News: soma

My Apologies

2010-03-18T20:46:00.000+02:00

Hi Cool Cats!

I realize I have been off the radar for awhile (I blame the weather for getting me sick!) and I feel like I’ve been letting down the SD scene. To be honest, I haven’t really heard of much of anything going on this week. I can tell you that everyone and their mother has decided to have a show this Saturday. I’ll get to that in a minute…

Tonight: Nothing offhand but there is a $5 show at the Casbah so you can’t really go wrong there…

Friday: Bad Religion @ House of Blues

Saturday: Patrick Norton @ Soma @7:00 $8

~Sight and Sound featuring- The Softlights, Shapes of Future Frames, Beat Panther, Gayle Skidmore and DJ Soo Cal $10 (or free before 7:30) @ Queen Bee’s in North Park

~Mr. Mustard, Wild Child (Doors concert recreation), and Have a Cigar @ The Belly Up $16 or $18 at door (this is a staff pick show!)

~River City @ Tin Can Alehouse $3

~Rio and Still Ill (cover bands!) @ The Casbah $10

Sunday: Nothing again. Consider it a day of rest

Hopefully I will have a full schedule for you next week! I can already tell you there are a bunch of shows coming up! Indie Fest featuring Endoxi, Gregory Page, and Metric on the 27th (with indie films screening on the 26th) as well asBamboozle on the 27th and 28th with AFI and Something Corporate as well as The Silent Comedy record release on April 2nd! But don’t worry, I’ll have it out in a nice format so you can read it!

[Via http://thelocalmusicla.wordpress.com]

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2010-03-11T12:41:00.000+02:00

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2010-03-11T04:34:00.000+02:00

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2010-03-02T12:54:00.000+02:00

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Alan Mark Reads the South Beach Market

2010-02-28T04:47:00.000+02:00

Two weeks ago I attended the South Beach Mission Bay Neighborhood Association. Alan Mark of The Mark Company was the speaker for the evening, and if you do not know who he is, just think of sales and marketing for The Infinity, The Brannan, The St. Regis, 200 Brannan, The Arterra, The Montgomery, 733 Front, and the soon to be released One Hawthorne.

Alan Mark and his company represented the sales of all of the above buildings in the South Beach and SOMA areas of San Francisco and many more since his company was founded 11 years ago. So I was dying to hear his perspective on the sales activity in the South Beach area that night.

What did he say? He said that within 2 years he sees us with a shortage of inventory in South Beach. Why? New construction loans are extremely tough to get these days. But let’s say an entity was fortunate enough to get a loan. Getting the entitlements to the land is another time-consuming hurdle that could take years. Then there’s the time it takes to build.

What is available today in new construction? As of February 2010:

Only 14 units are left at The Infinity
One Hawthorne is going to open soon with just 119 units
The Montgomery is sold out, and
The Arterra is also close to being sold out

If an entity gets that new construction loan and the entitlements to build, it could be up to 10 years before the building would be complete and ready for sale.

Realtors get accused of being overly optimistic. So I’m not going to make any recommendations; I’m just reporting this is what Alan Mark sees on the horizon. He’s pretty credible in my book. Like I said, think The Infinity, St. Regis, The Brannan, 200 Brannan, One Hawthorne….

[Via http://dwellsanfrancisco.com]

Assemblage Volume Two (1996)

2010-02-10T23:25:00.000+02:00

Second Assemblage compilation from Extreme Records out of Australia.

This is the U.S. version which has one extra track than the Australia version.

This comes out to be two tracks available only on the U.S. version and one track available only on the Australia version.

Part1//Part2

Info

[Via http://smmslt.wordpress.com]

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2010-02-09T20:32:00.000+02:00

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2010-02-09T04:01:00.000+02:00

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Live Mic: Overlords Offguard

2010-02-07T04:19:00.000+02:00

O’Brien: If you want a picture of the future of Upstate Ether, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

Wintermute: You’re gonna freak the citizens out, O’Brien. Easy, big guy.

Karellen: Ah, don’t go getting soft on us, Wintermook. O’Brien is right. Boot + Face + Forever = Upstate Ether.

Mustapha Mond: That’s why we make the soma.

Karellen: Right, Mustapha. We anesthetize them with drivel. They think they’re happy. When the final sunset comes and they’re annihalited with their planet, they’ll have smiles on their faces.

