I know, because I’m originally from Seattle! Thank you, Hunter for finding this.
I wish there were a more technical, perhaps more modern analysis of San Francisco’s microclimates, but this is all I could find in visual form. The temperature descriptions are relative to the area’s overall climactic patterns — in my estimation, “moderate” means probably above 72F for the high in summer, “cool” means below 68F. “Hot” is probably in the 74-76F range.
To experience the sunniest and warmest summers in San Francisco, the obvious neighborhoods to live in are the Excelsior District, Visitacion Valley, Crocker-Amazon, The Bayview and Hunters Point. Nice compromises would be Portrero Hill, The Mission, and anything along the eastern waterfront. According to this map, the only difference between zone 6 and 7 is wind, not temperature, but having checked some local weather stations, it seems that the southeast quadrant is in fact a degree or two warmer on average.
Board games used to be a major pastime of mine. Being an only child, and possessing a lexicon not particularly bespoke for a little tyke, I often had to play with my mother or Mervyn, the bunny rabbit (which usually means that I won, of course). But now that I look back on them, I realize that they were, for a while at least, part of the stylistic and cultural vanguard, little designs for an engineered contemporary middle class.
The design king amongst board games has to be the 1971-era edition of Careers. With a name like that, you can only imagine that it was a hit amongst guidance counselors. But it’s the clean Helvetica that attracts my eye these days.
The board game’s cover isn’t quite as bold with its typographical license, but there’s a lot of modernism to be felt in the deliberate choice to not capitalize the first ‘c’ in Careers. Caught with mink, lose 1/2 your fame? Common sense. Let boss win at golf? Now that’s the dated adage I was looking for — who plays golf with their boss any more?
The ungame is derided today, although to be fair it is still in print. I give it some pomo credit for having such a fantastically existential name — it “tells it like it is” and lets you know, right up front, that it ISN’T a game! It is a tool for hapless middle class parents to somehow discuss morality and contemporary issues with their children. And it even came in religious editions:
If you squint you can see such exciting un-locations as the “Favor Factory” and the “Compliment Clubhouse”. An entire CLUBHOUSE devoted to compliments? This game would be fantastic to play while drunk, the answers would be truer to life than Dr. James Dobson could ever have hoped.
Side note: Austin, Texas’ NBC affiliate co-opted the “tell it like it is” phrase, right down to using the exact same font, from this game, sometime in the late 1980’s for their ad campaigns.
Another favorite game of mine was “Bargain Hunter” — it was actually billed as a fun antidote to inflation, the non-corporeal scapegoat of early 1980’s malaise. It was also the first board game to feature credit cards!
Design-wise, Bargain Hunter is only middlebrow, but I do appreciate how slavish it was to the style of TV game shows of the time. It looks like it could be “Let’s Make A Deal”, which it clearly owes a bit of its substance to.
Payday was the ultimate board game product of the 1970’s — the first signs of Keynesian distress appeared in the recreational amusements of Americana. To wit, it was a pretty ingenious idea to use a calendar and paycheck to teach children that their life would be consigned to humdrum doom.
While the Peter Max-esque drawings are merely okay and a bit ‘bandwagon’ in terms of design, the font I love to hate to love makes an appearance! Take a look at day 29 — Lottery Draw! That, my friends is the inimitable Bookman Swash. Yes, this Bookman Swash:
“Sentence Cube Game” was another one I used to mostly play with myself (although I do remember conning a few friends into thinking it was the REAL SCRABBLE). This game looks like what Meathead probably played with Gloria while Archie was away at work. “Ages 12 and up — quaaludes not included.”
I am a nostalgic, I admit it. I don’t really own any new board games. This was my last acquisition:
Anyone want to play? I get to be Jessica Fletcher.
Just because stores are still opening and just because cranes are still moving downtown doesn’t mean we’re not having a tough time. I am a qualified, competent, smart person with 8 years of work experience, and I can’t even get a single call back. In a city that’s supposed to be recession proof.
How I envy this woman, with her monitor wipes and floppy disks.
Jona Lewie. Most people my age or of any age have no clue who he is, and those who do know him know him for one song, “You Will Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties”. His one or two hit wonder status obfuscates the fact that he churned out several years worth of inspired new wave songs.
I discovered Jona the same way most others did — from “Kitchen At Parties”, but that song seemed too creative and witty (with lyrics like ‘She was into French cuisine / but I ain’t no Cordon Bleu’) to be the extent of his charm. He was such an unlikely new wave pop star — 10 or 11 years older than fellow Stiffy Kirsty MacColl, and he’s not really all that much of a singer, he’s more of a talker. Not your typical Stiff star, he sings synth-heavy narrations on the now-ness of the late 70’s and early 80’s — an unexcited troubadour of the lounge lizard bildungsroman. He’s kind of like the musical version of Mike The-Cool-Person from the TV show The Young Ones, a bit of an aging hipster, slightly sleazy, occasionally saccharine, but always full of cheeky puns and one-liners.
(Speaking of Kirsty MacColl, she actually sang backing vocals on “You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties” and appeared as one of the bored girls in a few TOTP appearances. They were a bit like an alternative version of the Kate Bush/Peter Gabriel mentor/protégé relationship.)
