Best Shows of 2014

As I predicted in my 2013 round-up, my show going would fall precariously in 2014. As the year came, to a close, I felt sort of “meh” about this year’s show-going experiences. Something about this snippet from the Atlantic piece on the mid-life malaise, “Jeste also notes that the brain circuits linked to rewards lose some sensitivity with age,” made me think that maybe I just wasn’t feeling the same euphoria that I used to feel from a really good show.

But with certain gripes (which I will note below) aside, 2014 was actually a pretty solid and enjoyable concert year. My hope for the years to come is that we can somehow maintain at the 10-12 show per year frequency, but we’ll see. In 2014, we did learn to enjoy the comfort the assigned seating, instead of fighting in the scrum of standing GA tickets, so maybe this will prolong our concert going.

I’m going to start with a run down of this year in live music, and end with my “top 3.”

• Kraftwerk at the Fox in 3D. This was my first 3D show, and probably one of my most heavily anticipated shows going into 2014. Yay, for the grandfathers of electronic music!
• Pantha Du Prince at Mezzanine. This is the show that taught us that we’re too old for shows at Mezzanine. We always knew it was a late venue, and arrived at 10:30. The door guy told us no “ins and outs” and that PDP would come on at 12:45. So, we went to eat, came back at 12:45 and felt like death because PDP didn’t come on until 1-ish. We stayed about 45 minutes before we headed to the land of nod.
• Beck at the grand re-opening of the Masonic. He put in a solid set, and it was nice to be in a newly re-done venue, however, the HVAC system was not up to par. They ripped out the seats on the first floor of the Masonic to make it GA and didn’t up the AC / ventilation for the increased crowd size, so I had to go out to concessions for air constantly because I felt that I was going to faint.
• The Cure (and TV on the Radio at the Bottlerock Festival). I have seen our future, and our future may be festivals like this. I had not seen the Cure since high school and J and had never seen them, so we went up to Napa for this festival. It was mellow, uncrowded, offered $25 glasses of cabernet sauvignon, snacks from Morimoto’s, and plenty of 50-year-olds in Robert Smith outfits. And they of course pulled the plug on Robert Smith because he played too long for them (but not too long for us).
• Jeff Tweedy and family at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. HSB remains one of my favorite SF events, even though I battle heatstroke at it every year. Mr. Hellman, God bless your soul. And friends, you should really try to go with me to HSB in 2015. It’s free and baby friendly, so you have no excuse.
• Com Truise (and Tycho at the Fox). We were initially going to waste these tickets, but I pointed out to J that Com Truise was the opener, so we went. This was a case of the opener definitely outshining the main act.

And for my top 3 (in no particular order):

1. David Gray at the Paramount. Go ahead, and make fun of me all your want, but David Gray is one of my favorite performers and I’ve never seen him perform live before. I found out a friend was a mutual fan, and had company to finally see him live. I walked away thinking this was my favorite show of 2014, and this was the show that I felt the most acutely, in terms of my emotions.
2. Slowdive at the Warfield. J said that this was his favorite show of his entire life, and he is a superfan who had waited forever for their reunion. I actually knew very little about the band going into the show, but appreciated that it was a great performance.
3. Flaming Lips and Friends NYE Extravaganza. This is how we chose to close out the year, folks. This was not as great as last year’s Halloween show, but it hit my brain’s pleasure receptors with Beatles’ covers, confetti cannons, Wayne Coyne’s unabashed glee, and balloons. I could think of no better way to cap off 2014.

Happy 2015 to all! May the world have a geopolitically more stable year and may justice prevail in the U.S. of A.

P.S. – These were the other shows that I went to in 2014, but did not describe above: F**k Buttons at the Independent, The Knife at the Fox, and the War on Drugs at the Fillmore.

Best Shows of 2013

It’s that time of the year again, where I look back and reflect on concerts that I went to over the past year. In 2013, I saw at least 27 bands* perform full sets over the course of 17 shows and 3 music festivals. Since I spent 3 days at my first and last trip to Coachella, I’m going to say that my show attendance was the same, if not more, than 2012.

The year was notable because there were a lot of bands that I saw perform twice in 2013 (Yo La Tengo, Alt-J, Peter Hook, and the Savages). I also got in a fair number of nostalgia acts (Blur, the Postal Service, Peter Hook x 2, Johnny Marr, the Stone Roses, New Order [without Peter Hook], OMD, and Stone Temple Pilots [without Scott Weiland]).

