Friday, February 2, 2007
Morning run: 15 minutes. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Followup with student AF about junk e-mail options and spam. Set up the jobs listserv so that Joel could do his own adds and deletes. Spent most of today just catching up on e-mail and installing Joel's new monitor since his old monitor had been flaking out on him inconsistently. Minor web edits for James. Legal name change followups. One quick edit to the student database. Helped Joel understand conditional formatting in Excel. Lunch: hot dog and pizza from the cafeteria. Napped. Dinner at home with Patrick: Patrick had leftovers, I had shell pasta with sausage in marinara. Patrick went to bed (he has a lesson with Simmone in the morning) and I went to see Stanton Warriors at 1015 Folsom. I had never been to this nightclub before. I was worried that I wouldn't get in because I didn't buy a presale ticket and because I am pretty sure Stanton Warriors are world-renowned breakbeats DJs and would have a large following in San Francisco, but it wasn't a problem. While waiting in line, a woman told me the club held 1,500 people, and a man told me there were a lot of different rooms. The place was huge, and I couldn't keep track of where all the rooms were and how to get from one to another. It was almost entirely a straight crowd that I could tell, lots of people just having a good time, with plenty of friendly security (oxymoron?) keeping the pleasant vibes going while the various DJs pumped and mixed the beats. I didn't enjoy the SW performance as much as I had hoped—frequently the DJ would let one song die out essentially completely before mixing the next song in, and there was a pattern to the sampling and cutting that I grew bored with after the first few times. I could tell he was very skilled, but for some reason this performance just didn't click with me. I prefer to have the music continue without stopping. He seemed to rely on feedback from the crowd a lot, but he communicated mostly with arm and hand gestures only and generated just a lukewarm response. The crowd did respond positively to some of the tracks he laid in. I didn't recognize any of them because I don't keep up with the scene. I left before SW ended their set and planned to go to Club Dragon for a bit, but on the way over I ran into Travis on the sidewalk who had just left—they had closed already, which surprised me. We decided to get a bite to eat and drove separately to Baghdad Cafe. We shared a turkey club croissant and rippled disc fries while catching up. I hadn't seen him since camping, I think. Afterwards he gave me a short ride to my car in his brand new Subaru with a nifty Garmin GPS.