last evening of sitting and drinking with our campmates and friends, and random passersby who wanted to tell us how much they had enjoyed our camp. This, I thought, is what I really come to Burning Man for, not the spectacle, not the party, not even the art (much of which was frankly mediocre this year), but for the social interaction it affords me, the ability to let go and find some other aspect of myself than what I need to keep in operation in the default world.

The Birth of the Desert Fox
This was Jeremy’s first year at BM, and naturally this added a certain amount of tension to the experience for both of us. On Sunday evening after our arrival we went out to The Man on our bikes with J, and it was only then that the scale of it really hit him. It’s easy enough to look at a number like 38,000 people and think, wow, that’s big, but until you’re on the playa and actually start riding around do you get any indication of the physical reality behind that number. At various points throughout the week, as the crowd grew and the general cacophony increased, he told me how much he admired me for having been able to come last year “alone,” and how he would never have been able to cope without me there for support.

There were some real challenges for both of us this year, often involving both crowds and intoxicants, as described above. But no matter what his psychic state, Jeremy always looked fabulous, like a post-Apocalypse anime boy, and in my psychedelic vision he became The Desert Fox. Early in the week we had been out by the perimeter fence and came across a fake National Forest-style sign explaining the origin of “the fence.” While most people thought it was there to keep people without tickets out, it informed us, it was also put up to keep people in, largely as the result of a burner attending a shamanistic transformation workshop and believing he had the ability to transform into animals. Thinking he was a desert fox, he wandered out onto the deep playa, only to be returned to the “festival” three days later by a farmer from Elko.

That he spent a couple days walking around wearing goggles, a camouflage bandanna, and khaki shorts certainly influenced my perception, but we were both amused by the dual qualities of folly and genuine transformation inherent in this tale, and I think, in some ways, it really did pertain to his experience. I would like to think that, no matter how ridiculously hedonistic aspects of our experience were, we both experienced something that was transformative for ourselves individually and as a couple. After our long trip on Friday and into Saturday night I know that I felt we had come through a bonding experience. Of course, The Desert Fox was a better playa name to have bestowed upon Jeremy than the one he started the week with – Sunscreen. This was because he got badly sunburned on Monday, and everywhere we went for the rest of the week people kept saying “hey, do you have sunscreen?”

Furchtbar Techno
It’s really too bad that, for a large portion of those in attendance, Burning Man is the only place where they get to hear electronic music, because much of what is played is simply awful, and played in an equally awful way.

Burning Man is certainly the home of big penis art, and much of the music played there partakes of the same aesthetic, though where trance once ruled the playa, now it seems to be all about breaks. As an example of the truly horrendous things the average burner has to endure, consider The Alien Love Lounge, which was camped a good block away from us, but whose sound system (in blatent disregard for the sound rules laid down by the BORG) could clearly be heard in our camp. From early morning to deep into the night these guys played the most horrible, most inappropriate music possible. There was no thought on the part of the DJs for what might be appropriate morning music, or what effect their ridiculously loud system might have on the camps around them. As a result, all Saturday afternoon, while tripping balls in Kitty’s tent, we had to listen to the most gawd-awful, ghetto-booty breaks ever committed to wax. At one point there was a break, and I heard the Pink Panther theme come on. Thank god, I thought, that jackass done waving his penis around, and now we’ll have some nice Saturday evening lounge music. Moments later, somehow, this gentle lilting melody was crushed by the idiotic bassbooms of breaks. I wanted to go find the guy and roll a hand grenade under his decks.

When we did our camp party on Thursday night I was pleased to note that our system was clear, but not necessarily very loud outside our immediate borders. When I played I tried to be conscious of how our music would be heard by passers-by and those in the camps around us, and I think it went over okay. I even had two genuine “chills down my spine” moments as I DJed. On Thursday I played a progressive trance set that managed to draw in numerous random folks, and at the end I threw on the Son Kite remix of Analog Pussy’s “Future,” which has a huge anthemic lyric about “Face this dying world/write your name in water/they try to take us down/but we will not surrender/we are the world/we are the future.” Cheezy, but I knew that the one place in the world where I can get away with playing that track is BM. I got out from behind the decks to dance to it, and it gave me absolute chills. Everybody loved my set, and I really felt that I had done something special.

