Give What You Take

The title of this post comes from a song by Mojave 3 (on MySpace), one of my favorite bands. Mojave 3 rose from the ashes of Slowdive (on MySpace), one of the original so-called "shoegazer" bands that explored the beauty of noise, using lots of guitar effects and feedback to create a kind of shimmering "wall of sound" texture to their music. The unfortunate term "shoegazer" cropped up because many of these bands seems to stare down at their effects pedals while playing, appearing to be staring at their shoes.

Mojave 3, however, abandoned that style of playing and embraced a mellower style with elements of folk, country and dream-pop. They have now released five albums, my favorites of which are "Out of Tune" and "Excuses for Travellers".

The point of all this is that last night Mojave 3 singer Heil Halstead (MySpace) came to town for a solo performance at Cafe du Nord. I've been into Mojave 3 for about five years now, but have never seen them live. Last night Neil performed a roughly even mix of Mojave 3 songs and songs from his two solo albums, plus a few songs I had never heard before. About half the show was just him and his acoustic guitar, the other half he was joined by a bass player and a guitarist/mandolin player. I was very happy to hear some of my favorite Mojave tunes like "Prayer for the Paranoid", "Give What You Take", and "In Love with a View".

I have to start bringing my camera to shows... This post feels naked without photos from the show. I had to google these images.

Outside Lands

The Outside Lands Music Festival has been going on for the last three days and it so ridiculously close to my house that as I type this in my dining room I can clearly hear Jack Johnson performing. I opted not to buy a ticket to the fest, mainly because it cost around $165 and I'm not crazy about crowds that huge. But two of my favorite bands, Radiohead and Wilco performed there and I managed to experience them for free in nearly as good a way as if I had paid to go in.

Our house is circled in red on the left side

On Friday afternoon, as I worked in my home office, I could clearly hear Radiohead sound checking "Talk Show Host", so right then I decided I would get as close as I could for free and enjoy sets by Beck and Radiohead that night. It's no more than a 5 minute walk from my house to the festival site, so I wandered down there after a sushi dinner friday and hung out listening to Beck at one of the side stages. Through the fence I could kind of see the stage, but the sound was quite good. He did a nice set, but from the couple of times I had seen him before I felt much of the enjoyment of his shows is visual as well as musical. I do really dig his new tune "Chemtrails", though.

After that, Radiohead played the main stage, where the sound easily carried up to our house on 35th ave. I spent most of the set hanging out on the grass just outside the fence surrounding the polo field. The sound was quite good, but it would have been nice to see them too. At least I've seen them twice before.

At the encore break I started wandering home, knowing I would still hear everything the whole walk home. By the time I got home they were playing Paranoid Android (which I love), so I sat on our front stoop and listened to the last three songs. It was actually louder, although less well defined, than it was by the fence. How cool to listen to Radiohead perform live from my front stoop!

The next day I biked around the festival site a bit, just people watching and checking things out, but didn't really stop to hear much music. Regina Spektor is the only artist that day I would have really liked to hear, but the timing didn't work out. Then, as a drawback to being so close to the festival, Tom Petty was seriously intruding on the film "Henry & June" that Stella & I watched at home that evening.

Today I biked back over and caught most of the set by Stars, and enjoyed that pretty well, largely because I found a spot outside the fence, on a hill, where I could see and hear them perfectly. Fortunately, Wilco was playing that same spot this evening, so I went back and caught their entire set. I've seen them many times, but I think they are one of the best bands around right now, so it's always great to see them. Their addition of the avant-jazz guitarist Nels Cline to the lineup was an inspired stroke of genius.

Well, now summer seems to be over. Stella is beck to work teaching at University High School. Jeffrey is back with us after a summer in Michigan and he starts third grade tomorrow. Fortunately, fall is the real summer here in San Francisco. September through November are the warmest and least foggy months.

and it looks like we have a date and location...

We're tentatively booked for:

Saturday, June 27, 2009. The Michigan League in Ann Arbor.

Let the planning fun begin.

where to have the wedding

Stella and I have spent much time discussing where to have our wedding. She's already posted about this on her blog, but I feel a need to write about it too. Ideally, we would do it here in California, either at a winery in Napa or an inn somewhere in Marin County. We could count on perfect summer weather and it would be very beautiful. However, a great many of our friends would likely not be able to fly to California for this.

