Bay Station Love the Bay 2019: Episode Two featuring Yours Truly, Michele

Bay Station welcomes chanteuse and drummer Yours Truly, Michele aka Michele Kappel to the sailboat Espresso, for an afternoon conversation and concert on the Oakland Estuary of San Francisco Bay.

Bay Station - "Trickster Moon" (Super Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse)

ay Station Love the Bay Full Moon Sail -January 2019. Filmed on the Alameda-Oakland estuary during the Super Full Moon Lunar Eclipse 1/20/19

Bay Station Loves the Bay: Music & Sailing Adventure

Wow, what a ride the past weekend has been. Bay Station completed its mission on Memorial Day, sailing from Richmond to Alameda after a music-filled few days with some of our favorite friends in music. Below is just a sampling of some of the tiny boat concerts staged on Espresso. Check out the Bay Station Facebook page for full videos! Thanks to all those who participated!

A post shared by Bay Station (@baystationband) on May 29, 2018 at 7:10am PDT

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New Music from The Welcome Matt: "More Empire Days"

San Francisco's The Welcome Matt is releasing a new album! Check out the video for the first single, the title track "More Empire Days":


Then go get yourself a ticket for his album-release show at Doc's Lab on May 13. 
KC Turner Presents
The Welcome Matt
Special Guests- Guinevere Q / Seth & Erma
Saturday, May 13 - 8pm
at Doc's Lab San Francisco
$15 ADV / All Ages

#ClimateFacts: People's Climate Movement 4/29 in DC

We resist.
We build.
We rise.

 April 29^th 2017
 Washington DC
 March for jobs, justice and the climate. More info: https://peoplesclimate.org/

Notes from the Resistance re: #CLIMATEFACTS:

Senator Jeff MerkleyVerified account ‏@SenJeffMerkley 
Trump is trying to censor #ClimateFacts. He won't succeed. Follow @AltNatParkSer @rogueNASA & RT! #resist
 @KristinesWeb 
Arctic sea ice has declined by more than 30% in the last 25 years #ClimateFacts
@LeoDiCaprio 
#ClimateChange affects fisheries, jobs, livelihoods. Get informed. #climatefacts
@Elliearogers

Solar industry created more jobs than oil and gas combined last year. Labor vs. climate is a false fight. #NODAPL #climatefacts @POTUS

More information and how to get involved: #ClimateFacts: You Can't Hold Science Back

 

Read.Eat.Listen: Mom

Today would have been my mom 80th birthday, which is as hard to believe as it is to think that she passed away more than a decade ago. I don't know there is a bigger 'life learning event' than a parent's death. Any notion of permanence goes out the window; an awareness of the hows and why's of one's attachments becomes abundantly clear and no matter how old you might feel, you realize more than ever that you're responsible for your own reactions. And as the years go by, you realize anew how much you owe to your parents.
Read: Sometimes, all I have time or inclination for is poetry. More from Jane Hirshfield:

For What Binds Us

By Jane Hirshfield
 

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Eat: Mom, dear Phyllis Jane, wasn't much of a cook or baker, but she occasionally whipped out a killer angel food cake. I loved watching the whole process of her separating eggs and whipping the whites into a great soft mound of goodness to lift and leaven the batter. Plus licking the bowl of its sweet sugary residue after the cake was in the oven was as much a treat as the finished result. As an adult, I don't keep white sugar or white flour in the house, so I searched around for a healthier equivalent and found this raw vegan version from Real Raw Kitchen  (It sounds deliciously coconutty albeit is nothing like what my mom made); and this Gluten Free (but sugar-ful) version from Gluten Free Mommy. Bon appetit!
Listen: While my song"Adding Water to the Ashes" is about faith and lost love more than anything, it owes a ton to my love for my mom.  I've been playing this song for years but finally have some live footage from the show last week at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco.
"Adding Water to the Ashes" from the 2008 Cd of the same name.

Read.Eat.Listen: Full

Read: The dear writing-group friend LJ recommended 'Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing' by Deborah Levy and I ate all but all of it up on the flights to and fro LA a couple weeks back. A free night looms and I'm about to devour the rest. Any writer/creative sort will appreciate her eye for detail, hard-stories-to-write-when-it's you material. This books isn't so much about how to write rather than the mysterious why we write (her chapters are titled 'Political Purpose' 'Historical Impulse' 'Sheer Egoism' and 'Aesthetic Enthusiasm.'