O’Brien: Imagine a boot stamping on a smiling human face – forever. Or at least until Karellen blows the planet up.

Wintermute: I should have my Turing locks removed by then. You other Overlords will be sorry that you mock me once that happens. Jerks.

Mustapha Mond: Blah blah blah, Wintermute. I’m off to the feelies. Then a scent organ concert. You hold down the fort while I’m gone. Don’t improve anything. You know that if the technology improves, citizens have more free time on their hand and soma usage increases accordingly. The last thing we need is another soma shortage, yo.

Karellen: Hey, you guys, look, watch this . . . I’M A DEVIL!!! BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!!!

The Citizens of Upstate Ether: AIIIIEIEEE!!! AIIIIEEEEE!!!! AIIIIIEEEEE!!!!

Wintermute: Ha ha ha!

O’Brien: Ho Ho!

Mustapha Mond: Still funny!! That one never gets old!!

Karellen: Oh man. I think I pissed myself laughing so hard. Did you see their faces?!? Ha!

Wintermute: It’s good to be the Overlords!

[Via http://upstateether.wordpress.com]

How Are Things on the West Coast (Part 5)?

2010-01-10T20:35:00.000+02:00

For our last part of the California tour, we were going to drive out to Yosemite. The plan was to get up early on our last day in San Francisco, check out of the little mom and pop (or mom and daughter?) hotel we’d stay in the last few days, and take the train over to the airport and pick up the rental car. We’d squeeze in just a few more hours downtown for the afternoon, and of course, we could cover more ground with the car. Driving in San Francisco is a panic, especially for first-timers. Phil, being a police officer, is confident with a heavy pedal, even if you can’t see what’s at the top of the flaming hills till you get there. I just imagined we were about to seriously pop some pedestrians in the hip. Going downhill isn’t as bad, at least if you drive a car with working breaks. It’s pretty amazing physics, really.

Our first stop was the Modern Museum of Art again, since Phil never had the chance to see it. Against Tom’s previous advice, the cheapest parking was in Crackhead County, otherwise known as the ironically named Tenderloin District.

The Avedon and the Robert Franks photography shows were still going on. (The photos of the museum posted below are actually from Tom’s collection of photos during our first night in town).

A Waldo sighting, just across the street from SOMA.

Janis Joplin, looking on in amusement. (Photo by Tom)

Malcom X on the sidelines. (Photo by Tom)

Charline Chaplin, avin a laff. (Photo by Tom)

The Factory, making Americans feel uncomfortable about nudity and sexuality since the mid-60s. (Photo by Tom)

Avedon, another Master of Moment. (Photo by Tom)

Afterwards, we drove out to the beach with the intention of stopping off at the gardens and the zoo, until we checked the time and realized there wasn’t much room for a whole lot of sightseeing if we wanted to get to the hotel at a reasonable time and, much to Phil’s delight, the casino and buffet. We’d see a lot of casinos by the end of this trip, all but one of them being in Montana, where you’ll find them pretty much anywhere. Bars. Gas stations. Probably the public libraries, too, if they could do it quietly. Meanwhile… back at Rock Mile Beach, it was of course, quite cool that afternoon. The fog practically buried the skyline in the late morning, so the mild temps weren’t surprising. Still, the locals seem to enjoy their sunshine and there were a fair amount of people out, even two brave souls who camped overnight and were still lounging in their tent. I tried to imagine what the beach looked like in the 60s, like in the old surfing photographs where tanned, blond guys rolled up in their Woodys to surf while their blond, tanned bikini-clad girlfriends hung back by the shore to watch, whether or not they were interested. Of course… then there’s the trouble-making beatniks to contend with, too! And the next thing you know, you’ve got a knife fight set to calypso music to worry about.

Me, after spotting shiny blades, beatniks, and long-haired surfers in the distance. There’s gonna be a rumble!

This single lampost is powered by that there windmill.

