Long before I moved to (the outer reaches of) Noe Valley, I was aware of its safe, traditional, almost suburban atmosphere. 24th Street is a showcase for middle-of-the-road eateries, shoe shops, flavored lattes, and fleecy weekend wear. It’s also the site for one of the premier stroller derbies in the city, by which I mean the roaming dog and tot zoo that occupies the avenue any given Saturday. The surrounding neighborhood, though, is filled with charming homes, relatively quiet, walkable streets, and just enough protection from Twin Peaks to slow the onslaught of fog.

Situated amongst the mercantile pablum of 24th Street is Harry J Aleo’s wonderfully looney Twin Peaks Properties office, which still displays random conservative memorabilia featuring Reagan or Bush/Cheney through its front windows. He used to post handwritten notes in the front, railing against the liberal loonies and any other affront to his way of life. Harry was clearly a traditionalist.  He once said,

Tradition means a lot to me. We have to maintain some of that tradition for future generations.

Harry’s since passed on, but his beliefs still resonate with a cranky minority wary of changes to their neighborhood.

Like many areas in the city, Noe Valley is evolving. The demographic seems to be trending towards a younger population. Whole Foods moved into the old Bell Market, challenging established mom and pop shops like the 24th St Cheese Co and Drewes as well as several wine shops, flower shops, you name it. There is an invasive proliferation of real estate offices.

And most recently, a Pavement to Parks plaza was proposed for the intersection at 24th and Noe and it’s drawn a lot of ire. Certainly, there are people who are uncomfortable with any challenge to conventional street use. I attended the first community meeting about the proposed plaza and many of the opponents made plangent cries for how it would impact the ease of their drive…around the block. What  stood out to me most was the fury some individuals exhibited, indignant that the city could foist something like this on them and their neighborhood. It was every bit the Tea Party lunacy of the health care forums last fall.

Just consider the contempt shown by opponents to the plaza in this video, which features some of the same eccentricity as a Christopher Guest mockumentary:

One of the obstreperous persons shouting over the city staff in the video is Joel Panzer, “master property manager”, who’s responsible for possibly the tackiest signage in the city (at yet another local real estate office).

He’s also interested in preserving Harry Aleo’s storefront as a museum to traditionalism. After all, they were here first and they want to make sure others remember that.

Maybe all this change – even proposed, temporary change – is just too much for longtime Noe Valley residents, who demonstrated similar rancor when the city changed Army Street to Cesar Chavez Street. I don’t want to seem above nostalgia or historical preservation, but I don’t believe in traditionalism. This city and its neighborhoods are going to change, despite heroic attempts to freeze them in time. I have great hope that, in time, our streets and public spaces will be greener, more walkable, our city made more vibrant by designing for the pedestrian environment over the automobile, thus reintegrating islands of suburbia like Noe Valley into a cohesive urban fabric. The Pavement to Parks program is a great way to test different ideas while soliciting community input. As with health care reform, I trust that a very vocal, but misinformed minority won’t derail its progress.

My head feels aflame this season. I don’t think it’s just allergies, though my eyes are burning. No, spring is truly sprouting and the air is heady and rich with new blooms. The local wildflowers signal in great waves like LED beacons of red, yellow, purple, pink and white to the imminent flood of produce from farms all around us.  Strawberries are here; asparagus, peas and morels are peaking.  And, just in time for Easter, the fava beans are starting to rise from the earth like the lamb of god himself. [Note: favas and lamb are a divine combination]

Praise be!

My burgeoning obsession for produce grows ever more delirious around springtime. I crave rapini and various flowering mustards. I felt practically anemic the last few months going without Will’s avocados. But I covet favas and I’m not sure there’s anything I look forward to more all year — except maybe Stan Devoto’s Pink Pearl and Arkansas Black apples — than the sight of these beautiful green pods at the farmers market.

I’m growing favas for the first time this year. The flower is absurdly pretty, velvet black and white and filigreed like a pontiff’s crown. I’ve clearly stunted the plants’ growth by using old wine crates but improvisation is the plight of many apartment dwellers. Still, it’s all I can do not to constantly sit outside and just watch the damn things grow millimeter by millimeter.  I’ve spent many nights outside with my headlamp hunting for snails and other garden ne’er-do-wells. I’m no buddhist. I will throw my arm out heaving those things to the ground with force.