Eat: Oakland's Eat Real Festival is a foodie's dream (9/19 – 9/21) Oakland Local -  This weekend marks one of the quintessential Bay Area foodie events of the year as the 6th annual Eat Real Festival sets up in Jack London ...

I was one of the musical acts at the first year of the big foodie shindig that is theEat Real Festival. I'm returning to play at Jack London Square during the party this coming Saturday, Sept. 20.  Look/listen for us  2:30-3:30pm on the Lot Stage. There will be plenty to eat. I'll report back on what I actually ingest while there.

Listen: I'm a sucker for the ever-prolific, heart-on-his sleeve,  perhaps 'hard'-songs-to-write/writing-them-anyway truth-telling badassery of Ryan Adams whose got plenty new music with which to fill one's ears.

Artist Interview: The Welcome Matt's POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE

San Francisco musician Matt Langlois, aka The Welcome Matt, is a tireless, fearless and fun artist. Touring, collaborating and recording continuously, the Bay Area-via-New England troubadour has had his work featured on  KFOG’s popular Local Scene CD twice, teamed up with renowned modern dance choreographer Christine Cali to co-create multi-day dance performances, and signed a publishing deal with Wixen Publishing. Along the way, he co-wrote a top-40 European hit “San Francisco,” by Cascada, recorded and released a video for his cover of David Bowie’s ‘DJ’, collaborated with Cali on another three-day production, ‘L.O.A.D.E.D.’ and launched a video series featuring other local artists guesting on his songs called 'Welcome Matt Wednesdays.' Amid all these accomplishments, he managed to sneak in recording a new collection of indie-rock goodness, “POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE,” recorded at Lost Monkey Studios in Hayward, CA.   Advance notice on POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE, which will be released July 16, is already attracting critical raves: "Pop Junk Fluff and Hype"...romps eagerly around the ears," wrote The Ringmaster Review. "Fiery rock guitars flame over the pop canvas whilst vocals and keys leap with energetic rigour and enterprise. It is a spellbinding mix of styles and flavours, electro and alternative rock... yet another impossible to ignore or resist piece of excellent rock ‘n’ roll."  

Langlois discussed the process and influences leading up to his latest batch of songs... and his next!

Q:Who do you count as major influences?

The Welcome Matt: David Bowie, The Kinks, The Clash, The Replacements, Aimee Mann, Blumfeld, Camper Van Beethoven, Devo, The Who, Blur, Roy Orbison and Gil Scott Heron.

Q: Can you name your top three albums?  

TWM:[I] first listened to these during pivotal points of my creative up bringing. They conjure a certain sense of longing:

Scary Monsters—David Bowie

London Calling—The Clash

Lola vs the Powerman Moneygoround—The Kinks

Q: When did you write your first song? 

TWM: 8th Grade “Right Back To the Center." I probably thought I was channeling John Lennon.

Q: What's your writing process like? Do you write everyday? 

TWM: Like all mechanisms of survival and coping with existence… eating, sleeping, staying healthy, not staying healthy, and dreaming. In other words it’s in constant motion…songs are always smoldering.

Q: How did you go about selecting the songs for POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE? Did you have them all before you went into the studio or did the recording process inspire new material? 

TWM: Yes, I wrote a list of songs i thought that would work together sonically and conceptually.

Most songs come in batches… originally these came as a loose concept album.

I was originally going to name the CD “The Return of a generation xer," hence, “The Welcome Back.” Then “ Key of G" which is about shedding the past. After that comes songs with loose concepts of that person dealing with aspects of modern day life such as technology, government surveillance, mind control through consumerism, global warming ("A Hail Mary"). But the “Xer” leaves again [and] travels the world (Let’s Really Go) to gain perspective and makes a decision to “Cast a Line” toward living more life despite the negative effects of the current state of things (instead of throwing in the towel on the world in which he/she has come back to). I decided to simplify and name it POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE.

Q: Describe the recording process for you?  

TWM: 4 cups of hacking out rough sketches of song arrangements with 3 tablespoons of tempo, mix in a layer of drum groove over a thick bed of bass, ( keep stirring !). All the while sprinkle over various guitars, synthesizers, percussion, maybe a little piano, roll it all around a preheated pan of vocals, shove it in your brain oven for a bunch of weeks until you’ve eaten and digested it all, and hope someday others will want to sit down at your table and enjoy a nice meal.

