Monthly Archives: September 2006

PLUR and Pleather, Leather and Piercings

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When it comes to pride parades, P.C. San Francisco leaves no carnival opportunity undiscovered. This past weekend featured the brightest and darkest of festivals with LoveFest on Saturday and Fulsome Street Fair on Sunday. Both had women in fishnets, middle-aged naked guys and the pungent aroma of government weed. But what Bay Area party would be complete with out these things? Saturday and Sunday thousands came out to rave and spank, starting the fun with LoveFest.

Don’t throw out those glow sticks just yet. Dance music is still alive and pulsing and LoveFest is the proof. The festival is originally based on the rave music Love Parade in Berlin. The German festival decided not to go international this year. So the San Francisco sponsors took on the street party solo with the new name, LoveFest.

Each float had a different D.J. spinning and a crew of party-people to warm your dancing feet. Some floats had generic dancing babes (a la Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video). Others had a variety of costumed and candy-covered club kids. The line between spectator and participant was blurred as those who watched the parade came dressed up to join in and dance down Market Street when the music moved them. If you can dream it up and it’s brightly colored, there’s a chance someone was wearing it on Saturday.

I commend the planners of Lovefest for pulling off the event without a horde of sponsors hawking banks, beer, lube and other vaguely related products. The focus remained firmly on the techno beats and the beautiful, freaky people. Saturday’s street party owes its success to the ordinary folks with a wealth of time, creativity and, well, wealth that made LoveFest a newer brighter, happy-sunshine-rainbow-butterfly version of Halloween.

Fulsom is like Halloween, too! But only if you imagine the Halloween party that Larry Flynt would throw for Jean Genet and Sandra Bernhard. It’s the party where folks get-together and celebrate all things BDSM. What is there to do at the Fulsom Street Fair? You can get spanked and flogged (for free!) by a professional. You can find and join a public circle-jerk. You can finally get a chance to wear those ass-less chaps grandma got you for Christmas. You can watch a terrific drag show that showcases twenty years of Madonna in twenty minutes. You can shake your ass with hot women in pink leather pasties to the dark techno of My Life With Thrill Kill Kult.

As much as I enjoyed dancing to the Days of Swine and Roses, the band that really stole the show was Smash-Up Derby. This is a tranny-sexy-cool group with a great drummer and a ton of energy. They started as a collaboration between two mash-up D.J.s, Adrian Roberts and Dada. It’s unfair to focus attention to any one member of the band, however, as each member provides an essential element of talent and synergy. On top of that, they have a fun and catchy concept: they do live versions of mash-ups. That is, they cover two songs at once by taking the lyrics of popular songs and mixing them with alternative rock classics.

Whether your preferred form of hi-jinks involves all-night dancing or all-night nipple pinching, start planning your outfit for next year. I know I will be searching for just the right pink-day-glo platform boots or lace-up pleather pants. You gotta’ represent, you know? That is, if you insist on wearing clothing at all.

Like A Drunk Phone Call in the Middle of the Night…

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… only you can mock it at your daytime convenience.

I’m drunk. but having one of those moments where I appreciate the miracle of life.

Take a moment to let it sink in. This is life. Beautiful, precious, (melo)dramatic, insignificant. How does your heart beat, over and over like that, without stopping? How do you breath, over and over, every minute? If you’re brain is only neurons firing, how do you have this history of memories that result in a person. You. Not just a being but a storyline, an actualization, a culmination of thousands of years of evolution? (and still so much further to go, in that regard.) I look at my pasty skin, my multi-colored eyes, my yellow teeth. Any number of miracles are happening there.

If you accept that living is miraculous (how can you not accept that?) than it must be pointed out how insignificant we are compared to the cosmos. And yet, miraculous we are nonetheless. So. Also miraculous must be our cells dividing. Every flake of skin we shed is a tragedy to the epidermal next-of-kin. There is a war going on between my blood-cells and the alcohol. A holy war, for the holy land that is the temple of my body.

Not that I am sacred. No more than you.

This thing called life is so brief. In less than a century it will all be over. This collection of memories and ideologies that is unique in the entire universe to you will be gone. There is no replicating it. Then:

Take a moment to treasure yourself.

Because no one will ever be exactly like you, and all that you have learned, and have yet to learn, cannot be matched by the history of time.

And no one will ever be exactly like you again, and someday,

you will be gone.

What impact can you make, in so brief a time? And yet, what other choice do you have? Each moment compels you to rub your back on the musty pages of history. It doesn’t matter how small the mark.

It matters that it is really happening. Life is more amazing than anything I could have dreamed up. Kudos to God (be that evolution). Stunning debut. Even from pain and misery, life gets a standing ovation.

Now I look forward to the second act. icon wink Like A Drunk Phone Call in the Middle of the Night...

Old News Worth Repeating

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“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (chuckle) is working very well for them.”