I’ve got my fingers in the dirt now more than ever — at Alemany Farm, Garden for the Environment, Little City Gardens, and in my own ramshackle cracks-in-the-concrete space outside my apartment — and it’s got me thinking a lot about the edible environment around me. I’ve long thought of fava beans as an almost exotic crop, an heirloom produce that most people wouldn’t recognize outside of Italy where it’s as common and prolific as pot herbs. But I’ve seen it everywhere this year, at Alemany Farm, in community gardens and even in other front yards.

And that’s great. The bright fresh flavor of these beans (or peas, really) is every bit as intoxicating as the smell on your hands after picking a tomato. If more people are introduced to favas, it could spur them to seek out their own little cracks in the pavement, median strips, or even support the development of new community spaces.  Or maybe they’ll just dip into the next healthy packaged food craze at Whole Foods while protesting the new community space down the street. The power of favas can only go so far.

But there is nothing like the satisfaction of eating from one’s own land, container, rooftop or window. The exhilaration of spring’s blossoming and bright flavors is balanced by simple preparations.  While I anxiously await my miniature bounty of favas, I foraged some wild onions just up the hill and picked some greens and herbs right from my front patio. A squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil. Good god. Gone are the warm, hearty soups and braises of winter.  Here are the salad days of spring.

As an aside, the way I encounter new music is different these days, less in clubs (growing boring, old man) and more on headphones. I’ve got shelves and shelves of CDs, which I’ve never liked and I hate to think of as a collectable product, but I completely abhor the idea of an all-digital collection. Artwork and liner notes and simply browsing a library are all valuable components in listening to music for me. I love vinyl, but it seems ridiculous to grow a large vinyl collection in this era. So I’m split between the three formats at the moment. I’m curious how you all are collecting music…have you given up CDs for an iTunes library?

Onward, here are my favorites for 2009.

M. Ward : Hold Time
I don’t know why I’ve carefully avoided M. Ward’s music in the past but this album’s amalgam of folk, country rock and 50′s AM radio makes a mockery of my stubbornness. Like a sleepier version of the Buddy Holly apartment tapes featuring T Rex and a measured dose of sugar-coated Orbison string arrangements. This album’s got me all shook up. Uh huh huh.

Animal Collective : Merriweather Post Pavillion
The cyber-psychedelic soundtrack to hash dreams and atari riots, Merriweather may be the most fully realized, fully eclectic Animal Collective record yet. Furthering their syncretism of circus music, trance and Eno soundscapes, the music is both tranquil and jarring, often in the space of a single song, but it insinuates into your mind like a Super Mario Bros theme gilded with Hollies harmonies.

The xx : xx
I revisited Portishead’s Dummy earlier this year and was surprised how great the album still sounds.  Like that debut, xx features a cool, spare landscape for the pining hearts of vocalists trading off near-whispered lyrics. Someone mentioned Young Marble Giants as a reference and the lonely clarion guitar lines and steady restrained beats are similarly austere.  I hear it more as Mazzy Star with an electronic heart, or the late night companion to Rebecca Gates’ Ruby Series.

Foreign Born : Foreign Born
I’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again (year after year, no doubt): young men and women with ugly hair and challenging sounds will win the hearts of kids looking for whatever’s new, but timeless songcraft will outlive them all. I don’t know what Foreign Born look like, but this is a nearly pitch perfect record with great hummable songs. Oddly reminiscent of 90′s college rock, but cleaner, with a wider spectrum sonic palette evoking the Shins, Beulah and a grown-up Vampire Weekend.

Grizzly Bear : Veckatimest
I felt the fawning over 2006′s Yellow House was much ado about relatively nothing, but this album really took me by surprise.  With swirling colors of instrumentation, interplay between voices and songwriters, Grizzly Bear exploit the moody isolation of Van Morisson’s Veedon Fleece and melodic surprises in Cole Porter’s songbook and create something new and entrancing. If the Zombies made an album after Odessey & Oracle, this could be their basement tapes.

St Vincent : Actor
On her second LP, Annie Clark seems to alternate between menacing Wicked Witch and soothe-speaking Glinda, and you’re Dorothy trying to find your way through the technicolor production and tornados of strings.  I’ll stop here before I start comparing her guitar to a broom, but suffice it to say St. Vincent know how to cast a spell.

