On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 09:16:50PM -0800, Sunlight Data wrote:
> "warm, funky, exultant records that were just right for nightclubs and
> high-tech launch parties packed with gamines in $300 shoes sloshing
> day-glo cocktails"
>
> Really, if that isn't taking the piss (as the UK contingent says)
> I don't know what is.
>
> Well, it's pretty clear that Michelle Goldberg has the tenuous grasp
> on techno that you would expect from the average clever music journo.
> So it's not a bad article overall but clanks with the clotted phrases
> that pass for insight in the high reaches of music journalism these
> days.
It's not really a record review, it's cultural commentary. In a sense,
I get what she's saying -- y'all can say what you like about Chemical
Brothers vis a vis them actually being techno, but I saw them play SF
a few times, long ago ('95 and '96, I think), and they put on a great,
LOUD, completely unpretentious live show. On the one hand, I just
can't imagine going to one of those shows now, because hey do belong
to a different era. On the other hand, that's me that's changed, not
the Chemical Bros. I'm sure there are kids that are going to listen to
the new album and just think it's the keenest.
> Let me say, though, that there really were "office parties" at the
> crest of the dotcom wave in San Francisco. If you've seen the movie
> "Groove" -- that's us.
_Groove_ is the only movie in cinema history to feature a dotcom CTO
and open source pioneer (the same person, in fact, who owns the
machine that 313 is hosted on) playing a chill room DJ. Fun fact!
Impress your friends!
> (Aside from the speaking-part actors, although that's my man
> Dmitri-from-the-Lower-Haight who snagged some on-screen time and
> that classic promo shot with the disco ball on the Muni Metro.) A
> lot of the extras and small parts, and much of the equipment seen in
> the movie were also in the "Expansion" parties that we threw from
> time to time when various dotcom firms in South of Market San
> Francisco
If by "various" you mean "Organic", then sure. ;) I don't think there
was ever a non-Organic Expansion party.
> were moving in and out of their spaces. That was the only way to
> get 1000 people to a good party in SF in the late 1990s without
> getting busted (and one of the Expansion parties did get busted,
> ostensibly for a faulty fire exit sign in a building used 365 days a
> year as office and workshop space :).
The high point of that particular Expansion was the landlord for the
building trying to throw his weight around with the fire marshal,
being all "I have friends in City Hall, you know" (which may have been
true (it probably wasn't), but wasn't going to do us any good at
midnight on a Saturday night). In most parts of the world, the
landlord would have been screaming that he was going to have us
evicted, but not in San Francisco. Having hipster dotcom companies in
his building allowed him to boot all the sweat shops out and put other
hipster dotcom companies into the exact same dingy spaces for twice
the rent. Ah, those halcyon days!
It's worth pointing out that the parties Phred is talking about
generally featured some of San Francisco's most Detroit-friendly DJs
and were probably the best rave-type parties in SF post-1993. They
were cheaply staged, had ridiculous sound, and featured astonishingly
diverse lineups (how many parties have *you* been to with a Celtic
rock band, a gamelan orchestra, a shoegazer band, and a jazz singer to
complement the Banging Techno Loops (tm) coming out of the main sound
system?).
I miss those parties a lot more than I miss the company that sponsored
them, that's for sure.
> And then at 7 am we'd clean up, leave nothing but footprints, and the
> next week the place would be an Ethernet forest demarcated by a
> terrain of Aeron chairs and big 19-inch monitors with inscrutable code
> scrolling by :)
Not hardly, pal. More like two 21-inch monitors perched on doors
balanced on stands -- they almost never collapsed -- and there may
have been Aerons around, but *I* never got one. ;)
Forrest
--
. . . the self-reflecting image of a narcotized mind . . .
ozymandias G desiderata [EMAIL PROTECTED] desperate, deathless
(415)823-6356 http://www.pushby.com/forrest/ ::AOAIOXXYSZ::
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