Then, on Friday afternoon the gear was still set up, and Jeremy and I each took a turn at playing some chill tunes for happy hour. Standing behind the decks I could see the golden light of the setting sun on the Black Rock Mountains, the lamplighters walking by, everyone getting ready for their night out. I put on “The Difference that It Makes” by The MFA, and it was one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever witnessed from behind the decks. A hippie boy on a bike was riding through Neon’s mylar rain sculpture, and as he zoomed by he caught my eye and gave me a thumb’s up. I wonder how many other DJs got that kind of acknowledgment for making a moment of magic.

Looking back overall to this year’s experience, I came closer to finding out what I enjoy about BM, and what I don’t. Having really come to think about it as a city rather than event made a large difference, since a city is about going out to explore and find what you want, while an event is something programmed that you either participate in or don’t. I’m probably willing to do it a third year, but have some questions about whether or not I want to do it with Comfort and Joy again, hook up with another camp, or go independent – there were times this year when I found the large number of different personalities within our group a bit too much to deal with, and as I thought about, I realized that I’m much more comfortable being there with a group of friends whose company I enjoy than a large group that seems to have been brought together simply because they think it’s a cool camp. Of course I still have my issues with the general atmosphere of the event, the constant sex-and-drugs aesthetic, a lack of substance, and the penis-waving. But having survived a second year, I’m now starting to feel like a veteran burner, and see it as a place where I can go and be another version of myself for a while. That’s a very difficult thing to give up once you’ve really gotten a taste for it.

Burning Man, Ho!

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 21:42:41 GMT

Last night, with golden light fading over Oakland, I had the privilege of shutting the back door of Comfort and Joy's supply truck and announcing that it was packed and ready for the long haul to Black Rock City. I only wish I could say the same for myself.

Since Sunday my life has revolved principally around packing bins and vehicles and transporting their contents to various locations in San Francisco and the East Bay. Sunday night Jeremy and I packed up all of our personal stuff and had some of it ferried to a staging area by another camp member, Kitten. Monday I picked up my DJ gear that was being repaired, loaded the Scion B from City Car Share with a couple hundred more pounds of speakers, stands, turntables, and DJ coffins, and took all that to the same staging area. Then, on Tuesday, I helped load a van with items from the staging area and take them across the Bay to Oakland, where they would be loaded for the last time onto our 27 foot Penske truck. By the time I slammed that back door shut last night at roughly 8.00 PM (the earliest the truck has been loaded in the entire history of Comfort and Joy), I was exhausted. My left elbow ached, as did my knees, and I could feel the strain in my thighs from all the up-and-down motion of climbing into and out of cargo bays with heavy loads.

With the major camp chores accomplished and the truck now underway to BRC, there are a few minor material tasks to be taken care of at the personal level - wrapping reflective foil tape on my beater bike, a trip to Walgreens for personal toiletries, a last scouring of the apartment for whatever might have been overlooked in the explosion of clothes, costumes, and personal effects onto the bed during Sunday night's packing. Left out of this is the major chore of dealing with my mental baggage.

I wish I could say that I was excited and looking forward to Burning Man. Instead, what I feel is an ambiguous apprehension, not of anything specific (though I can already see the evolution of potential personality conflicts among the members of our camp), but just a low-level existential anxiety about the Burning Man experience itself.

As I've both implied and stated in other posts, I view Burning Man as an annual ritual event akin to Mardi Gras or Carneval, something that marks the passing of a year and is also the celebration of hedonism before moving into the season of Lent. This exists in a very real sense for me, since immediately upon my return I'll be starting a new job, and a period in which I expect that much of the indulgence I've afforded myself recently will be sacrificed for industry and committed focus. Though I can find ways to justify Burning Man as a hedonistic escapade, it is this very aspect of it, and its relation to my own life and achievements, that gives arise to my deepest misgivings.