Dirty Projectors : Bitte Orca
Finding their stride, the Dirty Projectors mine the same playful pop experimentation of early-80′s Talking Heads and invent a new language, all sunny, brazen and serpentine. You can hear it in the odd and shifting time signatures where even the lyrical phrases turn unexpectedly, the bright syncopated sounds, and the full-throated sirens singing both histrionic and sweet. It’s a collision of aural color on a canvas, strikingly beautiful. This album just kills me.

Lightning Dust : Infinite Light
A melancholy cousin to Brightblack Morning Light’s self-titled LP, Inifinite Light‘s warbly odes to love recall 70′s AOR, with acoustic guitar, organ, and electric piano, but occasionally flirt with vintage electronics and shifts in genre.  It’s largely moody, wintry, and witchy in a Stevie Nicks sort of way while the closing track “Take it Home” is a psychedelic dirge perhaps inspired by Isaac Hayes’ cover of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”.

Neko Case : Middle Cyclone
Neko seems drawn to the savagery of the natural world. Animals and natural disasters have underscored her last three albums, but they’re present on Middle Cyclone on almost every song, as tornado, killer whale, owl, mollusks and red tides – metaphors for the chaos her protagonists render as part their natural code.  Insofar as you can read into the musician’s life through their music, the language seems almost intended to distract from some of her most direct and personal lyrics yet.  Maybe that’s too easy a reading, but when Neko appears crouching with a sword on the hood of a car, I believe her when she sings “I’m An Animal” and wonder if her claws are sometimes too dangerous for the softer creatures around her.

Yo La Tengo : Popular Songs
Even better than their last album, Popular Songs is as apt a title as the Yo La Tengo Radio Hour. Playing this record feels like you’ve been invited into their garage to sit and listen to 10 great songs by bands you’ve never heard of.  There’s Motown, garage rock, catchy Kinks-ish melodies and ambient drone pop and, as usual, the tracks fall in sequence perfectly. I’m still going to be listening to this when I’m 80 years old, drinking vin santo and (hopefully still) half-lucid.  Give this a listen and I think you’ll be right there with me.

Other Good Stuff

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart : The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
I wanted to dismiss this as nothing more than hero worship but in emulating great pop shoegaze it hits all the right notes. Like a great Wannadies-meets-Smiths record with a little MBV distorting the blistering sunshine.
Flaming Lips : Embryonic
I can’t wrap my head around this at all.
Atlas Sound : Logos
Antony & The Johnsons : The Crying Light
Girls : Album
Sonic Youth : The Eternal
Bon Iver : Blood Bank
The Clientele : Bonfires on the Heath
Vic Chesnutt : At The Cut
John Doe & The Sadies : Country Club
AC Newman : Get Guilty
Dark Night of the Soul : (Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch with others)
V/A : Dark Was The Night

Blah

God Help The Girl : God Help The Girl
Tortoise : Beacons of Ancestorship
Camera Obscura : My Maudlin Career
Maybe it’s unfair to like someone better in their awkward bowl-cut, but Tracyanne’s more confident sound comes off as preening and dull.

Where You Been All My Life or Revisited

Fucked Up : The Chemistry of Common Life
Strangely catchy fusion of hardcore and shoegaze
Robyn Hitchcock
New Order
The Feelies : Good Earth
Young Marble Giants
Mirah
Buddy Holly : The Apartment Tapes

Haven’t Heard Yet

Jim O’Rourke : The Visitor

RIP Vic Chesnutt

You poor sad bastard. Listen to “Flirted With You All My Life” from this year’s At The Cut

“I’ve flirted with you all my life
Even kissed you once or twice
And to this day I swear it was nice
But clearly I was not ready

Oh Death
Really, I’m not ready”

Palermo is a hard city to forget – I’ve still got the bedbug bites as reminders – but an even harder city to figure out. It is a tumultuous, urban, energetic mess sprawling like a hardy weed at the foot of jutting rocky cliffs and choppy ocean waters. In the middle of September it was hot and the afternoon rains came in like a deluge. Unlike the other quiet coastal towns we visited in Sicily, Palermo is not Slow.  This is not some Under the Tuscan Sun bullshit. These people eat fried goat anus, for chrissake, and they will easily grind you up into some unholy rich and tasty concoction if you show any signs of meekness or Rick Steves unworldliness.