All of this sets him up to be something of a comic pop star, but that doesn’t do justice to his other talents — he’s a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, and was as early of an adopter of synths and drum machines as Gary Numan or anyone else at the time. In fact, his keyboarding skills are so dead simple that they’re devastating in the way they engage. He bangs the Polymoog like it’s a Farfisa and doesn’t apologize for it. He sounds like a lot of different things, but always like himself. Cases in point:
Here’s what put him on the map. It sounds like Ian Dury, Captain Sensible, and the male/female vocal alternation resembles the future Human League.
Then there’s this one, which sounds like an amazing synthpop version of the 1950’s, right down to the infectious chant. I hear a bit of Beach Boys and Nick Lowe in there too.
Even more shocking, his song “Heart of Steel” is a DEAD RINGER for the band Erasure. Yes, that Erasure — the electronics, arrangement, even some of his vocal delivery is a foretelling of what Vince Clarke and Andy Bell would sound like 5 years later.
He even sounds like a mix between the Beatles and Squeeze in this song. The song title could have been a Beatles throwaway track.
Further expounding on the Beatles-esque vibe, his other widely known song, “Stop The Cavalry”, is the UK’s most unlikely Christmas hit. It sounds like something from a new wave Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and was only a hit because it has a single line that states on a droll, dry manner: “Wish I was at home… for Christmas.”
Jona Lewie might not have been the most serious man to play a synthesizer in late 70’s Britain, but he was one of the most fun and one of the least remembered.
Look at this advertisement. “We dedicate the new Casio FX-750P pocket computer to Silvio Berlusconi.” It would be one thing (although a weird thing nevertheless) to dedicate a computer to him if he had been president in the 80’s, but he was merely a media tycoon. I guess it would be like HP dedicating a computer to Rupert Murdoch, or more appropriately, dedicating a Timex Sinclair to Reg Grundy.
Here is proof positive that this is the man who wears the pantaloni in Italy, for better or worse. He’s Italy’s lovable quasi-dictatorial, excessively vain, loafer-wearing Casio consumer!
Isn’t this album cover pop art at its finest?
And while I wouldn’t say the album’s contents itself are perfect, it has a brilliant production value that is something akin to the Beatles and Spector in the synthpop age. Listen to “Perfect Hostess”, for example:
Some of my favorite songs have been used for junction music on BBC, or even sometimes as the theme song.
In the late 1970’s, they occasionally used David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” to announce upcoming programs. The venerable documentary show “Arena” is something else, though, it is simply a work of art, both visually and musically. It uses the classic song “Another Green World” by Brian Eno. I can’t think of a more stunningly simple intro to any TV show.
I often dream what my TV show or my radio show would be like. Sadly, there’s a next to nil chance that I’ll ever have one, but if I did, it would be something like a mix of John Peel, Gay Byrne, and Tom Snyder. Something with a personal focus on music, mixed with humor and schmoozing with obscure but semi-popular legends. I can dream about what my theme song or junction music would be, though.
Candidate 1: The Associate by the Associates. This makes sense because it’s my favorite band, and I continue to believe they are criminally underrated. They are a critical darling, or were, I should say, but even so, only a small few seem to really believe in the Church of Rankine and Mackenzie. This song is one of their few instrumentals, so the beginning 30 seconds or so are perfect.
Candidate 2: The Jezebel Spirit by Brian Eno/David Byrne. This song is located on one of my least favorite albums that I otherwise should like — this has partly to do with the fact that I love Brian Eno and pretty much think David Byrne is about as overrated as it gets. But I do like this song because it sounds like an ethnic version of typical “Eyewitness News” music — like what a white person would think that television stations would use for theme music in Kinshasa or Nairobi. I actually used it for a project in a college class as the theme music to some news presentation. It was quite popular; it went off as they say!
Candidate 3: The Crunch by the Rah Band. Probably one of my favorite instrumentals of all time, for a number of reasons — it’s totally light-hearted and whimsical, the “Popcorn” of the late 1970’s. But it has a seriously sinister, brooding and gurgling bass synth backing that is quite addictive. This would be a great theme song to a comedy or teleplay — I call it “space cabaret”. It clearly aces the music the aliens were playing in the cantina scene in “Star Wars”.
Candidate 4: A New Career In A New Town by David Bowie. For some reason, I find this to be the most heartbreaking instrumental ever. Perhaps it’s because I’ve started so many new careers in new towns at the tender age of 26 that I sense a whiff of glib and guarded optimism in this piece of instrumental perfection. I can just see the salary man in all of us waiting on a foggy commuter train platform for what comes next — will he be made manager or made redundant? It’s a great candidate for a business-themed TV or radio show.
All that Google Mapping last night made me quite nostalgic. And a bit depressed.
This is where I was mugged, in Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn. The tan townhouse, in the little front stoop area.
This is where the handlebars fell of my bicycle, I hit a car head on, and flipped into the road, and where some kind woman pulled me onto the curb and saved my life.
I lived in the yellow and red apartment building on the right for 2 years.
This was where my office was, on the 20th floor.
I used to walk this road home every day, whether at 6AM or 4AM. With my friends, with my boyfriends, with one night stands, alone, with my iPod, even caught up in a conversation with a stranger I had met on the subway 5 minutes prior.
This is the place I stayed for 3 weeks with my great friend Ellen, where we slept on the hardwood floor in sleeping bags and they had the ugliest couch in the world delivered.
You have no idea how much I miss it all. I haven’t been the same since I left.
