Being Cool

Good Dog of the Week: D.I.Y. Pabst Purse Pup

Purse pups are all the rage these days, but, let's face it, you probably don't have enough money to go to TJ Maxx and buy an appropriately-sized handbag for your totally adorbs new teacup.  So why not upcycle that PBR box that's been sitting at the foot of your bed for the last few months and shove your dog into that?  Great way to save the planet and meet babes!

Noise Pop Is An Imaginary Music Festival

It's that time of year again—when we celebrate a week of local music in the Bay Area by boasting Noise Pop: the Bay Area's premiere indie music festival. Truly, it's an exciting time to be alive. Bands will influx. Tickets will sell out. The Bay Guardian will do a puff piece-turned-cover story on up-and-coming bands that are on the middle of the marquee list of Noise Pop artists. All those bands will share their newfound exposure on their facebooks, and the wheels of blogocracy will keep turning.

Except, here's the thing about Noise Pop: it's just a week of San Francisco shows. We live in a major metropolitan area with vast appeal and resources, any given week of shows is good, and Noise Pop makes a random week of the year out to be, somehow, a thing. To call this week of shows somehow spectacular (or even, particular), is a bombastic and perplexing tradition that serves little tangible meaning in the Bay Area music scene. It's a waste of energy that distracts—not highlights—from the terrific and unwavering musical draw and appreciation the Bay Area has.

Perhaps the greatest misdemeanor Noise Pop commits is that the so called 'Festival' suffers from a complete deficit of noteworthy headliners. For example, Noise Pop 2013 headliners include:

Toro Y Moi: Don't get me wrong, Toro Y Moi is a great and tremendously relevant band that does a terrific live show, but fall short of being considered the flagship headliner of a music festival, especially considering they've done three Bay Area shows in the last two years.

Body/Head: You run a real gamble paying money to see a Kim Gordon noise project in concert: you might witness one of the most profound and honest pieces of musical performance art in the modern era, or you might see a totally self-indulgent spectacle of humiliation and shame. There is a good chance, actually, that the concert will be both. As cool as it may or may not be, it is a guaranteed salting of our collective wounds that Sonic Youth will probably never get back together, and that children (us) are the real losers in divorce.

Rogue Wave: Playing the Noise Pop Festival in a rare Bay Area live appearance.

Amon Tobin: That's cool. Amon Tobin is cool, except, he's playing a DJ set. Not putting the 'DJ set' in parentheses next to your music festival's feature headliner is kind of like padding your bra in the giant middle school that is San Francisco.

!!! (chk chk chk): !!! was the most bloggable band of 2005, immediately before people began to realize the psychedelic jam rock they were listening to was the very same psychedelic jam rock they don't care for very much at all. Almost immediately after their plateau, the band would become largely marginalized by a new influx of electronic bands. A more accurate name for this band today would be '…', which will also be your reaction when you realized you payed $23 to see this band in concert.

Look, no offense to Portland or Los Angeles or New York, but fuck those cities. We live in the greatest city in America. We don't need to create imaginary music festivals to make ourselves cool. Go to foopee.com—a website that outlines every show happening in the Bay Area on any given night, for weeks into the future—and you'll find that every week in San Francisco is a relentless deluge of awesome shows both with big and small bands.

Spend a few dollars to go see some shitty band's first show at Bottom of the Hill. Sell some jorts at Buffalo Exchange so you can get $12 to go support that new venue on Valencia. Don't do it under the guise of a festival, do it because it's a fucking Wednesday. We don't need to waste our time making a big deal about a Thao And The Get Down Stay Down show, pretending it's part of a some big art and culture festival. It isn't. So before you spend $150 on a Noise Pop lift pass that gets you into (some of) the Noise Pop shows, remember: Noise Pop is all in your head.

#BLAMEZUCKERBERG

Phone Booth Bans Only Remaining Reason to Go to Phone Booth

Well, that’s it.  An end of an era.  The neighborhood’s last tolerable bar that empowered us to puff our way through intoxication has banned the very act.

