Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are the gorgeous gangly arty adolescents out of BRKLYN that have me enraptured just now. It's like The Feelies pulse is back with renewed energy. Their site is here http://www.clapyourhandssayyeah.com/news.php
I'm mad for them with their tightly wrapped scarves and throw-it-out-there pitch of a voice. Like Fiery Furnaces, they seem to polarize crowds, love 'em or leave 'em. I adore. It's city music to me, insistent, individual but a part of some engine, joyous and defiant -- "New York Calling At The Bottom of the Ocean..." sung over the edges, splashing around the song like a cocktail in a glass. I've never been to Brooklyn. The first posting this month was a dismissal of NYC. Here's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah changing a mind. YEAH.

Listening to Fiery Furnaces' version of Norwegian Wood over and over again over the wi-fi in my room just after midnight. It's intensely good especially after a few listens to get use to the wobble. Blueberry Boat was my favorite album title last year. On the same set of sites { http://www.kcrw.org to cite sources}
So.
I arrived at the How Weird Festival as it was unwinding into the wilderness of after party-dom, somewhere on Utah Street, in a big place, I suppose, since it seemed Everyone was invited. I thought a moment about going along and then thought better of it. I was not dressed for the whacky occassion, but I enjoyed the last few throbbing beats of electronic music. I suppose I should have gotten here earlier, as it wrapped up at 8pm around Howard and 12 street. I'll put this fest in my tickler file for next year. The sun must have made it quite a blast.

This glorious afternoon, I found myself with a friend in The Mission, along Guerrero, walking and talking, to 23rd where there's a garden lot, a fantastic palm shop set up between old vics, near a big famous church.
Amongst those succulents and fern, shade trees and air plants a person could get lost for hours and spend a pretty penny on plants too.

On the way back we thought to go to the golden fire hydrant, to pay a small tribute to the survivors of 1906. It's at the northeast corner of Dolores park, across the street from the train stop. I thought back as much as I could to a fiery furnace storming across the peninsula, when the quake and carelessness set fire that came right to the very edge of The Mission, along 15th, 16th, 17th to the edges of Dolores Park.
The Liberty Hill Preservation District doesn't betray the closeness of destruction a hundred years ago -- the flames that at turns lit these homes or saved them. The hydrant stood as a golden font. Still does.

Later, along How Weird Street, the final dots and dashes from the dj stage mess out and flutter across the faces of a few policemen, who seem a bit changed by the gig. I wandered home to my district and donned the headphones to hear Brooklyn calling -- Fiery Furnaces and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Menus for a Future Generation

I spent $1.10 on two pork steam buns on Stockton Street for dinner. One dollar and ten cents. The street was packed and alive at 5pm and the shopkeepers shouted out their offerings as fish flopped, so fresh and shiny and -- damn, I need a kitchen. If I had a wok, I'd take that tilapia and fry it up with ginger, garlic, scallions. The shops are intimidating at this time of day with the urgent and certain familiarity of the crowd. When I approached the counter for my steam buns, a look of mild impatience crossed the seller's face and then, when my order was swift and sure, a more welcoming visage came out.
Eating in the city can either bleed money on a plate or shock with its unbelievable affordability. I ate at a spot called Home in the Castro a few months ago, had that ubiquitous post-9/11 Comfort Food -- meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans -- and set myself back almost $20. Why do we pay so much for cooking that Mom pulled together because we had not much money? The other side of that spectrum is El Trebol, an old favorite Nicaraguan spot near 24th and Mission Street. For less the $6 a man can get a grilled steak, rice, beans, salad, tortillas, pico de gallo, and for another $2, a beer.
Downstairs from my perch on Columbus Avenue, at The Rose Pistola, a meal is segregated into its parts and sold off in very expensive morsels -- $35 for the fish alone, another $8 for the starch, and throw on $6 for vegies. If you glance at the wine list you've lost a benjamin. What will the future generations think when they find our menus?

North Beach Redux

A walk up this street is steep and steeped as it were in its own juices -- espresso, booze, and spittle. That doesn't dimish the fact that, like Montmartre, it has rough edges but is a city on a hill. The techtonic frisson between the plates on either side of Columbus Avenue make this particular intersection forever bewitching. To the east along Broadway is 'Thughaven,' with its strip clubs, hip hop heroics, knife fights, and speed. To the south is the tourist spine of Grant Avenue keeping the uninitiated away from Stockton Street, the true market-heart of Chinatown. To the west is good Vietnamese dining and then a tunnel through to Polk Gulch, under Russian Hill. To the northwest is my own strip of Columbus, up to Green St. and Vallejo, the easterly side, the 500 Block, Il Triangolo, not far from Caffe Pucini, my Italian kitchen. To the southeast is that pyramid, I.M. Pei's ode to Gold Mountain, and beyond it, the stacked pennies and banker's heart of the darkest, tallest tower in town. This is a true cross roads, an ever-changing frequency set in pavement.

Perl introduces the sidelights of the art world, the people who like Bob Fraser in Swinging Sixties London were the nexus of so many people and happenings, so is Hans Hofmann in the opening chapters of New Art City. I've always been taken by these sort of accidental 'salonistas,' people who gather talent around them whether by charisma or sheer inspiration. Hofmann's art itself is something I'm undecided about. His Academy, however, was a live wire of the arts. So few places are really like that, it should be celebrated. Here is Hofmann's 1964 painting entitled Rising Moon.

Whither Art Thou?

Reading Jed Perl's New Art City, I'm reminded how far New York seems to have come in this latest century from its aspiring heights in the midXXc. Seems that the mercury of inspiration has flowed away from it and toward the North, to Canada, and East across the Atlantic, to the United States of Europe, and perhaps South, to the other North America -- Mexico. Anywhere, now, but NYC.