Semi-coherent dispatches from the streets of San Francisco streamed to you at the speed of MUNI

Melting ice caps, violent international conflicts, Hummers outside my window, oil slicks in the bay - the picture of 2007 as I look back was of a dissonant world. The records that fought their way to the fore sounded like allegories for this dystopian vision. Noisy, messy, strange but headspinningly beautiful. Interestingly, each of these highlighted albums feature Track 1’s that immediately enchant, bombard, envelop, and slay. Despite civilization’s blind march towards annihilation there was, for me, plenty of great music to celebrate. Here’s the best of it.

Radiohead In Rainbows
A wistful and spare (by their standards) record with a scrupulous, dynamic songcraft that soars above the one-trick pony newer, fitter, happier bands so overhyped today. Obliterates the stale taste left by Hail To The Thief while rubbing shoulders with the best of their catalog.

Panda Bear Person Pitch
Sonorous solo effort from Animal Collective member. Imagine Brian Wilson, post-”Surf’s Up”, battling depression and calming his nerves in a sensory deprivation tank, while chanting hymns over ethereal lo-fi Pet Sounds outtakes.

New Pornographers Challengers
A more reflective turn for one of our brightest pop confectioners. Carl’s melodies shine, as always, but instead of manic guitar and drums, many songs are constructed from evocative colors of banjo, mandolin, flute and strings, and sweetly weaving vocal harmonies.

Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Britt Daniel’s songwriting swaggers, while Jim Eno’s lean production and a flawless sequence of songs show why Spoon are auteurs in the art of the 30 minute pop record. Studio banter, guitar clicks, and palpable shifts of console faders are mixed in like clues to the craft of record-making. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” with its literal echoes of Smokey Robinson and the Supremes, is nonetheless painted as only Spoon can and, like the rest of the album, is so good it’ll have you ga-ga-ga-ing like a blissed-out little babe.

Antibalas Security
Security blazes out of the speakers from the start with taut politically-charged afrobeat inspired by Fela Kuti. Killer stuff, but the latter half of the set still smolders with nuances of dub, electronica and Ethiopiques-jazz in a wide-spectrum sound (with John McEntire at the controls).

Caribou andorra
While I’m taken aback by the audacity of this one man chameleon, andorra hooked me from the first listen. Sounds as if the Nuggets box set exploded and Dan Snaith picked up the pieces along with other scraps of psychedelia, krautrock, and electropop.

Animal Collective Strawberry Jam
Animal Collective’s experimental tendencies may simply be born out of fearlessness. Strawberry Jam charts a new course from the skewed dream-pop of Feels into a range of compositions careening from psychedelic cartoon rave-ups to underwater carousel music to trance. Listen with intrepid ears and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Feist The Reminder
Loved her last record, but I wasn’t prepared for the kind of leap in songwriting or sheer imagination on this one (let alone the response to it). Leslie Feist’s singularly aching, mellifluous vocals still beguile, but this set of songs bear the elegance of Joni Mitchell with a smokey, earthy soul. Destined to be a classic.

Arcade Fire Neon Bible
The shift from 2005’s Funeral to Neon Bible is like the shift to color in the Wizard of Oz. Recorded in a church and featuring a gothic orchestration, this a cinematic album of technicolor sounds and dark imagery that is altogether fantastical, dreamy, and frightening. Win’s dour lyrics touch on crime, war, terrorism, christianity, and celebrity, including this refrain which could be my mantra for the last few years: “I don’t want to live in America no more…I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.”

Dirty Projectors Rise Above
Apparently re-imagined from memory, Rise Above completely re-contextualizes Black Flag’s Damaged as an art pop monster. David Longstreth sings soulful, throaty melismas over slippery west african guitar figures while the backup singer-sirens voices twine and enchant. With a nod to their forebear, the songs may suddenly devolve into crashing drums, delicious cacophony or Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. So punk rock.

And one more caught in between last year and this year

Peter Bjorn & John Writer’s Block
I didn’t have the actual release last year, but the domestic release seems old by now. No matter, it still charms my pants off (that’s a good thing). Perfectly demonstrating the Swedish penchant for pastiche, this is Everly Brothers Spector-ian folk shoegaze pop at its best and will have you whistling for days.