The list format doesn’t work really work any more, so here are my notable shows of 2013:

• The Savages at the Independent – We were supposed to see the Savages full set at Station to Station the night before, but we were running late. We did arrive at S2S in time to catch the last 2 songs and were completely blown away. Before arriving at S2S, we were ambivalent about going to the Independent show the next day, but as soon as we heard them, we decided that we had to go. This show experience was unique in that the band requested absolutely no photography of any kind and for most of the show, the audience complied (no smartphone screens to mar the experience). Their album also ranks in my top 5 of the year.
• Alt-J at Coachella – This band has the bro-iest following ever, but they must be experienced live. Their recorded music doesn’t do their live music justice. This is one of the few Coachella bands that I made a point to see again when they came through the Bay Area.
• The Flaming Lips Halloween Bloodbath at Bill Graham – Wayne Coyne + Carrie + Miley Cyrus + so many beautiful balloons (video link).
• Tame Impala opening for the Flaming Lips on Halloween (and at Coachella) – they were the perfect opener for the Lips and their album from 2012 wins for gradually growing on me over 2013.
• Junip at Bimbo’s – in spite of the drunk concert bros shouting “We love you Jose,” this was my idea of a sonically perfect show, the sound was perfect, the performance was perfect. Even though J did not know who we were going to see, he walked away saying this was probably going to be the best show we saw all year (and I think this was back in June).

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do another write-up next year, but for me, 2014 is the “year of no,” in terms of going out less, so I think my show frequency will fall significantly. Let us hope that the dozen or show shows that I select in 2014 will make for another amazing music year.

*By way of checking my Instagram and Google calender, these were the acts: Arcade Fire, Lorde, Alt-J, Phoenix, Flaming Lips, Tame Impala, Billy Bragg, Savages, Peter Hook, Junip, Stone Temple Pilots (this was not by choice; it was a festival surprise act), Of Monsters and Men, Yo La Tengo, Tamaryn, OMD, Grimes, Bat for Lashes, Janelle Monae, the Postal Service, Johnny Marr, Blur, Stone Roses, Thao Nguyen, Glass Candy, Twin Shadow, Efterklang, and Starfucker.

Why is the Rent So Damn High?

Today I went to SPUR’s brown bag discussion on “Understanding the Bay Area Housing Market,” featuring presentations from Jon Haveman, Enrico Moretti, and Tim Cornwell. The tl;dr version of the talk is that both the market to rent and the market to buy residential housing are expensive due to: 1. runaway job growth (fueling the demand side) and 2. a regulatory (hello, CEQA!) and permitting process that drives up the price of developing new housing (constricting the supply side).

Professor Moretti of UC Berkeley had some good data points for why prices are rising insanely at the moment. First, even though 20,000 new jobs were created in SF last year, there were only 2,548 new housing permits issued (and this housing hasn’t come on the market yet). The western part of the Bay Area (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara Counties) are now all above peak employment, so for every new job created, there is new demand for housing. He also explained the multiplier effect of tech jobs, where for every tech job added, 5 additional jobs are created, since they create the demand for local services which employ teachers, nurses, lawyers, taxi drivers, waitress, sales clerk, etc.

Tim Cornwall, who does a lot of real estate modelling, explained where we might be in 5 years. The current 5-year pipeline for Bay Area housing has 70,000 new units to rent (9% of the existing inventory) and 56,000 new units for sale (6% of the existing inventory). He put up a chart of the 5-year forecast of supply and demand, and the SF supply seemed to be just a smidge below the demand line. However, there were huge gaps between available supply 5 years down the road in San Mateo, Santa Clara, and the urbanized East Bay. The gap for San Mateo and Santa Clara counties was particularly striking to me, because in my head that translates to more shuttles between San Francisco and the South Bay, as more people are pushed up to San Francisco. As someone else blogged (I want to give him/her credit, but I can’t remember who), Google, Facebook, and Apple have no choice but to run shuttles up to SF because Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, and the entire Peninsula have restrictive planning policies that prevent adequately dense housing for their workers down there.

In terms the East Bay, it has lagged in terms of job creation, but the prices are being run up with the housing spillover from San Francisco. Cornwall has looked at the BART station boarding / exiting data and the run up in East Bay rental prices near BART stops correlates with SF job growth. Right now, Berkeley rentals are about the same as the bottom of the SF market.

Finally, on the issue of demand side prognostication, Cornwall pointed to where Gen Y is in their life stage. Between 2006 and 2013, San Francisco has seen its share of Gen Y’ers and Boomers* go up, whereas those around age 35 leave the city. Right now, Gen Y is perfectly happy in their 20’s renting and having mobility, but as they get married and have children in the next decade, housing demand will change.

