August 2009 Archives
What a treat to find several Midnight Music Label artists of yesteryear on iTunes now, like The Essence: Dancing In The Rain: The Best of The Essence (on iTunes), Sad Lovers and Giants: E-mail From Eternity: The Best of Sad Lovers and Giants (on iTunes), and The Snake Corps: Flesh on Flesh (on iTunes) and More Than The Ocean (on iTunes). Here's a video for "Look East For Eden" by The Snake Corps boys. I've been listening to these releases all week with a smile on my face.
Playing with my brand new Canon EOS Rebel T1i camera at 4am out in the street here in San Francisco. You can see bigger versions of these on my Flickr. So far I'm very impressed with my purchase.
The Christian Science Monitor interviewed me about hooping, and ran a photo of my feet. "It's a common sight in San Francisco - the green grass of a neighborhood park is accented by brightly colored hoops twirling at improbable angles around people grooving stylishly to dance music under the afternoon sun. These are the Bay Area Hoopers, who meet every Sunday afternoon in parks around the city to practice their moves, holding the hoops aloft, then spinning them around their midsections, arms, shoulders, and legs. For Philo Hagen, cofounder of the Bay Area Hoopers and editor of Hooping.org, the hoop is a way to shift one's attention from the head to the rest of the body. He says hooping is fun, childlike, and meditative, all of which make it tremendously good for the spirit. 'It's hard to get caught up in anything too seriously when you're hooping, and it's pretty guaranteed to put a smile on your face,' Mr. Hagen says. Full story: Christian Science Monitor
Music by Marsen Jules in cooperation with visual artist Johannes Braun.
I was excited to be able to find Deux online and purchase and download Agglomérat for about $10 US. Perhaps you will also enjoy these 16 tracks of exquisite French minimal electro from the early 1980's. Here's a video for Felicita from 1983.
Because I am mentioning the word "hula" no doubt you will think I am talking about hooping, but in this case I am not. I'm talking about dancing. Hit & Run Hula hit the Castro on Saturday. The group is the current wonderful insanity from Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu, a hālau hula, or hula school, based here in San Francisco. Led by Director/Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakāne, the hālau features a dance company of 40 performers and offers classes. Here they are with special guest drag queen Matthew Martin doing the Shirley Bassey lip synch.
In 1962, two women in Detroit, Michigan, died from botulism food poisoning after eating a bad can of A. & P. tuna packed by the Washington Packing Corp. here in San Francisco. Health authorities across the country began searching for all the other cans of Washington packed tuna marketed under various brand names (Tastewell, Ocean Beauty, Drake's Bay, Tuna-4-Cats) with a certain code. Meanwhile, Tuna sales nationally plummeted for all brands and the Washington cannery, which had never had a problem before and had packed 12 billion cans of tuna in it's 45 year history, closed it's doors. They were never accused of any health violations that could account for such a poisoning either. Although only a few cans were infected, all of Washington's stock was confiscated by the government and buried with pomp and great publicity beneath ten tons of garbage in a dump next to Candlestick Park.
The building has remained abandoned for 47 years, but recently I saw a notice posted there which is why I decided to pay the old cannery a visit. Caltrans has applied for a permit to remove existing structures, foundations and footings saying that the building is within an existing Caltrans right-of-way. A man on the side of the building was pulling stuff out of the trailer that's been there for a long time so I asked him about it. He told me the trailer is going to the scrapyard this week now that the building is coming down. He didn't know the exact date, but said they're going to blow it up. I decided to take some photos since we we don't know how much longer the Washington Packing Corp. building will remain with us.
You can view my cannery photos here.
The Hooping.org Forums launched today and the culmination of several months of work and frustration are over and the new social networking world for hoopers is now online. Oh Happy Day!
A beautiful video by my friend and neighbor Khan Wong.
Sufjan Stevens has turned the BQE into a film. I'm so very excited to see this. The release date is October 20th.
In heavy rotation these days is "Glider" - the first full length from Seattle's The Sight Below on Ghostly International Records. You can download the accompanying EP "No Place For Us" for free by following their link.
Peaches Christ presented the 12th annual screening of "Showgirls" at Midnight Mass and Elizabeth was quite the Nomi Malone, while I decided to go Vegas with more of a Siegfried flair.