I don't think before I type's Posts

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.

Volume 1: Caramel Offsets

This had been the worst day of Janet's life. She floated down the street incredulous as to how everything had gone so wrong, teetering on the highly erodible cusp of a full emotional breakdown. 

It was earlier that morning, the proverbial nail in the coffin of her nine-month relationship had been hammered in. As Janet strolled up the street of her city's main thoroughfare mourning the relationship she had put all of her hopes and dreams into, she felt as if one of the Mayans from Raiders of The Lost Ark had just torn her heart out and watched it beat in front of her. If anyone had approached Janet on the street that afternoon, even a Greenpeace canvasser or a Mormon proselytizer, she would have lost complete control and spent well over twenty minutes delivering hysterical and unintelligible confessions to a total stranger.

Janet knew there was but one consolation left in her life. When she was pushed to the edge, to the last point where a human could tolerate the sickening intangibles that accrue on your conscience, there was only one last thing that could give her the courage to keep fighting. 

Janet was going to drink some caramel. 

She stared at the barista, making dead eye contact with him while her tear ducts sat like a dam with a large crack down the middle, looking for any semblance of inertia to break open and flood a village with uncontrollable chaos. 

"I'd like a Caramel Blended," Janet explained. "Large. With whip. And caramel. Extra caramel. Can you put extra caramel in there?"

She watched as the guy behind the counter chased ingredients from every orifice of the overly thought-out establishment, consolidating them in a blender and blanketing them in unbroken sheets of ice. When the barista, knowingly looking up to her for signs of feedback regarding his proportions of ingredients, Janet shot him a dead-pan poker face of disdain and abhorrence, as if saying "fucking caramel."

"WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR," The blender whirred. 

Drink in hand, she stabbed a straw into it and sucked violently through the straw. The time for patience was over, the time for caramel was now. As the icy Caramelita-Blended drink slid into her mouth and down the back of her throat, suddenly her heart collapsed. It was assembled totally wrong. Everything was wrong. The icy inconsistencies overrode the sweet, tender texture that was such a desperate necessity to her in this dire moment. Despite everything she was already braving, she would have even stomached the icy unpalatability of this one last pleasure that her life yielded, but what got Janet was the caramel: there wasn't extra-fucking caramel in this drink. There was an average amount of caramel in this drink. 

With all will gone and only her visceral human instincts left, she took the icy drink, cocked her arm back, and chucked it straight behind the counter towards the man who had assembled it, nailing him square in the chest and causing whipped cream and icy caramel to explode onto several employees and a customer standing dominantly over the pastry case. Janet fell to her knees and began sobbing violently, in an arrhythmic overture to her full emotional breakdown. "I'm sorry," she choked through her heavy, asthmatic sobs. "I WASN'T AIMING FOR YOU."

Previously on Uptown Almanac

• Breaking News: San Francisco Coffee Costs More Than Crack, Just as Addictive
• "Is There Any Good Coffee Around Here?"
• HARD-HITTING COFFEE SHOP COVERAGE: Blue Fig Coming Soon

To answer your question, yes.

Dear Kixeye,

I am writing you regarding your the advertisements that you have elected to put on the side of every BART and Muni car in the Bay Area. You know the one--the one with the wolf? And its mouth is open? And it's shouting "WORK AT KIXEYE / BE AWESOMER." You know the ones.

Yes! Those.

First of all, congratulations. Congratulations on pioneering the exciting new frontier of memevertising. In this frantic and confusing age of holographic dead people and glasses that teach us to play ukelele, it's hard to break through to your average mama-grizzlybear consumer. BUT YOU DID IT! You said, "let's take jokes from the internet and use them to get people to come work at our startup!" A week and a half later, your very well-conceived ads were gracing every Muni bus, light rail train, and BART train in the city, extending an invitation to tens of thousands of commuters to seek employment at your startup.

But there are a few problems with your campaign, Kixeye. You see, when you exercise esoteric facets of internet culture to promote your recruitment campaign, you separate your potential applicants into two kinds groups of people:

• Those who understand the reference.
• Those who don't understand the reference.

The latter contingency are people who are just confused about why a wolf is shouting at them to work at your company and are nonplussed by your ploy to be "awesomer." This ad is not for them. Clearly.

The former category, the small group of people that will have any idea what this joke is alluding to, will understand that you have very aggressively misappropriated this peculiar segment of internet humor. What you wanted to use was the "Courage Wolf" meme, where you do something that results in being successful by being courageous. But, Kixeye, the joke you made was created using the "Insanity Wolf" meme, where the joke is that you do something excessively insane or irrational (to quote, "Insanity wolf tells his viewers to rape, kill, and commit other acts of insanity"). What you basically ran is an ad telling people that they would have to be insane to work at Kixeye. I'm guessing that it's just a happy coincidence that anyone would have to be totally insane to want to work at a ding-dong startup that simultaneously boasts an obscure reference to something on every bus and light-rail in the city, but somehow misses the joke that nobody got in the first place. Maybe one would have to be insane to work at a company with whatever knuckleheads thought that it was acceptable to pollute the city with this ad.

Anyway, good luck in the coming business quarter!

Sincerely,

Sam Bartos

Previously on Uptown Almanac

• Things San Franciscans Despise: Sidewalk Advertising