More Great Records From The Year

• The National Boxer
• Of Montreal Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
• Deerhunter Cryptograms
• Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings 100 Days, 100 Nights
  Sharon Jones can bust a groove in funk, soul, R&B, you name it
• Thurston Moore Trees Outside The Academy
• Deerhoof Friend Opportunity
• White Stripes Icky Thump
• Sea and Cake Everything
• Explosions in the Sky All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Elliott Smith New Moon
• Joan As Police Woman Real Life
  
• Clientele God Save the Clientele
  
• Gruff Rhys Candylion
• Betty Davis s/t
  stanky!
• Nick Lowe At My Age

Half-hearted

• Wilco
• Beirut
• Band of Horses
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Where You Been All My Life (older stuff i got into this year)

• The Fugs
• Loudon Wainwright
• Harry Nilsson
• Fela Kuti
• Lee Hazlewood
• Luiz Bonfa
• Richard Hell & The Voidoids
• The Small Faces
• Traffic

By now the haunting and touching Annie Leibowitz photographs that formed John’s last photo shoot are very familiar to most. Less familiar to me was this set by Allen Tannenbaum.

I can’t really describe what it is about Tannenbaum’s photos but they have this color austerity that I find so perfectly redolent of films and photography of the early 1980’s. Films like After Hours and One From The Heart. In contrast to the striking Leibowitz image there’s a levity at work in these, yet there’s the same naked honesty, the same intimacy.

The parallel statements between the visual language in these photographs and the music John and Yoko had just finished on Double Fantasy is unmistakable. I look at them and find myself daydreaming about the person John might be if he were alive today; how he and Yoko would be ambassadors of a provocative and honest marriage of love and art. It’s inspiring.

If you were casually reading the news in the last couple days, you might think that there were some playful hijinks afoot in that magnificent, if a bit tricky, shipping channel some of us call the Bay. It was initially reported that a pilot ran a 65,000 ton ship into the Bay Bridge, carving a gash in its side and spilling 140 gallons of oil. The number was eventually revised to upwards of 58,000 gallons and the oil is now spreading far beyond the impact site.

Yet the following day the Chronicle’s headline was not “Environmental Catastrophe!” or even “Damn, That’s a Shit-ton of Crude!” but “Crunch!”, as if to highlight the mechanical spectacle of it all. Still, with all the pictures coming in and the news reports sitting at the top of the Most Emailed lists, it’s clear that the public, at least, is concerned. I can’t help but think of the environmental aftershocks of this event and feel like one of the surfers interviewed: superdepressed.

Maybe this isn’t the Exxon Valdez, but it’s not the first time an oil spill has spoiled the waters here. 40, 000 gallons in 1996; 420,000 gallons (!) in 1988; 26,000 gallons in 1986; and 20,000 gallons in 1971 when two oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge. Scientists and Exxon are still arguing about the health of Prince William Sound almost 20 years later. But it’s all too clear that in the 21st century, with our atmosphere warming, our natural resources dwindling, and our waters polluted, we are swimming in oil.

A couple weeks ago I picked up a bottle of Claravale Farms raw milk. Though it’s rare that I drink milk in anything but the occasional cappuccino, I swallowed this stuff straight like ambrosia. It had a distinct appeal that was to my mind, the taste of the very grass the cows ate. Yes, I tell you, it was the nectar of the gods. Only days later, I read with complete shock that my new life-giving vigor elixir (step aside, wheatgrass, espresso, honey, and bourbon) was soon to be all but banned from the store shelves.

The bill, AB 1735, passed unanimously, with no public input and no advance notice to the two California dairies who sell raw milk (Organic Pastures near Fresno, is the other raw milk dairy). All for the sake of the public good, right? Isn’t that what our FDA and Food and Agriculture departments are charged with?

The new law sets a limit to the number of coliform bacteria present in raw milk. A limit, that by the state’s own tests, the two California raw milk dairies met only 6 out of 8 times last year. Was the “high-bacteria” milk dangerous? No. One of the great rewards in drinking raw milk is the abundant beneficial bacteria, just like in your yogurt (if the cultures are added after the milk has been pasteurized). The principal concern here is seemingly about pathogenic bacteria like E. Coli, which they didn’t find.