We’re sure this news isn’t a big deal to many of you, our health-conscious readers of pristine lung capacity.  But we welcomed the bar’s casual “fuck you” to the law.  Besides, where else could we make-out with girls we have an increased chance of outliving?

Now what’s left of the place?  Pool, cheap drinks, a great jukebox, and that east coast dive feel ever so lacking in SF?  Balderdash.  Cigarettes were the blackened glue that held the joint together.  And now?  Nothing.

[Photo by Ledjee L.]

WHO WANTS SOME SLAPS?!?!

 

Crestside Classic (Mixed By R8R) by Djp_Mix on Mixcloud

 

Mayne you know the music you're gonna play tonight is some bullshit ass playlist that is on some mom jam fist pump pitbull dr pepper rave level of boring ass brostep bloghousemashglowtrapxcrybabywave. What you need is some slapping ass bay classics straight out the crest. Oh don't worry if you don't know about the Crest, just roll with this shit. You probably have a better chance of spotting snopa la lengua hyperneighborhood on a map that you do the crest but, if you're looking for some credibility from the skrreet skirts just jam this shit and maybe your cubicle warrior homie will get with it if he fucks with some KC rap or he's just hella bent. If not fuck it, you'll probably get a drunk girl to throw up a dub and mabe you can skeet skirt on her later in the evening. Whatever mayne just bump this shit doggie, don't be threatened by the cuttiness. It's a R8R mix and if you know anything about that northern california trunk tape or the sac classics then you know this mix bumps hella horwd, fuck with it.

mixcloud mediafire tracklisting

if you really hate rap then don't click and just help the people in the post below.

Area Tastemakers Are, Like, So Over The Mission Right Now

As 2012 comes to a close, it's time for blogs to reflect on what the last dozen or so months meant for people who read blogs.  And despite all the countless top ten features and banal breakdowns, Eater's tastemaker's survey on what the best dining neighborhood of the year often stands out.

Suffice it to say, the list has historically been less about what neighborhood was best and more about piling the well-deserved accolades on the Mission.  But 2012?  Well, 2012's list is most definitely about the Mission, but it isn't the usual shower of compliments to which we're accustomed:

Josh Sens, San Francisco Magazine: Obvious to say, but the Mission

Brock Keeling, SFist: Anywhere but the Mission.

Jonathan Kauffman, Tasting Table: Clearly, this is the year when Valencia Street jumped the shark. No, really, people: OPEN YOUR DAMN RESTAURANT SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Yikes!  Proposed restaurant moratoriums, now this?  Some even went so far as to say, “fffffffff can't we just start eating in Bayview or something?” (I'm paraphrasing).

Does this mean 2013 is the year all the foodies declare the Mission “over” and move to Oakland or whatever?

[Eater | Photo by Serena McClain]

Hypermasculinity in the Mission

Yesterday, the beloved San Francisco Chronicle published an important look at the burgeoning “hypermasculine” haircut industry in the Bay Area (loosely defined as “establishments [that are] full of pre-1930s barber chairs, hand-powered barbering tools, folksy wooden touches, straight-razor shave kits, whiskey and, of course, the signature red, white and blue barber poles.”)  Behind the trend are tech-savvy folks who find their barbers on Yelp (the benchmark of tech savviness), don't want to “sit next to ladies with foil in their hair,” and yearn for a time when “men used to take more pride in themselves.”  They really want to look good!

However, it's not all about harking back to a time 'when men were men and women were in the kitchen' and there was a military draft, it's about being real. The self-described “founder” of Valencia Street's F.S.C. Barber (and curator of stunning lines) Sam Buffa explains in what could be the best line ever published in the Chronicle's 147-year history:

“This is about moving past the scraggly, long-haired hippie to something rugged and masculine and real,” says Buffa, who's interrupted by a friend bringing a quiche from Tartine.

You see, “San Francisco is ready for [real haircuts] in a way it wasn't before,” Buffa mansplains. “This city is not the people who used to be here.”

Namely, broke pussies.