There are two very negative ways in which Burning Man can be viewed. One is that it's sex-and-drugs in the desert for the bourgeoisie, and this aspect of it has been plainly evident to me since I first moved to San Francisco and began meeting Burners. I recall, for example, going several years ago to a meeting of Burners who wanted my friend Scooter help them make a sign. At this meeting was an older, genteel man who was part of a group that rode their BMW motorcycles to BRC every year, and treated every person who arrived on a BMW to a fresh steak dinner. I can't really think of anything that exemplifies the worst ostentation you'll find at Burning Man any better. So much of Burning Man seems to be about this cool thing I have, or this group's crazy set-up, or other ways in which money can be used to flaunt the very harsh reality of the Black Rock Desert.

The second negative way in which Burning Man can be viewed is that it's essentially a science-fiction convention on a massive scale, where the dweebs, nerds, dorks, and other social and economic outcasts come to feel like "somebody" for a short period, and, maybe, get laid. Freed from the shackles of conventional society, these people at last have an opportunity to shine.

Common to both these groups, and many others who attend Burning Man, is the way in which BRC serves a focus for the distallation of very basic and primal aspects of the self. Years ago a friend of mine was telling me about his experiences with founding a commune in Tennessee that went very, very bad. When I asked him what happened he said "when you take people away from civilization, all the things holding their anti-social tendencies in check are removed. At that point, you get to see what's driving people at a very basic level, and it often isn't very pretty." While this friend and I share a misanthropic view of humanity in general, I believe that this principle holds true for the Burning Man experience as well. Whether you are a bourgeois or a geek, what you have in common at Burning Man is that you no longer have to answer to the same system of authority as you do in the "real world," you are given license to manifest whatever it is that you have to suppress (and repress) in the course of normal life. The result, often, is not very pretty, whether it's a display of material excess every bit as offensive as a Hummer, or a display of personal excess that would make Hunter S. Thompson hide his eyes.

This is the aspect of Burning Man that frightens me and fills me with apprehension, that aspect that on Friday night last year sent me in search of quiet, de-populated regions. At a party with a bunch of young (early twenties) furry kids this past weekend I made a comment that there were some very dark things to be found at Burning Man, and one kid challenged me by saying "well, I can't think of anything dark that I probably wouldn't enjoy." I wish I had the ability to summon up that level of naivete.

So, the question is, in which camp do I place myself, the bourgious or the geek? Both, of course, and that is what bothers me on the personal level. Certainly my ability to attend the event and make my self comfortable there, and even put on some display, is a function of my income level, modest as it may be by San Francisco standards. And, of course, I'm every bit as much a geek and social misfit as other attendees. The work I do has no real meaning, and, in most cases, I am the most marginal of contributors to whatever effort is being undertaken. I go to Burning Man because I, like everyone else, want to feel like I'm somebody for a while, that I'm contributing to something real, and that this all has meaning.

The part that's bothersome is that my normal life is so mundane and unfulfilling that I need something like Burning Man to restore my sense of self (or to obliterate it, as the case may be). It would be nice if I reached a point in my life where I felt like I didn't need Burning Man, or I could just regard it as I would attending a concert or going to another city on vacation - an opportunity for diversion and pleasure, rather than as a means for finding a self that I then hide and nurture until it is given the chance to manifest again a year later.

As appropriate for a New Year's festival, I do have some resolutions, or at least aspirations. As with last year, I hope that Burning Man will enable me to widen my circle of associations, though this year my hope is that they are more intellectually, or creatively, substantial. This year, with the promise of a new, well-paying, steady job, I hope to spend more time working on defining the paths leading onward for what is clearly a crossroads in my life. And so, I also hope that next year I might be looking forward to Burning Man not as an opportunity to realize myself, but rather as a time when I can extend, and enjoy, what I have made of myself over the past year, or perhaps discard it entirely as yet another thing that has helped me grow, but is no longer necessary for my self-actualization.