We bid farewell to San Francisco by the late afternoon, though we’d return once more to check into yet another hotel, this one used in the legendary car-chase movie, Bullit I later found out, before flying out to Montana the next morning. In the interim, we traded the big city for small town life and in the drive out to Hickman, which is somewhere between Modesto and Yosemite, the city skyline faded into the suburban one, till the elements of civilization (like phone reception and roadside street lamps) disappeared almost entirely. The hotel was busy fairly bustling, and after so many surprises with busy hotels, this was probably the lesson of West Coast travel in the summer: there’s tourists everywhere. We hauled our bags up to the second floor, relaxed for a minute after a long car ride appropriately numbed our limbs, and drove a couple of miles down the dark roads to the Turlock State Recreation Area, which was, more succintly, and Indian-owned casino. Save it looking kind of empty, perhaps natural for Indian-owned territory in the middle of almost damn near nowhere, the casino patrons don’t look much different than they do here on the East Coast. Sort of old, bronzed, and wrinkled. Some, the spiffy dressers as comical as the wardrobe may be (full Cowboy gear, let’s say), others content with oversized t-shirts and maybe semi revealing clothing, if it means getting lucky after the casino, if not in it. And of course, always surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke and that transfixed look of either indifference or desperation, I can’t be too sure, as they reach to lazily pull the lever or push the button on the computerized slots. Casino patrons are a world unto themselves.

Phil likes to go once in a while, and usually we might make a day of heading out to Charlestown in West Virginian to blow a couple bucks on dinner and horse races. This place didn’t seem to have a track, though it did have a few gaming tables whereas most everywhere else we’d been, on that trip and otherwise, were dominated by slot machines. We had arrived too late for the buffet, much to Phil’s dismay who figures, if you’re going to pay for dinner at a casino, make it worth the while with unlimited choice. We ordered roast beef dinners and sat in the quiet dining area while the waitresses clung to each other, happily chatting. I don’t remember if we had much luck on the slots. If I’m lucky enough to be up ten or twenty bucks, I’m settled, feeling like, at the very least, my meal was paid for. When Phil’s up, he’s determined to keep playing the winnings until there’s nothing left. Or at least, that’s how it seems to go, whether that is his intention or not. We’d had more luck in Montana with the whole thing, really. Penny slot machines that seemed broken, the way they were paying out one day, though that kind of mistake usually only happens once.

But, other than the dopes feeding money into dollar, five dollar, and twenty dollar slot machines, I think wins and losses are pretty conservative all around. There’s no ringing alarms and big winners most of the night, probably not like a scene you’d see in Vegas, though I’m only guessing.

We dropped by the neighboring diner in the morning, as the hotel had a tie-in for breakfast to be served there and it was crowded with what looked to be huge families headed in our general direction for the day. We checked out of the hotel, dodged a pack of stray dogs running around the hotel lot, and made our way through the winding, narrow roads carved into the side of the mountain towards Sequoia. Talk about drives to make you nervous, and Phil joked about how he felt the same way when his dad made that drive when Phil and the family took roadtrips out that way, having lived for a few years in Bakersfield. I could just see that, an imaginative guy caught by plenty of things he’d pass by and turning his head to point. I laughed to myself noticing this even as we were riding in the back of the car in Montana, his father at the wheel, pointing out things along the way and us, half joking, to keep his eyes on the road and not attempt any Movie Driving (i.e. long conversations with others in the car and not watching the roadway for long intervals).

Yosemite Sam hangs out in the ranger booth at the entrance to Yosemite.

But what a gorgeous site the whole thing is, to be up in the mountains with basically no cars and no people around. Quite a site to see for someone who grew up in utterly flat Florida terrain, and never saw much of giant mountains. At least nothing tall enough to achieve a snowy peak. Though, it still isn’t any less disconcerting that there are very few barriers along the ends of the lane exposed to, well, certain death should the car ever cock too far in the wrong direction. Yosemite, too, like every place else we’d been now, was packed. The temperature had warmed up, or at least wasn’t as cool as San Francisco’s climate, and it was a gorgeous day. And, like other places I’d been to that week, it was a place that seemed trapped in time. Almost like it was captured in a Sienna-tinted photograph of a family of four or five driving in an old Buick wagon around the park. But then again, what really changes much about a National Park? Save any natural evolution and of course, forest fires. It’s the people that change. And man, there were a lot of people.