[SFGate | via MrEricSir]

Get Weird Or Go Home Tonight At RVCA

We know this rain is totally bringing you down, and all you want to do tonight is sit at home and watch last week's episode of Start-Ups: Silicon Valley (OH-EM-GEE she live blogged her date with the nerd/model?! Pa-TEH-tic), but do yourself and your sanity a favor and head over to RVCA tonight for the release party for the next installment of you favorite zine, Get Weird Or Go Home II. From their Facebook event page:

Our beloved Get Weird Or Go Home zine is turning two this year and to celebrate we're throwing a bash with beers, babes, hot chick DJs, bands and lots of copies 4 sale! 
The special twist to the evening is that photos from Get Weird Or Go Home will be hanging in the RVCA store and FOR SALE. Unreal, right? No way! This is real life and we are just so excited to show-off our talented friends!

**~~**Spinning music to sway, grind and rub elbows to: DJ MY G and LISA DINAMITA**~~**
**~~**ROCK AND ROLL BANDS to wink at cuties to include: Grandma's Boyfriend (http://on.fb.me/WB9UcB) and WARM SODA (http://warmsoda.bandcamp.com)!**~~**
ZINE COPIES FOR SALE: $10 CASH/CHECK
FIRST 25 COPIES SOLD GET SPECIAL SHIT!

The roll call of GWOGH's contributors reads like a who's-who of local photog's and creatives that have made a name for themselves already, plus I know *for a fact* that this event will be crawling with babes. Everywhere. Also, you're dying to know what “special shit” is.

See you there.

Mark Zuckerberg Moves to the Mission District

We sure have been seeing a lot of Facebook's billionaire “I'm CEO, Bitch” living the slow food high life in our fine neighborhood this past year.  From sunny days in Dolores Park, to late-night beer and burrito outings at Phone Booth and Farolito (with a little line-standing at the chosen foodie hot spot Wise Sons mixed in), it seems Mark has been trying to fancy himself as a pure blood poor person.

It has led us to wonder if he is trying to reinvent himself as a “Mission hipster” and others to declare the Mission as “the neighborhood Facebook built.”  It's even spawned some fantastical rumors among neighborhood chatterers that he might be living part-time in La Lengua.

Well, it seems as though the rumors might be more than that, as BuzzFeed's Reyhan Harmanci reports on the claims that Zuckerberg has made the Mission his new home (under the bold headline, “The Heart Of Silicon Valley Is Now In The Mission”, no less):

The techies' migration from suburban Palo Alto to the charmingly gritty — and once less charmingly gritty — urban neighborhood has come in waves, but really settled in this summer when the scene's low-profile king, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, began being spotted around a house at the edge of the Mission, near Noe Valley. But his arrival here, and his cohort's, isn't just a real estate choice: it marks the merger of tech culture and culture at large, a new hybrid in a neighborhood and a city whose key industry used to stand a bit apart. The first tech boom, of the late '90s, brought an influx of new people in the Mission — but it's hard to imagine that the hardcore engineers would have been happy with, say, the level of gang violence and messy artist warehouses a decade ago.

Now, with most of the rough edges sanded off of the previously-poor district, the tech guys are the Mission's mascots, the cool kids. Love it or hate it, the musicians and weirdos who won the neighborhood its hip reputation in the first place have mostly grown-up, fled to Oakland or both. The street artist [movement] “Mission School,” led by figures like Barry McGee and Chris Johanson, is dead.

But Zuckerberg spends time on Dolores Street, often walking his dog, and his part-time residence (he also has a much-photographed home in Palo Alto) is an open secret in the neighborhood. Though residents wondered at first about rather sizable security detail parked in a quiet corner, it appears to be paying some unexpected dividends: apparently a private security guy chased down a would-be burglar recently.

The move makes sense, especially given that Valencia Street pretty much looks like downtown Palo Alto anyway.  But one big question remains: will he be taking the Facebook bus or driving to work?

(Oh, and welcome to the neighborhood, Mark!)

[BuzzFeed]

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