:: Music As Social Agitation Records::

:: Thursday, August 25, 2005 ::

alright... so i just got done catchign up on some internet communications stylies and am still sitting in a hidden house off of Geary Street in cool, moist San Francisco. Carlos has been out this afternoon trying to hock some posessions in order to afford more necessary things like, well, food. hopefully tonights show will be a lot of fun at the amnesia bar with petracovich. i liked the stuff i heard of hers and it will be nice (sad to say) a bar designed for live music.... things are fine and fun, though my own finances (all 16 of them) have been dwindling down. thanks be to a familar greyhound steward behind the counter in seattle who gave me the student discount with no questions asked probably cause he recognized me as a long-time listeners, first-time caller... good guy, that dude. without his glance in the other direction, i would be sitting with about 40 negative finances and a growling stomach and a sour-sauced mood... last night was our unexpected extra SF night (since the beach-fire belly boat show got cancelled). we made the most of it mostly due to a kind, cheerful and gracious host, LX. Carlos knows LX through some computer techie connections and he is a really awesome dude. we are actually in the neighborhood he grew up in, that he recently decided to settle back into. he has the ideal home set up, it is a studio shack with a quaint alley yard, behind a larger, three-story apartment complex. this neighborhood is pretty dang cool and it is nice to be so close to a city center and not see those horrific, brown-toned new-millinial gentro-fied apartment complexes that seem to be choking so many other cities right now (see seattle, and portland especially). the sort of mammoths that like to nest on top of pit park in downtown bellingham... anyways, LX got off early and met us at the Javacat coffeeshop that me and carlos walked to after getting dropped off a few blocks down by Adam. turns out LX lives pretty much kitty corner from it... we decided we were gonna try to scheme to get onto some bill or possibly play an open mic and after coming back to LX's (and through the long tunnel that leads to the backyard where his house is), we dropped off our shit and and went to check out this coffeeshop two blocks off. I am not sure what type of music LX does, or any names of his projects but he has a lot of noise/experimental equipment and recording gear (a couple theramins for example) and two nice computers set up (he has worked for several computer companies, mostly in the game design realm, i believe, like atari and such and is now working for an arcade company -the one that put out the "golden tee" golf arcade game that is all on-line and such)... he has to drive to san jose to work, which seems to suck, but he is also a bike enthusiast and rides in the SF critical mass apparently....

anyways, the coffeshop open mic was thursday, so we grabbed the local rags and checked them out for options on our walk back. i kept finding blue nitrous tanks (which i mistook for those small CO2 tanks) and LX corrected me and made known there "purpose." we got back to the house and decided to go play an open mic later that night at a coffeeshop near Golden Gate Park called The Canvas Cafe (the place was a combination cafe, art gallery, bar sort of thing) but first we set out to go check out the ameoba records on haight street. it was a nice, short and scenic drive through the park and we spent a good hour at ameoba. i scored a couple classic NW albums (an early some velvet sidewalk record and an early mike johnson radio-promo album) and also came across some local bands in the bargain bins was searching. i found used copies of the pale pacifics new EP and also of korby lenkers "bellingham" album (which i had carlos take a picture of me holding, since i was wearing my bellingham jill brazil show... which gets me thinking, i hope john tosch comes out tonight to the show.... that'd be radical... anyways, we left ameobo and on the way back carlos pissed in the park in plain view of a roadway (like the good transient he is right now). we pretty much grabbed our guitars and we're out the door again in LX's bright read racing BMW (the vehicle lacked a back seat and the seat belts were a jungle to latch on). we got to the wide, spacious cafe around sign-up time (7pm) to find 24 people already signed up... shit. we threw our names on there and carlos acted the salesmen of our valor for the rest of the evening as we tried to vie for a better slot... after a couple hours, a few beers (courtesy of LX and his friend Michael Coyote who showed up to hang out some) and some rather disheartening performers and environs, we decide to head out for some food and come back after to see if we were still up to play. carlos talked again to Mike the Bob Marley-shrouded host of the evening and told him we had to get some food and would be back soon... our efforts to find the sushi that michael was craving and offering to buy us were soon thwarted (as every place, be it dining or excercising or dying) closed at 10pm. we eventually found a pizza place... got some young, trying-to-be-a-writer-in-a-suit-snob kicked out of our good booth (he proceeded to pout about it via body language for the next hour) and ate some very good pizza and talked about movies, music, books and the horrible songs coming through the stereo system. it was all these 80's hits, but done by crappy studio musicians. i felt gross, after sitting through some undesirable at the open mic, that it took us so long to figure out that NONE of the songs were the original artists. all i ask for is sincerity, is that too much? we walked back by the open mic to a much younger, looser crowd that would have been fun to play to, only to find out our names had already been called... we could probably have tried to "go next" but we were all pretty beat from the scene... a short ride home, a bit of discussion about technology and the fast-pace of the future and then some quiet, calm sleep.

it has been mild and mildly foggy here. the evenings are crisp and cool. not really flip-flop weather... the leaves are falling and tonight i just might wear shoes to the show. i miss getting to know people closely. i don't do that enough lately, really EVER lately, and the quickly changing faces and places of touring are certainly no help... autumn is when you start to dig into the soil, to entrench yourself with allies against the cold and i look forward to days like that again. i miss the romance of it.

:: brs 3:45 PM [+] ::
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