*The topic of Boomers wasn’t really discussed today, but I’m thinking these are mildly affluent, empty nester boomers, who are trading in their suburban homes for the convenience and cultural attractions of the city.

Best Shows of 2012

This annual round up is just about the only remaining item of consistency on this blog. Over the past few years, the formula for my show-going frequency has followed a pattern of n-3, where n= the number of shows I went to the previous year (i.e. 28 shows in 2010, 25 shows in 2011, and 22 shows in 2012), so my best of list is getting shorter. This post is an amalgam of best shows and interesting things that I saw at shows (through the hazy filter of Instagram, of course).

I started out the concert year in Seoul, where I was very entertained by the innovative coat check at the city’s electronic music festival, and my friend’s friend’s Korean Justice banner. I also made it a point to see a few favorites again (Radiohead, Washed Out), but surprisingly, these shows did not make much of an impression on me. I can’t fault Radiohead; I think that even with floor tickets, the HP Pavilion is not the ideal place to see them. For the first time, I saw a few acts on my “must see” list, the Flaming Lips at the Bridge School Benefit, and Fiona Apple on her Idler Wheel tour, but similarly these do not demand more than a footnote. As J’s sidekick, I also saw a few of his favorite bands, Spiritualized, Animal Collective, and Metallica (where ash and soot from the pyrotechnics had me blowing out black snot from my nose the next day).

Here are the 6 “top,” aka notable shows, of 2012 (from very good to best):

6.  M83 at NSSN – I saw M83 twice this year, but I have very little memory of the first time that I saw them at the Fillmore.  While a Live 105 show is not my ideal concert experience, they were excellent at NSSN (the true headliner), and like other French electronic bands, they were more of a “jam band,” when performing live.

5.  Cat Power at the Fox Theatre – This was the election night party in Oakland. I was pretty surprised by this show because Chan Marshall came out with a cropped, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo cut, instead of her trademark straight across bangs and long-hair. Cat Power’s music was angrier than I expected and matched her look (and perhaps her health and financial woes). Cat Power is crazy; and for her music, this is a good thing.

4.  Tamaryn at the Independent – The band’s music is strong and their new album was on heavy rotation in my playlist this year. Live, Tamaryn has the whole moody blond-hair covering her face, midriff bearing aesthetic rocker look down.

3.  The Weeknd at the Warfield – I was hooked on the Weeknd the first time that I heard a Flunk sample in one of his songs. Seeing him live, I am convinced that he’s the next Michael, the next Prince, and that this was the last chance to see him in a non-arena sized venue. J commented that R&B shows were weird because the audience was a sea of smartphone video screens for the duration of the show. His opener, Nosaj Thing, was the best opener of the year, and someone that I look forward to seeing again.

2.  Philip Glass, Tim Fain, and Joanna Newsom at the Warfield (benefit show for the Henry Miller Library) – The most civilized show of the year; a seated show at the Warfield. My favorite part was Glass’s performance of this work, featuring Allen Ginsberg:

1.  Pulp at the Warfield – Back when I saw them in April, I knew that this would be number 1, since it is easily one of my top 5 concerts ever. So, I did a full write-up to memorialize the experience back then.

Overall, I’m a bit surprised that the top 3 slots were very different acts at the same venue, the Warfield. Then again, the Warfield’s similarity in terms of layout, age, and beauty to the Fox Theatre in Oakland, highlights how atrociously bad the sound system is at the Fox. Every year, I vow to not see shows at the Fox, since they manage to make great bands sound terrible, but I find myself back at the Fox for a show or two. My concert-going wish for 2013 is that the Fox puts some money into upgrading / fixing their sound.

‘Til next year, EC

Yeah…Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

Normally, I save my concert reviews for year-end one-sentence summaries. But by the time December comes around, my memory grows hazy, and it’s hard to reconstruct my feelings about a show based on a single Flickr upload. I’m breaking from routine, and giving Pulp a full review now because I’m pretty sure that last night’s show will garner the top spot on my 2012 Best Show list.

Last fall, when Portishead played the Greek, I was pretty ready to retire from show going because I thought there was nothing left. Essentially, if I got to see Radiohead live every two years or so, I thought that I’d be happy. Well, I was wrong.  For my birthday, J got me general admission Radiohead tickets for last week’s show at HP Pavilion, and for a few weeks, I was happy. Then, I missed the Pulp ticket sale by an hour, and walked away empty handed when I acted on a rumor and tried the Warfield box office that night.