But I find the motive behind this legislation suspicious. If the public health is really of primary concern, why aren’t our legislators going after the much larger beef, spinach or processed food manufacturers? Because both the potential for harm and the necessity for oversight seems to demand much more attention than two raw milk dairies who already test their milk for pathogens. With the way health officials have actively gone after small farmers like they were cocaine smugglers, I have to wonder if there’s pressure from the industry that’s pushing the issue. Maybe they’re afraid of consumers switching tastes to a less profit-rich product. I’ve had some fine conventional organic milk, but nothing compares to that one bottle of raw milk.

Alternatively, perhaps this is just another step in the government’s path to drastically irradiate, pasteurize, and otherwise de-flavor our food supply to the point where it’s perfectly compartmentalized into industrial units and no longer something you can recognize from a tree or a field. If raw milk doesn’t appeal to you, consider the larger battle. Take a look in your kitchen and imagine your olive oil, wine or farm fresh eggs falling under the government’s scrutiny. They just might become the next target.

• Check out the FAQ and help out the cause through Organic Pastures
• Some good insight into this debate

If I asked you where Mt. Olympus was, would you ever guess San Francisco? Given that, would you ever be able to find it?!
This is a snapshot of a part of San Francisco that doesn’t exist anymore. Stunning isn’t it? Many of the city’s stairways lead up to incredible views, but the stairs up to our own Mt. Olympus put one in the middle of a suburban-seeming cul de sac.

The view is mostly blocked by on all sides by condos.

And all that remains of the “Triumph” of Mt. Olympus is its pedestal. As if to cover up this egregious act, trees circumscribe the entire hilltop perch.

At one time the statue, gifted by Adolf Sutro, marked the center of the city. If you had the audacity to scale its hill, you were rewarded with the striking drama of the urban panorama undulating around hills (we have over 50), green swaths of Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, and the proud red bridge pointing to the mountains beyond.

The landscape around us is changing - that’s inevitable. Theaters are torn down or turned into gyms. Incredibly hideous towers of glass are springing up, with freeway views and modeled after air filters. We may wake up one day to find that, yes, they did actually pave over paradise and put up a parking lot.

Ok, sorry about that last one. But Joni’s right, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

So it is really incumbent upon all of us to preserve SF’s peculiar metropolitan-meets-natural beauty. Because once the hills are topped with homes and the waterfront stacked with towers, all we’ll have left are the photographs to remind us of how beautiful this city once was.

• Where we were:
  San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection
• Where we’re headed:
  SF Planning: Better Neighborhoods
  SPUR
  Save the Neighborhood Theaters

Japancakes are an instrumental collective from Athens, Ga who made one of my favorite sleepy autumn records, a blissed-out chamber music meets Austin drone-pop affair with fluttering strings, flute and pedal steel. On their new record, out today, Japancakes cover the Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas”, but what really blows my mind is learning that they’re going to release a cover of one of my favorite all-time records, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, come November.
The last time I was this blown out was when Petra covered Pete.

But these yammerin internets carry wind of another Athens native, Vic Chesnut, and another exciting musical collaboration. Vic headed up to Montreal (which I believe is Quebecian for “rock and roll hotbed“) and recorded an album with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed You Black Emperor. Now, I’m a big fan of these modern-day Fishtank-type collaborations: Low and the Dirty Three, Calexico and Iron & Wine, Tortoise and Will Oldham, etc. But I never would have anticipated a meeting like this and I can’t wait to hear the whole thing. A tour would be even wilder.

It’s been a strange week for this urban dweller.

A weekend walk through Hayes, Civic Center, Russian Hill and elsewhere turned into, first, an ambush of bodily humours, and then a scatological scavenger hunt.

“Is it animal or human?”
“Projectile or pre-meditated?”

The nose gives you information your head wishes to forget.

Later in the week, I was on my bike when a driver refused to accept my existence and hit me. It was more of a lovetap - one that I could have avoided if I heeded the advice of a witness waiting at the bus stop and “stayed the hell of the road”. But my parents raised me to share my toys and I think the roads are for everyone to enjoy.

Every day is a golden day for a MUNI story. Yet, strangely, I don’t have much to take from this week other than the same slow crawl of a city bus. The bus stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass by, lurches forward, stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass…This week we learned that by shifting roadway priority to MUNI’s streetcars and buses on just 10 corridors, 3 out of 4 riders (out of a daily 600,000+) would see a speedier commute.

But to do this, you have to change the way the average person sees the city street.

It’s not a freeway…

It’s a fantastic walkway and a thriving marketplace for local foods.