- Barbara Bush, commenting on the flood evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.

Opera — It Ain’t Your Mama’s Browser Anymore

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I remember when my mom was trying out the Opera browser. She’s always quick to find the next trend. At the time, you had to pay to use it or have pesky ads on your desktop. Those days are gone. The new Opera is free and fast. Are you ready to leave Mozilla behind?

I know, you’re all attached to Mozilla as the only alternative to IE and the blessed-bringer of tabbed browsing. Guess what? Opera invented tabbed browsing. They were also the first to have a google toolbar. The new opera has this feature where you can use any search engine in the url box. For example, if I wanted to search for the “history of Crete” on wikepedia, I would type:

w history of crete

into the url box; hit enter, and it will take you straight there. And you can set Opera to do this for any search engine you want. I have ones for the urban dictionary and infoshop.org, though these would never be included in a standard browser.

This wasn’t what won me over, though. I’m sure you’re not spending countless hours on bittorrent because that would imply that you are downloading copywrited stuff and I don’t know anyone that does that. But let’s just say, you know, that guy, your cousin’s friend, who downloads torrents. If he uses Opera, he can just click on the torrent and it will download like it’s a regular link because Opera has a built-in torrent program.

The thing that won my heart is the “notes” feature. Often I keep a word processing program open just so I can copy/paste things into it that I found online. Opera has a built in note pad. You just select the text and on the right-click menu you can add a note. It will save this text in the “notes” area as well as the url you got it from.

They also have these widgets that you can use to further customize your Opera experience: mp3 players, video games, calendars, news feeds, a “to do” list, etc. You can make your own widgets. I’m a little skeptical of widgets. On the one hand, if all you do all day is browse the net, then why not have everything attached to your browser? On the other, why use a widget sketchpad (for example) to draw pictures when I can use the Gimp or Photoshop?

Hey, Ray**, when you’re looking at porn, don’t you generally have ten or twelve tabs open at a time? When you hover over the tabs in Opera it shows you a little thumbnail of the page (similar to the way Safari does it) so you know just which throbbing man-muscle to click on.

But wait, there’s more! Remember how when you do a google image search, first you have to click on the link then click again on “see full-sized image”? Opera has a rewind and fast forward button that you would use in situations like that to zip past the middle pages. Those programmers all the way in Norway have me figured out. Amazing.

Dear Mozilla,

It’s been a beautiful love affair. But I’ve found someone better, with more features. I won’t forget you. Can we still be friends?

Love,

Karma

*If your still using the antiquated Microsoft Explorer, get out of the Bronze Age my friend. Do you still listen to 8-tracks?

**Insert here the name of your friend whose internet porn collection rivals the number of records at your local college radio station

Plug Plug Plug Pandora

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Imagine a radio station that could predict what kind of songs that you like and only play those songs. As the music plays, you can customize it further by voting for or against particular songs.

But of course, my hipster friends, you all ready know that such a station exists; it’s called Pandora. You know, as well, that the idea behind Pandora is to imagine each song can be broken down into its own DNA structure. They achieve this by listening to thousands of songs and breaking them down into specific pieces. For example, Pandora indicates that I like songs that feature folk influences, major key tonality, prominent organ, acoustic and rhythm guitars. (Wait, maybe I should add some Le Tigre to de-emphasize the folk aspect. Just a minute.)

It knows this because I told it four or five bands that I like and created a playlist for me. Correction, it is constantly creating a playlist for me, perfecting and selecting for my listening pleasure.

Pandora is not for people who want to listen to the same five bands over and over (and over and over) again. It is for people who use Myspace as a way listen to the newest bands or download streaming audio of their favorite D.J.s.

Speaking of Myspace, remember when no one used it because we were all on Friendster? Personally, I switched over to Mspace because of the ability to customize the music on my profile. Friendster has, in a stroke (the Strokes are a good band, hold on while I add them to my Pandora list ) of brilliance, decided to partner up with Pandora to create customized radio stations. So if you have a Friendster account and you haven’t logged in for a while that would be an easy way to check out Pandora, if you haven’t all ready.

The interface is not perfect. It is hard move forward and backwards in your playlist. There’s no way to post your list on a blog (this may be of questionable legality, anyway, but people are doing it as is). You can’t give incremental or weighted rankings, only yes/no votes. Yet it is intuitively easy to use. As long as they have that, and the program works its magic, they will work out the kinks (oh! I like the Kinks! Just let me add them to my Pandora list and I’ll be right back). And the beauty part is that it does work.

Part of what people seem to get sucked into with the new technologies are the various abilities to customize their experience. Now we have a product that you can spend time tinkering with or just leave it alone and it will perfect it for you. That’s pretty damn special. I’m putting my money on this as the next big net phenomenon. Or I would be, if I weren’t spending so much time playing with it.