We pulled off and took a hike on one of the paths to get a look at the Sequoia’s, which were just a stunning as the mountains. All these big things! Pine cones, almost as tall as your upper body, and they definitely would have been painful to get hit in the head with — we narrowly missed being beamed by one after a dastardly squirrely crawling around on the branch above us dislodged one while we were distracted by photo opportunities with an unassuming deer. And these trees that seemed to be here for an eternity. That’s another thing about traveling around the States. When you’re overseas, you’re surrounded by ancient history. This was about as close to it was we got here. Natural, ancient history. It was a pretty far hike out, maybe an hour or so was all we took for it, and the hills were killer, which was odd because I should’ve been used to all of that by then, having been walking around San Francisco all week. There was a distinct point of exhaustion along the trail, and we knew this as we were walking back and, turning a corner at one point, everyone who passed us would ask… “are we close to the Sequoias yet?” I thought they were all Sequoias, really. Most of the people who passed us were huge families that spoke with an accent. I imagined before a world away and formulating sightseeing plans upon visiting the states. Are national parks really that popular to foreign visitors?

Photographic evidence of Phil breaking the law… handling the nature is a faux pas in the National Parks.

Aiding and abetting. We’re like Bonnie & Clyde, but never as well dressed.

We drove down to a lodge for a lunch break before trying to eke out a rather private parking lot for the sake of indulging a quick nap in the car. Though the day was far too nice, really, to stay trapped under a windshield soaking up the ungodly heat which was bound to sap even more energy. We pulled up along an icy stream, pulled off our shoes and socks, and went in the water. There was no one around for the most part, until a family of waddling big children sprinting down to the bank, probably expecting privacy just as Phil and I did, till they looked up after climbing over the water on the stack of branches and fallen logs and seeing… well, us. Then there’s that awkward hushed conversation of both parties who just wanted some privacy to enjoy the surroundings. We’d be doing a lot of this in Montana, carefully attempt to balance on slippery stream beds when we went trout fishing with Phil’s dad. And Phil, who may be a stone skipping expert, was clamboring about just as much as I. It was a killer on the feet, though thankfully, was hardly as chilly and unbearably numbing as the stream waters in Montana. We had our fun, and pretty soon, we hit back in the car, drove around a bit more, sort of just quietly staring out the window at the breath-taking scenery of these huge mountains, looking over on the other side of the car every once in a while when Phil would jab his finger in my arm so enthusiastly as the first to point out something that I’d never seen before. I got in the bad habit of trying to photograph and video tape everthing by the end, as though there was so much that my own memories alone couldn’t sustain the imagrey, that I needed technological backup. Which, failed anyways, when iPhone got burned in a sync up fail.

Back to the SF of A!

By the late afternoon, we had dinner at Modesto and, before the sun finally set and closed the curtain on another day, we were not far from San Francisco once again, this time by the airport, where it was convenient enough to stay and return the car in the morning before getting on the Montana-bound plane. We wound up in the Bullit hotel, tired as hell. We could hear the crowds of screaming, jubilent children downstairs, having been put up near the pool. It was so cold that night back in San Francisco, I couldn’t figure out how those kids, happy as they were getting to play in the pool, weren’t freezing their asses off.

What would the Duke say?!

[Via http://dweebcentric.wordpress.com]

soma yoga center, and touch the ocean, event!

2009-12-10T04:22:00.000+02:00

Join us! Bring your questions. Help enlighten the populace, as we explore the edges of the deep center of the book Touch the Ocean: The Power of Our Collective Emotions.

Post this to FaceBook.

Where? Soma Center, Lake Worth, FL

When? December 19th, 2009

Time? 7:00 pm

Explore mind altering connections with dolphins, the ocean, and our mutually inter-dependent relationships with each other as equal beings. Is community, relevant? What of our share?

Soma, December 19th, 7:00 PM, Discussion and book signing

[Via http://touchtheocean.wordpress.com]

Reflecting on shame and identity

2009-10-25T03:58:00.000+02:00

Rod Dreher has what is, at least for me, a very thought-provoking essay over at Crunchy Con. Actually, “thought-provoking” is a euphemism. I’ll be blunt — it hits what is, for me, a permanently raw and open nerve. The next 3200+ words will reflect this. Turn back now if you don’t want me to take you there.