We were crossing a busy street, which, especially in Sicily, almost begs one to make the sign of the cross before proceeding. Traffic obliged our passage to the extent that we weren’t actually hit.  One scooter pulled short of P by a foot; another jutted in front of us and as the driver steered by my toes, his passenger, sitting behind him, eyed me and exhaled like Marcello Mastroianni blowing a puff of smoke, “Palerrrrmo.”

I didn’t recognize the expression for what it was at the time, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of this city’s ethos, and a mantra for all who enter its confines:

• You just stepped in another pile of a mangy dog’s feces – Palermo!
• We took the french brioche and shat down the middle of it with an incredible heap of sweet, creamy gelato – Palermo!
• The streets here go every which way but back the way you came. Hope you enjoy the long winding walks – Palermo!
• Diesel, scooters, honking, cigarettes, broken glass, dusty dilapidated buildings, fish guts, whatthefuckareyoulookingat – Palermo!

In other words: take it or leave it, sucker.

We visited several of the neighborhood mercatos during our stay and nowhere better defined, for us anyway, this ethos; the good, the bad and the ugly.

At the Mercato del Capo, scooters crawl up everyone’s ass, vendors and shoppers alike smoke directly on the produce, flies are everywhere. I was struck by the classic southern italian faces – dark, serious, weary. Men shout at other men, grab their nuts, quickly flick their fingers under their chin (“Get a load of this asshole.”) or gesticulate in any other number of wildly primeval forms. The butcher sings as he skins a goat tethered to the old stone wall.

Another chops goat heads with a cleaver like they’re fucking coconuts, blood and brains decorating the street, your shoes, anything within range. The fishmongers hack enormous pieces of flesh and shout.  The locals shout back.  Everybody is shouting, gesturing.  Occasionally, to keep things looking fresh, vendors bring a bucket of water over to their produce or fish, dip their hand into it and fling water over the table, Pa-lermo!

This was not the proud, colorful bounty of a Florentine mercato, but a working class exchange that felt like it hadn’t changed much in centuries.  Except for those goddam scooters.

We just never got the East Bay. There is no shortage of charming little enclaves with names like Elmwood, Piedmont, Kensington or Temescal; names that sound, with no small irony, like suburban developments. Yet, I don’t think a neighborhood defined by a three to four block stretch of a busy street has much soul or character, especially when it all but closes down by 7:00 or 8:00 at night. Yes, there are nice little streets and some lovely independent shops and restaurants in the East Bay, but everything is disconnected by great miles of road and swaths of homes.

Oakland itself is such a weird place, all sprawling and discombobulated, from the bay to the wooded hills.  Pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of turbulent poverty. Pristine homes and ramshackle neglect. Manicured front yards and makeshift urban farms. I often felt like a tourist without a map, trying to connect it all. I think it says something that my favorite open space there is an old cemetery: Oakland was once thriving but seems to be just barely breathing at this point. “There is no there there” as it’s been said and repeated ad nauseum. There is tremendous potential there, and perhaps that’s true of the East Bay as a whole, but I’m just not ready to live in suburbia.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back. Here’s a travelogue of sorts from the last 9 months of living abroad:

The Best

Amazing sunsets. Of course, living in the flatlands as most people do, the only time I got to see them was on BART or on the vertiginous trails and lookout points around Tilden. And it’s really those features in the distance – SF’s skyline and Mt. Tam  - that make it.

Urban Biking. For its myriad faults and self-righteousness, Berkeley’s forward thinking bike policy makes for an amazing network of bike-friendly roads. Does it also make for aggravated, insensitive drivers on the more trafficked roads? You bet. Pedestrians, watch your toes. Oakland’s bike routes, while not nearly as seamless or hazard-free, offer a landscape unlike any other. Pedaling from North Oakland through West Oakland to Jack London Square is like watching a reel of Le Voyage Dans La Lune on the set of Brazil.

Springtime. People like to rhapsodize about the better weather in the East Bay but the difference is pretty marginal. The biggest benefit of living there, for me, was watching the foliage change with the seasons. Yuppies sure love to landscape their yards and come March there is a riot of green shoots and flower blossoms. We moved in the dark of January and the transformation was shocking, waking up to literally find flowers budding overnight. I had forgotten, and missed, the natural theater of spring. Walking to BART felt like walking down the yellow brick road…a barren suburban road where people scurry from car to house, but still. Pretty.