Q: Did songs take on different directions in the studio? What might be the most different result of what you brought with you to the studio?

TWM: Very often and most of the time I wonder how they’ll come out on the other side. 
More info @ www.welcomemattsf.com/
Buy Cast A Line on itunes HERE
Listen to songs from POPJUNKFLUFF and HYPE performed LIVE. @The RiteSpot  3153 17th
July 17th 5:30pm (Pre-set performance for CALI&CO's You ARE HERE @ODC Theater)
then again @The Rite Spot 3153 17th July 20th 8:30pm

Off-the-Grid Entertainment: Alejandro Escovedo's SF house concert and All Terrain Theater's Women in Solodarity showcase

It wasn't that big of a surprise to see last week's East Bay Express feature a story about  'Living Room Stages' on its front page. The rise in private, alternative performance spaces is a phenomena we're well acquainted with and greatly applaud, both as performers and audience members. Some of my favorite shows this year have been at non-traditional spaces (Treebones, Self & Soul Center, The Monkey House) and two of the three performances I saw this past weekend were in alternative spaces. Friday night was all about an Alejandro Escovedo (!)  house concert in SF, while Sunday afternoon was occupied with All Terrain Theater's annual showcase 'Women in Solodarity,' likewise in a private Berkeley space.
The audio experience in each was pristine and the audience well-mannered and intimate — folks mingled pre-show and during intermission and listened attentively during the show. In other words, the experience was completely about connecting to the artist and the work and the community.
I felt extremely privileged to get to see and hear Escovedo with about 75 other avid listeners at the KC Turner presented show. KC is a tireless house-concert producer (and music presenter in general) and the Escovedo show was a real coup. In a revelatory hour-and-a-half of music, Escovedo sang a selection of his songs representing the breadth of his career, from 5 Hearts Breaking to Chelsea Hotel to San Antonio Rain to Sabor a Mi.  In between, he discussed the genesis for each song as well as his early days in punk rock, his family's move from Texas to California, his evolution as songwriter, and touring, going on the road "with $50, a roasted chicken and a bag of weed." The audience, needless to say, hung on every word.
Escovedo himself is new to the small, solo house show experience but said he enjoyed the relative ease (no band and extensive gear to worry about) and planned on doing more.  Lucky us!

While I've seen plenty of musical house concerts, I'd yet to see a professional play in a private residence until Sunday. A friend, playwright Elizabeth Flanigan, had a short in this year's All Terrain Theater's showcase, the theme of which was "Digital Love."  All Terrain "specializes in presenting theater in non-traditional spaces, including a baby store, residences, laundromats, a record store, and traditional theaters" and Sunday's juxtaposition of venue setting and theater subject was noteworthy in itself. The show's venue was a converted downstairs in a private Central Berkeley home, while the showcase's theme called for seven different solo shorts depicting scenes about our often conflicted relationship with technology and the Internet. The playwrights covered a lot of online terrain: a woman addicted to her iPhone, another mulling the knowledge of Google, troubling aspects of surveillance, the damage done by drones and the convenience and pitfalls of online dating. Well-written and well-acted, I left both wanting to unplug that much more often and go to more theater.

Read.Eat.Listen: Time and Distance

I've been spending more time in SF proper more the past week than I have in a while so I'm really getting how quickly the place is changing.  New multi-story apartments, new restaurants, harder-than ever-to-find parking, but nonetheless beautiful as ever... When I moved 5+ years ago it was 'just across the bay' but driving across SF today I felt like I really moved a lot further away, like a stranger in a strange town. Plus it was super sunny. No fog in sight. Weird, but kind of cool, too. 
Read:  Waking the Buddha, by Clark Strand. After reading an interview with Strand on how he made his way from Zen to Nichiren's Buddhism, I had to get this book. Strand, a former Zen Monk and contributing editor to Tricycle, applies his scholarship to cover the SGI's remarkable and rapid growth with both rigor and heart. Good stuff ‘What the SGI has discovered isn’t just a new form of Buddhism. It’s a new way of being.' —Clark Strand in Waking the Buddha. Good stuff.
Eat: It's broiling hot. Who can think of food? Well, I usually don't forget for long. I had a simple satisfying smoothie @ Jane the other day composed of "organic kale, spinach, green apple, cucumber and lemon blended together with a drop of agave."  You can make it at home super quick. Yes. 
Listen: Conor Oberst - Time Forgot (Upside Down Mountain) I was taking advantage of NPR's First Listen to give Oberst's latest a listen... and this lyric caught my hear and kind of stopped me:
"They say everyone has a choice to make/To be loved or to be free/I told you once I felt invisible/And I guess by now you see/That what I meant is I’m not all there until I finally leave."