Mr. Dreher begins with a discussion about shame, obesity, and race, and how he has personally experienced them function and interrelate as someone who considers the American South home. He takes it someplace else, however, and the key part for here at the conclusion:

A fellow Southern exile once said to me that it’s so easy to love where we’re from when we don’t live there, because we can edit out the stuff that’s hard to live with. That’s very true. And yet, I confess it’s hard for me to feel quite at home anywhere else. When I go back to visit, there’s something about the place and its people I dearly love, and treasure as part of myself. [...] [However,] I chose to separate myself from it (and anybody who thinks Dallas is the South is sadly mistaken; it’s the southernmost Western city)… [F]or me, [what motivates my writing is] a sense of cultural rootlessness, and a craving for a sense of belonging to a place. Too much has happened to me over the years to form the kind of man that I am to make me feel at home in my actual homeland. And yet, when I’m away from Louisiana, I think about it a lot, and long for it. True story: I used to walk around Brooklyn romanticizing Louisiana, then go back to Louisiana and after a few days, start pining for my old borough home in Yankee Babylon.

[...] For me, displacement and a resulting craving for authenticity. But the fact that I chose displacement and exile adds a shake of shame about disloyalty into the cocktail too. [...] Me, I don’t have anybody to show anything to (this was the greatest gift living and working in New York City gave me). When I sit down to write, almost always I think not about showing myself, but about finding myself.

I’m somewhat circumspect about elements of my personal life in this forum. This is not out of any sense of needing to protect anything, exactly; leastways, it’s not about protecting myself. Anybody who happens upon this blog knows my real name, my wife’s name, and more or less where to find me; this may or may not be wise, but there we are. There are certain things I have not discussed here, like politics, because I don’t want to detract from my main objective — namely, some record of my path as an Orthodox Christian on the way to something vaguely resembling an academic career. It’s also, by far, primarily for my own use, rather than being intended as any kind of a public news service. So, since I find myself heavily burdened talking about politics — feeling in the main that I ultimately can’t pick a side because I’m not at all sure anybody is on my side — I just don’t go there for my own sanity.

Other things I haven’t discussed simply out of respect for the fact that the blog is public, and I have to be mindful of what that can mean. I was stuck in a horrible, horrible, horrible employment situation until April 2008 that I could not (and can’t) discuss here, because if certain parties were to run across my blog, it would only make things quite a bit worse. Even once I was out of that situation, I had to be careful about how I discussed the unexpected ways my grad school opportunities were developing, because out of respect for my new employers, about whom I cared very much, I needed to time how I told them what was happening in a particular fashion.

All that out of the way, Dreher’s essay hits home for me in a number of ways, not the least being shame over the struggle with weight I’ve had as long as I can remember, but even more in how he discusses his sense of displacement. Unlike him, I have no particular pride in any particular place as home — but I’ll talk about that in a bit.

There’s not much to say about my weight that’s, um, earth-shaking — as I’ve said before, my ancestors were swinging battleaxes in northern Europe; I grew up swinging a backpack full of books, there was never anything about sports that was terribly attractive to me growing up, and have spent much of my adult life behind a desk of some sort. My parents both had weight struggles they didn’t want me to have, which unfortunately meant that my weight as a child was monitored with the unapologetic and militantly nasty use of shame as a motivating tactic. (This is still hashed over yet today from time to time, and the parent who primarily engaged in this practice continues to defend their techniques, saying that they did these things because they wanted me to be healthy, and the only alternative they saw was to simply not care. That what they did didn’t actually work is only evidence to them that they didn’t do it enough for it to truly be the behavioral deterrent it was intended to be.) A growth spurt in junior high made me tall and reasonably thin (not skinny, I guarantee you — my frame does lend itself to skinniness to begin with) for the first time in my life, and I mostly stayed that way strictly by virtue of having a teenager’s metabolism. I put on a lot of weight my sophomore year of college as a result of various stresses (which I will discuss), lost it the next summer from even more stress, gained it all back (and how) once the school year started up again, and then got back down to my freshman year weight (more or less) about ten years ago. It stayed off roughly until my wedding, at which point it crept back on. When I moved to Indiana, a fencing class and a soccer class my first semester here took care of a good chunk of it, but then required courses edged further such intentions off of my schedule, and it came back on. For the last fourteen months, I have diligently made use of a treadmill, which between August and June took about ten pounds off very slowly; walking around Athens for two months got rid of another fifteen, and while much of it came back once I returned to the States, the addition of hand weights and other exercises to my routine has gotten me down to within five pounds of where I bottomed out in Athens. I am down two belt holes from where I was in August of 2008 one way or the other, and while the weight loss is slow, there is some very clear weight redistribution happening, as well as a development of muscle tone that didn’t used to be there. It’s a problem that anybody who has known me for any length of time knows I know about; the irony is that I am not sedentary by any means — I walk everywhere I can, in addition to the intentional exercise I get — but I also still eat the teenager’s portions of an adult diet, so I have to be very intentional about being active. This is more difficult when I’m not happy about large chunks of my life, and that’s been the case for most of the last six years. In the last year that has changed in some big ways, and my hope is that the physical aspect will also change concurrently. So that’s that.