Oakland’s Ghetto Deco. I was familiar with the exquisite Paramount and Fox theaters, but looking at the beautiful tiled facades and ornate cornices of the old I Magnin’s, Breuner’s, and Sears buildings, as well as Flora and even the smaller structures in between (wait, that’s a wig shop in that gorgeous space?!), I felt like an archeologist uncovering a forgotten bustling city underneath the grime and mundane boxy office towers.

The Worst

BART. We were so naive. We thought we were trading a primitive, sloth-like MUNI for a more efficient transit system unencumbered by street traffic. Not so. It’s more like we traded plastic seats for cloth ones (all the better to hide mysterious stains, smells and booger collections.  See next.)

People on BART. So appalling, it deserves its own mention. Most of the passengers sleep or pretend to sleep so they don’t have to get up for pregnant women and the elderly. It happens every single day. BART doesn’t provide the same electric and amusing brand of psychotics as does MUNI, but the pathology is merely shifted onto the everyday passenger who treat the seats or aisles like their private powder room. Is it the long commute that makes people crazy? Also, what is it about BART that beckons nose-picking?  It feels like at times like I’m watching a first grade class loafing in Men’s Warehouse and Dress Barn attire.

Medieval sword fights. Dungeons and Dragons?  The knights who say “Ni!”?  I have no idea what these dorks playing with swords and shields in the Rockridge station parking lot are all about, but this kind of shit is soooo East Bay.

Markets. I really don’t understand where or how people shop for food over here. Everything closes early or closes on the weekend. The undeservedly famed Berkeley Bowl is a vortex of angry moms, trustafarian burnouts and mediocre food. And that’s just the parking lot. In other words, a classic East Bay clusterfuck. Monterey Market, while slightly calmer and offering some decent produce, is more warehouse than market and like most places in the East Bay, should require you to sign a release form before you enter the parking lot as a pedestrian or bicyclist. Market Hall is an overpriced bonanza for the banal. The Pasta Shop is fine, for fresh pasta particularly, but the average corner store in SF is better than Market Hall Produce Market which offers basics like milk at more than twice the cost you’ll find elsewhere.

Driving. The East Bay is a series of communities connected, if in no other way, than by roads.  Literal mazes of freeways, major thoroughfares, and endless residential streets winding every which way. Most EBers I know are more apt to drive anywhere and I can sympathize – the geography and lack of efficient transit seem to demand it – but it’s hard to connect to anyone from inside your car and I think the region as a whole suffers from the effects of too many cars and not enough vibrant public spaces.

Though it is spartan, even strangely adorned with vehicular impedimenta, I find this space very beautiful. It’s the drill court at the Armory, an incongruous building at 14th and Mission in a city that seems to celebrate such architectural discord.

The moorish castle-inspired building was originally built as a National Guard facility in 1914. It was empty for years, and always seemed like a bizarre fenestrated asteroid dropped on the neighborhood. Eventually, kink.com moved in and while I’m not privy to the exact goings-on, the word is it’s kinky. Nothing wrong with creative re-use. The best part is that they’ve leased the drill court back to an organization responsible for developing the space into a community center.  SPUR is leading a tour of the Armory on September 30th and other than crawling in a window, this is a rare opportunity to view this space until it’s fully developed.

Of the many amazing but forlorn buildings deserving renovation, the Hibernia Bank building on Jones and McAllister streets has always struck me as exceptional. It is a beacon for the mid-Market area, perfectly representing its squalor and stagnation, but also its tremendous potential for inspired urban renewal.  The stretch on Market St from 5th to Van Ness is desperate for revitalization, and ripe for it too, with many striking facades and shuttered theaters.

The old Strand theater, with the federal building looming behind it, defines the very discord of modern and historic that makes the urban landscape so appealing to me. The restoration of the nearby Book Concern building into incredibly tiny condos (250 sf?!) is not to my taste, but it does at least represent a step in bringing new life to the area.

The old Mint on 5th and Mission could be a good example of appropriate restoration and reuse of historic spaces.  The space is currently empty, but owned by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society who envision a new cultural institution including a museum and visitor center. Meanwhile, Mint Plaza has literally sprouted up around the building to give the landmark new context in its urban setting.  As I’ve mentioned before, this was just another pee-smelling alley a few years ago. Now it’s a pee-smelling alley with plants and pedestrian amenities and restaurants.  In other words, a postage stamp size San Francisco!

