Via gearslutz.
Author: catsynth
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CatSynth pic: Jen SX1000
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Photos from SF Pride
Last Sunday was the big annual Pride celebration in San Francisco, and with the recent court decisions restoring and expanding marriage equality, it was the largest and most celebratory that I had seen in my five years here. It was already quite crowded when I arrived at usual perch along Market Street at 7th.
Marriage equality and the court cases were of course a common theme in signs and displays.
But there was also lots of perennial displays and entertainment. There are beauty queens, for example.
And the obligatory bare-chested men.
The above float does signify one of the big complaints about the event, that it has become very commercial and “corporate”. How should one react to a festive float like this one below, which has a positive message, but it also sponsored by one of the much-despised big banks?
In corporate displays, perhaps none was larger than Facebook, with hundreds of employees marching in colorful t-shirts, and Mark Zuckerberg doing a goofy dance on a bus (sorry, I did not get any good pictures of that). On the positive side, many community organizations were also represented, including the San Francisco SPCA:
The Contemporary Jewish Museum also had a contingent centered around their current Allen Ginsberg exhibition.
There was music, including a rolling live performance from Hedwig and the Angry Itch.
Many ethnic-based groups march in the parade. This year I managed to catch Trikone, a representing LGBT South-Asian Americans (i.e., individuals whose heritage comes from the Indian subcontinent).
Individuals from many countries were also more prominent.
This is a long all-day event. The parade always goes much longer than planned, and then there is the big festival in front of city hall. Certainly there were plenty of complaints to be heard about the crowds and slowness of things. But overall it was a very positive day.
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CatSynth pic: Juno 60 vs. Juno 106
Mimi is back! This time with duo picture of the Juno 60 vs Juno 106. Submitted by Eric Pochesci of polynominal.com.
As for the dichotomy, I would personally opt for the Juno 106.
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CatSynth pic: Maggie Monotron
Maggie the cat poses with an original Korg Monotron. Submitted by Pas Musique. Follow the link to find out more about their current musical adventures, including CD releases and upcoming shows. You can also read a review of their performance in San Francisco last year.
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Weekend Cat Blogging with Luna: Under the Glass
We’re in the midst of a heatwave in San Francisco, and CatSynth HQ gets exceptionally warm on these days. It’s on warm sunny days like this that Luna is especially of fond of napping underneath glass tables.
It’s been nice featuring Luna three times in the past week on the blog, but hopefully I will have some time for other posts as well, including getting through the backlog of music and art reviews from the past month or so.
Carnival of the Cats will be coming to Pet’s Garden Blog this Sunday.
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Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble and Emergency (X)tet, Luggage Store Gallery
A few weeks after performing at Berkeley Arts, the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble returned to the Bay Area. This performance, at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, featured the same film as a few weeks earlier, but with very different music and thus an overall different experience.
The evening opened with the Emergency (X)tet, featuring Bob Marsh and a rotating cast of string players. This incarnation included Doug Carroll on cello, Kanoko Nishi on bass koto, and David Michalak on lap steel guitar and effects. This was actually a birthday performance for Bob Marsh, so the set opened with a rousing atonal rendition of Happy Birthday that included audience participation. After that introduction, the group performed a number of improvised pieces, each started by a different member. Each piece seemed to focus on a particular texture of the instruments, with long drones that favored the cellos and the slowly bending sounds of the lap steel guitar, to extremely percussive sounds especially focused on the bass koto.
Then it was time for the JCDE performance of their project Current Events. Just as a few weeks earlier, the film opened with stark news images from the crash of Air France Flight 447. But the ensemble quickly veered off in a different direction, with Dubowsky providing a solid jazzy bass line and Erika Johnson and Fred Morgan on percussion holding down the foundation. This was quite a stark contrast to the dark and abstract sounds from the previous performance, but it was quite captivating and fun.
The strongest of the sections, once again, was “Future Cities”, which featured more rhythmic work from the ensemble as well as Dubowsky with classic analog sounds on the Roland Jupiter Six synthesizer – think a space-music jam from the 1970s. Indeed, the musical content made it easier to see more of the detail in the films. In addition to the future cities, I was able to focus on the the critters and landscape textures of the desert section; and the disturbing nature of seeing journalists killed in a U.S. drone strike was much clearer (it probably had a more profound effect on my opinions of drone strikes than two years of reading incessant rants on Facebook).
In addition to getting to see the differences between the two separate JCDE performances, it was also the right order to see them, going from the serious and abstract sounds to the funkier, more rhythmic nature of the second performance. I look forward to seeing more of the ensemble’s work in the future.
