San Francisco’s Chris “Dune” Pastras was the coolest professional skateboarder. I was 12 when I first read an interview with Chris in Transworld Skateboarding. He was really young, he painted, made music, wore vintage frames, owned his own company Stereo Sound Agency, and had really outstanding taste in music. He was the only other person I knew of who also liked KISS. Immediately after I read that article, Chris became my favorite skateboarder of all time. He was the best example of someone making a career out of the things I thought were fun and worth doing.
Skateboarding meant so much to me as a kid in the middle of nowhere. It was my window into a world where art was made, people took pictures, made films, dressed cool, cared about music and lived exciting and dangerous lives. The skateboarders had a certain interest in life that I didn’t see in the adults at the grocery store. Chris and his friend/business partner Jason Lee seemed to be all over anything cool. They made an amazing skateboarding video in 1994 called A Visual Sound which was unlike anything around at the time. The scenes were long, anticlimactic and paired with jazz music. Jason was in (then skateboard photographer) Spike Jones’ video for Sonic Youth’s 100% in 1992 and also stared in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats in 1995. Anyway, the point of this blog entry is not to document all their accomplishments: needless to say, both of them became quiet the celebrities by the end of the 90s.
I always imagined that someday I would meet Chris and we’d naturally be friends. When I had my record deal and needed some art for my album, he’d do the cover. So that’s what I did, I decided to contact Chris. He was nice enough to give me his home address and listen to my album. I didn’t hear much after that – and he stopped responding to my messages. He didn’t want to do it. Feeling disappointed, I avoided going to Chris’ last art show in the city. My ex coworker attended with her skateboard industry boyfriend. She said there were lots of girls all over Chris and Jason. It never occurred to me that Chris may have been creeped out by me. I never thought of Chris Pastras in a sexual way, and I hope I didn’t creep him out because that was never my intention. I’m sure he’s been hit plenty closeted skateboarders.
So I gave up on the idea of working with Chris Pastras because Chris Pastras didn’t want to work with me. To work with an artist, you’ve gotta have some chip on the table, or be able to create a mutually rewarding relationship. I’m sure if I had more monopoly money, Chris would’ve loved the opportunity to do something with me. In the meantime I’ll brush it off my shoulders and respect my elders.
I spent my holiday weekend catching up with childhood friends in my hometown. My friend Jess (pictured on the moon) only wanted to talk about Facebook and how “it’s the future dude.” When Jess isn’t selling condos or jumping on his three backyard trampolines, he’s on Facebook tracking and stalking Santa Cruz college freshmen girls.
Our friend Marcus (holding the earth) is a geographer but surprisingly has adequate offline social skills, so he’s hardly on MySpace. Jess had a hard time convincing Marcus and I (floating in space) that we should set up Facebook accounts. We lost our trust in Jess years ago when he was phishing porn sites and basically stealing anything and everything he could off the Internet. But guess what? This didn’t sound so sleazy.
So we set up Facebook accounts. And yes, for friend-to-friend social networking, Facebook does seem better than MySpace. But Facebook hasn’t figured out music, and doesn’t seem to be friendly to musicians or artists. It’s impossible set up a page for your music. It’s also impossible to decorate your Facebook page or make anything look aesthetically interesting. You’d never see an Internet celebrity like Chris Crocker develop on Facebook. Everything is set to private and nothing is entirely public. My first impression of Facebook is that it favors the dull and uninterested.
Facebook feels a lot more mature than MySpace. If you poke around on it you’ll discover it is polluted with coworkers, classmates and family members. My REI infused Tanzanian sister is on Facebook; and my “HUMANIST~ANIMIST” walking stick sporting santabear of a dad (below) is even on Facebook. Are you on Facebook?
Its, like, totally cosmic out here on the internets. Synergy! I just posted about a bunch of SF synth punk and then looking through our myspace bulletins I see that The Units have posted five versions of ‘High Pressure Days’, my favorite song by them. Not for download though, sad. I guess its kind of cool, but I did start to hate that song towards the end.
There’s:
the 1979 single version, which is rawer and came in a stamped white paper sleeve. No frills! So punk! Its awesome and is my favorite version.
The 1980 album version which is a cleaner. I like the backing vocals on this one better, and also its the first version I heard and I don’t like ‘changes’.
weird 1981 remix that doesn’t do much for me.
A live 1982 version which I kind of hated at first but now I kind of love. The live drums are gone and its definitely a bit more commercial sounding, which is the path this band chose to pursue. Generally its not worth bothering with anything after their first LP, Digital Stimulation, which came out in 1980 — trust me, I have a few less than awesome 12 inches. But this live version works. It survives the loss of drums and the more dancey synth lines that have been thrown in are interesting because they’re not up front and I don’t feel like I’m watching some late night network TV broadcast trying to show me the ‘weird’ new music with bad dancers.
a 2007 remix that doesn’t do much for me.
Also, poking around I saw found The Units Training Film #1, which I guess they screened at shows and was constantly being edited so it was never ‘finished’. Wow! Like, how did they do that? There wasn’t even iMovie:
Finally, these Units characters have been busy. There’s a reissue/singles comp coming out sometime on www.community-library.net. Ok, enough synthpunk!