I checked Stubhub and Craiglist religiously and one of my friends added me to a “Help everyone get to see PULP at the Warfield!” group on Facebook, and in the end, everything worked out. J’s roommate ended up having a pair of extra tickets, and I let out a squeal of delight when she nonchalantly offered them to me without knowing of my quest.

Thus, even before yesterday’s show, I was pretty psyched. I spent an entire hour clockwatching while sitting through a lecture on Biophilic cities right before the show. And for once, the show, ended up exceeding my keyed up expectations.

Jarvis Cocker, at age 48, may be the best showman that I’ve EVER seen.  He likely arranged the opening green laser messages that added up to the build up of the band coming on stage. He read out facts about Isak Dineson, whose birthday was yesterday. He threw out to the audience a book of poetry that he bought at City Lights that afternoon. He handed a beer to someone in the front audience, and told them to share it. He did this again with a couple of glasses of wine (Greg, who patiently waited hours to secure a front spot, deservedly got one of these glasses). But most of all, in playing Pulp’s hits, he alternated from a writhing dorky-sexy rockstar to a guide who gently coaxed me to re-live my awkward adolescence in verse. He owned the entire audience.

Yesterday’s show also answered the mystery of why I hadn’t seen Pulp live before. The last time they played in San Francisco was at Bimbo’s when I was in high school. I wasn’t even old enough back then to make it through ID check.

The concert gods have blessed the Bay Area this week. Pulp matched Radiohead’s two-plus-hour set with double encores, with their own two-hour set with double encores, albeit shorter double encores. By the end, Jarvis sweated through his dress shirt a la Morrissey and looked a bit misshapen as he performed Misshapes. But everyone left smiling as they sweetly ended with Pulp’s earliest song.

A Simple Life

This movie made me cry.

This movie made my friend Angela turn to me and say, “This is the saddest movie of all time.”

This movie made me respond with, “This movie is sadder than the film that J picked the night before.”

This movie made me relive all of the time that I spent with my grandmother at her assisted living facility, and later, hospice.

But in many ways, this movie wasn’t sad. You know from the outset that if a old woman has a stroke and goes into a nursing home, she’s not going to last to the end of the movie, so death doesn’t come as a shock. Instead, this was a movie about respecting one’s elders. A movie a about human dignity. In so many ways, this movie was the opposite of The Help. After the family maid, Ah Tao, becomes ill and has to retire, she’s not forgotten. Instead, her longtime employer, Roger, who she raised from birth, becomes her god son and visits her at her nursing home and makes her his red carpet date to a film premier. Both Roger and Ah Tao are two of the humblest characters ever. Roger is played by Andy Lau, who is Hong Kong’s equivalent to George Clooney, and his character is a film producer, but he dresses so casually that he’s mistaken for an air conditioning repairman. Likewise, Ah Tao winds up in the nursing home not because Roger wants to put her there, but because she wants to go there, as to not burden him.

This wasn’t a spectacular film (even though it swept Hong Kong’s Film Awards this week), but it was an honest film.* I don’t think that a similar project could get green lighted in the States, since American audiences don’t like to dwell on one’s possible decline from limping about to being strapped into a wheelchair. But for anyone who doesn’t flinch from aging or caring for aging parents or grandparents, I’d recommend this film.

*”Honest” deserves some qualification here. Angela did remark that this movie made its main characters too saintly, too perfect.

Oh where, oh where, is my photo lair?

Last week, I went to see Professors Zittain and Lessig in conversation about the Dilemmas of Open Knowledge at the Harvard 375 roadshow in San Francisco. In response to a question about data and consumer privacy, Zittrain added on to the old maxim that if you were getting something for free online, you were paying for it with your data. Now, he said, even if you were paying for a service, a company was likely making money with your data too.

I’ve been thinking about Zittrain’s words all day following the Insta-Facebook announcement. One of the reasons that I like Instagram is that I hate giving my data to Facebook. I recognize the utility of Facebook as my de facto digital address book and as an event notifier, but I feel powerless when it comes to my data on Facebook. Even though I wiped out bands and movies that I like from Facebook years ago (I’m thinking it has been at least 4 years since I “deleted” this info), I still get Facebook ads related to this old data. And I hate that even though I disabled publishing of location and status tags on Facebook, my friends and family report additional data about me to Facebook. Even if it’s “private,” Facebook still knows it. Even if I hit ignore, Facebook still knows it.

Thus, I embrace Facebook alternatives, and I’m saddened when Facebook acquires these alternatives. With Beluga, I was sad because it was highly functional, and Facebook shut it down to force me to use Facebook messaging instead (I resisted). With Friendfeed, I nuked my own account. And now, as the Atlantic has posed, the billion dollar question is, “Will Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram cause an exodus?”