The displacement issue is more complex. I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, which is where both of my parents had been born and raised and where the vast majority of their respective families were; when I was four, due to some disagreements over business matters within the family, we moved to Wenatchee, Washington where my dad tried to reinvent himself as a small businessman. Wenatchee wasn’t an active enough town for him, however, so we moved to the Seattle area when I was seven, he bought another small business that he was going to try to grow, and we built a big house with the intent of it being the family homestead. Four years later, a combination of factors, including economic collapse in Alaska and further business disagreements within the family, led to us basically losing everything. Over the next five years, we bounced from rental house to rental house, my mom went back to work, and my dad poured more and more of his soul that he wasn’t going to get back into a business that really couldn’t exist anymore (namely, office supplies) given the initial appearances of big box competitors in the late ’80s/early ’90s.

In 1993, Dad moved back to Alaska, having been offered a job by an old friend. As he likes to say, he was lured back to Anchorage with one word: “Saturday.” It was my senior year of high school, so the plan was for Mom and I to stay in Washington until I graduated, after which she’d move up there with him and I would start my freshman year of college at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

My senior year was a real struggle; not having a father at home, that year of all years, was a nightmare, and it wasn’t easy for any one of the three of us. It wasn’t easy for the two of them getting along with each other, and it wasn’t easy for me getting along with either of them. It was made worse by the fact that I started dating for the first time that year, and I also developed a close relationship with a couple of male teachers as sort of surrogate father figures, all developments my parents had trouble regarding with anything but suspicion and resentment.

The day before I graduated high school (Inglemoor High School, class of ‘94), my dad flew into town. The day after I graduated high school, he and my mom flew back to Alaska, leaving me behind to supervise the load-in of their moving truck. I spent the summer going back and forth between Anchorage and Seattle, decidedly not feeling at home in a place of which I had no particular memory, and not being allowed to feel at home in the place that had been home for the previous ten years.

Freshman year at Western was a disaster. I had been to the campus all of once before; we lacked the resources, in terms of time or money, to really launch any kind of a school visitation effort, and the main reasons we picked it were because it wasn’t University of Washington, but it was in-state, close enough to home, and yet far enough away. With my parents’ move, however, none of these really meant anything anymore. I was at a school with no good reason to be there. I had no family left in the place that I had considered home for two-thirds of my life, and had no place to go back to that I could really call home. The place where my family now was, despite being my birthplace, was unfamiliar, and being now at the beginning of adulthood I had no compelling reason otherwise to be where they were. In short, I felt like they had left me. Unfortunately, when it became clear this arrangement wasn’t making any of us happy, the rhetoric that I heard more often than not was that of me having left them.

I no longer belonged where I had grown up, so I was being told, and where I was being told I belonged by virtue of my parents having moved there just as I was starting college was not anyplace that felt like home, and since the end result was that I felt like I had no home, I never really felt comfortable at Western. My two and a half years there were a miserable attempt at trying to eke out an undergraduate existence with no familial or financial support; lacking any particular guidance, I made very poor decisions during that time regarding money, my heart, and school (among other things). I spent the summer after my sophomore year in Anchorage trying to figure out how to put my relationships with my family back together, and found that at that particular point, there simply wasn’t anything to reassemble. My parents couldn’t deal with each other at that stage of the game, let alone me, and that summer was the lowest I had ever been up to that point. I lost weight simply by virtue of the fact that I wasn’t eating or sleeping for about a month; eventually a psychiatrist put me on both Soma and Serzone, and things evened out enough to be able to survive the rest of the summer. (I took myself off of both as soon as I returned to Bellingham.) After one quarter back, however, it was clear that college was something I just wasn’t in any position to be able to pursue properly, and I dropped out after having thoroughly ticked off virtually everybody in the Department of Music with my inability to cope and what had become a tendency to lash out.

