UPDATE: Lawrence Le Blanc, Brick & Mortar's booker, tells us new soundproofing will go in Wednesday and “all is well.”

Despite being located in the shadow of the Central Freeway, the Entertainment Commission ruled Tuesday that Brick & Mortar Music Hall is too noisy and is only allowing the club to remain open under burdensome circumstances.  The Examiner reports:

The restrictions stem from nearly two years of complaints by neighbors of the venue on Mission Street near Duboce Avenue who say they have heard noise from the concert hall since it opened.

Following an hourlong discussion, the commission voted to approve numerous restrictions for the club, including limiting entertainment hours from 5 p.m. until 12:30 p.m. on weekends and 5 p.m. until 11:30 p.m. on weekdays. The sound levels of the club may also not exceed 80 decibels, which is about the level of a garbage disposal.

At the hearing, the owners explained they had already invested $50,000 in soundproofing, however the commission demanded the club schedule additional soundproofing by June 15—despite some neighbors defending the club, saying noise issues have improved.  Additionally, Brick & Mortar claims to have never received a complaint or police citation.

Brick & Mortar's owners allege the heavy-handed restrictions are not in fact over sound issues, but over their refusal to employ the Entertainment Commission's lone inspector's private security company, Yojimbo Protection Services.  In an interview with the SF Weekly, Brick & Mortart's owner Jason Perkins claims the club's troubles began last fall when he declined to hire Yojimbo at the inspector's urgings.

“I think if I hired his security company we would not have had one complaint,” Perkins says.

Other club owners, speaking off the record, report similar occurrences. One says [Inspector Vajra Granelli] referred him to a partner at Yojimbo to hire security for a nightclub. The owner hired the firm, but soon found that it was too expensive. After he replaced the firm, the club began getting noise and security citations from Granelli, according to the owner.

“The reason why clubs hire this person is because they [the entertainment commission] leave us alone,” he says.

The corruption has left Perkins frustrated and ready to throw in the towel. “We will close,” he told the Examiner. “We’ve got four other venues to run, it’s not worth it.”

[SF Weekly | Examiner]

The Nick Jones of the Flat Broke Puppet Co. has been lighting up the corner of 24th and Mission for a year now with his goofy breed of musical puppetry, much to the delight of children and adults alike.  Recently, the Chronicle caught up with him to get his story:

Jones, 35, ran away to San Francisco as an “angry gay teen” when he was 17. He didn’t fit into the small fishing town in Rhode Island where he grew up, but when he arrived in San Francisco, it wasn’t the mecca of acceptance he had hoped for.

Like other teens who land in the city searching for answers to their complicated problems, Jones found a world of addiction and tough streets. Over the years he came and went from San Francisco, struggling to find a place where he could fit in.

Four years ago, he landed here again. This time, he found a community through his puppets.

Jones makes his own puppets with material donated by friends. Wolfie, a ratty faux-fur wolf with button eyes, was his first. The collection has grown to more than 20, but he still calls Wolfie his No. 1.
Wolfie comes to life with a touch of a rough-and-tumble East Coast accent that Jones says is inspired by his grandfather. Jones’ other creations include a cat, three dinosaurs, a shark, a witch, a 1960s wannabe diva kangaroo and Mary Jane Lane — a wide-lipped drag queen he calls his chanteuse.

Keep reading on SFgate, and be sure to watch this profile put together by Mission Local.

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.

We've always been a fan of the mixtape, but it's lost its luster as sharing Rdio playlists has almost zero intimacy and only awful people still own working tape players.  But slapping up a handwritten playlist on the side of a Muni?  This could be the resurgence the lost tradition of mixtape swapping needs.

[via Muni Diaries]