Modern architecture can create inviting spaces in many forms, but there’s something really inspiring about these grand old spaces.  The style and accessories of their eras are charming, but part of the appeal for me is the very juxtaposition of the old and new in this city.  I hope that, to borrow an unfortunate phrase of my fellow mellow citizens, we can keep San Francisco’s architecture weird.

I came across this older piece in the Smithsonian Magazine (Jan, 2002) that looks like it could be representative of any point in the last 30 years. It’s a simple pictorial essay showing the the food an average family from a particular region eats in a week.  The simplicity of the concept bears semblance to a Golden Book-style title on food and culture: See the African family with heaps of whole grains, the Japanese family with a colorful variety of fish and vegetables, and the American family with…

Good lord! What is all that?

To contrast with the turkish family’s spread above, almost everything displayed in the american household is packaged and processed, recognizable less as food than as commercial products from supermarket shelves. Arguably, the only items here that don’t contain industrial derivatives of corn or soy are those grown in the ground or on a tree (see if you can spot them, kids!) but most of these were likely shipped halfway across the world to get to that kitchen.  At least the corn syrup and dextrose are domestic, right?

The visual disparity in the diets of different families is clear enough for a children’s book, but the implication seems lost on the majority of Americans. We are not eating food, we are eating food products. The unbelievable variety of colorful boxes one can find at the supermarket gives the consumer the illusion of choice, and belies a trend towards a handful of mammoth agribusinesses controlling our food system.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

In a word, everything. The industrialization of our food system is completely changing what we eat, how we eat, the safety of our food and our very health. Can you spot the items above that have had major recalls in the last couple years?  Off the top of my head: frozen pizza, peanut butter, oatmeal and unfathomable tons of ground beef, most recently 825,769 pounds of it.  Even the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup may be tainted with mercury. Our reliance on a food supply operated by giant corporate food providers is not sustainable, and it’s increasingly dangerous, especially without appropriate oversight.

As taxpayers, Americans support the growth of giant agribusiness directly and indirectly through subsidies. Large-scale corn production benefits from tax subsidies. Though none of it is grown for immediate consumption – it’s been engineered to be an ideal industrial product, not a food – corn by-products eventually go to an astonishing number of the foods seen above.  Corn is in the soda, the bagels, the cereals, the juices, jam, peanut butter, cookies, pizza, and as a major feed ingredient for conventionally raised animals, it’s also in the meat. Corn by-products even make up some of the packaging.

All this cheap subsidized corn provides incredible profit potential for agribusiness; it can, in turn, make for cheap food, but not healthy food.  As illustrated in the documentary Food Inc. we’ve reached a point in this country where it costs less for a family to eat fast food hamburgers than to buy a head of broccoli at the supermarket. Even when consumers seek healthy alternatives, they may not be affordable so they’re left with cheap foods of negligible nutritive value.  One in three people born after 2000 in the US will develop diabetes. It’s clear the only group benefitting from our modern industrial food system are the corporations.

The picture of American dinner table is not a pretty one. We need to change it now.

Like happily wandering through the city at night, hitting galleries and literary talks, sliding into an old theater showing movie shorts, sharing a beer with your graduate student friend who nerds out over their latest obsession/revelation – it was several nights of culture condensed into a couple hours.  From sidebar ephemera to emotionally resonant material, everything was compelling. The event felt like a celebration of great writing and great radio with just a little bit of theater to entertain the eyes. 

I can’t wait for the next one.  In the meantime, it’s got me jonesing for a lazy day with a pile of magazines and a couple beers.

Some net-able highlights:

• Photography: Todd Hido Foreclosed Homes
• Interview: Megan Prelinger of the amazing Prelinger Library
• TV: Botany of Desire as PBS documentary

Blue Bottle is my friend, in that odd sort of way. It’s guided me over the years, cultivating in my palate an appreciation for truly fresh roasted coffee and guiding my own experiments with coffee, espresso and roasting at home.  In turn, I have eagerly watched it grow from farmers market carts to the “convivial” little kiosk in an alley-way garage to its bustling but still tucked-away cafe and now to its corner spot in the Ferry Building, as auspicious a location as Chez Panisse’s must have been on Shattuck thirty years ago.