For now, I’m not nuking my Instagram account / app from my phone, because there simply isn’t a good alternative that I can think of off the the top of my head. Harking back to Zittrain’s words at the beginning of this post, one of the very few web services that I pay for is Flickr Pro, but given all of the churn at both Flickr and Yahoo lately, I have no idea what’s going with my data over there. Now, I mainly view Flickr as my backup for old family photos should an earthquake destroy all of our albums.* I swore off Picasa years ago because Google creeps me out as much as Facebook.  So, I now feel that when it comes to posting photos online, I’m homeless. The only photo houses available are rigged with CCTV cams inside, so what am I to do?

*My backup method does not feel foolproof to me given Yahoo’s recent woes. I constantly worry about Yahoo sunsetting Flickr.

Siri, Remind Me Later

In the spirit of this brief, earlier post, I want to memorialize the winter of 2011-2012 that’s about to end (even though it feels like that it’s already over).

This was the winter where San Francisco had an L.A. winter. There were a few, scattered cold days, but there were far too many sunny days, even in the Outer Sunset, where the fog usually reigns. This was the winter when I did not bother to go up to Tahoe even once, since there was no snow. This was the beautiful, warm, dry winter that will lead us to ration water later this year, or next. This is the winter when it did not rain on my birthday, even though it always rains on my birthday.

Best Shows of 2011

In keeping with my tradition of annual round-ups, here are my noteworthy shows of 2011, a year, where I saw everyone from Prince to St*rF*ck*r, and Arcade Fire twice. I didn’t cry tears of emotional joy at any of the 2011 shows, but the band that took the top spot very nearly put me into concert retirement with their performance at the Greek Theatre.  So, in ascending order of how much I enjoyed myself:

8.  Cut Copy at the Regency – This is the runner-up in the dance party category, simply because it was the most energetic. It took me forever to steady my phone to take a picture because people were jumping so hard on the dance floor. Oonce oonce oonce.

7.  The Kings of Convenience at the Fillmore – Based on Erlend Oye’s past work with Royksopp, this show was in some ways a companion piece to entry #5 below.  This was a two-man acoustic guitar and vocal set, which definitely emphasized, loud audience aside, that quiet is the new loud.

6.  Thao and the Get Down Stay Down – Miss Thao always gives her all, in her full messy glory for her shows. She’s definitely my favorite local musician.

5.  Royksopp at the Regency – This won the dance party category by the sheer force of Royksopp’s sound.

4.  Foster the People at Outsidelands – I went to the festival for Arcade Fire, but on day one, Foster the People stole the show. I didn’t think of them their album as all that dance-y beforehand, but I had fun doing the indie bop in Golden Gate Park during their set. Plus, it helps that like everyone else on Spotify, I spent a few weeks listening to their album non-stop.

3.  Fitz and the Tantrums at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass – Such stage presence! I boogied! I shook! Hands down my favorite act of HSB. Thank you, Mr. Hellman.

2.  Erasure at the Fox – Oh, L’amour, I broke out my gold suspenders for this show, and it was worth it.

1.  Portishead at the Greek – Half of the number 1 spot was earned through anticipation alone, but Beth Gibbons’s and her haunting presence earned the rest. It was nice to see that they moved beyond the screaming banshee rendition of Sour Times, into a more jazzy, lounge-y mode.  After waiting over a dozen years for this show (and after having checked off all of the other acts on my list), I felt very satisfied after this show to enter into concert semi-retirement (I had a very long post-Portishead show lull in ticket purchases). In 2012, I’ll probably halve, if not quarter, my show going habit, but I’m looking forward to Radiohead and M83 at Fauxchella.

Other honorable mentions:

Washed Out at the Great American – This originally made the list above, but I couldn’t remember anything from this show, other than it was good.

Ellie Goulding at Outsidelands – Her music is not quite my cup of tea, but an excellent set, plus the sunglass scramble added to the fun.

Best Coast at the Regency – Along with Thao, this goes into the messy, drunken, emotional vocalist category, and I mean this in a good way.

Beach House at the Fillmore – I was worried about this show because Toastyken had told me that seeing Beach House live was one of his least enjoyable concert experiences, but despite the droning vocals, I liked this show, and the teepee stars were a neat touch.

Someone Else’s Illustrated Reaction to a Book that I Happen to Like

Jason Novak on Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City:

“We must give our children all the light we can without forgetting our capacity for darkness.”