This will likely be my last post until I return. If I don't see you on the playa, I'll hope to see you when I get back.

"Program" at G3 - the Pup Spins

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:23:45 GMT

For a couple months now my friends Raphael and Anne (aka Saturnia) have been running a downtempo/progressive trance night at a bar called G3 waaaaaaay out on Geary at 3rd (like, it was a $20 cab ride when I went to check out their opening night). Last night Kitty and I got to spin, and, while there were (as usual) some technical difficulties, it went extremely well.

To quickly get the technical difficulties out of the way: there was no booth monitor to speak of, and I don't know what Allan and Heath had in mind when they designed the Xone:64 mixer, but it doesn't seem to have much to with DJing as I know it. Because I was having to listen to the mixes based on what was coming off the dance floor I wasn't able to do as much with the measure-matchng and subtle mixing as I might like, but it still came out all matched and not too shabby. As for that mixer, all I can say is "urgh." I'm not sure what the problem was (on reflection is may have had something to do with the channel inputs), but I I had the gain on the channels turned up all the way and could barely get any signal out of some of my tracks (not that I could really tell the amplitude, since the channel meters only had four bars, two green, one orange, and one red). And I totally don't get the point of having two mid EQs. There are some interesting filter effects built into the box, but I didn't really play with them. I dunno, I think the Xone mixers are built with more of an electronic performance/all digital setup in mind, but the Pioneer DJMs remain the gold standard for DJ mixers in my mind.

The good bit was that I played tracks that got two well-known locals (one of whom manages the Psytrance section of Beatport) to come up and trainspot (I had great pleasure in teling the Beatport guy that the Analog Pussy track I played was, so far as I knew, a vinyl-only release)- one advantage of being a vinyl DJ among people who only spin CDs is that you don't have all the same crap as everyone else. On the other hand, after my set Saturnia played some excellent tracks that have me thinking that I need to branch out a bit more. I dislike playing on CD players because each deck has a different feel to it, and I have a hard time making small, in-play adjustments to the tracks, but so little progressive psy is released on vinyl these days that if I want to continue playing it, I'm going to have to eventually incorporate CDs.

I was also happy that I got people dancing, and among the psytrancers, that's no small trick. This was a preview of the set I have planned for BM, and I was very pleased with the overall sounds and vibe. One of the great things about DJing in a bar or club is getting to REALLY hear the stuff you practice with at home played at the intended volume, and getting to feel the impact of the bass. I think I shall rock the playa with these tracks.

Afterwards Jeremy told me that I did a great job and that my mixing was "flawless," which was the best thing I could have heard all night.

John Digweed, "Transitions"

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:55:06 GMT

The latest mix CD from John Digweed with the unfortunate (since it invites comparison with the Ritchie Hawtin CD of the same name) title "Transitions*" shows that one of the early icons of trance has clearly understood the significance of the new techno sound coming out of Germany, but the result is a muddle of moods that, while technically astute, lacks the sense of drama and resolution that one would normally expect from a progressive DJ.

With the inclusion of tracks from the likes of Paul Kalkbrenner, David K, and Tigerskin, the remix of his own track "Warung Beach" by Kiki, and the inclusion of an ExtraWelt remix on this compilation, it's pretty clear that Digweed has been paying close attention to the new sound of German minimal tech and electo and has decided to make it his own. "Transitions" is thus full of growling sawtooth bass, machinic loops, and plenty of twitch and glitch. There are still moments that recall the soaring space trance of old, as with the opening track "Crusing" by Partial Arts, "On the Run" by Popnoname, "Plastic Rubberband" by Catwash, and "Jetchi (John Digweed Edit)" by Michael de Hey, but in general the sound here is heavier, tweakier, and more aggressive than what one would expect from the co-creator of "Northern Exposure." In fact, the first time I played this disc I was in a somewhat, ah, altered state, and had to turn it off after four tracks because it was just too damn tweaky for me to handle.