This morning, on its opening day, we sipped macchiatos from wonderful espresso cups made custom for Blue Bottle by Heath (another operation I feel a special kinship for, as we’ve just started to collect our own set). We celebrated the same way we did in the morning before going to city hall last week, or with Miette cakes at our git-together this past weekend: with good coffee and warm, caffeinated daydreams of a more pleasant life hanging out with our friends.

Only time will tell how the last year will fare in my personal pop music canon.  I saw only a fraction of live shows that I did in previous years. And whether it was my own frame of mind or the stale state of new music, I rarely felt inspired by any of the year’s releases. So, in almost 10 years of making these lists, here’s a first:

My Top 5 Records of 2008

Fleet Foxes s/t
These kids went to the mountains, divined their songs and floated out like buddhas on a magic carpet of beard and siren voices. Superlative mesmeric folk-pop of the same sonic cloth (carpet) as the Beach Boys, Shins, Bee Gees, and the Hollies. That is to say, it’s filled with blissed-out harmonies.  What My Morning Jacket wish they could have made instead of trying to fit their country asses into a skinny Prince suit. This record sounds like it came straight out of the early 70′s but to these ears it’s fresher than anything else on here.

The Walkmen You & Me
A band I have several times now written off as nothing more than a nice sound and an attitude completely blew the black plastic aging hipster frames off my face with this one. There’s nothing revolutionary here, just a perfect encapsulation of the album as art form: from the jacket cover to the tracking, the whole work plays like an exposition on the state of you and yours. In our era of blogs blogging about blogs blogging about sound clips and tedious name-that-influence bands, a suite of songs like this is the real new wave.

Vampire Weekend s/t
Like the Strokes’ debut, there’s something almost too perfectly glossy about Vampire Weekend’s own debut. The songs are remarkably good, forging a pop fusion from lithesome african guitar figures, insistent rhythms and squeaky collegiate insouciance. It may turn out to be an ephemeral pleasure, but for the time being this is impossible to put down.

Bonnie Prince Billy Lie Down In The Light
An undeniably great set of songs from this bright bearded appalachian misfit. His ability to win over the straight-ahead music crowd at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival made it even clearer that he’s at the top of his form. If you’ve followed Will Oldham off and on over the years like I have, this album should finally make a fan out of you.

Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago
I kept hearing about this record, but I didn’t expect something so quietly affecting. As stripped down and hauntingly lovely as Elliott Smith’s first records, For Emma is the soundtrack to twilit wintry nostalgia. It took repeated listens for Justin Vernon’s whispered croon to get under my skin, but this set burns bright and true with plaintive soul.

Also Enjoyed

TV On The Radio Dear Science
Deerhunter Microcastle
Atlas Sound Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See

REM Accelerate
For the joy alone of hearing a band reassess their direction and come back roaring after so many albums. Almost makes me forget their last one.

Cat Power Jukebox
Jim White Transnormal Skiperoo Beautifully melancholic
Cut Copy In Ghost Colours
Joan As Police Woman To Survive

Blitzen Trapper Furr
Really strong collection of songs that nimbly skip on the grooves of old 70′s AOR, melodica dirge, acoustic ballads and country-fried AM radio pop.

Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 8 Tell Tale Signs
Elvis Costello Momofuku
Calexico Carried To Dust

Sigur Ros med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaus
Loved the way they stretched out with bright and folkier textures on here.  The first track comes off as bulgarian choral folk meets The Feelies. Fitting, given that the title translates to “with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly”.

Jonathan Richman Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild
Department of Eagles In Ear Park
Sea and Cake Car Alarm

You make me sick

Beck Modern Guilt
Honestly, why don’t you just score Tom Cruise’s latest diatribe against psychiatry? It would probably hold as much interest as your last few records.

Mogwai The Hawk is Howling
Absolute shite; unless I just grew out of a music that once sounded really powerful to me.  No, no. This is absolute shite. Sounds like a band trying to imitate Mogwai because they heard that post-rock is the new thing.

Where You Been All My Life

Older stuff I got into or revisited this year

Serge Gainsbourg
Booker T. & The MG’s
King Sunny Ade
Erik Satie
Mose Allison
William Bell
Coleman Hawkins