Last night was the clap and Davell and the Transistors played, which is this guy’s project. Other than the fact that we love the clap, this caught my eye because it seems that Mr. Dog Swan was in a band called the Long Shoremen which my friend, who also turned me onto The Units, had suggested I check them out as well. I never did because I could only remember that he had recommended two bands and that one was The Units, but when I saw the name in print I instantly remembered. I searched (a little) for some sounds on the internets but came up empty handed but did turn up that they were on subterranean records which I always hear mentioned but more in terms of being a record store of sorts. From the looks of the website, which was last updated in 2002, that may be no more. This led to a little more searching and I turned up this Terminal Boredom and a Trouser Pressarticle which ties the Long Shoremen to Voice Farm which is another eighties SF synth band that egg city radio just posted about.
So there’s a nice bit of reading there for you. Its like we’re in school, which I’m sure is exactly what you’re looking for in this blog! Anyway, Davell and the Transistors was a lot like how the Trouser Press described the Long Shoremen — a poetry damaged art/sound experiment that I think he was channeling via some late night night UHF broadcast which he received via some bunny ear antenna helmet he made late at night in his bedroom. Seriously, although I have no proof that he channeled anything and he certainly wasn’t wearing that helmet (the one he wore was cardboard). I’m not sure that review sounds positive, but it was funny and I liked it.
It was a little slow last night at The Clap, but the audience was full of people in bands; we saw Greg Ashley, Brian Glaze, an ex member of The Time Flys, and Penelope Houston. I don’t know what that means really, except people in bands (and us at World Famous) don’t have to worry about getting up on a Wednesday morning or anywhere to be for the holiday. Um, yeah.
Getting a gun pointed in your face and being the only broad in a smelly old bail bonds office full of chauvinist pigs ain’t easy but when you’re raising two sad but wonderful kids on a single-mother’s salary you do whatcha gotta do to make a living. So began my life as a bail bondswoman, one of the first in the biz. From chasing drug warlords down in the Caribbean to schlepping through the hot thick jungles of Colombia in order to rescue my compadres, from rescuing a stripper and ending up locked in the back of a kidnapper’s Lincoln Continental to being attacked by toe-sucking pervert, I’ve done it all. And I did it all while trying to hold down the fort, keep my two kids out of trouble and keep an active sex life. Hey, I wasn’t always a grandmother and I may be 66 years old but I ain’t dead.
Laura Lanfield is too good to pass up… so to make up for a slow week, we’re having two MySpace of the weeks!
The Switch are one of those bands who use ironic children’s keyboards as instruments. On one hand they aspire to make the same epic dance songs that bands like New Order perfected decades ago; And on the other hand they make these inde rock songs that pout and shuffle around like Black Heart Procession. Basically they pretty much avoid having any fun while mashing together some morose genres of music. It’s hard for me to imagine that their lives are really as depressed and humorless as this music they are making.
I got this album at The Switch’s show a couple weeks ago at the Stud. They were surrounded by supportive friends who wholeheartedly dug the music. To me they came off as inexperienced live performers. They were sloppy and anything but casual. But don’t get me wrong, I think this band has a lot of potential as their songs are well constructed, to the point, and unique enough. I think their main battle is gonna be discovering their voice.
The Switch are really good at finding sounds on keyboards… but what they need to do is focus on finding different sounds in their singers voices. Main singer Christine does that female-singing-below-range thing that Nancy Sinatra and Nico were so good at. Her voice is not strong enough to really carry that style though. She probably should sing an octave higher. She definitely needs to be a bit more expressive, louder and conscious of what she’s doing. She delivers absurd lines about unicorns and male fantasies the same way she delivers what seems to be serious lines about foreskin and circumcision. It bums me out that all these clever lines and catch phrases fall flat just because her voice doesn’t sound engaged. The lyrics are interesting enough, they’re just not delivered in a way where you’d notice them or be able to remember them. The samey vocal thing just isn’t working. I think she needs to start listening to Biggie.
I just don’t see any momentum coming from this release. Maybe their epic journey music will take them… somewhere more epic on the next album? Maybe they will discover the magic healing crystal? We will just have to wait and see.
I will take a joke band over a needlessly pretentious Arcade Fire ripoff any day. But I do find joke bands a bit annoying as the joke never has staying power. While I loved “Dick In a Box,” I hate watching people reenact the joke in front of me. It was funny when Justin Timberlake did it, not you. People should come up with their own jokes!
Luckily we have The Cockless Suckers, San Francisco’s newest joke band. They have some fun songs like “Stalker Exboyfriend.” They look wholesome and they sound danceable. I sure hope they play live sometime soon. I’d go.
So it’s true. I’ve been really occupied. I found time between moving to call my father yesterday. He has discovered google; and has been busy googling himself. It turns one of his books is worth over a hundred dollars now. It’s funny to me that there are people out there who care about my father’s poetry, because I never did.
My dad has fought very hard to escape the ghosts in his past. It’s amusing to me that they’re coming back to haunt him. He wasn’t thrilled about my idea to leak some old stock he has in boxes.
He’s been done with a new novel for a while now, but is scared to release it. He is teaching high school in a very conservative school district. They’d most certainly frown upon some of the adult subject matter. It’s funny: no matter how much admiration an artists receives, they’re still required to act like any other rational human and just bottle it up most of the time.
He was pissed about the YouTube video I made where my bandmate, Aaron, burned me. I can see why. It has the potential of threatening any reputation I develop in the future as a working, contributing and sane citizen. My dad has made some really dumb decisions that I’m not stupid enough to blog about. Even so, we’re glad some people out there appreciate my dad for all that he is.
So keep you dreams alive everyone! Because if don’t, they’ll just come back to haunt you. There is no turning back.
Great show tonight at Cafe Du Nord with some of WFISF’s favorite bands. It’s free and fancy!