Here, in fact, is where I have difficulty with this compilation; I can't figure out how to listen to it. Though it has grown on me with repeated listens, it's very difficult for me to tell where Digweed is trying to go with this new sound. A typical moment of confusion arises in the transition from the first track, the aforementioned "Cruising," into "Feelin" by Every. "Cruising" has all the vibe of a traditional progressive track, including a groovy deep bass and spacey high end atmospherics on long delay, and listeners might first be inclined to let themselves ease into familiar territory. But then "Feelin'" comes in with a drum kit that is almost nothing but thudding subsonic bass, glitched-out 1/8th note reversed high hat wind-ups, and female vocals repeating "Feeling You" in a breathless state -- all sounds that have more to do with anxiety and tension than the groovy hip shake and get down of "Cruising."

This sequence - groovy space followed by techno glitch - repeats several times throughout the compilation, and the result is unresolved tension. Some of this surely has to do with the nature of minimal techno, which is more about the loop than the progressive build-up and break. Indeed, one of the other noticible qualities of this compilation is how dull the actual transitions are as a result of Digweed simply bringing in one track and letting the other practically fade out. There's very little in the way of DJ pyrotechnics here, none of the sudden cuts or drama one might expect from progessive trance or even house. It's all quite smooth, but also quite boring. As a result the tracks, in technical terms, easily merge from one into the other, but there is never a strong sense of release or advancement for the listener. It's not until we arrive at Digweed's own track, "Warung Beach (Lutzenkirche Mix)" that we finally get a sense of playfulness and real progression. But if this track is the big woo-woo that everything builds to, it comes quite late in the mix (track 12 of 15), and for me, it's too little, too late. The three tracks that follow, "Jetchi" by Michael de Hay, "McEnroe" by Dana Berquist, and "Gebrunn Gebrunn" by Paul Kalkbrenner, all have the quality of denouement to them, but at the end, I'm not sure what story has been told. Indeed, the vocal for "Gebrunn Gebrunn" even has a quality of resignation to it, with a typical black diva voice repeating "make a living." If anything, the story seems to be about going through it, getting it over with, making a living. Not much in the way of transcendance here.

So, what is this compilation about? Is it a dance set, an "at home" set, something to put into the car? While their are moments when I can picture the lasers and and the smoke machines, there are others when the I think of concrete industrial plants, graffiti walls, and hipsters in black. It is, in other words, a schizophrenic album that, more than anything, demonstrates that Digweed has a sharp ear for new sounds, but doesn't quite yet seem to have a mastery over the techno vernacular that would enable him to say something with it.

*ED Note: Apparently Transitions is the name of Digweed's BBC radio show.

Further Burning Man Prep | "Bijou Cabaret" at Martuni's

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:09:28 GMT

With two weeks left before our departure for Burning Man, Jeremy and I are focusing on very little else. Saturday night was another Drunk and Horny, where Jeremy played the most satisfying set he's had in a while, and I was ble to enjoy having Kitty and J around to help pass the time before we could leave. We had the option of heading out to a promising warehouse party afterwards, but with BM on the horizon, there just isn't much incentive for burning energy/money/seratonin on anything else. Instead. we would up having another one of those weekends where you get to discover the great part of living in San Francisco is the diversity of experience it offers, and I came to some peace with myself over the act of disciplined self-indulgence. Ultimately I have also come to understand something a little deeper about what Burning Man offers to the soul of America.

On Sunday we finally set up the mammoth tent I bought on eBay, and it was a good thing we did, as it has some unconventional aspects to its construction that I would have been displeased to discover while trying to put it up on the playa. At the very least, we'll need to stake this baby down solid lest it take off on us - at 10' x 17', it presents a very large sail area. As we were struggling to figure out what pole got attached to which ferrule, several people walked by and made comments about "nice place you've got there," and one even said "so, you guys getting ready to head out into the desert?" In late August, when young men begin assembling tents on the sidewalks of San Francisco, it's a clear sign that The Burn is coming.