It’s not an offramp…

It’s a neighborhood.

It’s not a parking space…

It’s a PARK(ing) space

So it can be done. Convincing people of the value of the land in an urban landscape may be as slow-going as MUNI, but a paradigm shift is possible.

There was a time once, not so long ago, when driving down I-80 meant passing long stretches of farmland. A time when Sacramento, Roseville and Rocklin were distinct towns with discrete geography. When Vacaville seemed like just a name, but the Nut Tree was a destination. Or at least a point of reference in a journey.

I was randomly surfing through old postcard images on this amazingly vast site, looking for an image of Union Square before its renovation, when I stumbled upon the photo above. It’s a lavish display, with Eames fiberglass chairs, bold fabrics, and patrons dressed not like they just came off the road, but like they’re out on the town…at the Nut Tree?

As inconceivable as it is to my memory of the place, the Nut Tree in its prime was the epitome of mid-century chic. With an eye towards modern design and the cosmopolitan, the restaurant incorporated scandinavian influences, cutting-edge building design and construction, and exotic food presentation. For a time it was even the sole West Coast retailer for Eames furniture. Dig the chair display, below.

Those times when my family had to get out of the car and rest we never even ventured here. We went across the street to the Coffee Tree. The only thing I remember of either place was an unsettling sense of anachronism. The restaurants are gone, but with the communities along I-80 growing like a stucco-colored mold, I pine for those Nut Tree days. Back to a time when this corridor had a rustic charm and a building in the middle of nothing could lure you off the road and share with you its sense of place.

M’ladyfriend and I were sitting on a motionless MUNI train recently, stalled underground as is more frequently the norm these days, when I was struck: we can dramatically increase efficiency in the transit system today by hearkening back to the rail days of yore. Say what? How?

The Handcar!

Picture it! You stroll out to Market St, a spring in your step, a tune in your head, body shaking with the ecstasy of breathing in the new day. Errrrrttt! Suddenly the rapture screeches to a halt when you see that Nextbus projects a wait of 35 minutes.

“NOOOOOOO!”

Just then a group of three suits pumping away at the lever of a handcar roll by.

“Hop on!” they say.

Soon you’re all 4 stoking the momentum, enjoying the scenery of mid-Market St, shouting a ‘Howd’ya do!’ morning call to the vagrants. One person jumps off at 4th and another at Montgomery. You reach your destination as another group steps on and starts see-sawing their way back up Market. Finally, a clean, green and streamlined transit machine.

I foresee the re-introduction of vintage handcars, a la the F-line, restored to their original condition like the beautiful San Diego car recently added to the system. C’mon Mr. Mayor, put down those bongos and get us some handcars. At this point, the best way to fix MUNI might be to let the people push themselves.

The first farmers market in SF appeared in 1943 at Market and Duboce. In a story that reminds me of a particular film noir, it began as a way for farmers to subvert the predatory distributors, sell directly to the customer and reap a fairer reward for their labors. While the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is no doubt a decidedly lavish version of that first market, it still represents a vital marketplace for the farmers and a boon to consumers.

Many of the producers grow on vestigial pieces of land in Sonoma and Marin counties, where continuing suburban sprawl and centralized food processing threatens not only the agricultural heritage of this land but its rich and dynamic ecology.

I had the opportunity this past weekend to visit Marin Sun Farms which tends an amazing piece of land inside Point Reyes National Seashore. The farmer/rancher, David Evans, led us from chicken hatchlings to turkeys to hens to goats (with cattle roaming the hills in every direction) all the while connecting his family’s long history in West Marin, the realities of ’sustainable’ and ‘organic’ labels, small family farms, feedlots and more, to the way he and his family currently manage Marin Sun. For me, the tour really confirmed an interdependence of farmer and consumer, ecosystem and food. The more informed and connected we are to our food sources the more sustainable and healthy our food sources can be.

Getting my produce fresh-pulled from the ground and talking to the farmers at the market establishes a valuable connection with what I eat. Reading about the relationship of sun and grass, grazing and fertilizing in say, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, can further elucidate the link. Actually witnessing this relationship on a farm, and in a small way, participating in it makes me want to consider each time I eat, Where did this food come from? Who grew it? How did they raise it? I’d show you the chicken I bought at Marin Sun but I’m not sure everyone is as ready for head and feet on their food as I am. Might I suggest a farm tour to get you better acquainted?