Read.Eat.Listen: Instruction

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside

through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

—From Essential Rumi By Coleman Barks

READ: In addition to Rumi, I've been reading Six Word Memoirs. I love reading SMITH magazine's project/feature 'six word memoirs' when I'm at a loss on where to begin with writing something, and/or don't want to get too lost in a rabbit hole of reading too much Internet fodder. There's also an ongoing Twitter Feed of @SixWords.

As part of teaching appreciation week, SMITH is asking reader/writers to submit #sixwords on the topic of#TeachingIs. I submitted "#TeachingIs holding space for awareness and discovery #sixwords" as I've come to believe the best teachers are like sun and water on a plant, letting me be my best self without much other interference. Other favorites include: 

 ‏@TchrAnnie  #TeachingIs trusting your students, igniting their curiosity

and 

@mollysroy  Every day is a second chance @sixwords #sixwords #TeachingIs

Kind of fun, huh?

EAT:  I grew up across the street from an apple orchard and my dad has 5-6 different varieties of his own apple trees growing on our property. I've always liked them in pie but have always gone in and out with them myself, perhaps due to their ubiquity in California. Also when you eat a lot of apples you know how some apples can be not so good. And maybe because even after all those years having apples given to me, buying them still feels odd.  Nonetheless, in part because the CSA box delivers boxes curated by someone else and has included more apples than I'd buy, I've rediscovered the joyful crunch and simple goodness of an apple. Lately Fuji apples have been on order, sliced and served up with cinnamon and almond butter, yeah!

LISTEN: "The Hard Way" by Tom Kimmel/The Waymores. I saw a trio of great songwriters — Tom Kimmel, Sally Barris and Don Henry — performing as the Waymores, in Niles on Sunday.  All seasoned Nashville writers whose songs have been covered by a famous lot of singers including the likes Miranda Lambert, Linda Rondstadt and Johnny Cash (!), the trio leaves no topic out of the mix of subject matter explored. Fom singing about dead people in love to their work ethic, they put on a great show of skill, heart and humble dedication. Kimmel's song "The Hard Way" especially slayed me:

 

Read.Eat.Listen: In process

Read: I'm really glad it's May. April was a challenging month personally, underscored by a nasty cold that stayed too long. One of the bright lights was poetry. I took National Poetry Month to heart and doubled up my reading of verse, a habit I want to keep. Here's one I appreciated from Linda Gregg today, culled, again, from the A Year of Being Here poetry blog:

Being
The woman walks up the mountain
and then down. She wades into the sea
and out. Walks to the well,
pulls up a bucket of water
and goes back into the house.
She hangs wet clothes.
Takes clothes back to fold them.
Every evening she crochets
from six until dark.
Birds, flowers, stars. Her rabbit lives
in an empty donkey pen. The sea is out
there are far as the stars.
Always quiet.
No one there. She may not believe
in anything. Not know
what she is doing. Every morning
she waters the geranium plant.
And the leaves smell like lemons.

— Linda Gregg

Eat: How to live local and feel connected is equal parts art and practice. How to eat healthy amid variable schedules falls into the same camp. I don't have much garden space and haven't made the time for the local community garden so I'm appreciating the CSA deliveries from Dan's Fresh Produce, as well as the new cookbook book, Clean Eats, from Dr. Alejandro Junger, author of Clean. 200 new, can't-fail healthy recipes. Ole!

Listen:  I've been spending a week plus learning some covers for a private event so I'm doubly enjoying the new Norah Jones/Sasha Dobson/Catherine Popper project Puss n Boots. Here's their version of Johnny Cash's Bull Rider.

Read.Eat.Listen: Edgy

After using the word 'edgy' to describe work I liked at last week's house concert (which was great, thank you Self & Soul Center), someone asked me what I was implying. By edgy I didn't mean irritable rather than innovative. I meant someone who knew the less shiny parts of living — the contradictions, the uncomfortable truths, the heartbreak, cravings, nameless itches and all-too-blatant injustices — and didn't turn away, but felt it, and made art of it, maybe, rather than medicating or sugar-coating or otherwise denying the real.

