opening night fireworks at at&t park

Due to being out of the country in Soccerland, I was sort of sad that I missed this season’s opening day & night because it’s been a personal tradition of mine. Yesterday, however, I saw something so rare that it was like seeing aurora borealis.

Well, it’s The Day After Earth Day and I think I speak for everyone when I say THANK GOD we can all go back to throwing trash out of our windows again. YES!!! Oh wait… you don’t do that?

Um, oh I just found out about this cool site called Free Music Archive and it’s great because they have very reliable music nerds who curate collections of quality music that you might not know about. Anyway, WFMU, the best listener-supported public radio station in the entire universe has a site and I highly recommend checking it out. WFMU put on a showcase in SXSW that I briefly attended only to meet the program director and sadly missed the Obits set. But it’s up on there too! I know documenting everything can sometimes bite you you in the ass, but most of the time I’m grateful this modern phenomenon exists so that I never miss a moment of value.

Speaking of Obits, “Fake Kinkade”, an angry and loud song about being duped into buying a forged Thomas Kinkade painting is my new Happy Place when I am under stress. I really don’t know how to explain why without sounding pretentious. Just a warning, I am about to get hardcore nerdy about why this song is so beautiful and powerful to me primarily because I can’t remember the last time modern music moved me this way. Have a listen:

I’m not sure if you are familiar with the artist Thomas Kinkade but you’ve probably seen his stuff everywhere and not realized it.

Check the wikipedia entry

Thomas Kinkade (born January 19, 1958 in Sacramento, California) is an American painter of realistic, bucolic, and idyllic subjects. He is notable for the mass marketing of his work as printed reproductions and other licensed products via The Thomas Kinkade Company. He is self described as “Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light” (a trademarked phrase), and as “America’s most-collected living artist”.[1] It is estimated that 1 in 20 homes in the U.S. feature some form of Thomas Kinkade’s art, according to Media Arts, the publicly-traded company that licenses and sells his products. He has received criticism for the extent to which he has commercialized his art — for example, selling his prints on the QVC home shopping network. Others have written that his paintings are merely kitsch, without substance,[2] and described it as chocolate box art.[3]

Not only do I not relate to his subjects but he is a highly successful commercial artist who manufactures prints on canvas with technology made to look like original real oil paintings. I’m not as much of a cynic or misanthrope these days but when I see his paintings of glowing country gardens and serene dewy pastures in pastel hues I think to myself, What a beautiful lie. He is a business man who has a natural talent for painting. But there is no soul within those brushstrokes and his artwork seems vacant to me—from the moment the vision was born to the factory where it was made thousands of times over by machine and not man.

So why does this angry & loud song give me peace? Because I can appreciate the beauty in achieving clarity from jarring, ugly realizations. The best and deepest smarts you can attain don’t come from school, but I think from rough and painful life experiences. It’s a new kind of freedom and level of understanding that one can only really earn by sacrifice and upsetting means. And the narrator of “Fake Kinkade” invested in something believed to be authentic, only to later realize he was fooled “by a forger in a foreign country I don’t like.” It’s a great revelation, at least to me, because I have never considered that the artist could simultaneously by the forger. And it has my favorite combination in song-writing: visceral/blistering/controlled chaos sounding with angular guitars and angsty vocals, but the lyrics are cerebral, meaningful and downright poetic:

As a person who has an unhealthy obsession with Americana, I love that this song can satisfy that fetish while showing a darker side of the white picket fence. One in 20 homes in America have a Thomas Kinkade print?! It’s a smart but not so obvious or obnoxious metaphor for dissing systematic herd mentality, inauthentic & mass produced “inspiration” and escapism in America all within a succinct 3 minutes. And although I am for the most part very content with my life, indulge in escapist entertainment every now and then and have material desires myself, I never forget that my deepest bonds with people is usually based on the common idea of being very suspicious of people who appear to be happy all the time. Why? For that to be possible in any lifetime, either they are so sheltered or sedentary that they have never, ever encountered a harrowing challenge or worse, it’s a bullshit facade. And Thomas Kinkade paintings are the perfect iconic symbol of being happy all the time. It’s such profound and brutal commentary but done in the best creative way ever. I hate it when ideas I agree with are too heavy-handed and beat me over the head in a self-righteous manner. So in conclusion, um, this song is FUCKNG GREAT!!!

Well today was kinda miserable. First day back at work after vacation and i had hundreds of emails waiting for me. I came home wanting to take a nap badly due to residual jetlag and realize my neighborhood was 20 degrees hotter and heat wavier than the rest of the city. My flat is top floor and the sun beats down on the roof all day, not to mention the large windows transforms it into a greenhouse nightmare. The best thing about these heatwaves…Dolores Park at night! The park is so crowded on freakishly hot nights and it was great running into random people i hadn’t seen in a while. I’ve lived here over 10 years and going to the park during these very rare warm San Francisco nights is one of my favorite things ever.

Wow, so those data recovery guys in the small Mission spot called TechCollective managed to rescue about 80% of the stuff on my camera. And they were so kind and thoughtful (stay away from Best Buy). I’ll save the photo summary for another day. Here’s video I took of some random band from Liverpool called Bodies of Work. They were really good and I think really young. The bassist looked like he could be on that show Freaks and Geeks.

Despite the dismal weather, being really expensive and not having as many pretty buildings as Paris, I really loved my time in London on a human and personable level. it was an entertainment mecca for me much like the reasons why people love NYC. There were tons of great museums that were free. The British Museum with its collection of artifacts was mind blowing, like here’s 24 rooms of cool stuff we stole from other countries in the past centuries. Really incredible stuff I have not seen before like ancient mummy housecats from Egypt wrapped in bandages with the same care as pharoahs and what not. it was hard for me to remember that a country with people so well mannered and pleasant in nature have had a long history of pillaging and a forceful proclivity for imperialism. Also there were vintage clothing shops that were amazing, much better than I expected food thanks to recommendations (Borough Market is where I had the best pot pie that made my knees buckle & indian food is a no brainer), quality non-corny/not-so-hipsterfied night entertainment and the people were so helpful. My luggage weighed over 50lbs (I swear I didn’t leave SF with that much but records are heavy) and random strangers in the tube station would offer to help me up the stairs. Not only that, but I would ask parked cab drivers for guidance when I was lost and they took the time to give me detailed instructions. You know how when you ask people for directions in the US, they kinda halfass and want to go on their way most of the time? I was floored. Even in the age of GPS, the cab drivers complete 2 years minimum “knowledge”, what they call it when they study the streets by heart before being active. Respect due! Cab drivers here are hit or miss with ultra specific location requests. I’m plotting a longer visit coupled with a Berlin trip.

i’m back on US soil and did a gloriously stupid thing with my camera which resulted in me frying my memory card and erasing 560 pics and video I took in Paris and London. Will take it to a data recovery spot later today and see if those dudes can perform a belated Easter miracle for me. Two things, this Obits album is really good. Best new rock album I’ve heard in quite some time.

secondly, Thomas Bayrle has knocked my longest running #1 art crush Ed Ruscha from the throne. I can’t remember that last exhibition that really really impressed me, maybe when the SFMOMA did the Bill Viola retrospective, but his work is amazing. He is a serious badass.

Also, me and Marco are thinking about starting an “anything goes” monthly, more on that later. Don’t count on me playing hip hop though! Those days are long gone. I’m thinking about adopting the name Snake Scarf because somebody put a python on my friend Kyle in Austin during SXSW and I told him he should be DJ Snake Scarf from now on, which he sadly did not embrace. Or maybe I will continue with Awww Damn.

I bought a lot of random records overseas and am excited about them.