Persepolis Now

If you aren't familiar with Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels or her movie, "Persepolis," now's the time to read them. In these stories, she reveals what it was like to grow up as a young girl during the Iranian revolution, and all the changes it brought to her life and to her family.

With all the events going on in Iran right now, I highly recommend that you read the book(s) and rent the movie. It's an amazing, moving story, and somehow again, very timely.

Adriana Kaegi ... "ooh la la" live

In my chillout podcast episode #45, you heard Adriana Kaegi's sultry "Ooh La La" from her new album, "TAG." Here you can see her perform it live in Manhattan. Listen to that sweet saxophone from Charlie Lagond, too!

ADRIANA live @ Joe's Pub singing "Ooh La La"

Things I Love About Living in SF

Tonight I was riding on the Muni metro and I was playing a game on my iPhone called "WordWhirl." It's one of the many free apps and you don't have to be connected to the Internet to play it...you just need to make as many words as possible out of a letter scramble in a prescribed amount of time.

Anyway...

The train was very crowded. Suddenly I heard a guy say ...."chosen."

And I realized that he'd guessed the 6-letter word that I was missing in my game. I had less than 30 seconds left. I looked at him. "Thank you," I said. "I couldn't help it," he said. We then discussed our favorite online word games until my stop came up.

This is one of the reasons why I like living where I do...

Idiocracy: Are we there, yet?

I don't know the name of this TV show and I've never seen it before tonight. It doesn't matter. But this evening I turned on my TV set for a few minutes and set it to a local channel.

A show was on that looked like it was a parody--or at least it could have been an outtake--from the movie "Idiocracy." This is a must-see dystopian movie that takes place in the future, where people are so dumbed down they can barely form sentences and clearly can't read. They sit in front of massive TV screens with super-sized sports drinks and watch "entertainment" shows about people jumping around and getting injured--an endless source of amusement for them.

Anyway, what I saw was very similar to the favorite TV show in Idiocracy. Various people, mostly overweight and hardly athletic, attempted to jump and dive into dumb-looking objects or through muck that appeared to be mud or pudding, apparently hurting themselves in the process. I kept the show on long enough to grab my iPhone and take a few photos with closed-captioning turned on.

Below, you'll see four photos from the TV show I saw tonight, followed by a YouTube clip that depicts the popular TV show from "Idiocracy" that seems eerily similar.

Marin

No, I'm not referring to the suburbs north of San Francisco. This is a short, animated film made in France by three directors: Alexandre Bernard, Damien Laurent, and Pierre Pages. There's a gallery of stills from it that you can look at after you see the film. It's really very well done, and a sweet story. I saw a link to it on a blog this morning and thought I'd share it, too.

Marin from Marin ShortFILM on Vimeo.

Yann Tiersen in SF

On Friday night, I saw Yann Tiersen in concert along with Asobi Seksu. I've enjoyed Yann Tiersen's music in the past-- most notably, his movie scores for Amelie and Goodbye Lenin-- so I was happy to have the chance to hear him live.

Asobi Seksu delivered a dreamy, psychedelic opening act with plenty of synths, an art-pop lead singer, and some driving beats that made me think of Stereolab at times. And Yann Tiersen played a melodic but forceful hour of music with his band ... part French chanson, part post-rock bliss, and some wonderful moments where he played violin with his band driving behind him. His violin melodies are some of my favorites, and they evoke in me a nostalgia for a past that didn't occur in my own personal life, but makes me want to reminisce about it all the same (see "Goodbye Lenin" to see what i mean).

The only issue I had with all this wonderfulness was that the reverberating acoustics of the concert hall did not support the ear-shattering sonic intensity of the volume. That is to say: it was too loud, and I had to get some ear plugs from the bar. I don't understand why some venues turn up the volume so high in an environment made from wood and plaster and mirrors -- the loud volume bounces along the hard surfaces and often can turn into a din. Why not establish an acoustical environment that's more like a recording studio, with sound boards and bass traps and other room modifiers that allow you to hear the detail of the instruments without distorting them? I must be getting old.

At any rate, the music was great, and I think now I just want to listen to them on CD and adjust the volume and the EQ the way I want it...

Boylemania

This weekend, I stopped by a magazine kiosk and picked up the latest issue of "Paris Match." Inside, there was an article about Susan Boyle, the woman who became an overnight singing "sensation" on a British talent show, and then watched by millions around the world in a viral YouTube video. I saw the video; so did you.

I went into a hardware store and had the magazine rolled up under my arm when the clerk said to me, unexpectedly "Is that an article about Susan Boyle?" I didn't think I was holding the magazine in a way that revealed what I was reading, and he seemed like a typical heavy-metal young guy who might be oblivious to anything outside his own subculture. But in a way, she is part of his subculture: YouTube. So there we were, caught red-handed in our own nerd-dom: me actually reading the article, him wanting to talk about it, both of us implicitly admitting that we'd watched the video clip more than once.