Sunday night we went to Martuni's, a piano/fern bar of the old school down on Market and Valencia, for Bijou Cabaret, where J and our friend Varian were performing. Trauma Flintstone was the Mistress of Ceremonies, and, with drag queens performing show tunes and the works of Natalie Merchant, chanteuses with ample bosoms belting out jazz standards, and neo-folkies strumming out Dishwalla, it was, as Jeremy said, one of the gayest things we've done in quite a while. Varian sang two tunes of his own composition, including a lyrical substitution of "Somewhere Up My Asshole" for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," at the end of which something did, indeed, disappear up his asshole. For the first song J accompanied him on electric guitar and Fender amp, and was quite cute in his cowboy hat, peppermint-striped Grand Ole Opry shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, and bolo tie.

Afterwards, Jeremy and I joined J and his "friend" Dario for pizza in Hayes Valley (and I was apparently so intoxicated from the three large martini-glass drinks I had at Martuni's that I picked up the check, as I discovered when I opened my wallet this morning and found the receipt with "DJ Dinner" scrawled above the top). As we sat there I had a moment of realizing that this was what living in a city is all about, the chance to go hear your friends perform in a cabaret, then head out for pizza afterwards. If anything, a city is really made up of the opportunity for different kinds of experiences that it offers, and this is what makes some cities, like San Francisco, Berlin, and New York, special - you can go from Drunk and Horny in a Haight dive bar to setting up a tent on the sidewalk to ferns and draq queens to pizza in the tony part of town, all without really leaving a six block radius. Call it "experience density," the real measure of a city.

We were out a bit late, and had a bit to drink, and I felt somewhat naughty for showing up to work at 10.30 this morning. But the fact is, with Burning Man approaching, this job in a holding pattern until I leave, and the knowledge that I will be clamping down to start a new job when I return, as well as the possibility of once again having to undergo some painful surgery, I'm feeling rather self-indulgent. As I wrote recently, one of the challenges of getting older is finding new experiences for oneself, and, to a degree, I've been using this slack period as an opportunity to undertake some experiments. These have been successul, even to the degree that some of them have resulted in hangovers and other unpleasant physical side-effects, but I have enjoyed this as a period when I can be a little "bad," and not "feel bad" about it - or, at least, so I have come to understand. I know that, after Burning Man, all these things will change, and I have been using the analogy of how Lent follows upon Mardi Gras. This morning I had a meaningful dream, in which I had the choice between a very pleasant day of sex-and-drugs, or getting my ass out of bed and going to work. In the dream, as in life, I chose work, because being seen as, and acting like, a responsible adult is important to me. At the same time, as I've gotten older, I've also gotten better at recognizing those periods or moments in which it's okay to let up on the reins a bit. One of the problems of American culture, I believe, is that we no longer recognize any kind of festival calendar that doesn't have anything to do with crass commercial consumerism. Festivals and feasts were the times in which societies were allowed to take a break from their responsibility, or celebrate that they had been responsible and had now earned some release (as with the harvest celebrations). For some small window of time they could forget themselves as producers and experience a bit of indulgence, slack, and maybe even get sexy with one another, living out some of their fantasies or other concepts of themselves. In current America, it seems like we are all driven to neurotic mania by this idea that we must be constant producers, constant workers, striving to achieve The American Dream, and if we let go for even a moment, if we show up late and hungover to work on Monday, we are lesser as people for it.

This is not to say that we should absolve ourselves of all responsibility in the name of a hedonistic ideal, but rather that we need to something of a temperate approach to temperance. I think this is also part of "growing up;" adolescents have a hard time with this kind of concept, because, in the limited space of their experience, they haven't had much opportunity to work with balance - after all, adolescence is largely about figuring out boundaries, and the way you go about doing that is by pushing to see how far they go. As adults, we've hopefully figured out those boundaries, and can tell when something is encroaching into an area where it shouldn't. When we "let ourselves go" it's usually within a well-defined space, and we know its limits and end. The other part of this is also recognizing that, in real life, sometimes people need these spaces for themselves, and we need to let that happen - we need, in other words, to learn forgiveness for both ourselves and others when we reach those points. Again, this is not to say that every shitty or stupid thing someone does when Bacchus or Passion overtakes them can just be dismissed, but if we recognize ourselves and others as human beings who are driven by passions and desires that are not always under rational control, it does make understanding, and forgiveness, a lot easier.

