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Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in
Autumn's metaphysical burlesque's InsaneJournal:
| Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | |
| 12:55 am | Halloween in SF There's a lot of really cool stuff going on this Halloween weekend. I'm not sure what event I'll choose, but hopefully my friends will go to the ones I can't make it to. 10/30: *An Evening with Kevin Smith at the Warfield. Tickets still available, but pricey ($45 and up). We got tickets to this a long time ago, should be hilarious. SF. *Live 105 Halloween Spooktacular giant party at the Cow Palace. Lineup includes The Faint, Infected Mushroom, Basement Jaxx, The Crystal Method and many more. Looks like a fantastic dance lineup, more dance-y than Live 105 usually is. $35 until the 29th, $40 day of show, or $99 for 4. Still pondering going to this in addition.... SF. *Kinky Salon is having a Halloween Party. Live spooky performances, DJ sets, cabaret act at midnight. Also, as befits the name, there will be playspaces open for sexiness. $25 advance, $30 door. Both Friday and Saturday nights. SF. 10/31: *Journey to the End of the Night is a street game that's like a cross between urban tag and a psychogeography derive. A bunch of my friends went to the last one in Oakland and had a really fantastic (albeit exhausting) time. It helps if you're in decent shape. Free, SF. Lots of walking and/or running. *Ghost Ship - a Space Cowboys party. 12k square feet of space full of DJ music, massive Burning Man style art, lighting effects, Steampunk Treehouse, all kinds of crazy stuff. Will be over the top. Treasure Island, free all night shuttle from SF. $40. Likely to sell out w no door sales, so buy ahead. *La Petit Mort with Rhubarb Whiskey is a bluegrass murder ballads show featuring some really excellent musicians. Expect great music, chatting, friends. Probably a more chill kinda night than most of these events. Sunshine Biscuit Factory, Oakland. $5-15. *Otherworld Halloween is an underground dancey thing, featuring a fuckton of excellent DJs and lighting/laser effects by a friend of mine. $15 at the door, goes late (6a). Oakland. *Cellspace Artfreak Benefit for sadly displaced Bill the Junkman. Imagine the entire Laughing Squid events calendar rolled into one night - Mark Growden, Attaboy & Burke, Extra Action Marching Band, Dr. Hal and more. If you're wondering what to do, PLEASE GO TO THIS! This will be amazing, and it's a hugely worthy cause. If you ever wanted to meet the SF Cacophony Society and all the artists it gave birth to, this is your chance. Not sure I'll make it to this, but I will definitely be there in spirit. Sliding scale, $10 up to however much you want to donate. SF. *Kinky Salon is having a Halloween Party. Live spooky performances, DJ sets, cabaret act at midnight. Also, as befits the name, there will be playspaces open for sexiness. $25 advance, $30 door. Both Friday and Saturday nights. SF. 11/1: Dia de los Muertos in Fruitvale. Sounds like the annual festival will be more entertaining and host more art this year than ever before. I've gone to this a number of years in a row, and always enjoy myself. Tons of people! Take BART, it's right at Fruitvale. Oakland. Free. So, did I miss anything awesome? What are you doing? |
| Saturday, October 24th, 2009 | |
| 11:23 pm | orange and black ...I am actually not a big Halloween person. Let me clarify. I have a thing for skulls. Probably a third of my clothes have skulls on them, and this LJ icon is in fact something I think of as personally representative. My love of Oingo Boingo and Day of the Dead are well known, and I collect calaveras. I have a thing for happy bouncy death. I like the contrast. I like the happy bouncy stuff but it needs a counterweight, a darkness and an anger to it without which it flies away into Pokemon happyland. So you'd think I'd be really into Halloween. Similarly, my colors are orange and black, purple and lime green, red. I love things that glow in the dark. I like dressing up in ridiculous outfits, and elaborate makeup. I like big boots and flouncy skirts and strange hair. I like dressing up to go out. Hell, my room is decorated with "Halloween" lights - strands of blacklight purple and bright orange, and a garland of lights shaped like eyeballs. The truth is, I love Halloween *stuff* - decorations, Jack o Lanterns, stripey socks and witch hats and all that - but I'm not super fond of the actual holiday itself. Like New Year's, Halloween is a big holiday for expectations. I want to be doing something intense and magical and fun and strange, and it's hard for anything to live up to that. This is not to denigrate any plans I have or have had, just that this desire born of a thousand bad movies makes it really hard to just enjoy stuff without wishing it was all more ...cinematic. This isn't even to say I haven't had a few of those amazing and cinematic nights, just that they're *really* hard to plan in advance. Cinematic usually has to sneak up on you at least a little bit; trying too hard is a quick way to ruin it. The other thing that's hard for me is the whole costume angle. I love dressing up in ridiculous outfits, but they're very rarely "a costume." Halloween usually requires that you are "a thing" - a cowboy, a ghost, a cop, a pirate. I have a lot of clothes and a lot of them are strange going out sorts of clothes, but hardly any of them fit nicely into a single noun explanation. I'm not a cowboy or a ghost; I'm a me who wanted to look fabulous while still being comfortable, and blend in ok at that club night or that festival or that convention or that party. A friend posted to Twitter last night: "Welcome to San Francisco! You will need: a dirndl, a Santa costume, a pirate costume, a steampunk costume, a clown costume, a hobo costume.." While he was kinda joking, he was also not wrong. The SF freak scene has a lot of events to which costumes are appropriate if not