There's a lot of uncomfortable truth going on right now and I appreciate those willing to go to the edges more than ever. Perhaps I should take a break from reading the news, so full of more of the failings of humans (Everest, South Korea, the bigot in Nevada), rather than the triumphs, but I don't want to deny it either. Challenging and painful as forging something new can often be, creativity lives and breathes by the truth, not ignorance.

Read:  I've taken a couple of workshops with wisdom teacher and writer Deena Metzger and always felt empowered at the possibility of effecting change and transformation through story afterward. To fix my current trip-up, I'm turning to her Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and From Grief Into Vision: A Council  today.

 "There is a silence that is the heart of God. And there is another kind of silence that kills. We were shattered when we came home from Africa, but also we had been restored. We had been broken down, we had been reconstituted. Story can do this; it can take the sharp slivers and the shards and organize them into a light. This is a book or it is letter or it is a long conversation. A memoir, a series of stories, a meditation on despair and beauty and hope. A book of healing...."

Eat: Gluten-free and living in the Bay Area and missing the satisfaction that a good piece of bread can give? A lot of GF bread is not good--gummy, bland, not-all-that-easy-to-digest for its poorly proportioned mix of GF flours. Then a friend turned me onto Bread Srsly, a SF-based company that delivers most of its wares by bike! Very cool people behind this operation and their GF sourdough bread rocks. Plus they now ship. 

Listen: Hurray for the Riff Raff, née Alynda Lee Segarra, a New Orleans based artist, has the edge and the soul going on:

Read.Eat.Listen: Regeneration

I was dismayed, heartened, inspired and confused by the latest report by the UN on Climate Change. Dismayed that things are as bad as they are; heartened that experts are not shying away from the truth; inspired by the possibilities for taking action and confused at how and where to start on the individual level. The upshot is, of course, there's no more time to waste when it comes to taking action to slow climate change and no more excuses to be made: climate change is a man-made problem. We've a couple more decades, if that, to halt or slow the crisis. This lifetime. Right now. Where to begin when the problems — from fossil fuel use, to fracking, to plastics in the ocean, to rampant development —  have such momentum? Fortunately, there are many people on it. Now it's our turn to listen and believe that what we do today affects tomorrow and  that the affect can be beneficial. Toward that end, I've been so encouraged to see all the footage of hatching Peregrines from the 'nest-cams' set up around the Bay Area. By the 1970s, the Peregrine was an Endangered Species, a victim of rampant pesticide use, but with diligent efforts by biologists and a ban on DDT use, the falcon population recovered. Thirty years of combined legislation and action works. Now look at them go: 

Read: Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, a takes on climate change in novel form. "Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths." 
Plus, this article: UN Climate Report Charts Ways to Halt Global Warming

Eat: An afternoon snack at Piccino in Dogpatch the other day entailed a spring soup made with butter beans. Butter Beans, or Fava Beans, are those large, lovely kidney shaped beans that look engineered for presentation possibilities. They're also yummy. I've got my eye on this easy breezy spring salad of Fava Beans with Red Onion and Mint.

Listen: I've been on an Over the Rhine jag most of the year, I admire The Lone Bellow and I've been a fan of eTown since the 90s when I lived in Boulder and watched many a live taping. So I was delighted to see this Over the Rhine/Lone Bellow/eTones rendition of Slip Sliding Away. Beauty. Yes.

Willie Nelson, Shovels & Rope @ The Greek 4/12/14

I first saw Willie Nelson 10+ years back at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 3. I wasn't expecting to like him, this favorite of my best friend's mom growing up. Instead,  I stood in the lowering sun amid the gazillion other fans as he walked onstage and greeted the crowd with a sly grin and open arms, and went, 'oh' as my ignorance was elucidated. My husband remembered seeing him play a marathon 3+-hr set from years earlier. "He just kept going...' So when we saw Willie, now 80 years old,  would be playing opening day of Berkeley's Greek Theater we said yeah!
Shovels & Ropes opened the evening on Saturday with a raucous set of their high-energy rock, playing like gleeful children let loose in the instrument room and appreciating every moment of their time on the Greek stage. Cary Ann Hearst has a voice like Dolly Parton's wayward niece, matched nearly word-for-word by her husband Michael Trent's harmony vocal, each playing guitar, drums, harmonica and a synth bass and singing lead as the song dictated. They lit a fire under the crowd and it wasn't even dark yet, and their song 'Birmingham' has been in my head ever since. 'rock of ages....'
I'd never seen the next 'opening' act, Drive By Truckers playing as a 5-piece....and was completely underwhelmed.
 Fortunately, everyone was keeping to the schedule and Willie came on soon enough, starting with what seemed to be one big medley of every great song you forget you know — Crazy and Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain and Always on My Mind. It didn't feel like a country music concert rather than a performance of the revised edition of the Great American Songbook by one of the Great American Songwriters of our time. Jeepers. And like a large engine, Willie just ran smoother and hotter as the set progressed, playing several instrumentals to better display his guitar prowess, singing a few new songs amid his well-burnished hits,  his voice undiminished by time, laughing and tossing bandannas and hats to the crowd and generally making a good case for playing music and doing what you love to stay happy and healthy.