Last year, when I was writing about going to Burning Man, I was worried that I would see it as largely an act of selfish, hedonistic, self-indulgence, that it would seem trivial and even profane in a world where there is so much suffering and horror. Now, while I still think that you can find much about Burning Man that is ugly and even rather disgusting, I have also come to recognize that, like a real city, what it offers is a very high level of experience density, and that the ability to partake of these experiences, to delve into self-indulgence with all its consequential ugliness and sublimity, is critical for the maintenance of our sanity. Burning Man is America's dance of the Bacchae, full of violence and madness, but also the harbinger of peace and civilization.

"Remote" at Counterpulse

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:56:17 GMT

Jerey and I went to see a great bit of theater last night, "Remote," by Kraft and Purver, at CounterPulse (I know, horrible name for a theater group, but still good events). He has all the relevent details over at his blog, and I added some comments about it there as well. Unfortunately, tonight and tomorrow are the last nights before they take the show to New York, and I'm certain you'll need reservations to see it. However, I recommend it highly; I rarely go to theatrical productions, esp. here in San Francisco, since I generally find them to be pretentious, overwrought, trivial, and ego-driven (do we really need that many monologueists in the world?), but this was terrific, the best thing I've seen in years.

Burner Weekend

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:36:27 GMT

After a difficult weekend last weekend (some of you may have seen my "friends-only" post, which I later downgraded to "private" after deciding it was too much angst for public consumption at any level), I was looking forward to something a bit more sedate, and perhaps assuring, this time out. While still feeling a bit sketchy around the edges I nonetheless had a fun time at yet another "turning 40" party with Mermaid and Jovino on Saturday night, and then on Sunday I had ample reminders of just how integral Burning Man is the soul of this city.

It seems that I have hit that point now where many memebers of my social circle are starting to hit the big 40 - a few weeks ago it was my friend Juicyfruit Jim, and now Mermaid and Jovino, while my own entrance into the special club was a year ago. It is perhaps a testament to the quality of the people I know that, while many of them expressed certain misgivings about turning 40 (including the usual "what the hell am I doing with my life" sorts of questions), all of them, when pressed, admitted that they really thought they were doing well. As I said to Mermaid on Saturday night, what better evidence do you need that you have accomplished something than to be surrounded by well-wishers? Several weeks ago, with my feet dipping into the water of the pond at Camp & Sons, with Jeremy by my side, I said "I may not be Karl Rove, but Karl Rove will never have this." At mid-life it becomes obvious that some paths have been passed by in favor of others, and so long as we feel that there is some benefit and some satisfaction to be found in the path we have chosen, I think it's easy to feel pleased with one's progress. For me the degree of success in my life has been (at least until recently) more defined by the relationships I've formed and the experiences I've had, though life here in the Big City has, at times, directed my attention more toward the markers of financial success as well.

On Sunday another friend of mine, Kurt, was talking about some of the changes he felt he has gone through over the past three years, and said he felt that they were evidence that you really can undergo substantial personal change at the age of 40. I replied that I certainly hoped so. I think the biggest challenge of mid-life is keeping oneself open to experimentation and change, and not feeling that's it's time to setttle down into a comfortable rut, whether that concerns something as mundane as your haircut or as esoteric as the means through which you seek transcendance. This past year (and the year or two proceeding it) have been periods when I've undertaken a lot of experiementation, in areas ranging from personal appearance to profession to substances, and have learned some new things as a result. If I can continue, through the rest of middle age and onwards, to find new challenges and experiments to undertake, then I think I will also feel that I am living my life well. I only wish that, unlike everyone else I know who is hitting 40, I wasn't going gray so quickly!