necessary. I think I might find next Halloween less frustrating if I spend the year collecting a fairly high quality set of four or five costumes. Fox and I had been kinda talking about needing to start costume trunks already, but like many things that has been on hold as we've been sorting through our things and organizing our house, and getting our finances back in order after my summer of unemployment. On a purely practical level, Halloween is frustrating because there are so many fun-sounding things happening at the same time and it's hard to pick. It's hard to know which event is going to be the best for what you're wanting at the time, and hard to get a sizable number of friends to pick the same event. This year there are at least three things I can think of that I really want to go to, another couple that I'd definitely enjoy but don't make first tier, one thing that a ton of my friends are doing but I'm pretty sure I'm not up for, and a couple of things I think I've heard about that sound awesome but I haven't seen concrete details. For some reason, I am feeling a lot more "bah, humbug" about it this year. I'm having a hard time coming up with a costume idea that I'm excited about, and I really hate going to costume events without being in costume. Wearing a meh assemblage of stuff out of my closet isn't really appealing, but I don't want to go buy a ton of stuff either. I'm sure I'll figure something out, but I'm feeling a little dispirited about it at the moment. What about you? What are you doing for Halloween this year? Costumes? Events? What are your thoughts on the holiday? |
| Sunday, October 25th, 2009 | |
| 9:47 am | Pritikin strikes again! A few years ago, I wrote a post here about a real live eccentric millionaire. Check it out here: http://tyrsalvia.livejournal.com/574173.h ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} discord_society if we're not LJ friends, or ask for access)Anyways, he's now talking about making his house a museum. I would *so* love to go to this! Bob Pritikin knows just what San Francisco needs - yet another museum. And the quirky former ad man, hotelier and musical saw player - yes, he plays a saw with a reputed Yehudi Menuhin violin bow - has the perfect spot. His house. It's packed with a kaleidoscope of art, kitsch and magic show paraphernalia. We're talking about a home where a tree in the yard shoots fire (although it wasn't working on a recent visit), Eleanor Roosevelt is memorialized as a whiskey decanter and Sen. Chambers drowned in the upstairs swimming pool after a night of carousing. (The good senator was a parrot.) The catch is that his mansion at the convergence of the Mission, Noe Valley and Glen Park neighborhoods doesn't have the proper zoning, and Pritikin will need approval from the city's Board of Supervisors for his plan. The whole thing may get as far as Pritikin's 2004 offer to turn his home into the city's mayoral residence - pretty much nowhere. Then again, this time could be different. Pritikin, whose parties and fundraisers draw a lively cross section of the city's intriguing characters and old-guard politicos, argues his home is really the perfect place for it. He even had the perfect name: the Only-in-San Francisco Museum. It seemed fitting for the collection assembled by a guy who wrote a book titled "Christ was an Ad Man" and gave out wristwatches featuring Jesus with fake eyelashes in honor of Tammy Faye Messner singing at one of his renowned Labor Day bashes. You've got Adolf Hitler's globe - with a plaque reading "May the bastard rot in hell" - juxtaposed with sculptures by pacifist Beniamino "Benny" Bufano and the blue neon sign from the defunct North Beach restaurant Moose's. Pritikin even had a mural painted on two exterior walls depicting 70 or so famous San Franciscans, from Dianne Feinstein to topless dancer Carol Doda riding a zebra, which is being unveiled today. Turns out the "Only-in-San Francisco" name won't fly, though. The San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau already owns the Web site onlyinsanfrancisco.com. So Pritikin has settled on The Pritikin Museum, and he's trying to get city approval to show off his collection to the paying public. Ticket sales will help cover the several hundred thousand dollars a year it takes to maintain his mansion and grounds, known as the Chenery House, he said. Pritikin's plan is to have about 20 visitors a day, six days a week, who would pay $49 a pop for a docent-guided tour, a magic show and a Mexican lunch next to the pool where the parrot drowned. "I'm not trying to make any money on this thing," he said. "I'd like to pay the bills, make a nice contribution to the community and have some daytime visitors." Pritikin says he will strictly limit the numbers of guests and hours of operation. He has enough off-street parking. He has a busy school and senior center on either side. He's met with neighborhood groups, who seem supportive. Pritikin also has an ally in Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who represents the area. Dufty asked the city attorney last week to draft legislation to create a special use district for the museum, saying Pritikin had an "extremely unique property" and "an amazing collection" of art and San Francisco memorabilia. "This looks like a walk in the park compared to a mayoral residence," Dufty said with a chuckle. "The issue for me is, is it consistent with the neighborhood and copacetic with the neighbors? So far, so good." And in Pritikin, we are talking about a guy who made his fortune convincing people to buy things. Some even give the former ad exec credit for the famous Rice-a-Roni jingle, although the words were written by the late Charles Foll. "It's so stupid," Pritikin said as he sat surrounded by a J.M.W. Turner oil painting of Venice, a 3-foot replica of the Transamerica building made out of condom boxes and a 19th century French carousel pig. "My work is so much more sophisticated than a stupid jingle." |