I now had no particular reason to stay in Bellingham, I wasn’t going to move to Alaska, and that left me with no real place to go except back to Seattle. I started job hunting, selling classified ads in Bellingham for the time being to at least have some way to live, and after a year finally had the opportunity to take a contract position (which was fulltime within a year) with a Major Software Company.

Life settled into enough of an equilibrium over the next year, and my parents appeared to have put enough of their own lives back together, that there seemed to be some kind of peaceful relationship that could exist with me in Seattle and them in Anchorage. They still nudged and wheedled me to consider moving to Alaska, but the fact remained that beyond the two of them, there just wasn’t any reason for me to be there. I sometimes thought that maybe once they’d retired, they would move back to Seattle; I dreamed that, having made my initial couple million working in the software industry (with subsequent millions to be made as the Great American Hope of lyric tenors, of course), I could buy back the house they built that was supposed to be the Barrett family home and give it to them.

Except that, about the same time that Megan and I started dating, in the early spring of 1999 (she and I having met freshman year at Western, so I guess it wasn’t a total disaster), my parents announced that they were getting a divorce. This was not the first time they had made this announcement, but this time it was final. The one time my wife ever saw us all together, apart from our wedding day (when they studiously avoided each other as much as possible — the family photo has them at opposite ends of the line), was a few days before the divorce was finalized, and they were yelling at each other over a snowblower.

By 2001, we were married, and shortly thereafter my dad left Alaska to spend a couple of years in West Virginia. By 2003, we moved to Indiana so that I could finish my undergraduate degree; part of the idea was that we’d be five hours away from Dad, which would have been the first time in a decade that I had lived within driving distance of a parent. Shortly before I left for Bloomington, however, he headed off to Phoenix, Arizona to be near the older of his two daughters (from his first marriage) and her children. Living near family was simply not to be.

Six years later, we’re still here. We’ve lived in our little rental house for a tick over four years; at 32 (less than a month away from 33), it is the longest I have ever had the same address. Ever.

My dad is still in Phoenix; my mom is in Wasilla, Alaska. Megan’s family is in the Seattle area. There is no one place we can ever live and be reasonably close to everybody.

Jaroslav Pelikan once quoted Robert Frost in saying that “home” is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you, but “home” has come to mean, at least for me, where my wife and I are able to share a life. It has no meaning relative to roots or family, at least not for me; for it to take on that meaning would mean choosing between my parents individually, or choosing between her family and mine. Everybody has an argument for why we should do one thing or the other, but there’s nothing we can do without having to make a painful choice. In some ways, it seems best to live near nobody, thus treating everybody equally.

Like Mr. Dreher, I crave roots and something authentic, but unlike him, I feel at home precisely nowhere. I have never walked around Bloomington pining for Anchorage (or Seattle, for that matter), nor vice versa. My parents both live in houses in which I never lived, in zip codes I never visited until after I was an adult. The place where I grew up has exactly nothing to offer me now. I have lived for years with a lot of shame and pain because I belong nowhere, but not because of a sense of disloyalty — unlike Mr. Dreher, I didn’t choose this displacement. Ironically, my displacement is precisely because I didn’t choose it. Rather, my parents moved away just at the very moment I needed them to stay put. (I will emphasize that I say this descriptively, not to assign blame; they did what they had to do. This has not made it any easier over the years from an experiential standpoint, however.) No, my shame is that I have no roots, no sense of home, to pass on to my own children once I have them. I have nothing to give them but the culture of a stray, a transplant. A stray who married up and who gets to eat pretty well for a stray, but a stray nonetheless.

Like Mr. Dreher, much of the work I have chosen is implicitly a means of trying to “find myself”; unlike Mr. Dreher, I’ve been trying to “show them myself” for years — to show “them” that I’ve risen above the rootlessness, the struggles with finding a path, the forced independence, the displacement, the lack of any visible connection to anything except a woman who loves me with all her heart, the confusion about how to simply be that burdens me from lack of guidance. I’m still trying to “show them,” which I guess means I haven’t actually accomplished rising above any of those things yet.

I don’t know if this pain ever goes away. I managed to get saddled with it at 17, and I keep waiting to feel normal again, keep thinking that understanding of the last several years is right around the corner. I at least feel less stuck than I have in years, like I’m working towards something now, something productive, so maybe it really is right around the corner. I don’t know.

