San Francisco Bay Guardian

The answer is yes, yes it will be. And how did the madness begin? “I was in the neighborhood and I saw this wall. And me being me, I got really excited and wanted to paint it.” And so it started, Brian Barneclo’s latest SOMA mural project, whose launch will be celebrated alongside "Systematics," his solo (indoor art) show at fabric8 on Sat/10. Read more »

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

So what if the Fader posted this last week? Vallejo royalty E-40's new Bjork-sampling track, the Droop-E produced, "Spend the Night" is too fabulous not to share (and it looks like the NY Times likes it too). The icing on the cake is that Bjork cleared the samples, taken from "Oceanea" off of her, IMHO severely underrated, acapella album Medulla. And as Fader commenter bollocks noted, this isn't the first time Queen B has appeared on a local hip-hop track. The timpani-heavy riff from "Human Behavior" was used back in 2003, "by Bay Area legends Hieroglyphics, for 'Let It Roll,' off their classic album Full Circle." Thanks for the knowledge.

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Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

A. E. Housman (who once deliciously referred to poetry as a "morbid secretion") said, "Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. " And as John McWhorter so ably demonstrates, Sarah Palin's words -- or at least the art of parsing them -- can be extremely pleasurable:
 
"This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of. Palin strings her words together as if she were doing it for herself — meanings float by, and she translates them into syntax in whatever way works, regardless of how other people making public statements do it."

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