So the other option is Michigan, where we used to live and the majority of our friends still live. Here, again, there are two options:

1) Get married at a beautiful location in northern Michigan, like an Inn where guests could stay the night or the weekend.

2) Get married in Ann Arbor, which has very limited options for beautiful wedding settings.

What is most important to us both is to have our friends present as we get married. That probably rules out the California location, unless suddenly large numbers of our friends started telling us how much they would love to fly out to California to be at our wedding.

Getting married in northern Michigan, while much closer to Ann Arbor, may still keep some people away who would attend an Ann Arbor wedding. After all, we would still be asking guests to drive four hours each way and pay for accommodations for one night (or two nights they were in the wedding party or just wanted to make a weekend out of it).

One obvious advantage of a destination wedding is that guests don't have to worry about driving somewhere after a night of celebrating. But there are various advantages and disadvantages to each scenario.

Since this event is very much about celebrating with all our friends, I'm curious about any thoughts my friends might have on where to best do this. We're looking either at next summer (if we can get it together in time) or summer 2010.

Any thoughts?

catching up (hiking up Half Dome)

I've been terrible about blogging this summer. So I am going to attempt to catch up a bit by blogging about some of the fun things we did this summer.

I'll start with one of the most amazing, and difficult, adventures - the hike to the top of Half Dome.

The view of Half Dome and the valley from Glacier Point

Half Dome is perhaps the most striking, or at least most well known, feature of Yosemite National Park. Stella and I spent a few days there in July and had an amazing time. It may be the single most beautiful place I've ever been to. But for now, I'll focus on the hike we did on our last day there.

The hike to the top of Half Dome is intense. It is 8.5 miles one way (17 miles round trip) with an elevation of nearly a mile. That's a lot of serious uphill hiking! Imagine taking the stairs to the top of the Empire State Building... four times. That's the elevation involved here.

We got up at about 6:45 am to head out for the trail head. We finally started the hike just before 8 am, a little concerned that we may have started too late for such a long hike. But the timing worked out fine... it turns out that we're faster than average hikers. All that running we do, I guess.

There are two wonderful waterfalls along the trail, both with intense but stunning climbs. The mist from the first falls is so intense that it's almost like walking through a shower. Very refreshing on a hot hike!

Hours later, we finally arrived at the base of the "dome". The last part of the hike to the base was a bit scary at times... it's basically rough stairs carved out of the rock with some rather steep and precarious areas.

But it was the climb up the dome itself that was most intense. When first discovered, it was deemed unclimbable. And until around 1920, only experienced mountain climbers had gone to the top. But in 1919, the park service installed two sets of cables to the top of allow "normal" people to go to the top.

The cables from the base of the dome

I'm actually rather terrified of heights, and normally wouldn't even think of doing such a thing. But when we finally got in sight of those cables, with the top right there in front of us, I told Stella, who expressed uncertainty about climbing the cables, that I'm definitely doing it. It must have been the lack of oxygen that made me decide to do this. By the time I was half way up, holding on to the cable for dear life at a 45 degree angle slope, I made the mistake of looking down. I had that brief moment of panic where I suddenly realized that I could actually die if I wasn't careful. Fortunately that feeling passed and I continued on the top.

The top was stunning. Amazing views in every direction, particularly of Yosemite Valley.
We hung out at the top for a half hour or more, then began our descent. This, to me, was even more scary than coming up. Contending with climbers going the other direction and waiting for the people ahead of me to move on made the climb seem unbearably long. Stella, however, had no fear coming down. I couldn't wait for it to be over. I felt amazed that people didn't often die here. Later I learned that people do, in fact, die here. Last year, three people slipped off the cables and fell to their deaths. You can read more about deaths at Half Dome here.

Finally, eight or nine hours later, we were back at the trail head, exhausted and sore. We both had blisters on our feet. My leg muscles were sore for a few days. But it was all worth it.

the ring

This is the engagement ring that Stella and I picked out. It's recycled white gold with a sapphire mined in an eco-friendly, conflict-free manner for Brilliant Earth. You can read more about it on Stella's blog.

This is the spot...

Lake Tahoe, California. August 11, 2008.


This is the spot...



This is the spot where I asked Stella to marry me.


She said yes.