Outside Lands, Part 2

My second day at the Outside Lands festival (a couple weeks ago now), was a better experience than the first. I was hanging out with Scott (who kindly gave me his extra ticket) and his friends, without a big agenda about what to see, and we smoked some weed and wandered around a lot. The day ended with Wilco, my Favorite Band, and it was a decent, if uninspiring, set.

But that day I also saw what must have been the best act of the festival, the Mexican duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela. I think it was the sickest guitar-playing I have ever seen. They had two giant screens so we could watch them play. Scott told me later every time he looked over my mouth was just hanging wide open. Slack-jawed, they call it. Here's one of their videos:



It was a beautiful day, the throngs were tolerable and the music was great. Also, the sound did not go out much, from what I recall.

Outside Lands

This weekend is the giant Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park. Kim and I went to the first night last night, primarily to see Radiohead. I have not gone to too many festival shows and I doubt I will go to too many in the future. It's a total clusterfuck and just not worth it.

I didn't mind how difficult it was to actually get there - we took the BART, tried to get a cab from downtown, gave up, went to the Muni, gave up, took the Muni back to Powell and looked for a cab again. We eventually found one.

Inside the park, it was cool until we tried to go see Beck. Kim and I got in separate lines for beer and food and an hour later had beer and food. It was just stupid. I'm actually going back on Sunday to see Wilco; I'm going to try to smuggle in some beer because fuck the organizers and their fucking bullshit. I basically paid $160 bucks so Kim and I could stand in line for food and beer and then hear Radiohead from half a mile away. Plus my sciatica was about as bad as it's been in six months.

There was bike parking:
Some delicious oysters:
Looking this way from the beer line, I thought I heard some music that might have been being played by Beck:Looking the other way, you just get the sense that humans are really stupid creatures. Why would any intelligent creature want to be doing this?
Emanating from that reddish and greenish area, below, were the sounds of the Greatest Band on Earth. Well, it wasn't all bad.

DIY Days

Last Sunday I attended DIY Days at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. My friend Maria, a classmate from CalArts, suggested that we go, so I have her to thank for getting me off my ass. It was an inspiring day of panels and case studies about very independent filmmaking, alternative distribution and self-promotion for your film projects. We heard from Tiffany Shlain, Arin Crumley, Caveh Zahedi and Lance Weiler among many others.

Here Maria is arguing with her friend, Ben, about whether it makes sense to buy people you're trying to network with, or pitch to, or from whom you want something, a cup of coffee:

My favorite talk of the day happened in the later afternoon, when the schedule was starting to bunch up, so it was not given quite as much time as I would have liked. It was called "Cinema and the Singularity," which title intrigued me enough to encourage me to stay when I had been contemplating leaving earlier.

The question the speakers were asking was rather mind-blowing to me. They asked, "What would singularity cinema look like?" A different way of putting that might be, "What happens when the stories start writing themselves?"

This was meaningful to me because, in a sense, it was a subject of my thesis film, Nervous, but I was only scratching the surface of those issues. The idea, though, of avatars in virtual worlds becoming self-aware and spinning narratives of their own is pretty interesting, if difficult to imagine and technologically unlikely (for now). It's a much more interesting topic philosophically than as some kind of prediction. I have thought about working out a feature-length version of the film, in which case I would certainly come back to these ideas.

As it turns out, though, the panels were not the best parts of my day. The second best part was learning about a crazy, amazing super-pen. I'm an avid note-taker, so this pen was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life. The kid who showed it to me was a little nervous at first - apparently he had just been trained by the company and had chosen me as one of his first marks to try his pitch on, so I could have easily rejected his advances. But it was a home run for him because I thought the pen was super-awesome.

The best part of the day was totally unexpected. Faye Dunaway was at DIY Days and I got to meet her for a quick moment, just as she was preparing to leave. Apparently, she is really into DIY cinema and fascinated with new technology, which is pretty cool for a woman in her late sixties. She was very nice and pretty low-key and was cool about me introducing myself as a fan and talking with her for a moment. It was thrilling, because I absolutely love her and several of her films are among my favorites, including Chinatown and Network. I gave her directions to Market Street.

Here she is, on her way out:

After the game

There was a day game yesterday at AT&T Park so, when I took my lunch break around 3:15, King Street was mobbed to a surreal degree. To that mob, everything must have seemed just right: leaving the game, big crowd. I wonder if it occurred to any of them that there are some people on King Street with non-Giants-related business?

On the block with my building is an alcove, a concave scoop removed from its building, a smoking area. Sometimes, in spite of the shallowness of the scoop and the lack of cover, it attracts the homeless. Yesterday, as I passed by on my way to get tacos, shouldering through the baseball crowd, a woman sat there in the alcove, legs crossed, and cut off all her hair with a steak knife, the tufts strewn before her, fluttering softly away on the breeze.

When she was finished, she bowed her mangy bald head toward a new task, the circular arrangement of a small pile of what looked like animal droppings on the concrete in front of her. It wasn't the shit of a large mammal, if it was shit at all; it was smaller, white-flecked pieces, like bird shit. Maybe it was from geese.

I looked at this scene for only a few seconds because, you know, it's not polite to stare. Then, for the next hour or so, it remained burned into my retinas, an omen of the apocalypse.

But what can you do?

Something else I've seen walking from work to the bus station.

How is it that we're supposed to live? How much are we meant to ignore? Caring too much is just uncool, always has been. Plus, it's exhausting. Is this why so many people are so relentlessly shallow? I'm sure I am one of them.

Is it that the press is "weak?" Or just that everything is subject to the omnipotent Market? Money is strength, power, love, sex, good, right, might. And...truth?

Edge of the world

Went with Val and Kim to a party in the Sunset. Met some interesting FX geeks from ILM.

I remember coming out here to Ocean Beach back in the day, during the boom, feeling like we were standing on the front edge of the world.

Privatization

I work in San Francisco and often walk from my office, near AT&T Park, to the Transbay Terminal at 1st and Mission, where I catch the bus home. I've noticed that some of the buildings downtown have notices like this one embedded in the sidewalk.

You know, we citizens have given up an awful lot of what was once called the "commons," to the point where assertions of ownership such as this are the norm. We think nothing of the fact that corporations own, or claim ownership of, pretty much everything.

Meanwhile, I frequently pass this frighteningly monolithic, windowless cube owned by the aforementioned, stadium-branding telecom. It was from a secret room within this Borg box that the National Security Agency jacked into AT&T's Internet backbone. Thanks to our brave lawmakers, this corporation now has legal immunity for having helped our government spy on us. Oh, well.