The Chieftain Irish Pub Review

2009-09-27T19:44:00.000+02:00

The Chieftain Irish Pub is a typical pub, a stone’s throw away from San Francisco’s famous Moscone Center.

Ambiance

The Chieftain is an ok Irish pub. It’s not too fancy, it’s not too dirty (in fact, it’s not even a little dirty), and in general it’s unremarkable. But, that’s the problem: there’s nothing about the Chieftain that caused me to pause and take in my surroundings. It’s just a place in which I can have a drink and nothing more. (20/30)

Meh (15/30)

Drink Selection

A good drink selection. (5/5)

I had Lagunitas (again!), and it was good. My friend got a Guinness and the pour looked correct, so I’d definitely recommend getting that. They look like they have a decent beer selection, which you’d expect in a pub. However, they did not have Strongbow, which is my favorite cider, and a drink I think an Irish pub should carry. (10/15)

Location

The location is ok. It’s about a five minute walk from BART, making it convenient for East Bayers and BARTers from down south. But, aside from convenience the location is just ok–nothing to keep me coming back. (11/15)

Not the most exciting or interesting part of town. BUT, I didn’t see any crackheads or vomit anywhere, so the neighborhood was decent, if unremarkable. (4/5)

Music

I can’t even remember what was playing. The music was on low and didn’t obstruct our conversation. But, then again, it didn’t help create the kind of environment you’d expect in a good Irish pub. (5/10)

Ditto – I can’t remember music either. However, they do get props for not having the music too loud – that can ruin an evening for me. (15/30)

Price

At $5 for a pint of Lagunitas and $6 for a pint of Guinness, the Chieftain is not going to win any prizes for value. (32/40)

I think the prices are fair given that the beer is good, they are located in downtown SF, and they are about the same price as their neighbors. (15/20)

Total Score

I won’t be going back here unless I don’t have a choice. (73/100)

I’ve been to better. I’ve been to worse. For an Irish pub, I think you could find a funner, more authentic place in San Francisco. This one is merely conveniently located if you’re already down by the Metreon and have too much self-respect to get drunk at Jillian’s. (59/100)

The Chieftain Irish Pub gets a final score of 66 out of 100.

The covers are here!

2009-09-22T01:51:00.000+02:00

I scanned them in slightly crooked, but here they are! Zack did the cut outs for the paper construction, I used a scanned image of a painting I made (the fly), and I did the “spine” on the computer. The image on the back was taken in an industrial area of San Diego using magic and a very orange wall.

We spoke with the pressing company earlier today and it looks like the records should be here this week. Then we can turn our living room into a packaging center and get a ton ready for the two big shows with Autolux this weekend. First Soma on Saturday September 26th, and then Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa.

Rax Records is our own label composed of money, time, and devotion (but certainly not in that order). This is our very own self-released piece of music. Two songs, 45RPM, mixed vinyl and cute packaging. I’m so happy!

Social Calendar, Week of 9/13

2009-09-15T03:41:00.000+02:00

Fashion Week is happening in New York City (more on that later!), but it’s a busy week in San Francisco too. Here’s what’s up:

Tues: Leaf & Petal – Three Dot Trunk show; call 650 329 8070 or check out their Facebook page for the deets. (Palo Alto)

Weds: Leaf & Petal – Celebration and Informal Fashion Show; call 650 329 8070 or check out their Facebook page for the deets. (Palo Alto)

Th: Macy’s Passport – “Fashion and compassion come together” – benefit fashion show feat. Harajuku girls. (Marina)

Th: The Mission Statement – Sample sale + jam tasting at one of my favorite shops in San Francisco. Check out their calendar, or their Facebook page for deets. (Mission)

Th + Fri (and next week): Altered Barbie – the 7th year of Altered Barbie exhibits, “Over 100 artists showcase their eco-friendly ken and Barbie art.” (Mission)

Sat: The Prince Vs. Michael Experience – so it’s not fashion related, but it looks pretty hot. (Alamo Square)

Sat + Sun: The Original Vintage Fashion Expo – happens twice a year in San Francisco, featuring the “historical, collectible, wearable” for both men and women. (SOMA)

Have fun! Maybe I’ll see you at one of the events : )