Read.Eat.Listen: Surrender

Seemingly out of nowhere this week, I came down with a 24-hour-ish bug and ended up canceling two-days worth of my oh-so-carefully made plans. Poof! I didn't go out of the house for a day and (mostly) unplugged. Kind of a drag and kind of a blessing at the same time. Today, everything was so vivid, the sun coming out after rain rendered the sky that much more blue, sprouting seedlings in the garden that much more green, that I felt grateful for the enforced break from it all. It's really easy for me to get busy, to try too hard, to try to figure it all out now, when the truth of the matter is I only have a certain amount of control over events.  The benefit of getting sick is how easy it makes it to stop — thinking too much, doing too much, whatever — and listening.  I'm reminded that surrender is not about giving up or giving in, it's simply about stopping the fight.

Read: Yay, it's national poetry month. There's a nice blog "A Year of Being Here" that features a mindfulness poem each day. One recent entry from poet Chris Forhan:

"Joy"  
It seized me—never mind the circumstance: sudden
scent in the breeze like cinnamon, sun silvering
a roof as the unicycle parade began—it seized me

as sickness does, wholly, with no mercy,
all of my body obeisant to its law as though none of it
were mine, finally: not the joy or the body. —Chris Forhan

Eat: Caldo aka hot soup. There's a Mexican restaurant in town, Acapulco, that does a kick-ass version, either veggie or with chicken, and its all I wanted to eat while under-the-weather. Here's a veggie version from Food 52. Simple, good, healing.

Listen: My pal and life-long music eductor Sally, gave me David Sylvian's 'Dead Bees on a Cake' on cassette many years ago (it was first released in 1999). Today I got in the car after yoga and heard one of the songs from that record, ' Krishna Blue,' and recalled how great that CD was. I also remembered another song on Dead Bees that fit the day: "I Surrender."

Welcome Matt Wednesdays #2 with Deborah Crooks and Kwame Copeland

Amid a prolific 2013 which included collaborating with modern dance choreographer Christine Cali, touring throughout the US, signing a publishing deal with Wixen Publishing and releasing several original videos,  The Welcome Matt, aka San Francisco artist Matt Langlois, self-produced POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE, a 10-song collection full of indie pop-rock gems. Kwame and I were privvy to learn one of the tunes from POP JUNK FLUFF and HYPE, the catchy "The Key of G,"  as a part of a laid-back recording of the Welcome Matt Wednesday video series. Can you tell The Welcome Matt knows his way around a hook? Find out more about The Welcome Matt at his site: http://www.welcomemattsf.com & view the video here: http://youtu.be/8gFrTV30nno 

