how yuppie is that?

Found a nice wine bar in the mission yesterday. We were prowling around town looking for costumed people to photograph (Andrew says: "But it's for homework!") and stopped in for dinner. Parea Wine Bar and Cafe (at Valencia/19th) has yummy organic Mediterranean food and an interesting list of mostly European wines. So we're sitting in this wine bar, eating organic food and drinking french wine out of an enormous glass, and practicing bridge while conducting separate telephone conversations with other people. Sigh.. I think that's yuppie even by SF standards. To make up for it we went to the Zeitgeist afterwards and drank lots of beer. :)

Did I mention that Agi has gotten us into bridge? I played regularly in college for a while but not since then. Andrew's new to it, though, so that was an excuse to buy a book about bidding. He's really taking to it well and it's tons of fun. We're starting to get into the more complicated aspects of bidding, with occasional hilarious results. Turns out we know lots of couples now so we have started trying to get more of them to play, as a counterpart to the regular Thursday poker games.

loud music

Last week we ended up at The Independent twice. Once on Tuesday to see Poets and Pornstars (Gen's friend's band), and once on Friday to see Lyrics Born and Cut Chemist. I think my hearing is definitely taking a beating after exposure to the SF music scene. The Tuesday show was fun, but there weren't very many people there. The lead singer has the most adorable British accent, though.

The Friday show was awesome. I'd never seen Cut Chemist in person before, and was vaguely surprised that he turned out to be a scruffy white dude. He had two turntables set up, one for records and one hooked into a digital feed of music. He'd be scratching one part of the track while someone else worked the video screens and someone else played some other layers of the music. There were cameras set up so you could watch him working the turntables, although the frame rate on the cameras wasn't actually fast enough to keep up with him... At the end, he brought out a handicam, taped some people from the audience saying their names and stuff, and then wired it up to the digital turntable thingy and worked in both the audio and video to the next song. It's hard to describe how completely awesome this is, both on the appreciation-of-technical-difficulty level and the sounds-really-cool level. The place was packed and there was a great vibe.