The actual party on Saturday night was rather low-key for us; Jeremy had to DJ at Drunk and Horny, so only J and Kitty accompanied me there. I had to rent a City Carshare to make it over to Oakland, and, as Kitty said, had we arrived an hour later and stayed an hour later, it no doubt would have been much more rocking. But since I don't like to drive, much less drive at night in a rented car, I was more restrained in my party activities and schedule than I might have liked to have been.

Sunday, after a homemade breakfast of buttermilk waffles and sausage, Jeremy and I joined our other Comfort and Joy Infrastructure Committee members for an afternoon work party - painting things (and the ruination of a pair of shorts and shoes), replacing Christmas lights, washing Aluminet, etc. On our way to the lower Haight we passed by my neighbors on Clinton Park who were fixing up their art car (which will eventually become a mobile igloo bar), walked past some folks in Duboce Park who were working on a dome structure, and during the actual work a neighbor dropped by to introduce himself and tell us about his camp, "Psychic Taxi." With the Hardware Store sporting a "get your Burning Man supplies here" sign and the long lines of people buying Handi-Wipes and sunscreen at Walgreens, it feels like the whole city is now gearing up for the Burn. While the city has certainly undergone a general retraction of late, it seems that this has only made Burning Man a more important cultural event. So San Francisco has lost 5% of it's population over the past three years - that just means that Burners are a larger portion of the population!

Finally, I'm starting to feel some excitement about BM. There is a part of me that is always anxious about large events like this, especially ones as large as Burning Man, which are apt to bring out my misanthropic tendencies. This year, though, with a year's experience behind me and somewhat tempered expectations, I'm looking forward to it with a greater sense of anticipation. Mostly, this year I've figured out what to bring and what to leave behind, and, most importantly, I'll have Jeremy with me. Of all the possibilities, I'm most looking forward to sharing a night of chills, thrills, and spectacles as we ride around the playa together.

Bauhaus for My House!

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:34:16 GMT

Like pretty much everyone in San Francisco, I'm obsessed with real estate, and have become even more so since working for a company that develops home mortgage loan automation software. At the bottom fo this post you'll find links to the Bay Area Housing blogs that I read on a daily basis, and I'm always checking out the Examiner and Chronicle for articles on the real estate market.

The big news here is the slew of downtown condo development happening in locations like One Rincon Hill - with condo asking prices of $750K to $2.3M. As you read about these condos on blogs like socketsite.com, you'll be treated to descriptions of granite counter tops and Bosch appliance, breathtaking panoramic views and other "luxury" features. But what I want to know is, where are the condo developments for those of us who just want a nice, economical, safe place to live?

According to a recent Chronicle article, developers here in The City will only build if they are guaranteed a 23% profit (that's net profit, by the way). The simplest way to ensure this is by making every development a "luxury condo" development. The City has regulations that a certain number of units must be offered for "below market rate," but there are many wide-open loopholes for dealing with this. The result is a city full of luxury condo developments, high-end Victorian rehabs, and absolutely nothing in the starter or middle range of home purchasing.

What San Francisco needs is a return to the Bauhaus ideal of functional, basic-but-good-quality housing developed for the masses. I don't need a Bosch refrigerator, I just need one that doesn't frost up every time I open it. I don't a sweeping view of the Bay, I just need some good light. I don't need a granite countertop, just something that's useful and can be cleaned. In short, give me decent habitation at a price that's affordable. Of course, 23% on 200K is going to be a lot less than it is on $750K, so the incentive for developers to build something other than luxury condos is lower. But it may also be worth asking whether developers or the city government should ultimately be responsible for determining the growth of a city and the housing options available to its residents.

San Francisco Real Estate Blogs

The San Francisco Real Estate Blog
Burbed - SF Bay Area Home Price and Mortgage Insanity Blog
Marin Real Estate Bubble Blog
SocketSite