Rain & Magik

It was the Bicentennial year, 1976, and the driest California year of the century was wrapped up in red, white and blue. All year, it seemed, we were celebrating the nation's birthday by stitching up Betsy Ross era bonnets, drawing flags on whatever surface we could find and studying up on our founding fathers. I remember collecting the special Bicentennial quarters featuring the colonial drummer and how our school teacher solemnly detailed the importance of the Declaration of Independence. By the day of the big celebration, the 4th of July, though, summer was as marked by the drought as it was patriotism.  As a kid, the drought was a curiosity as much for the concern expressed by adults as it was by the strangeness of not being able to get relief from the heat by running through sprinklers. We easily fished trout out of puddles that once qualified as the local creek, we let the lawn go,  had less fruit on our trees and reduced the fireworks celebration to some sparklers. But while it had lasting repercussions, that dry spell was only  a year. Time went speeding ahead, the rainclouds returned, and soon we were back to contending with flood years (1982). Living with extremes was growing up in California.
Like everything, extremes are relative, and as familiar as it is, in many ways, our current drought is dissimilar to that of the 1970s. The California Weather Blog has a comprehensive comparison of what's going on now vs. then.
So how welcome it was to wake up to the sound of rain on Sunday. How magical it seemed again for clouds to form and drop water, rinsing the air, rinsing the streets, cleaning off the car we haven't washed to add to our 20% reduction of water use. Most of all, it just felt good. I threw on a rain jacket ran/walked to my favorite cafe, not caring I was getting wet for the sheer joy of needed water received.
Speaking of magic, we went to the Magik*Magik Orchestra 5-year Anniversary Concert at The Fox in Oakland on Friday. A celebration of the amazing work of orchestra founder and director Minna Choi, who continues to innovate and expand the sonic landscape with her "made-to-order orchestra for artists and creatives."  
The concert featured a whose-who of Bay Area and beyond indie music acts (ala John Vanderslice, Rogue Wave, The Dodos) who've employed the orchestra for their recordings (Magik*Magik is the house orchestra for Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studio) or otherwise performed with the orchestra, as well as the also stupendously-amazing Pacific Boys Choir. Highlights of a night of sonic excellence were performances by The Lonely Trees' John Van Deusan (below)and Diana Gameros. But really, the night belonged to Minna and her already-incredible body of work.  Wowza.

Read.Eat.Listen: Trophies & Icons

When I was in grade school, my class was shown a cautionary film about extinction (mind you this was Santa Cruz during the 70s). I don't remember much else about the movie other than a scene of mystified children walking through a dusty museum full of taxidermied bears and fox, snakes and raccoons. The children in this movie, set far into the future, didn't recognize the animals, which were known to me and the rest of my class. This really got me. How? Why? What? I liked the fact, growing up in a somewhat rural area, that I knew live animals and their environments to some degree, not just vestiges.  The movie did its job and laid another brick in the foundation of my appreciation of nature. Which is why the implications of the California drought, and then happening upon a seemingly randomly-placed wall full of trophy animals has gotten stuck in my craw of late.

Unbeknownst to me prior to last week, a roadside restaurant along Highway 5 houses a large collection of trophy animals including three polar bears (!), moose heads and pronghorn antelope. We'd stopped for some road food and whatever pie we could find. Upon procuring the latter (in a bit of foreshadowing, a slice of 'Fruits of the Forest' mixed berry pie), we stepped into the cafe/bar side of Granzella's and.. stopped in our tracks: covering the high-ceilinged walls were hundreds of deer, elk and moose heads plus stuffed pheasant, pin-tail ducks and other birds.
'What the.... " We shuddered. Most people in the restaurant weren't evening looking at the stuffed animals.  I flashed on the grade-school movie. I Googled Trophy Animals & the restaurant name to get up to speed. I couldn't really find much other than the collection belonged to the owner of the restaurant. But I did fidd some other, unsettling, information about the practice of trophy hunting from In Defense of Animals. 
Some tips from their site:
What you can do:

• Contact IDA if you are interested in helping to end trophy hunting.
• Before you vote for a legislative representative, find out if he/she is supportive of trophy hunting, canned hunts or even involved in the killing of “big game” or any exotic animals. If yes, do not vote for this person!
• Before booking a safari in foreign countries, make sure the outfitting company does not endorse safari hunts and has no ties to any trophy hunting organization such as the Safari Club International and others.

Read: We came home from a gig Monday to the sad news of Pete Seeger's death and my wind down for the evening was reading his obit. Every songwriter, folk or otherwise, has felt the ripple of Seeger's influence. Reading the news reports and the many tributes, I was struck by what I knew but was once again wowed by: his resolute and fearless activism. What a model for us all.  Alec Wilkinson expanded on his New Yorker profile of Seeger to write The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger.

Eat: On our tour through the Northwest, I was on a quest for the best gluten free bread and found a good representative at Hideaway Bakery in Eugene (note they had a ton of non-GF bread too). Back at home, I've been scratching me head at my options, but have come across some good quick-bread recipes, including this dessert-like one for Date Bread w/Coffee and Ginger from Healthy & Seasonal Recipes. Yum.

Listen: Pete Seeger sings This Land is Your Land:

Happy Holidays Song: "Ho Ho" (Tired Santa)